falls asleep.

+Time is by no means a whine blog, but now and then a whine seems apt. Mine has to do with something learned recently; that folks who experience the kind of pressure from long term "making do" and "getting by" that we of Panama City and Bay County have been going through ever since HMichael, should expect to get stressed out, to suffer mental and emotional exhaustion and depression; in time possibly depression that is severe and clinical. I don't think I'm there. 

Trying to focus on myself as my own object, keeping an eye on myself from outside myself, I think my constant awareness of my sudden deep and deepening psychic crisis, from what had happened and was ongoing, all totally beyond my control - - the combination of the hurricane, its damage and longterm aftermath including shock and then long term Exile with everything changed and different, nothing as before; together with my daughter's precarious medical crisis of brain trauma, ambulance, firetruck, ER, wee hours dash to Pensacola, three brain surgeries, stroke and all that ensued over the next few months - - awareness that any part of it, and especially all of it combined, could (and maybe already was doing) damage me mentally and emotionally with dangerous physical implications - - that, my awareness of myself and of my vulnerable health at this age has kept me alert and on a fairly even keel throughout. What has helped?

Well, maybe, concentrating on other things. Appreciating that Linda and I were with Malinda, Ray & family. Focus on losing weight before my September physical checkup. Checking on efforts to recover and repair Harbour Village and 7H. Helping look after Malinda. Watching the new house go up at Breakfast Point. Since we've moved back to 7H, the physical benefit of walking miles back and forth every day between 7H and the car park a fair distance away instead of just an elevator ride down to the garage below us. Reading. Writing a daily blogpost. Watching war films and documentaries on YouTube. Preparing sermons and planning Sunday school, and the absorbing mental exercise that goes with both. Visits to Tallahassee and from Joe and Tass & family. Visits with my brother. Resuming the walks with Robert. IDK, maybe mainly the physical exercise and the fact I've always been aware of myself and regarded myself as something to be curious about and psychoanalyze and experiment with and notice. Self aware, unlike a cat suddenly confronting himself in a mirror. Wondering, actually, how the hell all this might leave me mentally. Contemplating theologically, including in the nature of existential crisis and purposely "WTH, why NOT me?" instead of "Why me?"

Married fifty-nine years, from time to time my parents expressed to me how fortunate they felt themselves that they'd never lost a child or grandchild. Not so with their parents or many, many people they and we had known along through life. Mom & Pop losing their first child, daughter Carrie as an infant; losing Alfred just after his eighteenth birthday and life opening up for him. 

One's child is one's child regardless of the passing of Time and ravages of life: now over sixty-one, Malinda was fifty-nine when we followed the ambulance carrying her to Pensacola that night because the weather was too heavy for medical helicopters to fly; and my thought and words all the way over, when I had been warned and was sure that hope was slim, was "If I lose this child I'll no longer know who I am". That possibility was acute from the moment we found her where she had lain unconscious and bleeding cranially some 26 hours, until she was discharged from hospital weeks later; and again with her return to hospital for surgery to correct a second aneurysm; and then the brain stroke afterward that left damage. In fact, I have lost the child, a bright, loving and able person, daughter, mom, grandmother, helper and friend. That's no longer who she is, I have lost. But I'm dealing with it better than had she died when statistics favored. Not that she's dealing better with it, but her daddy is; I can go see her, talk and visit, I don't have to speak to the heavens, or into some abyss of physical absence and curse the sky. Why me, Lord? Why the hell NOT me? And HMichael: why my town? Better someone else's town? Pray my troubles onto someone else? Actually it isn't about me at all, I just happen to be here in the midst of life.

If he ever crosses minds at all, most people think of Carl Jung as a psychiatrist, not a theologian, but I do, and he's quite good, incisive, analytical; sure, he's an analyst, does analysis from ana, back and lysis, loosen, undo, unfasten, dissect; works even better with theology than with human minds. Been reading, and I like his notion of God early on just as unfamiliar in dealing with us His experimental creatures in His image as we creatures are in dealing with Him. Jung says God had never had to be self-aware, but the Job experience forced that, and eventually justice somewhat prevails in God becoming one of us and trying to make up to Job and us for Job who IS us; thus, Good Friday.

So do I blame God for ruptured brain aneurysms and desolating hurricanes? Not really, not at all, at least, not angrily so; but when it comes down to it, as a believer I might reasonably blame either God or Satan for the damage done to innocents in human life, storms and bursting aneurysms. But to blame Satan would make my theism binary instead of mono and I'm not going there. Neither does Jung, actually, suggesting they are, or were, competing sides of one Being until Satan lost in shame and disgrace for hurting one so innocent and trusting, and was banished, at which phase God became moral and conscience-wise led by the experience of seeing what He had done, and to absolve Self and so make it up to Job. 

So who/whom do I blame? A point is that having to place blame is pointless, as Job found out, if for no other reason than that the other Guy was egoist blusteringly omnipotent and without the self-reflection that enables shame. It was Adam's own fault; but it was not Job's fault, Job did not sin, Job was innocent, including so innocent as to think he could reason with blustering omnipotent arrogance. So here I am, we are. Life is what it is. To love and to endure, and to suffer and to enjoy. We only get this one opportunity to go around, make the best of it.

Who am I? I can't say that I know or don't know; I can say that I'm never certain of anything, that I KNOW nothing; but I think.

Musing, not brooding. Just thinking. And again as usual,

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
And when I thinks, I falls asleep. 

T+