2019

2019 lurks. It's right around the corner, baby.

New years are strange animals. Everybody wants a new start. But usually, once you shake off the hangover, everything looks depressingly the same and nothing changes.

That is a killer.

2018 ground me down. Hollowed out my insides and left me numb. There were noticeable changes in my demeanor, which I have given a great deal of thought to. I wanted to chalk them up to learning, evolving - a sudden ability to not sweat the small stuff.

But I don't think that is true.

2018 started on November 2, 2017 when Carol had a tumor removed from her brain. She has not been the same since. And every day since then, when I look at her, when I listen to her, it breaks my heart. I didn't realize the toll it was taking on me until recently.

Having said that, what a stupid and a selfish thing to say. She is the one who has suffered - enormously - who had her life turned upside down.

Unfortunately, Carol is not real open about her feelings, a trait that has frustrated me for forty years. So she doesn't talk about it much. I know she is frustrated, but I don't have a sense for the the depth of her hurt. Then again, I am not sure she has a feeling for the depth of my hurt.

I got fat in 2018. This is not conducive to a positive self image. I am pretty down on myself, and feeling strange premonitions of foreboding for 2019.

Not the way I want to greet a new year.

I will be 65 on January 1. Not happy about that either. I don't feel old, at least not too old, but there is a sense of finality about that number, a sense of measurement - a yardstick.

Cancer lurks. Got the melanoma thing out there and not sure where that may lead. After I got over the initial shock in 2016 I joked about it. Stage 1A. Baby stuff. But I know melanoma can turn nasty. Go internal.

Also got three cancerous spots on my prostate. Being monitored. So that shit is out there, along with the whole turning 65 thing.

If I was smart I would draw from the examples Carol and my brother Ed set.

Carol fights like a warrior on this facial muscle thing and maintains a remarkably positive attitude. I hear her tell people over and over again that if this is the worst to happen to her, she doesn't have it so bad. If anybody else said that I would think they were full of shit. I believe Carol means it.

Ed has been through the toughest thing any person ever has to go through. He has also had a few other serious setbacks in his life. And he keeps bouncing back better and faster and stronger. He has an amazingly positive attitude as well.

I don't know if I am smart. I don't know if I can learn from them. I don't know if I can adapt their toughness to my own situation. Maybe I could withdraw a syringe of determination from each of them and inject it directly into my essence.

I am feeling flat about 2019. Feeling kind of broken. But I have a sense that if I don't turn things around, I never will. And I could not live with myself in that case.

Feels like a big year coming up. An important one.

I must try to be equal to the challenge.