More Later

Today is a day of irritations...

Mike, the ailing alcoholic, is second guessing his doctor's orders. According to Mike, Mike has a genius level brain with more experience with his alcoholism than the doctor has. Therefore, the doctor should conform his orders to Mike's wishes. This is the delusional thinking that chases us alkies to death...unless we entertain the possibility that we may be wrong about everything, we will surely die. "Jails, institutions, death."

And that vents a good deal of most of my ire for today. Although there are other small, niggling things wiggling on the edge of my brain that aren't good for me. Like why the State of Virginia is no longer covering my Medicare premiums...I have a phone call in to several politicians and we'll see who gets back to me first...

I wish I had something earth shattering to tell you, to keep you on the edge of your seat. But, it's a blessing to me that I don't. I am just one small person, in a world full of one small people to the tune of what is it now, 7 billion?

And the more I read in today's paper, and the more I hear on the news, I am more and more convinced that we are no different than the one small person in say, Augustus' Roman Empire. And my calls today connect me to the one small person in Rome, who went to the Forum to accost his/her Senator for an answer that affected their one small life...our system of representation is based closely on the system the Romans used. It is no wonder that I feel connected in this way.

But it does make me wonder what that small person's everyday life was like, and I cannot substantially fathom that it was much different than mine, emotionally and spiritually. It does give me a sense of perspective and keeps me much calmer than I would otherwise be.

Perhaps that is why the author Douglas Adams, pointed out that a sense of perspective is the worse thing in the universe to have...after all, at the end of the day, a sense of perspective does not "put beans on the table."