Strange Days

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I've had a weird couple of days. Peaceful - because I made sure I had solitude and time - but quite odd.

For instance yesterday I told the Sufi acupuncturist that it was the first anniversary of receiving my tattoo and visiting the Holocaust Museum. He said - oh - did you know this is a Jewish fast day? Apparently it marks the destruction of the temple (first or second? I didn't ask). I had never heard of it. Funny, though, that the one year anniversary of my head-on collision with the Holocaust should just happen to be a fast day in the Jewish calendar. It wasn't last year, but this year, yes. My rhythms are inexplicably Jewish.

Right after that I ran into someone who is holding a grudge against me. I was open and pleasant, but she could not even bring herself to be civil. It's OK - I have no dog in the fight whatsoever, but that kind of encounter tends to leave a bad taste in the mouth. Ya know?

Today I was thinking about my ancestors in the Holocaust, how they were asphyxiated in Volkswagons that were sealed shut. The wagons filled with exhaust and the people died. Compared to dying in the camps this was kind of deluxe. Carbon monoxide is a blissful way to go. My ancestors were killed in this way on August 9, 1941 somewhere west of Lviv in modern Ukraine. I wondered if I'm a reincarnated Melikier. I thought about how much I detest being inside any car, also how most of the cars I've owned in my life (not many) have been Volkswagons. I felt a little chill. Just then five VWs in a row drove past, one after the other. There was even a Passat taxi.

Is that normal? Seemed bizarre to me.

Later on someone I've known since the early 1980s, the sweetest, most gentle person you've ever met, flamed my ass on FB because of a post I wrote on my other blog. I wrote about Lyme disease, how evil its soul is. I didn't say this in the post, but I believe there's a way in which Lyme zombifies its victims. They serve the disease, not themselves. I've seen it more than once - the change in personality and world view. It's chilling.

What this friend objected to was my emphatic plea to be careful when out and about, to avoid catching Lyme. What I said in the post is don't catch Lyme. He insisted that advice sucks, his exact word. This does not sound anything like his normal self.

He demanded that I remove the sentence from the blog post. It was as if the spirochete was speaking directly to me. How dare I tell people to take this seriously? How dare I tell people to do everything they can not to be bitten?

That was NOT my friend talking. It took a long time to straighten out the misunderstanding. When I told him to unfriend me, but to please not tell me what to write in my blog, he kind of came back to himself. Even that was bizarre.

This man contracted Lyme many years ago, was given the antibiotics and believes he was cured. But he developed something like rheumatoid arthritis a few years ago and suffers greatly from it. These symptoms are associated with Chronic Lyme. In the weird interaction, my friend behaved like a spirochete, not like the man I've known for thirty years. WWZ is going to come through tick borne diseases.

Mama said there'd be days like this. I guess!

I'm ready for a few days of boring and normal. OK? Please?

Peace and love, y'all. Shalom.