When I started this blog, it was to set things down that I didn't really want to tell people. But the following is stuff I would very much like to tell somebody, but no one wants to hear it.
Five years ago today—August 30, 2020—I lost consciousness, collapsed, and hit my head firmly on the parking lot of the west Pasadena Smart and Final. The receiving doctor at Huntington Memorial told Lydia he did not expect me to live through the night because my brain was bleeding badly; but I did make it.
Along the long road of recovery, Lydia would sometimes say, as a way of getting me to count my blessings and put things in the proper perspective, that I was (I'm paraphrasing) fortunate to have survived.
The response I usually wanted to make but never did was: Did I survive, really? This was an honest question. It really wasn't until about February of 2024 that I at last was convinced that I did, that I would when finished healing be my old self again.
Mentally. Internally. In these aspects, I am my old self. Physically, nope. No sense of smell, which results in not much sense of taste. I completely lost my singing voice for a long time, but that does seem to be coming back slowly. But I don't want to get sidetracked here.
What I seem to have lost is my connection to people. That is not the old Rob. But that is due to the way people relate to me. And that may be a result of my brain injury; I don't really know, and no one will help me with that question.
I seem to have lost my ability to engage people in conversation. I used to be able to interest people in what I had to say. I can't do that anymore. No one, including Lydia, really listens attentively to me. Now, it is true that she is still interested, but not for long. She always interrupts me now, every time. I can only conclude that this is because I fail to maintain her interest, and her mind thus wanders, as it does; her mind is quite active at all times.
This may sound self-pitying, but I have thought about this a great deal, and I believe that I am only looking at the hard facts. If I cannot interest people in what I am saying, it must be my fault.
A big problem is my still erratic memory. A while back, we were over at Joe Rinaudo's, and I found myself surrounded by people with whom I shared a keen interest in the history of 20th Century musical and filmic creations. And these people were willing to listen to me, but I could not remember anything of what I wanted to say. It was a humiliating experience.
I have managed to maintain a long correspondence with my old best friend Blake, the smartest person I know, and that is encouraging. I am still in here somewhere, and Blake brings that out.
But the other person with whom I have regular converse, Nik, evinces absolutely no interest in anything I have to say. My only value to him, it seems, is as an audience to his weekly monologues and occasional soliloquies. And when, last week, I put up a bit of resistance to this, he became annoyed and more or less told me to shut the hell up.
The result of all this is that I have pretty much lost the drive to communicate, which is a huge loss for me. Not that I have really lost the desire to do this; it's just that I don't see much sense in trying anymore. It just seems like a big waste of time and energy.
I desperately need help with this. I need people to listen to me, to help me through this. But perhaps it is just that they don't have the patience to wait for me to get my thoughts out, which can be quite a struggle.
What hurts, frankly, is that no one cares enough to be patient with me, when that is what I would do if the situations were reversed. I have always tried to be in service to all who need me, and I more often than not am true to this aim. But it does not seem to be valued by anyone anymore.
And so I find myself once again asking the question: did I survive, really?
