John Swinburn

The stresses caused by fierce winds can build up over time. A huge, thick, powerful, mesquite tree might survive monstrous hurricane force winds in successive storms. The tree may lose a few limbs but stand resolute against the forces of nature, only to topple later when wind is only half as strong.

People are like that. They can survive unthinkably strong emotional upheavals, only to succumb to far lesser turmoil. It’s as if the cumulative force of emotional stresses shatter the barriers that protect us. I believe that is what happens. When people survive repeated periods of emotional despair, the strength that shelters them weakens. Even a relatively moderate emotional storm can decimate their ability to cope with the stresses of life. The terms “mental breakdown” or “emotional breakdown” describe that sudden disintegration of emotional defenses. Life’s challenges simply become too much for psyches to handle; our tough protective shields weaken. We capitulate, as if surrendering in battle. We can’t find within ourselves the strength to fight anymore.

Too often, I think we witness those struggles but do not know what we can do to help people get through or around them. I think we’re embarrassed, for some reason, as if their battles carry a stigma. In my opinion, the stigma is found in the failure to intercede; the stigma is in giving one’s personal emotional comfort more weight than the emotional survival of a person in pain. But it happens all the time. Excuses abound: “It’s none of my business.” “He would not want me to interfere.” “If I say something, it will only make it worse for her.” “She needs her privacy to deal with it.”

I offer this implicit condemnation of the failure to intervene as if I am a practiced intervenor. I am not. I know the excuses because I have used them. It embarrasses me that, even though I recognize the likelihood of a need, I can use lame excuses and personal timidity to stay an arm’s length from the experience.  Stronger personalities ignore the potential embarrassment; they barge ahead as if a life depends on it. And it well might.  When I find myself saying “I should have…,” my self-esteem drops a notch. As well it should. People (like me) would do well to put aside their own feelings of embarrassment in such circumstances and take the risk. We might blunder and make some embarrassing mistakes, but we might sleep better, knowing we cared more for someone else than about our own fragility.

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The next several days should be far more tolerable, with respect to temperature, than the last few days. Highs in the low- to mid-80s will feel a bit like fall weather after stifling heat and humidity that could drown even the strongest swimmer. These few days will provide opportunities to work outdoors without too much fear of heat stroke. I will blow leaves, power wash a deck railing, and paint said railing (with the help of my IC). We’ll be cleaning up and fancying up her house to help her sell it. But, before I blow more leaves, I will spray myself with something to keep the chiggers at bay. Yesterday, I made the mistake of wading into leafy debris without protection; this morning, I have chigger bites that, so far, the Chigger-Rid or whatever I have on hand does not seem to help.

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My stomach has been “queasy” the last day or two and it seems to be on track for more of the same today. I thought, before, it was a minor flare of Crohn’s, but I’m not convinced that’s not it. Instead, I think it’s a mild stomach bug that will probably disappear soon; but it has been a minor annoyance thus far. Nothing even remotely debilitating, but definitely irritating. My appetite is fine (too fine, in fact, like it always is). Maybe that’s the issue; I enjoy food too much. I’ll slow down a bit and will eat only food that is good for me. And I’ll drink water with my coffee. And so forth. I could stand to lose 75 pounds; I’d still be someone overweight. Losing 75 pounds is an attractive target. But I don’t want to put the cart before the cart-dragging hyper-power engine. Patience, Grasshopper.

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A friend has invited us over to watch Hamilton on Tuesday evening. I’ve been wanting to watch it, so this will be a treat, but I’m not extremely good at sitting for three hours (the length of the experience). We’ll see. If I can’t sit still for three hours, I’ll have to try to doze off without waking everyone with my snoring. Seriously, I will manage to sit still for three hours, but I am amazed that anyone creating modern-day operas thinks three hours is a reasonable amount of time for such presentations. Two hours should be the legal limit.

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We have other obligations this week, including what promises to be great fun in Little Rock, where we’ll sample hot-pepper-infused beer and will, no doubt, eat some extraordinary food. We’re going with friends who have a special connection with the brewmeister and the restaurant I have adopted as my favorite.

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It’s off to church this morning, wearing masks. I’m not fond of the idea of church this morning; it just doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather stay at home, where I could contentedly mull the vagaries of life. But I will go to church. I will wear a mask, but will growl at not having coffee; a decision was made that, in my opinion, should have involved me, to forego coffee and treats and require masks (the latter about which I agree). But I was not consulted. Regardless, wearing masks during the post-service period probably will impact the post-service conversations. In future, I will not attempt to engage in moderating conversations among people wearing masks; it would be a noisy and fruitless endeavor.

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It’s interesting to me. As I think about disagreeing with good friends about important issues, I never for a moment think my disagreement will have any impact on our friendship. But disagreements with people—people with whom I have no connection—tends to make me feel increasingly estranged from them. That makes no sense. I think I need to examine my thought processes. I need to determine why I can disagree with people close to me without damaging our relationships, yet my distance from people I do not know tends to grow greater when we disagree. There’s something in there that may explain how we can overcome angry disagreements with strangers. I just don’t know what it is.

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Some mornings, and this is one, I wake up and wonder “why?” I question why so many things are as they are. I wonder why I am the way I am and not the way I might want to be. The concept of church, as unappealing as it sometimes is to me, attaches to the questions and attempts answers. It’s the answers that I find both thought-provoking and laughable. Religion is a banal attempt, I sometimes think, to answer questions that have no answer. I think we should give up on trying to find out “why” and, instead, try to understand how we cope with what is. But that’s another deep thought for another deep time.

I think if I’ve learned anything about friendship, it’s to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don’t walk away, don’t be distracted, don’t be too busy or tired, don’t take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff.

~ Jon Katz ~

Yesterday afternoon was good. Exceptionally good. We had good friends over for a few hours. We ate, drank, and talked at length about everything under the sun. We simply  enjoyed one another’s company. Such afternoons are precious reminders that, no matter what else is going on in our lives, spending time with people who really matter can boost one’s spirits and make the world feel like a better, more welcoming, happier place. Friends who share one’s sense of humor are among the most spectacular gifts. Spending time with people whose values align with one’s own almost certainly spur the formation of close, strong, solid friendships. One of the group (there were only six of us) came a little early and shared her writing, her newfound passion that clearly reveals the depths of her creativity and her emotions—and her innate talent and intellectual breadth. All of us shared experiences and opinions and ideas—the things one does in the company of friends. It may be too much to wish for, but I wish we could gather more often and even more casually. Though the “preparation” for the event was not extensive, we made dips and prepared munchies and such that were good to have. I think a bag of chips or crackers, alone, could be adequate. It’s not the food that makes the experience; it’s the people. I feel extremely fortunate to have those people in my life. Friends can make all the difference.

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My handyman worked diligently yesterday, replacing outdated light fixtures in the garage, the master bedroom closet, and the crawl space under the house with new, energy-efficient, brighter LED light fixtures. He will be back Monday to continue checking off items on my to-do list. Replacing difficult-to-use metal closet rods with long, smooth, wooden dowels will be high on his (and my) list. I’ve finally come to my senses; it’s best to hire someone to do things one is capable of doing but that require more motivation than one is capable of bringing to bear. Plus, the recently-exercised skills of a handyman who makes his living doing such things make the jobs go faster and the end-produce function better. I do not like to part with the money, but I’m much happier to have the work done than to stew over not having it done.

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My IC will put her house on the market this week, thus culminating my efforts to convince her to move in with me. Between now and the time buyers take possession, we have a lot to do and a lot of decisions to make. Our work will include determining how to merge two households into one; which furnishings to keep, which to sell or give away, etc., etc., etc. The tasks seems daunting, and they are, but I am sure we will manage.

Yesterday, during our gathering with friends (I don’t want to call it a party, because it was not a party, but I think “gathering” is not quite the right word, either…I don’t know), we talked about people of our ages deciding to create multi-family communities in which everyone has the privacy of individual living space but in which everyone is a part of a cohesive group that is available to help and support the others. Co-housing, in other words, without the vernacular and structural formality. I still love the idea.

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My IC and I are exploring the idea of living in a different place.  A place with ready access to walkable neighborhoods that offer restaurants and bars and entertainment and museums and…all the stuff of big city life without the big city. It’s early in the discussion, but we’re having fun considering different places. So far, we’ve talked a little about Flagstaff, Arizona and Tulsa, Oklahoma and Fayetteville, Arkansas. There must be hundreds of other places that offer strong possibilities. Among our criteria (though nothing is carved in stone) is access to a Unitarian Universalist church; it’s not so much the church itself that is a draw, it’s the fact that such a church is apt to draw the kind of people with whom we might want to share our time.

In an ideal world, we would find a place that offers all the tangible elements that would draw us in, but also would be as free as possible of right-wing rednecks and hillbillies. I don’t mind centrist or left-wing (within reason) rednecks and hillbillies, but their counterparts are off limits. I do not want to be around people who subscribe to conspiracy theories and truly believe that aliens or Democrats plan to destroy the Earth by infecting us all with COVID or by operating child pornography rings out of pizza parlors. Sheeeeesh! It givces me shivers to think that these people are running free, spreading their miserable lies with abandon.

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For most of my life, whenever my wife and I decided to move, for whatever reason, we did not include criteria in our searches that might lead us to people with whom we held shared values or interests. Our decisions were based more on costs, housing styles, access to grocery shopping, and other things that did not overtly include “people-related” matters. Since moving to Hot Springs Village, though, it has occurred to me how critically important it is to be around people whose commonalities make life more comfortable and fulfilling. In the Village, I found that the UU church and the Democratic Club were the two best sources of like-minded people. Though I joined a writing group and belonged to a painting group for a while, they fed my need for “technical” affiliation but not for “emotional” affiliation. The difference, I suppose, is that “emotional” affiliation is stronger because it includes one’s personal beliefs or values.

If only I’d come to that realization many years ago, our lives might have been far happier and more fulfilling. That is not to say that we were not happy; we were. But we were, in large measure, the only anchors to one another’s happiness. We had no one but each other. That was good, of course, but it was lonely in many ways, too. If only I’d known.

At any rate, we’re exploring our options. And we’re considering how extremely important our friends are to us. If we leave, we must find ways to keep strong our important connections with the people who matter to us. We must keep our friends close, whether near or distant.

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I’ve written before that one of my favorite books of poetry from my youth is There are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves. As much as I’d like to be as gentle as those men, I’ve come to the conclusion that There are Men Too Stupid to Live. Period. Once again, I’ve proven myself among the latter group, though at the moment I’m simply a stupid observer. The active and deeply stupid participants are the local men and women who—frothing at the mouth and screeching like wounded banshees—post on NextDoor, spouting idiotic conspiracy bullshit. The most recent nonsense says the Biden administration is intentionally releasing COVID-positive illegal immigrants into border communities along the Texas-Mexico border. These moron posters don’t bother to manufacture any reasons the administration would do this; they just spew lies saying outright that Biden and his supporters intentionally are spreading COVID, “as promised” in Biden’s campaign rhetoric and policy statements. I am convinced nothing can be done to rehabilitate these stupid spewers of such obvious lies. Instead, the humane thing to do would be to throw these men and women into industrial-sized meat grinders and feed the grinders’ output—post sanitation, of course—to farm animals.  End of rant. End of admission that I can be just as stupid as the stupid people I consider reprehensible scum (but I’m not lowlife scum, but they are).

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Hugs are important to me. Long, leisurely, casual hugs. I think I’ve called such things by another name in the past: embraces. I like them. They make me feel like I’m really connected with a person. Except when the subject of the hug/embrace is uncomfortable with either the physical contact itself or the length of time it takes for the “connection” to take place.

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I’ll close this post with another quote by Jon Katz. I do not want to lose my way, nor do I want anyone I love to lose theirs. The fact that I gravitate toward isolation and privacy does not change the fact that I want and need good people in my life.

It is difficult to see ourselves as we are. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have good friends, lovers or others who will do us the good service of telling us the truth about ourselves. When we don’t, we can so easily delude ourselves, lose a sense of truth about ourselves, and our conscience loses power and purpose. Mostly, we tell ourselves what we would like to hear. We lose our way.

~ John Katz ~

The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another’s pain as one’s own, and to act to take that pain away. There is nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.

~ John Connolly ~

I opted to stay home last night instead of playing Trivia at The Beehive. My IC played, as I suppose she always will whenever she’s in town on Trivia night. I am not addicted to Trivia, nor to throngs of loud people in loud places. After weeks and weeks of once-a-week exposure to that adrenaline-laden environment, I think I needed a break; a serene Thursday evening. I do appreciate the experience of gentle night-after-night serenity, interrupted only by noises coming not from live humans but from a two-dimensional screen that can, unlike groups of live humans, be muted and ignored without fear of creating offense. Trivia is enjoyable. Being social is fun and rewarding; but my personality requires breaks from the stimulation of crowds. I need to recover my energy through isolation and solitude. My IC, on the other hand, recharges through social interactions. Interesting, I think, that people with such different personalities are so well-matched.

Home alone, I watched one episode of Rita, a Danish comedy-drama. I may continue watching it, a bit at a time, but the single episode I watched did not grab me the way so many Danish and other Scandinavian series and films have done. But it may provide mindless entertainment when I feel the need to watch drivel. For some reason, I prefer to listen to foreign television and film in the original language, reading the dialogue as English subtitles. In an ideal world, I would be fluent in every language and, therefore, would understand without subtitles. The world is not ideal, though, so I will cope with written translations. Speaking of subtitles, I find it interesting to watch an English-language program with the English-language subtitles turned on; the text version rarely matches what I hear coming from the speakers. I wonder how many adjustments are made to the actual “noise” from foreign flicks when I am reading the English language version? I’ll probably never know and it’s probably okay that I will never fully understand. Life is never quite what it seems, is it?

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I would be wise, every day, to consider the quote with which I began this post. It would serve as a reminder of who I think I am, at my core, and might prompt me to steer clear of behaving in ways I find juvenile and reprehensible and fundamentally at odds with the world in which I want to live.

Yesterday, I made the silly mistake of reading some NextDoor posts that presented as factual a barrage of unreliable stories about so many things. I should have ignored those appalling, stupid, mindless, moronic posts. But I did not. And my responses were predictably met with bitter attacks by people who very probably believe our flat Earth is inhabited by rat-people whose primary objective is to infest the body politic with rat-people disguised as humans. The world would be a better, safer, more humane place without them. Yet I took the bait, which no doubt caused these beasts to ratchet up their falsehoods. I wonder what causes them to be such utter and complete dimwits? Perhaps they are responding to pain and pressure the only way they know how; by spreading malicious lies whose only purpose is to fan the flames of hatred. I want, desperately, to be a better person than I am. These creatures make that wish an almost impossible dream. Despite my loathing for far-right-wing idiots who refuse to engage in debate and, instead, engage in lies, I can feel compassion for even the beasts among them. I do not know whether a guy who posted last night about losing a friend is left wing, right wing, or a flaming moderate. I know only that his post reveals he is experiencing pain. His neighbor and friend, who lost his wife not long ago, died. The guy who lost his friend posted a poignant comment about missing his friend. I felt compassion for the guy. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a Trumpster or a fan of Biden, he’s a person who lost someone who mattered to him. It’s painful to read about such an experience. It helps me to acknowledge that even the monsters among us have human feelings. (This guy, incidentally, is not someone I’ve named a monster…I do not even know his politics.) If only the “other side” would attempt to feel some modicum of compassion. But, even more, if only they would feel some sense of obligation to the truth. Alas, they feel an obligation only to made up and manipulated “data” that claims to support their spurious beliefs.  I wish I could assume their beastly behavior is simply an expression of their pain. But I can’t. I have so much work yet to do on myself; it’s an unending and impossible task.

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I had my handyman over yesterday to discuss with me a LOT of projects I want him to do for me. He should be over later this morning to begin working on them. The projects will take quite a while to complete, but my guy is ready to begin them today. I’m in no rush; but I’ve been wanting to get them started for ages, so it will be nice to begin them.

I should have remembered, though, that I’m having several friends over this afternoon. I’ll have to ask him to park so they will not block him in. And I may have to have him focus his attention on project components that won’t have him underfoot or vice versa. Oh, well.

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Tomorrow morning, I’ll orchestrate a video conference with several siblings. I look forward to another engagement, despite the fact that it will not be in person. Such is life. “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you will find, you get what you need.”

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Do all people long to be better humans? Does everyone recognize how far from perfect they are, how deeply flawed? Am I the only one who looks in the mirror and sees a patchwork of cracks that can be repaired only by starting over with new glass and a fresher image to reflect? That may be the wrong way to look at oneself, but I think it may be the only honest way. Seeing and feeling and knowing where the flaws are seems more honorable and genuine than denying those faults or trying to conceal them with strips of artificial personality. But concealing them may correspond to an attempt to eliminate them; so, maybe hiding them is not dishonest, just hopeful. And forgiving oneself for possessing them is said to be a requisite first step for eliminating them. But how much forgiveness is each of us due? At what point must be recognize that forgiving ourselves is like a “get out of jail free” card? If all we need to do to “atone for our sins” is to recognize and forgive them, what’s the motivation to keep them at bay? Or, perhaps, the way to change our perceptions of ourselves is to accept the argument that says “if you are flawed or broken, what does that say about me and my embrace of you as you are?” No, that seems more like the style of an enforcer  trying to strong-arm a person into coming around to his point of view. It’s hard to say what might bring a high-polish shine to a rough stone. Maybe a high-polish shine always is artificial. Maybe cracks and rough surfaces represent the natural order. Maybe attempts to improve one’s humanity are destined to bring flaws into more intense focus, calling attention to them instead of correcting or concealing them. Maybe our attempts to “fix” our core selves are just as vain as trying to “fix” the way we look.

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Enough internal examination for today. Time to get another cup of coffee and take on the universe.

I awaken early and steal into the kitchen, careful to minimize any sounds that might jolt the world around me out of its slumber. Mornings should be quiet, peaceful, serene.

For the forty-some-odd years I spent with my late wife, I took care to avoid making noise that would disturb her when she was sleeping. My normal habits—going to bed after she went to sleep and arising the next day before she did—could have been irritating and distracting, but I took great care to let her sleep in peace. It’s a practice I continued when she was in the hospital and in rehabilitation centers; even when I was alone, I crept around the house, careful to avoid noise and light that might have awakened her. I still do, though the world has changed for me. Now, I try to protect someone else from unnecessary light and sound.

Some mornings, like this one, I dwell on how important it was, and is, that my early morning habits not intrude on people who should not suffer my moody recollections. Some mornings I want to scream at the world. I want to slam pots and pans on the granite counter and break glasses in the sink. I want to howl, as if that might release the pent-up anger and pain that resides deep in me like a permanent burning ember, searing my gut. There’s nothing to be done, though, to release those scorching, scalding emotions. Only time can do that; and maybe time is not even powerful enough to completely erase them.

So I hold onto myself; I refuse to let the shouts and screams and howls escape from me, because mornings should be quiet, peaceful, serene. Somehow, I will hold those noises inside. The only evidence of the emotions that clamor to be released on the world are tears that stream down my face. Even those will be dry before morning light bathes darkness and sends it away for another night. And the day will progress as usual. It will unfold as if the howls and screams and tears and rage against something unknown were just imaginary beasts that died and disappeared when the sun rose.

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The good news is that my brother, who has been in hospital ICU and cardiac intensive care units for several days, is out of the hospital. The catheterization and implantation of a pacemaker went well and he is feeling good. I’ll arrange for a video call with all my siblings and spouses/partners for Saturday so we can celebrate. Though we can’t be together physically, we can all join in to celebrate electronically. We all should celebrate one anothers’ presence on a regular basis.  When I say “we,” I mean the collective “we.” As in all people. Life is too short to allow celebrations to wait; they should take place every day.

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My life is improving with each passing day, thanks to my IC. She provides motivation for me to get on about the work of making this house as livable as possible. Today, a handyman will come over; I will give him a long list of projects to tackle. He only has two free days, so he will not get to everything right away, but he will make a nice dent in projects that I have put off for far too long. Some are minor, almost unnoticeable. Others will dramatically change the environment of the house for the better. I’ve just been lazy and too frugal and unsure of whether I wanted to invest in a place I might leave soon. Her motivation has let me break through those obstacles; whether we leave it or not, we’ll make it a better place for ourselves or someone else.

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Friday afternoon, a small cadre of close friends will gather at my house again to celebrate being alive. I will again be the only male in the mix; I will be more than happy to be in the minority—I will be delighted. Have I ever mentioned that I enjoy the company of women? Well, of course I have. My IC enjoys the company of women, too, but she says she is just as likely to appreciate the company of men. It’s interesting, I think, that men’s and women’s intellects and emotions are fed and soothed in different ways. If I were more energetic, I might explore the literature about the psychology of male and female emotional triggers to learn what has been measured and what theories have been hatched about the impact of gender on emotional attachments. Or something like that. I’m still intrigued by psychology. I still wonder whether nature or nurture or something entirely different directs our tendency toward establishing emotional attachments. When, if ever, will humans learn enough about one another to actually understand why we behave and feel the way we do? Odd, isn’t it, how a casual mention of a female-dominated gathering evolved into an exploration of psychological differences between the sexes? One of the reasons I think I tend to gravitate toward women in social settings is that the topic I’ve just mentioned is much more likely to catch fire in such settings, generating conversation and ideas. In a male-dominated setting, the topic might be more likely to elicit yawns or quizzical stares than conversations. Or am I being bigoted in the extreme by saying such a thing?

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I’ve returned from taking a small, fluffy dog for a walk, leading to his morning poop. Upon our return to the house, I rewarded him for his actions by giving him four tiny dog-treats. He seems to absolutely love the little crunchy snacks. I would happily feed him the little treats for hours and I’m sure he would eat them, but that would no doubt upset his tiny-dog-digestive system, so he’s limited to four at a time, with many hours in between. He’s gotten used to the wait. He is a very patient, friendly (but not overly so) dog. Exactly what I was hoping for when I was in the market for a dog. Alas, he’s getting well along in dog-years. Of course, I’m getting well along in human-years, too.

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Look for your naked photograph on billboards in your neighborhood. Forgive the quality of the image; I had to shoot it through sheer curtains or an early morning fog.

A a small squadron of brown pelicans glides inches above the water, their reflected images so close to touching their bodies that their movements seem perfectly choreographed. As the birds seek their early morning breakfast, an occasional splash of a fish breaking the surface disturbs the glassy bay, sending gentle ripples across the still water.

I remember that scene. Or, rather, those scenes. I saw scenes like that—with those birds and their brethren—dozens, if not hundreds, of times when I was a kid and, later, when I was a young adult. Those quiet moments when the glowing morning sky and the water seemed to meld into one helped shape who I would become. Who I am, even now, I suppose. My experiences on the Texas coast imprinted on me.

Fifty years after leaving the water’s edge, I still miss the sounds and odors of the salt water coast. There’s something about early mornings on the coast that can’t be replicated anywhere else. Humidity, as thick as syrup and carrying the unforgettable aroma of salt water and creatures who live along the shoreline, was not oppressive back then. It was the natural way of the world when I was a child. I’ve long since forgotten exactly how to bait the hooks and cast the lines, but the sights and sounds and smells of the coast remain embedded in my memory. I don’t know why, but lately I long for those sensory experiences. I crave them, I think, the way an addict craves drugs. There’s a need deep inside me that nothing but time, alone, on a salty coastline can fill. No, not alone. I want privacy, not isolation. The privacy of sharing—with good friends and the woman I love—the deep connection I feel for the shoreline. If all goes according to plan, I will feel that deep connection in early November and will share it with people who matter to me. That’s when I will join people I consider members of my “tribe” as we make the trek to Galveston and experience the coast the way it’s meant to be experienced. Not as tourists, but as appreciative explorers. I can hardly wait.

The coast has changed, of course, since I was a kid. South Texas beaches are no longer empty, pristine places. Condominium projects and chain restaurants and convenience stores have invaded both the northern and southern tips of Padre Island, where I spent time as a teenager. Even the clay cliffs a short walk from my parents’ last Corpus Christi house have disappeared, replaced by sloping, grassy entrances to a manicured city park. The natural order of casual waterfront life has morphed into a more formal environment in which appearance counts for more than experience. But there remain places, I am sure, hidden from developers and overactive city planners and the like, that will recall the days of pure enjoyment of the way things were. I hope so, anyway.

For some inexplicable reason, I feel deeply sad this morning at the realization that I simply gave up on the coast so very long ago. Without giving it a second thought, I abandoned the coast and all the memories it had packed into my brain. The allure of bigger cities and their amenities seemed so much more appealing, then, than the charm of quiet isolation and the shoreline smell of a sandy beach. I did not realize, then, that much of the attraction of a desolate beach was the desolation; that the seduction of the seaside was as much its lack of “attractions” as its physical beauty. Barnacle-crusted boats and piers attached to the seabed with smelly, seaweed-laden posts were—and remain so in memory, at least—so incredibly appealing. They were part of the fascinating appeal of the water’s edge.  I gave it all up for something; I just don’t recall exactly what replaced my childhood.

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I may need some time to write and remember things that have long since escaped by porous brain. I’ve forgotten so much; I’d hate to forget the rest without writing it down. Documenting one’s recollections can be an important contribution to the future, if only people can be persuaded to read the drivel that spills from the memories of the aging and the old.  Most people seem to prefer fiction to fact; I think I’m among them. Reality is too harsh and glaring and painful. Life is more tolerable when we can manipulate its effects on our minds and bodies. “Tolerable.” We should embrace life, but we don’t always value it as much as we should. It is all we have, yet we tend to take it for granted, as if it will always be available to us, to do with what we will. We know otherwise, of course, but we sometimes choose to behave as if it is limitless. Yet our actions sometimes suggest we recognize just how important it is. When we hug one another, I think that’s a tacit acknowledgement of appreciation and value that we might choose not to (or my be too embarrassed to) openly express in words. So we hug. Hugs should last longer and be stronger. They should be embraces that require external efforts by third parties to pull the parties apart.

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Here’s a hug for those who actually read my mental spillage, especially those who read it today. I would appreciate a hug in return. I could use one this morning, as I mourn a lifetime away from salt water and sand.

Nothing is impossible. The planet on which we live could split in half, hemorrhaging molten lava from its open wound and wrecking the stability we’ve come to expect from Earth’s chaotic behavior. The Perseid Meteor Shower might surprise us during its August 11-12 peak this year, raining down massive, burning boulders that night and bringing an end to Earth as we once knew it. Time itself could come to a sudden and violent end one day around dusk, leaving in its wake a void in which “before” and “after” and “noon” and “6:45 p.m.” are meaningless noises uttered by maniacs and the misguided. Everything is possible. Nothing is impossible. Humankind has as much control over the universe as an amoeba has over the orbital path of stars in this monstrous place we call the Milky Way. Any claims we make to power are contrivances based on lies. We do not act; we simply react. We respond to external stimuli in the same way moths respond to flames; we circle the allure of fire until we shrivel into dehydrated hulks.

None of this is meant to be judgmental, though. It is what it is. Life and its obverse control everything, including us.

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Last night, we listened to the Hot Springs Concert Band play music from a number of musicals. The Sound of Music, Phantom of the Opera, Music Man, etc., etc. It was an enjoyable evening; light and happy are two words that might best describe the evening. A friend who plays in the band was happy to see us in the audience and we were impressed that such a diverse gathering of potential misfits could produce such appealing sounds. Interesting, that.

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I’m not sure whether it was a dream or something I read; whatever it was raised questions: Why is diversity so valued? What does diversity “bring to the table?” “Why do we (progressives and liberals, at least) so value diversity?” At first, the questions angered me. “What the hell do you mean questioning the value of diversity?!” But, then, I realized the question is legitimate. And if we cannot individually and collectively give reasoned, valid responses, we should stop using the argument in favor of diversity as a progressive crutch. However, I can say with considerable confidence that diversity is, indeed, good. It exposes us to alternate realities. It shows us what we are, by showing what we are not. It strengthens the breadth and depth of our knowledge. It chastens us and causes us to realize ours is not necessarily the best “way.” Diversity reflects the planet on which we dwell and the universe we inhabit. If we asked what we value about diversity, we might as well ask “why can’t we be satisfied with iron, alone, instead of having to acquaint ourselves with all those other metallic elements?”

Yet the question deserves more than flippant answers. It deserves consideration. It merits a full and complete mental assessment, followed by an explanation that is more than sweet porridge and cold milk. We who value diversity should be able to express the reasons for our appreciation of the circumstance clearly and unequivocally. Maybe I’ll think more on the topic soon. Maybe I will attempt to articulate the arguments in favor of diversity…diversity as a general state of being, not necessarily diversity as simply an expression of skin tones and sexual conditions and position in the social strata.

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Why are so many subjects simply taboo? Why is it considered rude or at least impolite to discuss bathroom habits at the dining table? Why do we avoid asking questions about neighbors’ preferences for various sex positions? Why are questions about the circumstances leading up to, and the manner of, death of a friend or relative considered so utterly heartless and insensitive?

It’s not like we pretend the unspoken topics of conversation mean the subjects of avoided discussion do not take place. If we were as open and as outspoken as we sometimes think we are, we would have no trouble approaching a friend in church on a Sunday morning, saying, “Hello, Charlotte, I noticed you and Anders left the party early last night; did you go have sex? How was it? Would you mind describing the entire process to me, from foreplay to climax and beyond?” Admittedly, I would find those questions hard to ask, if for no other reason than I do not know a Charlotte, nor an Anders. But, really, why have we chosen to surround certain topics with secrecy and taboo? Sex, death, and bodily functions seem almost universally unmentionable. I just don’t understand. And even if I did, I would forget and I would ask the question over and over again. Because no explanation is a particularly good one. We might as well pick another topic to avoid at random: “There will be no mention of hair color or pocket knives in this house!”

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I just stumbled upon a “to-do” list I wrote several weeks ago. I was grateful to see so many items marked off, but disappointed that several remain, including: “explore options for sky room glass selection…” and “explore treadmills.” Also, “measure and order screen and spline for screened-in porch” remains undone.  There are others, though some have been intentionally delayed. But the ones that have simply gone undone are annoying. I get annoyed at myself pretty easily. And I stay peeved at me for quite a while. I’m still upset with myself for things I did or did not do in 2019 and 2020. I hold personal grudges against myself that only I can address through mediation. The best solution to this unpleasant set of circumstances is to complete the items on my to-do list and keep the list up to date. I will try that next time. Next time? There should be no next time.

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It’s happened again. I’ve spilled random words all over the screen and have failed to connect them in any coherent fashion. That’s the way I roll, of late. I’m afraid my thought processes are going off in uncharted territories.

My IC convinced me to return to watching Schitt’s Creek last night. She has seen the entire series multiple times; I have only seen season 1. But, last night, we watched part of season 2. I feel confident that, one of these days, I will become as much a fan as she is. But it hasn’t happened yet. I expect it any minute, though!

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The forecast for Friday, July 30, calls for the temperature to reach 102°F during the day, dropping to 79°F. Both those extremes should be considered crimes against humankind and wanton attacks on the natural order. Something must be done. We can’t live like that. Maybe a trip to the beach, or into a convenience store freezer, is in order.

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Okay, I recognize that this may sound sexist or misogynistic, but I hope it won’t and that it isn’t. So, here goes: When women (and men) dress themselves to appeal to their “target” demographic, are they effectively flaunting themselves and suggesting they are interested in sex? Imagine, for example, a woman—wearing a low-cut dress, short skirt, sparkling necklaces and bracelets, and smelling of alluring perfume—walks into a well-known meet-market bar. What is she after? Is she using her appearance and aroma as “bait?” And, what of the guy who goes into the same bar, wearing a tailored leather jacket, expensive woven shirt (thin enough material to reveal his six-pack abs), high-end wool slacks, and $500 boots? Is he, too, trolling for a little action?

No, some might suggest, both of them are only presenting themselves in an appealing light in the hope of attracting attention. Naw, I don’t think so! The end game, for both of them, is excitement. They’re throwing themselves in front of their “target market,” only to discover at some point that, in that environment, victims eat victims eat victims eat victims. They tell themselves otherwise and accept nods of agreement from others who refuse to entertain the idea that we were all engaged, in our younger days, as gigolos or paid escorts. Except in my case my bait did not work. I went home and sulked, alone. Poor, abandoned, destitute me. I should have filed for emotional reparations, made necessary by the Sexual Revolution. And I missed it.

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Today’s time-swallowing events include a visit with an investment advisor at her office, a visit by a pest control guy to my house (the spiders, scorpions, and other such creatures are becoming intrusive), and a foray into a local school to hear Broadway musical themes, played by the Hot Springs Concert Band. I should not complain about my time being swallowed. It’s my fault; I let it get away from me without even a weak effort to stop it. Some days, I’d like to switch obligations with someone else; someone with an exciting, richly rewarding life. But who?

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So, shall we return to the time when we wore masks whenever we might encounter groups of people? I had not been doing it, but I think I shall return to the “old days” of protecting oneself and others against dimwits who consider COVID-19 a political hoax. I remain amazed and appalled that these people can lace their own shoes.

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Yesterday, following church service (consisting of a film about how rural America might cope, politically, with climate change), I facilitated the post-service discussion. I suggested that, if people simply focus on desired outcomes versus the process of getting there, our disagreements might be much more readily resolved. A woman in the audience made known that she disagreed, vehemently. She made a strong case (making mine wither into dust on the floor), after which the real discussion began. I was able to stay out of it, for the most part. Which is as it should be.

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Listening requires hearing between the bands of soft, smooth noise that deliver words to our ears. Listening, without understanding (unless accompanied by investigative explorations of the barely-audible static above and below and to each side of the thoughts words prompt or deliver) is simply hearing. It’s those investigations that can yield either the zenith of pleasure or the most excruciating pain. You have to be willing to laugh and cry and feel, louder and deeper than the sea, if you want to be a listener. The potential for pleasure makes listening for an impossible-to-reject siren’s song one’s purpose in the presence of noise.

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Protests against mandatory vaccinations against COVID-19, by French healthcare workers, have given me reason to become yet more confused. Their position is that the vaccines may not have been given adequate time in trials, among other easily defensible arguments. But one argument that exists only as an insistent chant on a sign got me thinking. Translated, it says “My body, my choice.”

Immediately, my argument commences: “No, not your choice, not when your idiotic decision puts other lives at risk!” I then begin to think about the arguments for and against a woman’s right to control her body, i.e., get an abortion. My argument has to include insistence that the fetus is not a person or is not being injured (in legal terms) by the action. But there, hidden in plain view, is the core of the argument: when life begins. By then, I’m still angry at the French healthcare workers, whose decisions have the potential of harming or killing thousands. Not true, I say, of the mother who aborts a fetus. And the problem’s scope becomes even more visible as we hear a response: “What you call a ‘fetus’ we call a living baby.” Some problems arise from such deep-seated and utterly opposite beliefs that we have almost no chance of resolving them.

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Once again today, I woke up much earlier than planned or expected. I was out of bed around 4, or maybe it was 4:30. At any rate, it was quite early. My energy level is not dependable, but this morning I felt fairly energetic for a while. I could have emptied the dishwasher and gotten more “minor” tasks done, except I did not want to wake anyone. So I sat, reading and writing and mulling over matters of life. Some of the matters of life are too difficult to address with mulling or writing; and reading can amplify them. Some days, I truly wish short-span, fully-recoverable, self-induced amnesia were available on demand

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I may not have told you, lately, that I love you. Well, I do. Yes, you. You know you’re the one, don’t you? Well, yes. And of course there are others. All of you, though, are magnificent in so many ways. You make others’ lives livable, enjoyable, fulfilling! Consequently, you’re over-the-moon-happy with every aspect of life that’s eligible to love. And you’re tolerant of those other elements of life on earth that feel like one is sleeping on a rocky matt without even a sheet. You take what comes and deal with it, no matter how difficult. I admire that about humanity. At least when that trait is visible.

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Enough of this for the day. I hope I begin writing more substance in the near-term. Enough of “me.” More of “someone else” is in order.

It is not only possible, but advisable, to begin each day with at least a modest appreciation for awaking from sleep. Acknowledging that good fortune (and it is good fortune) can trigger an ability to withstand the slings and arrows of wandering among the living and the living dead. The living will be at least moderately pleasant and the living dead will be tolerable. At least the latter may cause forgivable fantasies of doing unthinkably bad things to creatures some folks mistake for people.

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Some uplifting, soul-stroking poetry would be in order this morning. Something that would cause readers and/or listeners to tear-up and consider their beautiful smallness in this enormously complex and dangerous world. But, instead, I’m writing depressing, soul-crushing prose that promises to cause avalanches and earthquakes and tornadoes and monstrously devastating hurricanes; all this during horrible ice storms and devastating droughts.  My poetry gadget is out of whack. That’s a sucky way to start the beginning of a week filled with obligations and consternations.

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Awake since 4:30, I arose alert and alive and ready to jump into the day. After having been awake and writing for a while, I feel worn and tired and lethargic. I want to sleep, but it’s almost 7 now and the world is calling on me to behave as if I were awake. I keep falling asleep at the keyboard, a sure sign that I have a bad case of narcolepsy. The cure doesn’t exist, but a number of treatment options exist.

As I write my words here, I wonder how many people might stumble upon this blog and mistakenly believe every word I’ve written. Or believe my  descriptions of life or my experiences are one hundred percent accurate. Or overlook the that that I get my kicks in ways many people would find offensive in the extreme. Such is life.

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My IC and I both wish to initiate a healthier lifestyle; better food choices, more exercise, and a few related things. One of the prospective behavioral changes involves cutting back on snacks and “junk” foods and cutting back on (or cutting out) alcohol for a time while our bodies get reacquainted with the “Mediterranean diet” or “Mediterranean lifestyle” or whatever it is that make us feel and look great.

The personality I’ve worked so hard to develop all these almost countless years is considering rebellion, though, because I’ve been trying to force it to accommodate my own self-imposed deadline. That deadline can be arbitrary and selected without any thought being given to whether the date is “ordered” properly in my very anal way of living certain aspects of my life. For example, I need to start new “improvement” projects, whether of a  personal nature or involving major change in the physical environment. So, my next self-improvement engagement will commence on August 1. In the interim, I will be just as wanton and reckless as usual. But on that date and moving forward for an undetermined but necessary timeframe, I will adjust myself with an eye toward meeting as as-yet-undefined objective.  Clear? August 1. Wait for it.

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My day will again be split asunder by my obligations to the church. Minor obligations, but obligations, nonetheless. It is unfair of me to even consider being surly in the face of willingly-accepted obligations. It is not right for me to feel even the slightest resentment of doing what I’m doing. The difference between right and wrong can be as simple as curing an errant thought.

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Shutting off the pipeline of grief becomes possible after awhile. It’s simply a matter of twisting oneself a little, like turning a faucet handle. And then the flow of grief stops or, at worst, drops to a trickle. Grief becomes tolerable and a return to a normal life becomes both appealing and achievable. But the washer that keeps the faucet handle supple and productive becomes rigid after a while; some days, when it’s turned a bit, the leak that may or may not have existed before becomes apparent. That’s the time to tend to it; replace the washer with freshly-minted memories. Grief never dies.

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It is too easy to devote oneself to making changes in oneself to ensure a proper “fit” in a relationship. That is easy because it doesn’t involve persuasion; it involves internalization and enforcement of external expectations. Persuasion is much harder, but more likely to be permanent and gratefully accepted. Persuasion encounters reasons to reject making changes in oneself and, instead, insist on someone else making the changes. But it’s possible that no change is necessary. It’s possible that the perfect “fit” already exists. It’s possible one’s partner is perfect, thus acknowledging to oneself of one’s responsibility to correct the imperfections and make necessary change. The possibility exists that both partners in a relationship need only acknowledge their perfection to one another, thus bypassing any need for assessment.

Give and take, in bite-sized pieces, results in almost imperceptible changes that bring about near-perfection. That’s the way to look at the world of wonderful adjustments; not as defeats in a war-time battle, but as the spoils of a beautiful peace.

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Last night, after a day that involved a last lunch stop at SqzBx Pizza and Brewery in Hot Springs, we watched The Dig, a historical fiction novel of the same name, which ostensibly “which reimagines the events of the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo.” Sutton Hoo, for anyone who, like me, has been so incredibly sheltered to have never before heard of it, was called “one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time” by Sue Brunning, Curator of the Early Medieval European Insular Collections at the British Museum. The role of Basil Brown, the archeologist who found it and started the dig, was largely dismissed and ignored until many years after the 1939 find. At any rate, the film: It lasts about an hour and a half. Both audiences and critics have found it to be a decent film, if a bit slow going. I agree. Its overall rating by Rotten Tomatoes is 87%, with the audience at 78%. Watch it if you like. I cannot force you to watch it nor prevent you from doing it. You’re on your own.

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The mind that occupies my skull is experiencing technical difficulties this morning. It is bouncing aimlessly off walls, some of which do not even exist. My mind sends signals to the universe, only to have the universe reject them as undeliverable. I try to leave a message and the recording says the box is full, as if my fifteen second message is too long to fit into the storage device that holds more than twenty-four billions messages, many of which last seven to twenty minutes. You may have guessed; none of this is true. Why should it be?

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The first person who comments about this post will be eligible to receive enormously meaningful rewards from me. The rest will be pictured naked on billboards spread all around downtown Hot Springs.

Our choices are limited. We can accept our lot in life as it is, work to change it for the better if there’s room for improvement, or reject it outright and refuse to attempt to do anything to change it, suffering the consequences without taking steps to change them. There may be a few more, but those cover most of them, I think. I would be well-served to remember that those, by and large, are what we can do with the lives we have. Obviously, life is not quite that simple; but only because we insist on believing in and/or hoping for the utopia we know does not exist. Those thoughts bring to mind this quotation from my little black book of Zen quotations:

Beneath, the mountain stream flows
On and on without end.
If one’s Zen mind is like this
Seeing into one’s own nature
cannot be far off.

~ Hakuin ~

The connection to what I have written may not be entirely obvious, but when I think of the two concepts from different perspectives, they come around to meaning the same thing in ways that words cannot adequately explain. Even though I am in love with words and language and meaning, words cannot always do what art and abstract thought and inexplicable emotions can do.
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My IC and I staffed volunteer roles at last night’s fundraising dinner/silent auction for the Democratic Club of Hot Springs Village. My role was meager; hers was more involved, processing payments for late registrants and silent auction bid winners. I placed one bid, before the crowds arrived, on an enormous and truly gorgeous metal container. My bid, $75, exceeded the suggested “value” of the item by $15. Almost immediately, it was doubled by someone who wanted it even more than I. Then, after another few offers, the bidding stopped at $250. Still a bargain, in my book. The metal container was hand-crafted somewhere in the middle east, probably in Saudi Arabia, at least a few decades ago. I asked the winning bidder if I could come visit or whether we could share joint custody of the piece; the said I could come visit from time to time. Ach! In fact, I have no place to put the enormous piece of  practical art. But I would have made room, somehow. My IC, however, was the successful and sole bidder on a beautiful, framed piece of artwork; a lovely batik image of irises. The question, now, is where it will hang.

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My hospitalized brother called me yesterday while I was on the way to a pharmacy in Benton. He confirmed what I had heard; that the doctors plan to wait until blood thinner in his system has dissipated so the risk of unintentional bleeding is reduced during the implantation of a pacemaker. He expected to be transferred from the regular ICU to the cardiac ICU as soon as space is available in cardiac. There, he will wait until Tuesday for the procedure; he hopes he will be released from the hospital on Wednesday. He says he does not anticipate needing any assistance from a caregiver when he is released. I hope that’s verified before too much time passes. At any rate, the news is good and the prognosis sounds just fine.

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Health issues abound for my IC’s dog. His heart murmur is bad and his time probably is limited. Yesterday, while she was at the lake with her swimming friends, he pooped repeatedly at her house. Then, after she returned here, he did it again. Last night, on our return from our volunteer roles at the Democratic Club dinner and silent auction, he did it again. (We had left him in rooms with hardwood floors, but he did his thing…on a large throw rug…when got back home.) He spent the night isolated behind the doors of the master bathroom and the laundry room. He was left in doggy comfort with his bed, his toys, and a towel on top of a large, soft bath matt. I have not opened the door yet this morning to see whether he left any more gifts overnight. Poor pup! My IC walked him a bit last night after we returned; during the walk he either injured his left hind leg or got a thorn or some such ugliness. We could not find what was wrong; my IC will take him in for a veterinary visit today. LATE NEWS: The dog is happy, alert, and not limping this morning. He left no gifts overnight and seemed just as chipper as ever when he and my IC left for a walk a bit ago. I hope he remains happy and healthy for a good while longer.

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I am worried that stubborn, misinformed, and/or stupid people who refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19 will dramatically extend the pandemic and may well make it much worse. Already, the numbers are spiking again in many places, including Arkansas, where something like one-third of the state’s population has been vaccinated. Two-thirds of my fellow citizens have opted to believe conspiracy theorists and political monsters over qualified medical professionals and epidemiologists whose lives have been dedicated to learning about such things as COVID-19 and how its spread can be mitigated or, possibly, completely stopped. I am not only not proud of the majority of Arkansans, I am deeply ashamed of and embarrassed by them.

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Open expressions of love, the kind of love for our fellow humans we gladly reveal to the world, sometimes hide something deeper and more intimate but potentially awkward. Sometimes, we may be unable to articulate that deeper feeling, either for lack of the words or out of concern that it could be rejected. Or it could be viewed as inappropriate in the wider culture—or in the narrow slices of culture that define our lives. It is within these little woven ribbons of emotional connection that we allow ourselves to complicate the world in which we live. If everyone accepted and appreciated and endorsed all expressions of love of whatever kind an regardless of how they were expressed, we might all be happier. But that will never happen. While I acknowledge, intellectually, the value and desirability of the concept, emotionally I would be utterly unable and unwilling to accept it. I am—and I think most of us are—too emotionally brittle and lack the self-assurance to accept it.

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The day is off to a good start, over all. I am ready to conquer the world and the sum of my fears. Whether readiness will translate into success remains to be seen. More coffee and some sustenance may propel me toward good things. I’ll try them.

I learned last night that the procedure to give my brother a pacemaker on an emergency basis has been delayed due to a low platelet count, which could cause uncontrollable bleeding during the procedure. He is in ICU, where he is expected to stay for a few more days to address the platelet count before the procedure is done. At the moment, he is being told he may be in ICU until (or beyond) Tuesday. While you want to be in the ICU when constant, critical care is important to your comfort and health and survival, it’s not an enjoyable place to be.

My wife’s time in ICU last year was hard on her, if for no other reason than the fact she had little interaction with the outside world except for doctors and nurses. I was able to be with her some of the time, but she was either asleep or unable to focus her attention on me for much of the time.  Another brother’s time in ICU about three years ago was trying on him, though it triggered some laughter, as well. His hallucinations combined actual interactions with nurses and doctors with an overactive imagination tinged with a little paranoia and distrust of the anesthesiologists responsible for certain aspects of his care. Despite bits of humor and sleep that minimized periods of patient concerns, though, it was a highly stressful time for everyone. I suspect my brother who’s now in the hospital is feeling the same sort of stress. And I’m the sort of person who tends to feel it by proxy. Unfortunately, I can do nothing to minimize it for any of us so affected. Time and the actual experience are the only ways to deal with it.

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Last night, our trivia team came in second (just one point behind the winning team). That was a semi-happy experience. That success capped off a day that began with breakfast with the church men’s group, followed by a visit to the urgent care clinic at the west gate of the Village. There, I was given a shot (steroid) as a means of reducing the pain in my joints, especially my left elbow. I left with a prescription for another steroid for the same purpose (and as a possible remedy to my constant wheezing) and a prescription that might also work on the wheezing issue. I think the combination of drugs may have worked. The trivia almost-championship might have boosted my mood a touch, but the evidence this morning suggests its boost was very, very modest if, indeed, it helped at all.

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When I woke up a hour or so ago (around 3:30), my thoughts swirled around the idea that I might feel much happier, freer, and better able to enjoy the experience of life if I disposed of virtually everything I own: house, the vast majority of its furnishings, most of my clothes, etc. If I could withdraw from the responsibilities I’ve willingly taken on and escape the obligations of homeownership and organizational memberships and the like, I might feel the burdens of social constraints and commitments lift like fog.

These feelings are nothing new; they have come on me with some regularity for years. I’ve never acted on them by shedding ownerships and duties and contractual bonds or promises, of course. But I have never been able to completely erase them from my psyche. Part of the reason I cannot simply make my obligations simply disappear is that I have emotional ties to so many people. While sometimes those ties can feel like cables binding me to anchors, I am unwilling to sever them. Doing so, I think, would reveal that pure freedom is unbearably, intolerably lonely. The unrestrained opportunities afforded by pure freedom would come with different forms of pain, mitigated only by rushing to regain abandoned ties and commitments. Have I written about Catch-22 lately? I know the concept has been rattling around in my head a LOT.

There is no pure enjoyment. No joy that comes without strings or ties or cables. One must ALWAYS make choices and choices require making decisions about the relative value to oneself of multiple options. The freedom that comes from abandoning commitments or obligations is accompanied by the heartache of isolation or solitude. My IC and I have spoken about making choices that might give us access to some of the things we desire and appreciate, like walkable access to pubs and entertainment and shopping and so forth. Those choices, though, would come with population density (and its potential crime) and noise and concrete. And they would involve fewer trees fewer chances to see wildlife and otherwise experience the beauty of nature. And there’s the matter of whether these places might involve too much ice and snow in winter and too much heat and humidity in summer.

Utopia does not exist. But that’s what we’re after, isn’t it? We want perfect weather, perfect social conditions, perfect political and economic structures, perfect health, perfect friends and families and lovers, and perfect lifetimes. We want everything to be just right. We tell ourselves that perfection would be boring, though, so we justify to ourselves the fact that we tolerate imperfection. But that tolerance may be just a way to accept a reality we do not now, nor never did, want. So we keep trying to correct the imperfections, with the aim of achieving the unachievable. We learn to accept the unacceptable and try not to mourn what’s missing from our lives. We attempt to appreciate the challenges and the defeats we encounter in our experiences, deceiving ourselves into thinking those blunders and aberrations are just stepping stones along the way toward perfection. I suppose the only other choice would be to permit ourselves to accept the truth, thereby plunging into an abyss of depression and inescapable madness.

It’s almost 5:15 and I’m not making much headway toward achieving a positive attitude this morning. The empty coffee cup beside me, only the dregs visible at the bottom of the vessel, has done no good. I don’t know that I’m going to do much more good by drinking another cup, but I will do it, nevertheless. A much earlier attempt at coming out of this grey frame of mind, by scanning the online news, was understandably and abysmal failure. Maybe chewing a gummy and ripping into a perfectly round “personal” watermelon will do the trick. I just may give those options a shot. I have nothing to lose and maybe a tad to gain.

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My ideals change from moment to moment. I do not know what I want or need. And I do not even know whether my wants and needs are relevant; it’s others’ wants and needs that matter in this world. If all of them (they, the others, people outside myself) have their needs met, maybe my needs and wants will fall into place. Maybe meeting my wants and needs relies exclusively on others’ needs and wants being met. Maybe, in fact, I only imagine what I want and need because of my disappointment that others’ requirements are being ignored by the world at large. And maybe I’ve lost my mind; maybe all these jumbled thoughts are evidence of my madness and my inability to cope with the world as it is.

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Didn’t I just say I was going to try a gummy, some more coffee, and some watermelon? What the hell am I continuing, then, banging on the keyboard?! Dimwit! I’m stopping, right now.

Reminders about life’s fragility poured into my consciousness yesterday. First, I learned that one of my brothers was advised to have a heart pacemaker installed on an emergency basis. Next, I was stunned and saddened to learn that the younger brother of a former sister-in-law (with whom I became close long after she and another brother divorced) is in home hospice in response to metastasized stage 4 lung cancer. Then, last night, I got a call informing me that, just days ago, a man who had been extremely active in the local writers’ club in years lost his battle with cancer; he was 79 when he died. Other reminders of mortality abound. My IC’s dog, a sweet little twelve-year-old shih tzu, was diagnosed not long ago with a heart murmur that, in all likelihood, will claim his life sometime before too much more time has passed.

All life is temporary, though in most cases we experience it as if it were just as long as the sun is bright. Life is all we know, yet in the context of time, it is so brief that it passes in much less than the blink of an eye. I like the concept of life as an opportunity to pursue the equivalent of heaven (as if there were such a thing) here on Earth. Today is all we have. We should milk every moment as if it were our last; because it very well may be. Life is precious. It is not only only all we know. It is all we have. Life is not measured by how many dollars or automobiles or houses or boats we accumulate. It is measured by how much joy we experience and how much we share.

Sentient beings are fortunate in having consciousness of ourselves and our surroundings. We feel an almost impossibly strong connection to the the world of which we are a part. Yet humans know life ends. The more intelligent among us latch onto life as our greatest gift; one that deserves our utmost respect and attention because when it ends, it is over.

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My IC made an enormous batch of macaroni and cheese yesterday. We took a sizable portion (enough for several meals, except for gluttons like me) to the next-door neighbors. The “he” of the couple experienced a mild stroke recently, but he seems almost his old self. When we delivered the M&C, he wanted us to sit and chat and drink, but we had to leave. We will visit them some time next week, when we will drink wine with them and enjoy munchies and conversation. The two of them are sharp and spry in spite of their advanced age (he is 92 or 94, I think) and they both enjoy “happy hour” as if they were sixty years younger. I like people like that—people for whom the pursuit of Earthly pleasures is among the purposes of our existence. I happen to agree with their perspective on the matter.

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My recent visit to my doctor’s office was something of a dud. I went in seeking solutions to insufficient amounts of restful sleep, arthritic pain in my joints (especially my left elbow), and continuing wheezing and stopped up sinuses. I saw the doctor’s nurse practitioner, who said she would refer me for a sleep study. She forgot to address the other two issues that I told her nurse assistant about when I was first weighed (and queried about the reason for my visit). And I was sufficiently surprised by the rapidity of the visit’s conclusion that I did not bring up the other two issues. As I was leaving, the nurse practitioner learned of a family emergency and rushed out. When I called back yesterday, hoping to be given prescriptions to alleviate my pain and my symptoms, I was told the NP was still out with a family emergency and no one else could prescribe anything. I was advised to go to the critical care clinic outside the west gate to ask for solace. Bah. I want a personal physician dedicated to my health and comfort. And while I’m wanting, I’d like perpetual good looks, a six-pack abdomen, and one hundred and seventy-three million dollars in tax-free cash. I promise I would be philanthropic and generous in the extreme. My elbow still hurts (though Motrin helps a little) and I wheeze like a two hundred year old man with allergies and emphysema. But I’m moderately alive. I suppose that should be enough. After all, haven’t I just compared life to heaven and said it was all we have? I should stop with the ingratitude and whining. Neither become me.

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Finally, we finished Bosch. And we started watching Knives Out. A friend sent me a link so I could watch the latest season of Unforgotten, but I haven’t started watching yet (but I am grateful for the link in the extreme and I want to do nice things for my friend in return).

It occurred to me that, until a few nights ago, I have watched virtually no television/film since the end of May. The TV has remained essentially dark and silent for all that time and I have been blissfully happy without it. Though I never watched it a LOT, I did tend to watch a segment or two of favorite seasons of TV series or short films; now, though, I seem to treat TV as entertainment of the last resort. Conversation and word games and such are at least as engaging. But, admittedly, television can be addictive if one is inclined to allow addiction in one’s life.

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I’ve decided I will start posting nude photographs of “lurking” visitors to this blog, soon. If we can’t engage in conversations through comments, at least I can trigger excited chatter through soft pornography, right? So, if you have been reading this blog but have not commented or otherwise engaged in online conversation with me (and other blog visitors), you can expect to see photos of yourself, full-on buck-naked color images, before long right here on your computer screen. Lest you think I’m saying this in jest, please note the fact that most of your computers are  equipped with cameras and I am equipped with a vivid imagination. Combine the two and you’ll realize that I may have taken snapshots of the way I envision you in the altogether.  Now, if that’s not enough to spur comments here on a regular basis, at least it will reveal the exhibitionists among you.

Yes, I realize that what you read her may not be sufficiently intriguing to merit comment. Still, a simple “I saw what you wrote and I find it deadly dull” will suffice. (Admittedly, such comments will cause me to weep and wail openly, but what the hell.)

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In about an hour, I will head out to breakfast with “the boys,” a group of old guys from church who have nothing better to do on Thursday mornings than listen to one another express themselves. Actually, that’s a pretty good reason to go have breakfast. Before I go, though, I will try to coax a small sleeping dog to go for a brief walk and do his business.  Time flies, and so much I. More bloggery at another time.

How would we respond if we discovered that someone we find extremely attractive, but who obviously is “unavailable,” finds us equally as irresistible? The question becomes more than an academic exercise in a context in which the state of “availability” changes. This, of course, may not apply when one is in a committed or a permanent relationship. But even then, it can apply; though the situation becomes more complex, “stickier,” and more dangerous and difficult. Most of the time, I think, such dangerous situations take place only in the mind. But when the distinction between fantasy and reality begins to dissolve, I suspect chaos and confusion can lead us into perilous territory. But perhaps we are immune to such chaos and confusion and, indeed, to romantic or physical attractions if we are steadfastly committed to avoiding such perils. That’s the stuff of novels. Or short stories. Or screen plays. It’s almost formulaic. And “almost” may be giving it too much flexibility.

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Betrayal. The word has several definitions, each of which suggests deep and almost impossibly painful experience. The first definition is something this like: “an act of disappointing a person’s trust, hopes, or expectations.” Another one can be almost equally devastating: “the act of revealing information in violation of confidence.” In both cases, the act of betrayal destroys trust and can utterly annihilate relationships. Betrayal can end or irrevocably damage a romantic relationship or a friendship. The potential damage it can do to any relationship is enough to warrant steering clear of anything that could cause the parties to a relationship to question the relationship’s strength or legitimacy. This comes to mind as I consider jokes I may have told or implicit suggestions I may have made, in poor taste, that may have gotten a little too close to treading on the sacred soil of unwavering commitment. Commitment. That’s another component of relationships that can break into a million pieces, consumed in the explosive destruction of trust in the face of betrayal. But people take risks every day that can destroy it all. Humans are crazy and stupid or, at the very least, unthinking.

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Ready access to money can bend reality, causing the “wealthy” (or relatively well-off) to forget what poverty feels like. The ability to buy products or services that improves one’s conditions, even modestly, can make us lazy and forgetful. I think a mandatory period of three months’ penniless homelessness should be imposed on every citizen. We would learn to treasure the precious things we take for granted. We would internalize compassion in a way that is almost impossible when one’s experiences have almost always been positive; when one’s life is one of almost unending largesse.

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This morning’s cool, comfortable temperatures (presently, 68°F) belie the fact that it’s mid-summer. Only the high humidity (86%) and the sounds of tree frogs and crickets offer evidence of summertime in Arkansas. When I walked out onto the covered and screened porch and, then, to the open air of the deck, I was grateful for a reprieve from the South’s normally sweltering temperatures. On a “normal” morning in late July in central Arkansas, the lowest pre-dawn temperatures are in the mid to upper 70s. Combined with high humidity, those days make one feel a bit like gills would be more useful than lungs.  But not this morning. The high humidity is tolerable when the temperature is below 70°F.

While I’m grateful for the pleasant weather at the moment, I’m conscious of the fact that much of the rest of the world seems to be in a state of climatic chaos. Last week’s floods in Germany killed more than 160 people; I read this morning that the floods there were the worst in more than 700 years. And, as with any natural disaster, the political repercussions are in full-swing, with some political groups using the devastation to their advantage by blaming opposition politicians for the death and havoc. Germany, of course, is not alone in dealing with cataclysmic weather. Heavy flooding in central China has forced more than 200,000 from their homes. Passengers trapped in a subway car are among the reported eighteen dead from last week’s floods there.

Horrendous weather will befall all of us at some point. It’s not a question of whether, but when, The perpetual questions, of course, will revolve around whether climate change is responsible for fierce winds, unprecedented rainfall, withering droughts, ruinous low temperatures, deadly temperature spikes, and all the other natural phenomena. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, there will be those who deny climate change or, at least, the role humans play in it. Arguing about it is a waste of oxygen. Minds in the Year 2021 are not made up through exposure to facts and reasoned explanations; minds in this year are made up through political guidance that’s based almost exclusively on opposition to any positions taken by the opposition. It makes me want to swallow a powerful explosive device and then set it off as it nears my heart as it passes through my esophagus. A personal suicide bombing with minimal collateral damage. Except for the collateral damage of others’ disrupted and ruined lives. There’s no easy and painless way to put an end to perpetual human trauma.

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My mind jumps from idea to idea the way bees flit from flower to flower as they seek pollen. But while bees can behave in seemingly random, frenzied fashion, they ultimately produce honey. I, on the other hand, produce only half-finished (or even less complete) concepts that crumble into dust over time. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself, though. Many of my stories and plot outlines and the like have potential still. They have not disintegrated into dust. At least not yet. I will, by God, do something with my writing before I get too old and feeble to make any sense out of my thousands of unfinished drafts.

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I am hungry. Not just a little bit, either. I could eat a monstrous breakfast this morning; broiled salmon drizzled with some miso and lime dressing, some rice, a little miso soup, some edamame, and shredded wakame. Actually, just a small breakfast as described would be just fine. I could lose weight on that kind of regimen.  But that won’t start today. Today I may cook bacon, instead. Ah, the world of good intention and paved roads.

Since visiting the Greenwood Cultural Center and the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa last week, I struggle to understand what happened to the enormous power that propelled the social activism of the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. Though remnants of activism remain, today’s fights for justice and equality and economic opportunity seem to be little more than impotent vestiges of the past; tilting at windmills with the full knowledge that “activism” is all for show and is not expected to have real results.

Today’s conservative support for equality and justice seems to me to be contrived and hollow. It seems designed to deceive both its advocates and its opponents into believing it is real, all the while aggressively undoing the advances of the last seventy years. Conservatives have adopted the successful tactics of social activists, turning those tactics on their heads in furtherance of conservative causes instead of promoting integrity and equality. Legitimate calls for equality and social justice are drowned out by opposition to equality that is stronger today than ever in my lifetime. Real efforts to bring about positive change wither in comparison to growing choruses calling for conservative “values.” There is no value in subjugation and economic bondage, except to those who profit from financial enslavement and political feudalism. As much as I support and appreciate today’s efforts to bring about social justice and decency, I think most of those efforts are wastes of time and energy because they are so weak and diluted.

Maybe my own sense of powerlessness and surrender is evidence of the problem. What’s missing is the fervor and the ability to infect others with it. Leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and W.E.B. Du Bois and Rosa Parks and Malcolm X and Julian Bond and John Lewis and others are missing. But what’s especially missing are white leaders calling for equality and social and economic justice. And, of course, the rest of us, willing to stand up for what’s right in our everyday lives. Instead, a smattering of essentially powerless local citizens who have no hope of generating masses of followers are attempting to accomplish the impossible with archaic tools and diminishing support. I do not know the answer; I just know I am feeling discouraged. Hopelessness feeds itself, I suppose; I have consumed far too much and am full to overflowing.

Maybe monuments like the Greenwood Cultural Center and the Woody Guthrie Center and the National Civil Rights Museum and all the other testaments to “the struggle” were created too early, before we actually achieved success as a society. Perhaps we celebrated victory before it was ours to claim. I remember President Bush, standing in front of a banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” saying we had prevailed in Iraq, long before we abandoned the fight and allowed the country to descend into chaos. I am afraid we have a tendency to let up before the fight is over. Afghanistan, too, comes to mind. And, maybe, domestic efforts to accomplish the vision the country’s framers and founders had in mind.

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I’ve long been intrigued by the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, though I will admit to being far too ignorant of the details of his philosophy. His disdain for capitalism and his concepts of “the anguish of freedom” appeal to me. While I think his philosophies were guided in part by a mistaken “purity” of individuals’ choices, I think most of his concepts were solid. Money is, indeed, at the root of most human problems. While the idea of “evil” is magical bullshit, in my view, extreme problems do arise from the existence of money and our reliance on money (or the lack thereof) for our choices. Too often, we credit (or blame) our positions in life on how much or how little money we have. Our career choices fly in the face of the very real facts that we do not have to accept the careers given to us; we could, if we had the requisite courage, abandon banking or real estate sales or truck driving, devoting ourselves to farming or music or a thousand other options. Sartre argued that we, individually and alone, limit our choices simply by refusing to accept that we have the freedom to pursue choices beyond our limited scope of knowledge.

And, so, I ponder whether it’s too late for me to change course and explore new ways to live and to be or whether I’m simply giving myself an excuse to avoid uncertainty and potential failure. I blame Jean-Paul Sartre for insisting to me that any limits I place on my own choices are my limits, alone, and not limits placed on my by “the world” or by some outside force. My choices are my choices, period. I could choose any number of other choices, but I choose to believe my choices are limited. They are not. But it’s easier to believe they are, than to explore reality and find, indeed, my choices are limitless. Maybe not easy. But limitless, nonetheless.

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I think conservatives and progressives, alike, tend to stake rigid, inflexible positions. Out of embarrassment, they are unwilling to change even when facts bear out the fact that their positions are fundamentally wrong. In other words, steadfast conservatives and steadfast progressives (call them liberals if you like) are stupid. We paint ourselves into corners and then insist that’s exactly what we meant to do. We are stupid. Some of us are remarkably stupid, while some of us are only moderately stupid. But we’re all stupid to some degree or another. That’s assuming, of course, that our political philosophies fall somewhere along the spectrum of conservative to progressive/liberal.

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We throw money at problems we personally do not attempt to solve,  absolving ourselves of responsibilities to do anything but fund someone else’s efforts to do what we are too lazy or too incompetent to do. Doesn’t that make you feel good about your role in the world? We’re all (most of us) fooling ourselves into thinking we make a difference to the “bigger picture” by contributing to political causes or social causes or some other cause or another. We’re just buying our way out of a sense of obligation. “I gave money, therefore I contributed in some meaningful way.” Yeah, right. I gave money to a dog rescue organization, so the dog that’s being euthanized in the pound down the street is not my problem; my responsibility was satisfied when I signed the check. I think this is my morning to be skeptical and curmudgeonly and otherwise not especially fun to be around.

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I spent quite a lot of time yesterday on the phone with a mutual fund company, trying to figure out why my late-wife’s IRA has not yet been transferred to my account. Money. It’s the damn problem. That, and incompetent bookkeeping staff at pharmaceutical companies. And nurses and doctors who do not listen and do not complete their obligations to their patients. Oh, there are more. But I’m trying to turn over a new leaf and be so positive and sweet a person could flavor their pancakes with the syrup flowing out of my pores.

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We cannot be completely honest about what we want because that could create all manner of problems. On the other hand, honesty in expressing wants and needs ties in nicely with Sartre’s philosophies. So, I might surprise myself (and others) one day with unrestrained honesty. And I might be surprised at the firestorm that honesty creates.

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Time to face the remainder of the day. More coffee and, perhaps, something out of the ordinary for breakfast. I am passionate about breakfast, sometimes. Or maybe not. I have a title in mind for my breakfast book. Or another book. Time will tell which one gets written first, if one gets written at all.

Two quotations from my little black book of Zen resources. After I wrote the paragraphs below, I read these; I wish I’d read them earlier.

Zen in its essence
is the art of seeing
into the nature of one’s being,
and it points the way
from bondage to freedom.

~ D.T. Suzuki ~

and

Outside teaching; apart from tradition.
Not founded on words and letters,
Pointing directly to the human mind.
Seeing into one’s nature and attaining
Buddahood.

Walking is Zen, sitting is Zen.
Whether talking or remaining silent,
Whether moving or standing quiet,
The Essence itself is ever at ease.

~ Daish ~

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Even litter along the roadside has beauty if you look at it with a practiced eye and a warped perspective. With the proper point of view, rubbish illustrates our progress as a species. Clumps of clotted wrappers that once held cheeseburgers and greasy fries attest to the fact that we no longer have to forage for barely edible seeds and leaves and roots. Empty tins that once held sardines or tuna offer evidence that our days of fishing for bare sustenance are over. These days, we rely on modern forms of indentured servitude to perform activities for which we once had to depend on servants or slaves. Migrant workers and underpaid semi-skilled foreign laborers do the work today we once did for ourselves. Our use of the roadside as the receptacles for discards shows how far we have come; it’s our way of thumbing our nose at Mother Nature, expressing our disdain for her attempts to teach us lessons we never wanted to learn. Our arrogance, on full display as we empty ashtrays on city streets, was earned by months and years of forgetting all the details of what is involved in stocking grocery shelves and tobacco dispensaries. From mistreating chickens and calves on the farm to spraying pesticides on the food we eat, the things we choose to forget or ignore are legion. Who cares, after all, that the farmers who plow fields die from inhaling diesel fumes while growing tobacco for our chews and our vape pens? The debris and the offal we throw from our gas-guzzling cars onto the roadside inadvertently acknowledges our reliance on purveyors of muck and the residue of wasted lives to feed our reckless pleasures. Oh, yes, detritus left behind to rot and to sully the landscape and the streams and brooks that feed the rivers from which we drink is lovely. It is just as stunning in its refined elegance as the most beautiful oil painting. The byproducts of avarice and gluttony, left to fester on the fringes of our food chain, paints a remarkable picture and tells the compelling story of who we are.

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Season seven of Bosch is available on Amazon Prime. I thought Bosch ended with season six. Or maybe I just forgot Bosch in the face of so many other things I find appealing. At any rate, we binged last night on several episodes of the seventh season of the series before finally giving up around eleven, assuming we would get a good night’s sleep. This morning, after I arose very early, around 4, I followed up on what I have watched and failed to finish on Netflix, etc.  I discovered that the last episode of Hinterland I watched was Season 3, Episode 4; so, I have four more episodes to watch before I finish the series. But I haven’t watched in months, so I may have to start over. I highly recommend the series, but I cannot in good conscience recommend the last four episodes because I have not watched them. But I recommend them, anyway, thinking my conscience will be clean when all is said and done.  There’s much more I haven’t finished, too. And I discovered a bunch of crap I’ve watched but which I do not remember, at all. Maybe if I watched just a tad of some of the stuff on my “have watched” list, I’d recall it; but I am not prepared to do that right now, because…just because.

I have watched some pretty mindless swill on television lately. The Ice Road, for example. Pretty innocuous entertainment, though. But, on Amazon Prime, we watched Unhinged a couple of nights ago. I recommend it only if you’re a psychopath looking for some tips on how to engage in and extend extreme road rage. Why we watched to the end I do not know. Unhinged is unnecessarily violent and stupid from the start.

I’ve watched three of four seasons of Unforgotten. That’s another one I simply must return to because it’s so good. And because I love Nichola Walker. The thing is, seasons 1-3 are free on Amazon Prime, but season 4 requires payment of $15. That may not seem like much, but considering all the stuff I want to watch that requires some form of payment, it’s quite a burden. I feel like I’m being fed stuff Amazon knows will get me addicted, then cuts off my supply unless I’m willing to agree to the terms of their extortion. Ach! I want to scream, but I’m afraid I might be attacked by rabid neighbors who do not wish to be awakened at this hour (which, I might add, is already late, in my book).

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When I woke around 4 this morning, I learned I was alone in getting a reasonably good night’s sleep. I snored and wheezed and whistled and otherwise made noise that made sleep difficult for everyone in the neighborhood. I am surprised the Village police did not come and break down the door to find out what was making the racket. I suspect area forest nightlife was disrupted by my on-again, off-again breathing. The deer and raccoons were no doubt concerned that I might have died in my sleep, poor beasts. Seriously, though, I will visit my primary care doctor today to inquire about solutions to a number of complaints, including my very annoying wheezing and my tendonitis/arthritis. I’ve been advised to request a sleep study to determine whether I might be able to get to sleep, stay asleep, and be quiet during sleep with the help of some form(s) of medical intervention. Perhaps I’d be quieter and breathe more easily and freely if I lost 70 pounds and engaged in fierce exercise. I’m game for the weight loss, but my exercise regimen will never be described as fierce. 😉

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My coffee is cold. It’s only 6:00 a.m. That’s what can happen to coffee when it sits on the desk, barely touched, for almost two hours while I’m dinking around on my computer, attempting to write but failing miserably with respect to engaging fiction. Oh, well. I’ll get around to that one day before long.

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Attention: Fiction vignette ahead: It was as if he were being stalked by someone whose purpose in pursuing him was simply to let him know he was there, just beyond the shadows, hidden beneath the shrubs. The stalker seemed to have no overt animosity toward him, only a desire to make him perpetually uneasy, wondering why his follower was there. He concluded the stalker’s reason for watching him was simply to let him know he was being followed; that nothing he could do would prevent his pursuer from seeing him and knowing his thoughts. Nothing would stop the stalker from dismissing the man’s thoughts as impotent mistakes made by someone whose significance was lost just moments before birth. In other words, the stalker tormented him with his emptiness; that resolute follower reminded him of his ugly hollowness that asserted, loudly, he was devoid of value and pointless in the extreme.

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Among many problems I face is that I am unpracticed in accepting uncomfortable attitudes and actions. I want to control things outside my ability and/or right to control. But I know I have no control, except to accept life as it is or to change it by changing myself. Or, of course, to move away from the discomfort. It’s all more difficult than it should be, though how I know that is open to discussion. Whether I “know” anything is a matter of argument.

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Coffee can be heated or replaced. I will prove this to myself in a matter of moments. And bacon can be cooked, as can eggs. Life is sustained by food, both for eating and for thought.

We encountered heavy rain, on and off, as we approached Hot Springs Village yesterday on our way home from Tulsa, but the rain was not overwhelming. But after we picked up el perro and took him home, we set out for a late lunch at SqzBx; we had been craving pizza for quite a while and my IC had never eaten there but had wanted to for some time. So we set out for Hot Springs. Only moments into our drive, long before we got to the west gate to exit the Village, the clouds above us—apparently behaving like a balloon collecting water—ripped open. Water poured from the sky in sheets, prompting us to abandon our plans for SqzBx pizza. Torrential rains continued, off and on, for quite a long time. We opted to take a pizza from the freezer for dinner. This morning, as my IC was walking el perro, the sky burst open again, drenching dog and woman and causing dog to abandon his morning constitutional. And, so, we’re preparing to go to church; no, el perro stays home, guarding the castle.

Tulsa was great fun, though we did not make it to all the museums we had hoped to visit. The Gilcrease is closed for reconstruction. The Philbrook, on our plans, took a back seat until it was too late to visit. But we saw the Greenwood Center and the Woodie Guthrie Center and had wandered around downtown Tulsa and environs and stopped in at a place whose name escapes me, a gallery displaying string instruments and promoting the skills of accomplished luthiers. And we had lunch with an old friend of mine. And we discovered superb dining establishments and a huge park called The Gathering Place, said to be the largest public park ever built with private funds, $465 million. We will go back to Tulsa and stay longer because there is just so much to see.

During our visit, and our drive to and from, we discussed other places we might want to visit soon. Among them: Corpus Christi, Texas and Asheville, North Carolina. Unless our preliminary plans get derailed, we will visit one or the other (or both) sometime in August. Another road trip in the offing! And we may make a trip to Tucson, Arizona very soon to visit segments of my IC’s family; this trip depends on several factors that may or may not come together. Ah, life is good these days1

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My IC has taken on a new role with the church; responsibility for scheduling volunteers to staff the welcome tables at the front and rear doors of the building. While in Tulsa, visiting the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, she hatched ideas for the welcoming process, prompted in part by the way the folks in Tulsa welcome visitors. But my IC has her own spins for the process; I like her creativity and critical thinking skills. I wish I could borrow them, which would help transform my thoughts from idea to execution.

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All this talk of travel leaves me thinking about words I’ve read in my anthology of Zen quotations.  Here’s one piece that seems especially appropriate as I think about travel and travelers, including the way I behave as a traveler and as a human being:

One who excels in traveling
leaves no wheel tracks.
One who excels as a warrior
does not appear formidable.
One who excels in fighting
is never aroused in anger.
One who excels in defeating his enemy
does not join issue.
One who excels in employing others
humbles himself before them.

~ Zen Tradition ~

I have so much to learn, even after completing five decades of life and working toward completing a sixth and, I hope, a seventh and an eighth. The most successful among us learned all these lessons early, so they could teach others along the way. I have been a slow learner in some important ways, all these years. Much of what I thought was important turned out to be inconsequential and frivolous. And what I thought unnecessary is imperative to a life that matters. Live and learn.

It’s too early to know whether today will be just another repeat of 24 sequential hours or something more—or less. We jam so much into little packets of time, expecting minutes to burst, full-blown, into years; but expectations can be sidetracked by seconds that scurry to complete minutes, not lifetimes.  Dreams are like that, too. They cover us with wishes and hopes, only to morph into nightmares in which wishes have wings and hopes crash into the rocks beneath murderous rapids. Vivid visions turn dim and cloudy in the face of sandstorms.

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The highlight of the day yesterday for me was the Woody Guthrie Center. It was the most sobering, depressing experience, too. Hope, so strong and pure and powerful, crashed to the rocks. Wishes for a better, more inclusive, and loving future flew away as the energy of youth morphed into the capitalist greed that still, today, informs our most potent desires.

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Lunch with a colleague from long-ago brought into sharp focus the reality of loss and aging and dismissive acts of artificial appreciation. The “old days” were fine, but they are gone and forgotten by everyone but those who lived them. Those days no longer matter, just like those who lived them. Everything and everyone is replaceable. We’re either too late or too early. And too simple or too abstract to be understood.

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We throw money at the wall, hoping it will stick in the form of excitement and precious memories. It doesn’t stick.

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It is 7 a.m., time to begin digging into the rubble of time to see what’s there.

According to my computer, which has been conversing with The Weather Network, the temperature in Tulsa is 79°F and the humidity is 84%. Those readings were made just before 6 a.m. In my opinion, 79°F should never be permitted this early in the day. In fact, that level of warmth should be illegal except in extremely extenuating circumstances. I recommend President Biden appoint a Climate Control Czar to establish and enforce climate and weather-related limitations. I am sure other countries that are hungry to control all aspects of humanity and civilization would happily jump on board. China, Russia, India, and Luxembourg would, no doubt, become allies in the endeavor. World peace would most certainly follow.

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Speaking of weather, today’s plans could be subject to weather-related change. The forecast calls for the development of thunderstorms this morning and again this evening, with a high temperature of 90°F. Tomorrow morning, too, as we head home, there is a risk of thunderstorms. Well, until the Climate Control Czar makes her mark on the planet’s atmospheric comfort, we’ll just have to buck up and deal with whatever Mother Nature decides to do.

There was a time, when I was much younger, during which many people carried thin plastic raincoats with them. These raincoats were extremely thin and delicate and were folded nicely in little plastic bags. In those days, when the unexpected rainstorm arose, people would pull out their little bags of rain protection and would don the sweat-inducing gear, which tended to stick to the skin at the slightest hint of bodily moisture. The plastic, astonishingly thin, would shred into wet strips of useless petroleum detritus when the wearer attempted to shed the rainwear. These emergency raincoats never lasted more than one wearing. I remember this only vaguely, but I feel sure it’s not just my imagination. I do not recall why we did not use umbrellas in those days, but my guess is that folding umbrellas had not yet been invented. Big, awkward, unwieldy sticks wrapped in water-shedding materials were just too cumbersome, hence the ubiquitous emergency raincoats. Again, if memory serves.

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According to NationalToday.com, today (July 15) is:

• National Be a Dork Day
• National Give Something Away Day
• National Pet Fire Safety Day
• National Gummi Worm Day
• National I Love Horses Day
• Saint Swithin’s Day; and
• National Clean Beauty Day

I believe every day is “be a dork day,” so I behave accordingly. Just ask my IC.  As I was preparing for tomorrow’s celebratory drive home, I learned that July 16 is, among other things, Guinea Pig Appreciation Day, National Personal Chef Day, and World Snake Day. More importantly, though, tomorrow is Guru Purnima. Guru Purnima is a holiday dedicated to paying respect and expressing gratitude to one’s spiritual and academic teachers. Though predominantly celebrated by Hindus and Buddhists in Nepal and India, there is no reason to avoid celebrating here in the USA; in fact, we might be better served to celebrate Guru Purnima than National Corn Fritter Day, another of tomorrow’s special reasons to celebrate.

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My IC is adamant in her assertion that I should devote more of my time and energy to writing. Not just more of this frivolous nonsense, but more serious stuff like fiction short stories and novels. And I think she may be right. I enjoy writing fiction. In fact, I have started several novels but have finished none. Perhaps I should attempt to finish a novel or six. Maybe the one in which Fletcher Kneeblood (I’ll have to change his name, though, as it just doesn’t fit the character) is involved in responding to a plot to extort the U.S. into issuing a formal apology to the world for using nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I rather enjoyed the research I did in preparation for writing that one. As part of my research, I delved into how South Africa became the only nuclear-weapons-capable country to renounce and disable its nuclear arsenal. Does anyone else remember that? And I enjoyed writing an alternate beginning for the novel (parts of which I used in a later draft), in which the unsympathetic protagonist slept with a prostitute in a French motel, then flew Icelandair home to his girlfriend in the U.S., with a stop in Reykjavik. While on the plane, the guy hooks up with an Icelandic writer who had been in Paris tending to her dying ex-husband. I learned that Icelandair was formed in 1937; what a surprise that was (to me)!

Another just-barely-started novel, also a nuclear thriller, includes a scene in which the leaders of Canada and Mexico meet secretly to discuss how to protect themselves from the lunatic occupying the White House. During the meeting, they reveal to one another that their countries have secretly developed nuclear weapons capabilities. Their conversation continues, culminating in their interest in establishing a mutual defense agreement between their countries, China, Russia, and India.

One of those two novels, I do not recall which, includes a scene in which the voice of a Mexican mother in Nuevo Laredo, speaking by phone to her son who is in New York City, is suddenly cut off. The reason, I reveal shortly thereafter, is that a nuclear device utterly destroys both Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. That blast was a warning of what was to come.

I prefer writing that reveals characters’ personalities through their actions and words, rather than telling the reader about the characters. That takes more time than the simpler, more straightforward telling; but it’s much more interesting to the reader and it engages the reader more.  But one of the problem with my writing is my philosophy that says “why limit yourself to ten words when you can say the same thing with fifty?” Another problem is that I get bored quickly and easily. Though I love to write, my love affair falls apart when I have to stick to a single story for any length of time. So I wander. And I lose interest and move on, leaving the corpses of unfinished novels strewn behind me. There are other problems, too. But I may return to that passion anyway. I have nothing to lose and much to gain (if ever I actually finish something). Maybe I should finish up a few dozen of my hundreds of short stories, first. Most of them will require only the completion of a story arc and some polishing. We shall see. Time will tell, as it always does.

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Thank you to those few blog followers who responded to my plea that you reveal yourselves to me and tell me why you follow this blog. I will try not to disappoint you in future blog posts. This one, I realize, may do just that, though. Forgive me. Sometimes I have to immerse myself in silliness just to get through emotional rough patches.

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Thus ends my mindless rambling for the day. I hope the world gets better with every passing hour.

Yesterday’s lunch with friends in Fort Smith was delightful, but too brief. The margaritas and the meals were outstanding, but would have been just very good without the conversation. Our short time in Fort Smith was a perfect way to break the trip to Tulsa into bite-sized chunks. We plan to come back when our friends’ floor project is complete. And, of course, we’re anxious to have them back for another visit in the Village.

Once in Tulsa, and after several attempts to get a satisfactory room (with everything working), we settled for a slightly smelly room with two queen beds versus one king. We watched a movie until one of us fell asleep. I woke briefly as the credits rolled, then went back to tequila-fueled sleep. I woke around 4 a.m., then again at 4:30, but opted to stay in bed. Finally, around 7, I got up and showered. I spent far too many hours asleep in bed, resulting in my aching from excessive laziness. I should learn my lesson.

This morning, as we were getting ready to get our breakfasts, my IC noted that a man she had seen last night, banging on the outside glass door of the hotel while being refused admission, was milling about the front desk. We went to the desk to check in for the remainder of our stay (the first night was free, courtesy of hotel points, so we had to check in for the paying days), where my IC whispered to the desk clerk, informing her of the previous evening’s experience. The clerk said she already knew and had called the police. (The guy asked the clerk to check to see if his relatives were in some room on the sixth floor of the hotel, which has only four or five floors.) The police showed up moments later. We are not privy to how they handled the guy, but we noted he was not at the front desk when we went back to the room after breakfast.

Our first planned museum visit was to be the Gilgrease Museum, but we learned last night while structuring our day that it had closed for rebuilding on July 4. Crud! So, instead, our first visit was to the Greenwood Cultural Center, where we viewed photographs and watched a lengthy film describing the lead-up to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, as well as the actual riots/mayhem and the aftermath. The film and the photographic displays made me embarrassed of my history and today’s participation in white America. The information and historical data were so clear that the incident was spurred purely by racial hatred and white greed. The reason it was not taught in U.S. history until very recently is that it had been covered up and hidden; what little was circulated about it suggested it was a “black” riot put down by patriotic white Americans, leaving a death toll of 30. The reality is that the entire process was triggered by a false charge of rape against a black man and white plans to lynch him. Horrid, horrible, embarrassing, nasty history. Reparations should have been made one hundred years ago.

After visiting Greenwood, we sought out the site of the planned new church building for Tulsa’s All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church. The building has not been started, nor has the site been prepared. If it is ever built, it will be a very long time coming. From All Souls‘ vacant lot, we sought out the current location of the church. We found it, went inside to see it, and said hello to a few nice church people. During our visit, we came across an article on a bulletin board, describing plans for a co-housing community in Tulsa. We took down relevant details to explore later. As we were preparing to leave, we came across a woman who was rearranging a visitor information table (from which we had picked up a few items a short while earlier), who introduced herself as Neffertiti. Nice lady. She invited us back for Sunday service anytime (they have cut back from three to one service on Sundays, by the way).

We then wandered by car just a bit and came across a nice area that had plenty of restaurants, shops, and other intriguing places of interest. My IC sparked a conversation with two women who recommended several location eateries for lunch; they were going to Mi Cocina, they said.  After a brief stroll, we went there, too. Two margaritas each and two orders of brisket tacos, a visit to a bracelet shop and, perhaps, an hour and a half later, we went out again, this time seeking the location of the new co-housing development. We found it, still very much under construction. A phone number from the article on the church bulletin board yielded a conversation with one of the founders. She said they have only a few of the original 18 units available, both very small (1,000 and 1,200 square feet) and both priced at upward of $200K. Hmm.

Thanks to a bit more wandering, we know about some beautiful areas along the river that contain flat, concrete trails. Along the trails, occasional bursts of outdoor sculptural art (e.g., huge moose, wolves, etc., etc.) add delightful attractions. Finally, before we headed back to the hotel later in the afternoon, we stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of wine and a cheap corkscrew; just in case we decide we’re feeling thirsty for cabernet sauvignon later this evening.

Tomorrow, we’ll do more museum-hopping, followed by lunch with an old friend from my days as executive director of the association now called the International Association of Venue Managers (then the International Association of Auditorium Managers). My friend was president of the association during  one of my almost eight years as ED and we got along extremely well. I spoke to him this afternoon (first time in years!). He suggested a place for lunch, where we will go tomorrow. Nice trip so far, this!

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Tomorrow promises to be another wonderful adventure. I miss travel. It’s nice to get back into it, if only on a short trip like this one.

One year ago today, my late wife tripped and fell as she was rushing to her study, phone in hand, to speak with her cardiologist’s nurse. She had called the cardiologist, at my insistence, to discuss her growing weakness and her difficulty with stairs and with walking in general.

The fall itself was not terrible, but because of her heart condition, the aftermath was awful. Edema caused her banged up knee and leg to swell badly. Extremely low blood pressure, likely the culprit causing her to fall, persisted long after the incident. She was in the hospital or rehabilitation facilities for most of the following five months until her death. The incident in July last year did not represent the onset of her condition, though. She had been growing progressively weaker for at least a year, and more likely two years, beforehand. Her condition, cardiomyopathy or congestive heart failure, had been with her for decades.

I’ve concluded, after a lot of thought and self-recriminations and feelings of guilt, that I could have done nothing that could have changed the outcome. Yet that conclusion does not lessen the pain of her loss. But I am extremely fortunate to have developed an extremely close, loving relationship with a woman who understands my grief and with whom I share so very much. I am confident my late wife would have wished such happiness for me.

Anniversaries marking painful events or—in this case—the beginning of long, painful periods, are not reasons for celebration. But I think marking such milestone events can be healthy and can bring otherwise diffuse grief into sharp, but temporary, focus. I am sure I will remember and grieve more today than “usual,” but I also will celebrate my relationship with the woman who is helping me through the remainder of the lifelong process of grief.

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When my IC and I head toward Tulsa, we will stop to visit with two friends with whom I have had the longest and deepest relationship. We’ll have lunch at Rolando’s and we will talk, spending far less time than any of us would like, about life and love and the joys of a couple, one in her early-seventies and one in his early eighties, laying new flooring together. All of my friends are crazy like that; I would have it no other way. But this couple is especially eccentric in ways that I find absolutely compelling; that’s why I love them.

Once in Tulsa, my IC and I will spend a few days exploring several museums (perhaps among them The Gilcrease Museum, the Woody Guthrie Center, the Philbrook Museum of Art, the Tulsa Air & Space Museum, and the Greenwood Cultural Center) and otherwise exploring the city. There’s no way we can visit all of the museums in Tulsa during our brief visit, but we’ll hit several of them. And we’ll almost certainly stop at Costco before we head home (knowing, of course, that a new Costco is scheduled to open in Little Rock in a matter of days). There’s more in Tulsa, of course, and we will do what we can to experience as much as we can without wearing ourselves out.

As much as anything, our trip to Tulsa will be an opportunity for the two of us to get away from the surprising number and scope of obligations we have in the Village. For a couple of retirees, our lives seem extremely busy and demanding; we want and need some down time together. And so we will get it!

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The Affirmation of Covenant in my church is stated as follows:

Love is the doctrine of this church,
And the quest of truth its sacrament,
And service its prayer,
To dwell together in peace,
To seek knowledge in freedom,
To serve humankind in fellowship,
To the end that all souls shall grow
Into harmony with the good.
Thus, do we covenant with one another.

The first time I heard it read by the congregation, when I was a new visitor, something about it felt strong and emotionally compelling. I was especially enamored of the first line: “Love is the doctrine of this church.” Much of what I hear and read in connection with the church and the religion on which it is based reminds me of some of the core concepts of Buddhism as I understand it. (I STILL have a hard time calling Unitarian Universalism a religion for what are probably purely personal reasons related to my lifelong bias against organized religion.) At any rate, this morning my reminder prompted me to read this from my little black anthology of Zen quotations (The Essence of Zen):

It is not that I do not wish
To mix with others
But living alone in freedom
Is a better path for me.

When I think about the misery
Of those in this world,
Their sadness becomes mine.

Oh, that my monk’s robe
Was wide enough
To gather up all
The suffering people
In this floating world.

~ Ryokan ~

The contradictions of life are so fascinating! And ideas that, on the surface, seem unrelated or utterly disconnected, can be intricately intertwined. Thinking is such a rewarding endeavor! I wish everyone would do it.

One of my favorite poems (Atalanta in Calydon), written by Algernon Charles Swinburne (no relation, to my knowledge), includes the following stanza:

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath:
Night, the shadow of light,
And life, the shadow of death.

That stanza contains so many prompts for intense thought that I think it may be the single most thought-provoking piece of literature I have ever read. But probably not. 😉 Everything in our experiences is another reason to think, deeply, about what it is we are about.

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P.S. Thank you, Debbie, for responding to my request in yesterday’s post.

We are standing in the middle of a railroad trestle, ninety stories above a canyon flooded with raging water. The water, jammed with massive boulders, carves those monstrous stones into sharp scraps and slivers of rock that scrape deeper and deeper into the bed and banks. The trestle, once strong and fiercely adhered to the river bed and canyon walls, begins to shudder and shake, signaling weakness that soon could cause the trestle to fail. As we stand on the shivering structure, we feel a train approaching. It is coming at us at high speed. We turn and see it, watching it sway from side to side as it gets closer to the bridge. There is no place to run to escape the train, nor to avoid plunging into the canyon below when the wooden beams of the trestle begin to splinter. Suddenly, though, we slip and fall into a crevice, almost a cave, just five feet below, that is protected from the collapse. Huge timbers roar past our heads. Massive pieces of steel railroad tracks twist and bend as they spin by us, the terrifying sounds they make as they contort into rings and figure eights more horrifying than screams of death.

Twenty seconds in, no more, and the remnants of the trestle are silent. The train has disappeared into the current, washed away along with the steel tracks and massive wooden girders. Long strips of thick wooden beams dangle from bigger, stronger pieces. Other beams are lodged against canyon walls, forty or fifty feet above the raging water. The rapids below hiss and churn, but evidence of human intervention is silent. Soon, all evidence of humankind will have dropped to the water and disappeared.

Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor anyone else who comes this way again will know of the tragedy that befell the canyon. But we  saw it. And we survived it. As if adorned in the robes of a deity.

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I wrote the paragraphs above on the morning of June 7, 2021, just a bit more than a month ago. I wrote it as an exercise in transcribing the experiences of my imagination into words on the screen. What precipitated the imagined scene is lost to my memory. Or, perhaps more likely, no specific thought or event prompted me to write that scene; rather, I suspect I saw a fleeting image in my brain and latched onto it, writing experiences around that single image. There is no before, nor an after. The scene is simply an irrational moment with no reasonable explanation. The reader knows only that the writer is one of at least two (“we” is the clue to that certainty) who undergo the irrational experience. No explanation of why the trestle is about to collapse, other than a raging river. No indication as to why people would find themselves on a railroad trestle ninety stories above furious rapids. No explanation as to why they survived and what happened next. Why? Because nothing happened next. The scene, the only one of its kind, is done. Finished. An empty, incomplete experience.

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Some people have the courage to write reality; to paint—with words—pictures of personal experiences so intimate and so private that the sentences they write take the reader’s breath away. Such writers, memoirists or autobiographers, are astonishingly brave. They risk everything by exposing themselves as the deeply flawed human beings they are. They reveal themselves in ways the rest of us would never dare because we are afraid our revelations would destroy us or the way people view and value us.

I reveal a great deal about myself in my writing, but like almost everyone else, I keep the most intimate details and secrets to myself. The simile comparing oneself to an iceberg—far more mass beneath the surface than above—is apropos. Yet the only way we can develop and sustain deep personal relationships is by revealing almost everything about ourselves; taking the risk that the revelations will not consume oneself in flames. We have to trust others if we’re going to take that risk. Perhaps the writers I admire so much simply trust their readers to be compassionate. I’m too much of a skeptic to think everyone who comes across my writing will be driven by tenderness and kindness and sympathy.

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Today, I have two appointments: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Both are in Hot Springs, separated in time by three hours. I have not yet determined whether I will return home between appointments or stay in town between them. I could have lunch after the first one, carving an hour or so off my wait-time, but that would leave two hours to kill. I’m not good with making use of small snippets of time. This problem is not of sufficient magnitude to merit spending so much energy and artificial “ink” on it, but I’ve already done it, so there you are. Time will tell how it all turns out.

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The remainder of this week will be devoted to experiences. Learning and relearning things that matter to the world at large and, I hope, to me. I may blog or I may not. Time, again, will tell.

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Will it ever end? I mean the COVID-19 pandemic. Will we ever be sufficiently rid of the beast to feel comfortable in every setting? I am not optimistic. Too many people have abandoned intellectual reliance on science and have allowed themselves to, instead, become cult followers of conspiracy theories and theorists. They have become emotionally entangled with lies and political games, causing their intellects to wither.

But if, by chance, it does end, what can we expect in the future? More of the same, I’m afraid. We have become a nation in which half the population remains committed to and supportive of a man who lies for a living. The same man whose mantra is, effectively, cheating and deceit are more valuable than honor and truth-telling. I gag every time I hear his name. But he is history. His infections have spread to the vast majority of the Republican Party and its adherents.

We will continue to suffer the after-effects of science denial for the remainder of our time on Earth. Until the ultra-rich have drained every pocketbook and shoved every middle-class supporter of the Republican agenda into abject poverty, we will be subject to the whims of the 0.001%. It’s getting smaller and more powerful by the second. I hate it.

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All of this hideousness is nearly impossible to stomach. But I am fortunate in that I have a wonderful relationship with a woman who can help me, from time to time, forget the world around me and who can find silver-linings behind some pretty dark clouds.

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I am hungry. And thirsty for more coffee. I will stop writing for now. Maybe for an extended break. Whether my break is short or long, I have a request of those who regularly read  my blog: tell me who you are. I can tell a number of IP addresses from the Village open my blog pages with some regularity, but I do not know who most of the readers are. I’m curious to know who you are and, if you are willing to share, why you read this blog. I know, I’ve asked before, but this time I’m serious.

Yesterday, I wrote a bit about being an introvert. Shortly afterward, I saw a cartoon that explained introverts’ responses to an overabundance of social stimuli; disappearance. With just a few panels, the cartoonist illustrated how an introvert can behave like an extrovert but, unless there’s time spent recovering strength invested in engaging in an extrovert’s behavior, the introvert simply disappears. Where does he go? Inside himself, in seclusion. The introvert needs the fuel of solitude. My solitary time blogging is my way of replenishing that fuel, I think.

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My church responsibilities went off with only a few hitches yesterday. I stumbled occasionally as I read the script I wrote. In an ideal world, I would have memorized it, but I had neither the time nor the talent to do that, so I read it from several pages of 20-point type that still was not big enough to keep me from losing my place when I looked up at the audience. Oh, well, I was among friends who did not openly mock me for my missteps. The only other hitch was that I was not supposed to be moderator of the post Insight service conversation but, not seeing anyone else take on the role, I jumped in anyway. I thought someone would need to get the audience to sit and someone should circulate with a microphone so the audience could ask questions. So I did both. I did not engage as fully as a dedicated moderator, but I took on a role I was not asked to do. Perhaps someone else had been tasked to do that and I unintentionally stepped on toes. Or, perhaps I am not the only one who did not recall exactly how the post-service conversations go. All in all, though, it worked out just fine. In spite of my self-consciousness, I give myself a reasonably high score for yesterday’s church sessions.

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Yesterday afternoon, my IC and I went to look at an RV some friends recently bought. It’s a smallish van-based drivable RV. I sort of fell in love with it, but I doubt I’ll be buying one like it in the immediate future. My guess is that a fully-outfitted vehicle like theirs would command a very high price (especially in the context of John Swinburn’s limited solvency)  in today’s market in which RVs are in such extremely high demand. But if I were to win the lottery, I would include such a beauty on my list of things to buy. Oh, and some acreage with a huge barn to accommodate it when not in use. And, perhaps, contract “followers” who would follow the vehicle and would, when signaled, handle both set-up and take-down so I would not have to do the hard work associated with the RV lifestyle. I’m going out into the weeds, here, so I should return to the real world of wishes versus financial wherewithal. Such is life. I think I was born to filthy rich parents but was switched at birth and went home, instead, as the sixth child of an impoverished couple. I believe I inherited the greed gene from those rich biological parents; it did not come from the parents who reared me.

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I am off to Little Rock today to give my car its periodic spa treatment, i.e., fresh oil and a tire rotation. I could get the same treatment for it locally, but I feel that the Subaru dealer is more likely to inform me of any other issues they encounter. Plus, I like driving to Little Rock from time to time. It keeps my wanderlust and road-trip cravings fresh and potent. Later in the day, I hope to have certain unpleasant growths removed from my arms and hands and to have other itches and such examined and magically cured. Or, at least, treated with prescription ointments, salves, oils, and the like.

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I feel like writing much, much more, but today calls me to be fast and efficient, so I will cease this blather and move on toward a happy, successful, life-affirming day.

This morning, I will attend church, physically, for the second time in umpteen months.  At approximately the last minute, with several seconds to spare, I was asked to introduce the guest speaker for today’s insight service. I reluctantly agreed, because that’s what I do; reluctantly agree. The reason for my reluctance stems from my diminishing ability to speak coherently in front of groups. Once, I was a practiced public dissembler, lying to audiences about all manner of things I was asked to say or about matters on which I wished to mislead them. As I’ve grown older (and older and older and older), I’ve become more conscious of content when engaged in public speaking. So, when I relay information that seems less than entirely true or that seems intentionally and transparently translucent, I stumble a bit. I’m no longer paid to mislead (and to protect the interests of morally repugnant slugs) and it’s a little tough to speak on matters about which I have less than full buy-in. But all of this has little to do with church, right? Yeah, I suppose. But I slipped it in, just because I could. Anyway, this morning I will do the introduction; I will base my behavior on what is admittedly poor recollection of what is supposed to happen. By the end of this morning’s program, I may well be the first Unitarian Universalist excommunicated by popular demand. I’m really not very good at public speaking and never was. Why I came to enjoy it (but now I don’t), I will never know. I think I’m somewhere in the middle, now.

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My IC and I went to a friend’s birthday party last night at the sole pub in the Village. A band made up of extremely young people, Bad Habit, played for part of the time. They are good, no question. The pub is loud, no question. I’m growing more tolerant of loud, smelly, hot places suffering from COVID-related understaffing. Tolerance and enjoyment live in different states, by the way: New Hampshire and Baja California (so, technically, they live in different countries).  Eight-dollar drinks, though, are growing a little tiresome. I may open up a limited-access pub in my home, complete with a dart board. I would require only that patrons bring their own liquor/mixers or other drink or chewable of choice and that music be kept to decibel levels my ears can enjoy. My hours of operation might be a bit iffy, though.

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I found myself enamored, yesterday, with a two-bedroom, two-bath condo located in the heart of the Argenta district of North Little Rock. For only $250K, we might have been able to snatch a place within easy walking distance of excellent pubs, restaurants, a baseball field, entertainment venues, and the like. We wanted to go view it up close and personal on Monday. But we found out that, unfortunately, it was under contract. The Argenta district is hot. Condos, especially, are in very low supply. There are a few more houses, but not as easily walkable as the condo. I  hate that someone snatched it before we could even give serious consideration to the place. Admittedly, giving serious consideration would require us to do things like decide on who’s selling what, who’s paying what, and a host of other matters. But acting on whim is fun sometimes, even when it doesn’t yield solid results.  I still miss living in Chicago, thirty-plus years later. Instant access to city amenities is addictive (in Chicago, that included excellent public transit).

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I was awakened by a very loud noise this morning. Since getting out of  bed, I’ve decided it was a dog shaking itself awake while wearing an assortment of collar tags. The poor beast was shaking in abject fear last night during the worst of the thunderstorms, so he was allowed to sleep in bed as a means of comfort. But he woke me at 4:00 a.m. with his shuddering percussion, which made me feel less compassionate. I took him outside to pee (him, not me) while a light rain continued to fall. He did his business, but was in one hell of a hurry to get back inside. But, hey, it was already 4:00 a.m. I suppose he wanted to hurry back to sleep. I figure I’m up for the day. So here I sit, communing with the keyboard.

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Eventually, against our most fervent desires, we all grow up. Even those who claim to be wild and crazy in their old age have grown up; through pain, regret, love, anger, and a string of other emotions too long to measure. Emotions—the ones that bathe us in love and those that bury us in despair—thicken our skin and scuff our souls. But they can leave scars that cannot be covered up. And the retained pain in those scars can cause us to behave in ways we disdain, but cannot avoid because we’ve not grown up. Until we realize we must. We have no choice. The scars on scuffed souls cannot be used as alibis forever; eventually, we have to grow up and behave like adults.

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Self-deprecating humor always carries a kernel of truth. At least I think that must be the case. The comedians I’ve heard who use self-deprecating humor base their bits on their own lives. While humor is sometimes an exaggeration of real life, it is not always an exaggeration. Sometimes it is the only way a person can deal with a piece of his or her past that is just too painful or embarrassing or uncomfortable to share uncovered. I’m not sure why that came to mind this morning. Maybe it was because I was thinking about Robin Williams a couple of days ago; his self-deprecating humor was so funny. Now, in retrospect, some of his humor was not so much funny as it was poignant. And, looking back, perhaps a cry for help that was never heard until it was far too late.

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My public persona—an attempt at appearing a semi-pseudo-quasi extrovert—sometimes overwhelms the real me, the introvert. The introvert needs far more uncommitted time and less time in the middle of the action than the “average joe.” He needs more time to think than the normal person on the street. He’s just needy in an isolationist, hermit kind of way. Anyway, as much as I enjoy being around people I love, I sometimes need them to be in the next room or sitting quietly next to me.

The other side of me, a side I only occasionally recognize (but may be more common than I think), is the incessant, highly annoying talker. That side of me might be an attempt to show actual extroverts what it feels like to have the social needs of an introvert. :-).

What are the people with whom I socialize really like? I realize, of course, they’re “really like” the way they are with me. But I mean in the absence of other people who matter. I mean in the midst of personal challenges and traumas. Are their public personas really who they are, or is there something hidden behind that façade? We may never know, not even in the midst of heart-to-heart conversations. We may never know what’s hidden just a little deeper. But if we ever do, we should treat it as the honor it is.

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I may back away from some of my commitments at church. I’m not feeling overwhelmed. No, I’m feeling constricted. I can’t make plans without consulting my calendar, which makes me crazy. I don’t want to have commitments I can’t simply ignore. I have enough of those in the form of doctor appointments and their ancillary stuff like x-rays and CT scans and such. Aside from those necessary obligations, I want to have no responsibilities. What was I saying about being grown up?

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It’s only 6:10, but I might as well wrap this up and scrounge for breakfast. Or, I could wait and eat at church. What shall I do? Who knows?

Recently, I read the final column written by contract columnist Bernadette Kinlaw for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Though I do not subscribe to the publication, I have had the privilege of reading her columns for quite a while, thanks to a kind and generous friend who regularly forwards to me links to the articles. Kinlaw’s articles always addressed the humor, quirks, and absolute joys of language; its structure, usage, and related matters. One of her columns a couple of months ago addressed the crucial importance of apostrophes, while mourning the death of the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society. I fear it’s not just the danger to apostrophes we must fear. Rather, I believe the breadth, depth, and scope of the English language is in danger. And I admit my role in putting the language at risk. Thanks to my increasing acceptance of informality, incomplete sentences, and my own commission of grammatical crimes, I have to concede that I have some responsibility for imperiling the language. I suspect it’s not just English, though. I would not be surprised to learn that the modern world also exposes Mandarin Chinese and Italian and Portuguese to the hazards of informality and colloquialism gone awry. Rather than simply screaming about the death of language purity, though, I take action by sleeping with the enemy, as it were, while plotting the resurrection of modern languages circa 1960-1970. That’s all I can say at the moment except that I am, for the moment, the sole under-cover member of De Resistentia: Societas Linguae Puritatem, AKA The Resistance: Language Purity Society.

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I hosted a small gathering of wonderful friends, all female, yesterday for an afternoon of conversation, laughter, and varying degrees of inebriation. Fortunately for those driving home, that level was very slight. For some of the rest of us, it was more intense and significant. My friends brought massive amounts of food and drink, leading to my open display of gluttony. Mostly, though, my friends’ presence led to a state of supreme enjoyment; so very glad to have such good people in my life. I owe my original exposure to each of them to my church. Who would have thought, even five years ago, that I would belong to, much less be actively involved in, a church? So, in spite of my misgivings about the very concept of “church,” I am much happier because of it.  I mentioned “all female,” to punctuate the fact that the majority of my friends are female. I’ve discussed the fact that most of my friends are female with several people (mostly female) over the years. I have concluded the reasons for the overabundance of females in my society sphere are these: women generally are comfortable with a much broader range of conversation topics than men; women in general are kinder and more compassionate in their world view than are men (in general); women tend to view simple conversations as simple conversations, not as opportunities for competitive advantage. There are more. But that’s enough for now.

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Men could learn a great deal from women. While that statement might, to some, seem a welcome and long overdue admission from a male, it is a stereotype hidden within a compliment. The statement carries with it the implicit assertion that women are in some sense superior to men in some areas. “Yes, yes, we’ve saying that all along,” some women might say; to which I might reply, “Uh huh, so it’s okay as long as the stereotype is in your favor?” Like it or not, all of us are prone to making stereotypical judgments about one another. We seem to be innately biased, bigoted, and otherwise intrinsically judgmental. In my opinion, we need to be conscious of and willing to rectify our biases, no matter who is put on a pedestal or thrown under the bus. By the way, women could learn a great deal from men, too. Because that’s just the way the world works.

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From my ever-present book of Zen wisdom:

This is what is strange —
that friends, even passionate love,
are not my real life unless
there is time alone in which to discover
what is happening
or has happened.

~ May Sarton ~

As I mull this pronouncement, I consider that “time alone” does not necessarily mean hours or days. It can mean just moments after waking or in the stillness of night, alone with one’s thoughts though not necessarily alone in bed. Time alone can be the solitude of sitting silently on a couch next to one’s lover, reading a book. Or it can be the empty hours of a solitary cross-country drive or in an airplane. Time alone just means time to reflect; it can be seconds or days.

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Every time I hear it spoken or read it silently, my appreciation of my church’s doctrine increases just a touch more: “Love is the doctrine of this church.” That, especially in the absence of church dogma, is enough. Knowing that a solid group of people in the congregation take that to heart is enough. And with that I’ll plunge forward.

Fame and fortune, by and large, are accidents of time and circumstance. Changing otherwise insignificant aspects of when and how would alter the outcome. 

That profound couplet would be equally as valid to all aspects of human endeavor, not just fame and fortune. For example, people stumble into romances, friendships, animosities, and schisms purely by chance. The right (or wrong) word at just the right (or wrong) time can lead to estrangement or matrimony or a thousand variances thereof. We may attempt to create floral arrangements, but our efforts would be doomed to failure in the absence of seed and soil coming together at just the right time in just the right place. So, does this mean that our relationships and our accomplishments and every other aspect of human endeavor is either “meant to be” or happens merely by chance? In a word, “no.” No, it’s not “meant to be;” instead, it’s a combination of “luck of the draw” and our response to the opportunities placed before us by time and circumstance. At least that’s what I think. As of this moment, anyway.

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Do we often allow ourselves to be the willing victims of extortion? That is, do we frequently acquiesce to explicit or implicit threats that say, in effect, either you behave as someone desires or you will be punished in some way?

Pay at least the minimum due on your credit card account or you will be subject to penalties and interest. Satisfy your employer’s expectations or you will lose your job. File your tax return or suffer the consequences. Comply with your mother’s expectations for doing household chores or lose telephone privileges. Behave exactly as your spouse or partner demands or lose conjugal benefits. Extortion is a fact of our everyday lives; but we treat it as such and demand it be stopped only when it reaches a certain point beyond which we refuse to be bullied into changing our behavior. That imaginary line is blurry and is different for each of us, of course, but life would be far easier if we would insist of calling it what it is: extortion. That honesty might alter our behaviors to the good. And it might cause extortionists to modify their behaviors, as well.

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Today’s high temperature in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas is forecast to reach 90°F, eight degrees beyond what I believe to be the upper limit of comfort. If I were all-powerful, I would prohibit the sun from baking me and the rest of the inhabitants of Planet Earth with such obscenely high temperatures. I simply wouldn’t have it. I would not extort the sun by punishing its bad behavior or rewarding obedience with my wishes. No, I’d say it once and would expect compliance.

Compliance. That’s an interesting word. The Property Owners Association has a “Compliance Division.” Intended to bully people to toe the line, I guess. “You will comply and you will like it!” I think of Gestapo tactics when I hear the word compliance. Forced adherence to rules. Far more forceful than mere extortion; it’s more like Mafia demands of payment for protection.

I believe I drifted slightly off-course from my diatribe about unacceptably high temperatures. That must be a sign that I should stop attempting to write and should, instead, get on with the day. I will have guests in my home today. Church board members, mostly, who will meet to plan to year ahead. Later, I will host a small and highly important group of friends for a period of relaxation and social intercourse. Ah, the innuendo is flowing; I can feel it around my ankles. 😉 Or, to coin (again) a word: insinuendo. Onward, toward a happy day!

Lately, several people have mentioned to me that this blog has become more of a personal journal or diary than a blog; and I have agreed. I’ve responded that it used to be more of a repository of my fiction and philosophical ramblings than a recounting of my daily life. But it always has been a salmagundi of whatever happens to find its way into (or out of) my brain. This morning, I skimmed the first full month of this blog’s content—September 2012—and found an assortment of posts about weather, poetry, my love affair with early mornings, a screed about the “new Malthusian imperative,” reviews of previous days’ activities, a travelogue or two, comments on religion, and a conglomeration of other such stuff. I found no outright fiction writing in that month.

But the blog did morph into a repository of fiction a bit later, yet all the old stream-of-consciousness assortment remained. So, the truth is this. My blog always has been what I intended it to be: a place to store what’s on my mind, both factually and creatively. Some people who claim to know what a blog is “supposed” to be might dismiss my internet real estate as an impostor; an artificial pretender that’s missing the requisite theme or threads. And that’s fine. I do not care whether my blog meets their criteria for blogdom; it meets mine.

Back to my assertion that this blog is a repository of my fiction and philosophical ramblings; it definitely is that, too. When I pick “fiction” from the drop-down list under the “categories” selector on the right side of the page, a list of blog titles (along with a few introductory lines from posts) is presented. Among those titles are Telenovela, Farmers’ Rebellion, Shrapnel, Elbow, The New Realm, Convolutions, Visionarium, Meticulous Chaos, Vishnu Islam Apollo Poseidon Chaucer-Townsend, and many, many more. Every one of them are pieces of fiction; some finished, some simply vignettes. But all of them represent what was on my mind from the perspective of fiction-writing at the time.

I’ve often contemplated stitching my fiction together into a collection (as I’ve written many times before, but which I’ve still yet to do). The same is true of my essays. And my “generic” explorations of emotion (“generic” in that they do not directly address my personal emotions). And a few other such ideas for collections. When those ideas come to mind, though, I run into a roadblock in my mind: why do a compilation/collection of materials that already exist online? Though I always overcome the roadblock, mentally, I never seem to get over it from a practical point of view. For example, why bother? Who would consume those collections? And many more.

With respect to fiction, too, much of what I’ve written either are short pieces that have never made it into the blog or are much too long (e.g., several of the novels I’ve begun but never finished). Those facts remind me that too many writers fall into my category: wanna-be. A writer who never finishes his novels or never submits his short stories for publication is not an author; he is a wanna-be author who writes. Becoming an author requires discipline and commitment. I’ve never had sufficient burning desire to be published to get beyond that wanna-be stage. So I’ve settled for blogging;  that requires neither the energy nor the dedication to get beyond low-risk, low-reward self-publishing. I suppose I want my ideas to be “out there” to share with whoever stumbles upon what I write. Yet I have not had adequate motivation to get beyond it. Somewhere along the line I’ve read quotes something like “I do not want to write; I want to have written.” I understand. In my case, “I do not want to publish; I want to have published.” More evidence of my slothfulness.

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I’ve purposefully refrained from making today’s post a rehash of yesterday’s activities. Despite the fact that yesterday was an interesting, rewarding day, I do not necessarily have to document it here. No matter how badly I might want to do exactly that.

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And, finally, today’s quotation that I will consider as I face the fact that I have neither attained Perfection nor will I ever:

He who wherever he goes is attached
to no person and to no place by ties of flesh;
who accepts good and evil alike,
neither welcoming the one
nor shrinking from the other—
take it that such a one has attained
Perfection.

~ Bhagavad-Gita ~

Onward, now, to face the day. Breakfast at a local café, I’ve been told, has replaced the parking lot gathering. I will go this once, even though I am not a golfer.