This very body is still a little creaky, although healing, from whatever the hell is going on. I bought a stabilizing brace for my knee, and it was a huge help, although I'm not entirely sure it's meant to be worn six or seven hours straight.
I listen to "Bonnie Brook" a fair amount, not as much as I did a couple of weeks ago. The song rings a bell in me someplace: that sure, things are kinda screwy, and there's a lot of things in life that could have or even should have gone differently, but look, here we are and here's what life is, and look at your child sleeping there. I dunno. I'm still a sentimental romantic in here someplace.
My birthday is a week from today. I don't really have any deep thoughts about that, except to note the collapse of my knees so close to the anniversary of my entrance. Which was, by the way, suitably dramatic, with an extended labor in the middle of a blizzard culminating in a typically procrastinated and inconvenient pre-dawn debut. You can imagine any number of uncharitable things I might have said had I been able to talk.
God forbid we lose the oil, but at least we can rely on the elemental equation CELERY + UNDERWEAR = GRAVITY. (The classics never grow old.)
You know, everything always sounds like the end of the world, and nothing ever is. And we insist each time that the world is ending, because that's how we feel and we let our feelings consume us instead of wash over us. We keep using words like "never", when "never" is a very long time, untouchable by our momentary dramas. Even in our lifetimes "never" is too long to think about realistically. I think the past two or three years have been, for me, more eventful than any of the previous twenty-three. By no means all in a good way, either: I can feel circuits burnt-out in my brain, a stress and tension that grew and gripped into my heart and bones. It's possible I've lost some lifespan in the past few years of worrying. Who cares? I am here and it is now, and everything else is moonshine. I just have to live with right action, which may or may not involve worrying what other people think; I just have to move "without hindrance in the mind", and act in accord with the precepts, and somehow things will shake out right.