one step beyond.....

Life .

I'm sitting here staring at that word thinking about how to finish the sentence and as I do it looks odd to me, All by itself it looks too small and puny. I mean life is a big deal and I'm not sure those four letters do it justice.

It's like when you get a word in your head and you just repeat it and repeat it until it just becomes nonsense. Don't pretend that you've never done that. Oh, really? Okay, pick a word , right now, and repeat it for 20 or 30 seconds. Do it!

Sounds odd after a bit, right?

Well, that was a major digression, what a way to start. I don't think that I have ever wrote about the fact , that for the past three years I have been the principal care taker/giver, whatever you want to call it for my Mother. Who has dementia/ Alzheimer's, whatever you want to call it.

I would have to have three blogs to be able to even come close to describing what this experience is like. But I just have the one. Which I will admit I use as a refuge to dawdle on the minutiae of my life, I have always been a fan of that small telling detail, that speaks volumes- if you ever meet me in person ask me about Jamie Lee Curtis and the sock.

Tonight I will break with tradition and make a passing comment about my life right now. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that two people live in my house My mother and I. (if you are a completest you can add the cat) Ask my Mother and she will tell you that four people live here- Herself, the Man, The Woman, and then me.

The list order for my mother is not arbitrary, for that is the hierarchy that exists here. I come in a distant third to the Woman and I shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as the Man. The imaginary people outrank me.

I apologize if this sounds flippant- believe me at times it can be soul crushing, but that's a conversation for another blog.

What I will say is that she knows when they are here and when they are not here, she hears them when they speak, she can see them and gets frustrated when I don't.

They are real.

Today I thought back to a talk I heard Timothy Leary give years ago. It was a wide ranging discussion , mostly Leary answering questions from the audience. He was a nut, but a charming and compelling one. Of course the subject of LSD came up, the audience giggled in anticipation, and he gave a long considered response.

Part of his response included the idea that the mind altering properties of LSD opened the user up to other dimensions and that you could see the world in a new way. He said he had the experience many times of being in a room and seeing creatures, not unlike leprechauns, walking among the other "real" people in the room. Often they would play practical jokes on folks, knock a drink off a table or look up a young ladies skirt. He went on to say that the creatures were aware that he could see them and that they would smile and wave at him.

To Leary- They are real.

I draw no conclusion, I just make the observation.