APPROACHING ONE YEAR BRAIN SURGERY ANNIVERSARY

I'll probably post on the day itself, but only a few days away it occurs to me how lucky and how grateful I am for that "luck" of having mostly recovered, at least in the ways that count for most of us.

I still, as anyone who has read this blog for more than a year knows, have almost no interest in making the lists I made compulsively all my life before the surgery. And my taste continues to manifest changes I would never have predicted (as in feeling attracted to Meryl Streep and the young Mitzi Gaynor (!) when I see them in a film on TV even though when not viewing them I still feel no attraction toward them and would deny I did if it weren't for the strange reality of the attraction that overwhelms me when I see their moving image on the screen).

I now and then reread books I once cherished and am having various reactions that swing to either affirmation of my original taste or rejection of it. The kind of thing that might happen over time anyway, but in this case happened overnight, the night of the operation, as I slowly come to realize.

In the meantime, the main revelation of my post-op slow return of my faculties left me dismayed as well as amazed at the state of the political discourse in the USA, and in the almost one year that's elapsed since, that's only been emphasized even more, as in the rightwing media's brouhaha over Obama's trip to India etc.

The clips John Stewart showed last night from Beck et. al. were so ludicrously extreme in their lies and innuendo, anyone coming out of being in a coma for several years would think it was a hoax. Not the kind it actually is, but intended as a goof rather than to move people to anger and rage toward a president who has produced more positive social legislation to help his fellow citizens in under two years, than the last one did in eight years, but not enough to counteract the effects of the crippling or elimination of social policies that help us all by that same last administration's eight year run.

Oh well.

[PS: After I wrote the above, found this Rolling Stone article from a link at Ron Silliman's blog.]