A Sort of Stoicism

I am heavy with chemicals, dull and slow.  It appears, however, that I may finally be on the road to recovery, at least partially.  I must return to work one day, perhaps today.  I know it is not good for me.  As sick as I was, lying in the hospital bed with nothing to do did more for me than anything, except, of course, the heavy chemicals).  Maybe it was the Vicodin that put me at ease.  But the work world, the factory, I know is ruining me.  I used to love the job, but like the American culture, things have changed.  And I have not so much.  Not voluntarily.  And it is the involuntary part that is the killer.

My friend wrote me one word about the illness: "Stoicism."

Of course.  That and whining.  A whiny sort of stoicism may be just the thing.  With a little self-aware humor of the dark kind.  Hemingway's mistake was leaving out the humor.  By all accounts, he was not a funny man.

I should have marked the passage when I was reading the novel, but I didn't.  In grand chaos of Hemingway's posthumous "The Garden of Eden," Katherine is crazy and depressed.  She confesses her fear of dying to her husband David.

"But what if I am dead," she asks him.

"Don't let it happen till it happens."

The world is full of zombies.  It is difficult not to join them.

For a while I used the pseudonym "Woody Hemingway."  A funny, whining sort of stoic.