Friday, December 25, 2009

What a Way to Spend Christmas

I don't really get why there is some measure of surprise that I don't take meds. No meds. Is that such an out-of-the-ordinary thing? This near-death experience doesn't exactly make my life flash by as it does my mistakes. I feel so vulnerable, so utterly without income, and so saddled now with pre-existing conditions. It's like when you make a claim against your homeowner's insurance, and that's the last claim you're ever allowed to make, since suddenly you're a risk and have to be moved into the pool.

What I don't get is that the way I felt was pretty much continuous with the way I've been increasingly feeling - out of breath - but this time there was no strenuous activity at all. And climbing a single flight of stairs did me in. Did the clots move up into my lungs simply to say "enough already" stop and take stock? But what stock should I take?

I'm reminded that everyone around me is as imperfect as I am. There are flaws to the gift-giving, and I don't really have the energy to sustain the chit-chat. And that is what I mean by love. That is what it is, this imperfection falling short. Ivy league love can't possibly be love. Love is always bush league, because if you were to have to always play the perfect role, you'd never be there for someone. Love is aspirational too, just like humanity.

My cellmate made his living on car crashes as a cop, and then by getting crashed into, if I have that right. But he's a far happier man than I, and loves his wife and kids and still ogles the young girls. There's lots to be said about honor. There's lots to be said about aspirational love.

And I wonder now as I worry losing my mind in a different way from the time before, what I will or would be, that far short of memories and making sense. What would I be, then if or when I can't remember what it was that I'd made my life's work; this notion that it's not the hardware, stupid, it's the dialogic stuff which rides along it's froth.

What a way to spend Christmas - it reminds me of the last time I had to go to the hospital Christmas Eve, to get my appendix out. I wonder what the message is. For such a fake holiday, meaning nothing at all except that some Church bureaucrat wanted to make it so.

So, what if my hardware goes then, will I be the same me? I guess I won't be the one to know. I guess you'll have to tell me.




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