POST-OPS SIX
This new room was mine, for sure, yet it had seemed, in addition, to have always been mine, and custom-made for my very situation, as when, say, someone slides into home-base, feet first, and then when the dust clears the slider realizes all he's done is slide into a 'future' he'd already prepared. It's a very weird scene. And difficult too. If that was true, in any way, I thought to myself 'what a waste of effort.' I'd certainly never wanted to end up there. Certain things remain foreign to the human experience, yes, and creating spaces and environments beforehand should be one of them. I'd met many 'actualists' and new agers over the years who'd always claimed we 'create' our own reality. I never fell for that, and each time I set out to prove that I could create a world where hitting one's thumb sharply with a hammer doesn't hurt, I'd failed miserably - even though that could have been a pretty nice world. There are, or seem to be, certain 'laws of reality' that prevail. The only reason I bring this up is because my room nurse 'Rochelle' had started telling me some of her life story, which I found fascinating. And it overlapped precisely with this new-agey thing : I figured tying them together would make some sense. She was a gruff and tough type, from Philadelphia, where she attended nursing school at Temple University - a nice place and sort of right downtown. I figured her for, perhaps, 48 years old, maybe. One marriage gone. One grown daughter, and a grandkid or two, living with her. She'd been a bartender, working through school, biker bars, and rough Philly crowds. She didn't take much guff, and she seemed fairly wise and smart. The divorce , whatever it was, was a long time ago. She'd had one or two other postings to hospitals, and settled in here at Scranton. The really weird thing was that she owned a house there, she said 'about 200 miles away, (Philly) in which her daughter and kids lived with her - when she was there. In Scranton, she kept a motel room in which she lived, Monday-Friday. She'd drive home each weekend, to stay there, and check on things, etc., and drive back for Monday mornings. Sounded grueling to me. Her ex-husband's newest girlfriend was, Rochelle said, a new-agey witchy woman, with spells and incense and lights and magic fairies and all that. Rochelle said when she found this out the first thing she did was to make sure her ex knew that under no circumstances was there to be any influences or evidences of that sort of stuff in her daughter's or her grandkids' lives - or whatever right and condition he had to those kids would quickly be challenged and gone! That was pretty cool, and it was something I'd never thought about in those terms before. Things like that happen more than you'd think, I guess, as issues and ideas collide. In her presence it got me to thinking about what all this 'nursing' was anyway. I'd not met one yet, in either of my two hospitals, that I'd not liked - even the war-vet guy. I got over him and realized he was way about larger things - caring, giving, nursing; as were they all. Everyone seemed to go about it differently, maybe, but each knew well their stuff, and their routines. Pleasant and comforting. Each person I met was a talkable pleasure. Even the food service kids and the room maintenance people; commendable adjuncts, all. Life itself, if looked at in one way, is just a dull breadboard of the same old chippings and dried crusts. Somehow the Good Lord thought to make scavengers and other crawly things that clean up these messes for us. Yes, at the same instant, 'we' as the exalted humans, seem to take precedence and claim the top spot. A real juggling act is going on, at all times, somewhere. In the 'bookstore' industry - those superstore things, mainly, but also in most every book outlet, etc., you can find sections labeled 'Self-Help' or 'New Age' or 'Spiritualism' in with the usual stupidities of games, toys, branded merchandise and book tie-ins for movies, films, kids, etc. Rows of rock and roll bios are now all the rage too, as if what comes of the mouth of any entertainment creation today is any better or different than what comes out of their anus. Who want to read that anyway, except a dark-side witch. I was thinking about Rochelle's plight, with those grandkids, and her daughter, and the ex with his new tra-la-la fairy-twinkle incense and peppermint girlfriend. I'm pretty sure that one of those intrinsic-knowledge, self-help books (they really ought just call it the 'Ego' section), you can find one that instructs on commanding your life; on taking control of your moment to the extent that standing in front of a speeding train will NOT harm you, if you think it through correctly first. It's all a miserable, and stupid, conundrum, but, as usual, in the category of Freedom of the Press, etc., the 'now-voyagers' on all their ways to La-La Lands of their making, have won out; have altered the arguments, and have slanted the terms now, to the point that the sensible mechanics of real life, whatever they once may be been (no one knows any longer, because 'ignorance' too has now shuttered all the doors and windows of thought, knowledge, study, and investigation). 'Good luck, Rochelle, on that one. Good Luck!'
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