Day: September 28, 2024

There is a part of me that shifted over the last cycle. By cycle I am referring to the old science (fact?) that the body replaces cell types over every 7-10 years. This is not an all at once type of situation. It happens faster or slower depending on the particular system. The Neurons effectively don’t change at all. While there is evidence of adult neurogenesis, it is limited at best. I am getting away from the point. I am not who I was. Not physically or mentally or socially. I am not happy with who I am. That leaves deciding who I must become.

This moment struck hardest yesterday when I noticed uneven development in my pecks. I have not been working out lately, so there is no external factor motivating this decline. That fact alone struck me with huge disappointment. At first I assumed it could be part of a larger medical decline. I thought I may be dying very quickly. That thought forced me to consider who would be at my funeral. If I died right now I could hold that funeral in a double wide trailer.

I don’t have a lot of family or friends. I lost my local social circle as a side-effect of divorce. I have a brother who is not a birth brother but a friend I’ve been through so much of my life with that he is family. I have the Lady Talis and her family, the kids, and anyone beyond that small circle exists outside the realm of close contact. It is this self-imposed isolationism that has been the largest change/largest impact on self. I spent a life cultivating connections and through those connections building a lifestyle and activities and even gaining new access and insights to the world. Now everything is through a filter of articles or stories that other people have created. I’m not even on social media. My only access therein is as an echo chamber/promotion engine for my kids’ sports stuff. I am not entirely sure I am a person anymore.

I do not cultivate healthy habits. In truth I attempt to get such things out of the way. Last night I woke at 1:30 in the morning. My first thought was to check the score of my kid’s football team. My second was to blog because if I got it out the way, I would not need to worry about doing anything for the rest of the day. I would be ‘open’. Therein lies the nasty truth of my present reality. Open, you see, is what I aim for. I try my hardest to be available and not engaged in something that matters to me in any real way outside of, I suppose, two hours of video games. I am degraded in that fashion.

So I am learning what it means to not be a person. I am mirroring negative behaviors I see, and I am closing off and shutting down more and more. I don’t want to be that person. I want to be a different flavor of human. I want to turn this broken down old ship around, get it into port, and (after I stop mixing metaphors) get it fixed up right. However, I need to decide where I am going and who I am going to be on that journey. All I do know is it needs to start now.

I have to admit some confusion here. Recently I learned that Israel bombed a residential area as part of what they referred to as “a “precise strike” on Hezbollah’s “central headquarters,” which it said had been “intentionally built under residential buildings” in Beirut. Here’s the thing though: Kids died. Children were murdered because they would not risk their own troops in trying to eliminate the enemy. Instead they presumed moral authority to kill anyone who was in the path of their target at the same time they scream that Israeli civilians should not have been murdered and kidnapped. This double standard is at the very heart of what is making me less and less sympathetic to the plight of the Israeli nation. At this point they are killing more children than militants on both war fronts, a truth that threatens to eliminate an entire generational population. At the very least they are doing more long term damage to the peace effort than anything else and I believe they absolutely know that.

Here is a fundamental truth: Israel believes their people has more of a right to life than their enemy. This is a fundamental truth of war. However, when it dips towards genocide the world usually gets mad. The world DID get mad. The ICJ said, “you guys are wrong. Stop.” Israel said no. The USA said we will agree with the court but continue to fund the Israeli war effort because we are politically hamstrung to do exactly that. The real concern is that Israel will not stop and will in fact expand the war effort. This is about Iran proxies right now. Once it grows larger than that; once it crosses a certain threshold it will become a world war. Why? Because if nobody steps in then Iran will feel vulnerable enough to need to accelerate its own nuclear defense and that is a line nobody will let them cross. Once that line is crossed, the game because an endgame.