A fast Refuge

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Thursday, January 17th, 2013 – 13:50

I love the rain. It mutes the dissonance that pierces our ears daily, and it slows the pace of life a bit.  Rain can either be babbles of joy or missiles of napalm.  I tent to think of raindrops as memories captured in a translucent shell for a short time before crashing to the earth to form new one’s.

While on campus, I usually walk from one class to another even though the buildings are roughly 2km apart. It was only lightly misting a cool spray, so I sauntered over to the other building in about five minutes. Two and a half hours later, the cool mist had transformed into a bitterly cold deluge. I was ill equipped with just a leather jacket and backpack, but I decided to run the 2km irregardless of the consequences.

So, I started running, pacing myself as I went, through a myriad of deep and shallow puddles. I made it to the pavement and proceeded to continue on even though I couldn’t see due to the torrent running down my face. A car flew by and covered me with a frigid blanket of water. Just as I stopped to look for shelter, a woman in a BMW M6 stopped in the road and offered me a ride.

I went around to the passenger side, cracked open the door, and said, “But, I’ll get your interior wet”.

“Get in before you catch a cold”, she yelled whilst motioning.

She asked where I was going, and I obliged with the building number. I must have said “Thank You” a hundred times during the short drive to the building. When we arrived at the building entrance, the rain was still pouring. I asked if I could pay her for her trouble. She, of course, said, “No”.

I offered to buy her lunch, but to no avail. Finally, I asked her name.

Smiling, she said, “You’ll see me again”.

I said ‘Thank You’ about ten more times and ran into the building, waiving as I entered.

There are still some nice and decent people in this grey world. Don’t give up hope on humanity yet. If we take the pessimistic view that everyone is out to screw us over, then that’s exactly what we’ll get. Even though I was soaked from head to toes, I was still grateful to get into a car with the heat on full blast and receive a short ride.

Only wimps and women carry umbrellas. ;)

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Really?  Is it all downhill from here?  Are my greatest works behind me?  Am I to disappear into obscurity?  Are the best relationships in my life behind me?  Am I ever going to get married?  Will there ever be any wee JD’s roving the earth looking for trouble?  I ponder these questions and more a lot.  The older I get, the more concerned I become about what kind of legacy, if any, I will leave behind.

Hopefully, I will be on this whacky rock another 40 years.  We don’t know what tomorrow will bring or even if there will be a tomorrow.  The best thing to do is to live life to the full of our potential.  We can do a lot more than we realise.  The human spirit is far more powerful than we can contemplate.  I, like so many others, am a prime example of how the impossible can become possible.

For those of you that already know all of this, please feel free to skip to the next couple of paragraphs.

A day after I was born, I contracted spinal meningitis from someone in the hospital.  I died and came back on numerous occasions over the following days.  They told my family to go ahead and make preparations for my wake.   I didn’t give up and neither did my mother or father.  The fever accompanied by spinal meningitis caused blindness in one eye, hypopituitarism, hypothyroidism, hypoglycaemia, Addison’s disease, and a multitude of other developmental problems.

I developed at an alarming slow rate.  I don’t think I spoke a word ‘til I was three.  I believe my first word was Milk.  The docs said I was retarded and suggested that I be put in a home for such children.  My parents, thankfully, wouldn’t do it.  At the time, they were young and didn’t have the resources or knowledge they have now.  They both worked two jobs in order to pay my medical bills.  Regardless of the issues I may have with my parents, they sacrificed a lot for me.  The older I get, the more I realise that.

I had to wear leg braces to straighten align my feet properly.  Me and Forest Gump have a lot in common.  I had terrible seizures caused by low blood sugar, but it took a young intern to figure out what was causing them.  He was my GP for 36 years and has retired!

When I finally made it to grade school, I wore the clothes of a two year-old.  They didn’t figure out until I was seven that I had/have a dysfunctional pituitary gland.  So, yet another young doctor started pumping me with HGH (Human Growth Hormone), which is now illegal.  And, it is from dead people!  For eleven years, I was stuck with a 5cm long needle every other day.  Sounds like fun, aye?

They told my mother every year that I’d be lucky to reach the next year.  I’ve been poked and prodded more effing times than I would ever like to recount.

When I was 17, I looked like I was ten.  High school was a very precarious time of my life.  It was hell, but it was hell for most people.  But, I struggled through it.

I’m getting sober and tired, so I’ll rush this rambling along.

 

In 2004, my current doctor told me if I didn’t start taking medication again, I’d be dead in six months.  Needless to say, I’m taking everything that I’m supposed to take to keep me alive.

The same year, my orthopaedic surgeon said I’d be in a wheelchair in five years.  I’m still walking, running, and hiking on a daily basis.

The school district placed me in special ed. classes for the disabled.  My mother took me out, because she said I wasn’t being mentally challenged.  She was right.  I had to work harder, but I prevailed.

Doctors told her that I’d never be able to live on my own.  I moved out over 18 years ago and haven’t been back.

They also said I’d never be able to drive.  While I’ve only technically been driving for a little over five years, I’ve been behind the wheel for decades.

They said I had frontal lobe damage and wouldn’t be able to properly communicate verbally.  I do fair for a southern boy.

They went on to add that I had a low mental capacity and that school should not be a priority.  Wrong again.  I’m on the presidents list at the University and have stopped a liberal lawyer in his or her tracks with facts and figures.  Anytime you can get a lawyer to stop talking and listen, you’re fairly competent.

You can do anything, if you work hard enough for it.  That lad that used to believe that anything was possible is still inside of me.  Even though I still have to deal with adversity everyday, I still keep my head held high and work towards my goals.  Life is hard.  Deal with it and make the best out of a bad situation.

Candour

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In my previous post, Tipping Point, I discussed the professor and her views.  I may have been a wee bit harsh.  Today she did something that knocked me off my feet.  As I was leaving the classroom, she was talking to my study buddy/friend/eh.  The door closed behind me, but I stuck my ear up to it because I’m nosey.

I heard a pause, and then the professor said, “He loves you, you know.”.

“Jefferson?”  I heard her ask with curiosity.

“Yep”, she said whilst papers ruffled in the background.

I could hear tittering after that comment.

By this time, one of the other girls was listening with me.

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face”, said the professor.

I smiled and laughed with the naughty woman at the door and left.

It is nice to know that someone notices the things I do.

Tipping Point

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I need someone to kick me in the arse and tell me to bite me lower lip and take it like a man.  Take what, you ask?  A liberal professor that teaches at my University.  She’s not a bad person, just a woman that tries to push her views upon the rest of us.  I don’t think that politics belong in the classroom.  The class is supposed to be about Juvenile Justice. 

Everything she says revolves around race.  There are far more reason than race that cause juvenile delinquency.  Last Thursday, I had been sitting there quietly for half an hour whilst she ranted about race and how unequal things are in America between ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’.  Twenty or Thirty years ago I would have agreed with her, but not now.  A minority has just as much, if not more, of a chance than anyone else.  If you want to get technical, I’m a minority.  Blue-eyed people only make up 2.2% of the world population.  And, green-eyed people only make up .006% of the world population.  I’m somewhere in between, I guess.  Mind you, these statistics were taken from Wikipedia and are only estimates. 

There are several things that cross the line with me.  You don’t talk badly about the disabled.  You don’t make fun of Southerners.  You don’t make fun of Americans without expecting a retort from me.  And, you don’t make fun of the Irish without getting a counter from me.  I know what you’re going to say, if you’re Irish.  We don’t need your help, JD.  And, we didn’t ask for it.  I know you don’t need my help, but there is something at the core of my being that requires me to stand up what is right and to stand up for those that are not there to retort nonsense.  I’d stand up for a Yankee just as much as I would a Southerner, if I thought that he or she was unjustly being ridiculed.

Back to the professor.  She said that ‘white’ people try use the Irish as an example of Europeans being enslaved, but the Irish have never been enslaved.  “That’s a joke”, she said.  By this point, I had been listening to her for half an hour and my pulse shot up to at least 150 bpm.  I was so mad that my hands and arms were shaking.  If that would have been a man, he’d still be picking his teeth up off the floor with broken fingers.  It wasn’t necessarily what she said, it was how she jokingly played it off. 

With my arms still shaking, I went into a five minute brief history of Irish history.  After interrupting me several times, she finally said that the Irish weren’t scribed on the US Constitution as three fifths of a person.  So, I had to shut up deal with the rest of her rhetoric.   I didn’t have a comeback.  How in the effing hell am I supposed to come back from that one?

Then, one of the country girls defended saying the N word because it is in the media all the time.  The professor and her went back and forth arguing about it for thirty minutes.  There was no way I was going anywhere near that.  That would be political suicide. 

Going into her class is like pulling teeth.  It is the same old new age liberal bunk.  She has every right to be liberal and I have every right to be a Traditionalist with a tinge of old school liberal to mix it up a bit.   I know their playbook and she is reading from it word for word.  The 2012 election is drawing near, so they are pulling out every trick in the book.  One thing that they are pushing in the media is to perpetuate white guilt.  Why should I feel guilty about something that happened way before my time?  This presidential race will be about race once again. 

The sad thing is that most young people, black and white, know nothing about their families history.  How can a person make an informed decision without knowing their own history and the history of the country the live in?  How can we hope to not to repeat the past if we don’t know the past?  America will fall from the inside, if we don’t stop bickering amongst ourselves. 

The last thing I said to her was that we need to move on.  We need to know our history, but we should not be confined by it.  It is a shrine to visit, not a cell to be jailed in.  We are adrift on perilous seas with sails torn to shreds.  Will we let the winds push us into the craggy shore or will we work together and row towards the sandy beach?  Time will tell. 

I would like nothing better than to spend my life taking serene photographs and write poetry, but I can’t.  If I let the politicians and professors alike go unchecked, they’ll be no country left for my nieces, nephews, and my kids (big if there).  The old attitude of just letting them be will not suffice anymore.  I will be stomping the streets this election season.  Leave no stone unturned, I say.

So, onto my question, what is the best way to deal with this lady whom I respect but dislike politically? 

P.S.:  A few weeks ago, I contacted An Garda Siochána about interviewing a Garda.  They got back to me within a few hours and properly told me to feck off.  It was quite hilarious.