...
I was supposed to be home by now, but the project of keeping skin cancer at bay turned into a nightmare of broken old women and needing to wait for lab results and driving through the stupendously overpopulated outrage that has been made of my childhood stomping grounds. So I'm in Mendo World, trying really hard to get the concentration up for composing a vitally-important document, and run out of clean traveling clothes and coffee.
I could probably stay grubby okay and not suffer too much. Better to make sure I don't set my scalp back to bleeding on accident anyway, but the coffee thing is not optional. The entire world cannot endure me without either coffee or cigarettes. So when and if you ever feel inclined to try to cut me off of those, it will mean global catastrophe and you do NOT want to test me on this one. Okay?
So I know about addiction and self-medication and all that shit. I have compassion for idiots who suffer these. But I need to warn you that even if you could handle it when you were young and strong, you do NOT want anything that makes you loopy when you are old. Shit happens. Really bad shit happens. And it's a miracle if you come out with nothing worse than a seriously unsightly bruise.
If you drink, you gotta cut waaaaaaaaay back on that action. Or stop.
Do you know what it does to you to spend two months on your butt with your leg up above the level of your heart for two months? It gives you bedsores that take forever to heal, or never heal, if you are not extremely careful about hygiene and keeping damp parts dry and getting something soft and, optimally, springy under you. Your already almost extinct muscle tone goes away. Your already not powerful sense of balance, even when you're sober, gets radically worse. Your decline accelerates big time.
Plus, you are not the only one who is suffering.
That's what you can't forget... and always have had to forget to keep that self-destruct pedal to the metal. The people who love you suffer — depending — even more than whatever delusion made you so determined to incapacitate yourself like that was doing to you.
The key to this koan — you fucking sot — is gratitude.
You are an ingrate.
pipe up any time....
