Wednesday, August 26, 2015

wastin' time

i received an e-mail yesterday asking me to sign a petition supporting the sale of ugly fruit.  apparently u.s. grocers throw out 25% of the fruit they receive because it is u g l y it ain't got no alibi, it ugly.  yeah yeah it ugly.  i signed it.  but it made me think about time and how i've wasted about 25% of my time on this planet.  wasted it on booze, boys, bloviating, tv, self loathing, hating james taylor, microsoft office excel, dead end jobs, pinterest, anger, and sweatin' the small stuff.  sweatin' the small stuff is such a time sucker.  my husband and i have spent too much time battling over small stuff that i am slightly embarrassed to admit that we have fought over kitchen mats, whether or not to see the movie lincoln, fan on or off at night, routes from a to b, what station to listen to in the car, how to chop an onion, whether or not my complimenting the salad meant i hated the tuna sitting next to the salad, ad infinitum ad nauseum.

so why the fuck should i waste any more time writing about how i regret wasting time?  how the fuck is that gonna help me?  it wont get me that time back.  god dammit whatta waste.  some advice from a dying gal, quit wasting your fucking time.

if there is any part of your day that you just tolerate then i highly recommend you do something to change that because that part of your day will one day become intolerable which turns into something else which morphs into a half-fucked fox in a forest fire of resentment and sometimes self-loathing becomes your companion and then you die from cancer.

i'm still reading the book "die wise" by stephen jenkinson and i just read the following on dying:
     "If you wrestle death, your labor makes a proper place for it.  If you fight death, there is no place    
      for it.  Death is defeat, the end of life.  Demonize death and you turn life into a factory-farm
      canola field: flat, hollowless, no place for mysterious things of substance to gather.  But come
      to your death as an angel to wrestle instead of an executioner to fight or flee from and you turn
      your dying into a question instead of an edict:  What shall my life mean?  What shall my time of
      dying be for?  What is it going to be like in that cottage of darkness?  If you work hard in your dying 
      days, the answer could be "Not like anything you've known."  Dying turns into something you
      live.  The trick here is that to be able to ask questions like that you have to know somewhere in
      your bones, that you will die.  When the time comes you have to know that you are dying.  That
      shift from the future tense to the present is a chasm that many people these days never cross, 
      never even see."

i'm writing this because i am in a fair amount of pain and am fairly certain that the cancer is back and not slow growing like i wrote about last month, but metastisizing rapidly in the same area it always has called home.  i have an oncology appointment today but it would be ridiculous for me to say that this is anything else but cancer, and that i am wrestling with death.  now where the fuck is my singlet?

if i didn't have a sense of humor while dying then it would be tough to reconcile my life with death.

yesterday was dave chappelle's birthday and someone compiled a list of chappelle's show sketches that are still relevant today and this one had me laughing and i certainly would never call watching a chappelle's show skit a waste of time:








2 comments:

Unknown said...

We love you

riffbros said...

Thank you for your candid writing, your friendship, and your vulnerability. Love you.