Binge Watching Therapy

Shoyu on Rice part two:  As the news of my current condition continues to sink in, well I start wondering.  How lucky was I to not have another heart attack, the timing of the angiogram, a wife that has no problems taking me off at ER at odd hours and her gradual acceptance of my unusualness.  And of course, why me.

As I think about those possibilities and wait for the late night infusion of streaming typing, I decided to watch the Kaminsky Method.  Alan Arkin and Michael  Douglass star in a dramedy series on friendship and life in the elder years of life.  For some reason it made me laugh out loud.  I was on the     fringe of gloom and doom when I started to watch episode one.

The series forced me to identify with a lot of the attitudes and issues they lived.  The prostrate issue was hilarious for us old guys, but the difficulty in accepting friendship and the effects of friendship that are not necessarily the sweet and kind results of the Hallmark channel.  Things you that are at the tip of your tongue but are reluctant to release upon the world, especially in today's oppressive fear of offending anyone.  There exists a cruelty of friendship, and how we endure the joy in torturing each other.  The difficulty in admitting wrong when we can easily get away with things by just being old.

Ok, It's time to move beyond the bypass, cancer, missing colon, chemo brain, neuropathy, stents, endless prescriptions,  stiffness, pending medicare, but not ignore that they exist or have occurred .  The disturbing thought is that it is getting easier to see why people give up.  I will be OK as long as I don't end up in a nursing home where they put shoyu on my rice.