i'm trying very hard not to project my own physical decay - trigger fingers, A-fib, hydro-cele - onto the world. too many old folks feel the world is going to hell because they are. any change becomes a cause for alarm: a favorite tree cut down, a laundromat going out of business, an idiot elected to office. alas, i have old style cassettes with no interpretation left, a part of my past erased.
and these days i feel like i live in a country losing its grip on reality. true, people still buy houses and fix them up. on the large tv at the orthopedic office young couples describe how they're renovating and improving the premises. the other day on the local university campus groups of high school kids were all over the place being seduced to join up.
train-loads of new tanks roll through town, and new cars drive out of the dealers, shiny and ominous. every time i drive the canyon ninety miles to town, deadly boulders on one side and the swirling river on the other, i watch the oncoming cars like a hawk. damn, the most dangerous thing i can do is climb into my pickup.
of course, i am becoming a fraidy-cat. as i grow older, i realize how many things can get me and how many times i've fallen asleep on the road and woken up in the other lane, an oncoming truck not that far away. or the falls i've taken on my back off the back deck or the rocks below the lookout. life seems a crap shoot, a matter of pure luck. why wasn't i born in a ditch in india?
i do comfort myself with thoughts of being chosen, a poet, a traveler, a photographer, kept alive by Sidney, my guardian angel. and then, i forget all about him, sailing along as though my survival were my own doing, or simply good fortune. either i'm a saint doing good work in the world, or a fool too lazy to die.
and what is sanity? i've decided this morning it's empathy, the ability to have sympathy for other people, to cry for a child or help an old lady across the street. a friend had an uncle who worked at a ultra-security prison for the worse kinds of sex offenders. he said the prisoners all had one thing in common: no empathy. they couldn't feel he pain of another human being.
has the election of a man with no empathy put the world in danger? sometimes paranoia is reasonable, sane, justified. one push of the button and the northern hemisphere is toast. i'm just about to make a trip to australia, my third, just in case.
