Decline

I stayed with my father a couple nights, as my sister and her husband had to go out of town. My father has a form of dementia called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. He's not losing his memory as such, he's losing his muscle coordination along with his ability to speak. He has trouble finding nouns and sometimes can't begin a sentence. Also, he hallucinates. Not a lot, but he insisted there was arm chair that matched his in the hall, and was both puzzled and embarrassed when I showed him there wasn't.

To make things worse, his skeleton is falling apart. He got a knee replaced, the other one is shot, he as a bad hip, all of which need replacements but doctors have deemed him unfit for further surgery. His ankles are bad, his spine has a few curves in it.  Oh, and his heart has five stents in it.

What did this? Stress. My father was a Madman. He kept himself under an appalling amount of stress through his life. He smoked and drank. He felt too much Catholic guilt and too much insecurity about his manhood to ever let himself live a healthy life. Also, my mother kept him under a lot of stress. It was a bad marriage, not too much nurturing there, and my mother was mentally ill. Watching their marriage turned me away from getting married, and made me somewhat cynical about relationships.

I've been writing but it seems that I can't anything done. I've been outlining the final version of the novel. It's the first time I worked with an outline. The purpose of it is to restrain my imagination. Here's what happens to me: I'll be writing a scene, the protagonist meeting another character. Okay, I embellish the secondary character with a tattoo. Then I think, wait, is that just a tattoo? What if tattoo moves sometimes, a la The Illustrated Man?

Suddenly, what was meant to be just descriptive becomes a set piece with then becomes a plot point. The whole plot is changed because I wanted to describe something cool.

Needless to say, I'm at the point where my confidence in my writing ability is low. When will  be done with the novel?