Rüde Boy (original) (raw)

Earth-bound misfit, I	[Dec. 16th, 2025\|12:43 pm]Footpad
Yesterday evening was my Flugtauglichkeitsuntersuchung, my medical fitness examination as a prerequisite to flight training: an hour spent being prodded and poked and having one's bodily fluids examined and getting wired up to an ECG while on an exercise bike. Even if you only plan to be a glider pilot, you're going to be slinging a half-ton of fibreglass around over people's heads at autobahn speeds and they want to know you're probably not going to malfunction while you're doing it.Now the aviation medical examiner's report goes off to the German federal department of aviation, probably with some to-ing and fro-ing because of my history of depression, so that might take a while, but fingers crossed in a couple of months I get back a slip of paper that certifies that my little lupine self is officially deemed fit to sprout wings and fly.The local flying club operates a tidy little grass airstrip several miles away, so I've joined the club just in time for the gliding season to end and the winter maintenance season to begin. Which kind of suits me, so I've dived in with volunteering to help with things, which shows willingness and builds social contacts and, not least, develops an intuitive physical understanding of the aircraft that no formal training can replace. Plus, there's no end of manual labour to be done on the grounds (all that mowing!) and they can always use people who just muck in and get on with that.I've started the evening theory training course for the SPL, the Sailplane Pilot's Licence. Compared to the full private pilot's syllabus, it's surprisingly superficial! For example, they compress the entirety of the physics of flight into three hours of lecture time, which makes me feel vaguely like I'm being sent out to rappel across a canyon after being shown how to tie a reef knot. So I'm filling in the gaps with a lot of reading. The course is all in German, the reading mostly too, so I'm learning aviation and technical German at the same time, which teaches me immense respect for anyone who undertakes major studies in their second language. But, as an unexpected but delightful side benefit, I can feel the exercise paying off in greater fluency in technical discussions in German even on unrelated subjects.So what happens now? Until maybe April or May, not much but study: that's when the weather gets warm enough to generate thermals for gliding. I have to take various (not very demanding) technical examinations. And then, some dual flights with an instructor to establish the basics before it's time for that all-important first solo, the pilot's loss of virginity, where I strap myself into a slender fibreglass dart and get slung up into the sky on my own.
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[Dec. 16th, 2025|12:43 pm]Footpad

Yesterday evening was my Flugtauglichkeitsuntersuchung, my medical fitness examination as a prerequisite to flight training: an hour spent being prodded and poked and having one's bodily fluids examined and getting wired up to an ECG while on an exercise bike. Even if you only plan to be a glider pilot, you're going to be slinging a half-ton of fibreglass around over people's heads at autobahn speeds and they want to know you're probably not going to malfunction while you're doing it.Now the aviation medical examiner's report goes off to the German federal department of aviation, probably with some to-ing and fro-ing because of my history of depression, so that might take a while, but fingers crossed in a couple of months I get back a slip of paper that certifies that my little lupine self is officially deemed fit to sprout wings and fly.The local flying club operates a tidy little grass airstrip several miles away, so I've joined the club just in time for the gliding season to end and the winter maintenance season to begin. Which kind of suits me, so I've dived in with volunteering to help with things, which shows willingness and builds social contacts and, not least, develops an intuitive physical understanding of the aircraft that no formal training can replace. Plus, there's no end of manual labour to be done on the grounds (all that mowing!) and they can always use people who just muck in and get on with that.I've started the evening theory training course for the SPL, the Sailplane Pilot's Licence. Compared to the full private pilot's syllabus, it's surprisingly superficial! For example, they compress the entirety of the physics of flight into three hours of lecture time, which makes me feel vaguely like I'm being sent out to rappel across a canyon after being shown how to tie a reef knot. So I'm filling in the gaps with a lot of reading. The course is all in German, the reading mostly too, so I'm learning aviation and technical German at the same time, which teaches me immense respect for anyone who undertakes major studies in their second language. But, as an unexpected but delightful side benefit, I can feel the exercise paying off in greater fluency in technical discussions in German even on unrelated subjects.So what happens now? Until maybe April or May, not much but study: that's when the weather gets warm enough to generate thermals for gliding. I have to take various (not very demanding) technical examinations. And then, some dual flights with an instructor to establish the basics before it's time for that all-important first solo, the pilot's loss of virginity, where I strap myself into a slender fibreglass dart and get slung up into the sky on my own.

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre	[Jul. 29th, 2025\|10:04 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|flight, gliding, pilot, self-actualisation]My main instance for this post is on Dreamwidth, here. I invite commenting and posting there if you have a Dreamwidth account. The most surprising thing about flying in a glider is how goddamn physical it is. I've been thinking seriously about flying for a long time now, but circumstances conspired against it: workload, or travelling too much, or being in the middle of other projects, or being flattened by Long Covid. Or, most saliently, having a history of depression. Even the lowest tiers of pilot's licence require certified physical and mental health, and the merest mention of psychiatry sends the aeromedical system into immediate radical arse-covering mode. Now I've been okay for years, I'm working through the process: I give my chances about 50%, but that's enough to work with. In between, over the past few years I've occasionally gone up in light powered aircraft. I love the sense of liberation that comes as the plane lifts off, I love the deep technical knowledge and the mental demands of flight, I love the rich challenge of understanding the aeroplane as a dynamic system in a complex aerial environment. I love the mixture of analysis and intuition that it takes to fly a plane, the combination of thinking things through and feeling them in the gut. ( Read more...Collapse )
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre

[Jul. 29th, 2025|10:04 pm]Footpad

[**Tags**|flight, gliding, pilot, self-actualisation]My main instance for this post is on Dreamwidth, here. I invite commenting and posting there if you have a Dreamwidth account. The most surprising thing about flying in a glider is how goddamn physical it is. I've been thinking seriously about flying for a long time now, but circumstances conspired against it: workload, or travelling too much, or being in the middle of other projects, or being flattened by Long Covid. Or, most saliently, having a history of depression. Even the lowest tiers of pilot's licence require certified physical and mental health, and the merest mention of psychiatry sends the aeromedical system into immediate radical arse-covering mode. Now I've been okay for years, I'm working through the process: I give my chances about 50%, but that's enough to work with. In between, over the past few years I've occasionally gone up in light powered aircraft. I love the sense of liberation that comes as the plane lifts off, I love the deep technical knowledge and the mental demands of flight, I love the rich challenge of understanding the aeroplane as a dynamic system in a complex aerial environment. I love the mixture of analysis and intuition that it takes to fly a plane, the combination of thinking things through and feeling them in the gut. ( Read more...Collapse )

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Long road in small segments	[Jul. 28th, 2024\|04:24 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|long covid, running]A few weeks ago I started running again. It wasn't a considered act. There was no schedule or structure or master plan. One day I just went out for a run, and then the next day I did it again, and again, and after that I missed some days here and there but basically I just kept running a little each day.But only a little. For the first several days, it felt like all I was doing was digging deeper into lungs that had filled up with gunk during Covid and stayed that way forever since. At first I breathed only shallowly, with pain in the tops of my lungs as though I was tearing open tissues that had become stuck together. Each day after that the pain was in a different place, lower down, or to one side or the other, and after each run I coughed up more slime. It took over a week before I took a run where I felt like I was able to inhale all the way down.After that I thought the wins would come quickly, but they haven't. Mentally, some part of me thinks it's the kind of wolf that can still run half marathons. That part is wrong. I struggle to run a mile: there's a certain wind turbine one mile away and my target is to run up to it and slap it, but after that I'm done. Today, for the first time, I pushed a couple of hundred yards beyond it (uphill through long grass, for that matter). Afterwards I was dizzy and I've felt exhausted ever since.I do regain my strength, little by little, and I have to trust to this, but sometimes it feels like a terribly slow process. That's because it is.
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Long road in small segments

[Jul. 28th, 2024|04:24 pm]Footpad

[**Tags**|long covid, running]A few weeks ago I started running again. It wasn't a considered act. There was no schedule or structure or master plan. One day I just went out for a run, and then the next day I did it again, and again, and after that I missed some days here and there but basically I just kept running a little each day.But only a little. For the first several days, it felt like all I was doing was digging deeper into lungs that had filled up with gunk during Covid and stayed that way forever since. At first I breathed only shallowly, with pain in the tops of my lungs as though I was tearing open tissues that had become stuck together. Each day after that the pain was in a different place, lower down, or to one side or the other, and after each run I coughed up more slime. It took over a week before I took a run where I felt like I was able to inhale all the way down.After that I thought the wins would come quickly, but they haven't. Mentally, some part of me thinks it's the kind of wolf that can still run half marathons. That part is wrong. I struggle to run a mile: there's a certain wind turbine one mile away and my target is to run up to it and slap it, but after that I'm done. Today, for the first time, I pushed a couple of hundred yards beyond it (uphill through long grass, for that matter). Afterwards I was dizzy and I've felt exhausted ever since.I do regain my strength, little by little, and I have to trust to this, but sometimes it feels like a terribly slow process. That's because it is.

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Journals are good for me	[Jun. 10th, 2024\|01:10 am]Footpad
[Tags\|diaries, j'y suis j'y reste, journal, mental health, meta] [Current Location	Mallorca] [Current Music	birdsong and a distant road]The Sahara has come to Mallorca on a big brown wind, coursing up from the south laden with dust from the desert. All those fabled Mediterranean colours are muted in the haze and the sun's disk is dull silver on a colourless sky. It's beautiful but it's vaguely unearthly. So my sister and I and the podenco dog went walkies, rising at five in the morning to climb into the ragged hills behind Alcúdia. We rested at a mirador on a limestone crag and talked about our lives and prospects, we savoured the less sultry air among the pine trees, we restrained the dog from his visceral hunter's passion for the feral goats. Much of the rest of the day was spent knocking off tasks that my sister had lined up for me during my visit: fixing some fencing, sorting out a recalcitrant scanner, that kind of thing. Making myself useful in a way that will place no mark on history, or even necessarily on memory, but that's still part of the fabric of my life. I kept a journal when I was young (several in fact, at different times and in different phases of my existence). It's remarkable, when I review those decades-old pages now, how much returns to my recall that would otherwise be lost entirely. I'm no longer young, but then again I'm not old either, and there's much to learn. ( Read more...Collapse )
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Donald J. Trump 2020	[Oct. 1st, 2019\|04:16 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|lies and damn lies, politics, trump]I don't plan on getting into politics much, and I no longer pay any attention to quotes from Donald Trump because I assume they're moronic, deceitful and/or insane. But when Donald J. Trump himself ostensibly emails me then I guess I've been dragged into it. Someone used my email address when signing up for the Donald Trump 2020 mailing list, so this is what I got: Donna,Thank you for joining my team! I am counting on my loyal supporters like you to carry us to victory again in 2020. We are up against an unhinged left-wing mob, a Democratic party that has embraced radical socialism, and the FAKE NEWS media that will NEVER tell the truth about all of our accomplishments. "Unhinged". "Radical socialism". "FAKE NEWS that will NEVER tell the truth." So... yup. In case there was any doubt about it, it turns out the administration uses just the same voice when it thinks it's talking privately to its own.—This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there, because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.
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Donald J. Trump 2020

[Oct. 1st, 2019|04:16 pm]Footpad

[**Tags**|lies and damn lies, politics, trump]I don't plan on getting into politics much, and I no longer pay any attention to quotes from Donald Trump because I assume they're moronic, deceitful and/or insane. But when Donald J. Trump himself ostensibly emails me then I guess I've been dragged into it. Someone used my email address when signing up for the Donald Trump 2020 mailing list, so this is what I got: Donna,Thank you for joining my team!

I am counting on my loyal supporters like you to carry us to victory again in 2020. We are up against an unhinged left-wing mob, a Democratic party that has embraced radical socialism, and the FAKE NEWS media that will NEVER tell the truth about all of our accomplishments. "Unhinged". "Radical socialism". "FAKE NEWS that will NEVER tell the truth." So... yup. In case there was any doubt about it, it turns out the administration uses just the same voice when it thinks it's talking privately to its own.—This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there, because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.

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I done twat	[Sep. 15th, 2019\|11:35 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|twitter] [Current Mood	pragmatic]I have deactivated my Twitter account. I might reactivate it long enough to temporarily post a link to this post to explain why and where I've gone, but otherwise this absence is probably final. After going on and off it a few times, I have concluded to my satisfaction that Twitter is inherently and irremediably socially and intellectually destructive and that I (and you) will be happier, wiser and healthier without it.The crux of this is politics, and dialogue with my friends on the other side of the political divide, some of whom I know to have deeply nuanced and considered opinions. Twitter makes these people sound like fuckwits to me, and, no matter how hard I try, it makes me sound like a fuckwit to them. Politics is hard. Like any complex topic, it needs time and space: space for nuance, time for reflection and mutual accommodation. Twitter permits neither. It crushes the subtlety of real-world opinions into mutilated bonsai soundbites. Stripped of the depth and detail of reality, these soundbites become trivially refutable, and thus stupid, and thus contemptible, and thus infuriating. So Twitter becomes part of the vast mechanism that has turned our politics into a cesspool of vitriol and mutual incomprehension. For this alone, Twitter is loathsome and deserves our contempt.I could of course just forbear from political discussion, or even unfollow people who post political opinions, but why should I even need to apply such an extraordinary constraint? The problem here is not the friends or the opinions. The problem is the medium, Twitter itself. And it's not just politics. The same pathology applies to any discussion on any topic of any merit.Meanwhile Twitter suffers all the other pathologies of social media: the fostering and projection of an artificial ego, the nourishment-free pabulum of ersatz social contact, the Fear Of Missing Out. I'm sure it's possible to work round these things, and to foster a happy and rewarding environment on Twitter. I had some success in that direction myself: I was mindful of my usage, and I mostly only followed people I'd met in person. But the entire environment militates against it. Some people do grow beautiful roses in that there horseshit, but that doesn't mean it's sensible to live in a midden.There's plenty of merit in Twitter too, of course. There's friends, and wit, insight, trouvailles, repartée, dog pictures. I'll miss sharing all these things. But I won't miss the feeling of an endless contest for nebulous appoval points, I won't miss the urge to check my feed thirteen times a day, and I sure as all hell won't miss having to amputate the resources of my mind in order to fit them into 280 characters. So goodbye Twitter, and, on balance, a resounding good riddance.I think I'd still like somewhere to post pictures of my dog though. Hmmmm... —This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there, because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.
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Why I'm stuck in Switzerland for several months	[Dec. 20th, 2016\|11:41 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|bureaucracy, depression, kafka] [Current Mood	bitter] [Current Location	Switzerland]A note for Thalian on why Aki and I can't come to visit him and Rapante:Okay. Three months ago my life got taken over by a certain exuberant and clumsy squeaky hairball.This means that I can't travel by train any more. Squeaky Thing is a big, powerful dog, and she's one year old and absolutely full of energy. There's no way she can spend six hours in trains. It'd be wretched and exhausting for both of us. I need a car.That means I need to be legal to drive in Switzerland, and that means I need to switch my EU driving licence for a Swiss one (a thing I never previously felt much need to do). That's a pretty straightforward process, should only take a week or two, which is just as well because they take away my EU driving licence at the start of it.I decided to carry over my C1 and D1 licence categories too – that extends the process with a quick medical exam, but fair enough.The Strassenverkehrsamt (Road Traffic Authority) helpfully provides a Web site listing doctors who are qualified to carry out the exam. There are four levels of accreditation for this exam; I need a doctor at level 2.I look up one from the Web site, and spend a congenial hour being examined. The doctor looks at my retinas, palpates my liver, listens to my heart, takes my blood pressure, makes me touch my nose with my fingertip with my eyes closed, tests my hearing with headphones, holds a vibrating fork against the soles of my feet, hits various bits of me with little rubber hammers, asks about histories of fainting, diabetes, substance abuse, mental health ("depression? Huh, obviously well handled, I wouldn't have guessed"), and finally pronounces herself satisfied and says she'll send a summary to the Strassenverkehrsamt.Four weeks later she calls me up saying that the Strassenverkehrsamt has decided she isn't accredited to give the exam, despite her own protestations and her presence on the Web site, and I have to start from scratch. And incidentally they decline to fix the Web site.So I go to another doctor, who gives me exactly the same examination but a bit less rigorously, and he sends pretty much exactly the same summary off to the Strassenverkehrsamt.Two weeks later (we're now up to about two months since my original form submission to start the process), I get a letter from the Strassenverkehrsamt saying, "You have a transport-relevant illness. You will be scheduled for an examination with a level 3 or 4 doctor at the Institute for Medical Law, Transport Medicine, and Forensic Psychiatry."What? I just mentioned I get depression!So I start looking up what this process is all about, and my blood frankly runs cold.The Institute is where they send people who've committed grossly dangerous driving behaviour and need to be examined to see whether they're fit to be allowed behind the wheel. I find a document published by the Institute on how to prepare for psychological examinations there, and it includes gems like:_The goal of the discussion of the subject's history of traffic offences is to determine whether the subject has succeeded in developing an appropriate understanding of the problematic nature of their offensive behaviour in the past. [...] If the subject shows that they have engaged in deep self-criticism, then this shows that they have accepted responsibility for their previous criminal offences._The letter from the Strassenverkehrsamt says that the Institute will send me an appointment, which will be in about four weeks. After two and a half weeks I've received nothing. I phone the Institute and they say they're backed up solid with appointments and they'll probably be able to contact me in January to set an appointment.I've contacted the Strassenverkehrsamt to ask if it I couldn't just cancel the whole process and start from scratch. They say no: now that they have the note from the doctor saying that I'm depressed, it's on file and they'll make me go for an examination anyway. So all I can do is sit on the conveyor belt and wait for it to bring me to the machine.I've now been three months without a driving licence, with the prospect of at least a couple more. And since I can't drive, I can't go any sizeable distance with Maia. And since I can't leave Maia so soon after her adoption, that means I'm not going anywhere at all. Especially not back to Germany to see my partner, our new house, or our friends.This is what I get for allowing the Swiss authorities to find out that I have a common and (in its effects at least) well-understood psychological condition.—This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there (it's simple with OpenID), because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.
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SEEKING: someone for two-week visit to Zürich in return for dog-sitting	[Oct. 4th, 2016\|08:06 am]Footpad
[Tags\|appeal, dog, maia] [Current Mood	pragmatic] [Current Location	Zürich, Switzerland]I'm looking for someone in Europe who'd like to come to stay with me in Zurich, effective immediately, all expenses paid, ideally for two weeks, in return for taking care of a very sweet and fairly low-maintenance dog during the day.The situation is this: I've adopted a lovely dog called Maia, but she's unused to being alone. She wants my company if she can get it, but she'll settle down in others' too after a few minutes' whimpering. If she's left alone though, she paces and scratches and cries for a fair while before settling down. We can get her past this; it just needs time and appropriate handling.In the meantime, though, I'm in a bind. I can't leave her to whimper in my apartment during the day, because Swiss neighbours won't abide the noise or the sound of a suffering dog (good people, the Swiss). Due to her restlessness if I leave my desk even for short periods, I can't keep her in the office during the day either.I anticipated this situation and had contingency plans for it, but they depended on an agreement with my workplace, and yesterday the company told me that the situation's changed and now I'm needed full-time in the office. Oh dear.Interested? I'll pay for all your travel and upkeep, including a travel pass for the city. In return, you don't have to do much but be there, and take a pretty adorable dog out for a twenty-minute walk in the middle of the day. If you like the idea, please email footpad@gmail.com, or message @footpadwolf on Twitter. Friends-of-friends also welcome, as long as they're vouched for.—This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there (it's simple with OpenID), because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.
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Introducing Maia	[Sep. 21st, 2016\|11:04 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|dog, maia] [Current Location	a train in Germany] [Current Mood	hopeful]I have a dog in my life again. Well. Nearly. I'm working on it. I'm on my way.Nearly a month ago, a trusted friend in the UK contacted me to let me know of a dog who was in need of a new home, after her erstwhile family had failed to cope with the demands of keeping her. The dog was eight months old, just at that age when puppies are at Maximum Bounce, almost full-sized, and yet not entirely in control of their own flailing paws. The dog was not well controlled; she was being fed a high-energy diet, the condition of her claws suggests she wasn't getting as much exercise as she could have; and she was being allowed to jump up at people. The family's young child was, quite naturally, absolutely terrified of her. And therefore, rather than working on shaping her behaviour and accommodating her needs, they just decided she had to go.My friend described her to me and showed me a photograph, and some forlorn irrational part of me, some part of my heart left broken and empty by the death of Mischa, perked up its ears and said with heartfelt assurance, "This is the one."It's not quite as crazy as it sounds. I'd met her brother on a previous visit, and I knew he had a solid, warm, engaging character. I trust my friend's judgement of dogs, and he described her as intelligent, social and gentle. She was right; I was pretty sure of it.Meanwhile, the dog's owner was showing increasing erratic and worrying behaviour, at one point even falsely claiming he'd had the dog killed, and eventually I wired my friend enough money to go and get her out of there. He had to travel across the country to get to her, and my heart was in my mouth until I received the text message saying she was safe. He's been looking after her since, while we worked through the various formalities involved in preparing her for importation into Switzerland.That logistical exercise, it turned out, was about the easiest of the many tasks ahead of me; I've had to move mountains since (seriously; I'll tell you the story soon), and the hardest parts are by no means over.Last weekend I met her for the first time, two nights and a day in her company, and all my instincts were vindicated: she is a lovely dog, a lovely dog — intelligent, gentle, beautifully socialised, reserved with strangers, affectionate with friends. To be sure, she's not without her problems: she's only scantily trained, and she shows signs of separation anxiety that will certainly be brutally emphasised when she is wrenched from another home, one where she's only just begun to settle in and attach herself to my friend. So that'll need careful management, and I'm already talking to a dog trainer to back me up and fill in any gaps in how I handle it.Now I'm on the train up to Cologne, where I'll stay at home tonight with Akeela and Draugvorn, in the house we used to share with Mischa. From there, with the invaluable assistance of various friends, I'll be making a road trip through six countries (seven, if you count Wales as its own) to collect Maia and bring her home.Maia is nine months old, the pup of an Akita mother and a German Shepherd father. She currently weighs 32 kilograms and she's 84 cm tall from her forepaws to the tips of her ears. Her coat is a gorgeous reddish tawny, and the posture of her tail variously assumes a wolfish drape, a Shepherd sabre curve, and sometimes just a suggestion of an Akita curl. Unlike her siblings, she takes more after the engaged, people-oriented warmth of the German Shepherd than the Akita's aloofness.After I started working in Switzerland, Mischa remained at the house in Germany with Aki and Draug, and I mostly only saw him at weekends. Maia, on the other hand, will permanently live and travel with me.But for now, all that is in the future. Right now, I'm on a train, hurrying north, towards this new chapter in my and Maia's lives.—This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there (it's simple with OpenID), because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.
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Pawprints in Erebus	[Sep. 8th, 2016\|11:23 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|bargaining, bereavement, dear mischa, grief, mischa, stages of grief] [Current Mood	desolate]Dear Mischa,You know that I love you. Yup, still do.It is now three months, twenty-eight days and twenty-three hours since you died. I barely ever cry for you any more these days, although occasionally some compulsive memory or some piece of music comes up and hits an emotional chord and blindsides me with pain. Just a couple of days ago I heard Peter Gabriel's I Grieve, the simplest possible poetry with long-spaced words set in melody like jewels forever separated by the impassable gulfs of absence:I grieve for you You leave _me_and suddenly it was as if nothing had really sunk in and losing you was as incomprehensible and raw as ever. Losing someone isn't a hurt that heals, it just gets covered over with ever thicker scar tissue until you can't quite find it any more. The well of tears does not run dry; with time you are just less drawn to the water's edge.They say the pain will give way to gratitude, but that's not really true either. The gratitude hasn't grown; it was there from the beginning, and never stronger than when I sobbed over your lifeless body, but every fibre and nuance of it remains inextricably convolved with the bitter icy electric-shock pain of your loss. Nothing hurts more than remembering how thankful I am that you were my dog, because nothing more searingly illuminates the starkness of how you are, with such implacable finality, gone.But I'm okay. Really I am. Almost every day, and almost every hour of the rest. It's just once in a while that your shade walks beside me, gentle and vivid and unnaturally calm.There is a thing which I thought, in time, might eclipse you in my heart, might lay the memories of you to rest like the lowest stratum of old sepia photos in a long-forgotten drawer. That in itself is a terrible thing: to lose not only you, but to lose the loss of you, to forget why I loved you, to forget how unique and irreplaceable you were, to quench the ember of you that lives on as a part of me.But in fact it doesn't have to be that way. Thank god. The love of another, it turns out, is unfathomably different from the love of you; it is orthogonal, different in every possible way, an absolutely distinct quale; no interaction between the two, no interference, no intersection. The one is not dishonoured or diminished by the other, its light is not dimmed, and you will always be to me everything you ever were.And there is a time to rise from your grave and start to walk on.I love you, my much-loved and gentle dog. I love you very much, and I miss you and always will and there really is no end to these tears.If you're out there, if you can, if you will, wait for me: there's a far dark river and I'll see you on its shore. But I may be a little while, for I have things to do, and there is another who needs my care and my love as you did too.I think you'll like her. Wait for us and you'll see.All my love, now and always,me—This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there (it's simple with OpenID), because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.
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Pawprints in Erebus

[Sep. 8th, 2016|11:23 pm]Footpad

[Tags**|bargaining, bereavement, dear mischa, grief, mischa, stages of grief] [Current Mood**

desolate]Dear Mischa,You know that I love you. Yup, still do.It is now three months, twenty-eight days and twenty-three hours since you died. I barely ever cry for you any more these days, although occasionally some compulsive memory or some piece of music comes up and hits an emotional chord and blindsides me with pain. Just a couple of days ago I heard Peter Gabriel's I Grieve, the simplest possible poetry with long-spaced words set in melody like jewels forever separated by the impassable gulfs of absence:I grieve for you You leave _me_and suddenly it was as if nothing had really sunk in and losing you was as incomprehensible and raw as ever. Losing someone isn't a hurt that heals, it just gets covered over with ever thicker scar tissue until you can't quite find it any more. The well of tears does not run dry; with time you are just less drawn to the water's edge.They say the pain will give way to gratitude, but that's not really true either. The gratitude hasn't grown; it was there from the beginning, and never stronger than when I sobbed over your lifeless body, but every fibre and nuance of it remains inextricably convolved with the bitter icy electric-shock pain of your loss. Nothing hurts more than remembering how thankful I am that you were my dog, because nothing more searingly illuminates the starkness of how you are, with such implacable finality, gone.But I'm okay. Really I am. Almost every day, and almost every hour of the rest. It's just once in a while that your shade walks beside me, gentle and vivid and unnaturally calm.There is a thing which I thought, in time, might eclipse you in my heart, might lay the memories of you to rest like the lowest stratum of old sepia photos in a long-forgotten drawer. That in itself is a terrible thing: to lose not only you, but to lose the loss of you, to forget why I loved you, to forget how unique and irreplaceable you were, to quench the ember of you that lives on as a part of me.But in fact it doesn't have to be that way. Thank god. The love of another, it turns out, is unfathomably different from the love of you; it is orthogonal, different in every possible way, an absolutely distinct quale; no interaction between the two, no interference, no intersection. The one is not dishonoured or diminished by the other, its light is not dimmed, and you will always be to me everything you ever were.And there is a time to rise from your grave and start to walk on.I love you, my much-loved and gentle dog. I love you very much, and I miss you and always will and there really is no end to these tears.If you're out there, if you can, if you will, wait for me: there's a far dark river and I'll see you on its shore. But I may be a little while, for I have things to do, and there is another who needs my care and my love as you did too.I think you'll like her. Wait for us and you'll see.All my love, now and always,me—This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there (it's simple with OpenID), because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.

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