bleh. i’m at home, waiting for a friend to pick me up and take me to the eye doctor. it is only in the last oh… fifteen minutes or so that i have been able to open my eyes. woke up this morning, 6am-ish, with both swollen shut and refusing to open.
talk about a panic.
i finally figured out they were glued shut. ugh. so… a slow walk to the bathroom and about ten minutes of careful washing later, i can physically see… but my eyes are so sore that blinking hurts. 🙁
probably allergies. we’ve had rain the last week and between the existing pollen, which was already making my sinuses and nose unhappy and the molds that are out now that it’s been raining a few days… well… i reckon the eyes decided it was time to crank up.
so, as i’m waiting, i’m scanning information. vonnegut has died. it starts to become something of a list. perhaps you keep one too… the list of people whose death indicates that yes, you too are going to age, and yes, you too, are going to some day die.
i remember when i never thought about death. literally. never occurred. i suppose i thought, somewhere in the back of my mind, that i was immortal.
actually, you know, i sometimes think that’s all backwards. that we really are immortal, just not in the way we think of it… and we are born knowing it, and we forget it as we age because we begin to believe in this world, this ‘reality’, this self.
hrm.
anyway… the obituary writer said something that made me smile, they quoted vonnegut from some years back. quoting that obituary:
To Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies – ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”
amen, brother. you are missed.
did i mention my eyes are hurting? hurting. ouch. 🙁