I have a lot more to complain about today, but I'm going to put my outrage aside for Mother's Day, a day I respect. Mother's Day is about your own mother, first and foremost, and mine is not around anymore, but maybe I can still try to make up for all the Mother's Days I so thoughtlessly missed while she was here. I was generally lucky to have my parents, who were very honest and hard working and responsible and set a fine example for their children. (My mother worked most of her life as a grocery store cashier and my father worked in the Post Office to his retirement.) I had to share my mom with a lot of other siblings, of course, but there was one time I had her all to myself.
My poor mom said I was a difficult birth. I think I know why: because I didn't want to leave the womb. When a mother experiences contractions people often errantly say something like 'that child wants out now.' No, the contractions take the unborn child by surprise as much as the mother. (All this information came to me from a waking dream which may or may not be accurate, but I still think is worth sharing.) Mom also would tell me sometimes that she wasn't sure I was her child - based on something I might have said or done at the moment. This, too, might be explained by reincarnation.
When a man ends his own life, he expects to be dead from the effort. If everything goes warm and dark after, that's a good sign. If he's no longer breathing, he's on the right track. But how does he know that everything is warm and dark and that he is no longer breathing if he no longer exists? Such are the philosophic questions that might occupy the waking hours of an unborn reincarnation in the womb.
Always be gentle and kind with pregnant women. The unborn child is sensitive to his mother's feelings. They feel their mother's joy as much as her grief. The Beatles made my mother happy and maybe that's why I love them. But when she got into a fight with my dad one day, I wanted that dispute resolved immediately. Eventually I came to terms with my new existence as, I still thought, some kind of disembodied soul in limbo. I liked it. I could sense my mother's love, which I may have mistaken for God's love or something, and all I had to do was lie around and philosophize. I didn't have to breathe. I didn't have to even eat. (Would someone check and see if the fallopian tube has taste buds? Or does the unborn child pick up the sense of taste from his mother's experience?) Anyway, just when I was really starting to like being dead, it all started collapsing in on me. I could see light poking through my field and I thought, 'Oh no! I'm getting born!' A determined suicide, I resisted with everything I had. I tried grabbing onto things and holding on, but I wasn't strong enough. Then when they gave me to my warm sweet mother, I finally accepted the situation. When you're that small and helpless, you quickly learn that resistance is futile.
I hope you found this story amusing and enlightening. Maybe while people are calling me cuckoo for sharing it, some crooked comedian will plagiarize it for you so you can fully appreciate it. Happy Mother's Day.
I think I'm just about done with the dead end of disability here now. I don't feel honest about it anymore anyway, now that I'm a little more informed about things. You know, in Toronto my first rooming house had a chemist, a student, a nurse's aide (my fair friend), a computer programmer, but the rent was two hundred something a month. Everyone knew how to play a musical instrument, and the percussionist kept his gear in the basement. We'd get together down there and jam, and my fair friend would be the crowd. We were kind of a family there. But I never meet any nurses in my rooming house here - unless they're reviving an overdose victim or inoculating us against typhus or something. I guess they have their reasons for it here, and I'll try not to take it personally. At least I got to catch up with most of my old work before I left.
(Red titles were recorded in the last six to eight months.)
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