I wrote yesterday about "the Fox News gang". Today this woman who sits with them and has been friendly with me a few years, stopped by my booth to tell me a black joke about Obama. I was truly disappointed to see her stoop to that. I think she really likes me. She has flirted with me for a long time. That won't be so welcomed from now on, and there is probably not a time in my life that I need that flirting more.
I did receive an appointment letter from the arthritis clinic at the VA Hospital in Durham. This has been important to me to get that letter. That means my appointment is recognized as official, and I'm really needy to find out if there is something they can do to assist me with the pain I'm experiencing that won't have too horrible a side effect.
In a lot of ways I'm pretty much out of control of my physical person now. I receive information from the other and provide information to the other through a screen of self concern. Maybe it's the same old selfishness I've employed for as long as I can remember. I don't think it is deliberate, but just the natural way I am as a man.
I can't begin to tell you how helpless it makes me feel not to have full use of my hands. I have to make sure I don't bang them into the objects around me because I immediately withdraw into the reaction of my body hurting. If I am around other people i forget they exist until I can manage my reaction.
The fact that I'm still able to type is fairly astonishing. This stuff moves. It doesn't always hurt in the same place daily, and sometime it changes in the immediacy of now. It's difficult to make plans to do something in particular because I never know when the body parts I need to accomplish something I've planned will interrupt the process. It doesn't hurt as much to type today as it has for the last week or so, but I'm not getting my hopes up that it will be this way tomorrow.
I'm still strongly influence by the Jung quote about religion being one's defense against the experience of God. it's the idea of performing some act religiously that attracts my attention. I do things as if with religious intent sometime. Like learning to weld metal in my mid-thirties.
I was married to a beautiful woman with whom I had a child. I didn't have many skills to offer anybody who might offer me a job so I could pay the bills my family incurred. I'm not a hustler. It just don't come to me easy to figure out how to get money from other people. I had lived as a beggar, not a bread winner.
The unemployment office offered me a chance to go to a government-sponsored welding class. I went because it was the only way I could get some money. I didn't realize it was an opportunity at first, but I started hearing rumors that welders made at least twice the minimal wage per hour, and minimum wage or close was all I had been offered to work for years.
I began to work at learning to weld so I could support my family religiously. I'm not going to describe the process, but I spent a lot of extra hours after work learning to weld better in order to get the top journeyman's pay as soon as possible. I'm pretty sure my ex-wife thought i was seeing another woman at the time. It took about a year and a half, when the normal time was seven years. Welding became a religion to me. I've had other religions.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
