John Swinburn

Materialism creeps into our lives without our knowledge or consent. We see something interesting or hear about an item that appeals to a longing we think is within us. Or we watch an advertisement designed to trigger that longing, even though the longing may be a product of marketing minds whose job it is to create desire where none existed before. However, it happens, we acquire material things. Occasionally, we recognize the pointlessness of accumulation for the sake of accumulation, but only rarely do we react by taking control of our tendency toward instant—or only modestly delayed—gratification.

I cannot begin to recall all the conversations I have had with people who recognized, when they prepared for a household move, the enormous burden of over-accumulation. They were shocked at the sheer volume of “stuff” they had collected. Often, they vowed to discard all the excess, keeping only the necessities, and to never again allow materialism to control their lives. Many of them have expressed thoughts similar to these: “I realized that accumulating material goods had no appreciable impact on my happiness. In fact, when I discovered that I had collected enormous amounts of what amounted to useless garbage, I was stunned. I vow to never again permit myself to buy for the sake of short-term gratification.” Or words to that effect.  Most of those words, though, were hollow. As mine have been.

Recently, I have played with the idea of imagining a life without all the individual pieces of clutter in my life. I try to imagine how different my life might be if an item around the house were to simply disappear. Thus far, I have decided my life would be impacted to almost no extent if all the knickknacks on display on shelves were gone; the empty shelf would look slightly different. My clothes closet would be roomier if most of the clothes I seldom or never wear were to escape. The drawers in the kitchen would have fewer items in them if the kitchen tools I never use were to disappear. Of course, it’s easy to imagine life without the items that don’t really matter. But what of the ones that do?

I regularly glance at clocks throughout the house. When I imagine a life without them, I cannot foresee any insurmountable obstacles. And if the cordless phones in rooms around the house were to disappear, I would get by without undue hardship. I have discovered, in thought at least, that I could live comfortably without staplers, pots and pans of multiple sizes and shapes, most of the chairs in the house, all the tables (provided I could sit at the counter), and dozens upon dozens of other things.

I could live without the gadgets I have allowed to enter my life: the Echo Dot that serves as home to Alexa, whose weather forecasts and jokes both are unreliable; the electric kitchen timer that allows me to ignore time until reminded; the remotes for two televisions (and the two televisions); the ceiling fans; etc., etc, Of course, some of these items, and many more, seem to add convenience to my life, but they also rob me of presence. I do not seem to pay close attention to the really important things around me because my attention is diverted or made unnecessary by “things.”

This recent imaging life without is not new. For as far back as I can remember, I have occasional bouts of dissatisfaction with myself for what I consider superficiality. I regularly rediscover I either am too attached to material things or insufficiently appreciative of the material things that really matter. I have aspired to minimalism since I was in college; I have not yet succeeded. I’ve had fantasies of living in a single room cabin, far from civilization, outfitted with a bed, a single-burner stove, a plate, a knife, a fork, a skillet, a coffee pot, and a refrigerator (the cabin has electric power; my imagination is not prepared for full-on asceticism). In my cabin, I would write a manifesto for life on planet Earth. Yeah.

Of course these thoughts of excessive materialism lead to, or are accompanied by, questions of whether the same superficiality exists with regard to people. Do I take people for granted, failing to give sufficient dedicated thought to how important they are to me? Though I recognize their importance, I doubt I often allow myself (or require myself) to dedicate more than a few moments to allow my appreciation for them to fill me; to let it seep into every pore and to wash over me.  I think love requires that sort of dedicated attention. It requires a recognition that another person’s existence is key to your own and that without it you would be like an amputee forced to rebuild a life with a vital piece missing.

As usual, my mind wandered away from the road I was on. Minimalism. That’s what has been on my mind. I think life without the debris of materialistic urges might constitute a more pure existence. Without the detritus, I think we might experience more serenity, unencumbered by meaningless possessions. Maybe. But will I ever experience it? I doubt it. I still have too much “stuff,” even in my mind as I imagine life without it.

An brief excursion into Greek and Roman mythology this morning veered sharply into an interest in linguistic treatment of grammatical structures across languages. I have always abhorred explorations into the formalities of grammatical structures, perhaps because I found the explanations too complex and dry to be of any interest. Or, perhaps, I simply do not have sufficient intellectual firepower to understand them. In spite of my tendency to steer clear of grammar, when I encountered discussions of grammatical structure across languages (during an exploration of Greek god mythology), I was intrigued. (As for English grammar, I know what conforms to the “rules” of the language and what does not, I just cannot explain why.)

I doubt my interest this morning in the accusative case, the genitive, the dative, the vocative, etc. will be long-lasting. But I found it interesting to be exposed to concepts that illustrate, at least to some extent, the ways in which various languages are structured in similar ways or, at least, can be compared and contrasted.  My interest in linguistics is neither new nor encyclopedic. My oldest brother pursued graduate study in linguistics before ultimately stopping the process at ABD (all but dissertation). Partly because of my admiration for him, I explored the possibility of going for an undergraduate degree in linguistics, but got sidetracked by other interests. But my interest in linguistics never waned (nor did it ever blossom into a full-blown diversion). For some reason, I remember learning, in a linguistics class, about the term ‘glottal stop.’ My recollection relies more on the experience of duplicating the instructor’s pronunciation of the word bottle, as spoken in some versions of regional London English. In place of the sound of the “t,” there is a brief pause (which is produced by closing the space between the vocal folds).

At any rate, I found myself wandering through grammatical structures and down linguistic pathways unrelated to Greek mythology. I spent a good hour reading about the evolution of grammatical elements of spoken languages. I learned about (maybe re-learned?) the ways in which certain sounds of spoken language (like the glottal stop) are symbolized in written form (symbolized in the International Phonetic Alphabet as ⟨ʔ⟩). And I discovered that the language used to define certain terms is almost unintelligible without serious investigative research, like this from Wikipedia‘s definition of fusional languages:

Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.

I need this kind of diversion at the moment. Something that will both take my mind off the fact that the world is collapsing around us and that will briefly deepen my shallow intellectual store of useless knowledge. I still need to return to Greek and Roman mythology, though, inasmuch as I was unsuccessful at learning much today. I cannot keep writing this, for now, because I have other obligations. Or other inquisitions. That’s it, I should re-read Jorge Luis Borges’ Other Inquisitions. I remember being enamored of the essays contained in the book, but it has been so long ago that I recall almost nothing else. I hope I still have a copy; I’m afraid I may have gotten rid of it, though, in the massive book purge before our move to Hot Springs Village.  Perhaps I should try something new; some more modern. But no, not until I re-acquaint myself with the brilliance of Borges.

Enough. I have obligations to fulfill this morning. And I haven’t even showered and shaved yet. Ach. So much to do.

My new primary care doctor spent an hour and fifteen minutes with me yesterday, the longest “in-office” visit I can recall. Surgeons have spent more time with me, but I’ve been unaware of their presence as they sliced into my flesh and removed pieces of me so the remainder might survive. Yesterday, though, the doctor actually spoke with me and asked me a lot of questions. He scheduled me for a return visit in a month, as well, when he will burn off some skin blemishes on my hands and excise a particularly bothersome growth on my right hand. He explored my state of mind, as well, recommending some tactics to improve it. I am grateful for his time, but I am afraid his words and even his time have not yet spurred me to emerge from this cloud of harsh, hot, suffocating dust. But I must give it time. I haven’t even begun the new regimen of consuming an ever-increasing assortment of pharmaceutical wizardry in pill form.  And I have not inquired, yet, of Walgreen’s as to whether I can get injected with doses of Shingrix two months apart.

I wonder how my body might react if I simply stopped taking all the damn pills that have been prescribed for me? Atorvastatin, metoprolol, gabapentin, tamsulosin, losartan…and on and on. Would I wither? Would I crash and burn? Would I weaken gradually until my muscles and bones could no longer hold me erect? Would my heart simply stop beating? I do not plan to find out by experience, though I think it would be fascinating to know. One day, science and medicine may be capable of duplicating patients (but eliminating sentience from the copies, thereby eliminating some of the concerns about the morality of human experiments) and testing the effects of drugs and the lack thereof and so forth. How would I react to seeing an exact replica of me react to having drug treatments withheld? Would it have bothered me, for example, to have watched my doppelgänger’s body respond to untreated lung cancer? I will never know the answer to my hypothetical query, but thinking about the question arouses my innate interest in the philosophies that give rise to morals and their foes.

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I tried to speak to my wife yesterday to no avail. Her phone was either switched off or the battery was in need of charging. And the room telephone in the facility where she temporarily resides was not answered; either it was out of reach or she chose not to answer it when I called. She does not seem to understand how much it bothers me to have the only tether of communication shut off. But, then, I cannot possibly understand how the experience of being confined to a single room for the better part of three months, with no visitors, is impacting her perspectives and her perception of the world. I want nothing more than to embrace her and protect her from the world.  Yet she may not want that at all; she may prefer the more reliable retreat into herself. My attempts to communicate frequently may be precisely what she does not need and, in fact, those attempts could be annoying to her in ways I cannot understand.  It’s maddening to me to realize that it is possible I am largely to blame for her withdrawal.

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Mornings no longer appeal to me. The quiet hours before sunrise no longer provide respite from the chaos of daily life. I’m losing my interest in watching sunrise unfold into a thousand muted shades of pink and orange and violet and blue, ultimately cascading into brilliant oranges and pinks. That majesty, recently so awe-inspiring that it almost brought tears, is now simply a matter-of-fact process. Sunrise and its companion, sunset, do not  hold the power over me they once did. It’s as if a sheet of grey gauze, intended to filter out color and light, has been placed over my eyes.

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Last night, I went to bed very early, around 9:30. I did not fall asleep right away and I woke up several times during the night. My SleepNumber app claims I was in bed for seven hours and fifty-nine minutes; six hours and fifty-seven minutes of which were “restful,” the app claims.  I do not believe the app. For one thing, being in bed for almost eight hours is radically out of the ordinary for me; I do not like to be in bed that long. For another, I recall getting up to pee at least four times; the app claims I was up only twice. The app claims my heart rate was forty-eight, considerably lower than the normal fifty-eight. And it claims my “sleep” was restless for only an hour or so. I have grown suspicious that the app is making stuff up. Alexa, perhaps, is communicating with it, recommending it tell me lies (in retaliation for my unreasonable hounding of and cursing at Alexa for her intrusive flaws). I simply must stop believing the app. Just stop looking at what it claims to report.

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WordPress continues to refuse to display comments. Later today, I will contact my web host (that also provides me with WordPress) to ask for assistance. If that does not work, I will contact a consultant who knows WordPress far better than I in an attempt to get help. I rarely get comments, so the problem is not especially troubling, but when those few people who leave comments see that the comments they left are not displayed, I suspect it is upsetting to them. I know it is upsetting to me. Is this just another example of how I am allowing technology to manipulate my emotions? Am I permitting software glitches to control centers in my brain that regulate my heart-rate? Am I allowing the human-machine interface to cause my serotonin levels to plummet, thereby sparking anger and, ultimately, rage? I think those are possibilities. I must attempt to gain control again; it’s my brain, after all, isn’t it? Or is it? Has technology already snatched my self-control from me, swallowing it and releasing it into the internet as the technological equivalent of marijuana? That’s a question of interest: might it be possible for software and hardware to be influenced by mood-altering interference? Is that what hackers are doing, in fact? So many questions, so few answers.

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I must be back at the medical clinic in less than an hour to have more lab work done: hemoglobin A1C, vitamin B12 level, and vitamin D25 hydroxy. So, I’d better finish my coffee, take a quick shower, and eat something. And, then, face the rest of the day.

WordPress is being utterly uncooperative. Yesterday, with no warning and no discernable reason, it refused to show comments left on blog posts; not just new comments on new posts, but all comments on all posts. I can see that one or four or three comments were left, but those comments do not show up on the posts. I can read the comments if I log into my account, but they do not show up on the public area of my site. I’ve been wrestling with that problem since yesterday, to no avail. Then, today, as I was attempting to backup the site with a new plug-in, WordPress (or the plugin) put me in a perpetual loop, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of my Dropbox account. My patience is growing thin; it is now a fragile membrane a single cell thick. A stranger’s errant thought or glance from two miles away may be enough to rupture that microscopically thin film, releasing a torrent of pent-up rage in me that could incinerate Western civilization and severely damage the rest.

The proper reaction to the anger growing inside me is to make breakfast, shave, shower, and ready myself for my doctor’s appointment; my annual physical with a new physician (because the physician who previously served as my primary care doctor abandoned me and the rest of his patients in the Village, as I’ve mentioned before). All right, I will attempt to corral my burning fury with a quick bite to eat. I’m afraid, though, I might toast bread with the fire in my eyes, alone. Perhaps I should stick with water, which will turn to steam as I swallow it. Enough. I need patience right away. And the doctor needs patients to be calm, more or less.

Already, today is emerging as one of those days that challenge my on-again, off-again insistence the universe is essentially random. As I poured fresh water from a container into my coffee maker’s reservoir, I was surprised by the beauty of the shape of the stream of water. A blue light hidden in the bowels of the reservoir accentuated the stream of water as it flowed, but even without the blue cast, the constantly changing shape of that water would have been exquisite. It offered me a splendid example of the methodical connections between components of the universe.

I realize, of course, how silly the preceding paragraph may sound. The reason for its seeming absurdity rests with my inability to articulate the emotions I felt as I watched the water flow from the glass into the reservoir. It occurs to me that, if we let ourselves experience the awe of being, we cannot help but think the universe is not random; not in the least. I am not suggesting it is governed by a God, but that every aspect of existence is intricately connected to every other facet. That labyrinthine web of interconnectedness, I think, evolved over billions of years and continues evolving today. There is no randomness. There is, though, an inexplicably complex orderliness. It is inexplicable simply because its order is so exceptionally complex as to appear chaotic.

That leads me to the idea of balance. In a universe so remarkably complicated, chaos and randomness would erupt in the absence of a natural tendency toward balance. I think the universe seeks balance. I say “seeks” not in the sense of intent but in the sense of natural affinity; the way water on planet Earth, thanks to gravity, seeks to flow downward.  The concepts of good and bad, happy and sad, night and day, light and darkness, heat and cold, etc., are expressions of balance. Each pairing is enormously complex in its own right—and in some cases the “pairing” is virtually impossible to understand or even to see. Taken collectively, though, opposites represent the universe seeking balance.

Language may be a consequence of humans’ need to understand—or attempt to understand—the universe and to experience it in a way that maximizes balance. I wonder whether human emotions followed or preceded language? If we consider a baby’s cries and laughs, we might assert emotion came first. But if we consider compassion and love and hatred, we might say language must have come first, serving as a tool to shape and mold emotion. Perhaps emotions and language are among the intricate pairings that bring balance to that tiny piece of the universe that resides inside our brains.  As I imagine the inexpressible beauty of brilliant orange and pink and grey and white streaks of sky during sunrises and sunsets against massive banks of puffy clouds, I search for the balance that counters them.

Aching sadness and sharp emotional pain as fierce and penetrating as lightning bolts contravene joy. Balance. One moment, we rejoice in the overwhelming beauty of love and Nature; the next we mourn, in grief over the agony of seeing someone in pain.  Balance is not necessarily the lovely sense of harmony the term brings to mind; rather, it can be a sharp rebuke for neglecting to recognize the natural pairing of ecstasy and pain.

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That did not go where I expected it to go. My cheeks are wet as I contemplate the beauty of the shape of flowing water (I wish the film had not usurped my term) and the awful pain of clinical depression (the latter something I have never experienced).  I wonder whether balance is responsible for the tears, or whether the world simply is becoming too much.  Perhaps it’s the guilt I cannot help but feel when I allow myself respite that is unavailable to my wife. Last night, I had dinner with some couples from the now-defunct “world tour of wines group.” I was unable to talk to my wife. I wonder whether I might have been able to reach her had I stayed home and called the nurse’s station. I will try later this morning.

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During my Internet wanderings this morning, I came across an article concerning a new film about the 1995 slaughter at Srebrenica. The film, entitled Quo Vadis, Aida? premiered at the Venice Film Festival last month. I hope the film eventually finds its way to a screen near me, whether Netflix or otherwise.  Our visit last year to Bosnia-Herzegovina introduced me to quite a lot about the horrendous 1992-1995 war that included genocide. The woman who made the film (Jasmila Zbanic) is quoted in the Associated Press article as saying: “When I watch films and find patriotic things about war, I cannot identify with that. I hoped people will identify with Aida, the film’s main protagonist, because wars are banal and evil and there is nothing good in them.”  [Emphasis mine.]

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The dissolution of national territorial borders should be a global priority. Erase borders entirely. Allow everyone free access to everywhere on Earth. Of course, the preparation for that eventuality will require a guaranteed minimum income for everyone, everywhere. Existing governments will have to eliminate their parochial claims to “their” money and be willing to share or, rather, relinquish their resources to a central pool which would then distribute them as needed for maximum benefit to the largest number of people. I’m not talking here about a country or a region becoming “communist.” I’m talking about citizens of Earth being treated equally by all other citizens and by whatever global government might be permitted by the people to administer the functions of government. It’s the biggest idea that will never be implemented because it will never be given even a shred of serious consideration. Idealism should be valued more highly and given more opportunity to correct the flaws and blemishes of humankind.

The competition between days with too many things demanding my attention and days requiring nothing of me is intense. I want both, but for different reasons. When obligations consume every waking second, my mind has little opportunity to dwell on things I would rather not think about. When I am under no pressure to fulfill commitments, I am free to let tightly-wound tensions ease. Both appeal to me, but both carry with them unpleasant side-effects.

Busy days tire me and spin me in increasingly inflexible coils, all the while washing me in guilt for permitting my mind to stray from things I should think about, no matter how unpleasant. Lazy days drown me in regret for having an undeserved luxury, something unavailable to my wife for far too long.

I feel brittle; breakable, as if I were a long sheet of glass with both ends on top of two distant supports. The weight of a feather pillow half-way between could cause the glass to crack. The weight of a second pillow could cause it to shatter. I am, by nature, emotionally fragile and weak, but I cannot afford to shatter. As I consider this attribute, my anger at myself grows for failing to take whatever steps might have been necessary to strengthen that weakness in years past. Building strength requires repetitive exercise and time. I suppose I was satisfied to be soft and feeble; if not satisfied, then tolerant of the state into which I grew.

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It is impossible to know what is in another person’s head. What we might consider irrational and unwise behavior may be based, in fact, on solid reasoning; just reasoning we cannot understand or accept. That is not to say that we ought to change our mind about the erroneous nature of the behavior, only that we ought to attempt to understand what could be driving it.

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BBC.com sometimes reshapes my day from unbearable to tolerable. Today, for instance, I awoke depressed (and I remain so), but an article on BBC.com gave me a brief respite with a couple of articles relating to India. The first one related the experience earlier this week of the owners of Baba ka dhaba, a street food stand in south Delhi’s Malviya Nagar.  One of the owners, an 80-year-old man, during an interview by a video blogger broke down when explaining how his business had dwindled during the pandemic. The video went viral, resulting in an enormous boost to his business (and some significant donations) during the last few days. The second article involved a British academic’s tweet that called idlis “the most boring things in the world.” The south Indian diaspora responded with stunned indignation (and humor) to the assertion, some pointing out the irony of the pronouncement. The academic is quoted as saying “…a lot of people have made the very valid point that it is a bit rich for a Britisher to criticise Indian food as being bland!”

Aside from temporarily lifting the veil of sadness this morning, skimming BBC.com aroused my desire to have Indian food sometime soon.

My affable, cordial, compassionate neighbors have become friends. We are not extremely close, but we are becoming closer. They have friends who have known them for nearly fifty years; understandably, they are closer to those friends than to me. But our six-plus-year acquaintance is deepening. I am very slow to open up to people, probably for fear that I will disappoint—or be disappointed. Though I can pretend to be relaxed around people with whom I am not especially close, my nature is to be cautious and reserved. As time goes by, I feel my comfort with my neighbors grow and my tensions in their presence ease.

My neighbors are the kind of people one hopes to stumble upon when moving into a new neighborhood, a place about which one knows virtually nothing. I think they view the role of neighbor as one that carries responsibilities. They define neighbor in this way, I think, the fourth-level definition of the word: a person who shows kindliness or helpfulness toward his or her fellow humans.

Last night, I had dinner with my neighbors. They have invited me over to have dinner on their deck several times in recent months. They offer wine and a satisfying meal and conversation. It helps, of course, that they are liberal/progressive. They label themselves Democrats; though I almost always vote Democrat, I do not attach that label to myself (for reasons too convoluted to go into at the moment). Often, we talk about and bemoan the fact that the current occupant of the White House is utterly inept, running the once-proud country we call home into the ground and causing people around the world to consider him, and us, a laughingstock. But I digress.

Though last night’s dinner had been on our respective calendars for a few weeks, I was not looking forward to it. My experiences during the last few days have left me worn and beaten and depressed; I did not feel like “being with people.” But I went anyway. And I am glad I did. Despite feeling the same guilt I have had every time I’ve enjoyed myself lately, last night peeled away a layer or two of the angst I’ve been feeling. Simply being in the presence of two extremely generous, kind, thoughtful people helped lift my mood.

Perhaps what most helped elevate my mood was the fact that our meal was both extravagant and extremely casual. We enjoyed snow crab clusters, requiring us to use shears to crack and cut the shells and deal with dripping juices and fragments of crab shells and sticky fingers. The only way to eat crabs presented in their shells is to be informal. You have to abandon any pretense of elegance. It’s a bit like a picnic on sand; it will be messy, no matter how hard you try to avoid messiness. I felt absolutely comfortable in the presence of two good people spraying themselves and one another with crab juice. I forgot, for a while, the stress and the worry I have been feeling. Though they are both back this morning, I think a brief break from my fractured mental state may have kept me sane for a little longer.

I returned home in time to turn on the Vice Presidential debate, which erased all evidence of serenity. But those few hours with friends and neighbors were like a lifeline. Today will be another battle with the world. It will start with my “fasting labs,” which required me to cease all food and drink at 8:00 p.m. last night, and then move on to my Thursday morning parking lot meeting at church. From there, I will try to communicate with my wife.

The stress I have been feeling will no doubt increase as I attempt to figure out how to care for her when she returns home, which apparently will be sooner than I thought. I will have to provide for a hospital bed, a Hoyer lift, and various other pieces of equipment. I will have to figure out what to do with our four-poster bed and what to put in our room for me to sleep on, next to the hospital bed. I need to arrange for professional home-health assistance and other general household help to assist me. Despite all this, though, I think I came to realize last night that an occasional break is what I will need to maintain my sanity. It may also drown me in guilt, but I might have to drown to survive. My neighbors’ compassion and generosity could well have kept me from the brink of madness. I will always appreciate them for that.

A journal, properly maintained, serves as an historical record. Regularly left unattended when entries should have been made, though, a journal’s value declines precipitously. In the latter case, it may as well comprise random shreds of information that not only fail to tell a story but, indeed, may mislead. My failure to keep and properly maintain a journal of my wife’s experience since being hospitalized in mid-July this year contributes to an incomplete recounting of what both she and I have been going through. Much of what we have gone through is personal and private and not the sort of thing one makes public; at least not for long after the fact. Yet I have failed even to record it privately. What I have written has been recorded on this blog. Looking back at my posts, I see that the story is utterly incomplete, yet it does reveal to some extent the degree to which our experiences have fallen and risen and dipped again…and again…and again.  But, still, the story has not been properly recorded. No yet. I intend to spend some time in the next few days—maybe much longer—trying to document what I have failed to document. I will not post it here; not in the immediate future, anyway. But I think I need to make an historical record of one of the most painful periods in my life thus far. I assume, but cannot be certain, that it is one of the most horrendous experiences my wife has ever had, as well. And it continues.

I’ve been advised to “take care of” myself during this extremely difficult time. Though I’ve gotten advice on how to do that from several people, I don’t know quite know how. Several people have offered to help me in any way they can; they are genuine in their concern, I am sure, but I do not know how they can help. They cannot remove the constant worry and fear. They can listen, but I am certain that no one can afford the time to listen long enough, because I don’t know long I might need to tell what I am feeling. Once they heard me, though, what could they possibly do to assuage the guilt and pain, I wonder? I do not want to ask someone for help, only to have them try and discover there’s nothing they can do. That would transfer guilt and disappointment to someone who was only trying to help.

I do not know what I need to get through what seems to be a never-ending crisis. One of the worst aspects of it, for me, is that the stress and strain and mental anguish I feel must be a tiny fraction of what my wife is going through. I feel intense guilt that I can even think of relieving my pain; hers is the pain that needs relief, far more so than mine. I cannot get that out of my mind. When I try to direct my attention to other things to get my mind off what my wife is experiencing, I am consumed with guilt for having the audacity to even attempt to give myself relief when I cannot give it to her.  Those brief moments of talking with friends or having a glass of wine with neighbors or taking on projects for the church give me momentary respite, but after that break I feel even worse for having taken it. People tell me I should not feel that way. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I cannot help it. I think I’m hard-wired to react that way and the only way to stop it is to cut the wires.

Writing about what I am thinking, even as disjointed and convoluted as it is, is probably healthy. That’s what I am doing here. I am not asking the unfortunate reader for help; this is for me, to preserve what’s left of my own personal sanity.

I mistyped a word in the paragraph above. I wrote “preserver” instead of “preserve.” Perhaps it was a Freudian slip of the finger, an acknowledgement of a need for a “preserver” to cling to, hoping to keep from sinking. This is hard. Too damn hard. Too hard for me to continue writing about it here.

I am fortunate in that, when the world around me is too harsh to tolerate,  often I can retreat into my imagination. I can manufacture another world, a place filled with odd characters and bizarre landscapes; a haven free of violence and fear and worry and hate. My good fortune rests with the fact that I have a loose affiliation with the stars and a kinship with the empty spaces between them.

Often, I can slip into a world void of all the strictly human emotions that demonstrate humankind is a deviant mistake of Nature.

But not always. Not often enough. Too frequently, a clawed hand reaches for me, dragging me out of my sanctuary into the oppressive darkness. While fighting to peel off the fingers of that clawed hand, my imagination sometimes takes me in a different direction, one in which all the horrors I try to escape are magnified a thousand-fold. That’s what madness is; being caught in a swirling pit of terror and hot, wet smoke so thick it wraps around one’s throat like a boa constrictor. A single breath of that fictile soot transforms the lungs into solid hunks of concrete.

How fortunate am I, then, to readily retreat into my imagination? When my asylum can be invaded by the demons from which I flee, where is my good fortune? Is a vivid imagination a protective shield or, instead, a bright guiding beacon for a rabid succubus intent on transforming every shred of serenity in me into strips of razor wire?

Too many questions have no valid answers. Too many “what if” scenarios consist of tainted assumptions wrapped in untold lies. Even in the bright light of this stunning blue-sky- morning, shadows behind tall trees form pockets of darkness. As I watch the morning unfold, it occurs to me that shadows always follow the light. There are no alternate realities; pretense and imaginary circumstances are like magnets for that clawed hand. Perhaps the best approach is one in which reality is faced head-on. Maybe hand-to-hand combat with hatchets and clubs is preferable to dreaming the enemy has magically vaporized into a sweet-smelling mist that spreads happiness with every inhalation.

We can no more control the future than we can control the past. We can influence the future, but we cannot control it. Using our influence is the best we can do to determine the outcome of the present. When my efforts do not achieve the desired results, a brief escape into my imagination is all I can afford. I have to return to reality, wipe the blood off my face, and pick up my hatchet and my club.

Try as I might, I cannot seem to find the path that assures me I will not fall from a high beam into a canyon on one side or a deep stream on the other. No matter how closely I try to pay attention to the strip of ground in front of me, it seems always to be hidden by fog and encroaching darkness. There was a time when the sound of a water in the brook next to the path guided me—or, at least, steered me away from the precipice. The water is frozen, now; a layer of ice too thin to hold my weight but too thick to hear sounds to warn me away from the danger of falling in. I cannot step forward or backward without the risk of falling through the ice or plunging into the canyon.

My safety is not my concern, though. The risk to me is of no consequence. Protection of the light that sustains me is what matters. The safe return to radiance of that brilliant glow is what counts; the only thing that counts.

It turned out to be less ominous than it felt, but it was sufficiently troubling that it disrupted my routines. Assuming I have routines these days; I am not sure I do.

Tuesday night, at around 9 pm, less than an hour after I spent half an hour on the telephone with my wife, I got a call from the rehab center where she temporarily resides. The call was from a nurse, who informed me that my wife’s blood work revealed a critical shortage of a necessary element in her bloodstream. The shortage was so critical that it was necessary for her to be sent, by ambulance, to the nearest hospital emergency room. I spoke to my wife after speaking with the nurse, telling her not to worry, that this was something they needed to do to ensure she remained healthy.

And then I waited. My wife called me sometime after midnight to tell me she had arrived at the ER; all was well. The rest of the night, until about 4:45 this morning, I spent in my recliner; never far from wakefulness, always distant from sleep. Finally, sometime before 5, I got up and decided I would try to go to bed. Around 5:20, my sister-in-law texted me, inquiring what I knew. Nothing new, I told her. Then, ten minutes later, my wife called me. She had just arrived back at the rehab center, after a night at the hospital.

A few hours later, I spoke to the nurse practitioner who oversees my wife’s care. She was impressed that my wife was doing so well. She smiled, the nurse told me, happy at the change in my wife’s behavior. I did not speak to my wife until several hours later, when I went to visit her during one of the “Window Talk” visits, where we see one another through the window and talk to one another via microphone. My wife did, indeed, look wonderful. And she sounded like her old self. I was almost delirious with happiness. But our visit ended after 30 minutes and I have not spoken to her since. My guess is that she has been sleeping, trying to make up for an entire night of sleeplessness. Regardless, though, I feel her absence like it is a knife in my chest. Not knowing whether she is experiencing depression or sleep deprivation or displeasure with me for some reason is painful. I have no reason to think any of the above, but I feel those sensations anyway.

My pain, though, is nothing in comparison to what she must be feeling after more than two months of isolation in a tiny hospital room. I would trade places with her if I could. But I would not want her to feel the angst I feel at this moment, if we could trade experiences. I miss her so very, very much. Her experience, though, must be a thousand times worse. I am not sure whether this joint horror is worth the potential benefit of separation. I just do not know.

My blood pressure is not as high as I expected it might be, based on volume of the sounds in my head. 134/87 is, in fact, relatively close to the “normal” range, if memory serves me correctly.

I frequently hear my blood pumping through my body. The sound is enough to drive me mad. It is not really loud, but its volume is high enough that it intrudes on my thoughts to a degree sufficient to be upsetting to my serenity. As if I have experienced serenity these past many months. Would that I had.

My primary care doctor, the one who abandoned me and the rest of  his patients early this year, advised me to take my blood pressure every day and to make a record of the readings. The purpose, he said, was to capture shifts that could give me significant warnings about changes in my health. Dr. Sparkledogma was (and probably still is) a friendly, approachable, very young doctor. I am sure he’s still very young, even nine months after abandoning his patients. By the way, Sparkledogma is not the doctor’s name; I am using an alias to protect our respective privacies.

I do not feel abandoned when a grocery store clerk or a financial advisor or an attorney changes jobs; I might miss them when they go on to greener pastures, but I do not feel a sense of personal betrayal. But that is not so when someone in whom I place the security of my health and well-being moves on. When such people move on to new jobs, I feel let down; as if their assurance that my health is among their highest priorities was misleading, at best, or—more likely—an outright lie. How could they be lured away from tending to me in sickness and in health? How could more money, a less stressful schedule, an opportunity to work closer to home, or more friendly co-workers matter more to them than the health and well-being of someone who is, in the final analysis, a stranger? As I mull this over, it occurs to me that I am paying someone to care. Were those people in a different profession, I might not label them as doctors or nurses; I might label them as—to use a polite term—prostitutes. That is, of course, patently unfair. And it is simply untrue. Isn’t it?

Let’s remove judgment from the assessment. Both roles fill a professed need (the legitimacy of which can be called into question in either case, depending on circumstances). Both roles involve remuneration for service. So, are we all (or most of us, at least) guilty of applying different judgmental standards on the two professions? Social norms are fickle; they are rife with prejudice and bigotry.

This matter of feeling abandoned by a paid professional—who chooses to go in a different direction without the client—reminds me of an Australian series I recently watched on Netflix. The series, called Rake, features a n’er do well libertine barrister who, early on, is astounded when the gorgeous prostitute he has been paying for several years (and about whom he has fantasies that they are truly “in love”) decides to pursue another profession. The barrister is stunned to learn that, for her, the relationship was strictly transactional.  She tells him something to the effect that “you paid me to behave in a certain way in your presence and that ‘s what I did…apparently I did it well.” Good doctors behave as if they are caring confidants; their patients are the most important people in the world at the moment the patient is in their presence. Do not get me wrong. This is not a criticism; it is an acknowledgement of their professionalism. That’s what they should do; unless their patients feel a sense of absolute trust, the doctor cannot do everything within the doctor’s power to care for the patient.

Speaking of doctors, the doctor who abandoned me has been replaced. I got a call yesterday, letting me know that my annual physical, scheduled for next month, will be with the new doctor (unless, I was told, I wanted someone else). I chose to stick with the new doctor, Dr. Geezerfingle. I think Dr. Geezerfingle, whose first name I did not get during the call, recently moved here from a desolate small town in the midwest. If he is the one I found by searching Google, he has practiced medicine in the same little town for a very long time. I suspect he was lured to the Village by the promise of a slower pace, decent money, and a retirement “vibe.” Yes, I make a lot of assumptions. I could be wrong about Dr. Geezerfingle. He could be a strapping young physician, still wet-behind-the-ears, anxious to make his mark in general medicine with an undeclared specialty in gerontology. But, frankly, I doubt it.

The thumping or pumping sound in my ears has, thankfully, gone almost silent. Some mornings, it seems so loud I feel I might lose my mind. Seriously, some days it is so distracting I feel like stabbing myself in the hand with an icepick just to force my attention elsewhere so the noise will not be so all-consuming. Fortunately, I have been able to avoid icepicks by directly my attention to the keyboard and the screen, though this morning I feel a rather nasty, sharp pain in the middle of the top (opposite the palm) of my right hand. I felt it yesterday afternoon, too, as I was turning a screwdriver, with all the force I could muster, in an effort to remove a long screw from a board that forms the cap of my back deck railing. That’s another story that’s probably almost as interesting as this one. I’ll spare the unfortunates who stumble upon this blog; I won’t write about it.

The time is 7:16 and I am feeling breakfasty. Something simple, probably, but that could change when I see what ingredients beckon me when I enter the kitchen.

The last time I left yellow roses here on my blog in memory of my mother’s birthday was on her birthday three years ago. I think the first time I left these roses here for her was two years prior to that. Yellow roses were her favorite flowers. I think the reason for her adoration of yellow roses was the song, The Yellow Rose of Texas. My mother was proud of her Texas heritage. That song spoke to her of that heritage and the civility and gentleness of “the old days.”

But, this morning, after listening to the song on a YouTube video, I decided to do some research on it. I learned that it can be traced back to a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania racist minstrel show from 1853. The lyrics at the time were (by today’s standards) patently offensive and coarse. The sheet music version, classified as an American folk song, was published in 1858 by Firth, Pond & Company. The lyrics changed over the years until it became a far more innocuous love song, the one I think my mother appreciated. I hope so.

At any rate, happy birthday, Mom. I’ve lived more than half my life so far in your absence, but there remains in my memory (as poor as it is and has always been) a place with you in it.

Another night of brief sleep, from midnight until 3:41. No dreams this time, though, that I recall. Instead, I spent many of the sleepless moments thinking about what the universe might be like if I had the wherewithal to recreate it.

The thoughts lacked detail. I did not, for example, ponder the composition of stars nor the processes whereby life forms might evolve from the combination of elements. My contemplations dealt more with concepts, like the relationships between time and thought. In the universe as we know it today, thought relies of what we already know; things we learned in the past. The concept of the universe that kept me awake is very different. Thought, in this very different universe, would absorb information from the future to create a past. Although it may sound like science fiction, this concept is rooted in neither science nor fiction. It is rooted in an entirely different framework of existence. The closest I can come to describing it is to portray it like this: information from a future that (obviously) has not yet occurred is processed to create a past that, also, has not yet occurred. Because neither has yet happened, they are independent of one another, but inextricably linked because, without each other, neither could exist.

And that is a possibility in this imaginary universe. Neither the future nor the past are necessarily givens. It is entirely possible, in this inside-out, upside-down universe, that time can both stand still and unwind, causing events to “unhappen.” That is not to say that events are erased; they simply are transformed into non-events. To understand that admittedly difficult to grasp concept, imagine a gust of wind on today’s planet Earth turning into a piece of pumice on a distant asteroid. Suddenly, there is no disturbance of molecules of air; the wind “unhappens,” replaced by evidence of a volcanic eruption. In this universe, the volcanic eruption may not have yet occurred; and it may not even occur in the same galaxy. Assuming, of course, there are galaxies. Distance, as you can tell, are just as irrelevant as time. Yet time must have relevance, in that a future is required if there is to be a past.

Emotions do not exist in this alternate universe. They cannot exist, because emotions depend on elements of time that are reversed in this new existence. Depending on one’s perspective in today’s universe, the absence of emotions could be either a terrible or a wonderful thing. Yet in this new universe, terrible and wonderful are meaningless concepts. Obviously, then, we lack the ability to comprehend existence as it might be in this new universe. Yet, here I am attempting to describe it. That is an exercise in futility. Futility, by the way, has no place in the new universe as I envision it.

Actually, the more I ponder this new universe of mine, the more I come to realize it is simply a structure within which reality plays out. It is not reality itself. Reality is what it is; it is not the framework within which it exists. But reality relies on that framework, doesn’t it? If reality had a different framework, it would be a different reality. Take, for example, kicking a football. In the framework that is today’s universe, kicking the football would send the football into the air in the same direction as the force of the foot that kicked it. But in the framework of my new universe, kicking the football would rely on events in the future (because, having kicked the football, the past would have been created); those events may be completely different from today’s universe. Kicking the football, then, could transform in this new universe into someone biting into a sandwich or a meteor striking a distant planet.

Would life exist in this new universe? I am not sure. Life introduces pain, so I am inclined to say it would not. But without life, what is the meaning (or, the purpose) of the universe? The same question may be asked today: with life, what is the meaning (or, the purpose) of the universe? I think the answer is the same. There is no purpose, per se. Purpose and meaning are artificial constructs humans use to justify their existence. But that may be too cynical. Perhaps all matter, both living and inanimate, has purpose. Even if that purpose is to take up space that otherwise would be vacant; or to interact with other matter to cause decay and regeneration; or to illustrate, by virtue of the appearance of the past, how the future will behave.

Meaning. Purpose. Even without humans, do those concepts exist? I’ve decided they will in my new universe. I just haven’t decided how they will be measured and how they will be justified in the absence of some overarching power that drives the universe to operate.

I wrote, in an as-yet-unpublished stream-of-consciousness screed, about celestial euthanasia.

Celestial euthanasia is a process that results in the death of all the stars in the universe—along with all matter associated with stars and their progeny—suddenly collapsing the universe into eternal cold emptiness.

My new universe would begin with that process. “Eternal,” though, may be taking things too far, although my new universe would be a replacement, so “eternal cold emptiness” should be fine. The concept of celestial euthanasia is useful only as a way to stage the introduction of a replacement universe. The concept is far broader than it need be; my original thought was not to euthanize the entire universe, but only the beings in it that are chiefly responsible for pain. That is, of course, human beings. I think I decided, ultimately, to just scrap the whole thing because getting rid of humans alone would leave plenty of pets and herds of cattle and horses and so forth in dire straits; wholly undeserved.

I could probably rattle on for hours about this. I’ll spare myself the indignity; I’ll stop here.

I do not recall a night like last night when my thoughts were so insistent on refusing to let me sleep. I did all the tricks I could think of, to no avail. No matter the approach, my mind flooded with worry, apprehension, and other unpleasant emotions. I was in bed before midnight and I fell asleep rather quickly, but I awoke soon thereafter and spent quite a bit of time in between fitful sleep and worried wakefulness. Around 3:30, I got up for a few minutes, then went back to bed to try to sleep. I suppose I slept, but it was restless and uneasy. Finally, sometime after 4:45, I drifted off. Between that time and 7:05 when I got up, I spent time in restless sleep and in an odd dream. I awoke at 7:05 from the dream; I made notes of it right away so I would etch it into my brain.

My wife sat next to me as I eased the car out of a dark, rain-drenched parking lot onto a multi-lane highway. Before we entered the roadway, though, I lathered my face and neck with shaving cream and began to shave, using my right hand to hold the razor. My left hand was on the wheel.

The night was pitch black and the few lights I could see were distorted by glare and heavy rain. I could not see the road well enough to drive, but I continued driving nonetheless. I set the razor down on the seat next to me and searched the dashboard and the turn signal stalk, looking for a switch to turn on the headlights. All I accomplished was to turn off the dash lights. When I turned them back on, I saw that the speedometer indicated I was traveling at 50 miles per hour, far too fast for the conditions, especially since I could not see the roadway nor any guiding stripes. Somehow, though, we managed to come upon a gas station and convenience store. I got out of the car and walked around front; it seemed, initially, that the lights might have been on, but I discovered the beams of light were just reflections. I went back into the car and began searching for the fuse box, assuming a fuse must have blown. I decided I should go inside the store before I pulled out a fuse, just to make sure the store carried fuses.

I walked across the parking lot, my face and neck still almost fully covered in shaving cream, holding my razor in my right hand. When I entered the store, I saw a stack of napkins near the counter and tried to reach around someone to get some napkins; I wanted to wipe my face clean. Before I could get my hands on a napkin, though, two police officers—highway patrol, I think—came in the door I had entered. They were drenched from the rain. They looked at me; instantly, I was gripped with fear, thinking they were going to assume I must be drunk because I was inside a convenience store, carrying a razor and covered in shaving cream. They did not seem to be phased, though, as they headed toward the restrooms. That’s when I woke up.

The entire dream, from the moment I pulled the car onto the highway until I woke up, I was terrified. I am not sure why were were driving in the rain, in the dark; I have no idea why I would have lathered my face in shaving cream and started to shave while driving in the dark. My beard is notoriously slow-growing and thin; I’m sure a shave could have waited a day or two. I was unfamiliar with the car. I think I had forgotten to turn on the lights before we started out on the highway. I don’t know. I was just afraid and my gut was twisted in a knot. My wife had very little to say during the dream; the only thing I remember was hearing her say “I think they are on,” referring to the lights that I then learned was an optical illusion, thanks to a reflection.

Even though I remembered quite a lot from the dream, I am certain some of it has dissolved into the mist. Would that I could record dreams in their entirety, then play them back. Or, perhaps, maybe I would not like that at all.

For the first time in quite a while, I knew by the time I touched the keyboard of my laptop computer than I would write and post two articles today. This is the first. Normally, I would have posted first about the topic on my mind when I awoke; for my own reasons, normal is not the order of the day.

Unless exposed to other cultures very early on, I think children assume their own cultural norms are “normal” and they do not think of, or even know about, the norms in other cultures. In most Western countries, with several notable exceptions, the custom is for women to assume their husbands’ surnames upon marriage. Children, when they encounter married women whose surnames differ from their husbands, think the concept of a woman retaining her maiden surname is odd. They do not necessarily consider the idea of calling a name “maiden” odd, though. It’s what their culture taught them, whether intentionally or coincidentally.

An online article on BBC.com, viewed on my Samsung phone, triggered thoughts on the matter. According to the article and several sources from which the article’s author got her information, 70 percent of women in the U.S. and almost 90 percent of British women adopt the surnames of their husbands upon marriage. Simon Duncan, a professor in family life at the University of Bradford, UK, is quoted as saying, “It is quite surprising… [so many women adopt the man’s name] since it comes from patriarchal history, from the idea that a woman, on marriage, became one of the man’s possessions.” He goes on to raise the question, “…is this just a harmless tradition, or is there some sort of meaning leaking from those times to now?”

This subject has interested me for many years. When my wife and I got married, she chose to retain her maiden name. I recall being more than a little proud of her for her independence. I remember, too, thinking the practice of adopting someone else’s name was evidence of subservience on some level. During the mid-1970s and early 1980s, I participated in a number of discussions with friends on the pros and cons of women adopting the surnames of their husbands. Ultimately, though I thought the practice was somewhat medieval, I came to accept that—in the U.S. and several other Western countries, at least—it was simply a cultural norm; a practice whose roots may have long since decayed, but whose fruit remained in full blossom.  Part of my thought process in accepting a practice I increasingly found patriarchal and subservient was based in learning about marriage naming practices in other countries. In Mexico, the naming convention is as follows: A person has two surnames; the first surname is the father’s first surname and the second surname is the mother’s first surname.  Marriage does not change the woman’s name. So, for example, here is a hypothetical example in practice: José Garcia López marries Luisa Pérez Garza (she retains her name); the full name of their child, whose given name is Estella, is Estella Garcia Pérez.

I think I have written before about naming conventions in some Scandinavian countries. In Iceland, for example, a child’s surname is created from the father’s given name, followed by “-son” or -dóttir (“daughter”). Again, marriage has no effect on a person’s names. As an interesting sidenote, though, in 2019, the laws governing Icelandic names were enacted which will no longer restrict given names by gender (a long story behind that, there is). Icelanders who are officially registered with non-binary gender are permitted to use the patro/matronymic suffix -bur (“child of”) instead of -son or -dóttir.

Strangely enough, I have gone off-track again. My intent was to explore the patriarchal nature in Western culture of women adopting their husbands’ surnames upon marriage (after doing so, I promptly revealed examples in which that is not the case). But it’s more common than not for women to give up their own names in favor of their husbands’ names. I think the cultural norms of a society are closely aligned with the political leanings of the society (or vice versa). For example, I would expect Republicans to be far more likely to oppose women retaining their names upon marriage because, in the Republican viewpoint (as I see it), to do so would be an affront to patriarchal culture; and that, my friends, is sacrosanct.

I have much more to say about this, but my focus has dissolved into a hazy mist. More when I am able to be more precise and persuasive. Next, my second post of the day. Eventually.

Fastidious cooks, I suspect, clean their ovens after each use, preserving the bright-as-new shine that looks, to me, like an oven has been ignored. But looks can be deceiving; those fastidious cooks apply more energy and time than I am willing to give, thereby ensuring a spotless shine worthy of showroom display.

Although I do not use the oven a great deal when I cook, when I use it the things I cook apparently emit oily vapors and flecks of fat or tissue or strings of vegetable protein and the like. The oven in my house is not hideous, but the glass door is deeply unattractive and the once-shiny interior surface of the oven is dull and mottled. If it were a dog’s coat, I would call it a hazy deviant brindle. Except this oven’s interior was a bright cobalt blue when purchased. Now, it is a rather odd brindle blue, not at all pleasing to the eye. I hope it will shine again, though. I decided last night that the oven needed cleaning, so I prepared to tackle the job. I set out a spray bottle of filtered water, a plastic scraper, a towel, and soft cloths. Then, this morning, I sprayed water according to directions and set the oven to “Easy-Clean.”  Ten minutes later, the sound of a bell signaled that the task was finished. I opened the oven and wiped up the water. An improvement, but not at all what I expected.

The directions suggested especially dirty ovens might require a second “Easy-Clean” cycle. Though this oven was not especially dirty (but what do I know about the relative dirtiness of ovens?), I decided to go through the process again. While that is happening, I am writing. Ach! There went the bell again! I will return here when I am older and wiser.

I am older, but not appreciably wiser. The second “Easy-Clean” process did little to improve the appearance of the oven. I wiped the oven surface, expected the shine to return. An almost imperceptible improvement; still, not clean. The next step, the instruction manual says, if the oven remains embarrassingly unattractive, should be “Self-Clean.” “Self-Clean” requires the kitchen to be vented, all accouterments removed from inside, outside, and near the oven, and a long time period without access to either the oven or the stove-top burners. Three settings, ranging from three to five hours, are available. Temperatures inside the oven reach upward of five hundred degrees during the process. I remember that either the installer or the salesperson suggested “Self-Clean” be avoided because the high temperatures could damage the appliance’s delicate computerized controls, rendering the oven and the stove-top useless and exceptionally expensive to repair. So, what to do?

The manual does not mention oven cleaner, but I have some of the stuff I use on internal elements of my smoker to clean up after brisket, ribs, turkey, pork loin, etc. Those meats, coupled with high temperatures and smoldering wood chips, leave black, hardened goo and layers of smoke and grease on the racks, drip pan, and door, not to mention the internal sides, top, and bottom. I use oven cleaner on some of those elements. And I decided to spot-clean the oven with the stuff. It’s working, I hope, as I write this. I shall see.

Dramatic improvement, but still not as clean as I’d like. So, I did another spot-clean. The down side of using Easy-Off is that the stuff has potent ingredients that cause me, if even a tiny whiff of the stuff gets in my lungs, to go into a fit of coughing that lasts several minutes. I suspect several layers of lung tissue are vaporized when one part per billion mixes with air that I breathe in. Thankfully, though, my pulmonary decay contributes to a shinier oven. The next time I go in to wipe the inside of the oven, perhaps I should try to hold my breath for the three or four minutes necessary to accomplish the task. I rather doubt I would be successful, inasmuch as it’s tough for me to hold my breath for ten seconds during CT scans of my chest.

The deed is done. It’s as clean as it’s going to be, I suspect. Though dull spots abound among the shiny blue surface, they are not spots of dirt. No, they are the scuffs and abrasions of food preparation. Those hazy areas amid the polished luster of sparkling cobalt offer evidence the oven has battled pork roasts and pizzas and chicken breasts and sausage & cheese balls and hundreds of other explorations into meal preparation.

It occurs to me that the oven (as well as the stove-top and the smoker and the grill) constitutes one element in the cycle involving the combination of heat and ingredients. The animals and plants we consume transform nutrients and fuel from the sun into their bodies and substance. We then apply heat to the flesh of those animals and plants, transforming them into our own bodies. Eventually, our bodies decay to form nutrients that finally may make their way back into nutrients. The only constant in the cycle is the sun; it is required for the heat and for unleashing the nutrients required for the next step in the cycle.  If I were more inventive and more energetic, I could skip the oven and the stove-top and the smoker and the grill. I could rely, instead, on the one constant. I could harness the power of the sun to cook my food. Hmm. I suppose that’s exactly what I’ve done heretofore, without even realizing it. The sun’s power must have been harnessed to allow for the creation of those cooking devices. While I’m not directly harnessing the sun’s power, I am the recipient of the efforts of others to do exactly that.

This is the sort of thing that happens when one cleans the oven and thinks about the process. It leads places that, initially, might have seemed utterly out of place in one’s brain. I just referred to “places,” as if there are locations in the brain associated with thoughts and ideas. I know that is theoretically correct. I wish I could control places in the brain, mine and others, that deny entry to anxiety and fear and doubt and discomfort and all the rest of the emotions that can make life seem to be the enemy. But I can’t. So, instead, I clean ovens and wash the deck and patch dings in walls that should have been patched years ago. That’s my attempt at therapy. That, and cooking. And writing.

Sometime within the last week or two, dictionary.com and thesaurus.com got new looks. I use both websites quite often, though I haven’t visited them for several days. This morning, as I clicked on my desktop link to dictionary.com, I noticed a different color scheme—with a brighter intensity—right away. When I clicked on a word (I had looked up “anxiety”) to find synonyms, I saw that the color of thesaurus.com, the other half of the website pair, had changed, as well. Their respective logos, too, were different. Yet, as often as I use both of them, I could not recall precisely what was different about them; I just knew “something” had changed. My inability to recall just what the two schemes looked like before this new look bothered me. How can it be that I could not recall details about something I view with some regularity? My powers of observation or, at least, my powers of remembering my observations, are low.

My curiosity grabbed me by the collar and forced me to explore what I had failed to remember. It has been years, literally, since I made us of the internet’s Wayback Machine, but I remembered it existed. I had to depend on a Google search to lead me to archive.org, where a quick search revealed examples of the “old” look of both websites.

Having piqued my interest in remembering the appearance of some other websites, the Wayback Machine took me to the website of Challenge Management, the company we operated until we decided to retire. And I looked at various versions of the website of my church. Before I got thoroughly lost in old websites, I came to my senses. While I am glad to have the resources of the Wayback Machine, looking back at what has been replaced has only so much value and no more. Peering back at the “old versions” of every website I have ever visited would be an enormous waste of time and energy. And, as I learned this morning, the Wayback Machine has the capacity of becoming an enormously distracting attention-grabber. I do not even clearly recall why I looked up the definition of “anxiety.”

The Wayback Machine cannot take a snapshot of my thoughts at any given time; that’s what my writing does, but not if I allow myself to get sidetracked by wild goose chases. I wonder about the etymology of the phrase, “wild goose chase.” I think I shall see what I can find. Ah, wouldn’t you know it? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, though its earlier origin is unclear. And that little exploration revealed something else about “goose,” the meaning associated with “jab in the rear” and a bevy of related sexual slang.

I could drift through the history of language for hours if I allowed myself the freedom to do it. Instead, I’ll have breakfast and a shower and make my way to my morning “Window Talk,” the last one of this week.

Obituaries rarely capture my attention, but one I read this morning did. It was the death notice of the neighbor who died almost two weeks ago. The obituary told the story of his long life in a truly loving way, honoring his accomplishments, his interests, and his loves and passions, illustrating how they were so intricately intertwined with one another. I did not know the man as well as I would have liked; his obituary told me things about him, though, that reinforced my sense that he was a genuinely good person. Not just superficially good, but good deep down. The obit also caused me to reflect on my interests because this man’s interests were so varied: fly-fishing, playing pool, lapidary work, stained glass, silversmithing, woodworking, magic, woodcarving and golf. Each of those hobbies require both interest and discipline; a person has to be able to focus intensely on them to achieve a depth of skill that brings the level of satisfaction necessary to enjoy them. But maybe the skill is not the important thing; maybe it’s simply the satisfaction of doing something enjoyable.

I think the breadth of his interests illustrates the depth of his engagement with life. That concept is, for me, a bit hard to understand and explain; yet it’s so clear to me as I think on it. Adequate words to describe the idea elude me. The fact that this man earned his doctoral degree and taught at the college level for many years while spending time outside the classroom engaged in such diverse hobbies intrigues me. I appreciate what must have been the richness and intellectual range that such diversity suggests. Perhaps the intensity of focus required to attain a doctoral degree teaches one how to apply that same intensity to what, for me, would be a casual and short-lived interest.

My interests are just as broad as his, I think, but not as deep. And my discipline sometimes seems nonexistent.  For a short time, I was fascinated with welding and metal-working. I enjoyed it immensely. But my interest and involvement went only as far as the night class in metal arts that I took. Though I was extremely interested, I was unwilling (or, perhaps, unable) to invest in the equipment I would need to continue the hobby at home. The same thing is true of my interest in working with clay. I enjoyed pottery-making and mask-making for a couple of years or more, but when circumstances changed that prevented my free access to a studio at my leisure, I stopped. I was unwilling to invest the money to get kilns and pottery wheels and so forth. Ditto wood-working and painting.

I think I know why I have been unwilling to pursue hobbies that require investments. It has been because I know who I’m dealing with. He is the sort of person who is apt to lose interest when it becomes apparent his skills do not measure up to his expectations. Unfortunately, that is true of pretty much everything I have tried. Even engaging in interests that do not require significant investments soon reveal that I will not become a “master.” So I abandon them.

What is most frustrating to me is that I know I do not have to become a “master” at any of them. I simply have to enjoy them. That’s all it takes for a hobby or interest to be fulfilling. Or, at least, that’s all it should take. But for some reason that’s not all it takes for me. If I’m not good enough at whatever I try to satisfy myself, I’m not good enough to continue with it. No matter whether I enjoy it or not. My enjoyment begins to decline when it becomes apparent I will not achieve a greater level of skill. It’s like I want to reach the level of professional in everything I attempt; if I can’t, I stop trying. That’s not always true, though. I think I could have enjoyed metal-working and working with clay; the investments were the stumbling blocks. I have never wanted to fritter away money needlessly (though I do exactly that involving all kinds of other things).

I’m psychoanalyzing myself here. Doing a reasonably good job of it, too, if I say so myself. But I’m only recognizing the symptoms and identifying the disease; I cannot seem to find the cure. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s a chronic condition that must simply be managed, not cured. My way of managing it is to move on to the next interest, knowing it will be of limited duration.

Ed had it together. He achieved a long lifetime of accomplishments and he enjoyed a variety of interests outside his profession. I aspire to be more like him. Perhaps I will try stained glass next. I’ve had more than a superficial interest in working with stained glass for a very long time; just never explored it. Maybe now is the time. If only I can avoid thinking I need to achieve competence equal to the creator of the glass in the Chapel of Thanksgiving in Dallas or the glass in the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México in Mexico City. I try to convince myself that I must remember it’s the process, not the product. But I always forget. Ed must have known how to harness the attitude that what’s important is the process, not the product that emerges from it. I want to be like Ed.

Soon after I awoke this morning, I developed a craving for congee. My impatience kicked in at the same time, so I cobbled together many (but not all) of the ingredients for basic congee, threw them in the Instant Pot, and am now hoping for the best. I have not familiarized myself with the directions for using the Instant Pot, which is a mistake; I tend to avoid directions unless the outcome of avoiding them is almost cataclysmic. That’s not always true, but usually. Give me a chain saw and a radial arm saw and an oxy-acetylene torch and watch the fun begin. I hope the outcome of making congee is less dangerous than the prospective encounter with shop tools. I may know by the time I finish relieving my fingers of letters of the alphabet and other keyboard characters.

My SleepNumber app informs me I did not sleep well last night. I did not need the app to tell me that; I was well aware that I was restless all night and slept only in fits and starts. It failed to capture one of two trips to pee, though, so I am not sure I should believe all it tells me. But it says I did not fall asleep for an hour and twenty-two minutes after getting in bed and that sounds about right; I had a hell of a time getting to sleep. According to the app, that finally happened at 1:33 a.m. The subsequent “restful” sleep amounted to two hours and forty-two minutes of my five hours in bed. So, I was tossing and turning for roughly half the night. The app gave me a SleepNumber score of 15 for last night; I average 61 and my best ever was 92. I have work to do on making my sleep patterns restorative.

Regardless of how long it took and how restless it was, I finally awoke at 5:14 a.m. from a disturbing dream, in which I asked a burly and very unfriendly-looking guy blocking my old red car to move his jalopy of a car out of my way. Then I realized I had lost the keys to my red Ford, a late 1950s model, that was improperly parked in the driveway in front of a monstrous and horribly disorganized box store (I had been inside). My assumption is that I was in Mexico, in that all the people I encountered spoke Spanish. Somewhere in the dream I realized I was supposed to be somewhere soon, but I had no idea where, and I had no transportation, given my misplaced or lost keys. There was more, but it’s gone now. But, toward the end of the dream (I think), it occurred to me that I have to record an introduction for a church insight presenter mid-week and the timing of that recording could conflict with my wife’s visit to the wound center in town.  After I awoke, I consulted my calendar and discovered there is no conflict, so I tore that little shred of anxiety from my psyche and discarded it. God, dreams are bizarre! They wrap one in such convoluted fears and place the dreamer in circumstances that he would never encounter in the real world of consciousness.

I wonder whether our lives would be appreciably better if all we had to worry about was staying out of the reach of hungry predators, finding adequate sources of food every day, and securing a reasonably safe and comfortable place to sleep each night? If we could discard worries about overeating, asylum-seekers, Presidential elections, the Oxford comma, too much salt, mass extinctions, Supreme Court appointments, artificial international borders, drug cartels, military spending, etc., would the challenges of survival seem less onerous and more appealing?

I remember so very little about my carefree childhood; assuming, of course, it was carefree as I suppose most childhood is. I wish I did, though. I wish I remembered a time when I lived for the moment and worried about nothing. That must be among the most spectacular and attractive mental states available (or not) to human beings.  I envy people who can remember in great detail the joys of childhood. I cannot remember much about any phase of my life, up to and including retirement—it’s like my memory of books and movies; once I experience them, most of the detail vanishes into the mist.

Soul-crushing worry and subsequent regret, though, stick with me for years. Someone told me recently I should be in counseling/therapy. They may be right. Either that or the magic pill I wrote about not long ago. Not the one that makes me larger, nor the one that makes me small, nor the ones that mother gave me… Where the hell is Alice when you need her? Someone else, a person who periodically partakes of mood altering substances, says they are not as innocent and innocuous as some say and as I’ve believed since the 1970s. That’s another thing one might not need to worry about if predators, food, and shelter were the only things that really warranted one’s time and attention. It occurs to me that some people who go “off-grid” may be battling their demons, the ones comprising what we ironically call modern “civilization.”

Demons, I think, are the attributes of our society that needlessly drag us into caves and beat us bloody and senseless with truncheons originally designed to provide for our protection. Somewhere along the line the purpose of these devices, intended originally to bludgeon attacking wolves and tigers, morphed into tools of control and subjugation.

Wait… Is the congee ready? Indeed it is. This post, therefore, shall be abandoned to its own devices, whether truncheons, clubs, cudgels, sticks, blackjacks, or hammers.

Now that was worth waiting for, in my opinion.

As the pressure builds inside this bubble we call the United States, I suspect more and more people are beginning to develop a tiny shred of understanding of what it might be like to seek asylum in a country other than one’s own. A person—gripped by fear, possessing little or no money, and unable to speak the language of a place she hopes will be a refuge—puts her faith in humanity that someone will offer assistance; someone will help deliver her from the hellish nightmare that caused her to abandon everything and everyone she has ever known. How would she react, upon reaching her hoped-for refuge, to being detained and treated like a common criminal, rather than an economic or political refugee? How would I react? I can only imagine my fear would be magnified a thousand-fold and my faith in humankind would diminish dramatically.  As we witness the deconstruction of democracy in this country, can we imagine a time when we feel compelled to leave everything we have ever worked for, to leave our birth families and our friends, and seek asylum in Norway or Iceland or Canada or Chile?

I call this country a bubble because we are insulated from reality by what we read and watch and are told. While a free press is integral to a free democracy, the benefits of a free press (which increasingly is in peril here) are delivered only when the people partake of what the press makes available. And the press must not only be free to report facts, it must actively investigate and dig to find them. Today, the free press is under intense economic pressure because “the people” are choosing not to support the press financially. Subscriptions are declining and advertisers are investing in non-traditional channels to reach into the pocketbooks of their intended victims. The result is an underfunded press and an uneducated populace. We don’t know what we don’t know and we don’t seem to care.

With a handful of exceptions, I think what’s left of the free press in this country tends to accept what they are told; they report accordingly. They are complicit, therefore, in the massive misinformation and disinformation processes that are taking place in this country. They, and we, buy the BS being sold by our own government. They, and we, accept carefully orchestrated information campaigns designed to pacify us and remove from our reach the weapons of recourse. Somehow, suddenly, the voting process in this country has become a hotbed of malicious manipulation; it cannot be trusted. The postal service cannot be trusted. Voting machines can be hacked. Ballots can be snatched and magically reappear with votes cast for the “right” or the “wrong” candidate. As the press reports on all manner of accusations made about the voting process, I believe the accusers are planning actual rigging and manipulation; that will offer “proof” that the accusers have been right all along. We are being carefully led to slaughter and what’s left of the “free press” is busy exploring accusations about the illegitimacy of vice presidential candidates and other such smokescreen distractions. If the “free press” ever turns its attention to the facts, the public will fail to read or listen, because we will be glued to “news” being delivered by QAnon or AlterNet or 1600 Daily or Anti-Fascist News. Those sources are not “news;” they are mouthpieces designed to slant “facts” to support their political perspective.

One of the definitions of asylum is “an institution for the maintenance and care of the mentally ill, orphans, or other persons requiring specialized assistance.” Given our refusal to acknowledge what we are seeing take place before us, perhaps that is the asylum we seek. But it will not be available to us, no matter where we go; arguably, we cannot prove we are mentally ill or otherwise require specialized institutional assistance.  The asylum we might ultimately have to see is  “an inviolable refuge; sanctuary; the immunity afforded by refuge in such a place.” When I arrive in Norway or Iceland or Canada or Chile, will I be detained, strip-searched, and placed in a holding cell for months while the authorities decide whether I will be permitted to stay? Will I be shipped back to an authoritarian regime staffed by thugs hungry for blood and the thrill of the screams of the tortured?  I suspect it will be both. Like every country facing an influx of refugees and asylum-seekers, my countries of “choice” will be overwhelmed by the flood of people fleeing in fear for their lives. The remnants of the free press will attempt to report on the travesty, but they will be silenced “for the public good.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. If the corruption becomes so blatant (but how could it become more blatant than it is?) that the people can no longer tolerate it, they might start a revolution. While that could start another civil war, it might instead trigger an intense national (or global) introspection that leads to a cleansing.

But until the majority of us realize that what we are all seeking is “an inviolable refuge; sanctuary; the immunity afforded by refuge in such a place,” we will not recognize that the asylum we desire can be right here. Until we are willing to share that refuge with other asylum seekers who have no place else to go, we will not find the peace that asylum should provide.

I don’t have the energy to weave all the threads of this meandering diatribe together. They form a fabric, in my head, but my fingers are incapable of stitching them together in a way that shows the cloth clearly. Asylum. I weep for all the asylum seekers, including those of us who one day may have to adopt that description.

I spent too much time this morning writing a post that I dare not make public, lest I be accused of conspiracy to practice unlicensed surgery by excising the malignancy of a grotesque public hypocrite from the body politic. That having been said, I join many millions around the world in mourning the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She has been called a trailblazer. She was that and much more. Her remarkable legacy will be long remembered and honored.

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Today began, in earnest, when I finally got out of bed at 6:42. I cannot believe I slept that late. The day is half gone and I have accomplished nothing. My Sleep Number app claims I went to bed at 1:14 and, with the exception of five short periods of restlessness, slept through the night. Until 6:42! The app says I had four hour and fifty-three minutes of restful sleep.  And, then, I awaken to a day half-consumed by emerging daylight and lost darkness.

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I have a Zoom meeting this morning to discuss a website. Though I suppose it’s an important matter for the church, nothing much seems particularly important to me of late. Churches, in general, are on my list of snarl-eliciting matters. In another church-related matter, I have made multiple calls to the local Catholic church and to a Baptist church, seeking a sliver of information about parking lot maintenance contractors; I have not received return calls. I think my mistake may have been saying I am a volunteer with the Unitarian Universalist church; in the tiny little minds of some people… I won’t go on. I’m angry at the world right now. There’s some evidence my little piece of the world may be improving, but there’s so much more evidence the rest of it is swirling into an already clogged sewage mistreatment plant. Jeez! Can’t I finish a single paragraph without diving into the darkness?

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Yesterday, or perhaps it was the day before, I went through a bunch of photos from the trip my wife and I took to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzogivina, Slovenia, and Montenegro. I selected several photos that showed my wife’s smile, saving the images to a dedicated folder. Looking at the photos was at once uplifting and painful; I want to see that smile again, here at home.  It’s hard to smile when confined to a little room and with rare opportunities to interact with loved ones except by phone and an occasional window visit. But those visits will become more common, at least for the next week. The facility agreed to let me visit her every day for a while; I hope those visits lift her spirits.

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It’s almost 8:30. I should make the bed, eat some breakfast, and shower. I feel like crawling back into bed, instead, but I won’t.

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Ten minutes later and I’m feeling more “up.” I called my wife and spoke to her for a few minutes. We talked about a painting in her room; two dogs with a singled stick in their mouths. The dogs look like they are smiling. I think my wife would like a big Labrador retriever to come to her room, put its head in her lap, and allow her to lavish affection by petting its head. I’m in favor of that.

I have only vague recollections of Buffy Sainte-Marie from the late 1970s and early 1980s, although I instantly recognize her name when I hear it. And I remember her fame emerged from her music, though I do not recall specific songs that I associate with her. Her name same to my attention again recently while listening to a SiriusXM station entitled North Americana, a mixture of music from the U.S. and Canada. The programming for the channel is described as “Today’s alternative country meets yesterday’s folk, rock & roots; everything from Tom Petty and Blue Rodeo to City and Colour.”

Wikipedia describes Sainte-Marie as an Indigenous Canadian-American. Wikipedia reminded me that she was a co-writer (with Jack Nitzche and Will Jennings) of “Up Where We Belong,” the Oscar-winning song from the Officer and a Gentleman sound track. I learned, from reading that article, that she married Sheldon Wolfchild, with whom she had a son; her son’s name is Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild. Starblanket was the maiden name of the wife of the son of the chief of the Piapot Cree band. I won’t go into the connection; suffice it to say there was one.

Why I was so fascinated when I stumbled across Buffy Sainte-Marie’s music is a mystery. It’s an even greater mystery why I was possessed to explore more about her background. And I do not entirely understand why I was enthralled by her son’s name: Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild, though I suspect my interest stems from something I wrote (outside of this blog; not published here) a few days ago. My words involved being wrapped in stars and witnessing the wild majesty of the universe beyond our planet and beyond our solar system. “Starblanket Wolfchild” seems to describe what was going through my mind when I put the words down.

I am sure it’s sheer coincidence, but strange coincidence can be twisted into evidence of spiritual connections. Coincidence can be rejected outright, replaced by belief that the “coincidence” was not coincidence at all but, in some mystic fashion, destiny. I dismiss such stuff as rubbish, but not everyone does. Some people thrive on such celestial connections. They build entire religions on frameworks of happenstance and accidents of time and proximity. Or, perhaps, they use the coincidence as fuel for their books and stories. Books and stories become mythology and legend. Humans’ ways of explaining the inexplicable or incomprehensible.

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I try to enmesh myself in writing and thinking to keep my mind off unpleasantness. It does not work. My thoughts get tangled. They create dreams that morph into nightmares that will not end. Last night, I dreamed of being in a two-car garage littered with small rattlesnakes that could strike double the distance of their outstretched bodies. The snakes could slither vertically up walls, too, and launch themselves across the width and breadth of the garage. The dream merged with another, somehow, in which people signed up to visit specific rooms in a house; someone had to accompany them to the rooms to protect them from the snakes as they made their way through the house.

My mind feels like it is wearing thin, as if my brain is made of thin cloth worn thinner by rubbing against a metal post. This thought reminds me of a time when, as a child wearing a new pair of slacks, I slid down the metal railing attached to a set of concrete steps leading from the sidewalk to the porch. The cloth of the new slacks wore through in the crotch until the fabric was almost transparent. That’s what my mind feels like; thin to the point of tearing.