Broken Wing

There are few things more tragic than a suffering animal, whether that animal be human or not. Watching the demise. Witness to the dissipation. All you want to do, all you feel you can do, is hold on to something no longer there. If it ever was. Knowing full well that nothing you do can effect any change in the situation of our own mortal vastness.

I’ve studied enough Hinduism to know that it’s all illusion: the pain, the suffering, even the conception of life itself. But the illusion is all we have. All we can know of life.

The post-structuralists are accused of nihilism, but only by those who don’t understand them. They gesture toward the im/possibility of death. It is always already outside of our phenomenological experience of life. It’s a death that lives on (sur-vivre as survival), that dissolves ontology, absent both the ontic as well as the logos. Something singular yet universal, embracing all horizons.

And yet it’s not death that concerns us, as the Cynics would agree. It’s dying. It’s the slippage from being to nonbeing. The erasure of all but the trace. The omnipresent absence neither here nor there. The unbearable void that muffles the word, the name, the universe.

But everyone—even the so-called Christians—agree: it is only through dying that one becomes immortal. Too bad none of us will be around when it happens.

Please keep Bolesław in your thoughts.

The New 30

I think it’s fairly telling that I should lose my earrings just a couple of weeks before I turn 40. I had to remove them at the doctor’s office while they were taking an EKG. I wanted to get my heart a little look-see since midlife is fast approaching. I put them in my shirt pocket, joking with the nurse that I couldn’t remember the last time I had removed them. Afterwards, I sat at Nodding Dog Coffee Shop in Bishop Arts for an hour working since I haven’t had an Internet connection since Friday afternoon and I’m supposed to be teaching an online section of philosophy this term. When they closed, I returned to the old apartment to do some more gathering of my things to move them to the new flat. It seems most of our things are finally here, and there are even some books already on the bookshelves! Today we finally got phone and DSL. (And AT&T sucks absolutely, but that’s another post altogether.) It must’ve been while I was cleaning and packing that my earrings slipped out. Perhaps I’ll find them when I go back for that last transport of framed art and a vacuum cleaner. So, my heart is healthy. The doctor said I have the heart of an athlete. That’s good news, especially since both my maternal grandfather and my father died of heart disease. No diabetes. No high blood pressure. And he’ll send me the results from the thyroid tests once they return from the lab. Another year. Another decade. Another (new) home. (It wasn’t until we were saying goodbye to Mary that I realized I spent my entire 30s at my last home: I moved in when I was 29, and I just now left—not counting a couple of years in Japan and Europe.) My 30s were good, and so much better than my 20s. I’m looking forward to the future, no matter how short that may prove. This is probably the first time in 17 years that I don’t have any of my rings in any of my 7 holes. I miss body jewelry. I miss the sleepless nights that turned into blissful decadence instead of exhaustion. Now it’s off to bed. Or to work.

Observance

Today, on Columbus Day (Observed) I’m sitting through a lecture on early American history—yeah, academic calendars don’t quite match up to national holidays. (When I was at UD—boo! hiss!—I was told that we would not be off on Labor Day because “we are not laborers.”)

But today, I too feel like Columbus: discovering something that millions of people already knew about. (Thanks, Lisa Simpson!) My discovery: I need a break from sitting through lectures and spending far too many hours in front of a computer doing research and writing.

A modest proposal for renaming the day observed today:

• Stolen Continent Day
• Genocide Day
• Taino Heritage Day
• European Legacy Day (celebrating the effects of smallpox and “conquista”)

Indeed, perhaps we all should just walk backward into the ocean….

Sweet Substitute for Joy!

My neurologist prescribed a new drug for me yesterday to take in addition to Rozerem, and last night was my first ride on the Amitriptyline pony. It’s classified as an anti-depressant, but since the only thing I tend to be depressed about is my insomnia, my doctor prescribed it for my insomnia. It didn’t do much for me last night in the sleep department, but I woke up in an appreciably better mood than usual. I actually sang out, “Good morning!” to one of my neighbors. She was scared and ran inside to lock her doors. You see, I’ve conditioned most people in my life to fully appreciate my asocial, misanthropic self.

On the commute to work I found myself mostly flipping between the classic rock stations and actually enjoying the gratuitous guitar solos I’ve shunned since the early ‘80s. When I heard Coldplay as I was scanning the other listening options, I immediately shuddered and switched back to the oldies. Amitriptyline strikes again, I thought. What else could make me both sing greetings to my neighbors and listen to hair bands from my teenage years? Was it depression after all that turned me into my post-punk, spiked hair, black-clad self? I’d probably be married with kids in college and living in the ‘burbs if I could’ve gotten a decent night’s sleep in the past few decades. I’d be driving a Lexus instead of that damned sensible Camry!

Perhaps tonight I’ll up my dose and see where the Amitriptyline pony takes me tomorrow down the stony path of self-rediscovery.

Beaver Dreams

I've taken this magic little pill (Rozerem) for the past two nights: the first night I dreamed I bludgeoned two people whom I love, last night I barely slept at all, and for the past two days I've felt stoned and strangely euphoric ... in a dazed & confused/Donnie Darko sort of way. One would think that with all this science and all this technology, somebody somewhere would create some good meds that can put my ass to sleep at night and wake it up in the morning. Before getting this prescription, I was self-medicating with melatonin. But when I take those magic little pills too regularly and consistently, I suffer from severe depression. That was something I learned only too well after a particularly rough case of jetlag after returning to Japan one time. Now I make sure not to take it every night, and never to take it more than two weeks at a time. I'll keep up with the Rozerem dosage until I return to the sleep lab; that is, unless I get involved in some Homer Simspson antics like when he was taking sleep medication a few weeks ago. I'm not interested in being a volunteer firefighter.

Bringing Sexy (and Consumption) Back

Who would've thought that TB could be so fuggin' sexy?!?! This photo from the AP (or perhaps it was Jeff Koons or even Pierre et Gilles) does more to glamorize the disease than any lackluster nineteenth-century painting or even Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. I wish I was coughing up blood with both of them....