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My dad was rather eccentric, which is the term used for crazy folks who happen to have a lot of money. Anyone who lived through the era of The Great Cleaning after his death (when we had to figure out exactly what to do with so many firearms, band aids, magazines and bobby pins) knows what I mean.

Luckily the extent of that genetic eccentricity passed on seems to primarily manifest in me as a a big hit of Seasonal Affective Disorder and the attention issues for which this blog is named.

Still, it's odd when I find myself doing things that he used to do. One day I was standing in Piermont Bicycle Connection upgrading some bike component or other. I had a pretty vivid flashback to being a kid in any of a number of gun stores while my dad upgraded some rifle or shotgun of his by replacing the foregrip or trigger assembly for one gun with that of another one in the store. Shop owners didn't tend to discourage this as he usually ended up just buying both items anyhow.

Luckily I wasn't buying thirty cases of duck calls at the bike store, or I might have found myself being a bit more worried.

Yesterday I bought myself a new Philips light therapy device, it's a LED panel with blue diodes designed to do the same thing that the large light boxes used to treat SAD do, but with vastly less light. Some studies going back a number of years have shown that the mind reacts most strongly to the blue lightwaves and so I'm going to give that a shot. That's when I flashed back to sitting in front of the TV in my dad's house with his big homemade lightbox on. I haven't thought about that lightbox in decades—he ordered full-spectrum bulbs from a health store distributor and put them together in a figure he made. I had forgotten that he had that, and I'd never thought about why he had it.

Then there's the big collection of books on Buddhism he had (and Taoism too, but more on Buddhism perhaps because there tends to be more written on that subject) and the ones I'm reading myself as I work on being more present and less, well attention deficit-ey. Looks like he was probably dealing with that one too.

Course, none of this means that I'm going to go out and buy myself a bunker and stock it with Amway, but it's interesting to see things I didn't realize I recognized from my past.

Anyone want a thousand boxes of toothpicks?

Comments

[matthew]

i'll pass on the toothpicks, but commend you on your self-insight, and the sharing of same.