Click images for desktop size: "Hive"Just felt deathly ill.
I felt like a Mexican boxer. I was staring in the mirror and realized that as the pain got worse my grin got bigger.
I don't enjoy pain. Mexican fighters are trained to grin to psych out their opponents. (A kind of strategy that now finds itself being reversed - the bigger the grin they more hurt he is).
I found myself wondering who I was trying to psyche. Myself?
I don't need to be tough anymore. I just need to get through my day, to get through the week, to get through the month, to get paid, to pay my bills so can get through the day . . .
Once upon a time I dreaded living the kind of life I'm craving now.
It's not being defeated. I've never been beaten. I've lost quite a few, but I've never been defeated, down, surrendered. (For a lot of people that made me seem like quite a jerk.)
I've taught, or tried to teach my 2000 or so kids to walk with a swagger, to know that there is no one on this planet better than you, and to know that you are no better than anyone else.
And I wanted them to know that you're never beaten until you lay down and quit.
Ridiculously my own life is a testament to that.
I wonder if it's a weakness to not know that you're beaten?
To just keep trudging on against "the slings and arrows" like a robot, an android, a meat machine.
Nah.
The Vietnamese showed in the real world in the most impossible circumstances what happens when you refuse to roll over. Then the Afghans (remember when we were stunned by their belligerence against the Russians?)
In every life there have to challenges and times when you just want to quit, when you just want to throw the switch and bring down the curtain. If there weren't those trying times what cause would we have to celebrate?
Without duress and victory we'd all live like jet setting debutantes, with no knowledge of joy, no taste of pleasure, no appreciation of beauty.
I've known them and as free from some of the nasty stresses as they might be, the pleasure and love they have is shallow and empty past the point of mere heartbreak.
Excess is only a symptom and never a cure.
So, as bad a the pain is . . . people wonder why I resist taking painkillers so vehemently.
For this it's for sure not toughness or martyrdom. It's the fact I like life.
I've fooled around with them and I know that they only dull the knife edge of the hurt. For that they put a veil of gauze around your heart, your fingers. They make life look like it's all happening through a telephoto lens.
I guess some people like that, need it. It scares me. I like being alive.
When you talk about mountain climbing the first things I remember about climbs are the pain and the fear. Then the more satisfying memories of fear conquered, the impossible figured out and finished, the achievement.

Click images for desktop size: "Natalie PortmanMy life is like that now.
My puppy and I went to puppy class. It was unpleasant. My puppy was excellent. She behaved well and I was proud of her. The instructor allows herself to be too distracted. She's also not good with people. She insulted me twice, once very ignorantly and profoundly.
I can ignore all of that, she doesn't matter to me at all. I didn't like the wrongness done to my puppy. Wrongness perpetuated by being distracted and insensitive.
It will be okay. She's a good dog and is just confused now. She doesn't much care for other people and when she is forced to deal with them she, like most children, simply retreats. If the pressure continues she gets frightened.
My puppy did nothing untoward or wrong. She simply got afraid and worried that she wasn't with me.