My Mama's Mustache & Other Inherited Stuff  

Humankind cannot stand very much reality.
T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

 Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.
 Lily Tomlin (1939 - )

I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.
Mary Chase (1887 - 1973), Jimmy Stewart in "Harvey", 1950

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), (attributed)

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable.
Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974), "The Unquiet Grave", 1945

Serious? Well, sort of. Life is far too serious to be too serious about it.

I recall a funeral I attended, a brother-in-law. My sister found something funny in whatever another sister whispered in her ear during the flag folding ceremony and broke up laughing.
Bev loved her husband; he was about the best thing to ever enter her life. So when she laughed, we laughed a little too, a bit nervously.
We all knew there would be enough pain and tears in the coming days. There would not always be laughter.

I also remember an evening when my friend Dot and I walked into an AA club laughing so hard tears were popping out.
An elderly gentleman with many years sobriety said, "Alcoholism is a serious subject, nothing to laugh about." (words to that effect)
Dot and I put our best mock serious faces on and scurried into the as yet empty meeting room and laughed ourselves silly. We were not laughing at Alcoholism. We were laughing to lighten the load of reality.

Today I am going to talk about my fight with living in reality. I will not be able to finish today, so the subject will continue next Monday.
I will be spending more time on this blog in the future. And expanding my broadcast to 60 minutes next week. In addition I am planning a broadcast dedicated to the topic of sexual abuse. Sometimes I too like to distance myself from the reality of it. But it harms too many people, and there are no winners, only victims.