In September of 2021, I weighed 123.8 pounds, and I guess I cared because I wrote that down. In July of 2024, I weigh 123 odd pounds as well. I got that weight-recording thing from my mom. She repeatedly told the story of her Aunt Ethel, who was apparently so obese that she got stuck inside her claw-footed bathtub. Family members had to call the fire department so that a group of (hopefully) strange men could extricate the unfortunate woman. I can’t even imagine that scene. One sign of Ethel’s humiliation and trauma: My great-aunt’s story stuck forever in my mom’s brain, and subsequently in mine.
So I track numbers. It’s relatively harmless, I suppose. We carry the baggage of our families pasts, some of us more than others.
A biojar observation: It’s good to make a note of the past and our related eccentricities. The past can inform the future. But Great-aunt Ethels should never be driving our decisions. The past is nothing more than wisps of memory, corrupted by time. On any day, at any time, we can let the lessons of the past go, blow a kiss to Aunt Ethel and move on.
Today’s poem, which began as a haiky and sprawled out from there:
Do you suffer from
Jocelyn Turner
Symptoms, syndromes, sickness, nerves?
Money runs downhill
In the bubble chamber of paranoia,
Backed by creeps and crawlies,
Big Pharma’s children —
Round green, new blue, and classic white,
Triangular, trapped molecules,
Shared with frightened social media users,
Who breathe and swallow deep,
As they plunge down, down, down
Into Sackler-type rabbit holes.
I recommend the Netflix series “Painkiller.” Even if you’ve read about the opioid epidemic, the series fleshes out a great deal of detail that gets lost in print.
Zombie phrase for the day: We need self-driving cars.
Eeeeedeeedehhlbb diybihhh gahhhrzs.
