Personal
O/
Rescued.
2025.02.24
Monday February 24, 2025
Good morning, that wonderful way.
Good to have you read me again. O/
Hope all is well with you.
On with our show.
“What’s a day like for you, Ghos+? What do you do?”
I write, I right, I wright; I make convenient puns.
There’s the journal, the poems, the stories. We’ll get to the stories soon.
There’s dreams of better days, then taking steps towards them.
There’s Abe.
He’s come a long way since I rescued him from Texas.
He’s calm, friendly, and loves pulling squeakers from the bellies of squeak toys now.
He dances at dinner time.
He barely ate at all the first day and a half after I got him.
He took dog food from my hand when I offered, but the dog bowl stayed full.
The new dog bed stayed empty, passed by for the cold wood floor in a dark corner.
Going on two days with only a few handfuls of food, I picked up his bowl and sat with it in his bed, then called him over.
He ate some, looked around, ate some more, looked around, looked at me and ate.
Ate!
I cried.
Not much for crying, maybe only a handful of times since adulthood.
In his new dog bed, Abe ate and I cried; both for the first time in a very, very long time.
Rescued.
+he Ghos+
Happy Ghos+ Day!
2025.02.13
February 13, 2025
Good morning, that wonderful way.
Happy Ghos+ Day! O/
Three years ago, an SUV traveling 50 plus MPH crossed a double yellow line and drove into my driver’s seat right into my lap.
I died, seized back to life with my leg split in two and a long list of other internal injuries.
About five days later, I left the ICU with a metal rod connecting my left knee to my left ankle.
Other than a slight limp and some scars it’s fully healed.
Happy Deathday.
Ghos+: Not just a cool avatar.
Boo!
On with the show.
How’s Life?
Old rhythms waking up bringing you down?
Play a new song; have a better day.
It’s your dance. You invite the guests, you send them home.
Change the venue if you must, but keep dancing your day on purpose, with your own chosen purpose.
The only way to have a problem is to recognize one.
See opportunities instead and enjoy your time.
Sun’s just up.
The clouds sent a sampler pack of precipitation for an early Valentine’s Day gift.
A little rain, a little snow, a couple cookies of ice.
The person before you left the grocery store freezer door open while trying to decide a flavor of ice cream.
Now you can barely see through the glass to pick your flavor.
That’s the foggy view outside this morning.
Take care, send me a Happy Ghos+ day present, and make a better day.
+he Ghos+
Stuff for the Dark
2025.01.22
January 22, 2025
Good morning, that wonderful way.
Starlight, star bright first star I see this morning.
Early.
Even for me.
Most of my life is an exercise in getting to a page to put down words to make sentences.
Once you find something, someone, you love the day becomes a process of getting to them.
Once there the day is only a matter of enjoying the moments made possible by the effort.
Early mornings and late nights always went best for me. People can be so disruptive with their expectations.
The world was loud, soft, sick or well-enough.
It's easier now. The days are more temperate being tempered by the insistence they are.
A quiet room, a place to shine, to write, to dream. My goal for most of my life was to get there.
Every checklist of a day's events included one word: Write.
When I reached remission, I made it the only word on the list and built everything around it.
Life is too precious; do what you love.
Don't make time to do what you love; do what you love.
Make every other action in your day support doing what you love.
That's how to have a good life.
That simple.
"C'mon, Wynn. Everyone can't just do what they love. That would be chaotic," you say.
No. That would be Paradise.
There's more to what we love than what we want. There's a richness there, a dream fulfilled.
So much we have is unnecessary. So much we have we think we need is, too.
Our movement towards minimalism is a sign deep down we know this. We keep what brings us joy, what serves our dream, and let the rest go.
They're thoughts to help myself.
I hope they help you, too.
Closer to sunrise...
An Abe-rolls-his-eyes-at-me-it's-so-early morning.
How are you?
Well, I hope.
The quiet before sunrise is best.
Potential. A reliable punctual friend, the Sun.
There's only so much we can write about the Dark.
We call him Mr. Lights Out, but he's the default state.
Sunshine is extra. Sunshine is stuff for the Dark.
Hippies and their 'We're all stardust' business are right.
Perhaps one day our physical science will come to its empirical senses and include light and color in every equation.
Light, whatever that is, is the only building block of matter.
A blackhole filled with starlight, that's the Universe.
Gravity, the push from the fire.
The Sun's not getting closer; we're fading.
Dreams make a place for the light to go.
Enough of that on another day.
I do hope you're well. Take care, (you little dance of starlight you), rocket scientist or hippie, and have your better day.
+he Ghos+
If you're interested, there's more posts about me here:
Lonely Wins
Spent most days of my life fighting for it.
2024.12.14
Good morning, that wonderful way.
Memories found me this morning. I've been so single minded in my work lately, I forgot I had yesterdays.
Easy to do for me.
Spent most days of my life fighting for it.
Remission is a lonely wonderful event. You have a second chance at life, but nothing to show for it.
I went to work. Not a job: Work.
I'd missed out on so many words made readable, so I set about just about every hour awake making them.
It's what I love to do. I was kept from it, Life I mean. So having won a chance, I started at the one thing I always loved and never looked back.
Until this morning...
Feel there ought to be some drama following the ellipse, but there's only old awful memories of struggle for a chance at life.
Lonely get to the kitchen to eat, crawl to the shower to clean, drag myself to the door to let the dog out; victories everyday. Lonely wins where words would be.
So I work. Finally.
If you wonder why I'm a literal ghost online, now you know.
Hard fought medicated walks to the bathroom took the place of Facebook memories.
I spent enough time on illness. I'll leave it in the past. Good morning words take its place.
Late Autumn, late sunrise about an hour away.
Abe is asleep on the loveseat.
When I stand to walk to the kitchen for coffee, he'll hop down to go to the porch door to be let out.
I'll get there before he can whimper it's taking too long without having to have devised a military strategy days before to time the medications so I can.
Take care, chances are you've got it so much better than you know, thank Life for the chance for a Life, and have your better day.
+he Ghos+
If you're interested, more about the author here:
Flannel
There's flannel involved.
Not a Hipster.
A bearded guy writing in a coffee shop.
Flannel.
There's flannel involved.
Flannel not trying to be flannel.
Just flannel for the sake of New England's don't like the weather wait a minute quick change exit stage left drop the flannel.
Flannel.
A New England Guy, with a beard, wearing flannel that the rest of the Country, in a moment of rare clarity, thought to copy.
But if any New England Bearded-Not-Hipster-Person lived in Sunny California, the last thing we would wear is flannel.
The lack of trees leads to lack of air, leads to loss of brain cells, leads to out-of-place flannel.
Flannel breeds brain and beard cells.
A vast majority of the best Universities and Hospitals come from New England.
Why?
Trees.
A deep breath isn't something we do on a yoga mat.
Here take a deep breath means go outside.
We'll go Zazen some other day.
Right now, it's an outdoor chair with some trees,
In our flannel.
+he Ghos+
Wynn
Dances With Both Legs Again
2024.04.19
2024.04.19
Good morning, that wonderful way.
Abe's watching shadows through the double-sided entry way door to the sunroom from atop the loveseat, head on arm rest, long hound dog running legs stretched out with the nails he trims himself pointing at the coffee table with a television remote, a coaster, some hand sewn tea cozies and a blanket from Utah from a Mormon owned company they had flown in from Made in China.
It's still soft. Still comfortable. Still off-white. Of course.
So's Abe. Soft. Comfortable. Off-white in places. Brown in others. Black in nose. Eye circles too, mixed with bright mahogany highlights. Grey-brown ticking down his legs. Spot on his back makes a heart, a brown Gray's Anatomy Anthology shaped heart, not Valentine shaped brown heart.
The mark on the backside of his head is a waterfowl's portrait. The neck of the bird down the neck of the dog. I watch it when we walk, when he leads the lead along the lake, along the street.
I know he's not oblivious to the traffic coming at us feet away. He doesn't mind so much the way seasoned pedestrians don't.
I don't either. Though, at times, I think of that SUV that lost its hand on the wheel and left me left leg-less, if not for the alloy aluminum nine-inch nail my bone marrow wrapped itself around to take ownership of so I can walk again.
At times, Abe goes for his leash on the counter and dances. Hop-hop jump! Unannounced and ungoaded starts a walk we both know happens.
How could it not with a dancing dog dancing for a friend he knows carries the leash and can dance with both legs again?
+he Ghos+
Wynn
Spend Your Fire
He's beautiful, you know, Death I mean, like a wonderful father.
Fifty Fahrenheit. The Snowflakes that make it at fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Some women are like that. Some men. Individual every-bodies. Some of us hold on long enough to touch down.
That one day my immune system had me in bed, (was it bed?), nothing left to vomit. My mouth was 'back-from-gut-Gatorade'. Blankets weren't covered in sweat and vomit. They were sweat. They were vomit.
What was I? A vibration? A vulgar vomit encrusted immuno-inhibited morphine makes it to the bathroom if timed right, time?
What for?
A punch in the face goes away. That's time: Punch, beginning. Pain, middle. Healed, end.
What was Time for this pain? What did when have to do with healing this hurt?
A little more every day, the cells set up shop to wage a defense... from what? But they keep setting up and after a time the preparation for the attack becomes the diseased agent of attack.
There's a feeling something isn't right. The environment is hazardous somehow. Shields up! "We've got this."
More and more cells, troops out, stock up... years go to decades and there's too much military for one body to sustain. Police rule.
The more troops pumped out the bigger the drain, the more the house suffers, the louder the cry for help.
You hurt yourself to help yourself. On autopilot.
Nodules like barracks show on your calves then quads then hit waist high-a forest fortress of nodsum.
Your eyes want to see the enemy. Why can't they see the threat? Send forces! The band of brothers so bunched bulges iris into lens. More havoc! Send more, help!
Blood for eyes. Blood and Blue Police State body. The more it hurts itself the more it hurts itself to help itself. Barely two months go by, barely a step out of a chair, eighty pounds lost, blue eyes near full red.
How can you get to the bathroom? How can you move your body when it moves so much?
Auto-immune attack: Sarcoidosis.
A high dose of prednisone for years kept it at bay, slowed the military march to a barely acceptable regulated, elevated level. A decrease in dose and inflammation rose. For near a decade that was the dance.
Immuno-inhibitors, methotrexate, pain medication for the inflammation of the neuro-system where the forces spread.
Chair-bound pain. Percocet gets me to the bathroom and the fridge if I time it right.
Those days the kitchen was further away than the moon, morphine got me in the car to pick my son up from school.
In the dizzy dirge Death comes, he's polite with a dark sense of humor. A potty-mouth. I suppose if you're Death incarnate you've literally seen it all.
What's dark humor to Mr. Lights-out?
"Shit, you look like crap, you oughta get to the bathroom. Or...?" He offered me his hand.
He's beautiful, you know, Death I mean, like a wonderful father.
"I'm here if you need me, but you don't got this," the bedspread was a sheet of paper he pressed his finger to, "You are this."
Though he's beautiful, maybe because he is, I placed my finger where his was and wrote my sentence for the day, "Stay."
A thirty-minute crawl. I made it to the bathroom to piss and shit and vomit all at once, while I decided what life meant now I decided to live and not what I could handle but what I was, and why it was worth staying, and how I could keep it going.
I stopped the immuno-injections. I started the climb to myself.
What was wrong?
The world is so much.
Everything!
All the light, sounds and sense we take it all in, we have to express it, we have to let shine out what shines in or we burn from the inside out.
We all ingest the World's Fire. What a great gift! And responsibility.
The Warning Label:
Be careful how you spend your fire but make certain you do.
Hold too much and you burn from the inside out.
I held way too much light in.
My body wasn't broken.
It wasn't enough.
+he Ghos+
Wynn
If you're interested, there's more posts about me here: