8/11/26 - 8/13/26: flow into the future
8/11/26
When you just get done gently rubbing your mom’s beautiful, bald head in the hospital bed until she falls asleep, and you go brush your teeth, and you’re in your makeshift bed near her but your mind is racing. You open the curtain to look out the tall hospital window down to the dark park and expansive architecture of the city, with another, bigger city further in the distance. You can see a gas station’s exorbitant prices in red and the whir of the hospital room is in your head as you lay down and close your eyes. But you feel antsy and you forgot your headlamp so you can’t read or do the embroidery you brought. So obviously you go back into the hospital room bathroom ten steps away to take your classic hospital room bathroom selfies with the toilet prominently in a lot of them:
Goofy faces make me feel better. It's always fun to see the weirdest ways you can contort your face. I love having weird face contests with friends: who can make the strangest face that makes the other one laugh the most or the most frightened? I can do some pretty crazy frightening faces but I wouldn't dare showcase them here. Much too scary.
I have this random new art idea in the hospital as my mom sleeps and the afternoon creeps up on us. I feel more normal when I start having art ideas. It involves combining clay and my mixed-media textile paintings.
This feels like the longest day. Long like silly putty that never stops stretching and keeps elongating all the way into another solar system; like ever-expanding spider silk expanding into infinity; like relentlessly sprawling spandex never snapping back.
It's deep into the night and our new night nurse keeps coming in and every time he leaves, my mom in her super goofy, low-sodium state, and hospital-negligent related undernourishment that makes her brain drunkenly gossamer, keeps trying to marry me off: "I think he's cute. He's perfect for you. Get his phone number."
She's dreaming about Albuquerque, New Mexico now. One of her best friends lives there. She was dreaming that we were all there: me, my brother, her friend, and their entire family. And it was hot. The annoying, useless night "doctor" wakes her up every night to do a cognitive test. He asks her her name and where we are and she's like "Albuquerque, New Mexico", her eyes still tightly shut. Then she slowly lifts her heavy eyelids, adjusts, and is like "oh no........ Oakland".
It's just her and I again and I'm right next to her, rubbing her arm, rubbing her head, holding her hand. And she's at it again, talking about the nurse she wants to marry me off to: “He’s dressed in black. He’s the perfect height. He’s got the perfect haircut.” She's furiously single-minded and abundantly comical. She's making me laugh.
8/12/26
The way life stretches you in all these different directions all at once and what it asks of you can make you feel defeated. I’ve felt that way recently.
It can also soften you and simultaneously make your soul rough like sandpaper. It's contradictory and ineffable. Life is constantly changing with such fury and no one can quite prepare you.
And maybe, possibly, if you keep swimming further, there's this point past the feeling of defeat that’s hard to describe. I think I’m in that state currently. I feel gracefully and inevitably softer toward everything and much more sturdy out of necessity. Sturdiness is a muscle.
Being so solely focused on getting my mom’s sodium up so she can get back to her life-saving cancer treatments and have no more hospital visits is goal number one and nothing else matters. The next-level hyper-focus her care has required, especially recently, is something I have fallen into with full passion and intention. It often means sacrificing sleep but I don’t give a shit.
I shouldn’t send the text, right? I’m so sleep deprived I can’t tell if I should. I’ve read it over like a million times.
8/13/26
First day back home from a terrible three day hospital experience where they only brought her sodium up slightly. She's still so low.
As I’m driving to pick up my mom’s appetite stimulant I see a billboard on the right of the freeway that says “flow into your future.”
Classic driving scenario I experience too often: a car cuts me off extremely obnoxiously and dangerously, I beep at them, then they flip me off. It’s the Utter Asshole mentality. Today when it happened, I, of course, beeped more and gave them double middle fingers in return and called them so many creative names in the privacy of my car. I get impressed with the creative name-calling toward bad, aggressive drivers that I come up with in the moment.
I don’t drink or do drugs. Instead I get my thrills from going into the HOV lane when I’m not supposed to. It's exhilarating. My other thrill on the road is giving all the cops I see out and about the middle finger; below the car window, out of sight. That middle finger feeling is fantastic, regardless if secret or not. I guess driving really brings out my middle finger a lot, especially recently. I never really did that before. It's probably therapeutic for me at the moment.
I have the strong urge to make some cyclops monster faces out of clay. Both flat and three-dimensional. I'm flummoxed why I haven't yet. The cyclops is my favorite creature. Since I was little and was first made privy to them, I always daydreamed about being one myself. I know I would absolutely love it. Just one giant contact lens.
I saw this inspirational Japanese face mask today made by Junya Kono. I stared at it for awhile in adoration:
