Random Thoughts

 

     The morning of the 14th of June, 2024, began normally enough. Tink, my lap guard dog, watered a postage stamp of the backyard lawn while I pried the lid off a big can of Prince Albert and filled my pipe for the first dose of a fresh day. Everything was going great.

     Then the bluebirds of happenstance swept in from the unknown. On our way back into the house I became dizzy, whirly. light headed. When I reached the top porch step, I fell backward, down to the lower level and broke my neck in five places.  

    One hundred days later, in late September, I made it back home, after a life flight to Spokane, a session with a neurosurgeon who patched vertebrae with what in Xrays look to be parts from a metal gate, a fitting for a neck brace, a week in the hospital, a month in a Spokane rehab joint in which I contracted Covid and had my wallet stolen, then two months in a facility in Walla Walla with physical therapy services where I still go twice a week to be helped. I am free of the neck brace, but am a currently a toddler, learning to walk again. I no longer use tobacco. 

     During those hundred days, I had three industrial meals and two hours of physical therapy per day as my only obligations, There was ample time to ruminate. The primary subject of this process was “WTF (What the fruitcake) happened?” Three months of this and I concluded nothing of substance, but I came to believe that change is the only constant, that impermanence reigns. I became a Sofarist. More about this later. Here are some thoughts that bounced around my dizzy brain.

     As a nation, we live with a money sickness, capitalism, and have normalized the existence of billionaires without understanding how large a number is one billion.  One billion is a thousand millions. This is waay out of scale for a working person. If one had a job that paid $500 per hour, forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, one would earn a million dollars per year. It would take a thousand years to make a billion bucks. When there are folks sleeping under bridges on cardboard, no one person should be a billionaire. 

     The reader may recall that 2024 was an election year. All media (TV, radio, phone) were infested with political dung. I am registered in the voter rolls as an Independent, but I am probably better characterized as a socialist anarchist because I believe in the Birthday Party and its Nobody for President campaign. Why Nobody? Because Nobody cares, Nobody cooks better than Mom, Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen, Nobody is minding the store, and Nobody knows what is going to happen.

     Sofarism is a nod to impermanence and an offshoot of Momentarianism, my pal Merce’s credo, that urges one to live in the now.  As his business card puts it: “Now, more than ever. All we have is right now. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. The business is isness.  Fight couth decay.”

     My Dad used to say “Sometimes I get the feeling that there are smarter people than me.” Perhaps we should look at some of the smart folks’ ideas about change. In western philosophy, Heraclitus is given credit for the notion that everything is in flux, that s person can’t stick the same foot in the same river twice. Immanuel Kant said we can only experience change as a continuous flow through time, with each state being the necessary consequence of the previous one, and this continuity is essential for our perception of a stable world. A Chinese proverb says that plans cannot keep up with changes. The concept of impermanence is prominent in Buddhism, and it is also found in various schools of Hinduism and Jainism.

    Sofarism’s basic tenet is “So far, so good,” recognizing that we all live in the moment, but that everything could change at any time.  By including “So far” to our assessments of current states of being, we confess that we don’t know what is coming next, as in “Well, it is a beautiful day, so far” or “I’ve had three hotdogs, so far” or “Haven’t caught Covid, so far” or “That’s about as much random thoughtery as I can manage, so far.” Peace.

            

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