Prognostication

Soon after arriving in Yogyakarta in the closing days of December 2023, I noticed a car number plate directly in front of the taxi that we had hired to take us from the train station to our place of accommodation. The number plate read:

H 1305 SR

8-26

It was the SR that caught my eye of course: Sean Reeves. Now my mind clicked into gear. H is the letter used by vehicles registered in the Special Region of Yogyakarta and I took this to stand for Hidupan meaning "life" in the Indonesian language. The 1305 I interpreted as the number of days remaining of my life.

Given that the date was the 28th December 2023, 1305 days from this date is Sunday, July 25, 2027. The 8-26 (short for August 2026) suggested to me that I'd perhaps fall ill in August 2026 and pass away on July 25th 2027. I used Wolfram Alpha on my phone to quickly calculate the date of my possible demise. If it comes to pass, I will be 78 years old.

That age reminds me of Barry Thomson who was the owner of the accommodation that I moved into when staying in Brisbane a few years ago. He was 77 when I met him. He had battled advanced melanoma in his 60s and was now seemingly hale and hearty. He gave me two books he had written on how he had overcome his cancer. He died some months later, having quite quickly succumbed to brain cancer. He may well have been 78 at that point.

I should never have met him had I not been standing in the doorway of some alternative accommodation that I had first considered. The caretaker with two young Asians in tow suddenly arrived and took instant offense to the fact that I was blocking his doorway. A couple of years later I ended up living in that accommodation but on that occasion sharp words were exchanged and I ended up at Barry's place.

Even though Barry succumbed in the end, his story is an inspirational one because he did live a good many years cancer-free after his initial diagnosis and it wasn't because of any help from the medical establishment who had written him off. He followed his own path and won the battle. I need to do the same with my own mysterious affliction and try to find a remedy using my own methods.

I looked at the transits to my chart on July 25th 2027 and I'll link later to an astrological discussion of what I found. This is all much ado about nothing probably but it's interesting how I've become more focused on the timing of my exit from planet Earth. I'm probably not unusual in this respect but I should get on with living and making the most of the time that I have left.

This post has got me thinking about the use of the word "dead" in various expressions, so  I created a post on this topic in my Pedagogical Posturing blog called Dead Eye Dick.