First of all, I want to say, “Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.” So, here goes:
Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.
My mother would have appreciated that joke, so if anyone out there is inclined to be offended on her behalf, well…you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself, like the song said. My mother’s sense of humor was very goofy and giggly and rather silly. I got a goodly fraction of my sense of humor from her; she had extra, and no one else wanted it, so I got a very good deal.
Oh, on an unrelated note, I would like to note that, today, I am wearing cologne (or, well, aftershave, but I see no serious difference between the two things–one is named after a German city* and the other is just named for when you use it, as long as you’re not averse to the sting of alcohol on a freshly shaved face, which I am not, depending on whose face it is). I felt awkward having yesterday used the misheard lyric from Whitesnake which says that I was born to wear cologne, when I wasn’t wearing cologne.
Of course, I’ve never really been like a drifter, either.
I do, unfortunately, drift and meander in my writing, at least when it’s nonfiction (broadly speaking) and when I’m trying not to write about my negative thoughts and feelings so I don’t bring people down too much. That’s not as easy as it might seem, because those thoughts and feelings are always there, and they’ve been there for nearly as long as I can remember.
I’m not sure why they are there; presumably, and apparently, a lot of it has to do with my until-recently-undiagnosed ASD, but there’s also just something of a tendency toward dysthymia/depression in especially my Dad’s side of the family.
Though, honestly, there was almost certainly ASD on that side of the family, too**. I would be very surprised if my father could not have been so diagnosed, though he was surely “Level 1”, whereas I am said to be “Level 2”.
Speaking of my Dad‒which I was‒I guess I should wish him a belated Happy Birthday, wherever he may be. His birthday was a month ago today (it was a Saturday, so I wrote no blog post).
My own birthday is exactly in between my parents’ birthdays, which was something of a choice on their part; I was born by elective c-section, which was the usual practice in that era if one had previously had a c-section, which my mother had. So they had at least some choice about the specific day on which I would be born.
They couldn’t just pick willy-nilly, of course. If they had tried to wait until December, it would not have worked, and September would have been disastrous. Probably even early November wouldn’t have panned out. Still, I think they had at least a few days’ window in either direction, so‒it’s my understanding‒they picked my birthday to be right between theirs.
It’s the sort of thing I might have done, myself, so I appreciate it.
Let’s see now, what else is going on? Of course, there are many things happening in the world, as is always the case, and many of those things seem and feel quite momentous to the people who see them or experience them. From a certain point of view, they are indeed important, of course. But I imagine that the average Roman citizen often thought that the momentary political happenings in their world were the be-all and end-all, and now we don’t even know what those concerns (or who those citizens) might have been.
Mind you, if their concerns related to the incoming Vandals and Visigoths and Huns and so on, I suppose they might have been at least somewhat justified in their belief that pivotal events were taking place. But such times were narrow and few, relative to the “uninteresting times” in between.
Nowadays, of course, there are no actual external invaders coming in (though various propagandists might say there are). Alas, in the modern world, we have met the Vandals, and they are us.
I almost feel that should have read “they are we”, but it might be taken as implying they are tiny, as in “they are wee”***. Also, I wanted to throw a little homage to the famous Pogo cartoon in which Pogo originally said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
With that, I will call this blog post to a close today. I hope you all remember and embrace what we’ve accomplished here (basically nothing, as far as I can tell). I also continue to hope that you all have an objectively good day.
*Weirdly enough, the full term is “eau de cologne” which I think is French for “water of Cologne”. This is a curious term which must be quite historically contingent. It must also be quite exaggerated, because I very much doubt that the water in the city of Cologne has any particularly attractive and pleasant odor. Perhaps I’m wrong.
**There was even ASD, meaning Atrial Septal Defect, on that side of the family, which I had too, requiring open-heart surgery when I was 18. It is an interesting fact that the cardiac ASD is more common in people with the neurodevelopmental ASD, as is cavum septum pellucidum, a benign atypia in the space between cerebral hemispheres, which was found in me incidentally while I was being worked up for, I think, the cause of some then-occurring pituitary dysfunction.
***Or that they are urine, I guess, which would be a more acceptable misunderstanding.
Robert Elessar 