Hi, WYFPers! I like to occasionally jump in and write a Saturday evening diary to give the regulars in the group (and especially annieli and JeffW) a break, so here I am. If you’d like to take a turn at doing a weekly WYFP diary, please leave us a note in the comments, and the date in the future that you’d like to cover. Ok, let’s get the front matter out of the way:
MFP this week is once again being confronted with mortality.
A friend of mine, a few years older than me, told me this week he’d received a prostate cancer diagnosis. No cancer is good cancer, but they caught this early, and I guess if you’re going to get cancer, this is the one to have with a good future prognosis. His revelation to me got us off into a conversation on mortality.
My friend and I didn’t reach any conclusions, but it was rather morbid back-and-forth between two old gits to game plan. In passing, I mentioned something that Carrie Fisher had said in a recent interview, just prior to her death: “I don’t fear death; I fear the process of dying.”
Fisher’s viewpoint strikes a chord with me. While I’m a generally healthy guy for someone 62, approaching 63, I’m reminded that even if I put down 20 miles on my bike today with a local group of geezer cyclists, it doesn’t mean that I’ll still be around tomorrow. “Process” to me is a long term debilitating thing where there’s time to actually think about the end. Like Carrie, I don’t want to have time to think about it. When it comes, I just want it to happen.
Where is all this morbid shit rattling around in my brain leading to? Like many of you, I’ve been in a political funk since November 8th, 2016. Yesterday was the worst. It almost felt like, emotionally, what I would envision the process of dying to be like. I couldn’t watch, or even read very much online as events were proceeding. I was (and have been) in denial, like a dying cancer patient, but there it was, and there was no bargaining. Acceptance will never arrive.
There have been a lot of suggestions on how progressives grow their brand, get young people more engaged, and generally rage against the machine. I was writing a comment in response to another comment which had proposed a long term plan for growing the Democratic Party. While I was typing my response, it all of a sudden hit me that I don’t have the time left for long term political projects. So, I deleted my original response.
But I feel like I need to get back into some groove; get back on the horse to rid myself of this mood in order to get my head and heart back into it. I know what’s at stake. But for someone who is also close friends with the black hole of depression, it’s going to take some work.
Any suggestions you’d like to offer me in the comments are most welcome, as is rending of your own garments! Pour the beverage of your choice, pull up a chair, and tell us:
WYFP?