That's What People Do

Today in a meeting, I was presenting some idea to a group of supervisors and their (our) boss when an excruciating pain shot behind my left eyeball.  It was severe and I lost my concentration.  Feeling the fool, I had to excuse myself by holding my hand to my eye and saying just that--I had a terrible pain and had lost my concentration.  I am a bit of an ironman to them, I think, a ruffian and scoundrel, so this momentary vulnerability was something for them.  Of course I had to say that I was probably stroking out which seemed to relieve the tension.  "I didn't want to say anything," said the lady on my left, "but. . . . "  I hated the entire thing, of course.  The pain didn't go away and I felt a bit disoriented.  I couldn't tell if the colors in the room had changed or not.  There was no tingling in my arms or neck.  I do not have high blood pressure.  A fellow in the room who is an athlete and has coached rowing at Ivy League schools asked if I had floaters in my eyes.  Long ago I told you all about my eye "exploding."  It has done that twice now and I've been to two retinologists, both of whom did nothing but poke around and say that it might heal on its own.  Apparently some tissue in front of the retina is tearing away.  I see terrible flashes in the dark, scary things, and my vision gets worse and worse with big, translucent pieces of tissue floating around in my eyes making shadows and blurs.  Some days when they are all floating in the same direction, I am practically blind.  It has gotten much worse lately so that I worry about not being able to do much of anything that requires vision.  But complaining to people can't heal it, so I don't.  Still, his question had me thinking.

The pain did not go away and my neck was terribly and painfully stiff, so I decided that I was sorely dehydrated.  I've been drinking alcohol and not consuming water (I've been practically hydrophobic), so I bought some Gatorade which didn't seem to help.  Then I drank one more.

I stumbled through the rest of the day in a funk, left work, and went to eat some sushi.  And sake.  I thought to myself, "that is silly," but I remembered what Roger Sterling said:  "That's what men do."  Here.  You watch it for yourself (link).  You can laugh at it or ridicule the idea, but it is an ideology that serves and I was ingrained with it long, long ago.  Not the drinking part, but that there are things that men do.  We suffer silently and take our pleasures where we can because, as Draper says later in scene, the universe is uncaring.

After sushi and sake, I came home and poured a scotch.  It was good.  I had work to do to get pictures out to models clamoring for more images, and I had a ton of emails to write. . . so I poured one more.

I felt no worse.  I may even have felt better.

I think of the men I grew up with.  They had been through the wars and they knew suffering.  They had seen it close up and they knew that they would die, and they knew that something terrible was likely to happen before they did.  So they smoked and ate and drank and got bellies and coughs and bad hearts and died at sixty.  Sometimes they lived longer.  But when they died, they didn't cry out for much.  They didn't whine or ask for therapists or grief counselors.

I didn't like most of them most of the time, but I did and do like this about them.  They didn't expect much and they enjoyed things as quietly as they suffered them.

Of course, you can confute that if you want and probably easily.  But that is what I think about when things go wrong.  The cosmos doesn't give a damn about suffering.  Nor about pleasure.  I'm pissed off about my eyes, but that doesn't help.  There are lots of people who suffer earlier and worse.  I've had it pretty good.  So when the time comes, when things go very, very wrong, don't pity me or tell me all the things that counselors say.  We'll just say what people used to say.  Everything will work out.  We'll be fine.

That's what people do.