Like a movie you've seen too often. Or, just shoot me.

Yes -- exactly, life reaches a point where it seems like a movie you've seen too often. You know the plot and everything about it so well, you doze off ... not so much out of boredom (because Harrison Ford will always be a charmer, no matter how many times you've seen him in this), but with the simple familiarityof the action. It's not that this movie is one iota less than it was the first time you saw it --

Just shoot me. Seriously.
Would it be too droll to add "copyright Lucasfilm"or words along those lines?
Fair usage: call it a free promo for Star Wars. (Don't worry, Walt: I won't bill you, LOL)

-- but there's not enough freshness left to keep you awake and aware for two hours. And the real problem starts when LIFE has reached this same point...

Mom's sick again today. Screen door needs fixing. Shower's not draining properly. Garden needs weeding. I'm tired. I have a headache. This laptop is so getting so slow, I think it's having the cybernetic equivalent of a stroke. Blah, etcetera, blah, so forth, blah, such like.

You can always turn off a movie, but what happens if you turn off LIFE?!

Well, the screen door is booked in for a fix-it session on July 25. I have an appointment for an MRI on the 20th. Dave needs to wiggle the wire "snakes" down the shower drain -- again. Mike and I need to get some fresh air and sunshine, and do some work in the garden -- again. I guess I'll take a nap (again) while I have the chance; and I already took the pills for the headache...uh, again.

What the movie of my life need is a new plot, or new characters!

I listened to a podcast last week: turns out, up to 80% of everything we (think we) see with our physical eyeballs is no more than a memory feed. Your brain is showing you old data; most of the time it's not even taking fresh scans of the house, which is why you can be tearing the place apart, looking for something when in fact it's right in front of you all the time, but you can't see it. You're looking an an old scan, in which you glasses were not sitting in front of the TV, or your coffee cup was not sitting on top of the microwave. We see what we expect to see, and only seem to "come alive" when we travel, and the brain/eyes combination is forced to scan new places, new things, or else walk face-first into a camel.

I guess, Step One would be learning how to actually see every day, even while we're not on vacation.

Of course, if I did that, I'd see I also need to dust and vacuum and wash and scrub and...

Uh, tomorrow. Don't want to see all that dust right now.

And LIFE itself begs the question, what does happen if you turn it off or change the channel? But chasing down those answers will take you out of realms of philosophy and into metaphysics.

I wonder if I'll be cross or just bemused if the answer turns out to be 42.