Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck. I was reading her book of that name for the second time, thanks to my daughter who gifted it to me to cheer me up. The last chapter is about being 64 and death. It did not cheer me up. If Nora Ephron felt bad about 64, one can only imagine what she would feel at 74 if she’d lived that long. Actually, I could have told her. It’s a magnitude of 10 times worse. She wrote that if you’re lucky enough to have an intimate partner at 64, sex is never going to be the same as it used to be. Great. Helps ever so much. Some maggot got into my head and convinced me it would be a good idea start meditating again, specifically to free up the blockages in my yogic chakras, starting at the Root and working my way up to the Crown, where I would find Nirvana. Bad idea. Sure, energy starts flowing again. You develop a testosterone level slightly higher than the one which now blesses you with your own beard and mustache. So now, in my head, I’m ripe pickings for some lusty, gorgeous, sexy young thing. This delusional belief lasts until I try to stand up after sitting crossed legged for five minutes. There’s a mathematical formula for this cycle. Multiply the time I sit cross legged by 3 and you get the length of time it takes me to stand up and learn how to walk again. Timing is everything. Sometimes I think Timing is one of those chuckling Demi Gods with warped senses of humor who look down upon us from some ethereal cocktail party and say to each another, “Wait! Look at what I’m going to throw at her now.” If I ever ascend to Demi Goddess status I’m going to give Time a piece of my mind. If nothing else, I can now understand why my mother, living in her demented state at the nursing home, would seek out the few surviving men and stand next to them for hours. One time we caught her doing this wearing only her bra and her Depends. She forgot to put on her pants. That’s what I choose to believe. The man she was standing next to didn’t seem to notice. He was lost in his own reverie about being virile again. Seriously though, what does one do when accidentally unblocking the sacral chakra just a little bit? I don’t have the answer yet. I’m just asking. So far, the options I’ve come up with are either depressing or seriously illegal. Norah also cited the obvious “Consider the Alternative.” This implies that being dead is worse than being deathly ill or delusional. I have mixed feelings about this. My preferred response is “You can’t always make things better but you can always make them worse.” I spent my adulthood trying to keep from making things worse. As they say, it shortened the war by years and saved countless lives. I started meditating when I was eleven. I had asked my father to take me to Temple. Being the good agnostic that he was, he replied, “Take a bus and go by yourself.” Perhaps he wanted me to develop self reliance. That was never going to happen, so instead I sat on my bed and tried to learn how to talk to G-d. We kept this a secret. It would not have been safe to let any of my immediate family know I liked talking to G-d. I kept the secret until last month, when I told my kids. They froze in fear; but that story is for later.