What am I trying to say here? Time is like that swimming pool and we spend an awful lot of it under the water, moving forward or around knowing that at some point we gotta come up for air. We have a brief moment of clarity when we pop out, take that breath, and go back down. I think those are the solid moments in life that we don’t have to scramble to recall.
Omg. I just finished my absurdly long comment, & accidentally side swiped it into oblivion. I’ll try to recreate it, but who fucking knows if I am capable at this age.
At 55 I am right behind ya. Don’t wait up, I have no coordination, very little balance, & neuropathy destroys any proprioceptive input. I’ll stay back here languidly moseying.
I agree, it is very bizarre how time stretches, condenses, & blurs the further one gets from an occurrence. Pair that with post menopausal or manopausal brain fog & looking through the rear view mirror becomes an exercise of unexpected perplexity & questionable depth perception.
When I was young, my visual memories & my auditory memories were often linked & all were crystal clear. But now my auditory memories echo unattached & my visual memories sometimes feel like vertigo. And now I find myself Mr. Magooing through life.
Like your recurring dream, I have a waking image that stays in my mind that I believe represents my soul, my lifetime, & my memories. I am sitting alone in an empty, beautiful church. (Because of course. No matter how far I limp away, CHURCH remains a beckoning seemingly lovely facade that hides the putrid decay that rots beneath its surface.)
I am ageless (sometimes young, sometimes old, sometimes ageless), happily looking up in awe. I am surrounded by countless stained glass windows, depicting significant scenes of my life. Suddenly, without warning, all the windows shatter inward one by one, raining shards of colored glass all over me & the sanctuary.
I am alarmed & wounded, but start the daunting task of gathering the bigger pieces, trying to identify & reassemble the scenes like a series of puzzles, ignoring the bleeding cuts on my hands. My efforts are infinitesimally successful & largely futile, so eventually I resign myself to collecting all the shards, even the tiniest ones that are crushed as I walk, to create a kaleidoscope.
I view the rest of my life through this kaleidoscope, which creates images that are ever-changing, shifting & beautiful in different ways than the scenes that were previously solid. Even though they are shattered, broken, crushed, salvaged shards, the glass reflects my lifetime & remains colorful & beautiful in a new way. Every once in a while I stumble across another piece & decide whether it fits in one of the puzzles or gets tossed into the kaleidoscope pile.
This church setting remains in my mind, but sometimes instead it morphs into a funhouse maze with distorted mirrors that I’m desperately trying to escape. But still the same thing still happens with the mirrors shattering, & me trying to collect all the pieces.
In both scenarios, I am alone, but am fearful that someone else will enter the sanctuary or the maze & further crush or steal the shards of my life before I can gather them all.
Typical that my mind conjures up an impossible important task to be completed before someone sinister enters the scene.
BTW, I love “Dude Looks Like A Lady,” Steven Tyler really goes all out, so to speak. The only downside is I end up destroying my vocal cords attempting to replicate his ad libs at the end. That’s the part that reminds me of the crows “Ca-ca-ca-ca Cow Cow!”
Indeed. It’s a toss up on any given day of whether or not remembering clearly is helpful or harmful. Let’s just say that I hope no one’s life is ever dependent on the accuracy of my memory.
As Frank Zappa said, "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." Easy for me to agree with...my sense of personal history is as stable as the love child of Elon Musk & Roseanne Barr.
Equity Grading is bullshit. Hell all philosophies/social movements/political movements/whatever—including the ones I love and live by—are bullshit.
Maybe Ted Kaczynski wasn't so far off, except for the boom-mail.
Oops, I knew I would forget something profound. (Just nod & smirk, it’s fine, really.)
Your concept of fake it til you make it, is predicated on your knowing that you are willing to do what it takes to improve, gain skills, or overcome what stands in your way. Your intent is to move from faking it, to making it.
Trumplethinskin has no use for improvement, learning, or knowledge sharing. (Mary Trump, his psychologist niece, says he’s the only person she’s ever met who has no intellectual curiosity whatsoever.)
Remember during his first term when they had to start “dumbing down” the President’s Daily Briefs into bullet points containing his name, to keep his attention? I bet this time around he doesn’t even listen, he probably just gets a recap from Stephen Miller.
He just destroys everything in his path like Captain Caveman & then lies that he fixed it.
Ditto on the love child instability. My brother, who no longer speaks to my mother, recently said he pretends he & I are orphaned siblings & that our parents’ names are aliases for the con artists Rooster & Aggie Hannigan from “Annie.” The metaphor works except that Rooster & Aggie are brother & sister, which makes for an interesting “Flowers In The Attic” plot twist, but nothing would surprise me anymore in my real or hypothetical family tree.
What am I trying to say here? Time is like that swimming pool and we spend an awful lot of it under the water, moving forward or around knowing that at some point we gotta come up for air. We have a brief moment of clarity when we pop out, take that breath, and go back down. I think those are the solid moments in life that we don’t have to scramble to recall.
Omg. I just finished my absurdly long comment, & accidentally side swiped it into oblivion. I’ll try to recreate it, but who fucking knows if I am capable at this age.
At 55 I am right behind ya. Don’t wait up, I have no coordination, very little balance, & neuropathy destroys any proprioceptive input. I’ll stay back here languidly moseying.
I agree, it is very bizarre how time stretches, condenses, & blurs the further one gets from an occurrence. Pair that with post menopausal or manopausal brain fog & looking through the rear view mirror becomes an exercise of unexpected perplexity & questionable depth perception.
When I was young, my visual memories & my auditory memories were often linked & all were crystal clear. But now my auditory memories echo unattached & my visual memories sometimes feel like vertigo. And now I find myself Mr. Magooing through life.
Like your recurring dream, I have a waking image that stays in my mind that I believe represents my soul, my lifetime, & my memories. I am sitting alone in an empty, beautiful church. (Because of course. No matter how far I limp away, CHURCH remains a beckoning seemingly lovely facade that hides the putrid decay that rots beneath its surface.)
I am ageless (sometimes young, sometimes old, sometimes ageless), happily looking up in awe. I am surrounded by countless stained glass windows, depicting significant scenes of my life. Suddenly, without warning, all the windows shatter inward one by one, raining shards of colored glass all over me & the sanctuary.
I am alarmed & wounded, but start the daunting task of gathering the bigger pieces, trying to identify & reassemble the scenes like a series of puzzles, ignoring the bleeding cuts on my hands. My efforts are infinitesimally successful & largely futile, so eventually I resign myself to collecting all the shards, even the tiniest ones that are crushed as I walk, to create a kaleidoscope.
I view the rest of my life through this kaleidoscope, which creates images that are ever-changing, shifting & beautiful in different ways than the scenes that were previously solid. Even though they are shattered, broken, crushed, salvaged shards, the glass reflects my lifetime & remains colorful & beautiful in a new way. Every once in a while I stumble across another piece & decide whether it fits in one of the puzzles or gets tossed into the kaleidoscope pile.
This church setting remains in my mind, but sometimes instead it morphs into a funhouse maze with distorted mirrors that I’m desperately trying to escape. But still the same thing still happens with the mirrors shattering, & me trying to collect all the pieces.
In both scenarios, I am alone, but am fearful that someone else will enter the sanctuary or the maze & further crush or steal the shards of my life before I can gather them all.
Typical that my mind conjures up an impossible important task to be completed before someone sinister enters the scene.
BTW, I love “Dude Looks Like A Lady,” Steven Tyler really goes all out, so to speak. The only downside is I end up destroying my vocal cords attempting to replicate his ad libs at the end. That’s the part that reminds me of the crows “Ca-ca-ca-ca Cow Cow!”
...assuming that what we remember actually happened...
Indeed. It’s a toss up on any given day of whether or not remembering clearly is helpful or harmful. Let’s just say that I hope no one’s life is ever dependent on the accuracy of my memory.
Amen & me too!
As Frank Zappa said, "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." Easy for me to agree with...my sense of personal history is as stable as the love child of Elon Musk & Roseanne Barr.
Equity Grading is bullshit. Hell all philosophies/social movements/political movements/whatever—including the ones I love and live by—are bullshit.
Maybe Ted Kaczynski wasn't so far off, except for the boom-mail.
Naaah...you have a grande week, Mr. D!
Oops, I knew I would forget something profound. (Just nod & smirk, it’s fine, really.)
Your concept of fake it til you make it, is predicated on your knowing that you are willing to do what it takes to improve, gain skills, or overcome what stands in your way. Your intent is to move from faking it, to making it.
Trumplethinskin has no use for improvement, learning, or knowledge sharing. (Mary Trump, his psychologist niece, says he’s the only person she’s ever met who has no intellectual curiosity whatsoever.)
Remember during his first term when they had to start “dumbing down” the President’s Daily Briefs into bullet points containing his name, to keep his attention? I bet this time around he doesn’t even listen, he probably just gets a recap from Stephen Miller.
He just destroys everything in his path like Captain Caveman & then lies that he fixed it.
His mantra is more like
Make it, break it, fake it.
Declares a problem & says only he can fix it
Bulldozes the system to create said problem
Pretends that he fixed the problem
Repeat.
Hey! Wanna be president?
Profound, indeed, but is there an antifound?
I assume so, but if not a confound might suffice in a pinch.
A state I find myself in too damn often...
Ditto on the love child instability. My brother, who no longer speaks to my mother, recently said he pretends he & I are orphaned siblings & that our parents’ names are aliases for the con artists Rooster & Aggie Hannigan from “Annie.” The metaphor works except that Rooster & Aggie are brother & sister, which makes for an interesting “Flowers In The Attic” plot twist, but nothing would surprise me anymore in my real or hypothetical family tree.