Anniversary

I’m doing pretty well today.  I slept last night by dint of increasing my sleeping meds to the higher allowed dose, and I fell asleep and didn’t wake up for at least 6 hours.  A full night’s sleep is wonderful, and is all too often unappreciated.  My leg is stiff and a little sore, but there’s no visible injury — my nurse checked closely after I confessed to my incident when he arrived today.  I have an appointment with my pain doctor tomorrow at the crack of dawn, so I’ll report to him and see what he recommends.  Jerry was eager to go out this morning, and took off at a fast trot as I dragged behind, probably looking pathetic… this afternoon, though, he was hilarious.  I’d just finished a phone call, and he knows that after I talk to my family in Trinidad we go out for our evening walk; he didn’t wait for the second cal, but as soon as I put down after the first call, he jumped off my lap and ran to get his harness and leash!  Don and I were laughing too hard to respond… Don is feeling like himself again, and was planning for us to go out today but I didn’t have the energy.  

I overlooked the fact that yesterday marked 21 years since the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York.  Anyone who was alive at the time has that burned into their memories; where they were, what they were doing, etc.  The ripples of that attack have changed so many aspects of our lives that it’s really hard to explain and impossible to have imagined before that date.  I would love to imagine that we’ll create a better world with what we know now, but it seems unlikely!

In conversation with my nurse today, I learned that we have some common interests, notably science fiction and fantasy.  He was telling me about his visit to ComiCon on the weekend, and that started a discussion on Dune (I still haven’t seen the new one, J!  Sorry! 😪) and the new Lord of the Rings series and the other new fantasy series that are populating TV and streaming services.  I haven’t watched Game of Thrones after season 1, so I’m not into House of the Dragon — it’s weird, because these would normally be my type, but the TV series was too violent and gory to appeal to me.  I bought the graphic novel adaptation of Dune this weekend (that was what I was debating ordering the other night) and got the 2 volumes, only to find that there’s a third volume due out in 2024!!  We’re both delighted with the array of programming now available, and had a great side discussion on books and movies.  Isn’t it delightful when you find that someone has similar interests to yours?

It’s fascinating to me that we’ve managed to imagine all sorts of societies and landscapes when we’re bound to one planet.  Arthur Clarke, who was a prolific science fiction writer, imagined life forms that exist on Jupiter, and others that inhabit its moons.  Robert Silverberg imagined alien landscapes with plants that float and there are dozens of other authors who have imagined all sorts of fantastic beasts and plants.  Some of those descriptions are based in antiquity, and there are some very old bestiaries (books of animals) that purport to show chimeras as real.  (As an aside, there’s a fascinating report of human chimerism involving a  woman who was shown as not genetically related to her biological children detailed in a 2006 documentary).  It’s really amazing how we, as a race, have managed to create so many variations of life and projected them into other worlds.  I am certain that there is life on other worlds, maybe as diverse as imagined in Star Trek or Doctor Who, maybe humanoid, maybe reptilian-based, maybe silicon-based, maybe glass-like… there’s a whole range of possibilities that I don’t think that we’ll ever manage to catalogue, and definitely some that we couldn’t even imagine.   I do admire the people who can create those worlds and populate them with believable characters.  

We’re limited by our human experience, so what we dream up is based on a few thousand years of human civilization.  Our mythologies are full of some amazing creations, and I’d love to have the power to go back in time to hear the original stories and see the events that inspired them.  I’m sure that they’d be as incredible as some of the stories we dream up now.  I’m constantly amazed at the stories that tell of an advanced ancient civilization, where there are tales of all kinds of wonders and magics (Magic, I remember as being defined as “any sufficiently advanced technology that eludes our current understanding”)  Tales, for instance, of invisible helpers who open doors as a person approaches — we’d identify that as having a motion sensor, but in earlier times, that would be magic.  Anyway, I’m certain that the origins of many of our stories would be as unidentifiable as the start of a game of “Telephone” — you know the one where someone whispers a story to their neighbour, and it goes around until the last person repeats what they heard.  What animal(s) inspired a dragon?  How did we envision angels — which have far too many limbs to match any creatures we know?  Only insects have wings and multiple legs, and some classes of angel are described as having 6 pairs of wings, plus arms and legs — 16 limbs!  I sometimes think that our early ancestors were visited by other, non-terrestrial races, saw their technology as magic, and those experiences were incorporated into our stories.

On that note, I think I’d better head off to sleep as I have to be up early tomorrow for my appointment.  I’ll continue dreaming of fantastic beings and thinking of the marvels that exist in the universe… Good night all!