The Good Side of Bad

It was true: in progressive care, I slept four straight hours before anyone woke me up. I feel like I could lift a car or something right now. What do people do who sleep for 8? Chop down forests for kicks? One of these days, I'm going to rediscover that feeling.

My night nurse, Toni, has been in a few times and she manifests as a face on the body of a dervish. This would be more perfect were she a believer in the divinity of nursing, but she's far too practical for that--this girl just loves the nursing. If I had to guess, I'd say her personal religion has a heavy dose of scheduling and process involved int it--that by doing rightly, well and on time, we could solve most of the world's problems-and I agree with that.

It may open the door to Taylorism to believe so, but if you watch Toni go through the steps of checking vitals, dispensing meds and assessing need at her interval checks, you probably would never associate Taylorism with her whatsoever. You'd do a great disservice to the fact that if you truly love what you do, you truly want to do it with as little error and as well as possible.

Since yesterday, I've been thinking a lot about the good side of bad. This is an old conundrum for me. As a kid, I couldn't understand why anyone was ever angry at the Jews over the crucifixion. Weren't they simply doing what god had planned for them to do? Did they have any choice in the matter? Without them, would the crucifixion have happened if they had gathered up their psychic nuts, grabbed tight, and said, "don't kill the so-called rabbi, who cares?"

One extreme example of the good side of bad, perhaps....cancer, another.

I'm finding more and more how the GSB paradigm is applicable across vast areas of my life. It answers the worst pessimism with a slightly less polly-anna-ish optimism. It doesn't attempt to quell the forest fire of pouty self-loathing, it redirects it to that line of psychic pines we all have in our personal mountain ridges that require a good burning to pop out new seeds and spread themselves in acts of regeneration. The GSB allows you to look in the ugly screaming face of all the terror you can have and calmly tell it to fuck itself. You can stabilize with the GSB where no one can improve what condition is attempting to improve.

It is never bad to be practical. That's merely a way to explain what you actually can do in any given situation. Practicality itself isn't an answer; it's merely a laying of new fencework when you've had to sell some mental real estate. You cannot be made worse by trying, and we all know it.

So damned if some progressive care sleep wasnt' just the GSB I needed...Toni certainly understood that when I told her.