If Theres A Memorial

 I keep seeing scenes of people at memorials reading things written by the people being memorialized.  This reeks of Trumpian narcissism to me, BUT it doesn't seem fair to just dump the content into the left-behind laps either(here, kid, YOU do it!  Good luck, we're all counting on you!)

So....here's something, anyway...I think, at the end of the life, the onlt thimg besides general usage of the English language that I was ever any good at ( I think I had a pretty solid grasp of that) was making a collosal ass out of myself.  It's genetic, too.  Me Dad's family were a vaudeville family, playing music and performing on the road.  My Dad and his brothers even released a 45.  

But anyway, making a huge jackass out of myself on the radio went well-so well that the run went for over three decades.  I kept showing up, they kept paying me, until the MRI that showed the golfball sized critter growing in my head.  That changed everything overnight, pretty literally, and events following went much more smoothly than expected.  I was incredibly lucky and surrounded by loving friends and literally supported in every sense by my amazing boyfriend Jim..  I also had great insurance and my employer  and my boss stood by me.  CRAZY luck.  

I'm grateful to my writer's group for helping me finish my first crappy novella.  I'm not downing myself here.  Your first novel isn't necessarily supposed to be a work of heartbreaking genius.  It's like the first pancake-quite often, the first pancake sucks.  The first panake is the one you're supposed to eat when nobody's looking.  If only novels worked like that, but it's online and on line is for fuckin EVER.  

But I want to talk about Paradise.  The great Paradise that nobody talks about in our Industrial Animal Farm of a Plutocracy is living without working.  It's of course looked down upon, but retired friends and non-working friends of many ilk have all told me the same thing:  It's the Secret to True Happiness.  The sign above Auchewitz was a Big Lie, as is the work ethic I was raised on.  The lesson in the book Animal Farm hit me like a punch when I read it at fifteen.  I cried in my room for a half hour over poor Boxer, dead in a muddy ditch.  He had been my hero, and I rather brainlessly continued to emulate that Yankee work ethic throughout my chequered work history as though working HARD could make up for not being able to add or subtract (numbers never stayed in place for me-they JUMP), not being able to tell right from left most days, especially when looking at a map, (wait, which left? The real one or the one if you're facing down?)  and not being able to decipher the simplest workings of a computer platform.  I've always been bafflingly stupid concerning the simplest things, but I can explain some pretty complex themes from literature and even hold forth at some length on the virtues of certain authors, composers or even the occasional philosopher, if that's your thing.  I'm also a damn good listener, and I can make you feel truly heard, if that's your thing. If  not, you'll find me pretty useless, as most people have.  And for the most part in most of my life, I felt useless.  Because I was.  I can carry a cocktail to a table.   I can tell you stories about the name and the origin of the beverage. But as for how much to charge you for it and how to give you your change back, I never was any use.  

I found in the last two years that the life-changing magic of not working did more for me than anything else ever has.  It's thee most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.  "What are you doing with your time?" the wife of a friend asked me.  Well, the hooks of the Work Ethic have not completely released me.  I finished twoa novellas and an o[p-ed piece.  That's a product, proof of labor.  But to answer the question, I spend most days in pretty close texting/calling/Duo contact with friends, keeping up with my medicines and MRIs and other treatments like PT and trying to up my blue light time on my Optune machine to hopefully shrink my brain tumor, I journal, I do things around the house, I manage my disability money carefully, I manage my medications and, mostly,  I consume stories in written and spoken and television and movie form.

Mainly, I am enjoying my time.  Because I don't have to work.  I have no dread of the near future in terms of "Oh, damn, I have to go to a place where I won't measure up and I'll get fired soon and then I'll be completely without income again and I'll have to go through this whole horrible thing again." or, "I have to go face that guy who hates me because I lived past 25 and dared to stay in radio and who wants me out of the building and is trying to figure out how to get me to quit."  or "I have to go back to that toxic atmosphere where I'm hated on general principal and I'm about to be fired any minute and just thinking about the place gives me a panic attack and makes me nauseous."

But even when I LOVED my gig and looked forward to going to work every day, there was a creeping subtext of, "This won't last.  At some point I'll be too old and they'll kick me out, and it won't be long now."

From there, the future was grim.  Because social Security kicks in LATE...in your mid-70s, if you want to get enough to live on.  So you have to keep working, in my case, menial, entry-level gruelling jobs into your mid-70s, doing jobs you have no ability to do.  That's a hellscape of a life, at best. 

But I was saved from all that.  I was rescued!  

By Cancer!

At the tender age of fifty-nine Cancer scooped me up and flew me away to the magical land of Disability.  Where you get a check every month thats just about enough to live on-if in fact you've also been rescued by a magical boyfriend who doesn't charge you rent and is your loving caregiver.  

So the truth is, you've got to have both...the generous magical boyfriend and the magical curse of terminal cancer, which will put you quickly on the Disability list, where you can claim the funds back that you spent your Work Harder life paying IN.

So my fairy-tale ending depended on a disease to rescue me.  While it may well have truncated my life span, I've often said that I wouldn't mind skipping "the drooling years".   

It's a fair trade: fifteen years of struggling drugery for a couple (as I write this it's already two years of survival) of the relative luxury of living without working.  And it IS luxurious.  To live, simply live, without working is a simple paradise.  You don't have to live on a tropical island to enjoy it.  You don't need gadgets, although a phone and a tablet are very nice, so you can text friends at will and keep up with what everyone is binging, but that's hardly luxurious by common first-world standards.  To get up when you want and nap when you want, to live how you want, to only talk to whomever you want, all of these are great luxuries of living As Yourself, living in your truth.  That's what we all really want, and that is so often what work really robs us of.  The Plutocracy's biggest crime is to rob us of ourselves, not just through exhaustion and skinflinting, but through a myriad of other insidious mechanisms that separate us from our essential nature.

I am so grateful for my astonishing luck.  I wish you the best of luck, too.

If you want to celebrate that, very cool.  If you want to do a tribute, donate to the wild animal sanctuary in my name or something.   Or adopt a bear.  Everybody wants to be a lion king or a tiger king so they have very low bear adoption. That's my jam.

If you feel inspired to sing, Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, that's the tribute I would like.

But if it's a drunken chorus, make it a safe one, fuck nuggets.

I love you.