Early check-out

It was a term I used to use more often, back when I considered self-destruction a more arguable proposition, but didn't want to give it more seriousness than I thought it deserved.  OK to consider, but not OK to consider gravely, so to speak.

Now as I am sailing through completely different waters, with a lot more natives chucking spears at my ship from the shore, I am thinking more about involuntary early check-out, and wondering about a new term.  Early departure.  Early exit.  And maybe not so early?  If I go tomorrow, it isn't a case of the good dying young, even if I were to claim "good."  Not yet at three score and ten, but not early.  Lincoln was 56, Kennedy 46, Mozart 35, Alexander 32.  Now that's early.

So just, as my mother always recommended, leave 'em laughing?  Tipping the cap, glad for what you had, and with a smile?

There's the ticket.  The late matinee.

The tedium of old guy medical stuff

Once more into the ring.

Used to be that I was a healthy dude.  Always, for years and years, maybe a cold, maybe a broken bone or a gash, but nothing light's out.  Nothing even light's dimmed.

But for the last five years the dimmer has been twisting back and forth, letting me know that this health thing that everyone seems to know about is something I should know about, with big bills and scary prospects and a lot of science that is, at least, interesting, and language that catches on and catches up.  Like, a few years ago, vertigo, then cancer, metastasis, and radiation.  Last summer, a clavicle, then a stroke, or no maybe not.  A flock of acronyms: CT, PET, MRI, TIA, EEG.  And now a new one, a word that I never really thought medical, but now learn is.  Very medical.  Seizure.

I guess my first thoughts about seizures are combative, or at least physically assertive - he was seized. The platoon was seized.  Or credit remedial - the assets were seized.  Taking possession by force. 

But now I learn  that it's about a whole panoply of stuff that can happen to your brain.  The wonderfully European gran mal and petit mal.  Epileptic.  Partial.  All of it, more or less, an electrical fault across the circuits.

It is now my current diagnosis, this time of a short period of really falling off the vocabulary/grammar bus, unprovoked, just something that happened, just something.  Couldn't talk right for a while, then it came back.

J’étais saisi. 

But you really don't want a seizure, 63 years into the play.  You don't know the lines and you really, really don't know the last scene.  They really don't know how you got there, or if you will get there again, or was last summer a seizure, and this, or just this, or neither.

J’étais saisi.

Sounds better in French, non?