I have seen that in any great undertaking, it is not enough for a man to depend simply on himself.
-Isna La Wica (Lone Man) Oglala Lakota warrior 1850-1918
Blame it on the alcohol. In my running around today, that song came on the radio and I treated it like I always have and tried every other station out there. I think I ended up with NPR, The Delicious Dish until it was over and I could jam out to some 90's hip hop again. Today is brought to me by alcohol, delivered over a three day beverage endeavor that leaves me lethargic, dizzy, easily confused and entirely unmotivated. Three days of that and today was the last for a while. I'm breaking up with booze for a while.
Another side effect is epic TV watching, or in my case, 13" Macbook Air in my lap time wrapped up in a blanket, reclined in my tiny house. An episode of Elementary has the Sherlock Holmes character struggling with the boredom of not indulging in his dangerous drug addiction. Looking for something with more depth than a female Watson and Sherlock deftly describing their amazing cleverness with a perfectly timed tennis match of back and forth intellectual rundowns of the crime, I stumbled onto a documentary about mysticism in America. The second storyline started with a man walking down the road to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The hills looked familiar, with great exposed canyons opening up between flat lands of prairie grass.
I paused the documentary and looked up Pine Ridge, the largest reservation located on the border of South Dakota and Nebraska. Battle for Whiteclay was mentioned in the Wikipedia article several times and the struggle with alcoholism coming down to shutting down the four liquor stores a mile outside of the largest town in the reservation, a dry reservation. Well it's on YouTube and I'm over an hour into the documentary.
It's a long lived problem with minuscule steps forward at times, and desperate consequences for not meeting the goal of shutting down these businesses. I'm shocked by the 80% unemployment rate in that reservation and by the issues that plague one of the poorest populations in the United States. My own personal cause for clarity, energy, and healthfulness is directly propped up by watching this.
Tonight is video game reset sleep, but likely another 3 days before I'm totally myself again. I suspect these blog posts might get a lot more "heady".
Bonus Wikipedia article: In looking up Pine Ridge the ancient history of the place led to reading about La Garita Caldera, the largest volcanic eruption on the planet during the Cenozoic era, and let me tell you, it was epic - but it is a supervolcano. The epicenter was in the San Juan mountains in Southern Colorado. The article