The Day Begins

An unusual Thursday due to Lynn's check-in with her doctor

Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, prepares to leave "The Bunker" with me after helping to write the morning post on Harrowings.

It began a couple of months after our marriage. My wife started experiencing pain throughout her body and the symptoms took a while to diagnose. Her doctor at the time finally had a liver biopsy done revealing auto-immune hepatitis. Her liver was attacking itself. It was put into remission through prednisone and an anti-organ rejection drug, Azothioprene (sp?). The latter is the one she still takes. She has to have it checked regularly. What does one do in cases like this? I said, “(…) in sickness and in health (…)” on May 3, 2008 and when I make a commitment, that’s it.

The stroke she suffered on November 9, 2009 that impacted her brain stem, cutting off transmission lines down the left side was the crowning blow that has put us on the trajectory that we have been on now for the ensuing years. She’s basically supporting me at this point since the Harold B Gill Foundation, LLC and my post as part of the Front of House staff at Daily Provisions doesn’t bring in what my long career as an Enterprise Architect did.

So, I reflect on this fact of life. I’m working hard at putting down something of value for future generations. Yesterday was a very productive day as far as “The Work” goes. A longish edition of “The Passing Show” was posted. I don’t know if the body of work created will actually help future generations, but it is my intent. Looking back at my father’s long career of using the fragmentary evidence left behing by “the inarticulate” among the eighteenth century residents of my hometown and its environs, it is easy to conceive that what I lay down here might be picked up not only by my contemporaries, but also by my descendents.

I don’t know. I just know how things seem to me. I might be wrong but it is also true that one misses 100% of the shots that one doesn’t take.

A week ago, I wrote the essay above, digging into mySelf to see what makes me tick.

I know that I am no more than a node on the non-hierarchical network that is made up of all of us who are living now in 2026:

I know too that I am responsible, as much and as little as anyone else:

We can all be “good ancestors” and I wrote a bit about that in a note yesterday:

In part, it was prompted by a reckoning that I did about what has happened since the dawn of the third millenium BCE, a scant quarter century ago:

The real upshot of this was that, of the 6.23-6.25 billion who were alive a quarter century ago, already about 1.4-1.6 billion have departed. Doing the math, it would seem that some 3.5 billion of us on this planet are under the age of 25 and fewer than 5 billion of us are over that age. I remember myself at 25. I was not really all that experienced, even as I worked then as a foundry apprentice in Colonial Williamsburg and held a degree in German Literature from Randolph-Macon College where I’d received a liberal arts education. Well, what can one expect? This is my point. I’m attempting to parse out what the course of world history might be.

In the meantime, I’m doing what I can to inspire others as I move from dawn to dusk and back again. I particularly want to inspire us to use this platform in the ways in which it is most effective. To whit:

In short, please don’t like this post. Restack it if you do like it. Restack it with a Note! Comment on the content. Push back against the content. Let me hear something that comes from the heart of you. React in writing, not in pushing a “heart” emoji! Go for the right hand buttons - not the left. Share it on other platforms. Substack makes this so easy. If all goes well, perhaps Substack Team will pick up what I’m laying down here, namely that enabling “likes” is playing to the worst side of social media.

OK, shot out, as they say…

Onward!

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