David Cain writes, in Give Yourself a Ripcord to Pull:

The low mood works like a bad hallucinogen that turns your personal world into its dark, anemic twin, a landscape drained of good possibilities.

Aside from being unpleasant, this kind of mood creates an immediate practical problem, in that it prevents you from identifying and taking the actions that might bring you out of it. The mind doesn’t know what to do in this state, because a world drained of positive possibilities isn’t one in which anything seems like a good idea. If your world currently seems like a place where things never work out, how are you going to work it out?

There’s a related phenomenon, which I’ve been noticing in myself  recently: the “low mood” is also a breeding ground for all manner of unrelated negative thoughts, negative thoughts that, when in thrall of the low mood, may appear to be its cause.

Maybe I’m pissed off, anxious, or angry because it’s raining out, or because my stomach hurts, or any of a million other invisible reasons. In that vulnerable state, a gateway is open to every unclosed loop that’s banging around in my head. 

I haven’t filed my corporate taxes yet!

There’s gout weed growing in the back garden! We’re out of my favourite cereal!

How come Lisa uses so many abbreviations when she texts!?

It’s chilly in here!

Did my father really love me at all?

In the growth medium of the low mood, any of these can appear to be the cause of the mood itself.

More often than not, they have nothing to do with it.

From The India Notes, India badly needs its own ElevenLabs, and it’s a billion-dollar opportunity:

Western cultures operate on what we might call “transactional efficiency.” The individual is the atomic unit. You can walk into a bank, buy a coffee, or close a business deal with minimal personal context. Trust flows through institutions - contracts, processes, brands. The system works because it’s designed to be impersonal. Efficiency emerges from keeping the personal separate from the professional. 

India operates differently. Here, the individual isn’t an atom; they’re a node in an interconnected web of relationships - family, community, school, hometown, caste. Trust doesn’t flow through institutions alone; it flows through people. Therefore, before any meaningful interaction or transaction can occur, one must first establish context. The conversation is the due diligence.

Reading this characterization of India, I realized that much the same thing can be said of Prince Edward Island: to truly inhabit this place requires finding your place in that”web of relationships,” and it can take decades to do that.

For someone newly-arrived on the Island, as, I imagine, for someone newly-arrived in India, this web is hidden. It’s one of the reasons why moving here can be so confoundedly complex and lonely, especially in the early days.

From an April 1961 profile in The New Yorker by Robert Rice:

Nichols and May began their life together with an improvisation. It was a performance designed solely for their private entertainment, though it may well have also entertained, or astounded, a number of loiterers in the waiting room of the Randolph Street station of the Illinois Central in Chicago, which is where it took place. One evening in the spring of 1954, Nichols was walking through the waiting room on his way to a train and Miss May was sitting on a bench reading a magazine. They knew each other by sight, both having for a time hung around the University of Chicago and been associated with various little-theatre groups that originated on or around its campus. As Nichols remembers it, he had avoided becoming acquainted with Miss May, because he was sure she was sneering at him. He still speaks of “the look of utter contempt” that he believes was on her face as she watched him playing a part in Strindberg’s “Miss Julie”—the first time he recalls seeing her. Miss May denies that she ever regarded Nichols with contempt. “I didn’t regard him at all,” she said recently. In any case, that day in the waiting room Nichols resolved to face up to Miss May. He sat down beside her and, talking out of the corner of his mouth, assumed the character of a secret agent making contact with a colleague. She responded in a heavy Russian accent, and they went into a long scene that Nichols recalls as “half spy, half pick-up.” They no longer remember just what they said, of course, but if by any chance the scene foreshadowed a spy spot they did a few months ago for “Monitor,” it may have begun something like this:

Nichols: I beg your pardon. Do you have a light?

Miss May: Yes, certainly.

Nichols: I had a lighter, but (pause) I lost it on Fifty-seventh Street!

Miss May: Oh. Then you’re Agent X-9?

(via SIX at 6)

I’ve been unable to find any trace of Robert Rice, save for his bylines in The New Yorker from the 1940s through the 1960s: he seems to have left no trace of himself. His most cited piece seems to be his 1958 profile of Leonard Bernstein.

Extension, flexion, supination, and pronation: the four elbow-involved tasks, the tasks my elbow, newly Steve Austined, resists.

The road from here, now that surgery is done, my new titanium part installed, my incision well-healing, is to therapeutically extend, flex, supinate, and pronate, and in so doing rebuild my range of motion.

Right now my range of motion is frustratingly limited, limited in a “that’s it, I’m fucked” way that requires deep belief in the little-by-littleness of physiotherapy.

Physio is one of those  allied health professions that ended up on the wrong side of medicare funding, along with dentistry, optometry, and psychology. Without private health insurance, you’re on your own.

Except that if you have had orthopaedic surgery you’re eligible for outpatient physio in the hospital. I’m waiting for a call back from them today with an appointment time, hopefully one this week.

In the meantime I’m homebrewing some basic movements to get a head start, mashing up learnings from YouTube et al, with confidence from my surgeon’s parting words that at this point there’s no bad way to move. 

Danny Gregory writes about the events that befall us, and the marks they leave:

Each of mine began as a kind of catastrophe — a crash, a fall, a diagnosis, a shock whenever I bit down hard. Each felt, in its moment, outsized and defining.

But time works a quiet magic: the pain retreats, the swelling fades, the drama becomes dinner party conversation.

Now they’re not catastrophes. They’re bookmarks. Chapter titles. Some I share easily — “this one’s from when I was in college” — others I keep for myself. They’re proof of what I’ve been through, not barriers to who I can be next.

I have a scar on my left index finger from where the saw slipped while Dad was showing me how to cut up the pieces of the barn board in the back yard, remnants left by the previous owner, who’d bought a barn at auction.

There are three tiny scars on my belly, marks that show where Dr. Fleming removed my gallbladder.

And now, here in the fracture clinic, I’ve just had the dressing removed on my radial head replacement surgery incision, and can see the mark I’ll carry forward from that, a four inch wound—well healed, it seems—around the circumference of my elbow.

Nine years ago I posted this review in Google Maps about Berlin’s Tegel Airport:

My favourite airport. Easy and quick to get to. Compact and decentralized inside. Just enough services to get you by. And no soul-destroying duty free alley to be forced through. All the pleasures of a well-worn pair of shoes. May BER stay closed forever.

Today Google emailed me that my review had been removed, I presume because Tegel closed 5 years ago.

 It will be missed. 

So there are some things that suck about breaking your elbow. Here are some things that help. 

• My friends Luisa and Pedro both pointed me toward using the speech-to-text features of my devices to ease the process of writing. Although this is something I’ve been doing all along, their nudges prompted me to look at Voice Control on my Mac (Settings > Accessibility > Voice Control), a feature that takes the regular dictation features built into the Mac and kicks them up a notch, allowing keyboard free editing. For example, in this sentence, I can say “capitalize Mac,” and it will do that. I’ve powered a bunch of writing tasks today much more easily since I learned about it.
• To aid putting pants on one-handed, stick one finger, from your good hand through the butto nhole and pull it over, around the button. It helps.
• To aid in squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, stick the bottom of the toothbrush into the crook of the handle of a mug on the bathroom countertop to hold it in place.
• Did you know that you can request copies of your medical records from Health PEI? Here’s the online form. You’ll need a photo of your health card and photo ID. The orthopaedic surgeons notes from my first visit to the fracture clinic start out like this: “Peter presents to the clinic for evaluation of his right elbow. He is a 59-year-old, right-hand dominant gentleman who works as a printmaker. He is very healthy and active.”
• Friend of the blog David recommended no-tie shoelaces. Lisa is picking me up a pair in town today. Footwear independence!
• Our friends Valerie and Lars is invited us over to their pool yesterday. Although my bandaged arm can’t get wet, I was able to stand in the shallow end, up to my waist. Oh man, that was great.
• We figured out the turning on the air-conditioning before it gets hot is the way to go during a heat wave. Apparently air conditioners are great at maintaining temperature, not so good at forcibly lowering it when it’s already too hot.
• This $3 bamboo phone holder from IKEA has proved a very useful tool for one arm to use of my phone. Putting the phone in upside-down gives me enough resistance to plug in the Lightning cable on the bottom. Resting the phone in landscape, and putting the holder on the pillow that’s supporting my arm, lets me watch videos without having to hold the phone.
• Well-placed tea towels have proved very useful for keeping soup out of my lap, supporting my wrist, wrapping around an ice pack for cooling.
• Departure, a TV series starring Christopher Plummer that just showed up on Netflix, has proved a very helpful distraction when I need one.
• My workout coach sending me a care package filled with books and sweets and a card signed by everyone in the 5:00 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday crew.

Of course the greatest thing that doesn’t suck is the support of those that love me: I have no idea how I do all this without them. 

Lisa especially: she has been doing all the driving, all the cooking, all the clothes-folding, all the house-cleaning. Do you need two arms for it? She’s been doing it, on top of everything else that summer throws at us every day.

Rebecca Toh writes about the “vague, inchoate feeling” of who we are:

I can relate so much to this feeling that we are in the end who we are, that there seems to be a certain essence in us that we must allow to guide us through life. If we defy this compass, we can end up in places we don’t belong. But if we trust it, follow it, we might do something as grand as fulfilling our purpose.

Christie George in The Emergency was Curiosity, channelling Jenni Odell in How to Do Nothing:

As Jenny writes about retreat, “The desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal.” Our move to the woods is a retreat. As is my retreat from a more stable 9 to 5 job. As is this retreat into self-reflection…

I first learned about  George, and her book report about Odell’s book, when I saw her interviewed by Igor and Johannes on their Follow the Rabbit podcast. She is  broad-minded, lateral thinker, very much someone after my own heart.

I’ve been making my way through the book report over the last week, and, as Lisa can attest, it’s become a frequent topic of conversation in our household. You can buy a copy, digital or analog, in her online shop. 

Cate Hall writes about quitting:

When people think about quitting, it’s hard because they’re comparing the rich web of attachments they have now to some mostly blank slate, or, worse, the possibility of disaster. However, what’s more realistic to imagine, if you’re leaving something you’re no longer aligned with, is a future with more to love than you have now. Those things you will be attached to in the future are currently obscured by the impassable barrier of time, but they’re still out there.

I’ve always felt that I was born with this intuition: it’s what allowed me to drop out of university after a year, and, later, to leave well-paying, interesting project for the next thing.  

But the force has weakened me, and it’s something I realize I need to cultivate.

What’s missing in Hall’s essay is that it’s not enough to just break orbit from the mundane-but-survivable, because if that’s all you do, then there’s a danger of defining yourself as what you’re not doing, and getting stuck there just as much.

That, it turns out, I’m also very good at.