A Real Hiatus?

I may be writing this or I may not be.

When it occurred to me yesterday that perhaps my hiatus isn't real, that opened the floodgates and I've been questioning everything.

The whole thing with the olfactory hallucinations ought to have been a warning all along. If I'm smelling things that aren't there -- that the people around claim they don't smell -- how do I know that the things I see are really there? For that matter, how do I know the people around are really there and aren't just an illusion?

Perhaps you can see the quandary here. I can look up and see an enormous reddish pink blob in my house, stretched throughout the house, breathing, heaving, blocking entrances, even making midnight raids on the refrigerator. But it doesn't make any sense that such a thing would be real, and that it could be identified as my hiatus. A hiatus doesn't have personal qualities, presence. A hiatus doesn't eat that late at night.

But it doesn't stop there. If that's not real, where does it stop? Is Grandma real? Is she a 104-year-old woman, alive in 2009? Or could she have died, say, in 1973? Is this house really here? Do I type a blog on the computer in actual fact? Do I have a game toe? Are The Three Stooges still alive? Are they just now transitioning to Shemp? In that case I haven't yet been born.

It seems I have more questions than answers. Just like when I took tests in school.

It brings up the whole thing about reality. Does it even matter what reality really is? Since I could just cozy into this particular scene -- if I can get rid of the blob -- and live. Why not? Who's going to tell me I can't?

Let's say Grandma isn't in her room right this second sleeping late. It doesn't make any difference really. It looks like she's in there to me and that's what counts. And this house, it seems real enough, at least enough that I haven't worried about it before. So nothing's really changed.

So the answer seems to be that there's no answer and that's OK. The blob I see is my hiatus. I still can kill it by ignoring it. That's a good plan, as good as any at this point. That is what I will do.

The whole idea, though, isn't so easily dismissed. If none of this is real -- this house, Grandma, my life as it appears -- then what really is my situation in life? Maybe I'm an inmate in a state hospital, holding the bars, then erupting and being shocked back into submission. I don't know. Could be.