FRIDAY! Moose Drool and Wage Slavery (Stream of Consciousness - you have been cautioned)

[Guest]

Wow, what a fracked-up week!

I work in a place that defines the word anarchy. They've got a gerrymandered hodgepodge mish-mash of applications (that I'm not responsible for, thank goodness) that I have to do network accounts for.

What a mess! Barely manageable in the best of times, but this week I have been getting dinged for network account jobs I did two weeks ago. They were screwed up; that is, I was making silly little boo-boos that I shouldn't have been making - what with being a Sys Admin and all (and here I thot that sytems adminstration was the glamorous brass ring - remind me to tell you about the Hollywood Rose analogy - but I digress).

Anyway, I had to mea culpa to the boss about these mistakes, because I realized what was going on:

3 weeks ago yesterday, my skydiving brother Josh Whipple offed himself, and it's caused me to zombie out at work.

It's amazing to me how our culture has so disassociated itself from death and grief that it just seems that we have this "Drive On" mentality; as though we are going so fast that we "don't have time to bleed". But I submit to you that if we don't bleed now, we will surely bleed later.

I, for example, have become so conditioned by cultural training and bias that I cannot cope with grief in the way a thinking, feeling person should. I suppress it, and I therefore end up getting weird and angry with people (in the case of the passing of my mother-in-law [yes, go ahead and laugh. Wait til it's your turn] a couple of years ago), or doing The Zombie on the job in the case of Josh's sad passing.

I've been better since this past Sunday, however; my skydiving brother Barry Brummit was the officiator at Josh's memorial (and he was the officiator for Josh's wedding back in 2001, BTW), and he did an outstanding job of communicating to people that it was okay to feel upset or angry, even angry at Josh himself in order to work through the grieving process.

Barry, if you see this, many, many thanks to you for your hard work at making Josh's remembrance come off so well. I'll repeat here the words I spoke to you then:

Though we are not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven, that which we are, we are.

One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

-- Tennyson, Ulysses

"Whether we shall meet again I know not
Therefore, Our everlasting farewell take.

Farewell for ever and ever, dear Brutus, and I we do meet again, why, we shall smile,

And if not, why then this parting was well made."

-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

mh

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"The mouse does not know life until it is in the mouth of the cat."