Don’t Sweat The Big Stuff

The car lost its transmission, the kid has skipped the last forty days of school, the dog just passed out on the front porch and the doctor’s office called and said come right in and they wouldn’t tell you why they couldn’t let you know over the phone

Yeah, it ain’t fair.

So what are you going to do? Okay sitting down in the middle of the room and crying until all you can do is heave is one option. Might not be the best, but it is certainly the one which comes to mind first.

But is it the one that you should put all of your eggs in and watch like a hawk?

No.

There is no substitute for a good wallow in self-pity. There are times when a bit of wallowing is just the thing and you can pull out all of the stops and get a really good wallow going.

But it is not a long-term solution.

And for an artist, where time is so limited and there are so many demands on what little you have managed to coax out of a schedule too full for Wonder Woman, or Superman or even the Incredible Hulk to salvage, you cannot afford to let even one minute slip away unaccounted for, used to the fullest or scraped to the very bone and then cracked so that you can suck the marrow from it and still dry and bleach the bones for a future project.

You just have to suck it up and get on with it.

You know by now that I have been dealing with a whole bunch of health issues and most of them seem to be only managed with trips to Seattle. Seattle is a nice place and it is a big city and I am a city kid and love the smell of sex and sin and business and traffic and fun, fun, fun, but I don’t have time or the inclination to go there every six weeks so that a croaker can cluck over me and nod sagely and tell me that they have to do more work on something which was never giving me any problem in the first place and only became an issue because some other croaker said it was deadly dangerous and had to be addressed or I would turn into a stump and be left to wash up on some long forgotten beach like so much drift wood.

Yuck, what a cheery prospect.

And with stuff like that coming from the guys who should know it makes it hard to work up the gumption to keep plugging along at the stuff which really matters, but has so little immediate positive reward that it seems like a waste of time when the Quacks have consulted and decided that there is little or no hope for you and why should you try to keep going when they have all but given up?

Okay, it is seldom that dramatic or terrible. We all have a way of hearing what we fear most and if the Quack says that you have a hangnail to you it sounds like they just said they would have to amputate at the elbow.

So take a breath. How bad is the situation really?

That’s what I thought and believe me I have done the dramatic doom vision when there was little which couldn’t be fixed and have held on with all of my might just so I could prove the Croaker wrong and die from a hangnail just to spite them. But none of it or at least the worst parts were all in my highly developed imagination.

I hate traveling back and forth to Seattle. It is a colossal inconvenience and grotesquely expensive and tiring and I’d rather spend my time watching the Stanley Cup, (My baby Blackhawks won you know), or twiddling my thumbs or catching up on back episodes of Falling Skies.

Which is exactly why when something comes along and knocks the wind out of your sails it is so hard to get the gears turning like they should and even if you aren’t being made sick as a dog while the Quacks experiment around fiddling with your innards, get back to the work that you are ducking while feeling sorry for yourself.

Don’t do it!

Prove the Croakers wrong, live in spite of them and live well cause that is the best revenge. Okay, so there is no way I can get my silly-ass exotic sickness treated competently locally and Seattle is the right place for the job and even though I hate having to do it I will have to suck it up and keep making the drive until they Quacks either manage to kill me off or cure me. And no matter how hard I whine that’s a fact.

But if I manage to waste all of the time I do have while I am waiting for the next round of head-nodding and chin scratching then that is all my own fault.

Get back up and work something in in the in-between times. Time is limited for the best and healthiest of us. You can’t afford to waste a minute and there are only so many minutes which get issued to any one person so you’d better assume that the one you have in your hot little hand right now is the last one you are going to get and make the most of it.

Time lost is gone forever and if you don’t have a dog passed out on the front porch and the car is running and the Croaker hasn’t said a word to you in years then you are lucky and you have no excuses at all, so get busy.

Don’t wait for the time when you don’t have time anymore to do the things you need to do to keep making life worth all of the effort.

Now excuse me, I have to go and read Snoopy. The fearless World War I fighter pilot ace was down between enemy lines and surrounded by hostile soldiers and had just been forced to surrender so who knows what fiendish devilments are being used to make him give up the location of the allied bases in France…

Don’t think I don’t know how to make the best use of the time I do have between medical trips!