Ironics 101

Today Spike TV is runnning Band of Brothers from start to finish.  My friend Tina's son Joey is home on leave from a forward COP position in Afghanistan.  I wonder what he makes of this or if he's even aware that it's on. 

I could be watching this on DVD, but then I'd have to mess with remotes and changing disks.  I can tune out the ads and write when they're on.  This was one of Erek's favorites.  As he was dying, without even thinking about my liking it, he gave it and a bunch of DVD's I bought for ME as well as him to his son who managed to get here a day and a half before he died.  I went out and replaced everrything he gave away because they'd been my faves as well.

And it may seem odd that I have such an attachment to a war series.  I'm antiwar. However, this was a part of my father's youth and some of the most intense memories of his life, just as Viet Nam was a part of Erek's life.  It haunts those who survive it.  It buries survivor's guilt into many of them.  In some who survive it, they are motivated to overcome that survivor's guilt by working to make the world a better place.  Sometimes just making themselves into the best people they can be makes not only their world but also the worlds of those around them a better place.

Some don't deal with the guilt.   They just bury it and it rears itself in the consumption of everything without an end to the hunger, because they don't know what the hunger is.

2 winters alone

18 months after Erek's death and I should  be writing an ad for Philips goLITE Blu.  The item is a little full-spectrum daylight lamp with high intensity that one sets a couple of to 3 feet from the side of one's face and sits for 20 to 30 minutes once or twice a day.  It stimulates the endorphins in one's brain chemistry that are necessary to sleep when one is supposed to, that are necessary for one to think relatively rationally, that are necessary to break the depression of long dark winters at a high latitude when one has not been born and acclimatized to months of short days, overcast and long nights.  And they take the place of prescription pharmaceuticals in some people when those folks are faced with a depression so deep and so vast that suicide doesn't seem wrong but instead seems like the only rational way clear of that depression...the only relief.

There isn't an antidepressant on the market -- and several since taken off the market and several that never made it out of trials and on to the market -- that hasn't hit me with every negative side effect listed by the manufacturer, up to and including tardive dyskinesia.

Without that light this post wouldn't appear on this blog.