Resonances.

In referring to my health woes, the priestess said in her most recent email:

I wonder whether you feel quite astounded by the limitations of your body – that all this is not really your business, and why can’t you just be left alone to continue questioning life’s purpose in peace?

That’s it; got it in one. I suppose that’s what taking good health for granted means to me: I expect my body to be a faithful steed which performs unflinchingly and unfailingly, while I simply ride him along the road to pondering higher matters and trying to find the opening in the veil. It’s quite a shock when the old guy goes seriously lame and stumbles heavily.

(On which note, I have to go back to the Royal Derby Clinical Processing Centre tomorrow and climb onto another conveyor belt. You know what happened last time, don’t you? I’m nervous.)

But going back to matters corporeal and philosophical, I wonder what it means when you stop feeling sympathy with another person’s woes (not mine in this case) and instead find yourself becoming prey to full empathy – to feel their fears, their suffering, and their insecurity, and then to experience a deep level of sympathetic disturbance. Does it mean that there’s a bond in place, the like of which has always been a mystery to you?

And here’s something slightly odd: I watched the first of a series of historical documentaries last week and felt an increase in my symptoms the whole time it was on. I watched the second tonight and the same thing happened. So now it seems I’m suffering some sort of negative resonance with King Alfred and his daughter. Maybe it’s a past life thing.

Or maybe I need a Klingon cloaking device to shield me from influences. Maybe I should just give up altogether.

Another disturbing aspect of today was that my faithful old friend, the Feedjit stats tracker, appears to have disappeared for good. I loved my Feedjit; it used to help me identify certain known visitors to the blog and was a most welcome companion. And from what I’ve read on odd forums down the years, it appears there are very many bloggers across the world who also loved their Feedjit. This is clearly a bad day for humanity (or at least those who blog.) Maybe we should all just give up.