Life and Almost Death - For Real

Well, I have been watching M*A*S*H reruns (not that there is anything else) and I caught a huge error. Father Mulchahey is writing a letter to his sister, and mentions that it is the day before Christmas. They showed a chopper coming in with wounded... over the mountains of Korea, covered with... green bushes? Oh, come on. The winters there are frigid, long, torturous seasons. The foliage there does the same thing as here. It falls off. No way - no matter how warm or unusual a season it has been - the leaves did not fall off.

I find that amusing, but still. How do people not see this stuff? I'm sometimes not good with the details, but that seems to just leap out and slap me. Strange, isn't it?

I'm having a bad day. I almost choked to death, I have a complaint careening down the road, and I had a lot of weirdness. I like the weirdness. Sometimes it is a little heavy, but I do like it. However, choking was not what I had in mind. That was bloody well scary. I went to the Grounds department to bring the mail and payroll to Janet. It was a great visit, but I went away with a headache. So I went to the kitchen and John wasn't able to find me the magic aspirin - they get this weird stuff called Pain-Something and they are huge - massive. I tried to swallow it and choked. It scared the piss out of me. But I whacked my chest on my hands against my desk and it popped up - but my throat hurt. I was quite relieved. And that knot of worry that I've had since Tuesday morning, driving into work, suddenly undid itself and I was fine. I mean really fine. Perfectly okay, fine.

What a lousy epitaph that would have made, eh?

I feel great, suddenly. I have been watching Pleasantville, a wonderful movie about two kids fighting over the television - the brother wanted to watch a whole 24-hour marathon of "Pleasantville", a very square black & white dinner like "Leave it to Beaver" and his sister wanted to watch a concert on MTV, to get laid... they fought, broke the remote and ended up in Pleasantville, in black & white, she in a poodle skirt and him with his hair greased down. As the movie unfolds, colour slowly begins to infiltrate the town... with knowledge, sex, different things. For David it was standing up for his mother, for Jennifer it was waking up after reading a D. H. Lawrence book and going through a thunderstorm. It seems that an epiphany was required to make colour happen. But what a beautiful thing.

Learning. Living.

"It's not supposed to be like this."

"It's not supposed to be like anything."

I don't have the answers. I don't know the answers. I do know people - people are not black and white, they are all shades of grey. Unpredictable, unknowable. And some change and grow and some don't. I don't try to get it. But I know that unchanging people cannot move forward. Cannot succeed. I see it at work - and the changing people, maybe some are difficult and loud but they still manage to move forward into the future, if a little slower than others, but still managing. But those who don't... well, it is time for us to move on without. As any company should. And as okay as I am with that, I still feel poorly for those. How much are they missing out on because it is easier to remain stuck and not move forward?

I write. I'm honest, I say what I feel. I may not always be right to do that, but I rarely regret it. Someone should say these things. Someone should be open and expose all the feelings, the awkward, the happiness, the things that make up living.

The things that make us colourful.