Selah

☙

Warm days and cool nights. What could be mo' bettah? Granted, the last part of fall and the first part of winter had record cold temperatures in this neck of the woods, but this current weather pattern is kind of nice. There is something very comforting about sleeping under warm covers that reaches back into my childhood.

My brother came over to get the dog food and feeding pans he left with me to feed his dogs while he and his wife flew out to visit friends in Arizona for a week. They also drove to Las Vegas to help my 90 year old aunt celebrate her birthday. She is not even the oldest living aunt, but now all of them that are left are over 90.

My mother, their oldest sister was 93 when she died in 2005. Those Johnson's live a long time. It worries me. Their mother lived to be 96, and her mother lived to be 98. I've heard that the natural length of a person's life to be the same age as your mother's mother. Maybe I'll unexpectedly get run over by a truck first, but without a warning, thank you very much. BLAM!

I wouldn't go to court and swear that the silver colloids I've been spraying on my hands and feet was the cause of it, but all the lesions that I was having trouble with have dried up and pretty much gone away.

My internal use of it has been constrained to lifting my tongue up and spraying a spritz or two there for sublingual digestion. In my research I read that if I swallow it my stomach acids dissolve the silver nano-particles, but if I go the sublingual route they go straight into the blood stream. That seems to work best for me, but whatta I know?

I've become aware that I used the expression "pretty much" a lot, and I'm trying to become more aware of it. Whether I discontinue to employ it as a descriptor is up in the air. My main attention in this regard, presently, is to pay attention to where I used apostrophes, but I have no way of knowing whether I'm getting it right or not.

I have decided to stop with the "tossed-word-salad" for the most part. I use hyphens to bring my attention to the possible roots of words that lost their individuality through ti-me. Particularly if the letters "m" and "e" (me) are an integral part of a term or expression.

True, it helps me to get a deeper linguistic understanding of words that contain "me", but people have confronted me, in the past, stating that my doing that screws with the continuity of my intent for them, and have asked that I stop for their sake. No blame. I've always been selfish and wanted to do things my way for my sake. Maybe my dotage is making me kinder.

The biggest problem I seem to be having these days is my diet. Specifically, eating my own cooking. Damn, I'm a lousy cook! Occasionally I throw something together that tastes okay, and on rare occasion, excellent, but when I write "rare", I mean extremely infrequently. Maybe twice last year.

The local greasy spoon that follows the high school lunchroom menu is the criteria I use to judge my own cooking. Anything better than what I get there fits into the "excellent" category. That still doesn't mean that the average person would think what I cook tastes great. I get a lotta queasy feelings almost immediately after I eat my own cooking.

My first wife was a registered dietician who planned the menus of hundreds of hospital patients every day. She could cook lunchroom food with the best of them, but if we wanted something unique, we went out to eat. An Aries woman, I had to dissemble in order to run for my life.

My second and hopefully last wife couldn't even boil water when we began living together. All her mother (another Aries) taught her was how to shop at boutiques and irritate men to distraction. Her father died at a fairly young age to get away from that first-generation German bitch.

By the time we married (to give the child she was pregnant with a legal standing in the world), she had become a right fair cook. If she hadn't have had to work all the time because she had a lazy/crazy husband, there was a fair chance she could have become a gourmand.

It's not rare for me to consider killing myself. As I've written before, I've thought about it every day of my life since I was nineteen years old, eating my own cooking is NOT the way I would choose to die, but it may inadvertently happen that way. I don't know how that could happen though, I cook everything to death to make sure what I cook don't kill me.

Ideally, I'd get up with some ugly old crone who liked to keep a garden and cook what she grew there. I write "ugly" because it was recommended to me by a guy who swears he married his wife because she was ugly, and nobody else wanted her. The only-est thang that betrays his advice, however, is that she had wealthy parents, and hell, even I would have married her for that.

That is a lie I've been telling all my adult life. I've had several chances to marry into wealthy families, and just couldn't do it. It was not because of the money, coincidentally, but because I don't do the choosing when it comes to getting up with women, and there's the shame of it. I'm not a "real man" who takes control of intimate relationships and makes them go like I want them to happen. Worse, I refuse to let the woman run the show unimpeded either.

We both lose because of my bullish stubbornness, and I don't know how to change. I'd go so far as to say I can't change even when I try real hard. That's the deal, I guess, with being born with both the Sun and the Moon in the astrology sign Taurus, and with the opposite sign Scorpio for my Ascendent.

Fixed signs. That's the problem. Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius are the "fixed signs" in the zodiac, and I got the most fixed of the fixed signs as the major indicators in my natal chart. I like to say that my Scorpion personality is similar to the lyrics of an old hymnal, "I'm lak a tree that's planted by tha' water, I shall not be moved."

The aspects in my natal chart are weird. Of the 38 major and minor aspects in my chart, 33 of them are considered positive, and more than a few of them are really excellent. The negative aspects, as few as there are, are unequaled. When I'm bad, I'm very, very bad, and when I'm evil, I'm outrageous, and nobody can live with me or even stay friends very long.

At the risk of seeming insane, sometimes it's on purpose. There are times in my life I just have to be alone. Much of the time I have to be alone, the other times than that is just because I wanna. I don't like it very much, and I do get lonely infrequently, but shit happens, and thangs change. Selah

❦