Manksta

My “good time” has shifted. 0200 till 0900 seems to be the time of day/night that I feel almost among the living. I wake up at this time , and feel “fluish” and totally bagged but there is no falling back to sleep. Sleep , is a joke . By 0200 I think I have had enough of that other place called sleep. Since the chemo there has been no rest in sleep at all. Before I would at least get an hour or two within a 24 hr. period .“Monksta” I tried to look for the translation of this word from Lithuanian to English to no avail. I remember when I was young attending a basketball school/camp on the shores of Wasaga Beach on Nottawasaga Bay at the southern end of Georgian Bay. The instructor was apparently an NBA coach. Whether this was true , I do not know. Kids are almost as bad as adults at embellishing rumours . The only difference is that Kids really believe what they are saying but adults know that they are lying. The staff at the camp were Canadian/Lithuanians that had all experienced the horrors of the 2cnd World War in Eastern Europe. Needless to say there was a militaristic approach the running of the school/camp. Fresh faced kids aged 9 to 17 that the previous day were being spoiled by their Canadian/European mothers were now sleeping in military style barracks and being drilled most of the day past the point of exhaustion. “Monksta” ? The priest ( every military unit needs a Padre) , good humorously mind you, would come into the barracks , banging a pot with a wooden spoon yelling “Manksta” at the top of his lungs. We had 5 min. to get dressed and assemble in front of the barracks. The only way that you could stay in your bunk was if you were dead. I was 9 or 10 years old at the time. Then we would do calisthenic exercises and go for a 2 mile run , have breakfast ,a ½ hr rest , then a real 2hr workout running drills with military precision. We could then relax till lunchtime. A ½ hr after lunch I we would do it all over again. The only difference between the morning and afternoon session was that the afternoon drills were followed by an all out full court basketball game. My group was all of 9 to 11 years old. I wouldn’t have traded the whole experience for the world. When I now awaken exhausted , and probably depressed I recall the word “Mankstsa” and force myself to do some stretches and light exercise. The activity along with a couple of coffees can most of the time give me an hour or two of feeling not to bad. The flu like feeling is always there but the exercise and caffeine lessen the fatigue for a bit. The word “Manksta” and the memory of the experience the word evokes is what I use to motivate myself in the wee hours of the morning. I have always maintained that a persons habits and the foundations of his/her character is established by the time they reach the age of 14 to 17 years of age. Everything after that is fine tuning. I have been reading the bible and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The House of the Dead”. The former seems like a good self-help book in the style of Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie for people living 2000 + years ago. The latter a book that Dostoyevsky wrote about his prison experience in Russia in the 1800’s. I am only a third of the way into Dostoyevsky’s book. Unless things start to go horribly wrong for poor Fyodor in later chapters of his book , I am going to have to surmise that prisoners in Russia’s 19th Century penal system were treated much more humanely than the treatment received by inmates in the present day Canadian penal system. The more I look back in history ,the more I am amazed at the fact that we have not evolved socially at all. We have scientifically progressed so much in the last 200 years but have regressed in the treatment of our fellow human beings. Human slavery is the worst that it has ever been in the history of the world . We use most of our resources on developing means to kill each other. We are far less civilized now than during any time in our past. Being close to dying I guess I just keep mulling over the spiritual side of life. I have not come across anything yet that has not been blatantly transparently false. Most religious people I find are self-serving . They are not trying to do good of their own accord but rather to please a God that promise them a reward later. Jesus , you sweet smart Jew. The teachings in the Bible and the Qur’an have been responsible for more human misery and bloodshed than the devil could have ever hoped to achieve on his own. I have however realized and experience that there is power in faith but I still doubt if faith and religion really have anything to do with each other. I do pray however , usually to say thank you . To whom I do not know . I only know that with all the worlds suffering and misgiving and my death sentence that I am grateful for the decency and beauty that I can still find. See ya on the other side.