Babe, I’ve seen the guys before
And know I’ve got the lowest score
I know I’m unemployed and broke
But babe I’ve got a million jokes
And if none of them will make you laugh
Give me a minute and a half
And I I’ll write a million more
And give you giggles by the score
I might not be the greatest man
But I’ll do all that I can
I’d walk a hundred million miles
And move the world to see you smile
Lasso the moon, seduce the stars
To bring them down to where you are
And then I’ll teach them all to sing
How you’re my queen of everything
And as they sweetly harmonize
You’ll see my love shine in my eyes
And it will make you feel cozy and warm
And shelter you from the storm
And when I trip, stumble and fall
You’ll always be the one I call
Say “Babe, I’m in the hospital
Come pick me up, I feel so small”
Meh. That’s enough of that crap.
I mean, it’s cute and all and there’s some decent verses there. but there’s a lot of dreck too and it is not turning out how I wanted it to turn out.
Next time, go in with more of a plan. I know that’s hard for me, but it’s the only way to keep things moving in the right direction.
The idea was to make it a silly, goofy kind of love song. A serenade where the male singer makes the case to his crush that despite not being much of a man, he is still the one who will love her most and best.
And it’s still clear in my head and if I could just write the damn thing, it could be a very cute and charming love song celebrating love that is wrong on paper but beautiful and wondrous in practice.
But then I started to ramble, basically. Lost focus. Started just making verses for their own sake, and that’s no good.
So for now, I stop.
Some day I will give it another shot.
Had my phone appointment with my GP.
He called at 10 am, not 10:30 am which is when the appointment was scheduled. Meaning he was actually early for once, and that’s a goddamned miracle.
When I visit him in the office, he is a minimum of thirty minutes late.
I might be less rankled by phone appointments after this.
Anyhow, the takeaway from that conversation, besides a few pill refills, was that there are some podiatrists that work within the medical system and that therefore do not require a separate payment from the patient.
Boffo. I am going to call the guy Doctor Wishlow referred me to and make an appointment. Doc Chao looked him up for me and seems like this guy is a podiatric surgeon who specializes in, among other extremely impressive sounding things, “diabetic limb recovery”.
Holy shit. Then I guess he should be able to handle a diabetic foot ulcer no problem.
You know a surgeon’s good if his specializations sound like superpowers.
More after the break.
Save it for momma
Anyone who has been around kids enough has seen this :
The child gets hurt while playing, The pain is clear on their face and their eyes have filled with tears but they’re not crying.. not yet.
Instead, they run right to their primary caregiver and only once they are in earshot do they start crying.
Almost everybody knows this and accepts it and most people think it is cute, and it is.
But why do they wait? It hurts right away, so why not cry right away? They are crying because they are hurt, right?
The usual answer is that they wait because what they want is comforting from their primary caregiver. The crying is, in effect, an alarm and there is no point in sounding the alarm if there is nobody to hear it.
And that is true.
But it’s also huge.
Because it illustrates how emotions are information. Every feeling we have, in addition to performing its individual function, is also information to be broadcast to our fellow naked beach monkeys about what is going on.
Take a monkey troupe. One monkey sees a jaguar in a tree. It cries out in fear, and attracts the attention of several other monkeys, who investigate. They also see the jaguar, and they cry out in fear. The number of monkeys who are aware of the threat keeps growing. Eventually, the monkeys huddled together in fear undergo a change. Once there is enough of them, fear turns to anger, and they start throwing things at the jaguar to drive it off.
And unless this is an especially dumb jaguar, it works. The jaguar splits. The monkey troupe is protected. Victory for monkeykind.
And all any of them had to do was what came naturally : voice their emotion.
Now take us. Modern life is a hell of a lot more complicated. We definitely can’t go around voicing every emotion instantly. The complex network of relationships on which we all rely (commonly know as “society”) wouldn’t survive.
But emotions are still information. Everything we feel contains within it the impulse to transmit that emotion to our fellow primates.
So we all end up accumulating these unsent emotional messages because modern society still doesn’t take emotions seriously enough and we go on as if a repressed emotion just…. goes away.
But it doesn’t. And that’s why catharsis is so important. Emotions do not go away until they are successfully transmitted, no matter how long that takes.
That’s why so many of us have entire airlines’ worth of emotional baggage dragging us down. All those latent emotions waiting to be expressed and transmitted can really weigh a person down.
Therapy is one way to get that shit transmitted. Journaling is another. A heart to heart with someone you know and trust is a third.
But on the species scale, what we really need to do is teach our kids that their emotions are important and that part of being healthy is having a person to tell about our day so we can get those emotions out.
And the best way to teach that is to be that person for our kids.
We could pave the way to a radically less neurotic future if only we would listen.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.