I bought a new house! Well, I bought an old house.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1533-N-East-Side-Hwy-Elkton-VA-22827/108047013_zpid/

"To die is nothing, but it is terrible not to live."

-- Victor Hugo

 

You know that awkward feeling, when you walk into a medieval church and find a thousand-year-old picture of yourself in the stained glass? 

I had forgotten this song existed until I heard it the other day on Pandora. God, how appropriate it would have been a few years ago. Still beautiful, though.

 

Heroes often fail.

I can't stop listening to this. I've been playing it over and over again for weeks. That one climactic note....

It so bewitched me, that I had to look up who the violinist is: it's Hilary Hahn, which explains why it's so good.

I was surprised to learn that Hilary plays a Vuillaume rather than a Stradivarius or Guarneri. I guess whatever the secret is, Vuillaume figured it out too.

The last piece of the puzzle of my mind has finally been put into place. My daughter, the therapist (who also has the benefit of having known me her whole life), actually put me on the right track. It's a high-functioning form of autism. Along the same lines as Asperger's. 

So, it sounds like a lot: ADD, Tourette's, and ASD (autism spectrum disorder), as it's called these days. But the thing is, there is a very high comorbidity rate between all three: they seem to be somehow related. Perhaps (this is purely speculation) they're all actually manifestations of some deeper neurological developmental disorder.

I've spent my whole life wondering what's wrong with me. But now it all makes perfect sense. It all fits. I can't describe what a relief that is. 

Of course, there's the thought, "What if someone had correctly identified and treated this when I was a child?" Maybe everything could have been different. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have been able to do a lot of the things I've done (or at least attempted to do) if I'd had that label put on me at an early age.

But that doesn't really matter anymore. Nothing I can do about it anyway. What I can do, is start to take control of and order my life with a much clearer understanding of who I am and what I need. And maybe begin to free myself from this constant guilt and self-judgment over why I'm not "doing more" with my life. Really, I couldn't have. It's so clear now.

I had the first actual procedure in my back. It's supposed to take six to eight weeks to take full effect, but I'm already feeling an enormous degree of relief. Not only from the constant, incessant, unrelenting pain, but it turns out that my insomnia was also neurological. I never had it until just after my accident, and then ever since. But both after the test blocks, and now as the permanent one takes effect, it's just disappearing. Those damaged nerves must have been sending continual distress signals that triggered an anxiety response in my brain, and never let me sleep properly. I was going to say two birds with one stone, but it's more like two dragons. That's one hell of a stone.

And here's something I've been dreaming about my whole life--a wish that I never thought would come true. I've located (if the genealogy I found is correct), the castle which was my ancestral home. And it's still standing. It's in use as a wedding and event venue.

Or, rather, castles:

Apparently, they had...erm...huge...tracts of land in the area between the Rhone river and the Italian and Swiss borders, east and west, and between Marseille and Lyon, north and south. But I believe the first one was their real home, as they are for generations listed as having been born in Pereins.

So, here's my new plan:

1) Start hiking again, and get back in shape, as spring comes and my back hurts less, and the medications improve my emotional state.

2) Go back for more treatments, higher up in my neck and lower down in my back.

3) Keep working with my therapy and medications, and the new knowledge of what's actually the problem, to find ways to live.

4) Save some more money, so I don't have to spend everything I've got on numbers 5 and 6.

5) Go to France. Visit these castles. See where my ancestors lived, and where I came from. Also, while I'm nearby and doing medieval-themed things, visit Carcassone and Toulouse. 

6) Walk the Camino de Santiago. What I'd really like to do is start at the chateau on the top and walk to the Camino from there, as if I were going on a medieval pilgrimage from my home.

7) Meet a French or Spanish girl. 

8) Never come back.

"As the rich rise in social esteem, the virtuous sink....the natural end of democracy is despotism."

-- Plato

We had to do two diagnostic test blocks before proceeding to the permanent ablation. Some kind of procedural requirement. After the first one, when the raging pain on the right side was gone for a while, I noticed the pain on the left side. Apparently, the other was drowning it out. So when I went back, he did both sides, and I spent a night and a day freer of pain than I can remember, or could have imagined was possible. I also slept much better. I hadn't fully realized how frequently I wake up and have to shift positions to try to relieve the pain in my neck. 

With both sides muted, I felt a strange pain in my shoulder, but it felt muscular: I think maybe I've had it clenched for 26 years.

The prospect of feeling this way permanently is exciting. And a little bit scary, which is weird. I guess it's similar to how people feel when they're getting out of prison after a long time, or leaving their beds after a very long illness. 

 

Yes, I can. It's this "notice", and the bias, censorship, and propaganda that underlies it.

Silencing dissent is the halfway marker on the road to totalitarianism and tyranny. 

"Fixing the human heart is like fixing an automobile. You have to tear everything apart, and see what's important. Then you can put it all back together."

Heard that in a movie somewhere and it stuck with me.

C. S. Lewis - On the Reading of Old Books

C. S. Lewis: A Lost Chapter of Herodotus

How To Celebrate Christmas...Medieval Style!

It just struck me the other night how hilarious this is:

(me, on the left, ca. 1975)

You stay classy, San Diego.

Christmas is always a traumatic time. Every year, I make myself my favorite thing: a big figgy pudding.

But then these people show up at the door, hammering, yelling, making a god-awful noise, demanding figgy pudding. "Bring us some figgy pudding! Bring us some figgy pudding! Bring it out here!" I tell them to go away, to leave me alone, but they keep on, "We won't go until we get some!" In the end, I always have to give them the damn figgy pudding just to make them shut up and go away.

I said years ago that John Williams was directly responsible for my having come to love classical music, and that much of the best composing now is being done for movies. Anyone who disdains film scores as not being worthy to be included with classical music, I think must not have heard Joshua Bell play the theme from Schindler's List. But this was the one that captured my heart and my imagination, when I was just a boy; and here it is having reached its full potential, at last. One of the world's great violinists playing Leia's Theme from Star Wars on a Stradivarius.

Christian Marriage by C.S. Lewis Doodle

Charity, II. Love by C.S. Lewis Doodle