What I Didn't Learn

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I'm writing earlier today to see if that helps me to get inspired again, but I may be inspired in another direction that doesn't involve writing. Maybe not talking too. There was a young 21 year old on Letterman last night that talked about going to a retreat where the participants had agreed not to talk for ten days.

I started wondering if I had ever gone for ten days without talking. I don't know or can't actually know because I haven't recorded such a thing. I do know I go five or six days a week sometime without talking because I'm the only one here. I write a lot via this blog and the e-mail discussions I have with people, but I don't actually use my voice to say something.

At times I realize I haven't talked for a while because it's like I forget how to do it for a moment occasionally. Every behavior or activity I involve myself in that I had to learn how to do is gone go away from me before I die, and if not before I die, when I die the entire body of abstract knowledge I acquired in this specific lifetime will be gone forever.

It's what I didn't learn since I got this body that might get me through my dotage and the events brought on directly by the aging process. I've watched it happen in my own family with my own parents. They lived a long time. My father was 88 and my mother was 93 when they died. Forgetting the abstract, idealized life they had imagined for themselves in their youth was expected. Shit happens. Thangs change. What caught me off-guard was that in the end game, they didn't care anymore.

I think caring about stuff that you're supposed to instead of what actually troubles you is all blown outta proportion. To ignore what one actually cares about in favor of the perceptions of the other is just crazy. Other people only see themselves in other people just like you and I do. As the book title describes, we're all passengers on a ship of fools. Trying to "stay real" amounts to remembering that you're a fool.

Sometime I think I'm writing about a tragedy that hasn't happened yet in order to make sure it doesn't. Now, that's a little wacko I suppose. I'm not so sure it is wacko though, I see people being interviewed on TV on a regular basis who have written a book or novel to straighten out what happened to them after that tragedy struck.

One of the strangest stories I encountered on the internet was back when I was subscribed to an e-mail discussion group whose topic was about being pronounced dead, but not really dying. I don't know how much of what she wrote was true, but I sorta believed much of it.

The way she got dead without dying was due to a car wreck on her honeymoon in Hawaii. Her new husband didn't make it, and she barely survived. She was in coma for a long time and on life support. She wrote on the discussion group as a way of reclaiming her sanity. She claimed trees talked to her.

That was about the only aspect of her recovery that she worried about. She didn't think people believed her. I don't think she believed herself or she didn't appear to think it was sane for that to happen. Maybe that was some sort of indicator because nobody seemed to treat her like that at all. She wrote like a woman who had survived a serious life-threatening auto accident. It's a little like combat veterans, I don't expect them to go through something like that and act like it didn't affect them.

Car wrecks seem to influence people to write books as much as anything I can remember. Oddly, not that many people appear to write about being in combat to get over it. Maybe that's due to the kind of people who join the military in the first place. I think more people wrote about being in war previous to the services became an all-volunteer enlistment. Maybe a lot of the draftees back in the old days were frustrated English majors.

I got a few plants to protect during this cold snap. The weather service seems to be convinced it's not a "cold snap", but a system that could be around for a long time without relief. Yesterday I watched the weather program hoping for them to announce they'd made a mistake or the winds had changed or the jet stream moved north, but they didn't say anything encouraging at all. In fact, it's gonna be a couple of degrees colder still. What a drag, man.

My aggravation with this cold weather is my own fault. I oughta have been more practical and bought the machinery I needed to keep my house warm while I was still working and making some expendable cash, but it's not like my life is being threatened. The space heaters I use work okay. I just have to keep them turned off as much as possible, and I wear outdoor clothing inside my house to stay warm. It's embarrassing for people to realize how slackly I run my life. Always on the edge of disaster. I love it.

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