A Creature Of Habits

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This I am is of mine is a creature of habits. It's worst habit is attempting to please my me. I am is keeps no pets. It's god is a jealous god, and can barely stand I am's other renderings, but It knows it's place. 

100.)
They showed Jesus a gold coin and said:
Caesars men wanted tribute from us.
He replied:
Render unto Caesar what belongs to
Caesar, and render unto God, what belongs
to God, and render unto me, that which is mine.

http://reluctant-messenger.com/gospel-thomas-Nancy_Johnson.htm

Yep, I am is still stuck on the "me" thing. Why would it not be? I am is me. Everything else has changed. The world I perceive currently is not the world I grew old with. It's not the world around which I developed my prize habits. Soon, when the cataract is removed from my left eye too, the world I grew old with will be even further removed from what I led myself to believe was there. 

With a shower here and there earlier in the summer the grass on my lawn got green for a little while. Since we've had no rain to amount to anything lately, it's gotten brown again. The figs on my now ripening bush are kind of tough because of the drought. The skins of the fruit are thick as if they're trying to protect themselves from the lack of water and the hot sun. They're not ripening quickly either. It's like they're holding back and hoping for rain. It might not happen. 

Droughts are not that unusual here. What is a little unusual is that we haven't had any tropical storms or hurricanes this season yet. The yearly rainfall depends on storms to keep everything watered. Nature knows how to take care of itself, but the plants that humans grow for their own convenience are usually brought in from some nursery in some other climate. 

Some historians think that Jamestown, Virginia failed as a colony because of one of these droughts. Just about everything green dies. Gardens and the plants of nature too. Jamestown is only about a hundred miles north of here in another part of the mid-Atlantic coastal plains. 

The James River up in Virginia is only vaguely familiar to me. I worked a shutdown in the Allied Chemical plant that's close to the river. I didn't work there long. Maybe six weeks. It was not a safe place to be. There was a 45 minute audio tape each employee had to listen to as part of the orientation. The tape described a long list of chemicals there that could kill you before you could count to twenty. 

This plant was located in Hopewell, Virginia. Hopewell was famous as the seaport Ulysses S. Grant used to ship in war supplies to win the battle for Richmond, Virginia during the Civil War. It's just north of Petersburg, Virginia where there is a historic battleground I spent some time visiting. My great-grandfather fought there for Mississippi. Later he names his son (my grandfather) for his commanding officer. My legal middle name is Lee. 

There is not much difference in how the federal government treated the citizens of the defeated South than how they treated the defeated native Indians. They decimated the culture and punished people for speaking in their native tongue. It's not easy when the culture that shaped your thinking is criminalized by an act of law. By doing that, however, they are presently destroying their own culture, and there is nothing to be loyal to for anybody anymore. 

I don't know why I just took my usual dose of methotrexate just now. The guy in charge of the opthalmology clinic at the VA suggested I stop taking it until the cataract procedure healed. Methotrexate is notorious for lowering the potential of the immune system. I guess I caved, but for no good reason. I haven't had any real physical pain since I stopped taking it two weeks ago. 

It's probably due to the sadness I've felt since I had the operation and got the patch off my eye. It radically changed my life in every way. Perhaps I'm sad because I can see even more clearly that getting old is killing me. I can not only see the ordinary objects of the world better, but suddenly I can see my own skin more clearly than I really want to. 

My old skin didn't look so bad a week ago.  In just one week I had the aging process of the last forty years (since my first Saturn Return) sprung upon me like an albatross around my neck. It looks like death. Previously, I was able to rationalize the wrinkles and the mauve colors of easily bruised skin incrementally as time went by. No mas. 

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