GROANINGS/GROENINGS/GROWIN' THINGS

Regular Mom (Gary Larson type) to guru leading the class: "You say life is suffering, but isn't it also complaining?" (Sipress/TNY)


One very difficult week! Forgive me if I give in to some "c/o". The latter means, "complains of." Without this of course I would be out of job but with up to 10 inpatients at a time and three doctors out of five out-of-town I do get tired of dictating "chief complaints," as we say in the business. But of course it is not the doctor's job, while on the job, to express complaints! Except about excessive complaints! Unfortunately it is usually the nursing staff that has to hear this but I do try to minimize it. "I'm getting better!"

"You are not, you big baby." -- Monty Python and the holy Grail

Not that I am supposed to, but my mind has been wandering backwards, possibly because of the harshness of the present reality and partly thinking about literature in general. I was recently given the gift of a popular novel, "The Abstinence Teacher," and it brought to mind the general genre of "coming-of-age" literature. I have not read too many of these besides "The Sorrows of Young Werther" -so long ago- but I am referring to the more commonplace and usually adolescent quest to "find out who I am."

Actually, I do not recall trying to find out who I was; I was pretty sure who I was throughout childhood, adolescence, and beyond. And there was no shortage of people to rub it in, and to try to rub it out. Bless my Edifiers Lord!
I simply did not like who I was and spent a lot of time trying to compensate for it, remove myself from it, hide it from others etc.; but one thing I did not try to do was to spend a lot of personal time denying who I was. Except for those Calvin/SpacemanSpiff odds and ends. And guess what? I am still that same person! The difference being, I don't fight it anymore, and I do see the considerable advantages of being created thus; and they do seem to outweigh the disadvantages in the long run. I suppose it is like some people play the stock market; very often it is those who hang on and take the long view and refuse to merely respond to crisis after crisis, back and forth, who basically benefit. It is also kind of like the loneliness of the long distance runner, or the tortoise versus the hare. Success in the short run often turns to poison in the long run,.c.f. Donald Trump.

However, boasting is unseemly (Dragonspeak sez posting is unseemly, something I do not doubt!) So I will try to get back to "wholesome principles," as Calvin's father would say.

People -- not the magazine I suppose -- some people -- say that we live in a Culture of Complaint. Certainly it is hard to argue/complain against this given the accelerating progress of fragmentation of social and family relationships, largely as a result of our dissatisfaction with a materialistic paradise which is the envy (?) of most of the rest of the world. It has been long known that scarcity tends to promote cooperation within a culture but that prosperity tends to cause entropy, obesity, and the same infighting that we see today and at basically destroys most if not all previous civilizations. (Just watched, "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World: does it show?). It is not only lonely at the top, it is depressingly miserable. Fighting culture with culture seems to result in bloodshed, as per my previous post; but new cultures do feast on the flesh and bones and fertilizer of the old. Since this is normal, there isn't a lot of point to complaining about it, but, as Vladimir and Estragon would banter: "To have lived is not enough." "It is not enough." "They have to talk about it." "On! On!"

I was also reminded about how Flannery O'Connor, when questioned about the frequency of freaks in her stories and in the Southern literature of the time, explained that, loosely quoted: "Perhaps it is because we can still recognize one when we see one." In Western culture, unlike on your dryer, there is no "normal" setting; that was removed albeit slowly quite some time ago. Elsewhere Miss O'Connor opined that, "Nihilism is the air we breathe." I wonder if the editors of People magazine know about this --?

Please excuse the meandering of the above. I have not quite gotten my thoughts together and there have been many more thoughts going through my mind all week somewhat related to the above than what I can possibly express. I probably should remind people that I am not a theologian nor a professional philosopher of any kind and whatever I speak to is only in part, never with a view to being comprehensive. I would like to be fair however, insomuch as that is possible. When I speak, is obviously a man's -eye-view; one cannot presume to truly speak for the larger view and especially not for the God's eye view, if I may wax anthropomorphic for a moment. Only in the Sunday funnies, right? Salud!!!