Flu Shot

I drove to the county health department this morning to get a flu shot. I can’t believe I let myself be scheduled for 8 a.m. but that’s what happened. It was so early for me! I usually don’t get up for an hour or more past 8. My eyes were wide open (no sleepy sand, you know), but I guess I was so taken aback to be abroad in the land at such an early hour that I got lost and ended up 20 minutes late, though no one seemed to mind. Except for me; I was embarrassed about it. One trouble with that hour is getting caught here and there in the heavy traffic going to work. I’m not used to that any more!

I seemed to be the youngest person who was there as a patient. Only some of the workers were younger than me. The flu shot was $20. I overheard a couple of elder men being told that the pneumonia shot would be $45—ouch! So I got by on the cheap side, I guess. This is only the second year that I’ve gone for the flu shot in recent years, but I’m getting to where I think I need such things. I’ve been so sick with diabetes and fatigue and such over the past year that I’d hate to cultivate any extra diseases or disabilities.

I don’t guess I will, but I feel like going back to sleep. If death were as good as sleep, I don’t think I’d even mind about death any more. Sleep is damn good, except that it’s hard to wake up.

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Haste

Soren Kierkegaard: "Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."

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Tough And Rough

I dropped a few from my "Intelligent Blogs" list this week. No antipathy, just lightening the load. No relationship had ever developed there and no comments to and from, either, so I dumped them. Maybe they weren't weird enough; certainly I myself am a very weird and cultivated taste. I take up with these blogs because they're clever, but I only keep them if they're either decidedly likeable or think that I am. Is that playing too tough? I think not. But you never know. We are all diamonds in the rough, but I still like to see some sparkle now and then. The funny thing is that at the other end, I sometimes make some great friends with whom I don't immediately exchange links. Or maybe never do. It's a mixed up world.

So there you go--my blog, my world, my rules. Be glad you have your own!

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Dogger Gatsby's Scribbles

Dogger's 49th birthday was coming up soon when he sat down and wrote this out in an old notebook. Later he typed it on an old electric typewriter in the year of his death. I came along later and entered it in my computer, where it was almost forgotten the past 9 years or so.

"What could possibly be more boring than this? Nothing comes up, arrives, or develops lately. Life just goes on. No fruit, no regards, no pity. I've been so polite and estranged for several years now that the concept of Old Flame seems to be bogged down in some cave age anti-diaspora, blistered by desert rays and hot stray winds, a fancy form of remembering someone else's life, not mine.

Shall the form ever be reassumed? Will there ever be a gain amidst this loss? What loss? What gain?

The Harlot and the Harvest are heavy symbols, but take me flightily and fightingly along. I'm light and bowled over and out of sync with myself. I've ceased to anticipate and pray that I stay so. But oh, alas, such beautiful strangers come along, disturb my day, my heart, my head! Where do they come from? I come to know them, of course, but on the surface of the skin and in the narrow of my marrow, and out on the way to Mayfair I realized that I had finally arrived alone at last. My ribbons were in a tangle and my clothes improperly zipped and everything I've worked for is in a hapless pile at my feet.

I'm on the sickbed to Disaster at a galloping gait, on the nightmare to that fear factor fate we dread at a gutbucket rate, on the way to my last slow defense and defeat by addle-pated nomenclature. Now, next, out the gate on the other side. I'm restless, I'm tired, I'm worn completely out. How much worse can it get... "

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Conceit

Bruce Barton: "Conceit is God's gift to little men."

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Seriously

One of my favorite words: facetious.

I wallow in it!

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Tremble

Who knows where the time goes?
Phones ring and fiends sing
And nobody puts down a deposit.
The TV talks incessantly in color
While politicians show their teeth and fester
And never say a thing.
As usual, our hearts remained unmoved
And only our bowels tremble.
The men in charge are Murderers.
The men in charge are Us.

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Wretched Beauty By Beatles

Girl

Is there anybody going to listen to my story
All about the girl who came to stay?
She's the kind of girl you want so much, it makes you sorry
Still, you don't regret a single day

Ah, girl
Girl, girl

When I think of all the times I've tried so hard to leave her
She will turn to me and start to cry
And she promises the earth to me and I believe her
After all this times I don't know why

Ah, girl
Girl, girl

She's the kind of girl who puts you down
When friends are there
You feel a fool
When you say she's looking good
She acts as if it's understood
She's cool, ooh, ooh, ooh

Girl
Girl, girl

Was she told when she was young that fame would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure
Will she still believe it when he's dead?

Oh girl
Girl, girl

Ah, girl
Girl, girl

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Sick Diseased Bastard

I suppose I must strike many people on the Internet as a Sick Diseased Character who is self-obsessed and not kind to strangers. I know I feel that way, whatever the truth may be. If I didn’t have a sense of humor, I couldn’t be tolerated! It is hard, however, to keep my humor honed and my intelligence sharp at the same time. In the backdrop of Me, there is always this diabetes and fatigue and organ pulsations and my vision going badly.

Maybe it’s only that I notice the sick bloggers because I’m at or near those stages myself, but it does seem like a lot of bloggers have now or have had health problems. It is a curious impetus to Writing, isn’t it? I have not lately gotten appreciably better or worse, so I just drag on and usually don’t talk about it. Lately I haven’t written as much as I used to and I don’t know if the trend will reverse eventually or not. I’d like to think it will.

Maybe I should change to Blogger Beta as soon as possible, and thus have a source of anger to keep my juices flowing? That’s been my impression of it, but I’ve only been looking at it from afar, studying the kinds of questions posed on the Blogger Help Group. I may yet wait until I am forced to “migrate”, then see what happens.

I think if winter comes on and gets here, I may buy me a hat, a more expensive one, a more beautiful one. I’ll replace these $3 working hats or beach hats or whatever the hell they are. How does that sound?

Maybe I’ll change my underwear, too, while I’m at it, but No Details on that! You’re welcome.

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Are We Too Famous Yet?

Robert Benchley: "It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

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