John Swinburn

The temperature this morning, as of about 5, was 21°F. Today’s high is expected to reach 46°F. But the air temperature will remain at or below freezing until around 9 this morning. These facts matter to me because the slush remaining on the roads, particularly roads that had little or no traffic yesterday, certainly has frozen solid overnight. Black ice and re-frozen snow melt make for treacherous driving conditions. Even though my car is an all-wheel-drive vehicle, I hesitate to drive it on hilly terrain covered with ice—especially steep, hilly terrain. I want to drive to our new house today. I started to drive over yesterday, but when I reached a steep area that was shaded by pine trees, I decided the risk of sliding off the road and down a steep embankment was too great…so I returned home. I wonder how different it will be today? Maybe I’ll stay in, as much as it probably will drive me approximately crazy.

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Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.

~ Words from an Irish headstone ~

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I read this morning about California-born figure skater Zhu Yi’s falls in the Olympic competition in Beijing. Though an American, she was chosen to represent China in the event. Her unfortunate falls apparently gave rise to voluminous vitriolic comments on Chinese social media, though the mostly Chinese crowd in the stadium at the event applauded her as she bowed. I have grown to despise the concept that Olympic athletes “represent” their (or “a”) country. That idea foments rabid nationalism which, to my way of thinking, is anathema to the very concept of Olympic competitions. In my mind Olympic events are about individual and team performance. They are not meant to demonstrate one nation’s superiority over another; rather they are meant to celebrate individuals’ and teams’ extraordinary capabilities. The fact that Chinese social media attacked Zhu Yi simply demonstrates that China is just as susceptible to the imbecilic capacity for rabid nationalism as any other country. The shame about which the online attackers complain is not about Zhu Yi; it should be about posters’ own behavior. While I’m ranting about the Olympics, I’ll go on record as saying I think eligibility to compete should be limited to amateur athletes; athletes who are paid for their athletic performance should be ineligible to participate. Growl.

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I made sardines with grits for breakfast yesterday, just as I suggested I might. My breakfast had long-since been finished and the dishes washed and put away before my morning solitude ended a couple of hours later. During that morning solitude, the origin of sardines with grits never entered my mind. But when asked if the meal’s concept was “mine,” I responded that I doubted it, but I did not know its origin. This morning, before I began writing this post, I explored a bit, which jogged my memory. It seems sardines with grits is a fairly common dish in the Caribbean. Yet they are most common, from what I gather, in the Bahamas, which are neither in the Caribbean nor on its border. Notwithstanding their geographic distance from (or perhaps because of their proximity to) the Caribbean, the island nation is a full member state of the Caribbean Community. But that fact has nothing to do with sardines and grits, does it? No, so I’ll move on. So, based on today’s cursory research (and the resurrection of memories), sardines with grits is a Caribbean dish. I must have found mention of it long ago; I remember making it when I lived in Dallas, so it has been at least several years since I first tried it. My memory tells me I must first have encountered mention of the dish when conducting research for my “breakfast around the world” book, which I’ve never finished. I’ve never been to the Caribbean, so I did not come across it there. I remember another Caribbean (Jamaican) dish, one I’ve tried more recently, is saltfish and ackee. When I say “recently,” I mean since I moved to Hot Springs Village. I wrote about that dish on a blog post in November 2015.

The pause for research that led me to find the saltfish and ackee post also led me back to a March 2013 post I entitled “A Renaissance of Sardines,” in which I posted a recipe for sardines and grits. That recipe was slightly more involved than yesterday’s dish (which consisted of canned sardines packed in water, grits, and a few splashes of habanero sauce). The original recipe called for sardines packed in olive oil, grits, chopped black olives, and diced tomatoes.

While pondering those old recipes and the research I used to conduct in pursuit of my unfinished book, it occurred to me that my research tapered off when my late wife started exhibiting symptoms that her congestive heart failure was getting worse. Though she was not nearly as much of an aficionado as I, she enjoyed trying the occasional unusual (for us) international breakfast. When her interest began to decline, I no longer had a willing partner with whom to explore international breakfast traditions. I’ve never known of anyone else willing to explore gustatory adventures, at least not with regard to breakfast. That may not be true. I may have known others who are/were willing, but not in such an easily casual manner. Neither she nor I ever claimed to have the taste of a gourmet, nor to be fiercely and passionately committed to culinary matters. We both just enjoyed trying new foods and new flavors.

The oddest things can trigger precious memories which, in turn, can awaken grief from its slumber.

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I awoke this morning at around 3:30. I had an odd feeling that someone was standing nearby; there was no one standing nearby. I got up for a minute, but decided it was just too early to get up for the day, so I went back to bed. Just after 4, I admitted defeat and got up for good. Although I knew there was no one standing nearby, that feeling kept coming back, then fading, then coming back again. Finally, I decided I must have been thinking about writing a piece of fiction in which two people communicate with one another through their dreams. That must be it. But, still…

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I fell in love with this image I encountered yesterday. Actually, I fell in love with a number of images yesterday. Much of my day was spent at the computer, looking at art of various kinds. In my mind’s eye, I see images I would like to create on canvas or on the side of buildings, but I do not have the technical skills nor the mental capacity to transfer what I see in my head to the physical world. I admire artists whose hands and brains can work together in such extraordinary fashion that they produce magnificent works of art that I consider almost magical in their ability to spellbind viewers or participants. The image here should be relatively easy to replicate, with the right stones and the right beach. But that’s a bit like saying I should be able to create paintings just like the brilliantly colorful works of Leonid Afremov; all I need are the right paints, the right brushes and/or palette knives, and the right canvas. The successful merger of visions, skills, and materials requires at least a few dashes of magic.

You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine. When you peel it and smell it, it’s wonderful. You can take your time eating a tangerine and be very happy.

~ Thích Nhất Hạnh ~

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I vacillate between believing in the wisdom of people like Thích Nhất Hạnh and drenching myself in skepticism and setting it ablaze by striking matches made of disbelief. I prefer the way I feel when I think simple wisdom is the best guide to living a good, valuable, meaningful life. But I must admit that I feel that way less frequently than I’d like. I get frustrated. Upset. Angry at the world. “Why can’t we just…?” Is my fallback question when I think humankind is on the brink between perfection and irrevocable chaos. That is, usually.

But when I force myself to empty my mind of distractions and focus on the tangerine (a metaphor, in my way of thinking, for incredibly beautiful simplicity), the wisdom floods through as if a dam had been breached. Truth and love and palpable magic flows like silken honey. It’s really quite spectacular, albeit brief. Brief because I quickly realize the impossibility of getting everyone on the same “wavelength.” Oh, well.

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I feel as though I am being watched. Like someone is viewing me from a distance, tracking my moves. I sense someone’s eyes following me from the bedroom into the kitchen as I get up in the morning to make coffee and begin my day. A detective, perhaps, but not a police officer. And not someone paid to gather intelligence about me; no, it’s not a private investigator. Instead, I think I am being assessed. Evaluated. Sized up. The watcher—the voyeur—doesn’t see my every move. Probably doesn’t see me much, if at all. But she—if, indeed, the follower is a she—deduces what I am doing by analyzing what I say. And she infers, by carefully watching my shadow, the routes my body takes when it leaves one place and goes to another.

You probably have decided by now my story of being watched is just that; a story. Yes, it is. But it’s also tinged with suspicion. Suspicion is not the right word. No, curiosity is more like it. Is someone following my thoughts by reading what’s on my mind? Does someone I’ve never met extrapolate my broader thoughts by reading snippets of what’s on my mind in my blog posts?

What I’ve just suggested describes the way I sometimes create characters when I write fiction. I watch people in restaurants, in grocery stores, in their cars, etc., etc. And as I watch them, I take cues from their behaviors; those cues tell me what the people are thinking, where they live, how they make their living, and a million other details. Watching and listening, I get hints about others’ lives. I get enough to be able to get inside their heads so I can find motives for what they do and say. Eventually, I no longer have to watch and listen. Eventually, they do as they please and simply transcribe their thoughts and actions for me. My fingers sort and organize the letters into words and sentences, but they do the heavy lifting by telling me what to say.

Somewhere between being watched and allowing my fingers to respond to the commands of characters who exist in my head (often, though, because of characters who exist elsewhere), is the intersection between reality and fantasy. It is where the two merge that I find myself most comfortable. The real world is too harsh and demanding. The fantasy world is not sufficiently believable. Only where they come together does life feel natural and worth the investment of whatever it is we’re giving up to get it.

That’s an interesting concept, I think. Consider that life itself is a commodity we’re purchasing. Or is it purely an investment? What is the form of exchange we use to buy it? In Capitalist thinking, we must be investing life itself in the hope and/or expectation that we will have more of it to spend over time. That, of course, is ludicrous. Except that it’s not. No, by spending/investing wisely, we enhance the amount of life available to us. So, with proper food, shelter, and an environment conducive to sustaining life, we have more life to spend. Similar arguments could be made on behalf of other economic models, of course. Communism or socialism could demonstrate the same relationships.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This statement is not necessarily restricted to material goods or monetary units. It may apply just as well to emotional capabilities and requirements. If you have love available to give and I am in need of love, we have a deal. Except what do you get in return for giving? Or is reciprocity necessary in such an emotional exchange?

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Sometimes, writing is dangerous. Sometimes, the fingers want to express thoughts that must not be expressed  publicly if one wants tranquility to prevail. If I were to write what’s on my mind right now, I might offend some people, thrill others, and put myself in the position of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. One serves oneself and the world at large by keeping one’s own counsel. Yet, perhaps openness and honesty can bring about extreme clarity. One might discover that one’s thoughts are not entirely out of synch with the way others see the world. Hmm. That’s a risk sometimes worth taking. And sometimes not.

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I may make sardines with grits for breakfast this morning. Just for me. I think I’m the only one in the house who finds such stuff appealing.

One of my blog posts found its way into the February issue of The Springs Magazine. The publisher, JoAnn Mangione, who occasionally follows this blog, asked if she could include one of my posts in her magazine. Naturally, I was honored and delighted at the compliment. My little contribution is on page 8 of the February issue. My little piece represents a tiny sliver of the magazine. The magazine deserves a cover-to-cover read. If you’re interested in the arts and entertainment in and around Hot Springs, Arkansas, it is your best source of information.

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Except for recommendations we got to the contrary, we had planned to drive to central California within the past few days for a birthday surprise. We had hoped to see my sister during the trip. As life unfolded, though, delaying the trip was probably the best decision. But I’m anxious to make that trip before too many months have passed. As soon as we have comfortably completed our new house and sold this one, I want to hit the road for a bit. I say that a lot, don’t I? Well, yes I do. Because a long, meandering road trip has been on my mind for years. Almost as long as my longing for an orange Kubota tractor and a place to put it to use. I’ve about given up on my dream of working a piece of rural land; I’m too old and too sedentary these days. But I can drive. And I can get lost in awe as I encounter new topography and new horizons and awe-inspiring geology and vegetation and vistas that bring me almost to tears.

I will promise myself this: no later than June 1 this year, I will embark on a road trip; one long enough to satisfy my wanderlust for at least a while. It may be just two or three days long or three or four weeks long. And I don’t plan to do it alone. Whatever it is, I will do it so I can recover what’s left of my sanity. I keep telling myself there’s never a guarantee of tomorrow, yet I keep putting things off until “tomorrow.” That has to stop.

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I do not know whether road conditions will allow me to meet my floor guy this morning. I suppose time will tell.

I feel depressed this morning. There’s no etiology to my mood. Though there are plenty of things that could be partly responsible for it, I don’t think anything is to blame. I sometimes feel like nothing matters. But then, suddenly, the heavy grey blanket is pulled away from me and I can see and appreciate the blue sky. Not this morning, though. I want to see the blue sky and I want to feel and appreciate all the gifts of life that surround me. And I will. But not now. I wish I could flip a switch so that an electric current could flow through me, supplying energy and power to the emotions I want to feel. But I cannot find the switch. I feel around the doorway in the dark and it’s not there. I wish that, by walking through a door, I could instantly erase my existence from before I was conceived. Not like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but in a more realistic sense, like no one was impacted, positively or negatively, by my existence…that never was. This is not new. It happens on occasion and it always fades into memory. Not entirely gone, but not being so assertive that it invades my otherwise sunny disposition.

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My brother’s death last week was expected. Even after several days of allowing reality to sink in, though, it’s still hard to believe he died. It’s difficult to come to grips with the fact that he and I will  no longer engage in conversation. I will no longer be able to listen to him asserting strong opinions about matters about which we had radically different points of view. Within days of his death—before and after—the reality of his poverty asserted itself. Before his latest medical emergency, my sister had provided a few thousand dollars in funds for him to move from his longtime hell-hole of an apartment in a decaying old house to a senior living facility. Unfortunately, he fell ill and was hospitalized before he could move. Then, when his Medicare-covered hospitalization ran out (withdrawn because he no longer demonstrated the “progress” Medicare demanded to continue covering his care), I offered to pay for up to a month’s nursing home care while a long-deferred Medicaid application was completed and processed. He died just hours after he was moved to the facility…the facility that would not accept him until it received thirty days’ coverage in a shared room. At a rate of $7,530 per month.  When he died, I paid the nearly $1,000 fees required by the crematory. It was all a matter of convenience; other siblings would willingly contribute, but the process was greatly simplified with a single payer. It is my understanding that my expenses with the nursing home will be refunded. And it’s possible my brother’s bank account could be sufficient—thanks only to my sister’s earlier contribution for his move—to cover his cremation. My brother was extremely bright, but he made a lot of decisions over his lifetime that were not in his best interests. And he was the victim of circumstances beyond his control, as well. He was in part responsible for his poverty, but he was not entirely responsible. He did not deserve to live in poverty. No one does. But it sometimes is impossible to successfully intervene to counter the full throttle of social and economic engines that seem hell-bent on reaching an unwanted destination. Yet I wonder how his life might have been different if I had been willing to keep arguing with him even after he rejected the conversations. I could have refused to take “no” for an answer when he declined to accept my offer of providing start-up funding for his own air conditioning installation and repair company. I could have sent him money other times even when he said he would not accept it. Of course I’ll never know whether those or a dozen other financial and/or emotional support interventions would have changed the course of his life. But perhaps they would have. Maybe he would have had a healthy financial reserve so he could have paid for  his own care in his final days and so that his own financial cushion could have paid for his cremation. Maybe. But it’s pointless to speculate about what is now impossible.

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Sleet. Ice pellets. Freezing rain. Though I am not sure what is responsible for the noise, something relentlessly pelts the windows this frigid morning, making a sound unique to cold winter weather. When I awoke just before 4, an inch of white something—snow? ice?—covered the glass-topped table on the deck. Moments later, the sounds against the window began in earnest. The online weather forecast claims freezing rain is falling. It goes on to say that freezing rain will change to ice pellets this afternoon. And the forecast calls for temperatures to remain in the mid-twenties until late tomorrow afternoon, when they briefly will break through freezing, then drop to the teens through Saturday morning.

I suspect my Friday appointment with a guy to inspect the old flooring in my new house will not take place as planned. There will be too much ice on the roads to allow us to safely meet. I will be stuck here at my old house until sometime Saturday—maybe even Sunday—when Nature gives me permission to venture out to see what damage ice might have done to the trees and power lines. Thus far, our power has held. I hope it continues to keep us safe and warm for the duration of this winter storm.

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While the weather’s icy tantrum plays out, I will find chores to occupy my time inside. One of the tasks  on which I envision I will spent my time is to tighten the legs on all the dining chairs. When the chairs were recovered a few short years ago, the upholsterer stapled a piece of black fabric to the underside of the seat of each chair. That fabric covers the intersections between the seats and the legs of the chairs, making it impossible—without painstakingly removing every staple—to tighten the bolts connecting those pieces together. These Scandinavian chairs are brilliantly simple in design. But the addition of North American “style” has interfered with their simplicity. I truly admire the minimalist simplicity of Scandinavian design. I am not so taken with the North American stylistic additions. But at least the icy weather will give me time to do something I’ve put off for months. I hope I take advantage of that time, rather than frittering it away by engaging in mindless drivel.

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If the universe were in the mood to treat me more kindly, it would supply me with a month of isolation in a comfortable cabin in the far northern reaches of Canada—or somewhere else equally distant from the demands of the world. The cabin would be amply stocked with food, fire wood, and an assortment of tools and supplies to enable me to make ceramics, work with wood, pretend to make art with metal, and teach myself how to make stained glass objects. The cabin would have a computer on which I could write every morning and, possibly, many nights. While the computer would have internet access for the purposes of writing on my blog, I would be unable to read about or hear about world news. The only information I could get from the computer would be weather forecasts. By the end of the month, I would have answered my own questions. All of them. I would re-enter society with a better understanding of myself and how I can better engage with all the troubles that life and death throw at us. The answers are all there, inside. I just need to figure out a way to get at them.

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My mood is brightening a bit. I knew it would. It’s not even 6 yet and I’m tired again. It’s too early or too late to take a nap. And it’s too early to make noise in the kitchen. I will tiptoe around. It will be fine.

I disagree vehemently with a lot of people about their beliefs. I detest the repugnant philosophies of the KKK.  I find offensive the claims by some groups of men who insist that equal protection laws target men with the purpose of subjecting men to slavery by radical feminists. I am disgusted with people who insist that the Civil War was not about slavery but about States’ rights. But reacting to those philosophies and the people who hold them by stripping them of their ability to say what they think is contrary to the principles of democracy and the principles upon which the United States was founded. I have mixed feelings about giving a microphone to people whose words could promote or actually incite violence. But I think the excuse of snatching that microphone away to deter violence is too often a cover for silencing unpopular ideas. I loathe the idea that protected speech applies only to speech that espouses ideas with which we agree. That, in my view, is simply an “acceptable” form of forced conformity—mob rule disguised as democracy. It is hypocrisy of the highest order. Unfortunately, anti-democratic actions in the name of protecting human dignity are enjoying a monstrous upsurge. Silencing conservative viewpoints by refusing to allow conservative pundits to speak on liberal collect campuses seems increasingly to be in the news. The way to combat offensive rhetoric is not to silence it. The way to combat it is to forcefully argue against it, using honesty, logic, and an appeal to the deepest parts of humanity.

Whoopi Goldberg’s suspension from co-hosting The View (even after her apology and retraction) bothers me. She was castigated for saying the Holocaust was about man’s inhumanity to man and not about race. Before her censure, she said this:

“But I thought it was a salient discussion because as a Black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. So I see you and know what race you are…I thought it [the Holocaust] was more about man’s inhumanity to man…But people were very angry and said, ‘No, no, we are a race.’ I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me.”

Whether I buy her philosophy or her apology or not, I think stripping her of her ability to express her views is more offensive than any views she might have expressed.  In my opinion, Kim Godwin’s (president of ABC News) reaction to the controversy was more about bending to slanted public opinion than about “morality.” Godwin took the side of censorship. A principled leader who had the courage of her convictions might have, instead, said, “I find Whoopi Goldberg’s statements deeply offensive, but I find even more offensive the idea of silencing her because she disagrees with me. ” Or something to that effect.

Oh, I have been guilty of wanting to silence people (and calling for them to be silenced). But when I think, deeply, about what that means, I cannot help but be ashamed for behaving in such a brutally anti-democratic fashion. I absolutely abhor philosophies that I find offensive and dangerous and contrary to principles of human decency. But my distaste for those philosophies should not give me the latitude to suppress them. I should have to use my superior powers of logic to defend my position and to overcome the one I find offensive.

I find suppression of Whoopi Goldberg and the refusal to allow speakers (whether progressive or conservative) on college campus fundamentally wrong. It is, in my view, equivalent to book burning. And THAT, I believe, is the definition of evil.

The posts on this blog generally amount to conversations with myself. That is true even though my intent these days is to engage readers in far-flung dialogues that mimic the philosophical exchanges one might expect during a comfortable morning gathering over a long, leisurely coffee with friends. Or, during a late evening get-together over wine or shots of fine whiskey or smooth tequila. That’s the intent. Instead, these posts represent early-morning transcriptions of keenly personal conversations between an isolated mad-man and his equally reclusive doppelgänger; a man and his twin stranger who look and think dangerously alike.

The reader of this blog, then, who usually just skims the transcriptions and leaves without joining the discussion, is an eavesdropper. Someone who may be listening-in on the off-chance of gathering a juicy tidbit or who may be sufficiently bored to find even deranged dialogue modestly interesting—but not adequately engaging to warrant participation in the conversation. Perhaps it’s a bit like watching an automobile accident: it embarrassingly captures one’s fascination, but is not sufficiently intriguing to justify swerving at high speed into the tangle of bent metal and broken glass. An observation and a question arise from that similarity. Viewing an automobile accident usually prompts at least a few witnesses to inquire whether there’s a need for police intervention or medical assistance. Skimming the wreckage here rarely triggers such inquiries; instead, witnesses become like voyeurs who slowly drive by the aftermath of the chaos, assuming someone else called for an ambulance.

Admittedly, I can take comparative drama to absurd levels, but it’s just to make a point. That I feel a little like I’m having a one-sided conversation, although the dialogue does take place with myself, so it really is two-sided; just weirdly two-sided with someone who’s just as strange as the man in the mirror. The occasional comment from a reader, though, is like hearing the sound of a refreshing new voice chime in, giving the conversation much greater dimension and resonance. I wonder whether an early morning live podcast, either in addition to or instead of the blog, might trigger more engagement? Of course, comfortable early-mornings for me may be more like sinister times during which wakefulness is to be avoided at all costs to prospective “listeners.” I guess I could record the conversation with myself. But that might make the embarrassment of fascination with watching automobile accidents even more troublesome. Ach! Something to consider.

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For reasons too involved to warrant writing about them here, I did not pick up my glasses yesterday. In place of that errand, we saw the flooring beneath the luxury vinyl tile. Time will tell what we can/will do about our floors. Today, we will drive to Little Rock to visit a dining table whose cousin may wish to live in our new house. We will decide whether the cousin is a suitable half-sister substitute to our family of chairs. It may get messy, this effort to merge members of unrelated families from wildly divergent backgrounds into a nuclear family whose heads belong to a completely different species. But we’re adventurous. If anyone can, we can manage to meld screaming children from different cultures into a cohesive family unit that dutifully obeys its permanent foster parents.

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I will admit to wishing for bad things to happen to the people from whom we bought our new house. It’s only fair, I think, that bad things, sufficiently hidden from them so as to be completely unexpected, should happen to disrupt their lives in ways they simply cannot imagine. I’m in an Old Testament mood this morning: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The principle of reciprocal justice, measure for measure, is offensive to me in so many ways, but it does appeal to the baser elements of my prehistoric personality. Maybe it’s my recent fascination with synchronicity that makes me find such a base and brutal idea so appealing—that old-style linkage between crime and punishment speaks volumes about the synchronous nature of the  universe.

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Secrets. The idea of keeping secrets intrigues me. I’ve kept some secrets for years and years and years because to share them might cause pain or discomfort or embarrassment for people who matter or mattered to me. Some people find keeping secrets nearly impossible. They feel compelled to share what should not be shared. They hope the person with whom they share the secret will have greater honor, better discipline, and more integrity than themselves.  Sharing the secret reveals that their integrity is no longer intact; it is so badly cracked that it leaks promises and honesty, as if a faucet was turned. But is breaking a promise by sharing a secret truly evidence of irredeemable corruption? On one hand, sharing a secret one explicitly or implicitly promised not to share is inarguably a breach of integrity. On the other, “it depends.” Just like “a little white lie” may be only a minor rupture in one’s honor—but it’s still a rupture. Somewhere along the spectrum between integrity and corruption, there is a point at which the scales are no longer balanced; one either has integrity or is corrupt. Unfortunately, that point shifts, depending on context. Nothing is black and white. Everything is a shade of grey; everyone has his or her own opinion of where grey becomes too dark. We attempt to legislate morality. That is like legislating the distance between the stars.

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I could go on. In fact, I’m in the mood to keep writing. But I won’t. Things on my mind right now are too much like walking on eggshells; no need to cause grief, as it’s in ready supply without my help. Yet I want to have real conversations about things that matter. Things that are difficult, but that warrant discussion and debate. Lots of things. Matters of honor and love and disdain and fury and serenity and everything in between. Things about which we wish we had definitive answers but know we will not reach that point in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of anyone now living or living one hundred years hence. Ach! I wonder what conversations with Plato or Aristotle would have been like? Would they have asserted their philosophies and defended them as unassailable? Or would they have been open to examining viewpoints that were utterly foreign to them? Existential crises bring about such thoughts, I suppose. Nothing to be worried about. Existence ends. Crisis averted.

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Time for a shower. I shaved just after 4, so I’m ahead of the game. Breakfast will follow at some point. Even though I’m hungry right now. I have sufficient discipline to wait for thirty minutes. Or so.

Once again, I was unable to sleep through the night. Though I went to bed early, I woke only two or three hours into the night’s sleep. From that point forward, I drifted in and out of sleep at roughly ten-minute intervals. Finally, around 3, I got up for a while. Then, back in bed by 3:30. And, finally, up for the day before 4:30.

I have a bit on my mind, though none of it represents anything overwhelmingly pressing. The most important matter, I suppose, is the need to call the funeral home in Houston. They told me Friday they would need the email addresses for my sister and brothers (and me), so they can send each of us a message. The message will invite us to “e-sign” a document attesting to the fact that we are my dead brother’s only immediate family and that we agree to and request that his body be cremated.  And the funeral home will want my credit card number, I imagine, to pay for the cremation. Therein one can clearly see the intersection of capitalism and the delicate social customs designed to soften the hardest edges of life. And the edges where life intersects with death.

Beyond those unpleasantly fresh reminders of my brother’s death just two days ago, my duties are rather dull and innocuous. I still have not gone to the optical shop to pick up the replacement frames for the ones that broke a couple of weeks ago; I will do that today. And the delayed process of removing the overlaid flooring in the new house is scheduled to commence today. So, I’ll need to clear the floor of tarps and paint buckets and chairs and other odds and ends. I look forward to learning whether the hardwood flooring beneath the less-than-stellar luxury vinyl tile can be saved. There’s more. Lots more. I should, from now until we move into the new house and complete the sale of the current one, reject any offers to be social. I should just work. But I’ve already made commitments, so I guess that is out of the question. I want a road trip. A long, meandering road trip. Oh, yes.

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Why is it that we establish such utterly arbitrary limits on certain human interactions? For example, we shake hands (or fist bump, courtesy of COVID), but hugging may or may not be an appropriate greeting. The legitimacy of hugging depends on an imprecisely defined degree of familiarity between two people. And kissing on the cheeks is acceptable only if the imprecision of familiarity is taken to another, equally impossible to measure, level. Kissing on the mouth is strictly forbidden, save between people whose familiarity is close in the extreme—except when it’s not.

When one is no quite sure of the degree of familiarity one has with another person, awkwardness abounds. I may feel sufficiently familiar with a person to feel comfortable with a hug, but they may not have reached that point yet…so an attempted hug may be met with an uncomfortably awkward withdrawal.

I’m not happy with this awkward imprecision. I wish we all felt comfortable with hugging, kissing, etc. Seriously, why is an embrace in which two bodies are in close, human-to-human touch acceptable, but a kiss between those two people, in which only lips are involved, is not? I realize I am asking rhetorical questions here. I might find it more than a little upsetting if my girlfriend kissed another man. But, of course, I should be permitted to kiss and be kissed by my women friends because….well, because double standard.  Aha! There it is! We (or I, at least) can ask and answer hypothetical questions with ease, but when hypotheses are put to the test in the real world, we retreat to  our old tried and true (and maddeningly imprecise) social limitations and restrictions. I am extremely liberated from old and outdated social conventions. Except when I’m not.

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A trigger, squeezed ever tighter during a particularly sensitive moment, causes a firing pin to slam against the capsule that holds a highly unstable primer, causing a spark. The spark ignites combustible material, converting it to a rapidly expanding fury. The explosive force of that bottled fury forces an object, at high speed, in the direction of its target to do the damage it was designed to inflict.

Was that set of sentences intended as a metaphor for the eruption of rage? Or was that a blow-by-blow description of the manner in which emotion launches deadly, irrevocable anger? Or was it simply an explanation of the process whereby a simple bullet becomes a deadly projectile? Perhaps it was meant as all three. Only the person who formed those sentences knows their intent. Even laden with knowledge of the genesis of those letters strung together, though, the writer drenches the words with interpretations that may not mesh with the way the reader deciphers them. We cannot know until after we have uttered or written words whether the meaning we attach to them will coincide with the audience’s understanding.

You may attach deadly significance to my empty threats against the peace and tranquility of someone I find offensive. But my emotive flash may simply constitute a mechanism wherein my murderous rage is softened into harmless, albeit deafening, noise. Societies impose somewhat arbitrary rules on behaviors; partly as a means of filtering out the frightening disparities between what a person thinks and what he does. Threats uttered at high volume, despite the fact that they may represent a process of “calming” anger into simple noise, conflict with some of societies’ somewhat arbitrary rules. We grudgingly accept (or not) the infringement on our liberties as a generally tolerable means of tamping down fear. Yet those rules can be too much to bear when they remove pressure-relief mechanisms. In those instances, the rules can trigger the very behaviors they are meant to quell.

I’m just thinking with my fingers again. And I acknowledge that my thoughts may be too abstruse to be understandable to anyone but me. So be it.

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Time to go about my day.

Whether—beneath the sediment of almost seventy years—layers of buried memories of my family of eight await excavation, I do not know. Perhaps the passage of time turned those memories to ash that cannot be recovered. Instead of hidden memories, fragments of others’ oft-repeated stories may occupy recesses of my brain. Those stories may not constitute my memories at all. Rather, they may represent the fading recollections of the other members of that immediate family of eight—all older than I—now whittled down to a far-flung family of four.

I cannot recall a single childhood memory in which my mother, my father, my three brothers, my two sisters, and I all are a part. I was five years old when my nuclear family began to disintegrate, the way families do when children begin moving away to begin their own private lives that do not involve the rest of the familial clan. The next to youngest, who was five years older than I, would have been developing his own identity by that time. His youngest sister was two years older than he. Of the remaining three, all assortedly older, the oldest was fourteen years senior to me. Now, more than sixty-three years after my fifth birthday, only half of the nuclear family of my youth remains. And I remember almost nothing of the nucleus. Memories of only bits and pieces of its component parts remain lodged in my head. And, as I acknowledged before, I suspect many of those memories are not mine at all but, rather, others’ recollections transformed from their stories into my artificial memories.

These days, when a sibling tells of a youthful memory set in the town of my birth, the story is entirely unfamiliar to me—unless, of course, I’ve heard the story before. I do not remember my parents’ friends, the neighbors down the street, the family’s dinnertime rituals (if there were any), and a thousand other things my siblings recall. Sometimes, because my siblings may not recall specific time-frames, I detect an element of surprise from them when I reveal that I have no recollection of events that are so familiar to them. But, then, when they realize I had not yet been born, the surprise disappears.

The absence of memories sometimes frustrates me, but not to the point of getting angry at time’s refusal to coordinate with my ability to recall. I simply wish I could picture, in my mind, what life was like during a time no longer available to my memory. Sadly, the ability to ask questions that require others to recall their history is disappearing. I can no longer ask my brother, Tom, for example, to explain why he was so upset when—at about age fourteen—I stayed out all night, fishing with friends. It’s the little things. I doubt my lost memories have survived burial under the sediment of almost seventy years. Still, I’ll continue to try to dredge them up on occasion. And, if occasionally I am successful, I’ll hose them down, dry them off, and make a record of them here on my blog.

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Until the past few days, I’ve never given truly serious thought to making “pre-arrangements” for my death. For a while, I thought I’d leave my body to a medical school, but that ultimately proved too much of a bureaucratic tangle to seem worth my time. Subsequently, I’ve thought I’d leave enough cash so that my body could be disposed of in whatever manner my surviving family or friends might wish. But the challenges of the months and weeks leading up to the death of my brother have changed my thinking. I now think the responsible thing to do is to remove the burden of end-of-life decisions from loved ones and, instead, to make plans in advance. It’s not always possible, of course, but to the extent it is, I now am in favor of it.

The least expensive way to dispose of a body today probably is by cremation. Caskets and funeral rituals and expensive flowers and so forth may comfort the living, but they do no good for the dead. And they require surviving loved ones to make decisions and spend money that may stretch financial means beyond the breaking point. So I am in favor of cremation.

It’s not just the challenges after death that I think should be planned in advance. Planning for the unfortunate possibility of prolonged decline and decay should not be the responsibility of loved ones but, instead, of oneself. It’s far too late for me to purchase long-term-care insurance, but it may not be too late to develop a plan whereby my assets can be protected against being drained by a long and useless hospital or nursing home stay. It’s not that I want the State to pay for my long-term care; it’s that I do not want to suffer the indignities of long-term care with just-barely-tolerable quality of life. Rather than pay for an unwanted extension of an unpleasant existence, I want my assets to go toward people and causes that matter to me, not to keeping me barely and painfully alive.

I do not know exactly what I can do to ensure that I ease the process for those who survive me, but I’m going to explore available options.

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I read a bit this morning about Wild Nephin National Park, a place in Ireland I wish I could visit. I’ll offer this extract from the article as explanation: “It was Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger who described the Nephin Beg mountains in 1937 as ‘the very loneliest place in this country, for the hills themselves are encircled by this vast area of trackless bog,’ and little seems to have changed since then.”

Some days, I just want to be free of all human interactions; able to completely cut off all forms of communication so that I might as well be the only man on Earth. Reading about Wild Nephin National Park triggered that emotional need again; that sense that pure isolation might be the only way to keep me sane—or more appropriately, recover my sanity. The simultaneous harshness of nature and nature’s gentle protection work in concert to make one feel at one with the planet, I think. Knowing that a wave could suddenly kill me but that it could just as easily wash over me and and cleanse the grit from my life is enormously gratifying. Realizing that nature can take away every ounce of control I think I may have is somehow freeing. Perhaps it’s because nature cannot be swayed by what I think or do or say. I exist at the whim of the world in which I live and my existence could suddenly cease if that world “decides” it should be so. That comment incorrectly attributes motive to nature; anthropomorphism is an arrogant trait. We humans have the gall to assume we are the dominant forces in the universe. I think what I desire at this moment is an opportunity to listen to nature in the absence of human intervention; even mine.

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I’ll miss the rare occasions when my brother, Tom, and I spoke on the phone. We held radically different opinions and our viewpoints about the world often were at odds,. Yet our conversations somehow brought me down to earth, even when they raised my blood pressure. He had strong opinions about almost everything. So do I. Usually, those opinions were diametrically opposed. Often, both opinions were utterly free of facts to support them.

And I’ll miss hearing A.J.’s nails click on the floor as he came looking for me in the morning after waking. He was a sweet little dog. He never struck me as being “in synch” with my moods the way people often say their dogs are, but his moods could be molded to fit mine, I think.  Tears welled up in my eyes for a few minutes this morning as I thought about missing A.J.

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I am empty right now. Just empty. Actually, there’s something inside, I simply don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s an awareness that I know nothing. I realize I base everything I think on suppositions and assumptions, not facts. And I am not alone. Everyone does the same. We’re just babbling, as if we have answers. We don’t even have legitimate questions. We just run on and on and on without pausing long enough to try to absorb the truth that is all around us in everything we see or feel or taste or touch or smell. Our arrogance is more than enough to cause me to be enraged. And then I realize my rage is based on vapor that I can’t even see.

Last night, I left my cell phone in my study instead of my usual practice of connecting it to an outlet just outside the bedroom door to charge. I wish I would have followed my usual actions. Had I done what I usually do, I would have received the call and the text about my brother’s death when they were respectively made and sent. My brother, Tom, died shortly after midnight this morning. Though he had been in severely declining health in recent months and weeks—and the speed of decline had accelerated dramatically in recent days—the reality this morning of his death is a shock.

My process of mourning his loss began long ago, when it became apparent that his generally poor health was getting worse. I thought, well over a year ago, that he probably did not have very long to live. Heart problems, renal problems, uncooperative joints, rapid weight loss, and a long and unceasing history of smoking all pointed to the inevitable. But steeling oneself to the inevitable does not make one immune to the impact of the inevitable. It hurts. A lot. Yet my brother’s death relieves both the physical pain he felt and the mental anguish those close to him felt as a result of knowing he was in discomfort, distress, and pain.

I am grateful that my brother is no longer in pain. And may the memory of my brother bring those who knew him some comfort in mourning his loss.

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Yesterday brought about the end of another life. The physical condition of my sweetheart’s dog, long suffering from a heart murmur, declined so precipitously that that the need to end his pain became obvious. Yesterday morning, my sweetheart made the difficult but absolutely correct decision to have A.J., her 12-year-old Shih Tzu, euthanized. Just after noon yesterday, we took him to the veterinarian, who very gently and painlessly put him to sleep. I knew A.J. for only eight months, but I became extremely attached to him in that time. I’ll miss him more than I would have thought possible just a few months ago. My sweetheart’s love of A.J. was immense and intense, which is why she decided his pain and discomfort had to end. She is a strong woman.

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These two sharp, deeply jarring jolts rattled my emotional cage. My mind is racing with thoughts about mortality and love and questions about whether expressing one’s grief openly and without restraint is a sign of mental health or mental illness. What is grief? Is it an expression of one’s own pain? Or is it a vicarious expression of the emptiness of that small piece of the world no longer occupied by a physical body—a body that represents an emotional entity that can no longer be experienced?

I am reeling with the experience of deaths too closely spaced. My wife’s death just thirteen months ago occasionally still sears me like a piece of molten iron, though the metal is cooling. My brother’s death this morning is a fresh wound of a different kind, but still sharp and painful. And the wound caused by the death of my sweetheart’s little dog brings about yet another kind of pain.

We live through these experiences, though. We have little choice but to accept them and the pain that goes with them. The pain will ease, though the memories never cease.

Last night, my niece arranged a quick Zoom video conversation with my hospitalized brother, after she and talked on the phone while she was on her way to the skilled nursing facility to visit him. I could barely make out a few words as he attempted to speak. My niece was able to make out a few more. But neither of us could fully understand his words before he became too tired to continue. Before he drifted off to sleep, I told him his family, including all his siblings, loved him. He seemed to acknowledge me and I think he tried to reciprocate the sentiment, but his voice was too frail for me to hear. No one is willing to commit to even a guess as to how much longer he has, but a hospice nurse suggested to my niece that his time is short; days, rather than weeks. Times like this, when it is impossible to ensure that a person understands one’s words and thoughts, tend to make ripe the opportunities for personal second-guessing. Did I say I love him soon enough? Did I offer enough help to him? What did I fail to say that I should have? What did I say that I shouldn’t have? As I sit here this morning, contemplating these matters, the only way to a moderate level of emotional stability is to say to myself that both the words and the acts of every member of his small family clearly demonstrated—and still demonstrate—to him how much we care. And he forgives me and the rest of us for things I shouldn’t have said. He knows.

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For several days, I’ve been playing Wordle each morning. It’s a clever little game in which the player is given up to six tries to guess a secret five-letter word. The player offers a five-letter word as a clue and the game responds by indicating which letters are not in the secret word, which are included but not in the proper place in the secret word, and which are included in the proper place in the secret word. The game is quite similar to a game my mother taught me as a child, the Five Letter Word Game. In that game, two opponents attempted to guess the other’s secret word by submitting clue words; the opponent simply said how many of the letters in the clue were included in the secret word. We used a sheet of paper on which we printed the alphabet in the middle of the sheet. We wrote down our clues on one side of the alphabet and our opponent’s clues on the other. Next to each clue, we wrote the number of letters shared with the respective secret words.

In Wordle, I use a strategy in which I first offer a word that has several vowels. Then, depending on how many letters are in proper placement or simply shared with the secret word but not in the right place, I offer another clue that excludes the letters already ruled out and includes the properly placed letter and the improperly placed letter, but in a different place in the word. Engaging little game that exercises the mind. Yesterday and today, and perhaps a time or two before, I identified the secret word with my third clue word. I’m right proud of that!

Wordle’s creator is a guy named Josh, who says he is an artist, product manager, and engineer who lives in Brooklyn, New York but apparently used to live in Oakland, California. Some more information about him is offered on his website at https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/. The link directly to the game is here. I think I might enjoy conversation with Josh.

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The fact that, in general, I find the company of women far more interesting than the company of men has been a topic included in many of my blog posts. Despite my intellectual efforts to determine with some degree of certainty why that is, I still haven’t uncovered the secret. It’s entirely possible there may be an undercurrent of sexuality that drives it, though if that’s the case I need to work on controlling it or risk serious repercussions that could damage my very solid relationship with my sweetheart. But I think it’s far meatier than subsurface sexual attraction. I think it has to do with the extent to which both my interests and my attitudes parallel (or perpendict, if that were a legitimate word) the interests and attitudes of the people I encounter. Stereotypically  “male” topics like team sports, hunting, and golf hold little to no interest to me. Consequently, I tend to avoid interactions involving those topics or conversations about them. Obviously, though, stereotypes often are invalid characterizations; many women like team sports, hunting, and golf. That very fact, though, reinforces the idea that interests and attitudes tend to shape my gravitation toward women; when I encounter women whose interests and conversation revolve around those topics, I find that I have little interest in those women. And when I encounter men whose interests more closely mirror mine (which, by the way, often mirror those more commonly associated with women), I find myself more comfortable with them.

Recently, I had a conversation with someone (I don’t recall who—it may have been a conversation with myself) in which I suggested a version of Match.com in which people would be paired not for dating but for platonic engagement might be useful. Especially for men like me who might like “masculine” relationships that are safer than “feminine” relationships (which can tend to make some male partners suspicious or worse).

Just a thought this morning. Triggered, I guess, by my random thought that I might like to engage in conversation with Josh, the inventor of Wordle.

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I’ve discovered (re-discovered is probably more appropriate) an interest in refurbishing old cars. My interest has not, thus far, translated into action of any kind. Instead, it has simply led me to a cable television program (I do not recall the name) in which highly-skilled auto-restoration specialists seek out or rebuild parts for old, classic cars and who restore the vehicles into better-than-new versions of themselves. The other night, I drooled over a couple’s restored Studebaker and I felt surges of envy course through my body as the restoration team unveiled a complete makeover of an old Chevy Malibu.

I do not even change my own oil anymore, so the odds that I’ll get into automobile restoration are slim. My lack of mechanical knowledge—coupled with an absence of motor skills and a dearth of the money necessary to support the restoration habit—makes any such gamble a bad one. But I admire people who have the wherewithal, both financially and with respect to skill and determination, to do the work. I’d love to sit in a garage and watch the pros actually do the work. Turning old, worn vehicles that are on or even beyond their last legs into sleek, desirable vehicles is an admirable undertaking. Oh, if only I had Jay Leno’s money, his garage, and his staff of auto experts.

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I want to organize or orchestrate or otherwise cause to happen a family reunion. Time has a way of getting away from us. It robs us of opportunities if we allow it to take them from us. COVID, though, has done as much to excise opportunities from our lives as has time. Perhaps the risks associated with COVID are worth taking. Time doesn’t present us with risks; it presents us with certainty.

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I feel a desire growing in me for hot, spicy breakfast sausage and rye toast. If I knew how to make decent gravy, I might do that, too. Or maybe biscuits in place of the rye toast. And eggs? Meh. I can take them or leave them this morning. I need to get back in the habit of having a breakfast consisting of a single poached egg, a couple of radishes, and a glass of tomato juice. Those were the days when I was thinner and more righteous. There’s still time. But it’s not unlimited.

When I awoke for awhile around 3:00 a.m., the idea that people sometimes might be able to sense things going on in others’ lives—even at great distance—came to mind.  You know the concept: a mother senses something is wrong with her daughter, who has just been in an automobile accident in a distant town; or a man suddenly feels an inexplicable sense of elation at the same moment that his wife’s doctor confirms her pregnancy; or a woman is   overcome with a sensation of sadness and concern for a friend in another country and the woman later learns that her friend lost his job at the same time as those sensations swept over her.  I’ve always doubted the reality of such claims. I’ve always accepted the idea that such cases of apparent extrasensory perception can be explained in a way similar to the way some psychologists have explained déjà vu: that is is an illusion brought about by artifacts of recognition memory in which recollection and familiarity become interwoven in some way. Recollection meshes with familiarity to create a sense that “I’ve been in exactly this situation before,” even though that might be impossible.

But, increasingly, I am allowing myself to be open to the possibility that experiences and/or thoughts may be transmissible in the same way that light speeds through space. If radio waves can flood the “airwaves” over incredible distances, why can’t “thoughtwaves” do the same? The fact that science has not yet been able to detect or measure such phenomena does not prove that it does not exist. In fact, science never disproves anything—no more than it proves anything. Science simply presents factual evidence and tests theories against that evidence. I admit to doubting, with a degree of certainty that science would say is unjustified, that there is anything to extrasensory perception. Yet I’m increasingly open to the possibility. Can someone “read” my thoughts at this very moment? Perhaps I’ll find out.

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I went back to sleep, finally waking for the day at a few minutes past 5:00. When I attempted to make coffee, I discovered that my coffee-making device, easily ten or twelve years old, may be reaching the end of its service life. I was able to get a cup of coffee, but only after coaxing the beast to cooperate with me. For several mornings now, the machine has given me signs of its intent to go on permanent strike. Perhaps I’ll take action today to replace it.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

Coffee helps me maintain my “never killed anyone streak”
~ Anonymous ~

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My brother, the one who before Christmas was first was hospitalized and then transferred to skilled nursing, apparently is growing worse by the hour. I have tried to talk with him by phone within the last couple of weeks, but either have been unable to reach him or his voice has been so weak he could not talk. Being distant from a loved one who is gravely ill is difficult. Being unable to communicate with him is difficult. And it is tough to be unable to otherwise help him and those closer in distance to him. Fortunately, my (and his) niece is nearby and has been looking out after him to the best of her ability and at great personal sacrifice. We (as in the members of our society who permit it) should be ashamed of our failure to ensure more compassionate care of people as they come to the end of their lives. Bureaucracy and hard, cold capitalism should not displace human decency. But they do.

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The new lighting and fans were installed in the new house yesterday. They make an enormously positive difference. When we finish painting, complete the flooring, and take care of issues like gaps in door casings and generally cleaning the place up, it will be excellent.

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The sky this morning was the most spectacular sky I have ever seen anywhere! I took a few photos of this morning’s glorious sunrise, but for some reason I cannot get the photos uploaded to this post.  Though the photos do not begin to do justice to the beauty of this morning’s sky, they offer at least a hint of the unparalleled beauty of the sky here today. If I can, I will post a photo or two later. Rarely does a scene overcome me with awe in the way this morning’s sky has done.  Maybe never. I cannot describe how overwhelmingly, spectacularly, incredibly beautiful the sky was this morning. Viewing it was an experience unlike any I’ve ever had. Akin to a religious experience, perhaps.

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I’m ready for breakfast. Off I go.

The topic of synchronicity, not new to this blog, is on my mind. It occurs to me that synchronous occurrences are not always positive. They just as easily can be negative. When events take place in different places, involving people who have some connection, they may seem “designed” to illustrate a connection. Typically, it seems only positive events trigger thoughts about the connection. Yet negative circumstances, too, can spark realizations of the connection, though the connection itself may be entirely positive. I realize this paragraph may seem incoherent to most people—perhaps all people—who read it. Fortunately, I know what I’m thinking. It’s just too convoluted to chronicle in detail.

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Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

~ Franz Kafka ~

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The Associated Press sometimes seems to me a hybrid between news organization, cultural preservationist, historian, and keeper of wisdom and hope. This morning, in its AP Morning Wire, a link beneath an intriguing photo caught my attention: AP Photos: Beast-like ‘Carantoñas’ return to Spanish town. I followed the link and discovered a town I’d never heard of, Acehuche, a little town with roughly 900 inhabitants in Spain’s western Extremadura region. Through a combination of text and photos, the linked article revealed an intriguing story about a three-day festival celebrating the town’s patron saint, St. Sebastian. The festival involves men dressing up as fur-covered beasts called Carantoñas and women dressing up as “Regaoras.” There’s much more to the story, including fireworks, confetti, celebratory processions, and references to the pagan and early-Christian origins of the festival. I love stumbling across such fascinating stuff, about which I knew absolutely nothing before seeing the photos, reading the photo captions, and skimming the accompanying story. Just another reason I find The Associated Press such a valuable organization. The AP does not just report on society’s overnight progress in tearing itself apart; it offers a glimpse into reasons we ought not to allow that to happen.

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I cannot bring myself to write much this morning about the travails of dealing with the failure of our society’s healthcare safety net. The circumstances are too raw and painful for me, yet I probably am among the least-effected by them. Today, more than ever, I realize how important it is to find a source of medications that, in a pinch, could allow me to end my life if ever I were to find myself in a hopeless quagmire of a heartless, bureaucratically-infused governmental labyrinth. Our “solons” at both the national and state levels should be hung by their tongues over a pond full of ravenously hungry alligators until the lawmakers complete the task of permanently remaking our healthcare safety net into the compassionate social system it should be.

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Today, one or more highly paid electricians will install new lighting in our eventual-to-be home. Yesterday, my sweetheart returned to the paint store the paint we had ordered. She returned with replacement pails of paint that replicate the color of paint we had mistakenly been given. Because I had applied an entire gallon of the “wrong” color and was By God not willing to redo all the work I had done, we decided to use the “wrong” color instead of the paint colors we had selected. As it turned out, we actually preferred the color the store gave us, so it worked out just fine. But between discovering the paint-store’s mistake and getting the replacement paint, there was a period of distinct displeasure. By the way, it was impossible to be certain, before I opened a second, improperly-labeled, second can, that the “wrong” color was, indeed, wrong. But the difference between the color we picked and the color we were given was sufficient to create some ennui. All better now.  Next, aside from new lighting, we soon will move on to another couple of projects: uncovering what lies beneath the vinyl tile on the floors and installation of gutter guards. We  hope to salvage very nice wood flooring and install some new tile and carpet (where wood flooring was not used, originally). If that is not possible, we will have new, higher quality, vinyl tile professionally installed to dramatically improve the looks of the place. The gutter guards will save me many dangerous hours of cleaning leaves from the gutters for seven or eight months out of the year. Then, at some point, we will get doors that do not latch (or even close properly) repaired. And we will deep clean both inside and out. Some day, we will move in to the other house. And, then, the ownership of my current home will change. How that will play out remains to be seen.

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As usual, I made a cup of coffee right after I got up this morning. And, as usual, I have allowed it to cool enough that it’s no longer sufficiently hot to be drinkable. Well, I suppose I could drink it, but I wouldn’t enjoy it. So, I’ll need to brew another after I finish spilling my thoughts onto the computer screen. Of course, I could forego another cup of coffee. But that seems a senseless punishment for something so trivial as letting one’s coffee cool.

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I wonder whether it would surprise people to learn how often they are on the minds of other people? Would casual acquaintances think it odd that thoughts about sometimes frolic through my consciousness? Would friends be astonished at how frequently they come to my mind? Would followers of this blog be stunned to learn how frequently I think about them (or, in some cases, how infrequently)?

These questions naturally lead to considerations about the opposite: how often or infrequently do other people think of me? How frequently or rarely am I on the minds of friends or acquaintances? Do my blog followers ever think of me?

Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” That’s probably true. But it doesn’t really resolve the questions. We do not allow ourselves the luxury of dismissing our roles in others’ lives, nor their roles in ours.

I think quite often of Janet and Loren and Deanna and Lana and Rhonda and Ducky and Mel and Terry and Meg and Patty and Jim and Carol and Kim and Becky (and, of course, Colleen)…I could go on and on and on…there are so many others.  I don’t necessarily dwell on my thoughts about any one of them, but they flit in and out of my thoughts with surprising regularity. I suspect others experience the same thing. But unless we permit our introspection to focus on those thoughts for a bit, I doubt we even realize they are “there.” Until I began listing people about whom I’ve had thoughts lately, I would have been surprised that there were more than a tiny handful of people “in my brain.” But reality says they’re all “there.”

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Kafka was right. When I write with the knowledge that what I write will never been seen by another set of human eyes, I descend into that cold abyss of myself. I peel away the layers designed to protect me from others’ opinions of me. I write with brutal honesty, not just about  myself, but about the world as I know it and the people in that world.  With every word, the people in that world come into clearer and more positive focus, while often I seem to wither and fade in comparison with them. The cold abyss of oneself. When I think of it, I would not wish it upon any other human being, yet I acknowledge it exists for me. The cold abyss of oneself. Why choose to reflect on that, though? Why not the words of Sørren Kierkegaard?

Don’t forget to love yourself.

~ Søren Kierkegaard ~

Tuesdays are inherently better than Mondays, if for no other reason than—on Tuesdays—a local liquor store sells an already-cheap wine that I like to drink at a further fifteen percent discount. That takes the price down from $5.99 to $5.09. The store’s implementation of a fee for credit card sales jacks the price up a bit, I discovered during my most recent trip to buy wine, but I can maintain the full fifteen percent discount if I pay cash. Which I will. I do not begrudge merchants charging a fee on credit card sales; but I do not appreciate learning about the fee only after I look at my receipt. A prominent sign would be appropriate. Of course, I may simply have missed the sign. At any rate, today is Tuesday, so today is the day I should visit the local liquor store and stock up on Jacob’s Creek Shiraz-Cabernet. If I lived in an area in which Total Wine & More stores were readily accessible, I could buy bottles of the Australian wine at an everyday price that is fifty cents lower than my local liquor store charges. Oh, well. The price of living in a semi-rural community off the beaten path of mainline commerce is that the costs of the good life can be a tad higher than in congested cities.

The question inevitably arises, when I mention my affinity for my cheap Australian wine, about whether I would rather drink a more expensive wine. And my answer is invariably, “Yes.” But when I weigh my preference for a more expensive bottle of a cabernet or a shiraz cabernet blend against the considerably lower cost of my go-to wine, I usually choose my go-to wine. It’s a purely rational cost-benefit assessment; the savings I enjoy by buying the cheaper wine (versus a wine that costs, say, an average of $16-$20 per bottle) can be plowed into other things I enjoy. Leg of lamb. Netflix. A nice day-trip to Petit Jean Mountain. A superbly-balanced pocket knife. And let’s be entirely above-board here: after the first glass or two, the taste of a $5.09 (on sale) wine is almost indistinguishable from a $17 wine made from the same varietals. At least that’s true of my palate. I’m sure others may have far more sophisticated and/or better trained palates than mine. That’s fine. Let them spend their money how they like. I’ll try to make mine go as far as I can. Oh, and I am happy to very occasionally spend $20 on a superb (to my palate) bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.  (Though, generally, I try to stay with the lower priced SBs, as well, in keeping with my untrained palate.) I’ve found that some wines, both cheaper and more expensive than the ones I prefer, taste the way I imagine bottled loathing and bad attitude must smell. No matter what the most sophisticated sommelier or oenophile says, when I taste a monstrously expensive wine I find offensive, I do not beat myself up for my incredibly poor taste. I simply feel gratitude that my taste buds serve me and my bank account so well.

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I slept better last night than I did the night before, but my bed partner was sleepless from around 1 a.m. to well after 3:30 and probably much later. Insomnia could be a byproduct of the mattress, I suppose, but my guess is that it arises from other sources that may or may not be within our control. It is, again, a cost-benefit situation; is the lack of sleep worth the enjoyment of spicy food or liquor or psychologically thrilling films or hysterically funny comedies? We all make our own choices. Sometimes, those choices infringe on others’ ability to enjoy life’s little pleasures: like sleep or raucous enjoyment of food and drink and entertainment. I’m not sure why I’m wandering down into this rabbit warren involving the effects of lifestyle on one’s sleep habits; it was not my intent. I intended only to document the fact that I slept reasonably well while my sweetheart did not. A good friend of mine regularly accuses herself of overthinking things; she could be describing my lifestyle, instead. In fact, perhaps her self-accusatory statements are intended to prompt me to look at my own world-view. I’ll have to ask her.

+++

The demands of painting and otherwise devoting time to the newly-acquired house coupled with other demands on our time—over which we have little control—have severely interfered with our social life. Concerns about COVID-19, too, have curtailed our interactions with our friends, but the limitations can, by and large, be traced back to obligations that consume what otherwise would be free time. One must be careful not to allow other demands on one’s time to so completely consume one’s time as to eliminate social interactions, especially with friends. This is strictly an admonition to myself that we must carve out time for the people who are important to us, regardless of how difficult that carve-outs may be. Engaging with friends is—in the general scheme of life and one’s happiness in it—more important than painting walls or deciding on flooring or getting a haircut.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.

~ Leonard Bernstein ~

+++

The stresses of yesterday have faded a bit, though their presence remains…just not so clearly in focus. Often, though detours or delays may seem preferable to the risk involved in high-speed freeway traffic, it is best to press hard on the accelerator and do one’s best to avoid sideswiping other vehicles or slamming into them head-on. With great care and intensity of focus, one can get through hideous traffic snarls and incidents of road rage to long stretches of empty highway. I think of Dallas and Houston and Chicago traffic as metaphors for difficult moments in one’s life. If one is not careful, it’s easy to get stuck behind a never-ending commute rush; but if entering the fray is the only way to make it back home, the risk and the difficulties are worth the effort.

+++

A conversation yesterday between some other people and me remains on my mind this morning. That conversation centered on a person who has insulted or upset other people by being quick to make comments, either in anger or in asserting control. That person invariably recognizes and apologizes for the outburst; the apology clearly is heartfelt and deep. But one of the participants in the conversation expressed an unwillingness to be forgiving. “It’s not enough to apologize for an outburst. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place.” I countered by expressing an understanding of the flash of anger; no matter how much a person may want to “control” it, some of us have tried hard to accomplish that wished-for control and have repeatedly failed. My contention is that self-control in such incidents is simply an impossible dream for some people. The flash or anger or control is so quick to happen that the person has no time to reflect or to censor it. Because I am one of those people, I feel compassion for others in whom I see true regret after their flash of anger subsides. It doesn’t always have to be anger, either. It can be a statement of opinion as if it were fact; that can grate on people just as much as what some see as unjustifiable anger.

As I reflect on that conversation, I wonder whether my sense of understanding is simply my way of excusing my failure to exercise control. Perhaps the excuse—that the emotion is so quick to erupt that there’s no time to reflect and control it—is bogus. It is sometimes difficult to admit to the possibility that one’s failures may not be the result of uncontrollable forces but, instead, the outcome of inadequate efforts. Excuses. Excuses. How does one differentiate between legitimate explanations and illegitimate excuses? I am sure I could answer that question with what looks and feels like a reasonable argument; my answer could easily go either way. But bias would inevitably enter that argument and may well control it. We tend to justify/excuse our own behaviors because to admit to their impropriety would be embarrassing and, perhaps, would brand us as less than decent human beings. The sense of inadequacy is one of the most painful emotions, because it calls into question our value in comparison to those around us.

+++

The day has begun. Today, my plan is to bring peace to those parts of the universe over which I have some influence.

I had too much on my mind to stay asleep after 2:00 a.m.  No matter how I tried to empty my mind, vexing thoughts kept filling my head. Anxieties, worries, concerns—whatever names one might attach to troubling matters—would not leave my brain. Finally, about a quarter to 4:00, I surrendered. For the last hour, I’ve tried to focus my mind by writing, but the thoughts that kept me awake have insisted on intruding on my efforts to string together words into rational sentences. In place of coherent ideas, damaged fragments of incomplete sentences sprayed from my fingers. Finally, though, I think the flood of broken thoughts has begun to subside, leaving only the occasional urgent flush of insanity issuing forth onto the screen. For some reason, I want to be sealed inside a spacecraft hurling through black space toward the distant edge of the universe; I long to be able to look through a single window so I can see what is in front of me, in the direction I am headed. That wish is enough to drag me away from the vexations that have kept me awake since the early hours of the day.

+++

The churning of my stomach is sufficiently powerful to make loud noises, noises that would interfere with conversations if I were in the company of people who wished to converse with me. Not only do I hear the peristalsis, I feel it, as if my internal organs are attempting to flee my torso. I do not use the word, peristalsis, often. In fact, I had to search out the word for the involuntary constriction and relaxation of the muscles of the intestines. But I felt compelled to do the research, because no other word adequately describes the process responsible for both the noise and the sensation of attempted intestinal escape. The strength of the churning is such that I am a little concerned my abdominal cavity may be unable to contain the fiercely nomadic organs. What will I do if they succeed in breaking through the barriers that lock them inside? Will I allow them to go, leaving me limp and almost lifeless  and unable to call for help? Or will I seize them with the last ounce of strength in my hands, hoping my grip will prevent them from attaining their freedom? I think I’ve managed to calm my mind, but not my body. I no longer sense the imminent escape of my bowels from my body, but I feel their dissatisfaction, as demonstrated by their angry twisting and turning. So, there’s no immediate need to wonder what I will do. That question will wait.

+++

Today will be very busy. So I won’t be able to sit, motionless, in the cockpit of a spacecraft with my eyes fixed on the far edge of the universe. That reality—that I cannot escape the demands of this world for now—leaves me sullen and depressed. My bad temper is not suited to this first day of the work-week. Even though I no longer “work” in the usual sense of the word, the week remains a work-week to me. Will it ever be just another series of days?

+++

Even though it’s not yet a quarter to six, I’ll get something to eat. That will probably exacerbate the peristalsis. Not only am I sullen, I may be stupid.

Call it mawkish or maudlin or mushy. Call it by whatever name you feel compelled to use to dismiss it. But give compassion its due. Consider the power of kindness to protect people from stepping over that invisible line beyond which there is no return. Simply by demonstrating that someone cares, an act of kindness can prevent a painful life from ending early. And acts of kindness can guide that painful life toward a path more peaceful and fulfilling. But kindness is not just about saving lives. It is about saving the humanity in our lives.

This topic is on my mind this morning as a result of a bit of introspection—recalling my responses to real or imagined slights I endured from strangers. My thoughts were not about how those strangers should have been kinder to me; they probably did not even realize I was upset with their behaviors (which, incidentally, were not necessarily acts of unkindness but, rather, were acts of people being people). My thoughts were about how unnecessarily upset I was with minor inconveniences—and how my reactions did not consider for an instant what those people might be going through in their lives. For example: someone ahead of me may have allowed his car to remain motionless for longer than I thought necessary after the stoplight turned green. I did not consider that the person might be distracted because he just lost his job or his child or his spouse. Simply allowing him that distraction, rather than honking my horn and shaking my fist, would have been an act of kindness.  Refraining from showing my impatience probably would not save the driver’s life; but it might have saved my humanity from continuing to wither.

There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; my philosophy is kindness.

~ The Dalai Lama

I have witnessed responses to acts of kindness that seemed out of proportion to the acts themselves. Like someone breaking into sobs and tears when a stranger chases after them, calling out, “Excuse me, this pocketbook fell out of your purse!” I can imagine the overly-appreciative beneficiary of the kind stranger’s action might have been going through an emotionally wrenching experience. A simple act of kindness might have brought that person back from a  dangerous precipice, hence the unexpectedly emotional response. Or, perhaps the person was so unused to being the recipient of acts of kindness that a very simple act of kindness triggered what I, and others like me, might have thought an over-reaction.  I’ve seen dozens—more likely, hundreds—of “over-reactions” to simple acts of kindness like that. As moving as those acts and those reactions might have been, I have to wonder about how many other situations there must have been in which kindness did not play a part. How many people might not have been shown the humanity in others, and what might have been the results of the absence of kindness? And what of those who let the opportunity to be kind pass by? How much colder and harder and angrier did they become?

It is easy to sit at my desk early in the morning and write about the power of kindness. But it is much more challenging to weave kindness into my psyche with enough staying power to ensure that it replaces either indifference or hostility. No matter how much I want always to be kind, keeping my indifference or hostility at bay sometimes is a Herculean task I do not seem to have the capacity to accomplish. Just recognizing the desire to be kind, though, may help. And recalling the dozens or hundreds of times I have been the recipient of kindness when, instead, I could have been the recipient of indifference or hostility may do the trick. Both, I hope, will conspire to make me a better person. Some day, maybe today, my kindness may be needed to help a stranger survive emotionally devastating circumstances about which I know nothing and never will.

+++

Yesterday, I discovered that the paint can I had been using was mislabeled at the paint store. The color got mixed up with another color we had picked for another room. Fortunately, we like the color I applied to the walls so far. (The colors are very similar shades of green.) Unfortunately, we do not have any more paint of that color to finish the job. That means we’ll need to see about getting the paint store to give us another gallon of the paint I’ve been using, as well as a gallon of the paint I thought I had been using (for another room). I will force kindness to replace hostility in my mind, regardless of whether I am the one to go to the paint store or not. The fact that we like the “wrong” color quite a lot (more, I think, than had I painted the room with the intended color) helps.

+++

My aching muscles may force me to call this Sunday, today, a day of rest.

As the sun emerged from its evening slumber this morning, the eastern sky bathed my part of the world with muted brilliance. Orange, blue, and deep purple light filled the horizon, backlighting the forest of naked trees behind and below our house. Despite the frigid temperature (my computer’s display tells me it is 12°F in Hot Springs Village), the sky looks warm and inviting. Only when I approach the big windows on the back of the house does the reality of merciless cold sink in. This is not a moment to walk outside wearing only flip-flops, a t-shirt, and a pair of think sweat-pants. So, I add a sweat-shirt and slippers lined with artificial wool; still, I am unwilling to step out into air that is far beyond brisk. Even without the mess that ice and snow makes, very cold weather is unappealing in the extreme—except it seems to clear the air of even a hint of moisture, intensifying the crispness of vision. Everything looks clearer and in much sharper focus when air temperatures plummet toward the single digits.

+++

Once again, I went to bed late and, consequently, awoke considerably later than normal. By the time I got out of bed, the pre-dawn sun had begun to strip the sky of darkness. Within minutes of taking my first sip of coffee, the night sky started its departure, replaced with dim light and soft versions of the colors I described above. Then, in what seemed the blink of an eye, the light show reached its crescendo. Morning colors faded into the starkness of day.

I wish I could slow the disappearance of the peak of morning’s beauty. The sense of awe and the intense emotions that accompany the dazzling display of Nature’s celestial art fills me so completely; but it fades far too quickly. That sublime sense of wonder brought about by a beautiful morning sky disappears so fast, replaced by a feeling of resigned indifference to the demands I face for the remainder of the day. With the right frame of mind, I might be able to capture that magnificent mood and feed on it all day long. Holding on to that frame of mind requires devotion and a sense of awe of its own. Alas, I’ll have to think those thoughts another morning, before the spectacular scene unfolds before my eyes.

+++

Last night, we watched three episodes of season four of Ozark. I should have read a synopsis of the first three seasons before I began watching, because I could not recall the full story that led up to the opening scenes. My memory of books and movies is atrocious; within minutes of finishing a novel or a film, plot details are erased from my brain. I suspect the reason for the erasure is that there is scant room in my head. The storage space is small to start with; it is made smaller by my mind’s insistence on storing minutia that takes up too much of too little room for recollections. Despite my poor recall, I was able to get sufficiently familiar with the story line to enjoy the episodes. Ozark is riveting, both from the perspective of adrenaline-producing action and from the standpoint of psychological intrigue. Were it not immoral and illegal to launder drug money, and were the dangers involved in the endeavor much smaller, I think I could enjoy the occupation.

+++

A doctor in last night’s dream discovered I had been given a misdiagnosis by another doctor. Unfortunately, the initial diagnosis found I suffered from something mildly annoying but innocuous, while the subsequent diagnosis by the other doctor involved a deadly malady involving both the bones in my extremities and my torso, especially my chest cavity. I do not recall much of the dream, only my surprise at the second diagnosis and my fear that insurance would not cover the diagnosis, much less the pointless treatment. And I recall laughing nurses and other medical staff; they did not seem even remotely disturbed by my terminal illness. I remember, very vaguely, a sense that the second diagnosis was made in a glass-walled clinic in what seemed like a mall kiosk. I wonder whether, when we cannot recall specific aspects of a dream, our minds attempt to fill in details? That might explain the absolutely bizarre circumstances I sometimes “remember” from nonsensical nighttime excursions into madness.

+++

The last few drops of paint in the gallon simply weren’t enough to apply a first coat to the entire hallway. And it was getting late in the afternoon, so I was not interested in opening another can and pouring a bit of it into the paint tray. So, I left the hallway unfinished. I should be able to finish it today (if I kick myself in the rear hard enough to make me drive over to the house to get to work), as well as apply a second coat over the one I have applied. As usual, the most time-consuming aspects of painting has been the preparation. I do not like that aspect of painting. And, I’m discovering, I do not like the other aspects, either. Would that I could snap my fingers and the job would be finished. But that’s not possible. I have another several weeks of work to do before we can work on the floors. I expect we’ll move in before the end of August. Maybe.

+++

All right. It’s time to dive into the day. It’s well after 8. I’ve dilly-dallied around long enough. I’ve returned to this post to put an end to it. So there you are.

Despite repeatedly falling asleep while watching Stay Close, a “limited series” on Netflix, I subsequently managed to stay awake until about 2 a.m. And that late night resulted in me saying in bed until the sun began peeking over the horizon this morning. When I get out of bed so late, I feel like I’ve wasted half the day. It’s now past 7:30. I sense I cannot possibly accomplish all I intended today because of my slovenly ways. Late to bed and late to rise robs a man of wealth and exercise. Or something like that. Yet it’s so damn cold out that I doubt I would be out and about doing anything productive, regardless of when I went to bed or when I got up. Some days, it’s best to just go with the flow.

+++

One of the reasons I increasingly avoid going to CNN’s website can be found in the link from its main news page this morning: “Martha Stewart reveals why she broke it off with Anthony Hopkins.” For the love of God, this is news? Pardon me while I slit my wrists. My friend, Deanna, suggests that avoiding news is good for one’s mental health. I am certain she is right.

+++

A guy I grew up with, starting in elementary school and going all the way through high school and a bit beyond, got in touch with me by email a couple of days ago. He noted in his message that he came across an email I sent to him in January 2012; he wondered what’s been going on with me during the past ten years. I was the one who looked him up back then. The email to which he referred was the last of a few we sent back and forth beginning a month or two earlier. Until that brief exchange, we had not been in touch since before we graduated from college—him from Texas A&M, me from the University of Texas at Austin.

His unexpected message triggered thoughts about other friendships that either dried up for lack of intellectual or emotional fuel or, conversely, burst into flames before turning into embers. What—in the ignorance of youth during my last two years of high school—I thought was a close friendship fell into both categories of dissolution. That other friend and I agreed, immediately upon high school graduation and before we moved to Austin to start school in the summer, that we would share an apartment that first summer, then would room together in a dorm for the fall and winter semesters. I learned, within only a few weeks after we moved into the apartment, that we were not really compatible. Somehow, I had not realized before then that he just wasn’t very bright. And his primary interest in going away to school was to drink and party. I was interested in both, too, but not to the exclusion of academic pursuits. Consequently, almost immediately, our friendship withered. As the summer wore on, his failure acknowledge that I had an occasional right to peace and quiet caused what might have remained of a friendship to explode into a fireball of loathing. Long before the summer was out, our plans to share a dorm room had burned to ashes.

My classmate’s email brought to mind an adult-timeframe friendship that turned to volcanic ash. This more recent friendship dissolved after I called my friend’s attention to the hollowness of her repeated promises she always would be available to me 24/7; any time I needed a friend’s support. I had confronted her empty commitment before, only to hear a response saying I was merely misinterpreting circumstances. The last time, my anger and disappointment at yet another vacuous promise sparked repeated enraged replies from her, during which she accused me of mistreating her. This, from a woman who claimed she would always be “just a phone call away” at a time I needed someone to talk to in the aftermath of my wife’s death—but who repeatedly let days go by before returning a phone call or a text message, if indeed they were returned at all. I realized that, yet again, I had misunderstood: I was again simply a convenient acquaintance who could fill rare empty time for her, not  a friend who deserved respect. Fortunately for me, I was never in the throes of existential angst when I left those ignored messages. But the fact they were ignored demonstrated I could not count on help when and if I ever needed it. I may be unrealistic in expecting both steadfast commitments and unwavering follow-through on them. Yet I think my friends can reasonably expect both from me. Perhaps I’ve permitted a nonsensically romantic notion of friendship to interfere with life in the real world. That may be me. So be it. Better to strive to emulate Don Quixote than Niccolò Machiavelli.

Back to my old friend’s email. Though we’ve not remained friends—more like long lost acquaintances—it was good to get his message and to learn that, from what he says, his life has been good this last ten year period. It sounds to me like he is enjoying his children, his grandchildren, and even his career, which he says he will continue until he reaches his seventieth birthday. Personally, I am very, very happy I retired at 58. I would have been very happy ten years earlier if I had been able to retire at 48.

+++

We picked up some garage shelving yesterday from Sam’s Club. One day, when the temperatures return to levels suitable for human survival, we will erect the shelf units in our new garage. Then, we will begin moving “stuff” from the current house’s garage to the new one. This renovation and move will be a slow motion project. That’s fine. It will keep me busy. And it will keep me exercising muscles that haven’t been used in years. I can feel those muscles and their supporting joints. I look forward to the time I will no longer feel the aches and, instead, will feel the strength those aches will give me.

+++

OMG. It’s after 8! I have to get with it or the day will pass me by.

Bending down on my hands and knees to painstakingly apply tape to woodwork in an attempt to protect the wood from the unwanted application of paint is not something I find appealing. In fact, I’m increasingly finding it not only unappealing, but intolerable. I need to find someone who’s young, careful, disciplined, and who understands that the job of masking off trim is not a career worthy of hourly compensation in the triple digits. But I doubt I’ll find such a person without looking. And I don’t have time to look. So, instead, I’ll begrudgingly and very slowly do the work myself. And, I’m afraid, do it not as well as someone younger and more agile than I. Some days, I think I’m deeply and irrevocably stupid. Some days, I curse myself for taking frugality to extremes. I used to be smarter than I am now. I think. But maybe not. Maybe I’ve always been approximately stupid; just dressed up to mimic someone just barely above low-level sub-average.

+++

Today, the weather here in Hot Springs Village is brutally cold and getting colder. I hope my grocery order will be ready, as expected, at 7 this morning so I can get out and back home early enough to avoid being cold later in the day. No, that doesn’t make much sense, but then neither does anything on my mind at this moment. I didn’t sleep as well as I would have liked. That’s why I am the way I am this morning.

+++

I have grown tired of saying “yes” to doing things I do not want to do. My willingness to refuse requests to which I used to agree evolved from my observation that striving to please others by agreeing to their requests does not pay the dividends I assumed it paid. I learned the same lesson in a work setting in 1997 when, after almost eight years as CEO of an association that employed me, my employment contract was not renewed. Voluntarily giving up my personal time to work evenings and weekends so frequently for almost eight years counted for nothing. My dedication to minimizing expenses for my employer at the expense of giving up my comfort or time meant nothing. It was just a job. And when the board of directors decided to flex its muscle and hire someone its members found more appealing, I was summarily replaced. Neither of these lessons should be misconstrued to mean I have decided to be utterly and completely selfish. But I now weigh the impact of saying “yes” on my time and energy; I am willing to give up a bit of both, provided it is for a good cause (like helping a friend or making life easier for someone who deserves a break). But I am not willing to agree simply because I’m asked. I’m no longer willing to allow people to take me for granted. I write this not in response to any specific request that I have refused, but in response to something I read this morning. That piece just reiterated for me that looking out for oneself is not automatically selfish; it can be critically important to one’s mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

+++

This morning, after I got up a few minutes before 5, I glanced at a post in a Facebook group called British Food Lovers. There, an image of a full English breakfast reminded me of the days when I traveled to English on business a few times each year. The photo— bangers, sunny-side-up eggs, English bacon, a fried mushroom, toast, a small bowl of baked beans, and a couple of miniature slabs of hash-browns—was not quite the typical breakfast I remember, but it was close enough to bring back memories. It was during those regular trips to England that I learned that the unsavory reputation enjoyed by British food was undeserved. Like so many cuisines, a full appreciation of British food may require a bit of getting used to, but allowing the flavors to “grow on you” is well worth the adventurous investment. Steak & kidney pie, shepherd’s pie, cottage pie, and a raft of other uniquely British dishes are nothing short of wonderful. Even roast beef smothered in gravy, dramatically different from the roast beef generally served in the U.S., is an outstanding culinary experience. The woman with whom I share my home has the same stereotypical image of British food that so many other Americans do. If not for COVID and the degradation of civil society, I would take her there to show her that it’s not what she has been led to believe it is.

I suppose the “old style” British cooking has changed, though, as have so many other things British. When I see recent television series or films set in London, I can scarcely recognize the place; chrome and glass high-rise buildings now dot the landscape, something I never saw when I visited so often in the early 1980s. Even as late as 1998, the cityscape was very different from the way it appears today on television screens. Today, the 1980s and 1990s seem ancient history. I suppose they are. The world has ripened in the intervening years. I might even say it has rotted.

+++

The attention I initially paid to the British Food Lovers group caused Facebook to show me similar food groups dedicated to: Mediterranean food; Italian cooking; Lebanese cooking; etc.; etc. Unlike so many other unsolicited recommendations, I’ve found the food groups appealing. Now, if only I could discipline myself to actually cook some of the things I see presented by aficionados of various international cuisines…

+++

Okay. Enough for now.

Fragile male egos are on my mind this morning. No, not plural. Singular. Just my fragile male ego. I realize my ego is frail and brittle. It can be shattered like thin, delicate glass simply by giving thought to how our (and especially my) physical attractiveness declines with age. But, then, I have to ask whether that is a valid statement. Does our physical attractiveness decline, or does our definition of attractiveness fail to mature along with our bodies? Thanks in no small part to advertisers’ constant barrage of ads that reinforce the idea that “beauty” is the exclusive province of the young, we convince ourselves that we shed copious amounts of physical attraction with each passing year. (I put quotation marks around beauty because I’m drawing a blank as to the male version of that attribute…assuming beauty is not gender-neutral and applies exclusively to females)

My male ego took a beating yesterday while I was getting my hair cut. Sitting in the barber’s chair, I looked directly into a mirror in front of me. Looking back at me was a pasty-skinned man with far too much flab around his aging neck. Where once I could have seen a young man with reasonably tight skin, I saw a geezer who had allowed himself to slide gracelessly past middle age into the middle years of old age. Who would find that man even slightly attractive, I wondered? I have my answer and I’m glad my attractiveness does not rely exclusively (maybe not even partially) on my physical appearance. But if the majority of youth-fixated advertisers had their way, we would equate attractiveness with youth; nothing but age (or the relative lack thereof) and bespoke clothing designed to accentuate youthful attributes would matter.

Speaking of fragile male egos, I think they are largely responsible for the popularity of flashy pickup trucks, guns, and hunting gear. A large proportion of the male population seems to associate those products with the demonstration of adequate “maleness” and its corresponding attractiveness to either young, attractive women or equally macho men. Or both. I am grateful my fragile male ego is not strengthened by male toys. Instead, mine requires stroking of a different kind—words like “you’re handsome” or “you’re intelligent” or “you’re not bad for someone so old” work for me. 😉

+++

Speaking of pickups, what ever happened to the long-bed versions? They used to be long enough, with the tailgate down, and wide enough to fit a sheet of plywood. Now, they look like they might require a shoe-horn to fit a half-sheet. And what about shoe-horns; does anyone use shoe-horns anymore? So many products that used to be commonplace have suddenly disappeared. Or so it appears to me. Calculators, once ubiquitous, are now rare. Wall phones exist only in museums and on the walls of diners in derelict old western towns along long stretches of desolate highways.

Those isolated towns, the ones with wall telephones in their diners, make great sets for gritty movies in which all the characters—hard-drinking, tight-lipped, and deeply unfriendly to strangers—have monstrous chips on their shoulders.  For some reason, I like those kinds of movies. There Will Be Blood. Hell or High Water. No Country for Old Men. Missing. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.  Okay, they’re not all of the same genre/ilk. But I like them, nonetheless. There’s something about their tone. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I may not know movies, but I know what I like.

+++

New toilets are scheduled to be delivered today. At the “new” house. The toilets there work perfectly fine, if you like toilets designed to use too much water for too little flush. They are not broken. They work as they always have. They’re just not good, modern-day, water-efficient toilets. So we ordered new ones. We won’t install them until we know what we’re going to do with the floors in the bathrooms. That decision will come soon, I hope. In the meantime, I’m very slowly painting the walls, with the idea that every wall in the house will get at least one coat of a new color. Some will require two coats. Some will require a primer and one or two coats. It’s like renovating a house. Almost exactly like renovating a house.

+++

The temperature outside is now 52°F. The forecast calls for it to drop to 19°F tonight. Another night to leave the faucets dripping. And for the next two or three nights. I do not know whether I will do much painting while the temperatures are so low. I may sit in front of the fireplace at the “old” house, instead, warming myself and mulling over things over which I have no control. Which could be damn near anything.

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I made the mistake of ordering groceries online and scheduling pickup for tomorrow morning. The roads could be icy tomorrow morning. I do not much like driving on icy roads. “Do not much like” is my understated way of saying “loathe.” But what’s done is done. I guess I could cancel the order, but that would delay getting the groceries. So I will just play it by ear. If it’s icy tomorrow morning, I will drive slower than normal. Much slower than normal. Turtles could speed by me. Time will tell. It always does.

Though the vast majority of us seek both freedom and security, most of us historically have recognized the need to temper each so we can enjoy sufficient levels of the other. The concept that “your freedom ends where mine begins” refers to the competing behaviors that give rise to the need for civil limits on freedom. “Pure” freedom invites chaos because it does not acknowledge responsibilities to protect members of society from damage inflicted by the freedoms enjoyed by others. Therefore, societies establish generally agreed limits on freedoms, thereby securing what their members collectively accept as reasonably limited levels of freedom. When those limits infringe too deeply on freedoms in the name of “security,” people tend to complain or rebel. Conversely, when freedoms are so unrestrained as to fail to protect or preserve the enjoyment of freedom by others, members of society tend to clamor for greater restraints: more rules equal more security to enable the enjoyment of freedoms so infringed.

The USA today is in the throes of intense and frequently uncivil debates—and too often violent disagreements—about what constitutes acceptable levels of freedom. Hyper-progressives demand freedoms that über-conservatives find both offensive and potentially dangerous to the freedoms right-wingers want to enjoy. Similarly, über-conservatives demand freedoms that hyper-progressives find equally offensive and dangerous. It is interesting that both ends of the political spectrum fiercely depend their positions but refuse to accept exactly the same arguments from their opponents that they employ themselves. In both cases, they are in effect saying, “your freedom ends where I say it does and mine has no limits.” In other words, “only my position matters.” At both ends of the spectrum, but especially on the far right, I increasingly see demands that “my” freedom be secured by “my” rules.  And that security, again especially on the right, seems to involve guns and a fanatical worship of a narrow interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The solution to the impasse? I do not know. But I suspect it will involve either one or more supremely charismatic leaders whose words will somehow calm the growing rage or bloodshed of epic proportions, followed by either right-wing or left-wing authoritarianism. I hope, fervently, that charisma wins the day. I see no evidence of its emergence today, though. Neither Democrats nor Republicans seem equipped to handle the challenge, largely because level-headed, intelligent, persuasive people either have left the parties in disgust or their voices have been so effectively drowned out that no one can hear them. Both parties shriek when they talk; their screams are used to attack their opponents and to defend their indefensible positions. The charismatic leader, if one is to emerge, must be apolitical and secular. Good luck.

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Last night, we watched the entire third season of After Life, which is more than a bit of a tear-jerker. The end of the last episode is very much open to interpretation; it can be interpreted as either very dark or much lighter and more in keeping with the idea that “life goes on.” All three seasons reminded me of my own eternal sadness that will never recede. Maybe that’s why it was such a tear-jerker for me. Ach.

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This morning, I’ll be off soon to get a haircut, then to the bank to get some spending money, then to pick up a prescription for my sweetheart’s dog, and then to the paint store to get more rollers. And I have to drive into town to pick up a prescription refill for me—one that seems to have helped my stuffy head a bit. From there, I’ll head back to the salt mines, paint brush and roller in hand, to make a tiny bit of progress on the makeover of the new house. It’s slow, slow going. I imagine this project may take months to finish, at the rate I’m going. I wish I were flush with unnecessary money. I would hire all the work done.

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My mood this morning can best be described as moderately melancholy with a measure of or two of weariness thrown in. I’d like to replace that with something a little more appealing, but I don’t know quite how to get there.

Contrary to the common wisdom, Zeus did not invent thunder, nor was he responsible in any way for lightning, rainstorms, and the fierce tornadic winds that destroyed entire villages in a matter of seconds. No, Zeus was simply a better salesman than Gideon Grace, the actual creator of those expressions of Natural anger and depression.  Zeus felt no compunction about taking credit for the work of Gideon Grace, nor stealing the accolades due others. Zeus did not always take personal credit, either. Sometimes, he delighted simply in snatching credit away from those who deserved it and placing it squarely in the hands of those who did not. For example, Zeus was the first plagiarist, having taken words penned by a Greek fiction writer and planting them in the notebook of Moses, credited with writing the Book of Genesis. Though Zeus did not take credit for writing the book himself, he mentioned casually, to his friends, that he could have written a more convincing story.

In light of all of Zeus’s thievery of credit from others’ work and his remarkable skills at self-aggrandizement, one might wonder why we do not worship him today. We have Gideon Grace to thank for that. You see, though Gideon was robbed of credit for inventing thunder, lightning, rainstorms, and tornadoes, among other awe-inspiring forces of Nature, he had the last word. Gideon virtually managed, during his last days, to land a proverbial body blow from which Zeus never recovered. I could give you details, but frankly they are rather mundane and might detract from the impact this knowledge has on you today. There’s more about Gideon that would be news to you, I’m sure. But I’ll leave it, at least some of it, to your imagination.

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Gideon Grace and Aphrodite were unlikely lovers. Gideon was far older than she, for one thing. Her marriage to Hephaestus, Gideon assumed, made her unavailable to him. He initially did not know, though, that the marriage was rocky, at best. So, he assumed his innocent flirtations would amount to nothing. Their periodic messages to one another, carried back and forth by Hermes and Iris, carried only hints of the budding enchantment they felt for one another.  For quite some time, they danced around their growing mutual attraction, never daring to admit to something so utterly out of the ordinary and socially unacceptable. They had never met, yet there was something powerful between them, something magnetic. The emotion was a hybrid between physical and emotional and sexual attraction, tempered by their adherence to social mores and by each of their mutual assumptions that they, alone, had those deep feelings of attraction. But when Aphrodite crossed the threshold of Gideon’s house to meet him the first time, ostensibly on a purely platonic visit to lay plans for the upcoming Aphrodisia Festival, the walls of pent-up desire came crashing down. It was then that Gideon revealed that he sometimes used an alias: Ares. And thus began a tryst of epic proportions. But the stories about Gideon and Aphrodite have been bent and twisted so completely by the hands of history that their reality is no longer recognizable. So we do not know what really happened between them. In fact, they hid their relationship so completely that we can rely only on innuendo as the source of our knowledge about it. Even the rumors have been mangled so badly we cannot even be sure Gideon and Aphrodite existed. We must rely on our imaginations, then, if we are to know the whole story. The only thing about which we can be certain is that we can be sure of nothing.

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We watched an excellent documentary last night, entitled Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind. I have been a fan of Lightfoot and his music for as long as I can remember; certainly since the mid-to-late-sixties. The story of his evolution from a talented but rather unsophisticated young man to an extraordinary singer/songwriter was fascinating. I did not know about his self-destructive behaviors in his earlier years, up to and including the times when he released some of this best-known music. The documentary revealed the complexity of the man’s life, both personally and musically. And it documented the high regard he inspired in many other musicians with whom he engaged. The film, released in 2020, showed him as a 80-year-old man whose physical appearance has changed dramatically (and, in my opinion, for the worse) since his heyday. When I went to see him in concert in Houston, probably around 1982 or so, he was at or near the peak of his popularity. I still like his music as much now as I did then. His ballads are incredibly rich with emotion and they draw out those emotions in the listener, in me at least. I’m glad we stumbled upon the film on Amazon Prime. I haven’t watched much on Amazon Prime, but looking at my Prime “wish list” this morning, I saw that another film I want to watch is now available as part of my subscription: A French Village. I’ll have to make a point of watching that soon.

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I called my brother yesterday, the one who’s in a medical rehab facility, but when he answered he said he could not speak to me. His voice sounded raspy and weak and he seemed out of breath. I worry about him and wonder about his progress; whether he is getting any stronger. Ever since my late wife went into a rehab facility locally, my opinion of such facilities has declined dramatically. I am of the opinion that for-profit hospitals and rehabilitation facilities should either be prohibited or subject to extremely intense and constant scrutiny. Capitalism and medical care are at odds with one another, just as capitalism and compassion cannot exist comfortably in the presence of the other. I am opinionated. I know it. No one has to tell me that.

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Apparently, there was a big hubbub about the Dallas Cowboys’ loss to the San Francisco 49ers yesterday. I will never understand why people can get so enthusiastic about watching a bunch of overpaid men play a violence-prone game but cannot seem to generate as much enthusiasm about voting in presidential elections.

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I am hungry for pancakes. Unfortunately, I expect that hunger will not be satiated.

When I woke this morning, I felt a slight sense of panic that I might not have responded to a weeks-old email message from an online friend, a woman who stumbled across my blog more than a year ago and with whom I subsequently established an occasional email exchange. My panic subsided when I discovered that I had, indeed, responded. Though we’ve never met, I feel an emotional attachment to her; the kind of attachment one feels when there’s a sense that a person shares some of one’s personal philosophies. That kind of attachment is what led me to meet—face-to-face—Roger and Robin and Tara and Kathy (and another Kathy) and Larry and Teresa and Juan and…there may be more. While none of those people—who after encountering them through online exchanges and then meeting them in person—have become close friends, each of them has become a person I care about. Most of us stay in touch on occasion. We share intellectual and emotional attributes that tie us together. I sense that I share such commonalities with this woman. And when I learned recently that she is and has been going through some difficult personal struggles, I wished I could reach out and hug her. Or call and let her hear a friendly, comforting voice over the telephone. But we’ve never spoken and I suspect she might be reticent to give me her number or to call mine. As I mull this over, I realize I have never spoken by telephone to my other “internet-initiated” friends. So, perhaps original distance and the rarity of instances of communication make such forms of contact outmoded. Maybe communications in which spoken words are exchanged from afar are not suited to friendships created in the ether. Hmmm. I’ve thought about this sort of thing before. I still haven’t resolved it in my mind. Are “arms-length” interactions with which there are no (or, at least few) voices or “visuals” exchanged capable of morphing into friendships? Or are these types of interactions another form of engagement? Some day, I may have an answer. But for now, it’s just supposition that ebbs and flows day by day.

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The noise. Again. The noise. The sound of blood pumping through or near my eardrums. The muffled but maddening “thump, thump, thump” that offers sonic proof that my heart continues to beat away. I hear that damn noise loudest in the morning when I sit at my desk, pounding on the keyboard. While I deeply appreciate that my heart is doing its job, I wish it would not announce every throbbing beat with evidential noises.

I desire unmitigated silence.  Just briefly. No sound at all. Emptiness where noise now fills my head. No noise emanating from the heating ducts. No creaks in the floor as the house settles and rebels against changes in response to temperature fluctuations. No “huffs” as my damaged pulmonary system endeavors to deliver oxygen to my bloodstream. Pure, uninterrupted silence. I want for my ears the same experience my eyes enjoy when all light from every source is blocked. If I could enjoy both experiences simultaneously, even if only for a few minutes, my gratitude would explode like a geyser’s steam suddenly freed from its underground prison. I wonder, do other people have the same experience with incessant noise? Am I alone in my sense that noise, either natural or artificial, is a permanent fixture in my ears or my mind? Or, put another way, have I gone mad? Am I insane, hearing noises where none exist? I think not. Oh, I am sure I hear the noises. And I want them to stop just long enough for me to experience nirvana. Just long enough.

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Not long after I awoke this morning, after I satisfied myself that I had not neglected to respond to an email, I explored some recipes I found online. One, in particular, caught my attention. Kibbe nayyeh—a Lebanese dish consisting of raw minced leg of lamb, herbs, spices, and bulgar wheat—looks extremely appealing to me. I have long been a fan of various raw meat dishes such as steak tartare, Ethiopian kitfo, Italian carpaccio, and another couple of Ethiopian dishes called gored gored, and tere siga. Various people have advised me against eating raw meat, but it’s my contention that properly prepared raw meat has been eaten for many centuries without killing all those who consume it. And I love the flavor. Unlike the other raw meat dishes I’ve had, though, kibbe nayyeh is made from lamb, not beef. I have never had a raw lamb dish before (except when I’ve sliced off a little chunk from a big, beautiful leg of lamb). In spite of my growing concern about the treatment of animals raised so their flesh can be consumed by humans (and other creatures), I maintain my appreciation for opportunities to eat beef. And chicken. And pork. And so on. While I think I could survive just fine as a vegetarian, I am not sufficiently motivated or disciplined to do so. Therefore, I remain an omnivore. Thus my interest in kibbe nayyeh. But where can I find very high quality (95%+ lean) lamb? That is the only obstacle that might prevent me from making and eating kibbe nayyeh. Well, I am not sure whether my sweetheart would eat it. But even if she refuses it, I would make it and consume it. It may be a perverse pride, but I am proud that I will try almost any food that others eat. The foods of other cultures, especially, interest and intrigue me. My passion for foods from foreign lands makes living in a state that amounts to a almost a cultural-food-desert a bit of a challenge. Such is life, though. “It is what it is.” 😉

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The snow from yesterday and last night remains on the limbs of trees, on bushes, and on my car in the driveway. Whether the streets are drivable or not, I doubt I’ll be going out much (if at all) today. Painting can wait. But I really should get to the post office if I can. The world will not end, though, if I do not make it to the P.O. I’ll play it by ear. Perhaps I should plan on making BLTs for breakfast this morning. Or for lunch. Something to assuage my lust for kibbe nayyeh. Maybe a BLT will do it.

Perhaps one day after I die, someone will stumble upon this blog and will find its several thousand posts (approaching 3900 as I write this) intriguing. That someone—as she begins wading through the morass of words I have written here— might decide the writer had something profound to say but never found it within himself to orchestrate his language in such a way as to reveal that profundity. She might decide the tangled, unstructured outpourings the writer composed most mornings consists of a compelling philosophy hidden among scraps of language better suited to something else—an advice column or a personal diary or a wishful life list or a catalog of unexplored ideas. Whatever she decides the writing represents, she might decide to use an analysis of the writer and his words as the basis of her research for her doctoral dissertation, which she may entitle “Hidden Swinburn: Philosophies of an Introspective Madman.” Her doctoral advisor, Professor Kolbjørn Landvik, probably would suggest to her that her academic career would be better served by selecting another subject to explore. But this doctoral student, who I’ll call Phaedra Collier, will be undeterred. She will steadfastly refuse to deviate from her fascination with this unknown man who documented his rapid-fire attention deficits, no matter how mind-numbingly boring or unhinged they might have been. I imagine Phaedra Collier will regret her refusal to select another topic of exploration. During her dissertation defense, she will engage in fierce debate with Professor Landvik and his colleagues, Professors Ekstrom Noble, Linoleum Price, and Calypso Kneeblood. The professors will collectively agree Phaedra Collier has become too emotionally engaged with the blog’s writer to present cogent arguments supporting her contentions about his philosophies or his madness. They will reject Phaedra’s dissertation and send her back to start over. Phaedra, dejected and broken-hearted, will decide to abandon her dream of attaining her Ph.D. in Literary Philosophy. Instead, she will leave academia and will burrow into the far northern Canadian wilderness, where she will buy several hundred acres of virtually inaccessible land. There, with a used Kubota tractor, she will clear a small plot of land and build an architecturally significant house. From her modern abode, she will create a self-sufficient farm. She will earn money by creating and selling, by way of the internet, scented candles which, when burned, will smell like a fireplace burning oak and hickory.

I would like to have known Phaedra Collier, but she will have been born a hundred years or more too late. But I feel like I know her anyway. I can almost read her mind. And I can hear her words even before she speaks them.

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The trouble Phaedra and/or others like her might have when they stumble upon this blog is that the writer weaves fact and fiction together without warning. Even to the seasoned literary detective, it is sometimes difficult to determine which words are based in reality and which are mined from pure fantasy. Phaedra, as it turns out, was able to separate the wheat from the chaff or the gold from the iron pyrite or the charcoal from the coal. Her surname, Collier, derives from her ancestors’ trades: coal miners. Just thought I’d throw that in.

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I woke this morning before 4, my wheezing and coughing having returned with a vengeance. I’ve run out of one of a couple of medications about which I’ve not yet decided their utility. Apparently one or the other (or both, collectively) work to minimize my mostly nocturnal wheezing. One of the medications was prescribed and I am eligible for one refill, which I will call about today. The other was given to me as a sample by my primary care doctor. I had decided that one might work, so I asked my doctor’s office to prescribe it and they obliged. But my prescription insurance company contacted me to say the inhaler has a “high” deductible. Astronomical is a better word: $682 is what they want for a three-month supply. I can live with wheezing, thanks, at that price. After that “high” deductible, it would be “only” $117 per month. No, thanks. The deadline for agreeing to let them ship it at those prices has passed. So, I’ll see if the other prescription may be responsible for keeping my wheezing at bay. I would like to be able to sleep without waking myself up by wheezing and coughing. We shall see.

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Despite the fact that painting the house will be a very long-term project, I’ve decided it will be worth it. Having not yet completed the living room, I have decided the light forest green color my sweetheart selected is precisely the right color. I had been inclined to go for a light grey and I had wanted to paint the wood trim white. (The trim is stained and the stain has been mistreated over the years, so I thought painting would be the best way to restore it to a more attractive look.) No. The wood trim now looks spectacular. With some TLC, I think it will look wonderful. The room will be a showpiece. I can barely wait until we are able to move furniture into the house, with us to follow. But I’ll have to wait. I have a lot of painting yet to do. And we have to hang new ceiling fans and light fixtures. Oh, the house will be a beauty. I have been a doubter. But now I can see beyond the unkempt appearance and the needed repairs. Yes, it will take time, but it will be worth the wait.

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I could write and write and write about my life. But if I did, any reader who stumbles across this blog would curse me for the abundance of my words. So I’ll close this morning’s disgorgement and work on getting on with the day. I will try to get to work early today. The afternoon promises rapidly falling temperatures and mixed precipitation. Ach!

I have a nascent interest in knowing something about Aristotle’s personal life. All of us have at least some exposure to Aristotle, thanks to his influence on philosophy and modern modes of inquiry and thought. But few people know anything of substance about the man’s personal life: where he was born, how he was educated, etc. I suspect access to  reliable information about those topics has been severely limited by the passage of centuries and the decay of most of the records that might have existed in Aristotle’s time. My only option, then, is to travel back in time to the year of Aristotle’s birth, 384 BC. But how do we know with any degree of certainty that he was born in that year? Or that he died in 322 BC? How do we know he was born in Stagira, Northern Greece, or that was reared by a guardian after his father’s death when Aristotle was a child? We know these things because Wikipedia tells us. Wikipedia is today what Encyclopedia Britannica was in my youth. Except information presented in Encyclopedia Britannica was, I am told, subject to rigorous verification; far more than its modern unofficial successor.

When I was a kid, I could get lost in “the encyclopedia.” Its many volumes contained so much interesting “stuff!” I know I used to read the encyclopedia—I am certain of it—but my memories of losing myself in those volumes are hazy, faded snapshots at best. I wish I could bring those foggy memories into sharper, clearer focus. There’s so much I could learn if only I could recall aspects of my life that now are hidden behind a thick, dusty curtain of time. I wonder how I would have been different if I had been able to sit at Aristotle’s feet? I wonder how, listening to him share his knowledge and learning from him how best to employ critical thought, I might have been better able to think critically? I suppose I’ll never know. At best I can only imagine. I can only dream who I might have been, had I been personally influenced by arguably the most influential philosopher of all time.

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Even a modest amount of out-of-the-ordinary motion stretches fallow muscles and tendons. One’s arms and shoulders and legs—lethargic and unaccustomed to responding to minimal demands—object to such simple but unusual requirements by exaggerated howling, as if they were being subjected to brutal torture. I know this because I did a bit of painting yesterday. That activity required me to move a bit more than usual—reach up toward the ceiling, bend toward the floor, stretch and twist, and otherwise expose my body to positions it apparently finds offensive. This morning, I feel a little like I slept on a bed of sharp rocks after having my arms and legs bound with wire rope into deeply unnatural positions.  That notwithstanding, I shall return for more torture this morning because, otherwise, the process of painting the house will take far too long. While painting, I’ll take an occasional break to try to adjust doors so they close and latch properly. And I’ll do some deep cleaning—it seems the people who used to live in the house did not see the value in removing dirt and grime from stoves, ovens, door casings, shelves, countertops, floors, and other out-of-the-way places. One day, though, all this will be rewarded with a beautiful, functional, immaculately clean abode. I say “one day” because, at the rate I am going, the process will be complete far, far in the future. No. Stop that. I must maintain a positive outlook. I must adjust my attitude by becoming an optimist.

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With the proper tools and the knowledge and skills necessary to use them to their maximum potential, the limits of my ability to make things would be impossible to reach. But that’s true of everyone, isn’t it? All we need are tools and knowledge and skills—and the interest in using them and the discipline to do so. What world would we have today if everyone, from the first upright human to the baby born moments ago, used their brains to the fullest? They would either create or otherwise get access to the tools necessary to excel. The universe that today seems so impossibly huge would seem much smaller, because we would have learned so much more about it. Humankind’s potential would have taken us to levels heretofore only dreamed about in wildly fictional stories.

But we haven’t used our abilities to their fullest. And we’ve allowed damaged emotions and lethargy to derail us. I suppose we could start over, but after seeing what we’ve done with what we have, why would we?

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I’ve listened again in recent days to Happens to the Heart, a song written and performed by Leonard Cohen and published after his death. Cohen’s poetry overwhelms me with its enormous store of emotion and meaning. His music carries me to places I do not know or understand, but that mean a great deal to me. I am in a philosophical mood this morning. Cohen has taken me there, courtesy of his music and my memories of listening to it since my college days.

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Time to re-enter the world of practical action. I often prefer the realm of impractical magic.

I first mentioned Keb’ Mo’ here in a piece I posted in March 2013, but I’ve been one of his raving fans for much longer than that. I think the first time I heard his music was during a visit to my late wife’s sister when she lived in Santa Rosa, California. That was many, many years ago. Though I like a lot of his music—virtually all of it—probably my favorite song is Life is Beautiful.  And here, from YouTube, is a version of the tune in which he and Taj Mahal collaborate:

It may seem silly to say this, but sometimes when I listen to a large selection of a musical artist’s music I get the sense that I know enough about him or her that I am confident that, if we ever met, we would get along very well. Keb’ Mo’ is one such artist. There’s something about his music and the way he delivers it that tells me he is a genuinely good, kind, compassionate man. He strikes me as someone who is humble, has a good sense of humor, and has not let his fame and fortune ruin those qualities. The skeptic in me says I should just let myself believe all that and should never, ever engage him in conversation, if presented the chance. I often wish that skeptic would shrink away, never to return. Competing emotions can be troublesome. Indeed.

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A few days ago, I mentioned Ranchman’s, an old restaurant in Ponder, Texas where I used to get spectacular chicken-fried-steak. A friend happened to read the post, which triggered his memories of the place. He was introduced to it in 1972 during dove hunting season. At the time, the place was owned by the original owner, Pete, who always sat at a round table facing the door. My friend recalled his introduction to the place and how he experienced it: “Hunters didn’t bother to clean their boots when they came in. There was plenty of mud on the floor. There was a late model Rolls Royce parked diagonally in the middle of the street in front. One of the dove hunters, I imagine.” The Ranchman’s of today, even though it is shuttered for the time-being, remains an iconic attraction that recalls a different time. Although the place has evolved and “modernized” a bit, it continues to be a snapshot that takes visitors back in time.

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True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

~ Florence King ~

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Recently, I bought new lenses for my eyeglasses; the prescription, after an eye exam, changed ever-so-slightly from the previous lenses, so I opted to replace the roughly three-year-old lenses. But I kept the frames. Yesterday, one of the ear pieces broke. I called the optical shop, hoping to buy a replacement ear piece. Instead, I was told they would replace the entire set of frames under warranty. The skeptic in me (he lurks in plain sight) says the shop has nothing to lose by replacing the frames and a lot of goodwill to gain (from some personal experience in consulting interactions with optometrists, I know the wholesale cost of frames is a tiny fraction of the retail price we pay—at least that was true about 15 years ago). That skeptical attitude notwithstanding, I was surprised and quite appreciative at the good news. I now have something positive to say about McFarland Eye Care of Hot Springs. And that positivity notwithstanding, I plan to go to a different eye clinic to have my eyes checked. Optical products and ophthalmic care are different beasts.

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An idea for a piece of oddball fiction:

A man goes to a town he’s never been to or heard of before. He notices the absence of restaurants; no diners, no fast-food joints, nothing. He stops in at a convenience store, hoping to get something to eat. But he notices the place has nothing edible on its shelves. Nothing one might ordinarily expect in convenience store: no chips, no jerky, no candy bars. Nothing. He asks the clerk at the counter: “Is there anywhere to eat in this town?”

The clerk responds, “To what”? “

“To eat. Anyplace to get lunch? Or even a snack. You don’t have anything in here to eat. That’s kind of strange.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the clerk answers. “What does that mean…’to eat?’ Is that what you said?”

The man looks shocked. Did he just hear the clerk say he doesn’t understand the term “to eat?”

Yes, that’s what he heard. And he notices other customers are paying attention to his conversation with the clerk. They, too, seem perplexed by his question.

Just an undeveloped idea. I have a lot of those. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. My head is full of scraps of potential fiction, nonfiction, and would-be poetry. All undeveloped. Unpolished. Much of it, unfortunately, uninspired. But every word has the potential of replicating itself, each new version consisting of different letters. It’s like the way cells divide and change into different components of life-forms. Some words evolve into lengthy novels, while some are transformed into newspaper articles or business communications. And some ripen into urgent manifestoes that call for the violent overthrow of governments or whole societies. The thing is, one never knows what will emerge from a word as it changes. Identical words can morph in very different ways. Their progeny can mature into marketing catalogs or love letters or even ransom notes that threaten death and mayhem if the recipient fails to follow explicit directives.

One day, I hope to return to writing fiction. But for now, my attention span is so short I can’t even begin to think about writing something longer than a few paragraphs. I get bored with what I write. I get bored with myself. I feel the need to transmogrify in reverse, becoming taller, younger, better looking, and far more intelligent and worldly. A dashing figure who churns out novels and epic poems at the speed of thought. Uh huh. Right after I win the lottery.

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I woke this morning around 3:30, but did not get out of bed until a few minutes after 4. I really tried to go back to sleep, but my body was having none of that. So I got  up, made coffee, and retreated to my computer. It’s nearing 7 now and I cannot stop yawning. I am afraid I may not have enough energy to paint an entire room today. But energy or not, I have to get cracking.

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By the way, yesterday’s email notification about the day’s new post began “I am in the mood for a tit.” My intent was to write “I am in the mood for a titillating experience,” but I stopped mid-sentence. Apparently, I hit “publish” before I erased the sentence entirely. My apologies for the surprising error.