Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more