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Aging

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Lung cancer was a very unpleasant death - dragging on for years really. Like in retrospect, I'm sure a lot of the speech and throat problems we were seeing with my brother long before the formal diagnosis - those were the cancer.

And then the final countdown - just flat-out unpleasant.

He was the extreme case though. Apart from the fact he started smoking in different times when it was easy to smoke almost anywhere anytime. So that's how he smoked for a long time (as did I). But he never let up. I remember in recent decades picking him up for various family things, and I would set foot in whatever tiny, poorly ventilated apartment he was in at the time - and it would be ridiculous. He smoked, yes, but also there was a constant concentrated second hand smoke. Ridiculous.

To be honest, I was slightly surprised he put up any fight at all against the cancer. He tried some chemo and radiation. But his long-term behavior seemed to say he was trying to not get old.

Societally respectable suicide, as Vonnegut described it.



But I'm sure your average casual smoker in today's world has a million times better chance of getting lucky and dodging the bullets than my brother did. My brother positioned himself right in the hail.
 
So here is my thinking about the future as it currently stands.

Do NOT move from this place. Do the commute to the new workplace. Obviously experiment with routes and reduce the travel time as much as possible.

Make better use of the time spent in the car. This can start immediately and does not have to wait until the company moves. Basically what I need is a dictaphone (or modern-day equivalent thereof). Rather than listen to radio - which sucks so powerful hard - while I drive - I will turn it off and think about my new novel and record promising ideas - of which I'm sure there will be many every day - verbally on the device - for later transcription.

If a perfect situation re accommodations does open up closer to work, then I will act on it. If not, I will just commute indefinitely, meaning eventually I will go into retirement living right exactly where I am now - which is a damn fine place for it.


Plus I need more freezer space. So I will buy a little supplemental freezer and stash that somewhere. So I will take care of that and go forward into this Brave New World with more freezer space.


Both the freezer and the dictaphone can probably be obtained at Best Buy. I figger.


Then die.
 
Can't hardly wait to get my dictaphone


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Sometimes people talk like there is a contest to see how long you are remembered after you die. Like Shakespeare is sitting around somewhere saying, "Hah! People still be up in my plays 400 years later."

And then Julius Caesar sez, "Pfft. Lemme know when people are remembering you 2000 years after you die."

But I say no. They're dead. They are getting the exact same amount of stuff from their fame as Vincent Van Gogh - who died not knowing how famous he would be. Or some random family-less filing clerk who died in 2006. Zero.

But then, as an Astronomy student, I tend to look at time in billion year chunks.

If the whole damn human race is not extinct and forgotten in a billion years, I will be sitting around on my cloud, totally amazed.
 
It's finally happening. My dad is looking to sell the house my family moved into when I was 2, the house where everything happened.

It was inevitable of course. My mum is in a nursing home now so dad is alone in this big place. He's in his mid-80's and doesn't need a lot of lawn mowing and snow shoveling and gutter cleaning.

I believe they paid 15K for it. Dad is expecting to get 725K now. So noice.



But it will be so weird to drive by it some future time and someone else is in there. That's my house.

Just thinking about it makes my stomach go WOOOOOOOWWWWWW
 
So here's the thing: my mum doesn't remember my life. Like not really.

When I visited on Friday the topic she wanted to introduce was: what have I been doing for the last 40 years? 50 would have been a more apt number but whatever, the point is, she doesn't remember what I was like and the kinds of things I did.

She says she remembers my sister better - her given reason is she's a girl - :dunno: - but my brother and I, not much at all. All the details are gone. Like she wanted to know what my work life has been like. Did I ever do anything with my music/writing? I found myself telling her about what kind of a student I was and the sports I did. Yada yada.

She is very regretful of this. Apologetic.

I am certainly not mad at her or even the world in general. I mean, there are a lot of super-significant things and it is weird to not be remembered but, I have to admit, I am grateful and relieved about some things that have been wiped out.

The number of things in that category is not small.
 
It's a bit unclear. She has some dementia but it might be more in the category of Creutzfeldt-Jacobs than Alzheimers.

She doesn't act like Alzheimer's people I have known. Like she knows she is missing stuff but she is really aware and regretful about it.

At one point she was tested for Alzheimers - and was found to be fairly far along with it - but then later she took the same test and was almost clear. The doctor who did the testing said he had never seen anything like it.

:dunno:
 
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