by Alfred Lehmberg
It had seemed a propitious day, if tense and ominous... if filled with dread. Reality, looming. Existentiality in meatspace. That bell tolling for thee. Well, me... this time. The inexorable singularity remains to loom for us all. That may be good news, whoever you are. Read on.
Unfortunately, my very fearful, now-late Mother made the nonplussing disclosure to the first internet buddy calling me on the telephone. I'd had a stroke, you see. There was concern. We won't bury the lead.
She did it out of concern and fear for what she knew was a sympathetic ear, but it was "disclosure" nonetheless. I'd have sooner if we kept it to ourselves. The reader can suspect why.
Why? Think about it... I didn't want a reader to have any "excuses" to employ against me, thinking they could confidently answer questions about me, or the like, and it was largely my own damn business, anyway! I was the one payin' the f'n freight... and besides. It's not like I'm an airline pilot or a neurosurgeon... well, maybe a neurosurgeon, remembering Ben Carson...
She didn't know, was the point. "Otherwise distracted," myself? I didn't think to tell her not to. It's what people do.
The result was that I hadn't remotely felt like she'd blabbed. Her heart was in the right place, yea and verily. She's gone now... 1996...
It remained that the "news" was out, though, so I'd endeavor to turn it into a disclosure of my own... and a good thing, too! For reasons I'll go into, it was good news for you too, reader, even as you might perceive that it was bad news for me. It was good news; however, for me, though, too. Opportunity had presented itself!
Seriously! I mean that. See, the bell was rung, and hard... ...just, not shattered. This would be a bell taking the lesson! I was well served as it turned out...
See? As part of the new mammalian internet consciousness and aware of (unabashedly woke to?) an initiative combating the reptilian consciousness which had preceded it... and in the spirit of same? I was compelled to make a full report of that good news to you, reader. Listen up.
It was good news, remaining so years later, surprisingly, and I would be laughing, laughing in the pleasure of that news, sincerely, even as I first typed these words, now so long ago. Why, I'm laughing, now!
There were some grateful tears mixed in with all the eventual laughter. I was extremely grateful that I still had the capacity for both...
One anxious Tuesday, many years ago, at about eight o'clock in the morning... and during some news report about the aggregate egregiousness that our then-current United States government had committed (...but that story only at the tip of the iceberg, [right ?!]), I'd had that stroke to which we allude...
Yeah... sincerely committed to the idea that I just may live forever? I had a stroke. It was an attention-getter, yea, and verily!
Not a bad one, mind you, and not one requiring me to bang this essay out with my forehead, now, by any means... even as it's slowed me down... but a stroke nonetheless. A "Bell" rung as indicated, and I was shaken to my stackin' swivels!
I was left unsure on my feet, later making a lot more mistakes as I typed, and I couldn't chord my guitar for a long time... but hey... it could have been a lot worse. A lot worse. Moreover, recovery continues. Lucky stars are well-counted!
Oh, I'd had it comin'. We all do. Close to fifty pounds overweight, no real regular exercise in the preceding decade, and wrapped a little too tight (one might argue?) than is good for anybody? I'd been skatin' a tad too close to the edge of the f'n abyss for a while, at that point! The aforementioned bell tolled, finally, for... me. Sucker gut-punch!
I got a "wake-up call," to cut to the chase. Moreover, that new mammalian consciousness I'd alluded to earlier can transfer! Make it a wake-up call for yourself, too, if you choose! A 'freebie' "Lehmberg's Good News Plus" call! ...Costs you nothing but the time to read this essay. You could be pointed in a whole new, and more efficacious, direction.
...But outed? I owe it to you, reader, to start the, alluded to, transfer... apply the appropriately efficacious, inspired, and aspiring spin... tell the true story. See, I'm not to be pitied, or eased-up-on, or considered infirm... I'm not to be immediately considered dotty, disrupted, disordered, or disturbed. I'm still me, if a little slower version at present. Moreover, I flatly refused and wouldn't (won't!) tolerate reflexive sympathy. ...Wouldn't own it. ...Didn't stand for it!
An abutting illustration, does the honored reader remember Rich Reynolds of the very suspiciously spurious and specious "RRR Group" out of Fort Wayne, Indiana... He was circa an Internet of yesteryear and from decades past (last century, in fact)? You can read his homocentric, hubris-filled, and arrogantly mewling "pule-expulsion," still. I won't link to it.
Well, he'd had a light stroke earlier and I backed way off his expositional case, as a result, treated him with toleration he did not deserve... extended to him an idiosyncratic credit he did not earn! ...And, as a, one would suppose, predictable result of a subsequent "pointed discussion on ethics, credibility, and fair or balanced ufological reporting, unrelated to him, where no good deed goes unpunished"? ...He plunged an unearned blade of bogus manufacture deeply into my very innocent back... right around kidney level... for my trouble and earnest consideration!
Even if that trouble was senseless, un-based, and unfounded, still, it was serious and sincere! It was an unconscionable fabrication to wound! One is faulted to remember the headline ACCUSATION (!) before one remembers the below-the-fold exoneration! An accusation is always above the fold and the exoneration ever below.
This twat, this psychotic scourge, this toadie net-weasel circuitously suggested by way of a guy on his writing team, to our shared community at large (in a very public forum, the late Errol Bruce Knapp's UFO UpDates) that this writer was a pedophile...
!!!
See how this is gonna function? Mr. Reynolds dies periodically on the journalistic cross and continues to die at every opportunity presenting itself, for whatever provoked concern, concerning anxiety, or needless apprehension this writer feels the need to periodically express correcting a distorted record...
See how this might work? I've no reflexive respect for the dead, and the reader might consider their own even as I contemplate my own. Too often that "respect" only provides for a continuation of the unconscionable and egregious. Respect should be earned in death as it was in life. Consider Christopher Columbus. Sometimes history has been made to lie... and that just sickens the soul.
The reader was better advised to feel about me... exactly as the reader felt about me before my, actually fortuitous, episode, good, bad, or indifferently ugly. I had not changed, so the reader would have less of an excuse of such. Moreover? My character remained undamaged!
Be silently ambivalent, wish me well, or even ill. Then move on, with my thanks. I'll eat your literary face for anything less or more. I may eat it anyway; we must first come to that bridge.
Still, and now, a "fortuitous episode"? Yes. Proceeds now, the good news.
You see, for the better part of two years, previously, I had co-written a series of information papers with a former longtime friend and fellow military retiree Alan Graham. We collaborated about diet, nutrition, and the aggregate disservice done to all of us by a disingenuous American Medical health system and its "evil pharmacological ancillaries." Yeah... there's some nuanced if dicey shiznit afoot, medically, shiznit in large part obscured by your du jour conspiracy crazies and their monied corporate backers who most aren't woke (see above) to, but that's a dive for another time!
Back at "the ranch," Alan is the fellow who 'cured' himself of the 'incurable' ailment called Crohn's Disease, 'hereditary' arthritis, and some other diseases of the 20th Century. By all evidence of same, he vastly improved my extremely ill mother's last-years quality of life and assisted many others (why even "UFO abductee fake" Jim Mortellaro and his alleged wife [allegedly stricken with MS] among them, allegedly!), this writer had witnessed same.
A quality of life they had thought gone from them forever was returned. True stories all. Encouraging stories. Instructive stories. Stories of hope and a better quality of life.
Like many of you currently reading, I thought I was one of those immune to the diseases of the 21st Century. Not so. As a result, I wasn't really practicing what I'd helped preach.
Back at that original ranch, the circle-bar-stroke, I had survived what amounts to my second wake-up call... or, at least, that 2nd "wake-up" requiring a 911 buzz, an ambulance, and a subsequent 3-day hospitalization. The first episode was very brief, quickly recovered from, and a result of sleeping in a funny position... ...I "thought."
This had happened about 5 weeks previously... about the time that Rich Reynolds was twisting his contrived, fallacious, and libelous knife in my back... hmm? An interesting coincidence!
Back to me, I was just lying to myself about my physical condition. I knew what it was. I just willingly self-deceived. We do that, don't we...
No more. It's the third strike for which you have to walk (or be carried) away from the plate, after all. If I can't hit a home run with my efforts, I'd still, at least, like to get on base.
I still intend to get a 'hit', reader. That said, I'd ended my self-abuse at a bone dry 225 pounds (should be about 170, tops, soaking wet), blood pressure averaging 170 over 110 or thereabouts (should be about 120 over 85)... and was rendered unsteady on my feet if of sound mind... I lost for a time the coordination to play my guitar. That was especially and ominously crushing.
I was hoping I could report to you later that I'd dropped the meds and gotten my guitar-playing ability back. I did the latter. Still burdened with the former... but the numbers get better with every doctor visit!
I had hoped to make a full recovery, reader. A complete one. I aspired to be better than before. I aspire still to that goal. Progress was made.
Additionally, I'd hoped I could give the reader more time at-bat, themselves, as a result of some small attention the reader might pay to the evolved saga, here. What I intended to do is described very well at the indicated location (Google 'Graham Lehmberg' on the Alienview website), so I don't have to be tedious about it here in the essay. The reader can go have a look as the reader wishes. Or, e-mail me. I'll direct her to the sun source! North of any politics, you'll do fine.
The site is not the B's knees & end-all. It remains; however, to establish a path! Osteopathic trumps the allopathic!
It's not required to pay attention or follow along in any way, of course. It's just that the new mammalian internet I've referenced a couple of times now makes it possible for me to effortlessly share this "good" news! I shall, indeed, share.
It's my duty, I suppose, forgetting I'd as soon have kept it to myself. I have a system. I have a plan. I have hope.
I've good people around who care about me. Good news like I said. For me and, as I said, for you too...
But what does all this have to do with UFOs? It's this.
When I was lieing in the bed at the hospital that Tuesday evening after midnight, in the 2nd deepest dark of the blackest night I have ever known—even requiring help to urinate, reader—I was compelled to wonder if this was not the end of all things for me. Depression...
The end of physical love? The end of mobility? The end of the complete satisfaction I had taken for granted concerning wife, family, friends, and my little pound puppy dog, the late Sheiba? The abrupt end of a thousand and one other pleasurable things, wounds of slings and arrows dismissed as immaterial?
Perhaps not surprisingly to the reader? The loss of UFOs and the earnest consideration of their ancillaries figured closely after my concerns for the just iterated items... that I was being taken out of the game, you know? Everyone understands that. Bad enough to die... but to linger incapacitated and a burden.
I got released from the hospital late Wednesday morning. I was responding favorably to treatment and got a lot of mobility back as a result. After checking in with family and friends, still, my thoughts were on the night sky and her accouterments.
Thursday morning came with the usual alarm at 02:30 hours, and I was, apparently, to be given another chance to stare, at least once again, into her matchless depths and deeper reaches. Honestly, I lusted for that night sky... another gift I had taken for granted, I discovered. I won't make that mistake again.
At about 05:15 hours Central Time that day, with a temperature around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, I was looking to the west at the best Star-field I'd seen in quite a while. Winter always has the best...
!!!
The object appeared over the South South-West tree line, brighter than Venus, at about 50 degrees elevation, and preceded to travel Northerly at a rate of about 5 degrees in 15 seconds until it disappeared, also at about 50 degrees elevation, in the tree line to the North! The sighting happened between 05:15 and 05:20 hours, or thereabouts. It traveled with such unvarying regularity and brightness that I took it for the Space Station or an especially bright satellite. Checking the NASA java application for satellite prediction; however, at a NASA site for satellite observation and setting the application for ALL satellites and ALL passes, showed that there were NO satellites between 03:40 hours and 11:28 hours of 'any' type or at 'any' magnitude of brightness for my location (ZIP code 36330).
A UFO, friends and neighbors! With any other name? It would smell as sweet! I was well and truly served. Gladdened even. The reader may understand why—brushes with death always make a person appreciate the 'little' things.
I was still in the game! I'm in the game still! I'll keep you posted? Read on!
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| Plastic is silver to a person sans flatware... |
