Time Flies and Flutters

  IT  has been an interesting month or so.   Some of it highlights my good fortune, considering my compulsive negligence when it comes to nurturing and maintaining my own life and best interests.  This whole forced medical thing can sometimes be worked to some benefit.

Being old and poor but not destitute is a winner in the medical world, for the moment.  I made just enough that they allowed me to elect insurance which gives choice and I can refer myself to a cancer hack or orthopedic doctor.  Since rare diseases get misdiagnosed by the average nitwit, this setup allowed me to skip the fools and get to decent specialists.   I dodged a bullet there.

It was through my own research and long distance consultation with a friend's brother-in-law/hematologist that we got things narrowed down.  Hard to imagine now that showers had become a very painful ordeal, and high humidity could be torture.  I could not let water splash on me and leave it.   Those were rougher times in many ways.

But I got the stuff done.  Expensive stuff.  Mutation tests and other stuff which I will forego in future.  Colonoscopy and endoscopy can be over rated, and they can create problems which were not there.  I will avoid that in future.

Finally I even got a primary care babe.  I swear, in another life, I would have to be married to her.  In my eyes she is perfect.  If I knew her better, who knows.  Anyway, she's good news.

So, I even willingly accepted antibiotics.  They have it down to a five day thing.  I used to not handle them well at all.  Anyway, there may be a reason why they were invented.

I still wonder if I should just embrace the vagabond life, score one of those mini campers, like the egg shaped ones.  The very back is like an outdoor, covered kitchen, and the inside is mostly bed.  There are different shapes and kinds of lightweight campers out there.

It is a thought.  Sometimes you can get a gig doing part time work at a campground in exchange for free hook up and such.  There are entire websites devoted to the working camper community.  They migrate sometimes.  Sometimes stay for awhile at one spot.

My friend the ex math teacher, marine, resonator player, ex drummer, has a gig like that in Texas.  He has a fifth wheel set up, so his trailer has as much space as my cabin just about.  I have higher ceilings.  I must say, I have become hooked on high ceilings.  Had that in Memphis too.  The resonator is planning to stick with his gig for a year and cone back to SD because of family/grandkids.   Makes sense to me.

Finally broke down and got a 5 x 8 storage space in Alpine.  It is up some stairs but a good place.  Already, just from tools that need sorting, mostly, the floor space is mostly taken.  Some things get stacked.  I plan to organize it all in the next month, getting rid of what does not in any way bring joy.

I finally dumped the last souvenirs from New Zealand.  It is a great country and all that, but in the context of my personal visit and experiences related to the place, but not the fault of the place, there is nothing about it that gives me joy.  So, I donated jacket and other textiles geared toward jingoistic New Zealanders and tourists.   They only brought a dark wish for selective amnesia, and a sense of self loathing.  No joy.  No joy,  then it must go.

Got that from the cute Japanese girl's book about tidying up and her experiences with hopeless people, who must not be that hopeless, because they can afford to hire her.  Anyway she has done well with her hobby and compulsion to clean up.  I have made much progress, even at this late stage of life.  Much of life life has been spent rejecting my true nature, which is not chaotic and self destructive.  Even though it seems so.  That is reactive.  Reactive depression or just reaction.

People only harass or try to criticize others for things that aren't theirs to critique, when they can get away with it.  Hi, I'm your friend, your life sucks, your writing sucks, you should do so much better.  I only say this because I am a friend, and friends don't let friends under achieve.  Really?

That is the rationale of one whose concept of personal boundaries has been bastardized under veil of some altruistic sounding rationalizations.   End result is, the critic wields some kind of power as long as you sit still for it; "You should...blablabla"  Critic dictating down to you.  It is an ego trip.  Worst thing is, such people get furious at your reluctance to be harangued over that which is not anyone else's business.  Unbelievable, but a sign of the times.  Everyone loves excuses which give them license to judge, control, and critique the lives of others.

Like drugs were used to kill the 4th amendment, smoking was perfect for giving people the excuse to exercise power over others.  Certainly there was some element of legitimacy.  You don't smoke in confined areas forcing others to put up with your smoke.   But then it became a thing of fanatics making a big show of coughing and bitching when you were outdoors and downwind of them.

Then public officials start involving themselves in your diet, your obesity, your sugar intake, etc.   Public health costs is the rationale, yet most of those officials are bloated and over indulgent, themselves.  Ridiculous that people go right along.  Any excuse to push into the lives and business of others, while taking money from them at gunpoint.

So, obviously, whatever that school of thought is that says, "it's OK for friends to demean and judge friends in the name of their higher good", is not a school of thought to which I adhere.  Never liked it.  I think it is where politicians, mostly democrats, but repubs, too, as well as public schools, made me sick to my stomach.  They love that soviet style of intrusive propaganda and use of force to make you go along with it.

Work is too weird to describe.  One minute I expect to be fired, the next, I am in demand to solve problems.  The manager almost never listens.  His solutions are the craziest things I have ever heard.  I do my best to present things to him in such a way that he is not encouraged to give a point of view or solution.  I won't try to recall a good example.  It is often some impossible suggestion or is actually what we suggested originally but he nixed it, and now he is suggesting it like it is a new brilliant thought.  OK.

The best thing is that my Texas pals will be back to play a gig in Alpine on Sat.  I am their harp guy, so I will be playing.  They will be trying to figure out how to get me to move to their area in the Austin area.  I hear Austin is not what it was.  It is getting a little obnoxious, as far as the music scene.

But outlying areas in TX are going full guns if you are country, and probably being a badass Marine scout sniper doesn't hurt.

I refuse to give in to whatever "it" is; depression, psychosis, neurosis, fatigue, chronic conundrum, etc.   I do give in but not entirely.  I am not giving up.