I’m not dying, except in the metaphysical sense that we’re all dying.
I do, however, have a fatal, incurable disease, cancer. The doctors tell me that, actually, at my age I’m more likely to die of a heart attack or stroke (or, who knows? getting run over by a Waymo) than by the metastasis of my tumor, which has not yet occurred and may never. But knowing that one has cancer does cause a shift in perspective.
I’ve reached a “so what?” point at which few things in life seem to matter so much. Why shave? Why shower? Why change sox every day? Why bother going to the gym? Why bother doing anything, in the face of the One Inexorable Reality that grimly stalks? Now, this does not mean that one is relieved of certain obligations. One is expected to be kind to others, to keep one’s promises, to do one’s duty. These are the elementary rules of the road pertaining to human conduct: one is not excused from them simply because of the impending arrival of Death.
There is one thing, though, I feel I must do every day, and that is to write this blog. Duty? In a way. It’s not always easy because there’s not always some stunning new development in our dismal, tragic swamp of Oakland politics. I could write about, say, Flock cameras, but all I know is what I hear in the news, and anyway my readers probably know at least as much about Flock cameras as do I. So, again, why bother? That doesn’t eliminate my need to write something. I can always retreat into the kind of memoir-essay (“messy”?) I offer today. If nothing else, it’s a form I like, and after all that’s the point—my point, anyway—of writing anything. As Gore Vidal noted, “I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.”
And there’s this: Oakland is worth fighting for. For however long I have left, this is my home, and as I (or anyone) would defend my home against invasion by barbarians, so too is my city worth protecting. The wrong people currently control it. It pains me, because so much of the rest of America is recovering from the inflammation of wokeness. But not our little, liberal Blue city, with its commitment to leftist charlatanism and racist hooey. The least I can do, armed as I am with laptop and an internet connection, is “to warn and encourage,” which also happen to be the traditional duties of the British royal sovereign.
A thing I often wonder about: Heraclitus’s river, into which we cannot step twice, was the Styx, its boatman Charon, in whose vessel, Titanic, we are taken to—where? And who is our Charon?
Steve Heimoff