These days of bitter cold have got me down. Playing like I'm in Norway and it's summer doesn't work. A friend with half Norwegian ancestry was thinking about going there and someone from Norway told him the snow is all the time, but for a very short time in summer. The snow makes everything you do a major bother, dealing with the snow. It sure is a bother here dealing with the snow. I've read that the Native American Indians, anyway the Lakota, had names for something like 26 kinds of snow. I've noticed over my years of dealing with snow in the mountains, which means less and less every year, I don't recall two kinds of snow the same. Surely it happened, but I've been struck every time it snows at how different one kind of snow is from another. Some of it is easy to walk in, some you have to punch every footstep through the snow. Some is wet and sticks to everything, some is dry and sticks to nothing. Some drifts and some does not. I've not given the varieties of snow I've encountered names, but I do know how to read it for walking and for driving from half a lifetime of experience. I have to admit, I'm all for global warming. Sorry, Polar Bears. I like a short winter. Winters here in the mountains used to be about half the year. It would start getting cold end of August and finally toward the end of May would let up. The hard part would be November through March. Now winter is a little bit of a cold spell we're going through. I've heard in Helsinki, Finland, the summer temperatures have risen into the 80s and people are buying air conditioners the first time.
I went out and walked a little over half a mile in the below twenty temperature Friday afternoon. My nose has been running, feeling a tiny bit feverish, though not. I'm waiting to see if it's going to turn into something. Spent most of the day in bed today attempting to sleep it off. I hope I'm feeling better before doctor appointment Tuesday. Anything I tell him I'm having issues with, he jumps to write a prescription and I have to tell him it's not a problem, I don't want pills for it. I just thought he'd like to know. He didn't want to know. I take enough pills per day. It's like with somebody involved in the psychiatric profession, they ask if you've ever thought of killing yourself, and if you say yes, here come the men in white coats. I made that mistake. Then I had to explain, Of course I've thought of it. I'm a human with a mind. Everybody has thought about it. Anybody who says they have not is lying. It must be one of their alarm signals. If you say yes, all hell breaks loose and you have to talk fast to explain I REALLY DIDN'T MEAN IT. I got an ear infection, I suppose. Woke up this morning unable to hear from the right ear. I so don't want to tell the doctor about it. Next stop, drugstore to pick up another prescription. I don't like to tell the doctor about anything that's not debilitating. This is debilitating. All sounds are like they're on my left side.
He told me once, "We are chemical machines," so I go see him like I see a mechanic, when the machine needs fixing. First lesson among mechanics: if it aint broke don't fix it. When he said that, I stopped myself from saying, "Maybe you are." Or like PeeWee Herman said, "I know you are, but what am I?" Then, I'm not really sure. I know he was right in the way he meant it. It just ran all over me the way he put it. I can't identify my body as a machine, the same way I can't identify my mind a computer. When he diagnosed my heart issue, he said, "You're gonna die." Only thing I could think to say was, "Duh." He's known for being off-putting when he talks. I like that in him, to a point. He's direct, tells it straight. Suburbanites moving here to the exurbs hate him as a doctor. They go a few times and find a new doctor. "He doesn't have a bedside manner." My feeling about that is, who needs a bedside manner? I'm not going to bed with him. Though I do have some problem with him. I've gone to him thirty-five years and he has no idea who I am. He has his charts. All he wants to know about me is in the charts. A few times I attempted to give him context around something that happened. He wasn't interested. He's jaded by years of being a country doctor, dealing with people who don't take care of themselves as he instructs them, like taking their pills as told, instead of when you think about it. I think he's of the belief system that losing someone to death is a failure. Like wanting me to get a new heart so I can end up in a nursing home having strokes and staring at the ceiling, watching auction shows on tv, shitting in diapers. Glory Land cannot be that bad. I have so many friends and pets over there, I don't have a lot of resistance to Glory Land.
Forecast says the temperature will be up to 50 Monday and 60 Tuesday. I'm past ready. I'd forgotten how miserable below 20 can be. My game of pretending I'm in Norway and it's normal is not working. I'm thinking of how miserable it must be below 20 half the year. And wind off the North Sea. In Kansas, I grew up in Scandinavian protestantism. I understand why Norwegians I see in movies are largely quiet and don't make chatter. I got it when I saw a documentary of conversations with Ingmar Bergman in his retirement. I wrote about it in I WAS A TEENAGE EXISTENTIALIST. He had the same kind of protestant austerity through his childhood as I had in mine. Different, of course, because his was in Sweden and mine was in Kansas. Growing up with a Swede for a preacher was austere. Absolutely austere. I learned how to play along in appearance and go my own way in my mind. It got me through those years where only appearance of being controlled was required. I learned how to be out of control and it not show. Sometimes I like that, then sometimes I don't. I've no idea what it would take for me to break loose and express myself emotionally. When somebody really pisses me off, I act like I have no problem. Learned that from being lorded over by daddy, who would hit me again if I reacted. Whoever it was will never have a chance to piss me off again. I have control over second time. I stay away from that individual like I stay away from crocodiles. So I just took it and acted like it didn't matter, when what daddy was really doing was making me hate him more than I hated him the day before.
Mother was a churchaholic, dead and buried in denial, and daddy a mad man. The kid didn't have a chance. I reparented myself after I got away from them. Coming to the mountains was a big part of the reparenting. I had discovered Meher Baba on the way to the mountains, so arriving here was a spiritual path thing for me. New understandings, new knowledge, I came to the mountains as to a monastic situation where I lived by myself with Meher Baba my abbot in spirit. It doesn't mean I meditate around the clock. I don't meditate at all. I don't do austerity except for what my meager income cannot afford. Don't believe in it. I don't do yoga or tai chi. I've come to believe in living my life. I didn't know that before. I don't worry myself over sins. I have a fair enough understanding of what sin is not to be bothered by it. Largely sin is a control device by protestant preachers and catholic priests, religionists generally. Mother told me she's had it with the grand children. They don't visit her and they don't invite her to their birthday parties. I couldn't say it, but she's a wet blanket to kids. They know she's watching every move they make and hearing everything they say, judging them. And they know they can't get away from her without being told she wished they went to church more often and would get saved. It wouldn't matter if I told her. She wouldn't do anything about it. She's on automatic pilot for the Lord's work. It's her duty. And the grandkids only see her when it's their duty.
A couple weeks ago somebody told me that some kind of behavior was my duty. I said, "I don't do duty." Nor do I do should or s'posed-to. I make my own decisions for my own reasons and nobody who watches television is going to advise me on should, s'posed-to, or duty. The philosophy of television is if it can't be seen by a camera it's not real. In my way of seeing, it's the other way around. If it can be seen by a camera it's not real. Like after so many years of medical school, doctors tend to give little attention to the subjective. Only the objective is real. I'm of the belief that only the subjective is real. Not a belief like a religious belief. It's just obvious to me. The subjective is where intent is formed by attitude toward life, which is created by all kinds of subjective influences. Objective is excellent for the scientific method and I have no problem with the objective. Thanks to the scientific method I'm writing this on a laptop online. Without the scientific method I'd be using quill, parchment and candle light. This is faster, but slower is surer. Still, I see the scientific method as a tool, not as the nature of existence. It's a good tool for picking apart the nature of existence to help understanding. If the kingdom of heaven is indeed within, that seems to me awfully subjective.
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