Gotta kick this illness, I says to myself. I have things to do. I think it’d be uncivilized of me to go out into a coffee shop, sit down to write and add a little hacking cough to the ambiance. Give me some music to lift my spirits.

Not a damn thing started streaming.

I thought about my dreams for a while. That triggered Tom Petty and ‘Learning to Fly’. Naw, not today, Tom.

My sister-in-law’s plight entered the thinking stream. Her husband has gone through daunting treatments in trying to beat brain cancer. She’s been with him all the way. He’s in hospice at home this week after taking a fall and breaking several ribs. Methotrexate was added to his med diet to combat some of his brain tumors. MTX is one of those good drugs with lots of bad side-effects. My wife is enduring a shot of it a week and hates it. With my sister-in-law’s man, the MTX is munching on his brain, affecting his motor skills. He can no longer walk. His appetite is gone. Tick tock, I think with sadness. But we’re all always dying from the moment we’re born. Sure, but it’s easier if that’s going on behind the curtains, and we can live with the illusion that death is far away.

Such visions that I see, thinking of him, calls to mind Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. Great song, thanks, but not the uplift I seek today. Yet, my mind continued streaming Floyd. “Forward, he cried, from the rear, and the front ranks died.” That just embittered me as I recall how many pols, like Trump, have not served, getting deferments to avoid war, but stand quite willing to send people to death, and mock or denigrate those who did serve, passionately, proudly and braving.

Which triggered some Lee Greenwood into the stream. I shut it down. The Ramones, ‘I Wanna Be Sedated,’ streamed in. After letting that flow through and decreeing it too down, I brought up the Foo Fighters and ‘Learn to Fly’. 

Yes, that fits. Life is so much trail and error. We’re always trying to fly, and often crash during our tests. The thing is to get up and fly again.

From nineteen ninety-nine – a simpler time, wasn’t it? – the Foo Fighters.