|
|
|
a very long present
Monday, March 20 2017
This discomfort on the left side of my groin continues; if anything, it's grown slightly worse. Gretchen just happened to set me up with a doctor's appointment (for what might be my first medical check-up since my 20s), but that won't be until the middle of next week. The discomfort isn't that great in the grand scheme of things, but it nags at me and cuts into my ability to focus. Periodically I get up and do groin stretches, which seems to help. But then I go back to work and and the discomfort returns. And then I obsess over it like a hypochondriac, a feedback loop that makes it worse just from the mental focus on it. It's amazing how a persistent low-level discomfort like this can totally ruin one's attitude. It's even got me thinking of mortality in a way that I normally don't. Here's what I mean by that: this online journal registers in my mind as a very long present. But it's been going on for twenty and a half years. Objectively, that's a large fraction of even a long human lifespan. But to me, at least on some level, it's a present I entered and which I have yet to leave. This is, I suspect, partly why I keep doing it. But because it all get classified as a single unit in my brain, it causes me to use that span of time as a measurement of "not too far from now." And so when I add it to my age now, I am horrified to discover I will be just shy of 70 years old. If I (or, perhaps, we) make it that long. The omnipotent toddler running America might pick an unnecessary fight with a nuclear-armed adversary. Or that discomfort on the left side of my groin might prove to be inoperable stage IV cancer. There's a recent precedent for such things: one month Julius (aka "Stripey") was a fat and happy laboratory cat, and the next he was terminally swelled by some sort of catastrophic organ failure.
In other news, today for the first time I went off-trail through the snow. This was just to go to the brownhouse for the first time in nearly a week, and in so doing I had to trudge through six to eight inches of slush.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170320 feedback
previous | next |
