(Very quickly: I realize that my brilliant numbering scheme has failed me and Part Sixteen doesn't in fact exist. For those of you keeping score at home I apologize for this malfeasance.)
I'm going on my umpteenth straight day of very little, unrestful and altogether unpleasant "sleep" if you can possibly call it that. Growing up I had a pretty tenuous relationship with Little Nemo and his cohorts in Slumberland, take that to my years in bands sleeping on random floors, cut to all my hospital time where I've found it nigh-impossible to get more than an hour of sleep at a time, to now that I'm home and getting relatively comfortable I either don't get tired or I'll manage to fall asleep but end up jostled awake by pains, batshit dreams, or just general discomfort. It's especially grating on Kelley because I know she thinks there's something wrong or I don't want to sleep when she does but that's not the case at all. Love, nothing would give me more joy at the end of the day than being able to fall asleep with you like a normal person but that's just not how things work with me I guess. Hell, for a time I kept waking up because I was having extremely vivid and lucid Scrabble dreams where I'd just anagram crazy stuff and that's not really conducive to restful slumber. My old chum Andy reminded me not too long ago that when I was a younger dude I could get 20 or 30 minutes of sleep in a 24-hour period and operate fine, if not better than most people on real sleep. My brain has a hard time shutting off, it seems. Fortunately the wee sleepless hours are when productivity looms its head a lot of the time; most of my current and past 18 months of songwriting have gone on when I should be sleeping and I've got to tell you, it's very, VERY freeing to finally get some of the things bouncing around in my domepiece out in song form. When I was younger (18 to 24, especially) I was a highly prolific songwriter and would rattle off at least a song or two a day. They weren't exactly masterpieces, mind you, but there were some good bits in there. Again, turning to Andy here, during New Year's celebrating this year (last year? How does that work? 2011 into 2012: there.) said something like I've probably forgotten how to play more songs than most people learn. That's incredibly cliché and pompous but it's also kind of true...I used to know a TON of songs, both other people's creations and my own and it's really bothersome that now I'll sit down with a guitar or at a piano or something and I can't remember most of what I used to know, be it lyrics, melodies, chord progressions, whathaveyou. When I was a teenager it wouldn't phase me to learn entire abums-worth of songs and play them ad nauseum. In hindsight I'm sure my friends, family, schoolmates, teachers, etc. wished I would just shut the hell up but I would not be deterred! Great training for later endeavors, I will say, having such a broad palette to paint from: everything from jazz standards to classic rock, 60's pop, punk rock, ska, metal...it served me well being a semi-professional performer. Consequently, being a semi-professional performer might have led to the events that gave me pancreatitis in the first place, so perhaps it's all kind of a grey area of awesome.
On the subject of my time as a band guy I had a happy bit of happenstance just recently: as I've written before, one of my old cohorts and friends Derek Archambault is the vocalist for the amazing hardcore band Defeater and the time he spent in The Minus Scale was my favorite in that band. The five of us were amazing. The chemistry worked, it was fun as hell, and some of the best memories of my life came about from those days. For whatever reasons we lost touch for a bit (as it happens with just about everyone and me, especially when I was drinking all the time. God, I was such a fuck-up.) and while Kelley and I were in Portsmouth to watch the dismantling of the Memorial Bridge we decided to take a walk indoors to get warm and ended up at the jewel of Portsmouth record stores, Bull Moose Music. After a moment of getting acclimated I heard "Oh my God, Paddy Murphy." and lo and behold, Derek happened to be working. We chatted for a bit and he told me that he in fact knew about what happened to me. This was a bit of a surprise because for most of the past year I had tried to get in touch with him but the wheels just didn't align. What happened was a mutual friend of ours had called him while he was on tour and let him know that I was in really rough shape. Since I had changed my number since we had last spoken on the phone and I lost his number in the process we couldn't get in touch ourselves so it was messages relayed between friends. One of the reasons why I still love this guy is since I got sick I can tell when people are disingenous when asking about me but he actually gives a shit because he's not a lame scumbag who feels guilty about not asking how the sick kid is doing. It's all in the eyes, people. It was a relief to me because I had no idea if he knew what happened or how bad it was and one of the things I've been trying to get done is get back in the fold with the people that I love.
A similar situation happened this morning whilst talking to an old bud, Mr. Mikey Mirando. Or The Mikey Scale as I affectionately refer(red) to him. Anyway, he and I talk on a semi-regular basis via the interwebs,
generally about music and the like (we're both very, very big Alkaline Trio fans among other things) and today he asked specifically what happened, how I got sick, etc. After going through the usual "pancreatitis, colostomy, losing this or that organ" I brought up my weeks in a coma and some of the dreams I had which surprised him because he didn't know you dream in a coma. Oh yeah, you dream. It was kind of nice to talk about it because it brought back things that I forgot, like how it felt to know I was dying. Now, I don't say that for shock value or anything, in fact I laugh about it now because it would probably break my brain if I actually sat and thought about it. Seriously though, and I'm sure I've written about it before, but I distinctly remember having an internal battle with myself to keep myself alive. I was more or less on a cliff or something and there was me and utter, all-consuming eternal blackness. Part of me was saying "Dude, just let go and take off...it'll be way easier. Wouldn't it be nice to rest?" and the other side of me was saying "Uh, dude, you're not ready for this yet...take a step back." I did and I'm still here. I'm not really superstitious and I'm most certainly not religious but I know that I was on the cusp of the end there. A few times. It's kind of impossible to really articulate and maybe someday I'll write about it in physical, non-blog form. That's something of a shock to some of the folks that I've told that story to; there was no bright light, no angels singing, no loved ones ushering me with open arms...just inescapable and infinite blackness. Sorry afterlife believers, that was not my experience.
It's funny, I was raised in a Christian household, was saved at 14 and my favorite band of all time is a very overtly Christian band (Five Iron Frenzy, for those concerned.) yet I don't consider myself a Christian. I believe in God, or at least something bigger than myself keeping tabs in the universe but I just can't get behind a lot of things in the bible. I had a youth pastor tell me once that if you don't believe everything in the bible then you don't believe any of it. At the time I thought that was bullshit and I very much think it's bullshit now. For the record, there's lots of things in the bible that contradict other things so that argument can't even be made. This isn't the part where I go into a religious tirade, merely where I reconcile what I've always been taught with what I believe to be true, given my experiences. Yes, by all rights I should be dead right now but the thing is this isn't the first time I've faced the end and came back ok. When I was...20? I was in a fairly major car accident and at the scene the EMT's commented on how I shouldn't have lived and at the ER the attending doctor said "Someone up there must like you because people don't usually survive this kind of thing, especially like this." See, my car slid off the road and when I came back onto the highway I was perpendicular to it and a semi-truck hit me on my side, about six inches behind the driver seat. My car was essentially torn in half, all the windows blown out, my face and head full of glass and my glasses somewhere on the highway. I couldn't see both from my lack of eyewear and I was bleeding pretty heavily from all the glass cuts. I used a bottle of water to wash my face off and the driver of the truck rushed to my car and told me the paramedics were on their way. Oh, he also said "I think your car cracked my radiator..." Ok dude, I could be dying from internal injuries and you're worried about your truck? Sweet. Anyway, after I got to the hospital and they checked me out it turned out that I had not sustained any real injuries. I had a number of cuts from the glass in my face and head as well as a bruised ribcage from the steering wheel but I walked, or rather hobbled, away ok. Sure, because of my ribs I could barely walk for a week but I was ok.
So either it's all an incredible set of circumstances or there's a reason I'm still breathing. I'm not really on either side of this fence but I'm open to ideas.
Ok, I think this post got away from me. Lost my focus for a bit and I'm supposed to have lunch with a friend so I'll cut the chord. More to come. Cheers.
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