Please Read This So I Will Not Have Written It for Naught.

I do not look forward to the home-nurse visit today. I’d rather go back to bed. In fact, I do not know whether she will come today, but I suspect she will. I knew better than to get up so damn early, but the other option would have been to stay in bed with my eyes open and my gut behaving badly…pain, but not bad enough to warrant taking hydrocodone. At some point, the pain either will slip away for awhile or will merit giving in to those damn little pills. And I should take my “morning” pills, too. And the other stuff. I am not delighted by needing pills to make the day moderately tolerable. I’ll sleep later; that’s certain…I was up just after 2. Again. Three+ hours ago. And still futzing around with the blog.

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I may return to this blog later today. Or post this one, then write another one. The following paragraph will appear to have been written by a man in the throes of drinking a few pints of unicorn blood. I do not consume unicorn blood before 6:00 AM; so, no worries. I’ll feed the cat. Maybe that will turn the day into a winner.

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Tomorrow—July 1, 2025—is the first day of the downward spiral toward the conclusion of the final six months of a year that ushered in the demise of the first quarter of a dying century. Put in other ways, that same moment marks both the commencement of a once-in-a-lifetime calendar experience—a celebration of an eternal new beginning and the mourning of the disappearance of a moment in time that can never again be captured. Yet never has there been a moment in time that could be captured. Time can be lost. It can escape. Moments can slip away, but they cannot return…undamaged. Time cannot be retrieved. It cannot be preserved. Time cannot be bottled or canned or pickled or otherwise maintained for eternity. Time is an immeasurable commodity. Clocks and calendars can can measure what was, but not what is—because, once measured, it is gone. Future moments of time can be estimated, but not measured. In fact, time is simply a prediction—or a memory—an imprecise estimate of beliefs, presented as if they were immutable facts. The same is true of wealth, thirst, hunger…and so much more. All things…places…times…temperatures…circumstances…represent comparisons. Today versus tomorrow. Here versus there. Then versus now. Hot versus cold. Hunger versus satiation.  Contexts. Spectra. Continua. But comparisons and contrasts grow weaker and weaker with each expression. Every iteration becomes more difficult to defend. Eventually, our efforts to identify relationships between time, temperature, and taste become sordid and meaningless.

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If you did not read this, I will understand. It’s not worth reading.