Going back a bit to the Fear Pyramid, or Fear-a-mid, or Fear-amid, if you will.

Extinction doesn’t really get under my skin so much. Even if it’s old age that does me in, fuck it because it’s already happening. We’re all facing the same thing. There is a beginning, and there is most certainly an end. Some people believe in new beginnings beyond that. I don’t. The very idea sounds like a treadmill to me, or more appropriately, the very embodiment of the myth of Sisyphus. Keep ending up back where you started? Or worse?

No, not into it.

Eternal life?

Fuck you.

No, the time here, as much as it seems way too short, should be enough. Move along and make room for someone else.

The one that gives me the creeps is mutilation, or the compromise of the body itself. The decline scares me. Prolonged pain scares me. It’s not the fear of losing a limb or anything like that. It is simply loss of mobility and movement. Movement is truly all that keeps me sane and level. It strikes me that aging is a form of slow mutilation. That leads to inevitable loss of autonomy, the third level of the pyramid. Mobility is my autonomy. Without that, the other fears, right up to Ego-Death, will follow.

Just ruminating on that at the moment. It’s difficult not to. Having just been through another battery of tests that resulted in nothing conclusive, this is… limbo. A doctor can sit you down… sit me down… and give me a rundown of what the tests are, what they’re looking for, and what the possible outcomes could be. None of it is pleasant but you do what you have to do. You prepare for the worst. You wrap your head around how the worst might compromise everything on the pyramid between ego-death and extinction. You come to some sort of peace with it, or if not peace then acceptance. Then the tests turn up nothing at all, and you’re left with mystery.

All the acceptance pisses into a big open hole with mystery. There are symptoms. There are no obvious answers. No answers for the headaches which the doctors say are cluster headaches but with atypical pattern. There are the occasional vision brownouts that they now say are not signs of a tumor or a past or pending stroke. All the bloodwork comes back normal. They tell me I am healthy.

I am quite obviously not healthy.

Thank you.

Now we circle back to the word “psychosomatic.” The common misinterpretation of this word is that it’s synonymous with hypochondria and it’s all in the head.

It is all in the head.

But it’s not manufactured. It’s not made up.

Back to square one. It’s really kind of funny though, in a dark way, that not having a stroke or a tumor is more frightening than the thought of having one. For today though, because it is all about one day at a time, I’m just going to deal with the heatwave. I will be okay.

I will be okay.

I’m not okay.

I will be.