REGRET & RABBIT HOLES

Attempting to play in our mind what we think someone else may be thinking is never useful. It merely reveals our need for control, as we desperately try to imagine what we can never really know, the thoughts of another. 

As I look around the apartment I see things needing doing that I can no longer manage, so someone else has to do them. But then I assume my helpers will be dismayed when faced with that doing. This does them a disservice, because it is actually my own dismay that floods the mind and mistakenly assumes what they might think, say or feel. Most of the people who help me are more generous than that.

It is my trust that is lacking. They may well have a better attitude about their work with me than I have about the necessity for them to work for me.  I am reminded of a line from one of my early performances "you can't get good help nowadays, nobody wants to row anymore."

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A rabbit hole is something you enter and can't seem to find your way out of until a long winding path has been traversed. Recently I have found myself falling for two time-sucking rabbit holes on Facebook and Instagram. 

The first is a hair dresser in Dubai who performs the most miraculous make-overs. Women would come in with gray, stringy hair and walk out with full-bodied heads of hair with the gray blended in perfectly. Watching the way it unfolded was endlessly satisfying.

The second is a woman who grooms cats and dogs – Girl With The Dogs. Videos of the complete process of her brushing, trimming, washing these often unruly animals and the way she talks them through the ordeal is revelatory. Highlights are the hard plastic bubbles over the heads of cats who try to bite and the ear-covering happy hoodies to protect sensitive ears from blow dryers.

I could watch these transformations for hours, completely immersed in the process taking place. Not sure what this says about me. Perhaps an obsession with hair or a deep need for a little animal therapy?

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In one’s 80's, clarity is easier to imagine, but harder to facilitate.

Heart palpitations slowing me down.  All of sudden with no warning the pulse begins to race and I feel very weak and have to stop all activity and just lie down and breathe. It usually passes, if I do actions designed to lower heart rate fast. 

Tracing it back it usually happens when there is some sort of interaction (like being wakened from a deep sleep by a phone call from one of the Aide agencies) or a realization that things are not getting done to ease my care, so the burden falls on me to figure out why. This situation is not what it feels like to be taken care of, it is like laying a veneer over my life which I have to break through in order to live. Care for the elderly has degenerated into some kind of corporate race to the bottom, and the concept of "care" is no longer about well-being, but about organizational layers of incompetence and contact over-reach. 

Sound familiar? Just another symptom of a country in decline, suffering under a regime of the corrupt.

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When we experience regret, we may attempt to rewrite history to reflect a more advantageous outcome. This requires an expansion of lies, a denial of truth, and a slippery evasion of what led to our present situation.

Our hopelessly narcissistic president is attempting to apply this rewriting when it comes to January 6th. He and his grim band of miscreants dominate the news, place a pall over our days, and, like randy cats, constantly push their butt-holes into our faces.

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