I have been silent, at least blog-wise, for the past few weeks. It has been a time-filled, chaotic, period interspersed with periods of normality that have allowed me to catch a breath.
During that time, the only real shots I have taken is of the life around me here at the creek. But I plan to visit a trail tomorrow and thought that I should put a quick note here with images from this time away, rather than just lose them in a file folder on my PC.
My five office cats are all here, along with TC (the little guy with the milk-beard) but Tetsuo and he-who-is-as-yet-unnamed, aren’t.
I also have a few shots of Woody at the very end, who seems to be hanging around here recently banging his head off some of the trees in my yard.
Anyway, hope you enjoy.
So, I guess that brings the cat-contingent here at home to twelve.
I guess one might say that I have a liking for cats. But I never imagined that I would end up the old catman that I have become.
And this has really made me pause to think about “normal” life and what it means to each of us.
The whole Trump era, the pandemic, and now this criminal war in Ukraine, seems to have really taken us all away from whatever we once considered normal and frankly I doubt if we will ever get back there.
Trump has created a new level of lying and deceit that will live on long after he is rotting in a coffin somewhere. The pandemic has altered daily life to a level that it will never return to pre-pandemic levels. And Putin has shown that true evil not only exists in the world but it has the support of the willfully ignorant.
So, how could normal ever return after all that?
And that raises the other question, which is “What is normal anyway?”
You see, my version of normal is not just different from most other people I know, but it is also different from what I considered normal some years ago.
And if I am correct, that means that most of you reading this will have also experienced several changes in your lives that redefined what normal is for you too.
You might therefore arrive at the conclusion that normal is a moving target. But truthfully, I would suggest that normal doesn’t exist.
It never did and it never will.
It is a figment of our imagination and something that we wish for when something in our lives is not going well.
It has become the fountain of youth of our generations. Something to wish for but never to attain.
More often than not, when we are in unhappy times, we search backwards in our memories to a time we were happy and we wish ourselves back there.
But was there ever really a “there” or is it just something that we have reshaped into a happier moment than where we are?
This aching for a better time is why some pathetic dotard can popularize a catch phrase like “Make America Great Again” and all the idiots buy the red hats in support and preach about taking us back to a better time.
But who exactly was this America great for? Are the black republicans really imagining the same great time in the past as the ignorant rednecks? Do they really want to sit in the back of a bus again?
And it is easy to pick on the morons, I know. But this issue is a lot bigger than just the red politics. It’s bigger than the commie bastards that want to pull a new curtain across Europe.
The real problem is so embedded into life for all of us that it creates a veil of unhappiness across our very existence. Individually it creates a real level of dissatisfaction in our lives that steals the joy from our achievements and undermines any sense of good in our status quo.
It runs rife through groups; political, religious, social, or whatever. Uniting them in a common cause of dissatisfaction where they collectively push for something. For example look how overactive these gun nuts are … they aren’t happy with having a handgun or two. They need assault rifles, bazookas, and other weapons of mass destruction because somehow that makes them think these might take them back to a time they were happy with the size of their dicks.
Dissatisfaction is a cruel master. By it’s very nature, it can never be satisfied. We might think once we invade Crimea we will be happy, but no. We also need Ukraine.
If we could develop a level of satisfaction with where we are instead of always wishing we were somewhere else, our sense of normal would return.
When we aim for a normal that never existed, it can never be reached. And therein lies the problem.
… just a thought.
