Television Advertising Side-Effects

You’ve probably seen many medication advertisements during the commercial breaks in the evening network news. I see a lot of them on the newly-proliferating boomer TV channels. But how many of you actually pay any attention to them? Each one takes about five seconds telling you what it treats and the rest of the minute is used telling about the side-effects. The announcer talks really fast about these side-effects but I wonder if it’s to get them all in during the time or if they want them to go by so fast you don’t take the time to think about what they’re saying. […]

It’s My Life to Take, or Not

Close to forty thousand lives are lost to suicide each year. There must be a reason for this. It must be something simple. Something like… EVERYONE HAS DEPRESSION. The only difference is that some of us deal better than others.

In fact, people having depression and thoughts of suicide are not anything new. Read Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. You know the one, it starts “To be or not to be.”

Yes, I have severe depression. I’ve had it for years. I wake up every morning with disappointment; disappointment that I’ve woken up. And if I believed in the one-shot-life dogma of the Judeo-Christian religion I probably would have offed myself a long time ago. The belief that once you die you get judged to go up, down or some other more mysterious outcome causes a person to feel that death is the solution and we’ll work out the details when we get there.

I have absolutely no problem with people who commit suicide. Yes, its sad for those who are left behind but the well known truth is that everyone dies. And I strongly believe that we all have the right, whether we take advantage of that right or not, to decide when that death is going to happen. Some people may not want to know when they are going to die, but having control over that one last act is for some people, the only control over their life that they ever had.

However I am a firm believer in reincarnation. That belief that you keep doing it until you get it right. Sorta like the student in English class that keeps getting their paper handed back to them from the teacher with big red letters at the top that say “I KNOW YOU CAN DO BETTER!” It makes more sense to me to think that since even the christians teach that life is a series of lessons, there has to be more than one class. I think it’s more like you live – you get lots of life lessons – you die and get your grade for the class – then if you haven’t graduated yet, perhaps by moving on to Nirvana, you come back to the next class for more lessons.

So this philosophy is what keeps me breathing instead of “cinching up my belt around my ‘waste’.” If life sucks this bad this time, what the hell is it gonna be like the next time? I’m in no hurry to find out. To paraphrase the bard,  it’s better for me to suffer the current slings and arrows of outrageous fortune then to take arms against a sea of trouble and by opposing end them. I’m in no hurry to see what dreams may come otherwise. At least that’s what I think.