{"id":7606,"date":"2016-01-12T08:34:23","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T16:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/?p=7606"},"modified":"2021-08-26T18:38:17","modified_gmt":"2021-08-27T01:38:17","slug":"strange-tears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/2016\/01\/12\/strange-tears\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange Tears"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a mean hard bastard.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been that way all my life. Which is why I find myself in this very strange place.<\/p>\n

\"Th\"<\/p>\n

I feel like my world is slipping away.<\/p>\n

It was David Bowie\u2019s passing that popped the bubble for me. Or maybe it was a combination of seeing Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek Into Darkness<\/em> and Bowie\u2019s passing that managed to pound through my defenses.<\/p>\n

\"ThThese entertainers are people I\u2019ve never met, so it shouldn’t be personal. \u00a0But they\u00a0are touchstones in my life. Their loss is a sign of unrelenting change.<\/p>\n

I heard the strains of Space Oddity<\/em> on the radio this morning and was suddenly singing along & crying. It was weird.<\/p>\n

Unintentionally, I started tallying the losses in my personal life.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen my share of death. In the \u201880s and \u201890s the tally increased weekly. After a while I stopped going to funerals. It wasn\u2019t because I didn\u2019t care about or want to remember those folks. It was that I couldn\u2019t bear any more losses.<\/p>\n

\"61260414\"Time is catching up with me.<\/p>\n

I know in the not too distant future I\u2019m going to have to bear more losses.\u00a0The numbers are probably going to increase\u00a0faster too.<\/p>\n

Folks in my family are getting up there in years. I have friends who aren\u2019t in the best of health and while I love them, time and distance have made us into very different people.<\/p>\n

You see, time takes its toll on relationships too.<\/p>\n

Why am I crying? Even hard assed warriors cry. I’m not ashamed of my tears.<\/p>\n

The catalyst of music or movie is one thing, that\u2019s the trigger. \u00a0What is the underlying cause\u00a0of my tears right now?<\/p>\n

Is it that I\u2019m not as good as surfing the winds of change as I once was? Is it sadness that some days I feel like a dinosaur watching the last sunset? Is it fear of being left all alone?<\/p>\n

I know these feelings aren\u2019t unique.<\/p>\n

There are books and plays, movies and TV shows that have explored these feelings.<\/p>\n

Dracula, Dr. Who, and at least one book by Heinlein pop into my head instantly. These stories ask the question:<\/p>\n

If you could be immortal would you?<\/p>\n

Could you bear the mounting losses while continuing to walk endlessly into the future?<\/p>\n

How long before the transient nature of life made you a monster, disconnected from all the things that make us human? Would you, after a few hundred years, stop being human because you can no longer keep count of those you\u2019ve loved and lost.<\/p>\n

How long until the voices, faces and lives become background noise, and your interaction with them is limited to nothing more than furthering your agenda? You agenda would likely become an agenda, the normal lived couldn\u2019t see and one in which their life or death is but a drip from a leaky faucet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Images\"<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s normal to think of these things at points in your life. We know we\u2019re mortal, we know we\u2019ll end.<\/p>\n

Maybe the lesson is to just cry.<\/p>\n

Maybe from time to time,\u00a0we should\u00a0let it all out, not\u00a0hold anything back, and don\u2019t dwell on it.<\/p>\n

When our tears have finished, then we\u2019re supposed to pick up the less brittle pieces of ourselves and move on with grace earned by our successes, failures, and even our tallied losses from years of living.<\/p>\n

Like everyone else, I\u2019m clueless. I can tell you this;<\/p>\n

Time keeps moving on and so probably should we.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a mean hard bastard. I\u2019ve been that way all my life. Which is why I find myself in this very strange place. I feel like my world is slipping away. It was David Bowie\u2019s passing that popped the bubble for me. Or maybe it was a combination of seeing Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Strange Tears”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,87],"tags":[175],"class_list":["post-7606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-male","category-musings","tag-male"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7606"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7615,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7606\/revisions\/7615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}