Reluctant Eye

November 7, 2022 hermanshermitLeave a comment

This life keeps passing, the events unfold, day after day, week after week, all the same. The children get older, the tiny gods of our religion. The faces in the mirror get subtly more lined with each year. Doubts creep in, anxieties, “is this all there is?”

There was a point to all this, once upon a time. There was a belief that a life was a success, a failure, or mediocre, and the habits practiced would yield uncommon results. Yet, that’s not how it feels. It feels endless, futile, a re-enactment of a drama from another time.

“Daddy? What’s wrong?” she asks. A head shake, a pat on her head. “Nothing, sweetheart, it’s nothing.”

These are the same thoughts and feelings that millions have had before; this is cold comfort, of course. A burst of inspiration, a parting of the clouds, a transformation could change everything, but it doesn’t. Mundanity chokes the miraculous. Nothing disproves the assumptions of despair and nihilism.

She takes my hand and holds it.

Rootless

May 4, 2022 hermanshermitLeave a comment

If you should spurn the gifts of

Your fathers, you will swim in

Open sea without tether

Rats

April 16, 2022 hermanshermitLeave a comment

I dreamed I was a student or teacher, and had a bucket of rats that were tame and very good pets, as good or better than dogs. They had various patterns to their coats, more like hamsters.

I passed them around to the class, who petted them. I talked about the book “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh.”

I remember we had several hamsters when I was growing up. When I was 13, for my science fair, my dad bought thirty white Sprague-Dawley rats for me to keep in the bathroom, to do an experiment about whether their learning would transfer from one maze to another, versus just the specific maze experience.

I was supposed to pet all the rats every day so that the experiment wasn’t confounded by anxiety towards humans.

I didn’t have much experience raising rodents. In their aquarium cage, they knocked over the water dish. Some of the rats got dehydrated, probably died, and were cannibalized by their fellows. I found bones and a tail.

I was horrified. Did I tell my Dad? I don’t remember. But I avoided them. My Dad got mad at me for not socializing them enough, but it was traumatizing.

I got a “Superior” ribbon for the science fair, but wasn’t selected for the State finals.

The dream probably springs from an insight I had yesterday, that I needed to be a super scientist to make up for my failings as a kid to my Dad. I’m a physician repeating my final year of residency, studying for my boards, which I’ve failed twice already. I’ve been pretty depressed for a few years now, and the dynamic with my Dad weighs on me, though he’s pretty supportive now.

The dream was probably some wish fulfillment, about how, since I didn’t socialize the rats, the experiment failed, so now I was making sure all the dream rats were socialized.