“It’s your perspective,” she told me, not for the first time, when I reported another unenergetic start to the grey day stretching before me.  

“You’re stating the obvious again,” I reminded her.

There’s also the unsightly, slightly uncomfortable technicolor excavation of what was once my navel.  Purple, brown, yellow, maroon, greenish, a concave rotting peach in the center of my belly.  It prevents me from springing up and down on my hands a few times to get the blood flowing, to shake up my mood.  Doesn’t let me take an aerobic bike ride, either.

It is a matter of perspective, of course, and I was glad that for once she didn’t compare my outlook to my mother’s perspective.  My mother was given to these low grade depressions, seeing the proverbial glass as half empty instead of half full.  Either way, I say, it’s half a glass of juice where there once was a full glass (assuming it was ever full).  On the other hand, if we think of it as a glass of, say, piss, that one has to drink, instead of juice, in that case it’s better to see it as half empty than half full.  

I tend to think my mother should have taken those extra years of life as more of a blessing than she did, but it’s hard to judge her emotions in the years she lived without a husband, who died and left suddenly, six days from ER to funeral home, with no sphincter to clench when she had to go to the bathroom, with an endlessly creative cancer bearing down on her from several directions, alone, with the wars with those she was closest to flaring constantly.

“You should try to be more positive,” Sekhnet pointed out, this time blessedly (Bless you, Sekhnet) not making the connection with my mother, or my father, for that matter.

He styled himself a curmudgeon as the years went on, fumed regularly about the demeaning idiocies of the world.  His basic stance became misanthropic, his view was that people were basically self-serving, shallow, manipulative pricks. There was an element of defensiveness in this, of course, since he had to be on guard from the time he was first able to stand.

I’m no Anne Frank, not any more.  I don’t believe people are basically good or basically bad.  I think everyone is under a lot of pressure.  Some comes from within, some is thrust upon us and much of it comes from a relentless mass media selling the ideas that will keep the pressure on.  The advantage to keeping the pressure on is that a populace that is not under pressure, not distracted at all times, will eventually get together to demand the changes that they need.  Changes that will certainly tend to disadvantage the most advantaged and advantage the most disadvantaged.  And, as God himself knows, we cannot have that.

For example, the bad smell humans have when under pressure was part of a survival mechanism, the result of evolution or brilliantly intelligent design, as you prefer.  The stink of terror sweat could be a deterrent to predators.  The swooping animal would hesitate–“damn, that bastard stinks!” and in that moment the human could scamper out of harm’s way, live to reproduce its DNA with another stinking hominid.

The bad smell, over millenia, became a boon to a trillion dollar industry, as a procession of ever more ingenious chemicals was discovered to mask the bad smell.  Then the industry specialized, there are bad foot smells, breath smells, armpit smells, special feminine bad smells.  Of course, the industry would be nothing without marketing, making everyone aware of the need for the product, the humiliation of not having the product.   Marketing, of course, would be nothing without the visionary ingenuity of great artists and social psychologists.

But there I am again, riding in circles on one of my favorite pet peeves, instead of doing something productive today.  Oh, dear…