Ten Tips for Post-Coma Living

If in the Sault Area Hospital fluorescent lights beam mercilessly into your irises that have been out-of-commission for the past three days, affect an air of quiet respect as your mother and Emily weep and exchange hugs and shout sentences such as, “Thank God you’re alive!” If Emily offers to tell you what has transpired in the three days of your fugue following Big Donnie’s attack, e.g. ‘She accidentally got two order of fries with her value meal at Arby’s, ’ respond, “I can’t wait to hear all about it. ”

One: If freed from the Sault Area Hospital to your Etobicoke home, try to turn over a new leaf based on all you’d learned from the Catherine Internal at the monastery internal.

Two: Lay off the Varsol.

Three: Impregnate Emily, again.

Four: If perchance the sheer ostentation of the name Marcel_Proust brought about the last go-round’s turmoil, compromise on a less ostentatious name.

Five: Don’t harangue this baptismal deacon regarding Gurdjieef. Harangue her on the criminally-under-read scholarship of Klaas J. Kraay! Back-pedal rapidly when learning the deacon was Klaas’ student and grasps his work well beyond the titles of his essays.

Six: Be considerate! Chop extra wood for the wood stove, stoke said stove in the morning. Delete the easiest-to-identify dating apps from your phone. Practise humility by only levitating when Emily is not home.

Seven: If post-traumatic brain injury protocols require Emily to wake you hourly to ensure you don’t die in your sleep, remember with perfect clarity a recurring dream: hunched at Bessarion subway station with all belongings, place $5 in the token machine and receive thousands in Indian Rupees and Chinese yen and Canadian Tire Money. If backpacked books and records of a lifetime agitate contentious platforms, receive chastisement from the conformed masses, e.g. ‘rush hour is not the time to Sherpa all your dollar bin Ray Price gospel records and sad sister memories from Bessarion to Sheppard, pal, we’ve got our own podcasts to listen to. ’ Accusations of lechery will be levied until both platform sides condemn your pockets’ contents as artefacts of oppression, obfuscation, or else idiocy. If your source currency is inspected for the good of the commons, watch as your windfall is ripped to shreds and scattered across subway tracks by seething TTC code violation compilers.

Eight: If the earliest entry-point to medical model dream interpretation involves an OHIP-covered CBT charlatan prescriptively fugue-dreamt as Dr. Whybrow, then listen as the real-world Dr. Distorto balks with empirical high-mindedness that dream interpretation went out with Alfred Hitchcock and that Freud is more violently debunked with each passing day, entire wings of universities counterproductively devoted to the ceaseless denunciatory cause. Endure a long Livescience. com debunking “Was Freud Right About Anything?” before intentionally spilling your Fresca on Dr. Distorto’s huge pile of CBT worksheets and politely sprinting off towards the fire exit.

Nine: Visit the metropolis’ last practising Freudian. If the Freudian gets all keyed up about your frequent offhand references to breasts, he will need to know whether or not you were breastfed. Should you not consider this germane to the interpretation of your subway dream, suggest he enter the words “LiveScience” and “Freud” into Google.

Ten: If certainties of faith found in your comatose state drift too far from shore, your inclination to go weeks without water deeply deterred by the proximity of Mr. Sub’s salty sandwiches, your hostility having returned with your hunger (a likely result of the Infernal Serpent’s foremost handiwork: gluten) then attend a Roman Catholic service seeking to confirm any remnant decency in you. If the homily drones with sub-Barzilaian style, fear you’ll never find aid or succour in so toothless a faith-based environment. Meet the priest anyway to describe the dream and the safest-for-clergy aspects of your coma. If the priest aptly interprets,

“The Indian and Chinese currency represent spiritual truths found in the coma. Jesus was a house carpenter and his teachings were meant to build a metaphorical home. There’s your Canadian Tire money, which you’ll notice, they are just giving away for free when you buy something at Canadian Tire. Now, these code complainers, they scatter the money rather than using it to service their own ideas, because they have a priori determined its worthlessness. And anyway these agents would have been ambivalent were you less ostentatious. It was your pageantry combined with your uncertainty of faith that separated you from the spiritual currency. Maybe the lesson is you don’t need to lash out so much, but offer your rupees and yen with humility, whether the people on platforms consider them valuable or not. If I may offer my own metaphor: I live in the Beaches where there is an abundance of little free libraries. I’ll often find books such as Awaiting God by Simone Weil, their spines virtually uncracked by people they were given to as gifts. The difficulty with divine insight is some people want to take it away from you and tear it up, some mock it, and others just put it out by the curb as something quaint they hope a less sophisticated person might benefit from being deluded by. ”yet still your point of contention remains, “How to sound humble while offering unwanted truths?” then Father Fawndler, an unfortunate name, will respond, “Language can’t convey humility. You can only resonate what’s behind the Weil, as it were. ” If rye laughter resonates from you and Father Fawndler mistakes this as validation of his weak jest, show him pages of blog-based proselytizing. If Father Fawndlr pulls a Meister Eckhart volume from his shelf and holds his finger beneath the word ' Gelazanheit, ' Google its meaning as “serenity in abandonment. ”