I have a deep need, growing over the past six months of COVID-19 quarantine, to write, to express, interact with my gut. I am too old to argue, too bruised to fight back, so here I am, blog entry number yada-yada-yah...
There is an unease, a disquiet, that comes with my getting old, like the loss of vision in one eye, or the loss of hearing in one ear. And the feeling is fed by my struggle to do a single sit-up, and my exhaustion at setting the treadmill to 4-miles per hour. It's a kind of slow deterioration of the body, observable through mathematical measurement, but denied by experience, slowly, ever so slowly, changing my perceptions, and thereby changing my connection with the rest of the world, that great and mysterious "not I".
The physical changes are easy to see. Two hundred and forty-five pounds at five foot nine pushes me well into obese.
That's me, on the right.
Or as my mathematical, scientific, measurable, objective self likes to imagine it...
That's me, on the right.
But this physical deterioration (okay, non-judgemental self) this physical transformation, is not the source of my angst. It is rather the harder-to-observe mental deterioration that worries me, or at least worries a part of me, like seeing the world with only one eye. I can sense that I am seeing the world differently, but I can't figure out why. Hence, the unease.
What has writing got to do with this? Somehow, words, sentences, paragraphs come out of my brain, into my fingers, onto the keyboard, onto the screen, into my eye, and into a different part of my brain. It's like my body is an Internet of Things, connected through the network of my senses. It is Minsky's "Society of Mind", where the links have diminished, and each stands more and more alone, an ever-expanding universe, grey matter becoming dark matter, on its way to complete disassociation.
A part of me somehow feels the "I" changing, a disquieting, unsettling change, that I watched in my mother, as years of dementia slowly erased her from my existence.
But enough moping-about for today. I have things to do, people to Zoom, Pythons to write. In this virtual world, I fight against the sucking sound of my interaction drain.
But how will I know when to flush?
PS: Don't worry, I'm not going to flush anytime soon, just wondering how I'll cope with my future self. Of course, my future self will know what to do, but, as in the case of my mother, my choice might seem right for me at the time, but in anterospect, that's not a word.
