Tuesday, August 22, 2023
In bed at 10, awake at 5, moved to brr, up at 5:30, back and pelvic pain, feeling pretty miserable. Let Lilly out, 68°, high 76°, sunny day, AQI=49, wind SE at 7 mph, 2-12/18, DPs 63-65. Sunrise 5:34, sunset 7:43, 13+39.
Miserimeter. I start the day feeling pretty miserable with the usual morning back pain on top of (literally) pelvic floor pain. Plus mood misery. Two cups of coffee help.
LTMW Bird fight! Bird fight! a sparrow and a downy woodpecker. Woodpecker wins and sets up shop on the sunflower seed tube.
Sinead's Rememberings. I'm about 3/4 through the memoir and have mixed feelings about it. Her life was so radically different from mine that I have a hard time relating to it. I don't judge her or her behavior except in positive ways: admiration for her extraordinary talents and for her courage and persistence plus sympathy for her long-sufferings. I am sympathetic too with her spiritual yearnings though I can't claim to understand them, such as her desire to a priest or her finding Islam easier to embrace that Christianity or Judaism or Baha'i or Jainism or any other "ism." In the chapter "Gospel Oaks", she writes that she was seeing a psychiatrist, 6 days a week when she 'was very lonely' and that she was so lonely because she "is a difficult personality." It's easy to agree with her self-assessment. It's also easy to surmise that long before she was 'officially' mentally-ill, she was on her way to mental illness. She reports a lot of thoughts that are hard to understand, about God and the priesthood for example. Her personality was not only 'difficult', whatever that means, but also unstable. She speaks and apparently thinks in hyperboles. There seems to be little room for nuance or subtlety in her writing, her thinking, or her emotions. She was wildly in love with many men, slept with a great many moreed and seems pretty casual(for lack of a more accurate term) about getting pregnant with her 4 children as well as theseveral pregnancies she miscarried and aborted. The personality challenges she encountered throughout her life pretty clearly all started with her childhood, especially her abusive mother.
Today's WaPo: I’m turning 85. Is Alzheimer’s coming for me? By Elaine Soloway. Could just as easily have been titled "I'm turning 82, or 75, . . . ' "In less than a month, I’ll celebrate my 85th birthday. This is a poorly wrapped gift. Proportion of Americans 85 or older with Alzheimer’s disease: 33 percent. The number only increases with age." There is no escaping the numbers; they're grim. "[I]n my apartment, every surface contains a reporter’s notebook with a pen pal nearby. . . But now I recall an older relative whose apartment was festooned with notes. His handwriting became illegible over time, likely ruined by his crumbling brain." Little crumpled notes stuck in every pocket - who does that remind me of?
How often have I wondered why I keep writing in this journal and how often have I thought: it's a way of trying to detect cognitive decline or dementia. Can I still type? Can I put more than two sentences together coherently? Any noticeable signs of creeping dementia? confusion? Are coherent, if erroneous, thoughts in the journal a cover for the incoherent, irrational thoughts that come in the middle of the night, or the early morning, predawn, waking-up times? The minnows in the bait bucket, the caged squirrels?
Elaine Soloway who wrote this little essay is the mother of Jill (now Joey) Soloway who created, wrote, produced, and directed Transparent, which Geri and I watched on Amazon Prime in 2014. It was based on the life of her father, Elaine's husband Harry Holoway. Jill/Joey now identifies herself as non-binary and says her preferred pronouns (words fail me) are they and them.
Driving fears home: this morning while Geri was schmoozing with a neighbor, an elderly man approached them and said that he was lost, and that he didn't know his name or where he lived. Geri called the Bayside PD and an officer showed up. Eventually the gentleman retreived some memory, including his name and birthday and his former occupation as a silk-stocking attorney with a blue-chip law firm, his address in a neigboring suburb was determined, and Geri and the neighbor drove him home where his wife was anxiously waiting in their driveway. The gentleman is a year younger than I am.😰😱
The piece to the left is a chintzy gouache and colored pencil knockoff of one of Munch's famous Scream paintings I included in one of the 5 volumes of my Life in the Time of Coronavirus watercolor sketchbooks. The black blob over the screamer's head represented the deadly virus, or the fear of it, but it can as easily represent the fear of dementia among us old timers.
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