John Swinburn

Finally, after an extensive hiatus, I’ll attend a writers’ critique group in downtown Hot Springs today. I’ll take for review a revised first chapter of a would-be-novel I’ve let languish for several months. Whether I continue will depend on whether I decide the novel has any potential—for being finished and being moderately appealing to the intended reader.

I’m slow to start my assessment of my plans for the year ahead. Here it is, eight days in, and I’ve still given only modest attention to “what do I want this year to hold for me.” It’s odd, I don’t feel a sense of urgency, nor a sense that planning matters much. But I’d rather not be a ship without direction, so I’ve committed to myself to pay attention and make decisions about where I want to go, both figuratively and literally, this year.

My wife and I both know that one thing we want to do is to fit into our clothes better, so we’re adjusting our intake of food and booze (for me), in terms of substance and volume, with the objective of saving money on a new wardrobe and, frankly, feeling better (speaking strictly for myself) than today. I feel stuffed and lethargic, though I can’t quite figure out why. It’s not that I’ve gained THAT much weight, but my body is telling me otherwise. Where’s my energy? I should be out blowing leaves to clear out paths for water to flow around the house, but I’ve not been able to muster the energy and the inclination.

I want to travel, but I don’t know where. I saw a television program about Costa Rica the other day; that holds promise. Or Nova Scotia; I’ve always loved what little I’ve seen of Nova Scotia and I want to go back. I’d like to relearn what little I once knew of welding, and then build on what I learned, but that’s an expensive proposition. The need for money to pursue so many of my interests (or what I think might be my interests) suggests I retired way too early; I would have served myself by chaining myself to the work-world for another four or five years, saving every penny I could in the process. That ship has sailed, though. Nothing can be gained by second-guessing a decision long since made and executed.

This post is the poster-child for my style of blogging; stream-of-consciousness that has no meaning to others and holds questionable meaning to me.  I’ll stop now and drink coffee, cup number two.

I spent considerable time this morning learning details of the country of Yemen from the CIA World Factbook. The country has a population of more than twenty-eight million people; more than thirteen million of them do not have access to electricity. Fifty-four percent of the population live below the poverty line (the local measure of which I do not know). The country is in debt beyond my ability to comprehend. In 2016, the country’s revenues were estimated at $1.684 billion and its expenses $4.917 billion. Huge numbers of its citizens face famine; many have fled to other countries to escape the war, becoming impoverished refugees with virtually no resources of their own.

The current condition of Yemen can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire. In 1918, North Yemen became independent. The area that became South Yemen in 1967 had been established as a British protectorate in the nineteenth century; the British withdrew that year. Three years later, the government of South Yemen adopted a Marxist orientation, prompting the exodus of large numbers of people from the south to the north. The two countries were united as the Republic of Yemen in 1990. Four years later, a southern secessionist movement was rapidly quashed, but erupted again in 2007.  There is, of course, more to the story. Suffice it to say the history of Yemen and the roots of the current civil war are deep and complex. Reading the full CIA World Factbook entry (ten subsections, each rather extensive) leaves me feeling that the situation in the country is essentially hopeless. Even if fighting stopped today and humanitarian food and water distribution across the county could take place without fear of attack, the scope of need is almost too big to comprehend.

So, what’s the point of reading about the almost insurmountable challenges of a country half a world away—a country whose people I cannot personally hope to help? If for no other reason, I read about Yemen to better understand the world in which we live. I read about Yemen as a way to give myself a cautionary note about what civil war can do to a country and its people. And I read about Yemen so I can discuss it with other people so the famine facing its people does not get erased in the political conversations of the day.

Sometime yesterday I encountered the phrase, “compassion as a lifestyle.” It could have been last night while I was watching a film by Susanne Suffredin, @home, about the work of homeless advocate Mark Horvath. Whether it was the film (which, by the way, was quite moving and thought-provoking) or not, I latched onto the phrase as if it were my own. I love the strength of principle it conveys. I love what it can mean, if people adopt it. I mention the phrase because thinking of it this morning is what brought me to explore more about Yemen. And that got me thinking about other things related to countries and compassion, leading me down another rabbit hole. As usual, while reading about Yemen, I got sidetracked; I perused other countries’ entries in the CIA World Factbook. One of the smallest countries in the world, Tuvalu, owes its existence to ethnic squabbles, like so many others. According to the Factbook:

“In 1974, ethnic differences within the British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands caused the Polynesians of the Ellice Islands to vote for separation from the Micronesians of the Gilbert Islands. The following year, the Ellice Islands became the separate British colony of Tuvalu. Independence was granted in 1978.”

“Hmmm,” I said to myself, “what else can I learn while I’m here?”

Well, I learned that the governments of a number of countries whose citizens live comfortably and in relative safety and who enjoy considerable freedom get tax revenue equal to at least fifty percent of their Gross Domestic Product. They apparently have high taxes and enjoy some of the highest levels of quality of life on the planet. A few of the countries with such significant revenue from taxes include: Iceland (58.4%), Finland (54.2%), Norway (54.2%), France (53.1%), Denmark (52.9%), Sweden (51.0%), and Belgium (50.7%). The figure for the U.S. is 17.6%. Of course, the government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP tells only part of the story, but it suggests that high tax revenue tends to correlate well with generally high quality of life. Yet further exploration shows a generally high correlation, too, with high unemployment for youth between sixteen and twenty-four years of age. It occurs to me that, with the data collected about countries around the world by the CIA, someone with adequate computer and analytical skills could use those data to determine with some precision what types of governmental policies provide the greatest likelihood of decent standard of living for the most people, lowest infant mortality rates, lowest unemployment rates, etc., etc. I’m not the one to do it, but I wish someone would.

So ends my ramblings for this morning. If the data collected by the CIA through both overt and covert means were all used to improve the quality of life of people worldwide, I would be happy to be a CIA operative. But I may be a little old to start now.

This post is the final one in a half-hearted attempt to accomplish a goal that’s neither simple to articulate nor easy to abandon. Having not attained a foothold toward achieving the elusive goal, I’m discarding my efforts to chase it, at least by way of a series of simplistic posts. Instead, I’ll incorporate that hard-to-define goal into my normal posts, by which I mean in the stream of my consciousness. If the reader is having difficulty understanding what I’m saying…welcome to the world of this writer.

Writing has been, for me, a form of meditation. Writing allows me to escape the world outside myself and to examine with clarity the life within. That’s not always pleasant. The life within can be tumultuous and uncomfortable; it can be upsetting and disconcerting. Despite the sometimes unsettling rough ride I take through writing, though, I find in in an opportunity to explore aspects of my intellect and my emotions that don’t reveal themselves otherwise. I’ve attempted, from time to time, to use writing as a guide for myself, something of a prod for me to achieve resolutions that otherwise probably would not get the attention they might deserve. Those attempts, though, usually fall short. I’ve come to the malleable conclusion that simplistic, cookie-cutter solutions to problems that cannot be described in the absence of a ten-thousand word dissertation are fruitless. So, I’ll continue the uphill battle of cleansing the detritus from my brain in the usual fashion; writing when it feels right, thinking in the absence of a keyboard or a pen when it doesn’t.

So, step four is mopping up the first three steps of this series, replacing it with something less formulaic and far more realistic.

When we welcome reality into our lives, we acknowledge the challenges that confront us. By welcoming reality, though, we do not accept defeat, even if defeat appears to be the most likely outcome of an endeavor; we simply acknowledge the scope of the task at hand.

Nothing matters so much as the  time I learned I never mattered and never will.

This is bizarre. I must have been playing with WordPress a long, long time ago and set this post to print far into the future (as I did when I was learning how to use it). Apparently, this bogus post was set to go public today, just after noon. Anyone who gets my posts by email or is notified of them should disregard, please. 😉

I played with software on Christmas day this year, creating two covers for two bogus magazines I’ve written about in years past. And then I smoked and reverse seared three enormous ribeye steaks. Just another day in the Arkansas outback. Christmas day did not materialize quite as the plans had forecast, but that’s okay; too many voices in the house can be deafening. Until around 3:45 p.m., there was just my wife and me. She took a long nap from late morning until mid-afternoon, so I had time to play with Microsoft Publisher and entertain myself with inane endeavors. Later in the day, her sister came over and we finished cooking, albeit with some surprising adjustments. After smoking the steaks until their internal temperature reached 110 degrees, they looked positively raw. I was concerned the meal was not going to play out as planned, but I pan seared three monstrous one-inch-plus-thick ribeyes on a cast-iron skillet, using the propane burner on my grill on the deck. They turned out just fine and graced our Christmas plates with aplomb. But we only needed one of the three to feed us, so we have cooked steak in the refrigerator for future meals. After our early dinner, I played my Spotify playlist of Christmas music while they enjoyed a few games of Sequence. All in all, it was a throwaway day, but one that I enjoyed. I hope that anyone reading these words had an equally enjoyable Christmas. Maybe next year we’ll organize a more traditional day, suited to the season.

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Whatever your preference, I wish everyone (anyone?) who reads this a joyous winter season and a better 2018 than the year soon to end.

Last night, for the second year in a row, we spent the evening sharing soups prepared by members and friends of the Unitarian Universalist Village Church. Janine’s contribution was a North African inspired red lentil soup. Judging from the fact that all of it was eaten and several people commented positively about it and asked for the recipe, I think it was a hit.

We enjoyed the evening, but something about the experience left me feeling disconnected to the group. I felt almost as if I were observing the event instead of participating in it. I don’t know whether Janine felt that way, but from my perspective, we were both observers to a far greater degree than were participants. There was much conversation, much happy laughter, lots of person-to-person engagement all around us, but we were rarely part of it. Maybe it’s because we’re both introverts and tend not to initiate conversations. Maybe it’s something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. Last night, I felt very much like an outsider, even though I was in the midst of it, taking pictures that I might use in the church newsletter and engaging in the occasional quick conversation with others. “Conversation” is not the right word; my engagements were more like quick, superficial chats.

The pain in my left knee that began yesterday morning have colored reaction to last night’s experience. By lunch time, it hurt to walk and to bend my knee, which was visibly swollen. When it came time to drive to the church, I could not bend it enough to get in the driver’s seat, so Janine drove. I limped around getting soup and wincing at the pain. When we got home, I took a couple of pills for pain, which, this morning, seem to have helped a bit. My knees (both of them) increasingly complain about bending of late. I suspect the pain is simply the price of ageing and carrying too much upper body excess baggage.

Maybe today, Christmas Day, I’m just feeling a bit removed from society in general. I suspect I’ll get over this malaise. I always do.

It’s officially Christmas Eve. Or should I say it’s officiously Christmas Eve. In either event, the calendar claims the date is December 24, the day before evidence of the existence of Santa Clause will be found in households across the land. Not in this household, mind you, but in many households.

In this household, the evidence will point to the existence of the Chile con Queso Spirit, a moderately obese man of Mexican heritage who delivers incredibly flavorful cheese sauce to the tamales of children who have been good enough to merit tamale deliveries in the days leading up to Christmas. Inasmuch as there are no children in this house, the Chile con Queso Spirit has seen fit to deliver the ingredients for that delectable cheese sauce. Fortunately, one of my brothers organized the delivery of a couple of dozen pork and jalapeño tamales to our house a day or so ago, so there will be something in which the Chile con Queso Spirit’s make-it-yourself-sauce to bathe. And it will be good.

In advance of that spiritual undertaking, we shall attend a Christmas Eve candlelight service at an accepting-of-non-believers-church, where we will share soups at the conclusion of the festivities. Only afterward will be return to our home to eat tamales and chile con queso and chips and drink Arkansas-brewed beer.

Tomorrow, I will smoke enormous rib-eye steaks for an hour, then reverse sear those monsters. And THAT will form the foundation of a meal that will satisfy all of the eaters. Christmas comes only once a year. But we may decide to increase its frequency.

I think I’m coming to grips with the fact that I’m an extremely emotional person. I still try to stem the tears when I can, but I’ve reached the conclusion that some people (and I’m one) are just hyper-emotional. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it’s a product of my upbringing or life experiences. Whatever it is, it’s not going to change. I know that, because I’ve been trying to change it for the better part of 64 years. Tears come remarkably easily to me; I hope that’s an indication of the depth of my empathy. But there’s an ugly underbelly to the emotions that bring forth tears; that same emotional scale permits anger to rapidly erupt into rage. The love I feel (I’ll call my empathy by that name) when people need my compassion is counter-balanced by the white-hot loathing I feel (I’ll call my unbridled hatred by that name) when I believe people deserve my molten contempt.

My entire conscious life has been spent searching for meaning that, ultimately, I’ve decided does not exist. This universe and everything in it has no intrinsic meaning. We attribute meaning to “all of creation.” But that’s only a wish, not a reality. There’s nothing to search for. It’s inside us. Each of us determines the meaning that merits our very existence. I think suicides don’t necessarily follow pain, but a loss of self-induced meaning. And the loss of self-induced meaning can follow sensations of guilt, betrayal, loss, unworthiness, and so many other bits of broken-ness.

Tonight, on the eve of Christmas Eve, I’m melancholy and wishing the world were a better place.

I awoke at 3:56 a.m. No, that’s not quite right. That’s when I got out of bed. I awoke a short while before that. I got out of bed at 3:56 a.m.

Subsequent to abandoning my effort to sleep until daybreak, I thought about how the world has changed since I was a child. The advent of the internet gave rise to our addiction to 24/7 instant access to news and rumor and manipulative misinformation. The internet is just the latest technology to rip our lives apart. Television, radio, automobiles, airplanes, printing presses, the cotton gin, steam locomotives…the list seems endless. Every radical new technology-enabled capability seems to have altered life as we once knew it. I wonder whether life on earth—both human and otherwise—has been improved by all these transformations. There’s no way to perform an unbiased analysis, of course. In many ways, technology has magnified and enabled humans’ ability to do damage to the planet and ourselves. We’re probably less connected to the earth that we’ve ever been. And that’s unfortunate because that tenuous connection makes us less likely to consider the effects of our actions on everything around us.

We can never return to”the ways things used to be.” We can only learn from our experiences and attempt to create a future built on the best of what we’ve learned. The national, even global, conversation isn’t about building a future. Instead, it’s about tearing down a past. I wish I knew how to change the direction of the conversation. I’ve spent the better part of two hours ruminating on the subject. I am no closer to knowing now than I was when I awoke. But I’ve had two more cups of coffee than I’d had when I awoke, so I suppose I’ll call that progress.

My stenosis and bone spurs reared their ugly heads again a few days ago, causing my tangled nerves to react with pain in my arms, shoulder, and right shoulder blade. I had stopped taking my "nerve pain" medications, which was probably a mistake. And I hadn’t been getting the physical therapy I should have been getting, at least not as much a I should have. So the blame falls squarely on my very painful shoulders. It is getting better, though. I’d prefer a few shots of morphine to speed things up, but the government thinks free access to morphine would be problematic.

We had planned to go to Tulsa the other day, but I couldn’t see myself driving (or being a passenger, sitting in one spot) for four or five hours. Seems to me the pain is greater when I’m sitting in a car. I wonder how much of it is psychological?

The cold weather, coupled with the aberrant pain, is exaggerating my suffering, too. Every one of my joints complain about arthritis. I understand what they are saying; they are expressing their dissatisfaction with the way I’ve treated my body all these years. I can’t argue with them. My arthritis seems to get a new lease on life every time temperatures drop below forty degrees.

And if I didn’t have enough to complain about, I took my car in to have the "check engine" light checked, only to find the car needs $1000+ to address problems with the vacuum hoses (pretty much all of them) plus a valve and rust on the gas filler tube (the thing the gas cap screws onto). The car is fifteen years old and generally in very good condition, so $1,000 is not too much to spend on it, I guess. But after just spending $6,000 on getting the house painted and a couple of grand or so dealing with my nerves, that hit a sore spot. They gave me a loaner car, while the work is don, a "small" pickup that seems to me as big as a tank.

I could complain about the snow, but we didn’t get any. I understand Houston, Corpus Christi and perhaps points sound in Texas got a bit of the white stuff. I’m happy to keep it away from here, along with its cousin, black ice or sleet or any other frozen precipitation.

Tonight will see temperatures drop into the upper twenties, but tomorrow we’ll reach sixty and tomorrow night will edge to just below forty.

Tomorrow, a guy is coming to give me a quote on removing a large, badly sick tree. Tuesday, the fireplace checkup guy will be here. In between, provided my neck/ shoulder/arms can take it, I need to rake enormous volumes of leaves, Some days, and this is one of them, I wish I lived in an apartment where all the maintenance was handled by management. Or in Mexico. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Channels run deep within us, channels as delicate as gently bubbling streams and as powerful as rivers that fiercely tear into the bedrock of the earth over which they flow. Through these channels flow the aspirations that drive us to seek a better world, not just for ourselves but for future generations. Some call these channels conscience or morality or decency or humanity or…a thousand other names. I do not know what they are. I know only that they exist, even though in some of us they are clogged with doubt and grief and hatred and selfish narcissism. Shovels, in whatever form, can clear those congested paths.