Musing after 100 hours

My Kaiser prison

Situated, sited, stuck, smiling from the foot of the ladder and squinting up the many steps to the stars for 20 of 24 hours of past 8 days bivouacked in this Hospital my philosophical reading has not improved my mood. Not much does. Our absence of income or savings does not. Knowing our affordable and liveable studio apartment requires far more than 1.5 hours in my apartment per day does not. Arguing with my wife about being unable to ACT save for tiny increments of time does not. Having no job and less income does not. Drinking cheap wine and smoking cheap weed changes nothing. Reading and writing does. And my efforts on Substack to write are steps to freedom from fear. A higher and better coping. Can I toil writing many hours a day for renumeration? I think yes. Clearly though not on Substack. I probably will turn 99 Year Blues into a subscription offering but Lingering Sanity will be donation if you so choose and free.

99 Year Blues I think will be less free form and much more topical on Global Totalitarianism. Audiences are thirsty for ….not really sure if it is an insight or a call to arms. I can say my insights at 15 were a call to arms but no one for many years, even after moving to San Francisco to “fight the power's that oppress” had much interest in my quite original insights. My friends at Cafe La Boheme did. And yet, this lasted about 5 years until money flowed into La Mission flooding everything. City life. Not as exciting as New York. And after 9/11 I was glad of it.

My little life unfurls in a tragic land and tragic time. I make the most my mood permits of freedom. Sometimes I think like Thoreau - “A hospital ward does not a prison make” :) but he did not spend 100 hours waiting waiting waiting for a surgical date on the brain of his 80 year young spouse with all the hazards this entails. Other times my dramatic emotions think of the absolute catastrophe of the last 300 years in context of Covid being the Roman Concrete of the NWO. Still other times I ponder how to alter the course of fate by rejecting surgery and turning entirely to Medical Chi Gong. All on less than $500 after monthly bills. Scurrying up and down the ladder of life are all the beautiful people each with their tragedies and glories and responsibilities. Long ago and deep in time my choices made me not really a philosopher but philosophical. Blow after blow educated me into appreciating the common sense of Schopenhauer that life is giving and receiving of blows. Kindly life is cruel. Sickness unto death happens. We are never prepared. Fear of unknown overcomes the best with phantasms.

And I go on.

Hope” is the thing with feathers

BY EMILY DICKINSON

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.