Learn From It

JEFF
I know that pain interferes with healing, So I hit the magic button when I'm supposed to, but on the other hand, I really don't like feeling loopy.

BEARBAIT
This is why I'll never understand your kind.

Thus began an hour-long talk about addiction and escapism and the differences, biological and psychological, of addicts vs non-addicts. Apparently, addicts have no “off switch”, and loopiness is a kind of escape and thus goes a non-recovering addict out of the world. I can understand this. For a world that seems to love to take potshots at those with a disease (South Park, for example) and trivialize what doesn't fit (which, really, the smaller the mind, the less room in which to fit things), as I sit here in this hospital bed with a restricted choice (I can only hit the magic button—Dolores I call her—every 20 minutes and I'm delivered an additional 0.6mg of morphine), I'm wondering what we really do have any choice in in our lives.

This is the part where the blogger takes the Accidental and waxes quixotic and poetic about Essence: maybe this trauma was for a purpose. Maybe it was the Universe/god/Goddess/Intelligent Designer trying to tell me to slow down or change direction altogether.

Maybe the Accident exposes the Goodness in people and the Badness of the World About Us.

Naaah.

I'm just grateful to the Grand Whomever(s) that distance and perspective from and to my life is granted in an abrupt, no-choice way. And I'm glad that those most important to that life are here with me at this distance to hold me up when I need holding up. Maybe God's footprints in the sand beside mine, never wavering, are meant to tell me Something (maybe just that sucky and trite and cloying poems can become popular through arts & crafts projects).

This is time off, not just from work, but from my life. Biological necessity intrudes and I must attend to it because that's all there is: lose the biology and the rest crumbles.

What I've been reminded of is the necessity of others': nurses are extraordinary in every way. They are underpaid, understaffed and this County Hospital is suffering because of ironically-selfish voters.

When peoples' lives are bearable, helping others is an innate joy.

How people can attack those who are trying to help is beyond me.

Why people have forgotten the Samaritan and embraced the Pharisee may be learned one day, but probably only through catastrophe.

Where you are is the most important place, no matter where the Where. San Francisco taught me that years ago, but I mean Here, Now, When, What, Why and Where I am are not questions but rather axioms, the relative Truths on which we base our forays in to the world.

No, I'm not fucked up on opiates or other painkillers, I'm just where I am, who I am. My pain is simply more obvious and objective than usual, exposed and demanding. And I'm giving it its due.

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