To Give Back

If I could do anything for you, I would.

Unfortunately, I’m only able to do everything I can.

And I will.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I had a good friend tell me tonight that I need to have faith. Have faith that this campaign to allow me to write & publish my book will be successful.

It’s difficult.

The greater the risk, the harder the belief that your dream will come to fruition – and in this, I risk everything.

I told her that faith was believing in something that your true heart cannot see. I don’t believe in faith.

I told her that I KNOW that this Kickstarter campaign will be successful, because knowing is what makes dreams come true – and I SEE THIS. I see giving, helping, inspiring.

At exactly 6AM this morning, I click the button to make my campaign go live to the world – and I KNOW it will far surpass the goal.

I’ve had many people say that I needed to lower the money I need to make it happen, and I did as much as I could. What I ask for is the base of what I need to create the best I could ever give to you – nothing less, nothing more.

When you see the link tomorrow, please support it in any way possible. Give. SHARE. Know that what you do keeps me alive.

And I WILL give back.

Advertisement

Found Things of Ass

For those of you fortunate enough not to be on Facebook, they have this thing. Among their many other things. Things they have.
It’s basically a walk down the ‘ol memory lane, showing what you posted on this day back to the time you joined. When you think about it, it’s kind of creepy, but also strangely comforting in the way that it reminds me of an incredible, absolutely and frighteningly brilliant, beautiful woman I dated for a while in New York, who remembered EVERYTHING that I said or did. Usually it was used to point out how incredibly wrong I was, during one of our arguments, but on occasion she brought up things I did that were all snuggly and nice, as she rested her head on my chest in the rare times that one of us weren’t at school or work, and actually together. (I was working about 70 hours a week managing a kitchen, and she was in law school, working on the weekends. We had lovely dates that consisted mainly of collapsing in each others arms.)

Actually, this facebook thing is nothing like her – but at least writing about it prompted me to think of her again…

ANYWAY, today’s was something I posted on Facebook, and strangely enough not here. I do that a lot, but I think that soon I’ll completely reverse it and post things here, not on Facebook. You deserve them more.

but AS I WAS TRYING TO SAY, this popped up and I thought it was kind-of good and kind of funny, so I thought that I would share it with YOU, my wonderful and faithful blog readers. (Obviously, those who don’t read this will miss out on how beautiful & faithful and wonderful I think they are, so to those reading, just between you & me – you ROCK – but c’mon, comment more, okay? I like that shit. I get lonely – and it inspire me to write more, too…)

SO – here’s the thing I posted there but not here. It was posted when I was in a shitty respite place after an infection that made it pretty much impossible to walk due t the pain, for reference.
I knew that eventually I would get around to it. Thanks for your patience.

kSea Flux

July 16, 2015 at 5:30pm · San Francisco ·

Nearing the end of day 9 of the sore-ass marathon. Gods, these beds are horribly uncomfortable. The different shifts and positions you find yourself in for a brief taste of comfort would make an interesting study – comparing the healing speed of someone laying in a 3rd rate hospital bed as compared to the bed I recently left at UCSF, which had so many positions you could swing the thing – pivoting feet up, head up, bringing knees up & down as well as of course your back position…

My theory is that the person in the bricksoft crap bed (up, down, back, legs, with a built-in ‘Sadism’ setting that is permanently on) will be the first one to heal, as the constant position changes and just sheer will and fight to finally get the hell out of this thing and tend to his poor, flattened ass.

In any case, those are the results of this particular one-person case study.

I’m doing what I can to heal – physically & mentally, and last night was able to sit on the edge of the bed for 30 whole secons before the pulsing & throbbing pain in my calf & ankle grew the point of sternly suggesting I bring the leg back to horizontal – but hell, it was progress, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit passively & wait for the healing to happen magically. (Actual Dr. care is surprisingly rare & brief.)

There’s a rumor floating around that I’ll be discharged early next week, ready or not. I’d rather be ready, or as ready as I can be.

I’m going to need to make some changes to my apartment when I get home – so be prepared for a purge of some things that you may like. I’ll be giving them away…

All in all, I’m mostly getting better – I always do & always will, but now it;s a race against time and my distaste for walkers.

Now, my ass has taken over my train of thought, so I must bid a temporary farewell.
Never thought my ass could hijack my brain, but then again, I’ve never given it much thought.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And then it goes into thanking people about helping me with the herbs I can’t afford to get myself due to the $200/month I get to try to survive on from disability… but you don’t want to hear about that, even if not having the herbs I needed WAS the reason I almost died because of the infection & would have prevented it in the first place.

Okay, back to work on my book project. It looks like the Kickstarter for it is actually gong to launch THIS WEEK – and I’m fucking terrified.

Have a beautiful Weekend – and keep dreaming! Love you guys…

OH! And if you could do the whole “Share, Follow & Like” thing… yeah. I really like that stuff, and would appreciate it. It gets lonely here sometimes.
Lots of times.

 

Still kickin’

Funny how you can be just innocently reading something, your mind behaving for the most part & not going down that road of what you really should kind-of be doing because it needs to get done but you’ve rationalized it really well since it’s still really early and there are SO many more hours in the day to work on what should be done, and then you read something that makes you think about something else, and that something else makes you think about something else entirely.
I was just reading Jenny Lawson’s book “Furiously Happy” (which if you haven’t read yet, you should look into why you enjoy depriving yourself of certain amazingly wonderful things) and she mentioned a list of life goals.

I thought about making my own, just for kicks, and then I did that thing where I took the thought further, and wondered if I ever had. I mean, I’ve make enough month-goals, and week & day goals (which are usually simply known as to-do lists and are pretty damn boring compared to a LIFE goal – I mean, think about it. Day-goal: – “send emails to people”. Life-goal: “Jump out of a plane above an active volcano.” (Not that I ever really want to jump into an active volcano, that was an example – but I DO want to go skydiving. AND learn how to fly a plane…”

Then I began wondering WHY I had never made any lifegoal lists, because it almost sounds like fun.

And then I remembered that 30 years ago I was working at Tower Video in Berkeley, and got a call from some Doctor who could have said “If you have written a list of life goals, it might be easier on you if you just tear that thing up right now.” But instead he said “We’ve gotten your test results back, and they came back positive for HIV antibodies.”

This was back in the years when everyone was still trying to figure out what it was – also known as “The years when everybody was dying”, at least in the less formal circles. I didn’t know much about it then, and chose to completely suppress and internalize what I just heard, and live until I died. The way I figured, I had 1 -2 years at most, and wasn’t going to waste time with dwelling on it. I mean hell, I was barely 19 years old. I had better things to do with the little time I had left.

I recently looked up some statistics, and found that 98% of people infected with HIV died within 18 months.

That’s a LOT.

Somehow however, I wasn’t one of them, and I still can’t really figure it out. I’m pretty sure that I’m not meant to – that it’s just something I carry with me forever to inspire me to do more huge things and say to myself “Maybe THIS is why I lived?” Hell – I’ll never know…

 

But I do know that for around ten years after I got that news, every few days I wondered when I would finally get sick and die. I’ll tell you one thing – it really fucks with any long-term plans. “Hey! Maybe I’ll learn how to… no, I’ll probably die before it’s done and that time will be wasted.” “Okay, by the time I hit 30 I want to have accomplished…. HA! Who am I trying to fool? I’ll be dead!

It’s really difficult to imagine your future, to prepare for it, to hang onto the dreams of who you want to be when you are absolutely certain that you’ll be nothing but a vague memory I people’s minds – if even that.

But for some strange reason that I’ll never be able to figure out (unless, of course, I do something & die immediately afterwards, saying with my last breath “OH. THAT’S why I lived!”)…

I’m still here. ALIVE – and even though there are days when I just want to hide under the covers in bed all day, and sometimes do – every second of this life counts.

Do something good.

Into the Dungeon (book excerpt)

(A tiny, rough-draft taste of my upcoming book, Not Going Gently. I would love to hear what you think! ~ Casey)

I wasn’t surprised when I walked up the stairs & found the eviction papers taped to my apartment door. I was just surprised that they took so long to appear. When my new house-mates first rent check bounced however, I knew it was time to start packing.  In a strange way it was exciting – I imagined the papers as a passport to a new life, like a baby bird kicked out of the nest and into a tornado.

Having a feeling that this was coming I had already began to prepare, and now my entire life was portable, fitting into two duffel bags and a backpack. I put the books I couldn’t bear to part with and a few sentimental things into boxes to be stored at a friend’s house, and after I had sold or given away everything I could, I set the rest out on the sidewalk and went back inside to clean.

San Francisco has a wonderful system – many people I know have furnished their entire apartments with treasures found on the street, and much of mine was as well – from the gorgeously ornate wrought-iron wall sconce the size of a semi-truck tire to the beautiful hand-blown glass bowl which I kept on the coffee table, filled with the soft glow of blue Christmas lights that I bought at a post-Halloween sale. They were cheap, so I stocked up. A person can never have enough tiny lights to practice their patience – or failing that – their cursing, as they tried to untangle them.
I put the remainder of my things in front of my apartment and went back upstairs to do some cleaning. After about an hour I glanced out the window & was astonished. What was a somewhat sizeable pile before, with chairs, a couch, various lamps, clothes & random other things that had found their way into my apartment had almost entirely disappeared. It was as if I had missed the middle part of the sped-up video where the maggots clean a dead rat down to bone.
Curious about this phenomenon, I wanted to gather more of my things and set them out there, then peek out from behind a curtain with a video camera and watch what happened. I imagined that there was a network of scavengers who prowled the neighborhoods in cars & on foot, looking for piles such as the one I had put outside, and when they found one the alarm went out. They got on their phones or cupped their hands around their mouth & made strange animal calls, alerting the rest of the foragers to the booty. Of course, in my head, they weren’t normal  people – they were some post-apocalyptic creatures, some with mechanical limbs, dressed in dusty black leather with wild hair & eyes, who had trailers made of steel & lethal stabby-things hooked to their flat-black Prius’s, and worked with lightning fast efficiency.
Unfortunately I didn’t have a video camera or anything else to set outside and lure them, so the mystery still remains unsolved.

I had previously announced on a social network my imminent eviction, and was offered a few places where I could rest my head by the wonderful community of freaks I called friends. Bean made it more difficult, as most were apologetically not able to host a tragic, homeless Klown as well as an 85 pound dog.

All except one, offered by a person named Bob who I had met only once before. It was a home in the middle of the Mission District of San Francisco, Bob spent five days of the week at work in New Jersey, flying back on the weekends on his employer’s dime, and the only other person who lived there was the woman who owned the house.
There was just one catch. Bob’s dog already called it home, and while to most humans he was the sweetest, most loving beast – he had been trained by a former owner to joyfully rip the throats out of any other animal he came within destroying distance of. Bean was welcome though, and that was the most important thing.

Bob picked me up a few days after we talked, and when we arrived at the house I couldn’t believe where I would be living. It was a beautiful two-story Victorian with an enormous red beauganvilla draped over the entry gate as if it were a portal to a different world. Shortly after, I realized how fitting that observation was as I met the owner (a woman who was perhaps in her late forties who had the look of someone who rated personal upkeep pretty low on the chart) & she told me about what the 2^nd floor was primarily used for in this quiet, seemingly ordinary house…