9/13/24

 Friday, September 13, 2024

1224 Francis of Assisi is afflicted with stigmata after a vision while praying at La Verna

1993 Public unveiling of the Oslo Accords, an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement signed by Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Shimon Peres and fPLO official Mahmoud Abbas

In bed at 8:45,  awake at 4, and up at 4:15. Put a big load into the washing machine.  Let Lilly out at 4:40.

Prednisone, day 122, 7.5 mg., day 1.    Prednisone at 5:05.  Morning meds later and Trulicity injection at 10:40 a.m.

London Review of Books and Harpers.  I received promotional offers from LRB and Harper's yesterday, about $1 per issue for a year.  I couldn't resist, especially the LRB.

Journal entries from 2019.  

March 28.  I seem to be very arthritic in the middle of the night: hips, knees, elbows.  Not a problem during the day, except maybe hips (entry-exit Volvo problem.)  Balance, usteady gait quite bad today, walking outside to get mail and walking on the turf in fornt yeard.  Serious problem.  Feet and ankles swollen.

March 29.  Call from PN&R clinic nurse Katie re 4/23 steroid injection in hip.  Balance problems with turns, have to catch myself to avoid falling.  Feet and ankles swollen

May 26.  Difficulty walking on grass.

After early 2019, I started journaling only my blood glucose readings and meals.  Alas.   Reading these old notes from 2009 and 2019 makes me ponder again why it is I recorded them years ago, why I stopped, and why I started daily journaling again on July 30, 2022, with 154 entries in 2022, 365 in 2023, and so far 242 in 2023, for a total of 915 daily entries.  Egad!  I wish I had kept notes earlier in my life now that my memory is fading.

Cold turkey continues for broadcast network, local, and cable news, for two weeks today.

Video call with Michael McHale today. Geri's first cousin, it's his 78th birthday.  A fellow former Marine, Vietnam veteran, and Purple Heart 'winner.'  He suffered terribly after falling onto punji stakes in a 'tiger pit' in Vietnam.  He also suffered significant hearing loss.  A casualty of LBJ's and RMN's war of choice.  Knowing what Michael endured in Vietnam, and in his long recovery from his wounds in a Navy hospital and with PTSD afterward, I experience survivor's guilt and some sense of shame that I had it so easy stationed at the AirWing's headquarters, never being called on to kill personally or in danger of being killed.  

Gabor Maté.  I watched a YouTube talk by Maté about his new book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.  I've been grousing about our species homo sapiens for some time and Maté's words about "human nature" caught my attention.  "The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues.  The fact that they share the same errors does not make these errors to be truths.  And the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane." Eric Fromm, The Sane Society.     GM asks "Is there a  'human nature?"  If the Buddha and Jesus are human beings and Hitler and Stalin are human beings, what does that say about 'human nature'?  He argues that we can't talk about human nature in a fixed or rigid sense,  but what we can talk about is what creates a Buddha or Jesus, what creates a Hitler or Stalin.  "What conditions are necessary to create human beings who are self-aware and compassionate and what conditions support the development of human beings who are utterly and egomaniacally selfish and self-centered and utterly brutal? "    Of course when I heard the latter words I immediately thought of Donald Trump and all that we have heard of his sociopathic father, Fred Trump.  I thought of Donald's influence on his own children and of his influence on the  American public since he has moved out of mere celebrity status into prominent political status.          

Maté's talk and his book are not about Hitler, Stalin, or Donald Trump, but rather about the mind-body connection, the relationship between stress and trauma and physical and mental illnesses, and especially about the long-lasting effects of early childhood traumas on people's lives.  He defines trauma as a wound, not as what happens to people but rather as what happens inside people as a consequence of what happens to them.       As I listen to him I can't help but think of  Kitty and me growing up with our PTSD-suffering father after the end of WWII and after the notorious sexual crime against our mother in 1947.  I wrote not long ago about a column by David Brooks about   "core affects: and my suggestion to Kitty that both she and I had "core affects' of depression from our experiences in our basement apartment at 7303 S. Emerald, "an abiding sense of tragedy that sustained [us] through temporary periods of joy."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Anniversaries thoughts.  I am not inclined to believe in miraculously caused stigmata, either in Francis's case or in the case of, say, Padre Pio,  The wounds may exist but there is some cause of them other than divine intervention in the laws of nature, most likely resulting from some form of self-infliction.

Oslo, was probably as close as anyone ever got to a two-state solution, although they did by putting off all the hard issues till later: boundaries, Palestinian right of return, settlements, etc.  Maybe it was all a pipe dream.  In any event, it all went up in smoke when the law student put a bullet in Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 leading to Netanyahu's becoming PM in the next election.