[Image: “Storm Ahead (Badlands National Park),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
This has been an interesting week for me, in terms of what advancing age can mean…:
The Missus has been laid up — victim, apparently, of either a stomach bug or maybe even food poisoning (at least not COVID!); I’ve been carrying soup and crackers and ice water and ginger ale into the bedroom for her. One of her best friends began treatment for cancer. My mother and stepdad, in the meantime, have finally and formally arranged to move out of the house where they’ve lived for 30 years — it’s actually his childhood home — and into a senior, assisted-living facility. The Younger Sister-in-Law (YSiL), whose place we’re staying at for a short while, is out of town at a mini-reunion with high-school girlfriends; she’s my age, less one month. And YSiL and I spent one afternoon this week attempting to clean (possibly successfully clean) a living room rug on which I’d dropped a drink the day we arrived here; it was so damned heavy that YSiL was laid up, too, for much of the time until leaving for the reunion — having exacerbated a back problem…
And then along came whiskey river:
Surviving
There are days when the fear of death
is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates
everything. Without it, I might not
have noticed this ladybird beetle,
bright as a drop of blood
on the window’s white sill.
Her head no bigger than a period,
her eyes like needle points,
she has stopped for a moment to rest,
knees locked, wing covers hiding
the delicate lace of her wings.
As the fear of death, so attentive
to everything living, comes near her,
the tiny antennae stop moving.
(Ted Kooser [source])
I have seen no ladybirds this week, and I have encountered no other omens or living, breathing metaphors. I’m grateful for such small mercies. Further, in my idle hours, I’ve been (among other things) reading a book with a terrific title — which drew me to it right away: Battle of the Linguist Mages — and a terrific premise. Without going all spoilery, the protagonist/narrator is a young woman who’s a very serious computer gamer, an international champion of one such, in fact. The game at which she excels is a roleplaying game: players join combat with opposing forces using the power of their voices to sling spells around the battlefield (“diva casting,” it’s called). I’ve been highlighting passages like crazy, simply because the nuances of this sort of magic are so interesting. But this one jumped out at me yesterday:
Once you’d accepted impossible facts about reality into your life, your mundane tasks in life became significantly more mundane. Like, really I just wanted to wander the streets shattering plate glass windows with my voice, because awesome.
(Scotto Moore [source])
This passage jumped out at me, I think, because it represents a kind of meta-observation — on reading about exciting events, even fictional ones, as well as actually living them. It explains, colorfully (the “shattering plate glass windows with my voice” aside), the whole raison d’etre of escapist media — books, movies and TV shows, dance music, and so on.
Well, I finished that chapter of the book. And because I didn’t want to disturb either of my laid-up companions du jour, I decided to watch some escapist fare — specifically, The Orville: New Horizons, Season 3, Episode 3 — ominously titled, “Mortality Paradox”:
Here’s a portion of Wikipedia’s summary of that episode, edited/redacted as needed:
[Several crew members from the Orville] find themselves caught in a series of increasingly strange and dangerous [and imaginary!] situations where they each have a brush with death… the illusions are eventually revealed to be the work of a group of immortal beings […] from the multiphasic world the crew discovered two years ago, their civilization having advanced 50,000 years since their last meeting. It is revealed that they subjected the crew to the scenarios to help themselves understand mortality as their society had begun to stagnate. The crew returns to the ship and discusses the implications of immortality.
(Wikipedia [source])
Yes: the implications of immortality — which of course implies the opposite: implications of mortality.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just overthinking things — dwelling on those “mundane tasks in life” to the extent that I’m losing my enthusiasm for that which is not mundane. If that’s the case, then, well, let’s just say I’m eager to get back to underthinking them!
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