My approaching birthday has me flummoxed. Yes I know it is only a number. Yes I know that my life is defined by how I
live it and not how old I am. But I also
know that the time remaining is shorter that the time past. I want to stay vibrant. My goal is to be living to the fullest in the
face of the winds of life that erode us to nothing.
As I write this I am at my office working. It is Sunday morning and I am way behind on
my work. I have committed to come in
today for about three hours so that I get much closer to where I need to be on
my backlog of cases. Hopefully after I finish
up this note I will get some real solid writing done. We shall see now shall we not?
Yesterday I discovered my Fitbit™ had died. Turned out the charger was not assembled
correctly. I had gotten none of my
activity from Friday recorded. Well I
fixed the charger and I then spent time walking all over my neighborhood. We
need to get our 10,000 steps in don’t we? As the walk progressed it was clear there
are some lovely early blooms coming out.
For a few moments I slowed my pace and took photographs with my
phone. Of course I had to color correct
them with my phone’s software for better pictures. Reality is never quite captured by a phone camera
no matter how good that camera is.
Scattered wandering finally led me to the EL Public
Library. My thought had been to get a
book on philosophy to read; maybe I would get something about the Age of Reason. When I got just inside the front door I ran
into a librarian who is a casual friend.
She and I travel in some of the same circles because we both have
autistic sons. Talking for a few minutes
we gabbed and gabbed. She had a victory
with one of her children. It was good to
find someone who has similar battles to fight.
Warm conversations always make me feel better.
The conversation cut down on the time I had to look for
philosophy books and so I ended up just getting some movies. One of the films I picked up was a Thai movie
with subtitles.
The film was called Boomlee
Who Can Remember His Past Lives. It was a slow paced film. It was about a man dying from kidney failure
who is confronted with the ghosts of his wife and son. Some magical realism is
found in the film for the ghosts interact with other living people in the film
besides the dying man and nobody seems weirded out by the presence of these
long dead spirits.
Confrontation is not really the word either for the interaction
between the dying man and the spirits.
His wife’s ghost has come as sort of a spiritual guide across the
threshold to the next plain of existence.
His son who is a large spirit ape with glowing eyes has come to protect
him from malicious spirits who might interfere with his journey.
The man who is dying says it is karma that things are
playing out this way because he is dying relatively young. He is very clearly Buddhist. He talks about killing communists and about
spraying bugs with pesticides and the karma from that burdening him. His spirit wife inquires of him as to what
was in his heart. Was he acting with
good intentions? When he asks whether
his actions in this world will prevent him from reaching heaven his ghost wife
says, “Heaven is over rated.” I smiled at this.
My family commenced watching a rerun of one of the Bourne movies after this finished. I love the Bourne films but I was just not in the mood. At that point I went upstairs and continued
reading Dreamland, the book about
America and opiates. What I read about was the rise in pain medications for palliative
care in the early 1980s and about the “Farm”. The Farm was the federal
government’s drug treatment prison cum opiate teaching hospital, up until about
1990. The Farm conducted most of the research
into the mechanics of addiction was conducted pre-1990. MS-Contin was researched
there for those will long term pain.
The Farm was shut down because as governments are often wont
to do, they used its facilities off book. The Farm is where people conducted the
so ill advised experiments on hallucinogenic drugs that later came to
light. You know they gave LSD to people
for the CIA to see if there was any counterintelligence value to the drug. People
went bat shit crazy because of the quantities administered.
And then I fell asleep.
Some days are just full and action packed now aren’t they?
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