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processing trauma
Thursday, November 7 2024
Fairly early this morning, I took advantage of the good weather to continue work on the solar panel rejuvenation progject. I started by cutting the two by six to be serving as the new top plank (in the shallow box of the panel) to a length of exactly twelve feet (it was about an inch longer) and then spraying most of its length matte black (as it might be exposed inside the solar panel, where I would want it absorb all light striking it). Before installing it on the top of the panel, I scraped all the old caulk (nearly all of which was silicone) along the top edge of the glass, which would be resting against the new wood. Then I ran a bead of new silicone caulk along the glass and installed the new two by six. Unfortunately, because of the warped nature of the old plank when the old glass had been installed, some of the glass didn't rest on the new board when it was orthogonal to the solar panel box. It had to be twisted slightly, something I had trouble doing. Ultimately I gave up trying to get one piece of glass to rest on it and opted to rest it on a shim of plastic cantilevered off the new board. With lots of silicone caulk, it worked well enough. The whole damn thing is nothing but janky compromises and ad hoc fixes, so this was in keeping with that. After I had the new top piece in place, it was just a matter of putting the top trim on, securing the new support system of two by fours (I'd abandoned most of the old support system) and tigthtening up the cables that keep the panel from being thrown southward in a strong north wind.
As I worked on these things, it was interesting to see how various materials had weathered over the last nineteen years. Nearl all of the screws that had been exposed to rain and snow (whether designed for decks or not) had lost most of their threading, even though those threads had been buried in the wood. Large galvanized lag bolts, though, didn't seem to weather at all. Treated lumber did best if it was out of the rain, sun, or both. The planks forming decking directly under the big homemade panel have barely weathered in 19 years, whereas the planks lying flat to form the tops of railings haven't done nearly as well. The wood warps and gradually becomes brittle and then breaks apart. That was what had happened to the top plank of the solar panel, where high heat exposure also seemed to play a role. The silicone caulk doesn't seem to have degraded in the sunlight at all, though most of it doesn't go back the full 19 years.
Back inside the house, I took a rare recreational percocet (I have a small cache of them just for special occasions) to numb myself before writing about election day and its aftermath.
This blog used to have lots of readers, including a few celebrities. Now it's down to a handful. It's a dark, dank corner of the largely-forgotten old web, from the days before Google ruined everything via the now-infamous enshittification process. (The last nail in the coffin seems to be their deranking of pages not served by https, which this site still proudly is not.) Back when I was young and poor, my life was admittedly a much better story than it is now that I'm old(ish) and fairly wealthy. These days my blog exists mainly for my own purposes and no longer depends on an audience. I don't care if I'm boring or even if I have readers. Sometimes even as I'm writing I'm boring myself, but I write that boring shit anyway, because I know what the future me will find interesting. I know, for instance, that tedious details that make my eyes glaze over now are often a source of joy many years from now, when I can no longer remember the things I used to buy at grocery stores (and what they used to cost) in some particular decade. I mostly use this blog to keep track of events in a way similar to a private diary, and it's really only on the web so I can access it from any device anywhere and also so it will survive in the internet archive if anything should happen to me. (In that way, it is something like my eternal soul, though much more substantial and concrete than anything Christian theologians tell us we will have and can do in the afterlife.) Its public nature affects what I can and cannot write, but that's not much of a problem since I don't really need to say things that would get me in trouble or make people angry with me. So it ends up not being too different from a private diary. As with a private diary, a huge benefit it provides me is helping me process trauma. Election day was deeply traumatizing, and it's unpleasant to write about traumatizing events. To do so I must relive those events, sometimes in excruciating detail. But in writing it down, I somehow unburden myself of the trauma. It's hard to know precisely why or how this works, though it definitely does. Once I've put it in an entry, I can move on and the intrusive thoughts recede. To get to that point today, though, I had to take a fucking percocet.
Writing about my life has many other benefits besides the processing of trauma. It also helps me process events in a way that builds a solid framework of understanding in my brain, helping me benefit more from life's lessons and providing insights into issues, conflicts, and problems. Writing is very much a form of thinking, and without it, that thinking does not happen.
Sometimes percocet acts like a recreational drug and gives me very pleasant feelings in my mind and body. Today, though, that didn't really happen. It definitely numbed the pain of the election surprise. But it never made me feel especially good. And before too long it was giving me those feelings of acid reflux bordering on nausea that it often does. Antacids helped a little, and straight baking soda helped even more. But sometimes I felt so uncomfortable that I had to lie down. When I'd do that, I'd quickly recover and could do more of whatever I'd been doing.
Eventually I took Charlotte for a short walk west of the Farm Road. Then after Gretchen headed off to pilates, I took a nice hot bath, which was a good way of dealing with the lingering discomfort of the percocet and the underlying trauma of election day. I've been taking a lot of hot baths lately, but now that the solar panel is firing on all cylinders, I don't see why not.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?241107 feedback
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