It should be the most exciting time of the year here in my own hometown. Spring Break. St. Paddy's Day. March Madness. The Art Festival. The Rodeo. It all comes to a head in the next week. But I am blah. I can't even pick out a photo to post. I don't seem to have a thought in my head which would be wonderful if I were feeling glee. But for the thousandth time so far this year, I will "change my life."
I ran into a woman I used to date for a short while, a veterinarian who I stayed friends with. She put both my dog and my cat down right here in my home. I had just entered the grocery store and there she was leaning on her shopping cart looking awful, shorter and worn, wearing a back brace. She looked at me with tired eyes.
"Last time I saw you, you were getting ready to have back surgery," I said. She looked exactly like that now.
"I'm going to have another one," she said. "This is the fifth one. This time it is in a thoracic vertebra. I can only stand for about ten minutes," she said.
We talked mostly about suicide. When she put down my dog, it was instantaneous. There was no shudder, no contractions at all. The dog was just there one second dand gone the next. Pentobarbital.
"Man. . . that's how I want to go," I said.
"I'll put you down," she grinned. There was a reason we quit going out together.
She told me that was the way she planned on going. She'd hook up an IV and shoot the drug into the line. "It works so quickly, I'd be afraid I'd pass out before I finished the injection."
I told her I had a stash of pills, but I didn't know if they were enough. She told me how many I would need.
"The problem is if you take them all at once, you might puke them up."
"Yea."
I said that doctors die at home using barbiturates, "But I don't think even they can get pentobarbital. I don't think they are legal in the U.S. anymore."
"Yes it is It is used to treat epilepsy. They are cheap, too. I prescribe them for epileptic dogs."
Holy shit!!! I will Google today how to give a dog epilepsy. I need an epileptic dog! It is the safest, most pleasant way to take yourself out if you don't have access to the other stuff.
"But that will be a hard day, you know? Thinking that would be your last day on earth? I'm sure you'd be thinking 'tomorrow. I'll wait until tomorrow.'"
She told me she'd thought about it, but had decided that there were still people who needed her. I almost chuckled. She meant the people who need her to put their animals down.
"I still do some good in life," she said without any irony at all.
And that's the way it goes, I think. Life is an empty void and we stand naked and shivering on a one foot piece of land, and it is awful and it is horrible, and yet. . . we don't take the leap. We stand there and stand there until our knees won't hold us and we are tired to death. That is something like Camus' take on it, anyway. Like Hamlet, the only real question is to be or not to be. For Camus. . . is life worth living? And the answer? Well. . . people overwhelmingly choose to toil on. And so we roll the great boulder up the mountain like our champion Sisyphus.
One might ask, "Does he have free will?" Great question. I was debating that with two profs once. I lost the argument, but it is O.K. The most reasonable answer, it seemed to me was not that he could choose to roll or not roll the boulder but how he felt about it.
Hell of a thing, ain't it?
So when I returned from the store, I went out to finish up the last 10% of the mulch work. I had ordered too much and had to determine what to do with the remaining mulch. I decided just to spread it out over the driveway. I put on my gloves and hat and went out and got the pitchfork, rake, and wheelbarrow. Across the street, the same scrawny guy was working on the curbing.
"How'd you feel last night?" I asked him. "I could barely move."
"I slept well. My legs hurt," he said running his hands across his thighs," but I put two heating pads on them."
I told him I thought I was getting too old for this kind of work.
"How old are you?"
I told him.
"Wow. You're in pretty good shape. You look like you go to the gym."
"Oh. . . I've got some gym muscle, but it ain't the same as cowboy muscle."
He chuckled and bobbed his head. We talked for awhile. Turns out he grew up in a neighborhood that my neighborhood used to fight with.
"You were the rich kids," he said.
That one broke me up. It was called "Crime Hills" and still is. We were on the lower end of the working class neighborhood scale, but where he was from. . . worse. They didn't get to eat, apparently, because they were scrawny as shit, but you really didn't want to fight with them because they would never stay down. They never quit fighting, kind of like the apocalyptic retarded pit bull I like to mention.
"When did you graduate," I asked him?
Holy shit!--he was fifteen years younger than I.
I got back to work with my pitchfork, but whoa! Everything hurt on the first forkful, mostly in my back, but in my right hand and wrist, too. That little guy working across the street was working every day, and he told me he had built his own 4,000 square foot house, too.
"Me and my buddies," he said.
It was on five acres, and he said he had to work all the time.
"I could have paid a company $500 to mow, but I wasn't going to do that."
What pleasures he took in life, I don't know, but there he was, the Existential hero toiling on not knowing either Existential philosophers, I assumed, nor Sisyphus.
But I'll say that having that little fellow thinking I was muscled up made me feel better than the vet did going in for her fifth back surgery.
I cooked up a beef stew for my mother and her niece that night. I hadn't eaten a thing all day. The stew and the wine pretty much set me straight.
"Not today. Maybe tomorrow."
I will need to try to find a little joy here today underneath gloomy skies and bad weather.
"I can't go on. I'll go on."
Thank you Mr. Beckett.
Strange music for a gloomy day.
Guess you'll have to go to YouTube if you care to hear it (link).
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