John Swinburn

Until the psychopath in the White House has been removed, the chances of a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic are slim. His vacillation between one set of false assertions and the next, his tendency toward chaotically churning lies, and his willingness to blatantly disregard everyone more competent than himself (i.e., every living human) all contribute to the likelihood of a dark future. Only if people with expertise in medicine and biology, healthcare policy, and economic policy are allowed to take control of the country’s response to the pandemic do we have a chance of recovery. Judging from his history of utter failure in every aspect of his presidency, he will not permit knowledgeable people to take charge. And his Republican enablers in Congress are just as much to blame as the man to whom they bow and scrape. Eventually, I think, the chief incompetent and his sniveling worshipers will be turned out by fed-up American voters, but that may be too late.

Democrats in Congress share the blame, as well. I would like to examine the voting records of every Representative and Senator, after first reading through the unnecessarily complex language of legislation (designed, in my opinion, to hide vast amounts of corrupt rewards for political favors). I suspect an overwhelming majority of members of Congress have engaged in deeply corrupt practices, even while promoting and supporting some legitimately beneficial legislation in the process.  But the argument that “I should not be punished for stealing your car because I used it once to take food to the needy” is not sufficient to avoid prosecution.

This morning, I feel very much the cynic. Not about all people, but about damn near all politicians. It is as if involvement in governance exposes participants to diseases that damage their moral core. They may enter the fray with good intent that, unfortunately, succumbs to enticements to the exercise of greed.  More often than not, though, I’m afraid people enter politics knowing full well it is a dirty, disgusting racket. The good politicians, the ones who truly want to serve the people and do good, have to fight tooth and nail to retain their dignity and decency in a cesspool of corruption; maintaining one’s honor while actually accomplishing positive actions for the people is an almost superhuman endeavor.

The pandemic and its ramifications have the potential of remaking our society into something of which we can be justly proud. I’d like to think that is exactly what will happen. But I’m afraid I’m not only a cynic this morning, I’m a pessimist, too. We have to keep trying, but I’m afraid the effort is akin to fighting to put out a thousand-acre ocean of burning gasoline with a wet napkin.

***

In spite of my very sour, somber mood this morning, I was moved by something I read on the NPR website. There’s a movement afoot to save the U.S. Postal Service by encouraging people to go online and buy stamps. The USPS is suffering enormous losses, thanks to mail volume drying up in the face of the coronavirus. The movement, encouraged through the hashtag #BUYSTAMPS, is attempting to save an institution we depend on for communication. Regardless of how much we have shifted to electronic communication, mail delivery remains absolutely vital. Our idiot-in-chief doesn’t give a damn, though. Yet another reason to support it with significant purchases. I plan to go to USPS.com today and buy some stamps.

Today, my wife and I celebrate our fortieth anniversary. Celebrate may be too strong of a word; a celebration suggests more than a nice dinner at home. Yet that’s the plan. Because of the pestilence. But a nice dinner at home will be a very special dinner at home; my wife’s homemade lasagna, the very best lasagna I’ve ever tasted. So, I suppose it is a celebration. Remembering forty years (and then some) of coping with adversity and celebrating spectacular good fortune. We’re both different people today than we were forty years ago. But we’re different people who have been changed, in large part, by the changes in one another. Forty years of sickness and health, time to love and to cherish, leading up to the beginning of the next forty years. Maybe not forty more, but many more, I hope.

Ekstrom Noble. Lavender Bridge. Linoleum Price. Stricklin Barber. These people live beneath the dura mater, that outermost meningeal layer that that would protect my brain if my skull chose to abandon its role in that regard. Perhaps “live” is the wrong term. Perhaps “occupy” would more correctly describe their existence. And whether they reside just beneath the dura mater or deeper still, between the next two meningeal layers, or hide even deeper, I do not know. I suspect, though, they inhabit an imaginary space as yet undiscovered by neurologists and biochemists. They—meaning Ekstrom and Lavender and Linoleum and Strickland—are not alone there. An almost endless cast of characters join them there, wherever “there” is. Brighton Davis spends time there. So does Lina Lindström and Kolbjørn Landvik and Calypso Kneeblood and Fracas Edward Schlattery, Jr. and dozens more. And there was Garcia; just Garcia. He was gunned down in the first chapter of a book I never finished (one of many). But he was a central character in the book, all the way through to the end that was never written. He was the legend around whom the lives of the other main characters revolved.

The only discernible link between them are their unusual names. And, of course, the fact that they exist only in my mind and, occasionally, in my writing. I often wonder why I seem to be fascinated by characters with unique names. I suspect uncommon names lend an air of mystery to them, even before I flesh out their personalities. And I must want or need them to be unique, counteracting the drabness of their proletarian creator.

I could spend days and days and days creating the histories of these invisible people, beginning with their places of birth and their early lives. In fact, I have spent considerable time delving into the backgrounds and experiences of people whose minds work, in some ways, like mine. I know, for example, that a broken man whose last name is Truman but whose first names change depending on circumstance took his girlfriend, Cinnamon, to a hospital emergency room in Houston. The trip to the ER was immaterial to the story, if I recall it correctly, but I needed to know about it in order to know Truman well enough to show his descent into a turbulence of his own making.

Hmm. As I think about these characters, it occurs to me that their names are not the only links between them. Their troubled lives connect them. The circumstances in which they find themselves, though radically different from person to person, are difficult. In some cases, their circumstances are intolerable in the extreme. If I were to document their lives in sufficient detail so that they could fit into a story, the story would be very long indeed. Light-years long. And if their lives were intertwined, the story would form an epic soap opera, far more intense and improbable than Days of Our Lives or General Hospital or The Edge of Night. Odd that I recall the names  of those soap operas. I never watched them, but I knew of them.

I have better things to do today than reminisce about under-developed characters in unfinished stories. But the fiction inside my head sometimes is more appealing than the reality in my field of view and certainly more attractive than the character in the mirror. I can engage in conversation with the characters in my head and, if I’m careful, I can confront the more dangerous ones without being injured or killed.

Rod Serling was good at describing a world in which the impossible was commonplace. My mind is like that, but I lack either the patience or the skill to pull it off. In Serling’s world, a man could throw a stone at his own image in the mirror and the glass would shatter the man into a million shards. I do not own such a mirror.

Yesterday, I smoked a brisket, an eleven-plus pound beast that barely fit in the little electric smoker. In days gone by, I would have spent the entire day burning mesquite logs to heat the heavy steel firebox of an offset smoker. But yesterday, I entered an electronic temperature setting and loaded mesquite chips every few hours until a digital thermometer signaled me that the desired internal temperature of the meat had been reached. Though the old style was more difficult and time-consuming, it yielded better flavor and a greater sense of accomplishment. The flavor of yesterday’s endeavor was very good, just not as good as the meat that resulted from the more involved process. But that may not be true. Expending considerable effort sometimes enhances its own rewards; I can’t compare two briskets, prepared by different methods, side-by-side.

The effort involved in the “old style” of smoking a brisket would have engaged my mind in a way yesterday’s did not. That’s not true, either. My mind would not have been engaged. It would have been otherwise directed. Maybe sedated is the word. My thoughts would have been muffled beneath a layer of internal directions to perform repetitive mechanical tasks. Anesthesia by routine. Instead, the wonders of modern technology enabled me to smoke a brisket, cook a pot of beans, and pickle the beets to accompany the meal with little effort, leaving me plenty of time to dwell on economic turmoil, physical challenges, mental distress, and personal failings. Luddism has its benefits.

I’ve been up almost three-quarters of an  hour. I wish I could go back to sleep, but that’s not in the cards. It’s approaching 4:40. I am not in the mood to write, nor read, nor think. I would like to simply empty my mind and sleep, but I cannot shut off the switch that keeps thoughts racing through my brain. My mind is in mania mode. Now may be a good time to watch another episode of The Good Fight.

Death steals from us, leaving only shadows and memories. Those fragments of the past are wholly inadequate to replace the vibrancy lost to the endlessness of forever.

John Prine died yesterday. I never saw John Prine in concert, but I listened to his music thousands of times. And on occasion I watched videos of his live shows. He and Leonard Cohen were polar opposites in many ways, but I consider both of them poets of unmatched depth. They plumbed my emotions so completely that I considered each of them my closest friends, even though we never met. Their minds went to the same places mine goes. We conversed without speaking to one another. I read their minds. Or they read mine. John Prine’s death diminishes me in a way I cannot put into words. John Donne understood, though his poem addressed the loss brought about by the death of each person:

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Gloom seems to be washing over us with each passing day. The planet was sullied with the presence and power of Trump. Then the coronavirus swept across the planet. What will be the third most recent unspeakable horror, the one that will finish us? Are these plagues messages sent by Nature, urging us to abandon the planet before the planet abandons us? On the one hand, I do not for even a moment believe Nature or any unseen, all powerful being is urging  us on toward universal genocide. But on the other, I wonder about the statistical probabilities of wave after wave after wave of natural phenomena that challenge humankind’s existence. These waves have washed over us for centuries; nevertheless, we persisted. Hah. A little word play on the pointlessness of our attempts at relevance. I have tried to put a positive spin on this most recent calamity; cleaner air, clearer water, less crime, etc., etc., etc. Yet my assessment always comes back to the conclusion that Earth would be a better place without humans. Some of us claim, with great fervor, that we need to take better care of Mother Earth. The best care would be to stop destroying it through our continued presence.

So, how is it that I mourn the passing of John Prine, yet I suggest the world would be a better place if we all followed him? (Well, we all will, but I’m talking about something sooner than “eventually” after another hundred thousand generations.) I don’t know; I do not claim to be overflowing with logic this morning. Logic is not what fills my head; pain and anger and something to which I cannot attach a name clog my brain this morning. As they have many mornings of late. Not just mornings, either. Ach.

Maybe I mourn John Prine because of his humanity. He wrote “Hello in There.” That song is an ode to compassion. But it recognizes the flip side of compassion; neglect.  The lyrics tell that story; for example:

Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello”

***

The air is mostly clear this morning. A few clouds. When will I look up,  wondering whether it’s a cloud blotting out the sun, only to see a sky filled with nuclear missiles?

***

Powerless. That’s how I might feel if I were to walk outside my house and see a crowd of people, each of them carrying assault rifles, chanting about the Second Amendment. But if I were to exercise my rights, under the same amendment, to brandish a nuclear weapon, I might not feel quite so impotent. What are “arms?” The right to bear arms. The etymologies of “arm” and “army” are quite similar; they are intertwined, in fact.  The Second Amendment was, from the beginning, an incomplete thought buried in a nonsensical sentence. It should be rewritten and replaced with a coherent message.

***

The clock tells me it is just after seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. My brain tells me the time is much, much, much later than that. My brain tells me time no longer matters, because it’s too late. Too late for the clock to matter. Too late for time to have any bearing on what happens next. Too late for anything. Too late for everything.

The clock might as well be deconstructed into its original component parts: iron ore, petroleum…no, even earlier than that.

All the way back to the formation of the rocks that formed that ore.

All the way back to the point at which bodies of dinosaurs and the earliest plankton were settling at the bottom of seas that no longer exist, just beginning their journey toward forming petroleum that would, millions of years in the future, be extracted from the ground to make plastics.

Even earlier. As if “earlier” had any meaning in the absence of time.

Everything has origins. Multiple origins. Beginning with the stars of distant galaxies and culminating with the stunning combination of just the right processes and just the right ingredients and just the right environment and just the right time to result in…that spectacular something that captures one’s attention and holds it in awe.

What happens, though, when “just the right time” no longer exists? How does origin end? And when? “When” will no longer have meaning when time ceases to be. “Too late” evaporates into a meaningless mist.

Nothing will matter. Time will have scurried away toward the demise of everything. Origins will no longer have meaning, nor will endings. All the hopes and dreams and monumental expenditures of energy and passion that once drove humankind to expand beyond its capacity to survive will simply vanish. No tears. No expressions of mourning.

But there may be a seed left behind. A tiny seed that might recapture time and give it new meaning. A seed that, from the moment it arouses from the soil until it reaches maturity as a magnificent tree that reaches beyond the sky, will measure time and return it to its right course.

Last night’s Zoom videoconference was successful and not-so-successful. I think it was successful in that the participants (including me) enjoyed the opportunity to see and hear the voices of people outside today’s limited personal spheres. We all shared a little bit of ourselves and enjoyed the uplifting mood. It was not-so-successful in that some, perhaps most, seemed a little awkward or uncomfortable in an environment in which the only commonality among them was the fact that they know me.

In hindsight, I think I should have refrained from asking the world, via Facebook, about its interest in joining a happy hour videoconference. A better approach might have been to invite smaller groups of people, all of whom shared some commonality aside from knowing me; church acquaintances in one group, past joint co-workers/friends in another, etc. Groups with something that binds them together besides simply being connected to me in some fashion. Live and learn, I suppose.

The group was smaller than the expected twenty-plus people who said they would join. The maximum number of people who joined the videoconference reached only eleven, I think. Even that number was a bit too large. Six or eight would have been a good limit.

A future teleconference, especially one of the size of last night’s (or larger), might be more successful if led by someone who’s more gregarious than I. While I think I did a half-way decent job of faking it, a truly gregarious facilitator would have done a much better job of engaging the participants and getting them to open up. My friend Jim, who was on the videoconference, would have been a far superior facilitator, for example.

As I sit here this morning considering last night’s experiment, I’m reaching the conclusion that me attempting a video “happy hour” with many people was slightly insane. I am an introvert, pure and simple. In face-to-face “happy hour” environments, I tend to stay at the periphery with a few people with whom I feel closer than to the rest of the crowd. Though I’m capable of engaging and putting on an act of being gregarious, it’s not really me. I don’t enjoy it. What in the world made me think I would enjoy hosting a “happy hour” in which I would facilitate conversation? Madness.

But I did enjoy it, because it gave me the opportunity to engage with people whose company I enjoy. Just not as much as I might have in a more intimate environment with a smaller, more close-knit group.

One final thought about videoconferencing. I do not like talking on the telephone. Why telephone calls are unappealing to me, I don’t know. But last night, after everyone but one other participant and I had left the conference, I realized I really enjoyed one-on-one video. It felt very much like I was having a face-to-face conversation. I felt the same earlier in the day, when my friend Jim connected with me via Zoom to demonstrate using different background images. It felt like we were in the same room. I’m going to explore whether other friends also use Zoom or are willing to give it a try.

***

Because I cannot get COVID-19 off my mind for a single minute, I have to write about it. At this very moment, I feel overwhelmingly sad about what has happened and is happening worldwide. We are in the midst of a pandemic that is wrecking lives and livelihoods. The virus is sickening or killing millions and is ruining economies and the individual lives that depend on economic stability. When I hear predictions of “when this is going to end,” I think to myself, “this will never end; its impacts will be felt forever.” The repercussions of this pandemic will last many years longer than I will. And in those years I (I hope) have left, my way of life may be so radically altered as to bear no resemblance to the one I had until now. I try not to worry, but I do, about my wife. She’s getting physical therapy two or three days a week and I am concerned that someone else in that office may be shedding the virus. And when I go out to the grocery store, which is a rarity, I  am concerned that I might bring the virus home with me. I try to religiously follow CDC guidelines, but I wonder whether I am doing enough, or following them properly. I know I must lift myself out of this; I cannot let my sadness blossom into depression. I know that. But I worry that it might. When I realize, as I do at this moment, that there’s not a waking moment that the pandemic is not at least in the back of my mind, I worry that it might. I’ll give it a week; see what I write seven days from now.

***

I’ll try, today, between taking my wife to physical therapy and re-recording my poem for the Sunday church service (apparently, the sound wasn’t quite right), to coax the basil and chives and jalapeño plants into thriving. I now wish I had someplace to do more full-scale gardening than the few pots on my deck. And I wish I knew where to buy seeds. The old ways don’t work anymore. Nurseries are no longer open. I don’t want to go to the Lowe’s garden section (it may not be open, anyway). I’ve taken to saving seeds from tomatoes in the hope they will germinate when I plant them and will produce enormous, healthy, wildly productive plants. I’ve always wanted a tractor and a huge, secluded place to till the land and grow a garden. So much for that fantasy. Now, I’d be happy to have a few more pots and a source for seedlings.

Yesterday’s post marked number 3200 since I began this blog in August 2012. Almost eight years. A few years ago, I explored some of my earlier blogs in an effort to tally the number of posts I had written at the time. After I counted those posts, I wrote that “Musings from Myopia, my earliest blog, and the one I deep-sixed in a fit of writer’s existential rage, survived 1262 posts. It Matters Deeply, which apparently didn’t, lasted  82 posts.” There have been others, but the number of posts they contained is insignificant. I’ll round up and say I’ve written at least 4550 posts. Just 450 to go before I reach 5000. What will I do then (assuming I have not succumbed to the coronavirus or some other fatal affliction)? Probably the same thing I’m doing now. I’ll mark the occasion with a yawn.

***

“I’ve never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Clarence Darrow is said to have uttered those words, though a quick online search did not satisfy me that the words really were his. No matter. I appreciate and relate to them nonetheless. I can imagine much joy at reading the obituaries of select people I’ve never met. I realize, of course, that harboring such thoughts is contrary to everything I’ve been taught; such an attitude is anathema to the morality to which I subscribe. How is it, then, that I can believe in the worth and dignity of every human being, yet simultaneously acknowledge that I might get an attitude lift by reading an obituary? Hard to say. I suppose, deep down, I do not consider those whose obituaries might lift my spirits to belong to the category “human being.”  That may well be it. All human beings share the qualities of empathy and compassion. Hominids that do not possess those traits are not human. It’s the only explanation I can come up with to justify my hypocrisy.

***

I looked at my Twitter account (to which I very rarely post) this morning and found some interesting (to me) things I shared in years gone by:

• The sharp pain of personal loss cannot be shared, except in the abstract. All we can do is to try to weather the pain. And remember.
• Worshipping the gods of angry weather…and sacrificing a bottle of wine to them.
• Evaluating Fresca and vodka as an alternative to psychotropic drugs for the treatment of career-related depression.
• This is the time of day, just before I leave for work, that I feel like having a mourning martini.
• I’m stunned, saddened by Gwen Ifill’s death. She was the face of professionalism and decency in journalism. My sincere condolences to all. (That was my most recent Tweet, November 14, 2016.)

I have yet to appreciate the appeal of Twitter. Though I find Facebook more appealing than Twitter, neither compare to personal blogs, in my opinion.

***

One year ago today, this blog provided me with the opportunity to complain bitterly about a searing pain in my esophagus, courtesy of my 60 sessions of radiation therapy. That pain is, thankfully, gone. At the time, it was deeply upsetting, but it permitted me to engage in dark humor. This blog seems to have become my personal journal. I think I’ve said that before. About seven thousand times. Time to go toast an English muffin and top it with a delightfully hot and spicy homemade (by my wife) marinara sauce.

I think there’s a continuum of economic commerce that ranges from offering neighbors a needed cup of sugar to unflinchingly demanding a pound of flesh before even a grain of the sweet stuff is released. Maybe the spectrum is even broader. Maybe it begins at one end with freely sharing any and all of one’s possessions. At the other end, perhaps, is absolute control by one individual or group over other human beings; economic slavery or actual bondage.

If I am right that there is a continuum of commerce, then I may be right as well that commerce operates along two tracks: social and pecuniary. Neighbors sharing sugar clearly would fall on the social track. A refinery’s demand for payment before releasing a truckload of packaged products to a retailer is a pecuniary transaction. But even the social track involves payment; the exchange is emotional as opposed to monetary. The two tracks  increasingly, it seem to me, are blending with one another. I suppose they have been merging for a very long time, but I sense a more rapid combination in recent years.

The social track of commerce slides toward the pecuniary track when barter is involved. (But maybe the definitions are at odds with my thoughts; pecuniary involves money, while barter involves trade. Trade and money are not synonymous; but for the purposes of this morning’s musing, I’ll consider them blood relatives.) I wonder whether there exists a precise point at which the social, human element of commerce becomes secondary to the pecuniary or monetary element? There must also be a point at which the social track goes off the rails (pun intended), replaced entirely by an expectation of precise financial payment. Farmers’ markets at which payment in cash is expected, but where some bartering may occur with respect to reducing unit costs based on volume, retain some of the social elements. A grocery store with fixed, inflexible unit pricing on vegetables, regardless of volume, is clearly driven by financial expectations.

Progressives tend to favor the social track, I think. Conservatives tend to favor the pecuniary track. In my ideal world, sugar-sharing would be common in every component of human interaction. Money would be merely a convenience to enable more comfortable and efficient sharing. For my conservative doppelgänger, the ideal world would remove the unpredictable emotional aspects from commerce, ensuring absolute consistency in all transactions, devoid of emotional messiness.

My ideal form of commerce would necessarily intertwine with the political environment within which it would function. I suppose I would call that political structure Humanitarian Socialism. But maybe I shouldn’t call it that. I just learned, thanks to an online article published by the Jamestown Foundation,  that Chinese political analysts judged the collapse of the Soviet Union to have been caused by Gorbachev, who “was beguiled by the siren song of ‘humanitarian socialism,'”

Enough of this. Contemplating commerce will not achieve my goals for the day.

To heal. To me, the term conjures a string of related words and a host of related thoughts behind them. Healing leaves scars from wounds. Those wounds and their consequent scars may be physical or emotional or a combination. Whether injuries are minor or traumatic beyond description, scars left in their wake suggest restoration. Scars, though, sometimes lie. Scars that appear as confirmation of healing may be merely imposters masquerading as recovery; scabs, easily torn away to reveal the wound underneath.

Scars. They are evidence of injury. Evidence tends to prove or disprove an assertion. In connection with injuries, scars offer proof. But in connection with healing, scars neither prove nor disprove the extent to which healing has taken, or is taking, place. Scars may form in the absence of healing, their energy directed not toward restoration but as armor against further attacks.

A bullet lodged in the belly can remain, its damage camouflaged by new skin. The overt manifestation of the agony of rejection or abandonment can fade and disappear. But the scars left by those wounds do not necessarily offer assurance that healing took place. The bullet can be dislodged. A simple word or an unexpected memory can cause anguish to emerge anew.

A weapon or a word can cause a wound. Whether the afflicted can recover from the trauma depends on innumerable factors.  Recovery does not necessarily translate into healing, though. Recovery might lead only to a scar and ongoing pain. Healing from a wound, in my mind, means returning to a previous state in which the pain from the damage is gone. A scar may remain, but the pain is no longer present. Unless the pain has disappeared, healing is incomplete, at best. Scars may simply hide the damage; or they may preserve it, ensuring the damage lingers on and on.

How does one measure the extent to which a body or mind has healed from an injury? I think most of us can only guess and estimate and assume, when it comes to healing. Certainty is the province of professionals.

My thoughts this morning are fuzzy. I’m trying to wrap my head around something with tentacles and claws. My efforts are not working. The tentacles are wrapping around my neck and the claws are scratching my chest. And I think the beast may be carrying a pistol.