Stuck

Traffic jam on Highway 401 yesterday.

~~~~~~~~~~

Yesterday I sat for an hour going nowhere in a traffic jam near Tilbury. I got out of the car several times, took photos of the cattail marsh below the shoulder. It couldn't have happened in a more boring place on earth. The land is absolutely flat, but you don't get the feeling of vast plains. Roads careen off in strange directions, carrying caravans of transports who knew well enough to bypass the jam. Farmsteads gather like dust in pockets of earth.

The December issue of National Geographic contains an article on the Okavango Delta, which is one of the places on earth I would most like to visit. It is utterly flat, too, a gradient of a fraction of an inch over many miles. Rains fall in Namibia and Angola, and the floodwater spends months slowly surged downstream and spreading through the delta in Northwest Botswana, eventually seeping into the sands of the Kalahari Desert. It is a wild, croc-infested place, the kind of wilderness that fires my imagination.

Nothing like the bland soybean field of Essex and Kent Counties. We were stuck between construction barricades, figured it was construction holding us up. But for an hour? Some workers in a pickup finally stopped where a group of us traffic jam people were standing and told us a transport's brakes had locked up. Couldn't get at them because of the barricade.

When I got home and tried to transfer photos, my computer wouldn't recognize the camera. I rebooted several times, to no avail. Finally I restored the computer to a configuration from last week, and it picked up the photos. My hard drive had less than 1 Gig of memory free, so I deleted a lot of files and ran defrag.

This morning the computer wouldn't boot. Norton Antivirus kept blocking it with auto-protect, couldn't initilize some database files. I kept having to start it in safe mode and try to fix the problem. I must have tried to start the computer 20 times. Finally it is running normally. But who know how long this will last.

I need to spend a couple days cleaning up my hard drive, strip it down to the bare bones and then reinstall all the software. I don't have time right now. Too many other things to do.

Before I even knew how bad the computer was going to be, I didn't want to get out of bed this morning. I need to move ahead right now, but my brain is in a traffic jam. It won't boot up normally in the mornings.

I have too many files. Defragmenting doesn't help. I need a complete system restore, or maybe a new hard drive.

( Lake Erie from Poplar Bluff, yesterday at 11:02 am. )

Mental health update; trees consulting pebbles

From the haiku generator:

~

writing down the air
earth and water because we're
going to burn ourselves

~

trees consulting pebbles
and streams looking for meaning
in the storm grasping

~

It was a rough day: I had to go downtown to meet someone recommended to me by both the social workers who have interviewed me. I didn't want to go, spent some time pacing around the apartment. I had to pull the address out of my bag several times and check it before I absorbed where I was going. I felt useless, lonely and desperate.

My big fear is that Things Will Not Go Well, that I'll burn another bridge, so the world of opportunities will get smaller and smaller. It's irrational for me to avoid opportunities for fear of losing them, but this is in fact what I do.

The reason I had to go today, is that I have a second interview tomorrow with a social worker at the Community Mental Health Centre. Last time, he gave me homework; contacting this person was one of them.

It was also a good day, because the meeting went pretty well. Her name is Karen and she runs a peer support centre for people with mood disorders. Not only that, but she organizes a writers group. She's writing two novels.

She was pleasant and easy to talk to, a little scattered, so I felt right at home. Even so, I noticed partway through our conversation that I was twisting a band of paper around my fingers. A nervous habit.

I came home and fired all that anxious energy into tidying my office, went through two boxes of papers. I cleared enough floor space to vacuum. This wasn't just a matter of shifting things from room to room again. I actually threw out a large bag of papers, filed some others, and reduced the unsorted ones to a single box.