To be continued...

It's been nine years since I started this, nine years since I posted the first (and only, thus far) entry.
Not that NOTHING has happened, since 2010... to the contrary: too much has happened.

My health has worsened, of course.
Multiple Sclerosis. Optic Neuritis has robbed me of most of vision in my right eye, the incessant muscle spasms on one side of my face have basically taken out my 'good' (left) eye...
I tapered off of 13 years of morphine, by choice, in 2015 (because of the drug, to aid in the pain relief of severe spinal stenosis, I had suffered terrible, chronic skin rashes and non-healing lesions, listlessness, tooth decay and loss, insomnia, etc. etc.). The withdrawal dragged on, two weeks a month with each 10mg drop in dosage, until I was free, almost a year later. But the cost of that misery was huge: I gained another 70+ pounds to my already-overweight frame, putting me at almost 300 pounds at one time.
Stella's sweet, funny brother, Cosmo, experienced major seizures one morning and was gone by the time I got him to the vet, February 14th, 2015.
My father died, November 17, 2015.
My sister, Maria, and I, bonded and became closer - finally, after decades of crisis and disharmony - but on August 13, 2017, she died in her sleep.
It is just me, sister Kat, and brother Mike, now.
It will be two years, in a few days, but the three of us are still LOST without our sibling... this must be what it feels like to lose a leg, an arm, always aware it is missing.
But I am still here.
In a different town (since moving in early 2017).
But still trying to stand back up on my proverbial feet to face the next expected blow...

Once Upon a Time in An American Town...

...there was me.

Once described as ordinary, average (but with an equal little dash of eccentric and creative), I find myself, now, on the edge, teetering at the precipice of extreme dysfunction, an outcast, an abandoned and friendless pariah.
This will not be a sob story.
It will certainly not be fiction.
But there will be drama...

I once dreamed of writing fanciful novels, creating the life of my dreams, but finally found out what other , more experienced authors meant by the adage "Write what you know".
And you don't have to be at an ending to write the story of your life (those are called memoirs: this is not a memoir, either!): you have to be at a crossroads... a climax.

And I am certainly there, at the cliffhanger of my life.
I may make it through to a happy ending... I may not make it out of this point of flux at all.

We'll see...

Welcome to this lost, lonely, and poised-on-the-brink-of-disaster "caravan" (before the fires engulf it? before the landslide buries it? before the floods wash it away?)...

~ jipsi