I was all set to head off on a short hike last evening ─ perhaps a little after 8:00 p.m. ─ to visit the local pharmacy about four blocks distant, when into the house came my younger brother and his girlfriend Bev.
I was trapped, and annoyed. So often my life in this house seems not my own to be lived as I would choose.
Resigned, I complied and tuned in a movie for the three of us to watch ─ I selected a 2009 feature titled The Soloist.
It proved to be worthy enough fare. Bev can talk a lot through movies as she gets deeper and deeper into her white wine, so I always seek to find something that I am not at all keen on watching, but also something which will appeal to her.
Ruefully, at the movie's conclusion, my brother then requested that I locate a 2013 movie titled 12 Years a Slave. I say "ruefully" because I saw that it was over two hours in duration, and it was already after 10:30 p.m.
Bev rebelled and refused to watch it because of its mistreatment of Blacks and its abundant use of now-vulgar terms like "Nigger."
And so she soon enough went to bed in my brother's bedroom.
I was very much irked that I was now going to have to sit up late embroiled with this long movie that I had no input concerning. I had already drank the one can of strong (8% alcohol) beer that I felt like having.
I have to admit that the movie was excellent. And as usual, it made me realize how soft I am ─ I could never endure the abuse that Black slaves were subjected to. I would instead embrace my death.
The movie's ending was bittersweet in terms of the main character's rescue / departure from the plantation ─ he (Solomon Northup) had to turn his back forever on poor Patsey, a cute black slave who was constantly being badly physically mistreated by her two masters.
She had once begged Solomon to kill her, for she was too weak to take her own life, and the life she had as a slave at the plantation was not worth living.
Since nothing more was mentioned of her after Solomon was delivered back into freedom by order of the law, I can only assume that Patsey probably was abused unto death. Solomon would never be able to help her ─ his life was in New England, and the setting of the movie was pre-Civil War.
She would have been doomed.
I'm still bothered about that abandonment of her, even though I knew Solomon had no choice.
Patsey was ably and sympathetically portrayed by actress Lupita Nyong'o.
Anecdotally ─ and if Patsey is of interest to you because you once saw the movie ─ just over five years ago a journalist actually attempted to track Patsey's fate down. The nearly fascinating long article is at VanityFair.com and titled “What’ll Become of Me?” Finding the Real Patsey of 12 Years a Slave.
I believe that it may have been around 1:30 a.m. by the time I was to bed last night. And for the first time in months, I took a 10-mg tablet of melatonin.
I've been very short on adequate sleep of late, so I don't know if the melatonin was responsible for effects I was to feel, or if my experience was solely because being without adequate sleep had finally caught up to me.
I slept well until around 7:00 a.m. when I rose, thinking to get a start on a new post at one of my six hosted websites. However, that was not to happen because I got distracted with E-mails that had arrived in my account overnight.
Around 7:45 a.m. I was checking out the pharmacy (Shoppers Drug Mart) website to see if it stocked one of the nutritional supplements I was interested in obtaining, and I saw that the outlet near me actually opens at 8:00 a.m. on Sundays.
This was utterly unexpected ─ I was expecting that it would not likely open until 10:00 a.m.
So I decided to ready myself and pay it a visit.
It was 8:23 a.m. when I set off under mainly cloudy skies. Was it the melatonin that was responsible for a mental fog and physical lethargy that I just could not shake? I rather suspect that maybe it was.
While I was at the store's checkout counter, the very friendly cashier ─ upon me expressing my surprise that the store opened so early ─ volunteered that the nearby No Fills was now also opening at 8:00 a.m. every day of the week.
The last time I had checked that store's hours, it never opened until 9:00 a.m. and closed at 9:00 p.m. now.
Well, according to my cashier, it not only opened at 8:00 a.m., but did not close until 10:00 p.m.
This was superb news to me, for so many times I would have gone shopping early in the morning if it had opened at 8:00 a.m. By 10:00 a.m., I am usually too overcome with weariness to go anywhere.
I thanked the cashier almost effusively for this wonderful information, for that No Frills is one of my two favourite supermarkets.
Anyway, I was back home just ahead of 9:00 a.m., and still no one was up. That foggy lassitude was still with me, and before too very long I realized that I was ready for a return to bed.
And so I complied. I had not yet had any coffee, so nothing interfered with quite a good nap.
When I rose later in the morning, my brother and Bev were only themselves beginning to stir from bed.
It was during the latter half of the noon hour that the pair left for whatever mischief that they would be getting up to during the afternoon.
The day had become more sunny than not. As a result, after doing some preparatory work for that new website post, at 2:00 p.m. I was out into the backyard to sit low in a deckchair or lawn chair; and while attired in just a pair of cutoffs, I spent just over 40 minutes facing into the direction of the Sun.
Often it was cloudy, but it was always very comfortable out there.
It is approaching 8:00 p.m. as I type these words, and my brother has been home for quite some while. I must bring this post to a close.
Before I close, I want to confess that I failed to plank for nine minutes today. I gave up just after eight minutes.
I had counted to 500 before checking my cellphone's timer, and I had hoped that my count was slow enough that when I checked the timer, it might be reading somewhere around the nine-minute mark.
It was not reading anything of the sort ─ it was just a couple or so seconds past eight minutes.
I had strained so arduously to that point that this unexpectedly disappointing revelation was too much for me to withstand, and so I collapsed in defeat.
Maybe my count had too closely matched the actual passage of seconds, for 480 seconds would have been eight minutes.
I also want to mention an article I read today that announced the sorry impasse in the States where drug commercials are concerned.
Some while back, I had mentioned what seemed happy news ─ the U.S. government was going to require that pharmaceutical commercials on T.V. had to indicate the price of the marketed drug if it was over something like $15.
Well, it seems that this is not going to be happening after all:
- StatNews.com (June 14): Amgen, Merck, and Eli Lilly sue over Trump administration policy to require drug prices in TV ads
- NYTimes.com (July 8): Judge Blocks Trump Rule Requiring Drug Companies to List Prices in TV Ads
This is the August 11 article I read today that alerted me to this disappointment ─ and I wholeheartedly agree with authour Jack Harrison's sentiments:
JacksDailyDose.com
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