This is from Washington State, but it SO looks like the early vestiges of our winter in Central Canaduh. We ARE among the coldest places on the planet, or north of us is, but our summers are also hotter than most.
It is gray and cold here today. This is MORE likely to happen in November. Then, things get ghastly quiet as people hunker down for many months of a winter that won't loosen its icy grip until April-May.
I have been away, disgruntled with the lack of communication on this blog. It is disheartening, to say the least. But Farcebook, its apparent opposition, beckons. It's like dinosaurs and the process of natural selection and extinction, the way I figure it. Cogent thought isn't disappearing, but the ability to express it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction Anything longer than a few minutes is verboten. Even the shallow advertising industry knows that; its ads are 15 seconds, generally, reduced from 30. PLEASE: Read this. You will NOT turn to stone or perish. Farcebook won't go away. Comments you haven't read yet will still be there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFljpJdYRKM
I write about my cat, Sweety, a lot. I get that. She can be distant, and bugs me usually only when she wants something.
I did NOT take this photo in 2005.
I was still married then and she wasn't even a glint in some horny male cat's eyes. That is an incorrect date stamp I can't be bothered to worry about.
She is older now, but no less rambunctious.
She is still playful like a kitten. I have the scratch marks to prove it. She regularly starts WrestleMania matches with my slippered feet.
We often wrestle in bed.
I have recently relented and given her the run of my apartment, letting her do as she pleased. I was worried I would wake up one day to see remnants of my napkins all over the rug.
But that hasn't yet happened. She seems content and responsible now with new-found freedoms.
Her spot for a "cat-nap" is right beside me, under the heat of the floor lamp that illuminates my computer and all that I do.
She is sleeping there now, tuckered out from eating her morning meal and being like Mrs. Kravitz surveying all her domain.
I try to make the effects of this stroke minimal on my life, and as a result minimal on the lives of others. Doing so is, in fact, good for me in the acceptance of it. My "bible," if you will, is a book called My Stroke of Insight. It is by an incredible neurosurgeon named Jill Bolton Taylor, who had a stroke herself and has MORE than survived. She has thrived and has spoken publicly many times about her experience. It was given to me, I think (one of the effects of a stroke is for it to leave you with a lousy memory) by my lovely mom, who has since died. Amazingly, without a car, she would come and visit me in hospital far away from where she lived. Here's a few vids, but a warning, they are lengthy. Still, for a complete understanding, I recommend watching them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTrJqmKoveU This is long, more than an hour. I could not watch it all. My little brain gets too tired. Absorbing things of detail and consequence is very difficult. I can fall asleep, for example. The fact it is an interview by Oprah Winfrey, who likes to hear herself talk, is also a big problem for me. Still, it is incredibly interesting when Ms. Bolte Taylor talks and recounts every second of her experience. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9Phy9C5Ees
My own experience is not nearly so interesting. I am divorced. I had my kids over at my place as part of a custody arrangement with my ex-wife. I was playing with my son, between kitchen chairs on the floor. I was about 160 pounds (about 5'10") and in very good visible physical shape, but I smoked, drank, and had a bad diet. Still, compared to many men my age who are grossly overweight, due to what doctors later said was a hereditary condition, I had a stroke. When I collapsed, it was like fainting, I imagine. I say that because to my knowledge, I had never before fainted. My daughter, who was then training to be a nurse (she is now a nurse) called emergency. I was in a coma. I stayed in hospital about 4 months. I obviously eventually came out of the coma. The right side of my body is now semi-paralysed. I can walk, but very slowly. I cannot drive. My handwriting is very bad. My memory is very bad. By semi-paralysed, I mean I can feel it, but not normally. It is like being frozen for a dental filling. I still can perform regular bodily functions without aid. There IS no doubt I cannot perform some of them AS WELL or as quickly. I can perform them. Life is like I'm in slow-motion, like I'm a snail, and everyone else is moving fast. Mentally, thankfully, there appears to be little obvious effect. I'm the same arse I always was!
So nothing surprises me any more about America's gun debate except for the fact it drags on, unchecked, ignored and given yawns by the American population AND the political Right. It will continue off the radar like this, until THE NEXT major shooting incident and then CNN and other networks will fall over themselves competing for best major news coverage. But they will NOT examine why these shooting incidents keep happening and what America is doing about it, if anything. And things will go on, the same as it ever did.
And that the political Left allows that and does a bad job of making it look like it REALLY WANTS to do something about it. It is doing nothing. Nada. Zilch. I don't need to tell you about the incidences. The victims. Film-watchers. Teachers. Elementary school kids. It's INEXCUSABLE that the top nation on the planet is beset by a problem that other nations long ago solved. You HAVE to assume that it doesn't WANT this problem eradicated.
But this little factoid, above was on was on Farcebook. The good-looking girls firing guns is on YouTube. Guns and sleazy women! Can life get any better?
So thrilling. I have some growth on the back of my leg that my doc says I need to get frozen and removed by a specialist. I can't remember what he called it. A blah-blah-blah. I have many times before had needles inserted in my body. My knee, when I got my right meniscus removed following a Frisbee accident in a gopher-hole-filled field in Turkey (that's doctor talk for cartilage). My back (cross-country skiing mishap; a vertebrae was broken, turned around and agitating my vertebrae, which forced the removal of problematic said disc). Others. But I HATE needles. Gulp.
I passed a watermark in terms of views today. I am averaging more than 30 views per day. But sometimes, in fact often, there are no comments. I chalk this up to the assembly-line quickness and shallowness of Farcebook, which dominates all life. The mantra that "I've got no time. I must move on."
It's just life. That's the way things are. I don't propose to try to CHANGE it. I am merely saying: that's what we have become.
Of course there is still intellectual stimulation about. It's not like we have all become Hymie The Robot. But we only touch on things. On the surface of things.
We are so busy moving on to the next thing, like leaving a concert early to go and watch something else, that we don't have the chance to focus on anything.
To see and acknowledge the value in something. Or lack of value.
I dunno about you, but I find myself just skimming over some things on Farcebook or on the Net or wherever that I SHOULD really think through.
But I don't.
Instead, I feel like I'm on some kind of Farcebook assembly line of ideas. I've never worked on an assembly line, thank gawd. But millions have.
I wonder. After a while, do they even THINK about what they're doing? Or, like the mechanized assembly line they're part of, do they become just another part?
