Everybody has Something Going On

This is how I sit zazen now. I need it for this convo. photo by Leor. my daughter's feet and my breathing hose gesture supportSitting in my wheelchair in the park, a neighbor who in all my encounters with him has never asked one question about myself approaches:

Neighbor: so, how are you?

me: ok...

Neighbor: but...[gestures, meaning, why are you in a chair?]

me: I have a kind of ALS. 

Neighbor: what?

me: Lou Gehrig's.

Neighbor: OH!

me: it's lower motor neuron only, so I'm getting weaker; it's hard to breathe and talk, and I'm dying.

Neighbor: Well, everybody has something going on.

[I could stop there, really, but it goes on.]

Like. my wife...after the pandemic, decided she wanted to be an unmarried woman. She got all involved with causes like Black Lives Matter and feminist things and decided she wanted to be completely independent, like if she just wanted to volunteer in Afghanistan she could do that.

me: [exhausted from talking but trying to stay polite while challenging his aspirational ownership of his wife.] Would you have stopped her from going?

Neighbor: well, it's hard for me since she has been the matriarch of the family, organizing the gatherings, our whole social life...and she wants mediation but my friends say "protect yourself" and get a lawyer or she'll take you for all you've got. 

[hmm]

me: but you still care about each other, right?

Neighbor: well, I'm in therapy. The therapist keeps asking what I'm feeling and I tell her how I'm coping but she wants to know about feelings...

me: what about her?

Neighbor: She's very brisk. The other day she came in, vacuumed and did the dishes and then left again.

[why didn't he clean? no wonder she prefers Afghanistan?]

me: what did she do before the pandemic?

Neighbor: She was a public school teacher. She was the major breadwinner since I lost my job in 2006.

[more bladdiblah about their finances until I'm rescued by my visiting father and stepmother whom I had sent for a walk so I could rest from talking?]

Would you like to know how I feel or how I cope?

My current TV binge is Midnight Mass, where a very good 49-year old actress is playing the mother of a 39-year old actor who is the complex center of the story. She is inappropriately chipper and unwaveringly supportive of her son. The lead credit is given to the aspiring girlfriend. She has no character that I can perceive but she does have fluffy lips; oh! and the actress is married to the director. A more pivotal female is a dangerous church promoter who seems to be trying to do everyone in. Then there is a multiracial young woman who is disabled after a drunk accidentally shoots her spine. Miraculously she begins to walk again and forgives the drunk. The drunk is an astonishing actor, revealing depths of suffering and compassion. The priest, multi layered and charismatic, councils the son who is obviously developing as a human.

Don't get me wrong. I'm into this show, just as I was into American Horror Story but couldn't help noticing the uncritical exploitation of the mediocre mom.

I don't even know how to close this post. I can't escape the poisonous patriarchy. Haha, no, I guess I will!

October 3, 2021