WE HAVEN'T RECOGNIZED

Hmmm … that’s what this morning feels like. Notwithstanding my turning out the lights fairly early, I dozed, waking up on and off to The British History Podcast, mostly about Carausisus and Constantine. After awhile, I couldn’t take the narrator’s voice any more and switched to This American Life and then I think George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons finally put me out.

I tried not taking sleeping medication. I tried just falling asleep old school, without being bored or lulled to sleep. No good. The dementors were tapping at my window, waiting to crank up the anxiety into full on misery.

I didn’t get much sleep, but I had to get up to take Cooder to the vet, to see if she is healthy enough to fly to California. That cost a lot more than I anticipated. I think the lack of sleep and concern for her made me unfocussed and the next thing I know, I had spent almost three times my anticipated cat vet budget. I even asked the vet if it were time to put Cooder down, but she thought not. I may be in for a regime, if we can afford it, of weekly hydration shots which will keep up her kidney function. And possibly a regimen of special food. Regimen and regime in the same paragraph? Nearly the same word ... I suppose I could do better, writing-wise.

Besides the back hurting again, being sleep deprived, and probably freaking out about getting moved, the continual computer problems since I upgraded to Yosemite, the world seems so relentlessly awful. Although I try to keep my intake of bummer material at a manageable level, but between the Rolling Stone article about rape culture at the University of Viriginia, the ousting of the homeless in San Jose (... who would have thought you could make the homeless more homeless? That's nearly oxymoronic.) the Ferguson decision atrocity, and the Eric Garner murder, I am beside myself, and goodness knows being actually me is crappy enough.

The dementors began their attempted incursion with a vision. The world in a 3:1 aspect ratio like those pictures you see of Paris with the demon on top of Notre Dame (kind of like this but feeling squishier. And darker, more ominous. And more medieval.

I know the positive thinkers and the spiritually minded tell us all the time that there are plenty of options out there, and I know this is true on some levels, but it does feel as if the sky is falling or has already fallen, albeit in slow motion. More like ash smothering us. It's getting darker. And smaller. And harder to breathe. Cirrhosis of the heart and spirit, or just blackened like black lung. 

That's how I feel about Eric Garner. Like the middle class and the 90%, we can't breathe. What are "they" going to do with us? Line us up and shoot us or let atrophy, depression, and neglect kill us slowly as the spirits of many of us, older and younger, grow ever more leaden and hard?

Well, my back isn't feeling better. So perhaps I would be better off to try to get some more sleep and see if that improves my mood. 

A bit later. 

Worked on my (frustrating, non-paying) job. And hung out with Cooder a bit who had a good appetite. 

When I was a child, I recall asking my mom about The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire. I must have seen some reference to it, or perhaps The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or I just got them confused. No matter, I had anxiety about it. I wondered how it happened, how the people felt, did they know? Did it just happen instantly, like a volcano (the other disaster I worried about). My mother told me that it happened gradually. That civilizations rose and fall. And that the United States might be in the decline (mind you this was in the 1960s). 

She was right. And I was right to be worried. 

The other thing was the Depression. I recall hearing about that, maybe seeing The Grapes of Wrath on TV, and being terrified about living through such terrible times. Well, I got what I feared. It also feels odd that I am listening to the British History podcast which goes into the the Fall of the Roman Empire in significant detail.

I will try for that nap now and hope that I wake up feeling better, more energetic, and ready to make some serious progress on the last packing push.

I'm not a fan of Chuck's but 

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. 
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. 
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
There is no free will. 
There are no variables.” 
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor