My blog posts were, are, will be, aren’t, or never were. They cannot be should, because judgments are shaped differently than simple facts. Simple facts opt not to expose themselves to being shoe-horned into a mold that looks more like “sparkle” than “vodka.” Mysteries are like that, too. If they are “withhold with the final paycheck,” the word used to describe that compensation for employment just might be a bold prediction of the future. Hard to fully understand, but oddly prophetic in an analytical, math-like way.
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I watched a Netflix documentary last night about hospice care, specifically the care and conversations between a few patients, their families, and their doctors and nurses. Unavoidable grief was on display, along with worry and confusion and uncertainty. On one hand, seeing the way palliative care help the patients and their families deal with terminal cancer was heartening. On the other hand, though, and despite the utility of end-of-life discussions and decisions, it was almost impossible to watch the program without becoming acutely aware of how the topics can trigger torrents of tears from everyone involved.
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Not yet 6:00 a.m. and I have handled several of my tasks for the day. But I have plenty more obligations and implications to address today, so devoting even a minute to frivolous tasks would be irresponsible. I am capable of being lazy, so I have to watch myself closely and take any and all actions necessary to exercise control every time I turn my head. That notwithstanding, I tend to use chemo days into a crutch for my indolence, so this will be especially demanding. Therefore I should be gentler on myself than I deserve.
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Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York Mayoral race yesterday was a widely expected surprise. Some voters and pundits called the race tight, but gave Andrew Cuomo odds of winning a tight race. Others forecast that Mamdani’s background and progressive philosophies were too liberal for the majority of New Yorkers. His win may indicate a surge of left-leaning philosophies are gaining support in the Democratic Party. It also could mean the “average” voter has decided to discipline the Republican Party, after Trump’s embarrassing style of management during his horrifying first ten months in his second disturbingly successful attempt to turn the U.S. presidency into a carnival midway act. Voters’ selection of Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Zohran Mamdani to move forward it their respective races illustrated the effects of higher-than usual voter turnout and public sentiment about the diminishing ability of moderate or conservative policies to address problem facing urban political landscapes.
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The efforts between politicians to make progress in this country have become weak and sickly, almost as if the planned progress has been diverted into storm sewers where damaged culverts release bubbling explosive methane gas into housing where kids play with self-igniting kitchen matches. For that reason alone, a large proportion of the housing is at three to five times capacity. Fire Chief Anderson Gladewater, in his most recent report to the resident assembly, announced that high density housing in which insulation for physical structures consists of bone-dry pine saplings and saltpeter has successfully ignited dozens of small fires and an occasional inferno within the last year. “We’re making progress, folks, but we need to gentrify at a much faster rate. I recommend we displace up to 1000 families annually, turning their homes into soulless metal closets selling burner phones and packs of illegal cigarettes.” “That,” Chief Gladewater continued, “is the only way the badly contaminated older population can ripen in peace. It’s them or the kids, people. And it’s a lot easier to replace children than to replicate adults.”
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More than a month ago, I wrote a very short vignette, in which I used names I concocted for characters who belonged in other places and times. The names: Perfidia Adebayo, Insidia Aaberg, and Ephemera Foreva. The first two names slipped into my head while I explored a place in which I was judged to be an inappropriate presence—I was far too old and had not received an invitation suited to someone so lacking in age and experience. In addition to that, my thoughts were foreign to the two names that found me profoundly objectionable. Oh, yes, those names read my thoughts as evidence that I was at that moment an unwelcome intruder. I was not a danger to them, but their observations about me said they believed otherwise. They suggested, quite forcefully, that I should leave immediately. The third name intervened on my behalf. That name belonged to Ephemera Foreva, who invited me to stay; to sit and make myself comfortable. And that I did. But I wisely decided to hide my presence from the two unfriendly identities. From that point forward, I called them the causticacians when I wanted to refer to them. I decided the need to refer to them was uncommon; rare in the extreme. One day, I may explain how and why I came to that conclusion. In the interim, I ask only that readers trust my judgment. Failing that, readers should expect intellectual blindness or ocular deafness.
Ephemera has asked me to cease, for now, my inadequate attempts to describe the experiences I have been attempting to describe. I will respect her request. This temporary cessation is only a pause; not a permanent stoppage. Refusal to follow her guidance could cause the bones in my hands to break into thousands into tiny pieces of skeletal structure, damaged irreparably into memories as transparent as shattered glass. Shattered glass and crushed bones would be of no use to me, so I will refrain from behaviors that could lead me in that direction.
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It is no longer close to 6:00 a.m. and no longer dark outside the windows. More than 1.5 hours have passed. The day is aging even faster than I am getting old. While the morning remained dark, I doubled up on espresso and foods that exist only to quell starvation. Not quite suddenly, but certainly not at the speed of a tortoise, I screamed silently at the disappearance of darkness. I imagined emptiness…no breathing, no air circulation in my lungs, nothing visual to stimulate my consciousness because my consciousness was gone. There was no darkness; neither was there light. No awareness. No aching muscles. No difficulty calculating multiplications between two or more 20-digit numbers. No memories, no hopes, no desires. No empathy, sympathy, or hostility. An utterly unaware experience…without an activity in which I am unable to compare joy or terror or eternal boredom, because they do not exist, either. They once did, of course, but by the time I begin to understand that “not being” is impossible to understand (in the same way that the distance to the sun cannot be compared to the aroma of fresh-cut ginger), existence will be real only in the form of former and future lives. Life and death are identical to one another in the same manner as light and dark are different, but only when Schrödinger’s cat is neither alive nor dead, but both. In some cases, one’s imagination is more concrete than water is visible.
