I must entertain myself with stories and so must you. Do you each day tell yourself a story and reinvent the world, from the crocodile to the shoelace, from the cup of tea to the purpose of the day. Is meaning written in the clouds? Is the mind connected like a balloon to the body? Or is the body connected like an anchor to the ship?
Many things run through my mind like little mice.
The rain falls and the ducks chase each other around in circles. It looks like a game but it probably has more significance to them. Or maybe it is just that, it is fun to run in circles in the rain when you are a duck.
No, I bet it is political. Someone has something to say and someone else doesn’t like to hear it.
I am drinking hotel coffee. My mate and I spent the night near Princeton to offset his tremendous commute. I could not sleep all night but often I am more awake after I do not sleep, and that gave me a thought I will get to in a moment.
In the meantime I got vaguely misplaced on the drive to and fro and so yesterday I visited Jamesburg twice and today East Windsor twice. Also went right through the heart of Hightstown for the first time in my life.
The road is one long pothole.
And I just want to ask the Tea Party folks~ who do they think is going to fix the road? God is not going to come fix the potholes.
By the way, I have been thinking about my god and I have decided I like a combination of Nietzsche’s dancing God, Rilke’s wild-singing God, and Carl Sandburg’s God who gets up everyday and puts on overalls.
Also, my god has breasts. And a tail like a monkey.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, on Sunday we had the day of ‘Release The Lions’ and so now all three kittens are out of the garage and back in the garden.
Yesterday morning there were bloody possum prints on the backstep. (Nothing to do with the kittens, but for about a week a possum with a bleeding head and a snaggle tooth has been visiting and I so wish I could get it a band-aid or a stitch. The number of very red footprints makes me wonder what has happened now.) We shall see. I imagine my little bloody headed possum friend will return.
I have had three myofascial release sessions and it seems to be helping drive out some of my pain.
Yesterday I had the great joy of being well enough to go and see my lady friends and to play a round of Hand and Foot and one round of Bananagrams. Not enough but at least a good start at getting back to living.
And of course Japan is in my heart and on my mind. Have you noticed how the footage of Haiti after the quake seemed to be all people~ bleeding and crushed and crying and dusty and digging, and the footage of Japan is largely splinters of wood and waves of water and stoic people standing in long lines? Like one was all black and red and animated, and the other was all gray silver and shrouded? Besides the obvious climate and culture differences, why is the media coverage so different? And is this why donations are overall so low, compared to other disasters? Don’t forget to donate if you can.
As for not sleeping last night, it is exhausting in an epic way to spend from 11pm to 4:15 am awake and after hours of ‘doing nothing’ my body begins to ache. It wants to be in Africa and to get up and head to Mpumalanga to see the lions. Or to get up and hike a mountain. Sometimes I can use my insomnia to plan or meditate but last night all was futile. I simply thrashed.
But what I thought about was this. The first thirty years of my life I did not sleep. I also suffered from strange seizures which were quite terrifying and disabling. When I learned to sleep, in my early thirties, the seizures began to back off, until about the age of 36 by which point I was down to about one or two spells a year and they seemed to hardly affect me. I had gone back to college I had abandoned years earlier and was happy in my job and had a very full life. But within a year or two of the seizures fading out, the headaches began.
At first they appeared just a few days a month, but after a year or two, they lasted up to weeks at a time, and finally to every day or night. The first year or two, when the seizures were gone and the head pain was only a week or two a month, even with that level of off the charts pain, I preferred migraines to the seizures. The head pain was so intense and physical but actually less terrifying than the electrical/molecular/spiritual seizure thing which knocked me down and left the world a flat shade of gray. But as of about nine months ago, I was so destroyed by head pain, that for the first time in years I thought, “This is worse. I would take the seizures back.”
Poor brain. What it has been through.
Once you have lost your health, you have nothing else.
But what I thought after last night’s sleeplessness was that maybe I need to stop sleeping, and to see if sleep deprivation would bring back the seizures but knock out the complex migraines. If I slept less and had less pain maybe I would at least get more done. This not accomplishing much and being buried under paper is very uninteresting. Pain in not productive.
Then again, maybe these purple circles under my eyes would terrify the natives.
Though I have been thinking about body paint, and face paint, and perhaps I can go around more like a Maori warrior or an Australian aborigine or the Xhosa people. Or even the Jersey Shore girls.
May as well be honest about my life.
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