Observe your thoughts. Don’t believe them.
Eckhart Tolle
When I’m not thinking about my knees, I’m thinking about Hunter Biden’s laptop and I’d say just kidding but that’s about how often I’m not thinking about my knees. I’m reading an article about said laptop (what is this placement of the word said and wherefore cometh or dost the ease with which it rolls off the tongue or through the arms to the fingertips and keys of my own (laptop, that is)?) in New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer” that’s titled “The Sordid Saga of Hunter Biden’s Laptop,” and boy howdy as one of my old friends has said when faced with something for which there are no words. Here, it’s the saga and the writing of the saga. I actually love the word sordid but saga makes me extremely suspicious. There’s a part of my English teacher brain that wants to diagram the sentences of “The Sordid Saga of Hunter Biden’s Laptop” so that I can better get a sense of the chaos, the boy howdy. Because, let’s face it, Reader, I love some words strung together, but it’s the words themselves and not the strung. Those of you who throw around I hate humanity but love humans might understand. In this article and maybe in this laptop (not this laptop!) is pornography and pink boas, crack, motels, Russian business deals, women and more women, yachts, an affair with a sister-in-law, a dead brother, pictures of the dead brother dying, lingering echoes of a car accident that killed a mother and injured, gravely, said subject, presidents and ex presidents, all kinds of lawyers (and lawyers of lawyers), an 80s strip mall with a computer repair shop run by a Trump conspiracy theorist, that stringy-haired Bannon guy (why, why, why?) and hatchet-faced Giuliani and
well
that’s it.
Who is Hunter Biden outside of these chaotic phrases and sentences and forced conjunctions? What, exactly, is his essence?
I told Henry about it while he scooped ice into his giant cup (why the giant cups everywhere now?) and then filtered water. Mom, I really don’t care about that shit he said and wiggled his mustache (no kidding) and never were there wiser words.
By the way, I spoke to Nice Neurologist over the weekend, and he’s expressed interest in the phenomenon of Sophie not having seizures during viruses, most recently The Virus of All Viruses. He has another patient, a younger boy who reports the same thing. He said that Sophie is telling us something even though it’s actually me, Cassandra, who’s been doing the telling for nearly thirty years, but pay no _____ to the tiny little mother mind™ and it felt good to be affirmed, to put our heads together to understand that he might bring this to the attention of some immunologists he knows. At some point in our far-ranging conversation, he mentioned the discovery of penicillin, and my mind went not to the glory of eureka moments and fame or even to cures for seizures but rather to another discussion I’d had with a friend about the essence of our children and ourselves, that thing that is not our thoughts or feelings not our brain or heart but rather what IS. Like the thoughts of a dying person, scenes from one’s life running before the eyes, I thought of cures of injections of virus that somehow staved off seizures but fucked things up in other ways and that led me to musing over whether Sophie’s seizures are just what is and she is who she is despite them and because of them and always has been forever amen. Really, she has been telling me these things her entire life. She began by screaming them and soon grew hoarse and then silent because, really, we didn’t listen.
To the medical research crowds, we are all just anecdotal. And I say this with years of working for researchers behind me, some of them wonderful.
My Daughter, Evie, 32 years old, also gets respite from seizures when feverish. Never has a neurologist been curious.