Hysteria

In a little more than a week, I am going into the hospital to have some of the furniture in the suite rearranged.

That is because part of the corpus has gone derelecti, if you will. It is about to bail out of the plane. Going rogue. Skipping out. The pod is leaving the mothership. The horse is escaping from the barn.

Am I being obscure? Good. I would not wish to offend any sensibilities.

I have never had surgery before. I have never even spent a night in the hospital before, except when my son was born 20 years ago this very day. And I was conscious then, the entire time. All 37 hours of labor. Hah, I exaggerate, it was only 36. I have been conscious ever since, with brief lapses between the hours of 10 or 11 at night and 6 or so in the morning. I think this is called "sleep" although you couldn't prove it by me. Eternal vigilance is my motto; in Latin, "semper vigilantis". This will no doubt be my epitaph. Nothing happens of which I am not aware.

And now, because of the laboriousness of the aforementioned 37-hour labor, which caused some of the trees in my orchard to become, shall we say, overly capacious, gravity is, in a manner of speaking, encouraging some of the fruit to fall out of the tree. Somewhat necessitating a harvesting and the pruning back of some branches, as it were.

Yes, the battleship is in need of an overhaul, which will cause me to undergo general anesthesia for the first time ever, and I will experience a complete loss of consciousness for the first time since the Great Colonoscopy Caper of 2008. That period of radio silence was for a total of 15 minutes. I cherish the memory. If I could pay someone to render me unconscious via really good drugs for 15 minutes on a regular basis I would do so.

This overhaul will involve permanent removal of the carburetor on the old Dusenberg, and a rearrangement of the hoses in the exhaust system.

Of course, the redesign of this particular vintage gown requires that the fabric be more of a denim texture and less of a chiffon. Fortunately, the hospital has plenty of fabric sizing, and many darts will be placed in appropriate places. The finished product, I am informed, will look brand new, which is great news.

The other welcome news is that in the editing process of this cinematic classic, some great dialog will remain unaltered. That is, they will leave the gun, but take the cannoli.

A Terrible Seed

The thing I remember most is the cadence of drums.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Rolllllll, Boom. Boom. Boom. Rolllllll, Boom. Boom. Boom. Rolllllll, Boom. Boom Ba-Boom.

Thousands of drumbeats, as the procession slowly made its way through the capital. It is burned into my memory, as I sat for hours in front of the TV watching this overwhelming death ritual with the wide-open and unfiltered acceptance of an eight year old. 

In the silences between each cadence, only the sound of horses' hooves.

It is always there whenever I contemplate this watershed event, that sound. Stark. Solemn. Ominous.

Flashes of visual memory – the riderless horse, boots backwards in stirrups. The flag-draped coffin on a horses-drawn hearse.  The mourners, walking behind, led by a woman swathed in black.

I did not understand then, but this is what I know now.

Whatever potential for greatness existed (or did not exist) was snuffed out in an instant, gone. The future, altered beyond comprehension. The truth that lay behind the act, unknowable, beyond one simple fact.

Lee Harvey Oswald was an apocalyptic gardener, and he sowed a terrible seed.