Since I had my cardio logical tussle, I have been thinking about stress, which, of course, serves to enhance and aggravate the amount of stress that I am feeling. Hhmmm! I thought that pondering ideas was supposed to bring me to a deeper understanding and that this new understanding would in turn ameliorate the tension. No wonder the Greeks were walking around so much. This evening I will work on this potent subject until I WORK MYSELF UP IN TO A RAGGED FRAZZLE!
I remember back in the good old days when I stayed up late reading Understanding Media, that McLuhan often wrote about a guy named Hans Selye. (Anyone is free to correct me and my spelling, because I refuse to look all this up on the internet. I am high in my memory, working without a net.) who wrote a book called The Stress of Life. I believe that old Hans posited that life was stress. That we, without stress, would sit around like the Eloi on our clump of paradisiacal ground and quite possibly be eaten by the Morlocks. I know HG had a more political dialectic in mind, but I, in high memory and traveling freely in time, win this day.
Hans further pointed out that there were two kinds of stress. Dis stress. The bad stuff that wakes us in the middle of the night wondering who we killed and why we can't pay our bills and when is the Sheriff coming with his warrants and why we ate that extra piece of pizza with everything on it but the anchovies, no anchovies because Aunt Lucy was over and she thinks fish is something for her fourteen cats in the morning. And Eu stress ( a Eu is a sheep hence sheep stress, or was it good in Sanskrit or Old Icelandic? It was definitely good in some academically delight filled language. Greek it is! Because it is all Greek to me) which is the good stress that drives us forward in our lives and keeps the big fangs of the Morlocks away from our pantry.
I decide to look for good stress. And in truth I find eu and dis are very close to each other. For example, I want to write three times a week to this Blog. The thought pleases me. Eustress. Then it turns out that to write three times a week, I must actually sit down at a keyboard and compose this stuff in my head. Still eu but definitely heading toward dis. Then I am tired after a day of work and wouldn't it be great just to lay with only a tattered vestige of mind in front of the menu of myriad channels on cable TV and gawk at beautiful firm breasted women with hardly any facial hair who smile at me and just make me feel great. See where this eu is leading me, but dis on my other shoulder is saying. Remember you were going to write this evening. Now what was a very positive eu is becoming a very onerous dis. I finally decide that those women only like me as long as I pay my monthly bill to AT&T Broadband. So tonight diseustrss has won out and I am tacking away.
But I don't know whether this is an act of life or and act of desperation.
Now that I am winding down, I feel a sense of accomplishment I have just poured a nice glass of the same Chianti that I was drinking on Monday, eustress, it tastes fruity full of Sangiovese grapes, distress, because I opened the bottle two days ago and horrid oxygen has been eating away at the wonderful taste. But eustress to the rescue, I don't know that much about wines and my palette is definitely better for the varieties of diet colas. Non-knowledge (eu-know), and some alcohol, spreads the tension from my limbs. Hans baby, Marshall, baby, I hope you won't find it too maudlin if I tell you I love you both! Ciao!