The Duchy of Jerald

Last Night....my Mind Healed
Woke up thinking, fuck it was a circus in this room last night. Nurses and patients attending
each other, the only thing missing was the fucking dancing bear.
Then I laughed and laughed. I knew I was going to be ok. I AM OK. Since this stroke I haven't
described events in terms of metaphor like that.
Essentially I use my mind to create images. With words. Since having a stroke I stopped that.
This is neat. I didn't know that. I was too close to the process to see it.
The benefit of being ill, I was once told, the purpose of it, they said, was to do reflection and
examine your life.
This is patently religious horseshit of course. And dangerous. What happens if you lose your
purpose? You're fucked. They (various clergy) want your purpose to be to feed them the blood
and energy of your life. Leeches ain't in it, as my favourite writer Patrick O'Brian used to say.
Vampires or more likely, the walking dead in the robes of sanctimonious claptrap. I wonder what
claptrap is?
(clap•trapˈklapˌtrap/noun noun: claptrap; noun: clap-trap
1. absurd or nonsensical ideas.)
The purpose of life is satisfaction. If you don't want to think about stuff you don't have to. You
have free will and the power of choice. We all do. If one strategy for satisfaction is closed to me,
I simply choose another rabbit hole.
After all, shltty things happen to nice people (like me) and nice things happen to shitty people,
and I had better accept the sheer randomness of that, simply because it's in my best interests. I
am able to cope with the unknown future post stroke because we all have skills, great skills, with
dealing with the unknown.
We. Can't. Predict. The. Future.
Yet here we all are, coping.
My fellow patient doesn't know this. I long to tell him. He smokes constantly, therapists refuse
treatment, they say he reeks of tobacco. He puts 5 packs of sugar in his coffee of comfort. All
due to the mistaken belief that he can't handle the unknown when he is handling it. Based on
hard evidence.