The Ecology of Baseball

The lot on the corner, the one all choked with weeds,
Queen Anne's lace and dandelions, scruffy patchy grass,
Was filled with fun and laughter.
Huddled twisted green things dropped their starving seeds
There to lie unnoticed and watch the summer pass,
And fall and winter after.

There in the morgue of foliage, the grave of vegetation,
A pick-up game was always played every summer day.
The game was its own reason.
All day long on most days, 'til school would end vacation,
Then Saturdays until the snow took the field away
And hid it for the season.

Crappy days are here again

I should have been asleep hours ago. Now it's probably too late to expect that I'll wake up in time for work if I do fall asleep. Four months my life has been ripped apart now, and I just don't seem to be healing on an emotional level at all. My appetite is intermittent at best, my nights are routine torture if I can't find some distraction (and those I do find usually don't help much), my days are mainly a constant struggle to find a mood other than bleak depression or blind lashing-out rage at the interminable and inescapable pain.

I need to get out and be around people, see new faces, make friends, but I'm imprisoned in my own home most of the time because I have the children to be a father for. I don't have the option of just taking off for a while, I don't have the money to get a babysitter from time to time, and I'm starting to collapse under the weight.

I've been able to go drumming every other week for the past few weeks, recently by imposing on the generous nature and the affection for my daughter that the landlord's family has. (They're also my next-door neighbors.) I can't really count on that lasting on a permanent basis, and I don't like doing it anyway because I can't afford to pay them.

I get to go to church on Sunday. There they have a nursery and a children's program, so I don't have to feel guilty about a couple hours of trying to take care of me. It's helping, but it just isn't enough. I don't have the time or the support to get more involved in the activities on other days, where there's socialization that I desperately need.

Tonight's one of those times I truly despair. I just can't make myself believe it'll ever get any better.

Big (kinda) news

Last year, I helped design and create a database application to track our location's on-site and off-site document retention, taking a lot of the manual work out of the process of finding out where a particular item is and determining what needs to be shipped out of the building. It's been in use here for some time now, and the people who use it regard it as a pretty important tool, if not quite indispensable.

It's now being implemented in one of the offices in NYC. Yup ... picked up for the home office. :) This is kinda like a local newspaper reporter being syndicated in the New York Times. Not front page, of course, somewhere back in the Business section, but still, very gratifying.