Thank You Appendix

“What are you thankful for?” The unavoidable question that will come out of my child’s mouth this year as our small family sits around the dinner table this year. She’ll ask it out of genuine curiosity, out of a sense of tradition, and out of a desire to deflect my attention when I tell her she needs to eat something other than cornbread. I’ve known the question is coming for weeks and I’ve been trying to think of what I am actually thankful for. It’s been kind of a crap year I suppose. It started right off the bat with my wife losing her job and well it just kind of gets harder to pick out good news from there. So I guess I’ll settle for being grateful for bad news.

This year I am thankful for appendicitis. Specifically my wife needing to be taken to the ER with severe abdominal cramps early this summer. She had emergency surgery to have the offending vestigial organ removed. It was then that they found the tumor.

A carcinoid tumor. It’s a slow-growing type of cancer. It often goes undetected for years. If her appendix hadn’t gone then quite frankly the chances of it getting noticed before it was extremely advanced was slim. She was scheduled for another surgery quickly and the rest of the tumor, along with about two feet of intestine was removed.

This little disaster resulted in an out pouring of sympathy and support from friends and family.  Some of this support came in the form of a care package, that included two gift cards, one for a restaurant, and one for amazon. They were just enough to let us shuffle expenses around and kept us from making a hard decision between her post-op medications, groceries and other household needs in the following months.

That package also included a journal and a pen, that after letting it stare at me accusingly for a while I took up and have now been using daily to unclutter my brain every morning. This in turn, has caused me to start blogging again. Because why write it down if you don’t intend it to be read? Doing this has caused me to recently go back and examine some of my earlier work and I am thankful for the realization that it doesn’t entirely suck.

I mean don’t get me wrong there’s some real turds there, but I am happy to have found quite a few I’m somewhat pleased with. Especially the 100 word posts I’ve made but then I have always been a fan of brevity.

So yeah, thanks to my wife’s appendix that no longer is.

Oh yeah. I am thankful for my family and friends, my pets (even the emotionally needy rat terrier), lollipops, indoor plumbing, and all the rest of that stuff.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have turnips to peel.

Moving

Moving, again.

I despise moving.

I have done it far too many time in too few years. In the past I found myself compelled to move by the economic forces that occur when a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle, such as mine meets an unexpected financial disaster. Alcoholics do tend to make such poor decisions when it comes to money after all, especially when it is already in such short supply. With this move, however this is not the case.

This time the move seems to be on more amicable, and complex terms. There is no need to hastily make decisions about which facets of my life are important and sweep just those bits into poorly labeled boxes. We aren’t trying to load it all up at the eleventh hour, and hurry away like thieves in the night. We aren’t running to the refuge of a house of a relative or a sympathetic acquaintance. No, on this particular venture I get to enjoy the picking apart of my personal life. Examining the minutiae of my life’s contents as I sort through years of “saved” belongings.

Paperwork is the bulk of it. Notices from my child’s school, unopened bills that are usually paid online anyway, pay stubs from two years ago filed away for those many times I seem need to provide proof of income, bank statements that alternately full of either fanciful lies or depressing accuracies. Then there is fine detritus that tends to fill drawers. Loose batteries of indeterminate lifespan, key long divorced from their locks, broken toys , along with fragmented bits of jewelry, pins and other baubles abandoned long ago all awaiting unceremonious burial come this trash day.

Of course there is my extensive collection of notebooks and pads are strewn throughout the apartment in desks, on shelves and sometimes laying on the floor. All of them half-full of scratch sheets for homework,  grocery lists, abandoned journals and false starts for stories long forgotten, along with random thoughts and quotes that seemed important at the time. I marvel at the sheer acreage of deforestation these all represent.

Inevitably I find myself on my hands and knees picking up piece by piece every paper clip, forgotten Lego, and scrap of paper that has been deemed too large or hazardous for the vacuum to pick up. Stopping occasionally to place a handful of collected pennies into the appropriate jar. The whole experience seems so arduous considering that we’re only carting everything about a thousand feet to the house next door.

As I begin to think about the complicated series of events that caused this particular move it is with much dread that my eyes fall to the couch. That beautifully gaudy, orange, polka dot, swinging seventies style convertible love seat that my wife admired so much in the shop. It was such a wonderful couch up until we had to move it up the rickety wooden stairs to find out that our door frame was just slightly too narrow. We were able to barely squeeze it through only after getting it partially stuck and then removing its stubby, square legs. Now I find myself sitting cross-legged on the floor, eyeing this heavy carrot colored monstrosity like it was a body that I needed to dispose of.

In the old days of booze fueled evictions I’d just abandon it or maybe pitch it off the top landing of the stairs.

I despise moving.

Anyway, that’s been what I’ve been doing this past week.

Happy Monday.

Two Years, About One Quarter of the Time (Now with footnotes!)

Dear Readers,

I recently got a notification from WordPress that is was my second anniversary of having a blog. That’s just it, I have a blog. I don’t own one, I don’t run one, and I sure as shit don’t maintain one. Of the 730 days involved I’ve managed to publish not quite 170 posts, of them I could easily discount ten to fifteen percent of what I’ve written as utter nonsense posted just because… well that’s what you do¹. For what it’s worth I am here and still trying, I guess that’s a good thing.

The oppression of dates

I suppose the date of Oct 18th should seem meaningful. It is nestled quite nicely somewhere between my actual birthday later this month and the date that I had my last drink towards the end of September, some years ago. I think more about the passing of the latter than I do the former. Due to the personal philosophy that keeps me sober though I don’t really hold much truck with the pitiful insignificance of specific dates of my life because right now, today is the only thing that you can hold onto with any certainty. This is probably a reflection of my father’s lack of concern or respect for outward displays of ceremony².

Why am I here?

I started this blog with the intention of getting back to writing, specifically fiction. I’ve done a fair bit of that. Thirty-two of my posts have been a work of fiction. That’s about a 27% success rate on that front. It took me a couple of weeks of dicking around to work up the courage to post DIG! which, as it goes I rather like. By far the bulk of the material I have worked on I like to use the cute little label of “Creative Nonfiction”³. We’ll just chalk those up to journal entries, memoirs, coping with my sobriety and, attempts at making somewhat intelligent commentary on the world around me. One of the things I’ve been rather proud of is starting a serialized fiction piece.

The Untitled Thing has often shown a lot of promise but the last few entries have gone of track a bit so I feel I need to take a long hard look at that before I go any further. I doubt I’ll go as far as a full rewrite but I am keeping the nuclear option open for now.

And I was of course extremely flattered that I got Freshly Pressed for writing Rarity of Quiet sometime ago

Absences, breaks, and hiatuses

Life gets in the way. A lot. I learned not to apologize for that a early on⁴. I do however feel like talking about it right now.

I have these bouts of insomnia, like not sleeping for more than two hours at a time for more than a month kind of bouts⁵. On the upswing of these I feel great and get super productive for a while and everything is kinda awesome. Then the exhaustion erodes everything away until all I have I anxiety wrapped in a nice warm sweater of depression and self loathing. That’s when I generally stop writing because everything I do upsets me in some way and most of my energy is spent on keeping myself upright and making it through work, often to come home and stare longingly at my blog’s dashboard for about an hour or so before pretending to sleep.

But then eventually I feel better and when I get over it all I always come back here so there’s that.

Also I don’t like publishing when I am angry at a specific person in my personal life because it always winds up being about them and quite frankly that’s not fair to myself, them, or my readers.

Sometimes I have too much other shit to do.

And, sometimes I just don’t feel like it… which is completely valid.

In all serious gratitude

There are a handful of people that I know for sure have been following and reading my works for these past two years. I cannot express properly how much that kind of support means to me. If it was not for them I would have given up long ago.

I also am more than grateful for the browse by readers, new followers, random likers, and odd commenters that pass through here from time to time. I am firm believer that writing without some kind of audience to share it with is a rather sad and pointless endeavor, well it is for me any way.

Thank You,
Doug Hippensteel
Corned Beef Hashtag

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1. I’m looking at you, pretty much all of November of 2013 and also the bulk of this post most likely ↩
2. Let’s not dwell too much on my father unless you’re gonna wheel in a chaise lounge⁶ and start smoking a cigar. ↩
3. Which is about as close to an oxymoron as you can get without needing special gloves to handle it. ↩
4. Seriously if there is one piece of advice I got about blogging that I feel needs to be passed it’s: Never waste time apologizing for not posting something; it’s a waste of your talent and your readers attention. ↩
5. As opposed to the, “I didn’t get any sleep because I spent all night binge watching Netflix and getting wasted.” kind seems to be an epidemic, and pisses me off greatly when someone refers to it as insomnia. Just sayin’ ↩
6. Sometimes a couch is only a couch. ↩

Bicycle Stories Month | Final Recap and Round-up

 

And we come to a close…

It is now June, and the sun has set on both National Bike Month and this little blogging event. This was the first time I hosted an event and I am glad I did, I got to meet some new people, discover some new blogs and write a few stories that wouldn’t have seen the light of day otherwise.

Though engagement wasn’t as high as I would have liked I am happy I didn’t just give up on the event. Three great pieces were submitted in the last stretch of the month, you can find the links to them below. I’d like to thank those authors and everyone who even just expressed interest in participating. I’d really like to say thank you to all of you who stopped by to read this month.

The Round-Up Portion

This weeks participants, in order of date of submission.

Bicycle, Tiger, Thief, February Street

Her Bike, Charlottesville Winter

The scraped knee… A childhood rite of passage, Meaningful Mommy

 That about sums up the week

If that isn’t enough bicyclelyness for you, take a peek at My Bicycle Diary for some extra reading material.

I am not sure if I am going to be hosting this again next year, we’ll just play that one by ear for now. In the meantime Happy Biking and happy blogging.

Bicycle Stories Month | Week 4 and not quite 5

 

It’s Almost Over

We are going into the last nine days of May and, therefore Bicycle Stories Month is coming to a close. If you are still interested in participating you have until Saturday May 31st to share your adventures in cycling. To avoid any hang over posts we’ll be skipping this Tuesday’s round-up and recap, instead a final one will be posted on Sunday Jun 1st.

How Does this event work?

1. I’ll make an Event post each Thursday in May that I’ll stick to my home page for one week (Note this is the page for this week). It will be posted at 8:00am EST.
2. You create a post for your bicycle story
3. Use the tag Bicycle Stories Month and/ or include a Pingback to the weekly event post (again that’s this page)
4.  On Sunday June 1st, I’ll post a a final round-up of participants.

How do I participate?

If you’d like to participate then  just get out on your bike and then post about it. That’s it, no prompts no specific challenge to it just lets tell stories about bikes for a month. Your post can be in any format your comfortable with and just needs to be broadly about cycling.

• A story or journal entry about your day out biking.
• A photo essay showing places you visited on your bike (it’d be nice to include some pictures of your bikes).
• A journalism piece about a bicycle event in your community.
• The tale of teaching you child or sibling how to ride
• When you got your first bike
• Tell us why you hate riding a bike.
• A how to on bike repairs
• Anything you want just as long as it involves a bike, even a complete work of fiction.

Do we get a badge?

Absolutely, if you want a badge to include on your blog or in your post then feel free to grab a copy of the logo for the event, and stick it anywhere it makes you happy. Here it is again in case you missed it at the top of the page.

Bicycle Stories Month Semi-official Badge

Don’t have a Blog? We got you covered.

If you want to participate without a blog you can make a short post or share your photos on this blogs Facebook page to share your biking stories this month. I’ll be sharing bike related links there all month.

I hope that you’ll join in and have some fun with this event.

 Have any questions, or need additional information?

Please leave a comment on the Event Page or Contact Me through the myriad of options available.

Happy biking, and happy blogging.

Bicycle Stories Month | Week 3: Recap and Round-up

 

The Recap

Yes I am just a glutton for disappointment

At this point I really should not be surprised by the lack of involvement in this little project. Which is cool, I mean  it’s not like anyone’s holding a gun to your head… Would that work? I mean it would be a good way to bring the stats for my sites up… ah but then I suppose everyone would be doing it.

Oh well life goes on and so does the month of May. Since the month is  so close to an end I will be including week 4 and 5 in the next round-up and that will be posted on Sunday June 1st, so there won’t be one next Tuesday, for those scant few who are still paying attention.

What in the name of… Wait What?

I’m doing this made up little thing I’m calling Bicycle Stories Month. It’s to get people riding their bikes and sharing their experiences. Since you showed up here you might as well join in.

If this is the first you’ve heard of Bicycles Stories Month you can check out the details on the event page.

 

The Round-Up Portion

My submission for this event is Memory Lane but, if you’ve already been by once today you already know that

 

Aaaand that about sums up the week

If you’re currently on the toilet and staring at your phone (c’mon you know you do it) you can take a peek at My Bicycle Diary for some extra reading material.

That’s what is passing for a round-up this week. If you are still interested in joining this project remember anything posted after the rest of today and all of Wednesday will be eligible to be included with next weeks round-up, and a next and final  event post to link to will be up on Thursday May 22, at 8:00am EST.

Happy Biking and happy blogging.

Bicycle Stories Month | Week 3

 

And We’re Still Going…

Third week of Bicycle Stories Month is underway, so it’s about time you got involved. You still have until Saturday May 31st to share your adventures in cycling, even if they are completely imaginary. Seriously, how would I know the difference.

How Does this event work?

1. I’ll make an Event post each Thursday in May that I’ll stick to my home page for one week (Note this is the page for this week). It will be posted at 8:00am EST.
2. You create a post for your bicycle story
3. Use the tag Bicycle Stories Month and/ or include a Pingback to the weekly event post (again that’s this page)
4.  On the following Tuesday, I’ll post a round-up of and/ or  reblog some of my favorites. (entries made after the round-up is posted will be eligible for the following week’s round-up)

How do I participate?

If you’d like to participate then  just get out on your bike and then post about it. That’s it, no prompts no specific challenge to it just lets tell stories about bikes for a month. Your post can be in any format your comfortable with and just needs to be broadly about cycling.

• A story or journal entry about your day out biking.
• A photo essay showing places you visited on your bike (it’d be nice to include some pictures of your bikes).
• A journalism piece about a bicycle event in your community.
• The tale of teaching you child or sibling how to ride
• When you got your first bike
• Tell us why you hate riding a bike.
• A how to on bike repairs
• Anything you want just as long as it involves a bike, even a complete work of fiction.

Do we get a badge?

Absolutely, if you want a badge to include on your blog or in your post then feel free to grab a copy of the logo for the event, and stick it anywhere it makes you happy. Here it is again in case you missed it at the top of the page.

Bicycle Stories Month Semi-official Badge

Don’t have a Blog? We got you covered.

If you want to participate without a blog you can make a short post or share your photos on this blogs Facebook page to share your biking stories this month. I’ll be sharing bike related links there all month.

I hope that you’ll join in and have some fun with this event.

 Have any questions, or need additional information?

Please leave a comment on the Event Page or Contact Me through the myriad of options available.

Happy biking, and happy blogging.

Bicycle Stories Month | Week 2: Recap and Round-up

 

The Recap Portion

Don’t make me beg now

Week two comes to a close and I have to say I’m a little disappointed. I suppose I could have decided to run a cat stories event this month and you’d all be stabbing each other in the neck to be the first to post for it. Damn it I should have made it about cats shouldn’t I.

Seriously though, I get it, we all have lives and our own publishing schedules and such. Mine has been kind of hectic lately so I haven’t been able to spend as much time as I would have like checking out other people’s blogs this week myself.

Oh well life goes on and so does the month of May.

Wait I swear I didn’t know anything about this! What’s going on here?

I’m doing this made up little thing I’m calling Bicycle Stories Month. It’s to get people riding their bikes and sharing their experiences. Since you showed up here you might as well join in.

If this is the first you’ve heard of Bicycles Stories Month you can check out the details on the event page.

 

The Round-Up Portion

My submission for this event is Reconstructive. It’s kinda fun you should check it out.

Also I’d like to thank February St. for mentioning this event in the post Coming Fiction and Laptop Death. My condolences about the departed computer and I hope you are still interested and able to take part in Bicycle Stories when you get it sorted.

Aaaand that about sums up the week

If you’re currently on the toilet and staring at your phone (c’mon you know you do it) you can take a peek at My Bicycle Diary for some extra reading material.

That’s what is passing for a round-up this week. If you are still interested in joining this project remember anything posted after the rest of today and all of Wednesday will be eligible to be included with next weeks round-up, and a new event post to link to will be up every Thursday at 8:00am EST.

Happy Biking and happy blogging.

RE: Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin

Another late start to my blogging week. Gee, thanks life.

So I have been thinking about writing, namely my experiences blogging. I am, in some way, amazed at how positive the whole experience has been. Being from a certain perpetually dismal outlook on life, I had to really work myself up to doing this. Besides just opening myself up to constructive and well intended criticisms, I was expecting, givien my general observations of human nature, a lot more negative reaction to my writing.

It would be very easy for my little site to be ignored or the subject of ridicule. Instead I have gotten a lot of interest, support, and encouragement from the people who have stumbled upon it. I have also received a lot of good advice from experienced bloggers, and from the staff at WordPress by way of the various challenges that I have participated in.

I would really like to (once again) thank everyone, specifically the regular commentators (is that the right word?) on my blog Our interactions do more to keep me engaged in this than project than most anything else I can think of. You know who you are so I doubt I need to call you out by name.

I was trying so hard to come up with a good quote to start this piece off with, but I kept coming up dry. When I was driving the girl to school this morning, we ended up listening to Sly and The Family Stone. It seemed a bit appropriate so here it is.

Anyway that’s what I’ve been thinking about this past week.

Happy Monday!

Bicycle Stories Month | Week 2

 

Welcome Back!

This is the second week of Bicycle Stories Month, so if you were interested last week but didn’t quite get around to taking part you are in luck. You still have until Saturday May 31st to share your adventures in cycling. Why wait though you can enter as many posts as you like throughout the month.

How Does this event work?

1. I’ll make an Event post each Thursday in May that I’ll stick to my home page for one week (Note this is the page for this week). It will be posted at 8:00am EST.
2. You create a post for your bicycle story
3. Use the tag Bicycle Stories Month and/ or include a Pingback to the weekly event post (again that’s this page)
4.  On the following Tuesday, I’ll post a round-up of and/ or  reblog some of my favorites. (entries made after the round-up is posted will be eligible for the following week’s round-up)

How do I participate?

If you’d like to participate then  just get out on your bike and then post about it. That’s it, no prompts no specific challenge to it just lets tell stories about bikes for a month. Your post can be in any format your comfortable with and just needs to be broadly about cycling.

• A story or journal entry about your day out biking.
• A photo essay showing places you visited on your bike (it’d be nice to include some pictures of your bikes).
• A journalism piece about a bicycle event in your community.
• The tale of teaching you child or sibling how to ride
• When you got your first bike
• Tell us why you hate riding a bike.
• A how to on bike repairs
• Anything you want just as long as it involves a bike, even a complete work of fiction.

Do we get a badge?

Absolutely, if you want a badge to include on your blog or in your post then feel free to grab a copy of the logo for the event, and stick it anywhere it makes you happy. Here it is again in case you missed it at the top of the page.

Bicycle Stories Month Semi-official Badge

Don’t have a Blog? We got you covered.

If you want to participate without a blog you can make a short post or share your photos on this blogs Facebook page to share your biking stories this month. I’ll be sharing bike related links there all month.

I hope that you’ll join in and have some fun with this event.

 Have any questions, or need additional information?

Please leave a comment on the Event Page or Contact Me through the myriad of options available.

Happy biking, and happy blogging.