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Come fly with me, come fly. . . .

I have been trying to avoid saying that "I have a hitch in my gittyup", because then I will probably go on to saying, "folks", and "someth'n", or maybe even, "sump'n".  I don't want to do that because I have no desire for a political career.  But, truth be told, I have a . . . an intermittent, sharp pain in my right hip or thigh that makes it difficult to walk for exercise, and sometimes just a pain to walk.

An X-ray of my entire mid-section (as it turned out), showed that my hip sockets looked like hip sockets, which I found to be odd and comforting.  What was not so comforting is the fact that everything' south of my belt glows in the dark.

Today, I had an MRI:  a magnet resonating image.  They led me to a semi-trailer out in back, laid me down on a gurney, and inserted me into a high-tech, sausage-making machine.  They assured me that they would get a splendid picture of all my soft tissues, some of which glow in the dark; some of which are the muscles and tendons that attach to my leg.

Even with a headphone tuned to National Public Radio, I was bombarded with amazing noise and resonation.  I wondered what it would be like, not to be 160 pounds, but perhaps 260 pounds, in the sausage machine.  I suspect it might be like coming up out of that mine in Peru, or wherever it was, in a capsule.

I am, intermittently, listening to a book in which the protagonist has an innate sense of time.  He simply knows what time it is, all the time.  He does not know how he knows that.  I know how I acquired my innate sense of direction.  I had an MRI.  Something in my head now knows where magnetic north is.  I am like a migrating bird.  I leave home, cruise about, stop for a bite here and there, and land on the same branch I sat on last year.  The cells in my brain are lined up, magnetically, and only a reversal of the earth's magnetic fields might confuse me.

And that causes me to wonder:  do geomagnetic reversals--"chrons"--the last of which happened 780,000 years ago, cause birds to get confused, or do they fly backwards, or what?  A little aberration in the magnetic field would be OK.  It would simply cause me to land on a branch on the other side of the tree, or yard, but what if north and south flipped?  I wonder if our health care plans cover that sort of thing.  I will bet they do!  Insurance company health care plans are best at covering things that hardly ever happen.  It is the ordinary things they hate to cover:  they happen.  

I know you have been wondering about my gittyup.  I will keep you posted.  In the meantime, I have turned off the night light in our bathroom.  Between the glow and my innate sense of direction, I don't need it.

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