Desire and Discontent

Originally Posted Thursday, December 26, 2013

This morning is flat and gray, damp and cool.  There seems nothing but silence apropos of nothing.  I am uninspired.  Even the morning news seems to have taken a disinterest in things.  Maybe the best journalist are on holiday.  It is the time between.  You wouldn't want to get sick and have to go to the hospital just now.  Think about who's working.  But, as I may remember, more mental cases end up there this time of year than at others.  Wannabe docs--those not yet ready to take their boards-- are trying out their chops, eager and confused.  Many patients come in ambulances straight from cheap "retirement" homes where they scrimped on the eggnog this year, lonesome and despondent to the point of death.  They cry out unintelligibly in pain both real and imagined.  But where there is pain, there is opportunity.  A chance to practice medicine. 

Mental cases.  Where the hell did that come from?  My mind is a sewer of bad phrases.  I know a million of them.  They are a source of great humor.  They all refer to the sub-normal, the deviants and the perverts, the crippled and the deformed.  The words were invented after WWII, I think, when everyone wanted normalcy so much.  Everything needed to be "normal."   My world has been filled with that dichotomy.  Surely you've seen a David Lynch film before.

But I need to steer clear of such thinking. 

And here's Thelma--that normal-est of women--when the kids should be asleep.  What troubles her in the late night hours?  After the presents were all opened (I bought her a scarf which she said she adored) and the holiday dinner consumed, she was gone.  She was going away for New Year, she said vaguely.  She wanted good weather.  She knew some people.  Thelma, Thelma, Thelma. . . such a profound source of desire and discontent.