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I feel better this morning than I have for a while. In between the tooth extraction and the antibiotics that came with it, some of my former misery seems to be going away. There is room for improvement, but my future seems rosier.
Last night I watched an interview on the Charley Rose program with a former Navy Seal who had written a book about his experiences being a Seal. It was probably his description of the trials and tribulations of the training these men go through that had me dreaming practically all last night of crawling around doing sneaky stuff. I didn't actually kill anybody during the dream nor did I get killed, but it was a harrowing affair from beginning to end.
I woke up to go the the bathroom a few times as usual, but when I went back to bed I became a sly snake-in-the-grass again, and was hunting down the bad guys all over the place. Once my dreaming about being an insurgent started, I somehow knew it was going to go on for the rest of my dreamtime. What a wild and crazy night! In consideration of the fact that in real life I'm an old man, it was a bit exciting to think of myself as a young warrior again.
One of the detrimental affects of the rotten tooth was that the entire left side of my head felt swollen and very uncomfortable. I guess that worried me as much as anything. In my usual worst-case-scenario attitude, I speculated that I might have a brain tumor. So, when the dentist asked me if I had experienced any discomfort like that on the same side of my head as the bad tooth (without me telling him previously I had), I figured it must be a common symptom I might get over in due time. This morning, after dreaming all night of engaging in manly hand-to-hand combat, the swollen feeling I experienced up side mah haid is pretty much gone, and I feel like I may live a while longer after all.
This swollen condition of my head and thyroid glands not only caused me serious concern about my health, it really irritated me when I wore my new noise-canceling headphones. They're designed for the ear cups to fit completely over my ears in order to physically shut out some of the ambient noise.
A part of the discomfort I felt from wearing the head-phones came from the hot weather. Enclosing my ears with insulation caused them to perspire beneath the ear cups. I gotta get some cheap in-the-ear type ear phones to use the software in hot weather. I'll still have to wear the over-the-ear, noise-canceling head-phones when the military helicopters come next to my house to play war games. I guess they have to practice assassinating people like Bin Laden somewhere.
A part of the discomfort I felt from wearing the head-phones came from the hot weather. Enclosing my ears with insulation caused them to perspire beneath the ear cups. I gotta get some cheap in-the-ear type ear phones to use the software in hot weather. I'll still have to wear the over-the-ear, noise-canceling head-phones when the military helicopters come next to my house to play war games. I guess they have to practice assassinating people like Bin Laden somewhere.
In between my swollen head and the unbearable heat I haven't been able to listen to the Gnaural meditation software comfortably for at least a week or more. Last night I wore the head-phones with some degree of comfort again, and I was very pleased about that. It's free software, and it works for me, so what's not to like.
It stormed big-time just west of here. Where it rained the temperatures cooled down fast. We were all grateful for that. The front that moved east over the Appalachians was the same one that brought all the tornados to the midwest. Joplin. It had calmed down considerably when crossing the mountains. The rain came along the front from south to north as usual. I kept waiting for it to progress eastward and bring some rain to my house. It never did. Not one drop fell here.
The whole system petered out about twenty miles west of here. The cool front eventually did pass over us, but without the rain, and the temperatures did cool off considerably when that happened. The grass on my lawn is still turning brown, and only spotty showers are predicted for today. The chances for us getting a shower seems slim to none. At least it's cooler than it's been for the last week.
The religious documentaries that have been playing on PBS recently have had me thinking about what actually influences me most powerfully in the contemplation of my own life. It's probably the story of Gautama the Buddha, and the story of Moses. It's not like I think of myself as a Buddhist or a Jew, I still consider my beliefs to be those of a Doceticist, it's just that the metaphors associated with these classics appear to apply to my personal experience more that most other collections of campfire stories. How weird is that for a Saturday morning?
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