John Swinburn

Some mornings, words flow like water from a freshly-charged underground spring. Other mornings, language drips from my fingers onto the keyboard in excruciating slow motion, as if I had dipped my hands in hot tar and then plunged them into a bath of dry ice. This is one of those other mornings. I’ve been at it since around four o’clock; I have almost nothing to show. My creativity peaked while cobbling together a recipe for Ethiopian mitmita, using scraps and pieces from cooks and chefs far better equipped than I. As for true creativity, I believe I left it overnight in a chest-style deep freeze somewhere in rural Nebraska. Inasmuch as I have not been to rural Nebraska since I lived in Chicago in the late 1980s, I think the creativity succumbed to terminal freezer burn. I have been to Nebraska since I lived in Chicago, but the sole visit was to Omaha and not to the desolate stretches of rural Nebraska where I must have encountered the chest freezer.

The problem is not necessarily creativity, or the lack thereof. The problem is that I have nothing of any consequence to say. When the value of one’s words evaporates into an invisible cloud and blows away in a fierce wind, one’s mind becomes a vacant wasteland. An empty, irrelevant vessel unable even to serve as a repository of bad ideas. Even the bad ideas leaked out through massive cracks, wider and longer than the walls and fences they replaced. The mind is porous.

The problem with that is easy to see; leaks can occur in both directions, but the pressure inside is greater than outside, so the contents escape like air from a fractured balloon. A balloon can burst, but can it fracture? Perhaps a frozen balloon can fracture, but the volume of air in a frozen balloon would have shrunk from its original size, so the membrane would have wizened. A wizened balloon is not subject to fracture; it simply falls, limp, to the ground, its purpose gone with the volume of escaped air.

What is the purpose of a balloon? Do balloons have intrinsic purposes? I suspect they do. Their fundamental reason for being is to protect contents within the balloon’s sealed membrane from interacting with the external environment. But maybe their real purpose is not to protect what’s inside the membrane; instead, the purpose may be to protect the external environment from contamination by the matter confined within the balloon’s membrane.

I’ve written about balloons before. On one occasion, I wrote, “Emotions are best sealed in casks filled with lead and dropped into the deepest part of the sea; if not that, then released like white doves and helium balloons.”

I am too tired to finish the remaining half cup of my cold coffee. It’s nearing 6:30 and I’m well past tired; I’m worn. This is an unwritten sign; I should let my body try to rest.

Where does one’s energy go when it goes missing? The law of conservation of energy, also known as the first law of thermodynamics, states that the energy of a closed system must remain constant—it can neither increase nor decrease without interference from outside. The universe, we are told, is a closed system. So, all the energy in the universe cannot increase or decrease. That being said, I’ll ask again: Where the hell does my energy go when it goes missing?”

I believe my energy, of late, has been  transformed into unspent fuel. Flab. But what happens to my energy when I spend it? Like when I go into a furious home maintenance frenzy? That energy, I have decided, is simply transformed into another form of energy. Who knew, though, that a clean garage floor and sparkling windows were manifestations of energy? Who knew I have the ability to magically convert raw human energy into clean air conditioning compressor fins? Well, that’s not quite right. The fins were there to start with. It’s the clean that was missing. So, the reality is this: I can convert my human energy into clean. “Clean?” Yes, clean. That must be what’s happening, right? I spend my energy and, in return, I get clean air conditioner compressor fins. I already had the AC compressor fins, so what I really got in the trade is clean. Clean is a product of the first law of thermodynamics.

I’ll add “physicist” to my resumé.

I awoke at 3:51 this morning, earlier than usual, but not by a wide margin. I thought, at that hour, I would have a couple of hours of absolute solitude; not so, in that my wife was up less than nine minutes later. No matter. We secured our individual solitary spaces and dedicated ourselves to our individual routines. She read a book. I read a complimentary email from a friend who had watched/listened to my church insight presentation. His message also included links to a couple of items he thought might be of interest to me; they were. I spent a tad more than one hour and eleven minutes watching and listening to a recommended conversation, a video podcast on Bloggingheads.tv, between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, two Black academics, on matters relating to race. Their discussion was both enlightening and thought-provoking. I realized, while listening to them, that I might be more willing to listen to them because they are extremely articulate and African-American than I might have been had they been less articulate and/or white. Therein, I think, resides vestiges of racism and convoluted bias that I would have hoped was long gone. Their conversation led me to assess the degree to which my views on all manner of issues might be colored by my own default liberal biases or, in some cases, conservative biases I did not realize hid inside my brain.

Sometimes, I realize I have to “open the hood” and look inside my brain to get a clear image of what’s there. It’s not always pretty. As much as I want to think my intellect and an innate compassion controls my beliefs and behaviors, evidence to the contrary suggests prejudice and animus take charge more often than I would like. But those are issues for another day. This morning, I’m more inclined to explore food interests and the extent to which my likes and dislikes might be informed by fernweh.

Quite some time ago, I stumbled upon a blog entitled Afroculinaria, which as one might guess, is based on an interest in African food. The blogger, Michael W. Twitty, has written extensively about African-inspired food, especially the food of Southern African-Americans that grew out of African roots. He describes his blog as “exploring culinary traditions of Africa, African America, and the African Diaspora.” That encompasses a lot of food. And, of course, he intersperses shards of writing on politics, slavery, bigotry, recipes, and plenty more. My primary interest has been on his recipes. I remember one, in particular, that intrigued me because it was for a dish I had eaten many times, but with a different “main” meat ingredient. Instead of beef, his dish called for bison. Not a huge difference, but big enough. I had never used bison (nor have I, yet). But the dish was a favorite I had eaten only in Ethiopian restaurants, zilzil tibs. Zilzil tibs, as I had known it, was a very rare beef awash in an incredibly flavorful spice mixture. When I have eaten zilzil tibs, it has been served alongside one or more Ethiopian vegetable stews, called wot, and eaten with injera bread. At any rate, I was fascinated with Twitty’s recipe, so much so that I vowed to prepare it (but using beef, not bison). I have yet to fulfill that vow. The reason? I have not yet had, at the same time, the discipline and the ingredients to make injera bread. I know I can gather all the appropriate spices (in fact, I have a source for berbere, so I would not have to create my own as Twitty’s recipe calls for). And though his recipe does not call for it, I would want to use a more traditional recipe that includes niter kibbeh, or spiced butter. As I considered the recipe I wanted to make, I realized I like the idea of Twitty’s recipe, but I preferred the ingredients with which I was familiar. Ach! I talk a good game about making Ethiopian food, but I rarely perform. It’s time I make a commitment; either put up or shut up. So, I shall make an Ethiopian meal, complete with injera, before the heat of summer gives way to the chill of fall. Whether I make zilzil tibs or gored-gored or some other meaty concoction, I shall make a full Ethiopian meal! If I do not follow through, I will limit my food intake to 200 calories a day for a month. That should serve as a sufficiently frightening cudgel. Oh, as to fernweh. I long to have experienced Ethiopia and its foods; I’m not sure whether I really want to spend a lot of time there, though.

But I do long to return to Chile, though I have never been there. I imagine wandering to a quiet Lo Barnechea neighborhood, where I would find Hosteria Doña Tinta. I might order lomo vetado a lo pobre, but I would feel guilty for doing so, simply because of the English translation of the dish: loin forbidden to the poor. But I have been assured, though not without some degree of suspicion, that the name does not have any negative connotations for poor people. Still… But Chile. Frankly, much of what I have read about Chilean food leaves me less than overwhelmed, but I cannot divorce my insatiable desire to experience the Chilean Pacific coast from my inexplicable appetite for Chilean cuisine.  My taste for Chile, I think, can be traced in part to a house on a mountain ridge, right on the Pacific coast. I found the house on a Chilean real estate website and fell in love with the place. The design was modern and minimalist, a style I have loved from the moment I saw such architecture. The home was poised high on on a rocky crag overlooking the Pacific. A huge terrace, facing the Pacific, and a pool suggested to me the place was designed for outdoor living. The kitchen was enormous and well-appointed. Its very large island had plenty of room for workspace and for eating. I recall the kitchen was equipped with two refrigerators; at least I think so. And the price! If I remember correctly, it was priced at the equivalent of less than $200,000 U.S. I wanted to buy the place, immediately, upon finding the listing. My wife, though, being the practical sort, suggested it might be best to visit first. But before that, she suggested, we might want to retire with a considerably larger nest egg than we had at the time. Crash! There went my Chilean retirement. I still long to visit. I missed my opportunity, twice, to live in a country with a female socialist president. Michelle Bachelet served as president of the country for eight years, in two separate terms; during both terms, I remember being slightly miffed that I was not living in my dream house in Pacific coastal Chile, regularly eating fresh-caught Chilean seafood.  My fantasy life takes me to some interesting places; unfortunately, my real life rarely tags along. At least, I say to myself, I can eat Chilean dishes and daydream about engaging in philosophical conversations with Michelle Bachelet.

I really should write more about the real world. But, then, I know so much more about fantasy than reality; I would feel like a fraud writing about the real world.

It should have come as no surprise to me that listening to certain pieces of music early in the morning can have very different effects on my psyche. But I was surprised, nonetheless—when I listened to Ravel’s Bolero and Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and a piano solo of Flower Duet’ from Lakmé by Léo Delibes—that my perspective on the day changed with each piece. This was after I repeated something I did last night, which was to listen to and watch a YouTube performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue by the Royal Academy Symphony Orchestra.

Listening to this somewhat random assortment of music made me feel receptive to whatever the day offers, though that receptivity varied in its intensity and its shape with each piece to which I listened and watched. The “shape of one’s receptivity;” that’s a difficult concept to wrap my head around, much less put into words. I did it just now, I know, but probably with words wholly unsuited to the task. And how does one measure, precisely, the intensity of one’s receptivity? To anything? These words are beginning to sound like so much linguistic mush, a meaningless word porridge that has no substance. But that could not be further from the truth; there is substance in those terms. Admittedly, the substance may be buried beneath definitions twisted to fit my mind and my mood; regardless, there is substance. It is palpable; I feel it as if it were a physical thing.

Music can open one’s mind to possibilities that, without its effects, seem distant and unlikely; so remote that reality could not possibly catch up to them. But music can anesthetize the sensation of impossibility, clearing away obstacles that we allow to block the way before us. Music can make us receptive to dreams and visions and wishes and desires that seem out of reach. And it can shape how receptive we are to exploring ideas that might otherwise be hidden or dangerous or forbidden.  Music can trigger emotions both sensual and chaste and thoughts both passionate and decidedly detached. Sounds molded around notes and melodies can be either manipulative or freeing; or both.

Is it odd that music can open and close our minds? Sounds, arranged just so, can evoke supreme serenity or delirious excitement; sometimes, in a bizarre state of rapture, both can exist simultaneously. I know so very little about music. I cannot read music. I cannot tell one note from the next (I can differentiate them, one from another, but I cannot say which is which).  Yet even in the absence of understanding, I know deep inside that music is a powerful elixir with almost magical qualities. Music can erase cares and surmount constraints. It can overcome hesitations and taboos. I suspect the idea of armies marching into battle to the sounds of music intended to steel nerves and harden resolve is based on the belief in the power of music to conquer fear.

That last sentence triggered another, related, thought. Is there something about music that makes it pair well with alcohol? Both of them, in proper measure, can enhance experiences. Both can diminish inhibitions. Paired together, they can overcome irrational fears (karaoke, anyone?).  I wonder why music sounds smoother or rougher, softer or harder, and more personal with a glass of wine? It could be because they go so well together. This morning, though, alcohol is not involved in these musings. Maybe, though, we (and least I) tend to listen to music later in the day because it pairs well with alcohol. Just a thought. Along with so many others.

Onward toward the brightening day. I can listen to bird songs. Are they music? Or are they simply conversations and pronouncements I overhear as I eavesdrop on the denizens of the sky? I suppose it doesn’t matter, as long as it sounds right and feels right. Nobody needs to know of my love affair with avian cantatas if I decide to keep it a secret.

A few days ago, I mentioned to my sister-in-law that I remembered, years ago, having thought it would be cool to have an app that could identify birds by listening to their songs, sort of like Shazam does with music. Our conversation surrounded my relatively new-found BirdNET app, which does precisely that. Not satisfied that I thought I remembered articulating the wish for such an app, I went looking for evidence of my prescience. And I found it. In a post on my old blog, Brittle Road, dated August 26, 2012, I wrote these words:

The birds’ chatter gets noticeably louder and more insistent as I get closer to the plants where they are hiding. I wish I could tell from their songs what they were.  That gives me an idea!  It would be great to have a smart phone app, like Shazam for my iPhone, that would identify bird songs.  When I hold my iPhone up in the direction of speakers playing a piece of music, Shazam usually is able to pinpoint the name of the song, the artist, and the album on which it is found.  I wonder if there’s any reason the same mechanisms used in Shazam could not be used to identify bird songs?

I do not know precisely when BirdNET was first made available in beta test mode, but I suspect it has been relatively recent. Regardless of when it launched, it was (and is) a magnificent example of the marriage between curiosity, intellect, and technology. I applaud the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Chemnitz University of Technology for an extraordinary demonstration of exciting technology. A quote from the website linked in the first sentence of this paragraph says, ” Our research is mainly focused on the detection and classification of avian sounds using machine learning – we want to assist experts and citizen scientist in their work of monitoring and protecting our birds.” Such stuff makes me wish I had the wherewithal to absorb enough knowledge of ornithology and technology to participate in the exciting work of the two institutions.

Bird sounds and songs. Most humans, and I include myself, have virtually no knowledge of what those noises mean. We spend our entire lives surrounded by those sounds, but we largely ignore them or appreciate them only to the extent that they are “pleasing to the ear.” But what do those chirps and whistles and calls MEAN? Humans may never truly understand what occurs in the brains of birds as they create their unique notes and spread their voices in the sky and among trees and brush and on wires along lonely stretches of highway. We may never know.

Another mystery we want to unlock. But do we really want to know everything? Aren’t the mysteries of Nature, especially, sacred secrets about which we want to remain in the dark? Do we not long to always have just beyond our reach mystic enigmas, magical puzzles that hold the secrets to life, secrets we are forever prohibited from knowing? I think we want to know, but we don’t. We want to have answers, but we want to be delightfully confused. We thirst for knowledge, but we truly worship its absence. Like birds, we are living conundrums.

Birds, we are told, are modern-day dinosaurs. According to Julia Clarke of the University of Texas at Austin (my alma mater), “All of the species of birds we have today are descendants of one lineage of dinosaur: the theropod dinosaurs.” And there you go! That one bit of knowledge, which has been lodged in my brain for a long, long time, could prompt me to return to college to pursue a degree in a field of study that could expose me to every other field of study: a terminal advanced degree in renaissance multi-disciplinary natural science philosophy, or some other such non-existent educational fantasy. I do want to know the answers! Mystery be damned! I want to know the facts!  Ah, but do I really? I think not. I think I am just like the rest of the human race; largely attuned to science and facts, but steeped in superstition and mysticism with a touch of doubt, and anger at my inadequacy.

I could imagine spending my days in intense field work, watching living dinosaurs soar through the air. Except I would need the body of a thirty or four year-old, if I were to be moderately comfortable doing that. I don’t have such a body. Rats. Just as I imagined what would become BirdNET, I now imagine an injection that will restore youthful energy, strength, stamina, and intellectual capacity. Eight years from now, if such an injection is available, I will insist on taking at least a bit of credit for its creation.

I started the day by writing about the Unabomber. I then switched gears, locating and saving images that might complement my presentation on the transformative power of words. From there, I made a breakfast consisting of a flour tortilla, refried beans, shredded cheddar cheese, cilantro, and salsa from a jar. Then, back to the Unabomber. Then, writing about sitting in a large kettle of water, the temperature of said water increasing very gradually by one degree every three hours; would the eight degrees in twenty-four hours be noticeable? How about twenty-four degrees in three days? That exercise in writing was set aside for another time and another mood.

I took out the trash and drank a glass of iced tea without the ice. I pondered how an elderly gentleman in the mountains of Japan might dismiss my value to humankind without ever even knowing of my existence. So many thoughts race through my mind; unconnected, unnecessary, unproductive thoughts. Ideas with no bearing on reality. Curiosity about the experience of taking LSD; I never did, but would I, if given the opportunity? And I considered an article I read yesterday, describing a woman’s preparations for her planned demise; seeking an end to pointless, incomprehensible pain.

A huge creature, a beast I used to call “daddy long-legs,” is crawling up the screen outside the window to my right. I expect it is spying on me. It is part of an advance party, scouting for potential dangers to the millions upon millions of similar creatures waiting just beyond the edge of the forest. I wonder why the creatures would be interested in us? Especially me? Am I a good specimen of the most savage among my species? That creature could probably write a book at its experiences in the universe, if it could write. And who’s to say it cannot? Just because I do not understand its methods does not mean it does not possess perfectly good methods of written communication. It just has an entirely different means of communicating from me.

I may start doing podcasts or video messages each day instead of writing with my fingers. An audience of six, sleepy and disinterested, would cause my ratings to stay beneath the floorboards of an ancient house without wiring. My experiment would fail. Enough of that.

I must leave soon for my videotaping session. Wish me success, please, and don’t forget to write.

Perhaps when I return home, I will plant some dwarf snapdragons. Perhaps I won’t.

Darkness leaves early of late. Light pours in over the horizon like a silent nighttime flood, with no warning, until it is too late to wallow in the absence of light. The only symptom of the flood is the too-late-noticed dissolution of darkness, stolen by time slipping away with big, fragments of nighttime and leaving hazy horizontal holes in the sky near the edge of the earth. By the time I arose from my slumbers early on this day, the peaceful darkness has given way to chaotic morning, awash in the noise of wild birds prodding the universe with their songs.

By the time I was upright, dawdling time had long-since passed. It was time to prepare and wolf down breakfast and, then, to put the finishing touches on my celebration of words and language and their conspiracy to thrust emotion into the spotlight.  I am writing in this stilted fashion with a purpose that would be almost impossible to explain if I were to try, which I will not. At least not for now. Not before I understand what is happening in interstellar space and not until the edge of the Milky Way is clipped by invading Star-Spirits, those critters who sprinkle hope and the illusion of possibilities in their wake.

The clocks here on Earth measure almost 10:30 in this time zone, swath of sky that looks more like a shard than a slab. Time to devise plans for what the past will look like hours hence.

This bright, cool, rapidly-warming morning invites me outdoors. But I am back inside, dedicating myself to writing a presentation I will make to an empty sanctuary in the coming several days. Before I started writing this morning, I spent some time outside, listening to the birds and attempting to identify them by their songs, with the help of the BirdNET app. I did not see Scarlet Tanagers, but BirdNET assured me that I was listening to them.

My first action outdoors, though, was to hang the hummingbird feeder outside the “sky room.” When I took the feeder outside, I noticed that three of six starter pots of tomatoes had been knocked from the railing to the deck, by raccoons no doubt. Had I not taken in the hummingbird feeder, the beasts would have spilled its sugary cargo all over the deck and probably flung the feeder to the ground far below. Bastards! The tomato plants look like they survived the indignity. Now, though, I have to decide how to protect the plants from marauding raccoons.

Back to the presentation. I’m taking a break from working on it. I do not know yet when I am to go to the sanctuary to deliver my talk to a video recorder. I only hope I have finished writing it and have practiced it enough that it will not be hard for viewers to hear and watch when the video is posted to the church website. The presentation is for an Insight Service; they are held on the second and fourth Sundays of the month on various topics by speakers other than our minister. Before the pandemic, they included Q&A after the presentation. Now, though, I can avoid the embarrassment of being unable to answer questions intelligently. But the lack of feedback will make the presentation less fulfilling for me, I suspect. Such is life. I can live with just talking to an empty room. I do a variation on that theme every day with this blog.

I really have to stop procrastinating. I don’t know precisely when, but sometime during the next few days I have to deliver a finished Insight presentation. So, I must finish writing it. Back to the other writing I must do.

I’ve been awake, off and on, since 1:30. About four hours ago. I almost got up for the day at 1:30, but fortunately I looked carefully at the clock before I made the commitment to get up and get dressed. This is not a rarity. I’ve arisen in the middle of the night on numerous occasions, slipped out of the bedroom, made coffee, and prepared myself for the day, only to discover my mistake. Sometimes, I stay up for the duration. Other times, I slink back to bed, cursing my inattention under my breath. Last night, I did not get so far along. I tried to go back to sleep. I succeeded in spurts, but I woke myself from light slumber with squeeks and snorts and other such noises. Not snoring; simply breathing through corroded pipes, I guess.

But I’m up now and ready to tackle the world, more or less. First things first. I will write until I feel like stopping, sipping my coffee along the way until I finish my one and only cup. Then, after a quick shower and shave, I’ll get dressed for the day. A little more formal than usual because I have an appointment in Little Rock at UAMS with my surgeon’s nurse practitioner, my 20-month follow-up. I have an appointment for a blood draw there, too; I committed before surgery to allowing them to include my blood in a hematological study of lung cancer patients over time. I may go to Colonial Liquors while I’m in town to buy some Arkansas beer to ship to a friend out east, if they sell warm beer. My understanding is that beer degrades considerably if it’s chilled, then warmed, then chilled again. So, I don’t want cold beer. I want warm beer.

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Yesterday afternoon I facilitated a Zoom conversation about race with twenty-seven other members of my church. It was an interesting discussion, I think, though I was very conscious of the time each person, including me, took to express their thoughts. Consequently, I do not think I adequately made the points I wanted to make. I may write an article for the next church newsletter to expound on my ideas; of course, the church newsletter, like many information resources, is largely ignored or skimmed with such superficiality that my words probably will be overlooked or utterly ignored. I’m not complaining, just stating what I believe to be fact. My fundamental point was to be this: white people must take the lead in dismantling systemic racism; that may be quite painful because aside from changing minds, it will probably require dramatically reducing our privileges vis-a-vis replacing heartless capitalism with a system that more closely resembles socialism. One person yesterday (maybe two) mentioned the need to change from a capitalist society to one modeled on socialism. The chances for success are slim in my lifetime, but perhaps in the next generation or two. Youth do not have so many experiences of failure to impede their efforts.

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I extracted some thoughts, on matters presently on my mind, from posts of the past. I incorporate them below. I think I’m doing this because I have a growing urge to rifle through all of what I’ve written over the years, extracting what I consider to be the better or relevant materials into a collection I might publish. This idea, of course, is not new. I’ve thought about it extensively and have written about it here on my blog. I need either to commit to it or to abandon the idea. But, for now, I stick a toe in the water and wonder whether the effort would be worth the outcome.

Communal Society Versus Individualistic Society

There are so many other laws, social and legal, that impose the social preferences of one group of people on every individual. Think of nudity, extramarital relationships, profanity, alcohol, marijuana, Sunday liquor sales…the list could go on.

I find it offensive that society can impose its collective will on so many things that are, to the extent they cause no harm to society at large, personal matters. The trick, of course, is to define that line of demarcation at which personal liberties infringe on the social order. But, often, that line of demarcation is ignored entirely.  Too little attention is paid to the concept of freedom and too much is paid to what a large or influential group of people find disagreeable. The result is the imposition of unreasonable restrictions on personal freedom.

I could easily take an opposing view of the imposition of social mores on individuals, though. I believe individualism is a negative force in society and that a sense of community and communal efforts better serve us. Mixed thoughts; much complexity.

The Suffocation of Communication

I resent Facebook. Facebook extracted depth from communication, replacing meaning with volume. Depth now splashes in shallow Facebook pools, trying in vain to find its way to the life-sustaining oxygen of conversation. Conversation that died at Facebook’s hand. Conversation withered in the absence of air, replaced by meaningless chirps—the sorts of noises made by wind-up birds whose wings keep the attention of infants for a few moments while their parents try to breathe. But the parents don’t breathe; they perish while listening to the shrill noise of artificial love-bots.

On the other hand, Facebook has enabled us to dramatically expand our circle of interaction. And it enabled Russian trolls and bots to steal the 2016 election. I still weigh in heavily against Facebook. And against Twitter, the enabler of the Dissembler-in-Chief and his insane cult of followers.

On the Contents of “Holy” Religious Texts

My sense is that,  from the start, the “supreme being” has been ourselves, our own consciences. The stories helped some people better understand the concepts. And they were contorted and bent and wrenched into shapes that changed them from myth to reality. But the reality isn’t real. At least not from my perspective. But the original motives were probably good.

And so I am spiritually promiscuous.

The dictionary might define thunder as follows:

A loud, explosive, resounding noise produced by the violent expansion of air heated by a lightning discharge.

I have a different idea about thunder. It is a mystical, magical, wondrous CRACK!, followed by glorious rumbling growls that shake the foundations of the universe. Thunder explains, in an instant, the pointlessness of attempting to harness Nature.

Yesterday, I wanted to express my frustrations with the world around me by writing a scathing rebuke of humankind.  But I just could not force myself to the keyboard. Instead, I did as I sometimes do when my emotions are raw and the universe seems intent on punishing us for the arrogance of our existence; I put on a happy face.

I covered my face with two masks: one, depicting the artificial stoic everyone sees; the other, a piece of cloth to give protection to the people around me. Both of them are, in a sense, protective of those with whom I come in contact. And, I suppose, they protect me from the responses people might have if they saw the anger and the pain and the pointless frustration behind the masks. I say pointless because frustration with “the way things are” is wasted mental energy unless it is spent changing “the way things are.” Talking about the anguish that grows from racism and the twisted thinking that breeds it and writing about the evils of injustice…I don’t know, those are such weak responses to such an enormously damaging set of threats to decency and humanity.

An American rock band that was popular in the early 1990s, Rage Against the Machine, clearly understood the power of anti-establishment lyrics, coupled with an angry, repetitive, enraged beat. I was aware of the group, though I did not listen to much of its music. Now, though, I think I understand that its members were not only performing music, they were demanding justice by way of a growing scream that continues to echo in a vacuum today. The group’s name, Rage Against the Machine, is an apt phrase that describes what I have been feeling these last few days. Revolution, rebellion, and aggressively forcing change is on my mind these days. But being “on my mind” and “clutched in my fist like a truncheon embedded with spikes, ready to do its awful work” are worlds apart.

Last night, I watched a substantial part of #WeCantBreathe: A UUA Virtual Prayer Vigil. That was a mistake for a number of reasons. It fed my rage and left me feeling that the only thing “we” are doing is spraying a light mist of words on a raging inferno consuming the world in which we live. I was not thrilled with the overtly religious tenor of the online event, either. But that’s neither here nor there. Rebellion. That’s what we need. Voting with fists and firearms and breaking into National Guard armories with the aim of thwarting the “establishment’s” use of weaponry against an enraged, oppressed people.

This morning, I began the day with a cup of coffee. I sat outside in the early morning coolness and experimented with an app on my smart phone (BirdNet) that “listens” to bird songs and identifies the singing birds. I heard Carolina wrens and northern cardinals and crows and pileated woodpeckers, among others. And an occasional breeze rattled the new wind chimes, creating a calming sound. Now that is a great way to begin a day.

But I feel hypocritical when I seek serenity, believing as I do (for the moment, at least) that rage-infused action is what is required. What good, really, are marches and peaceful protests and letters to our Senators? What value are letters to the editor? How many years have oppressed people been told to “just give it time” and let the system work out the kinks? Oppressed minorities and the poor and disenfranchised have waited generations and generations for the “kinks” to get worked out of the system. And they have witnessed how their “allies” are complicit in the oppression. The most recent public example was in New York’s Central Park, where a woman called the police to report an “African-American man” was threatening to kill her, whereas he, an avid birdwatcher, simply asked her to leash her dog. That ostensibly liberal white woman quickly weaponized her language by telling the police, in not-so-coded language, to come protect her from an “African-American man.” And I feel hypocritical just writing about it. Especially here, a place safely shielded from most eyes. So I am protected from the neo-Nazi backlash and the dimwit hillbillies with their AR-14s and kevlar vests, brandishing Confederate battle flags.

I am deeply, deeply, deeply unhappy. There is little to like in this American society of ours. We live in a root-ball of greed whose growing branches and leaves spread its infected capitalism and merciless animosity toward the poor like a wave drowning the world. I want, desperately, to love this country. But I can’t. Not in its present form. I’m afraid it will be worthy of love only after the thick scabs that replaced its torn skin have been ripped off, revealing the body beneath. That flesh and sinew and bone might be strong enough to survive, but only if its healing is pure.

God, I hate feeling this way. It’s a mixture of rage and fear and hatred and love and embarrassment and compassion and more. The mix is tainted with sand and fine gravel, so the emotions grate against one another with every pass, the pain feeling akin to abrasions, like road rash, sprayed with merthiolate. It’s too early for liquor and I have no sources for less legal and more soothing plant-based psychic balms. So, I will “slog through the porridge,” as I am wont to say. This angst will pass. It always does. The fact that it does, though, is both embarrassing and hypocritical. Oppressed peoples do not have the good fortune of “getting over it.” Because it keeps coming back, stronger and more virulent than ever. And they get to watch people like me wring our hands and wish there was something we could do. Well there is. We’re just not doing it. We’re talking about it and pretending to be activists. Activists are not needed. Armies are. Courageous people, knives clutched in their teeth, willing to stand face-to-face with the oppressors and demand change. Fat effing chance.

I may go outside and pull and few weeds. And plant a few IEDs. Just joking, purveyors of government espionage against its own people. It’s not just the government that maintains and promotes oppression. It’s our own people. Neighbors who vote in misguided, deluded, intellectually-challenged “self-interest” that contributes to the shackles placed around our necks. I can’t stop writing about this. I must go outside and listen to birds! Or I will explode, revealing all the blood and pent-up emotion I carry around with me. If I’m ugly now, the result will require a new word the conveys ugly to the tenth power.

Enough of the screen-based scream.

If the universe treated me with the respect I deserve, it would permit me to return to a place I have never visited and again become a person I never was. The universe would allow me to escape to Abbotsford, British Columbia in the year 1977, where I would live comfortably as a forty-five year-old Canadian farmer using Dutch greenhouse technology to grow tomatoes in enormous hothouses not far from the Fraser River.

I picked 1977 for several reasons.  The same reasons caused me to choose to be forty-five years old. Those reasons revolve around nostalgia for an imaginary time when people in general, and Canadian farmers in particular, were gentle, compassionate, and intelligent. I was at my peak, physically, when I was that age, though that time would not come for me in this dimension until the year 1998. At least that’s what I choose to believe. Had I been a forty-five year old Canadian in 1977, I would have been slightly taller than I am now and considerably lighter. My waistline would have been roughly ten inches smaller and the muscles in my arms and legs would have been far stronger than they have ever been before (or since).

The rural farmland around Abbotsford in the mid-1970s was, in my mind’s eye, soft and sweet and loving. That farmland embraced farmers the way passionate lovers do, with a gentle fury that conveys both vulnerability and protective strength. That was a time before the stench of corruption in Washington, DC and all the U.S. state capitols made the air impossible to breathe south of the Canadian border. The miserable stench of Canada’s neighbour to the sound is what sparked Pierre Trudeau’s interest in building the Canadian Good Neighbour Wall. He started planning The Wall in May 1968, shortly after he took office as Canada’s Prime Minister and less than six months before Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. Apparently, Trudeau had a premonition about the decay of the U.S.

Dedication ceremonies for that first portion of the Wall, built between Boundary Bay, British Columbia and Emerson, Manitoba, were held in May 1979, just before Trudeau completed his first sequence as Prime Minister and less than six months before Ronald Reagan won the White House. The main portion of the second half of the Wall—from Emerson to Saint Stephen, New Brunswick—was finished in April 1984 and was dedicated the next month near the end of Trudeau’s second slot as Prime Minister. And, coincidentally, less than six months after Reagan won a second term. A symbolic “End of the Wall” edifice, located on the shore of Lubec Narrows (the Canadian side, of course) was dedicated at the same time.

I would have watched the U.S. elections and the ugliness surrounding them with disgust and amusement. Canadian tomatoes were in exceptionally high demand in the United States in 1977, thanks to a crushing decline in California tomato crop yield for both processing tomatoes (by far the bulk of the market) and fresh market tomatoes. The vast majority of processing tomatoes that year would have come from Canada. Florida’s fresh market crop shifted to processors, so Canadian tomatoes took the mantle of top producer of consumer fresh market tomatoes that year, too.

By intertwining fiction with fact, my excursion into 1977 British Columbian life has taken me into the bowels of an extraordinarily successful tomato farming operation and beyond. Both of my key farm managers hailed originally from Portugal, where cork, wine, and sardines were the main commerce trade exports that year. Because the tomato operations were so lucrative, I could afford to explore other options, so I decided to give my managers freedom to imitate their home country’s successes. Growing cork in British Columbia seemed far-fetched at the time, so I focused on the wine. Though I am quite fond of sardines, I felt any attempt to replicate Portuguese success near the Pacific coast would be destined to fail. Wine, though! The reason British Columbian wines are so popular today can be traced to my 1977 investment in Grape Air, the air cargo company that outfits Boeing 747s for grape transport. The company began with just six jets in its fleet; today, the fleet numbers more than six hundred. Every plane leaves Lisbon full of grapes and arrives in Vancouver fifteen hours later; nine hours thereafter, following unloading and maintenance, it heads back for another load.

It was Grape Air that allowed me to retire into a life of stunning philanthropy. Thanks to generous donations made to Canadian medical research facilities, Canadian doctors have developed cures for virtually all diseases. And contributions to Médecins Sans Frontières led to the global elimination of malaria, measles, all forms of corona virus, and psoriasis. The Grape Air Foundation was the sole source of funds for creating and subsequent maintenance of the Trans-Canada Canal, about which I’ll write more in a moment.

Even though twenty-three years have passed since 1977, I remain forty-five years old and Canada remains largely bucolic and serene. The Canadian Good Neighbour Wall remains a protective shield against it hideous neighbour to the south; indeed, we no longer permit Canadian airwaves to be defiled with feculent lies broadcast by Fox News and its ilk.

Every year, I walk from Abbotsford to Boundary Bay, where I board the Trans-Canada Ferry, an impressive paddle wheeler that floats along the Trans-Canada Canal, a marine navigation channel dug as an additional discouragement to wanna-be Canadians from the land to the south who would love to escape their mundane existence by fleeing to Canada. The Trans-Canada Canal skirts the Canada-USA border just north of the Canadian Good Neighbour Wall. My trip from the Pacific to the Atlantic takes twenty-one days, including overnight stays at the ports of Sault Ste. Marie and Fort Frances, Ontario. The trip back to Abbotsford, by horse-drawn carriage, is a months-long affair. The horse’s tail, woven into a beautiful braid, is a glorious vision to behold, even when we’re among the rare desolate stretches of road. Every year, my trip home is the subject of articles in countless local newspapers in towns along the way and, on occasion, The Globe & Mail and the Toronto Star.

I think I’ve written quite enough about the ferry and about trailing the tail home. It’s time to return to reality, despite the fact that reality is an especially unattractive destination at the moment. Such is the life of a misfit.

Responsible members of any society have an obligation to pay attention to what is going on around them. They have an obligation to protest injustice and to warn others when they see or hear or otherwise learn about dangers that could, if left unchecked, damage the society of which they are a part. But sometimes the barrage of alarming information can overwhelm a person’s senses. At times, the ceaseless onslaught of signals grows so constant and so loud and shrill that the signals, themselves, present the most immediate danger. They imperil a person’s ability to shield himself against his own deafening demands to do something—anything—in an attempt to protect himself or those he loves from growing danger. That screaming urge to take action, I think, can be so overwhelming as to cause people to do irrational things.

Sometimes, though, irrational actions are precisely what society needs to right itself. Irrational actions can so “shock the system” that members of society seem to collectively take a deep breath and look at the madness that surrounds them. It is hard to predict which irrational acts might reach through the fog of confusion when society is utterly unbalanced and unhinged. Is it an individual suicidal protest on national television? Is it the detonation of a bomb in a crowded office building? Is it the threat of widespread destruction and murder by an unknown “defender of the American way?” There is no way to know. It is not just hard to predict; it is impossible to predict.

So, there are competing forces at play: protect oneself from dangerous internal demands to “do something” or; attempt to jolt society into taking collective corrective action by acting in ways that may be irrational.

That’s a long, somewhat translucent (but almost opaque) explanation of what is going on in my head this morning. By ignoring my responsibility to “pay attention,” I have attempted to protect myself from going mad. I’ve made an effort to avoid the voice and the words of the wanna-be dictator in the White House. I’ve done the same with respect to the majority of Republican legislators in Washington (and many of their Democratic opponents). I have tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid the thick stupidity of dimwits who equate wearing masks with secret support of the “deep state.” Yet “news” keeps slipping in, attempting to slit my wrists with its sharp edges and ugly realty. I watched, in horror, the videotape of the Minneapolis police officer killing an unarmed, non-threatening Black man. I heard about the idiot-in-chief taking action intended to silence his critics in and on social media. I learned about the on-camera arrest of a CNN reporter covering the protests and destruction in response to that murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department. I could not help but hear that protesters set a Minneapolis police precinct building on fire.

Obviously, though I have attempted to shield myself from the madness of watching civil society disintegrate before my eyes, I failed. I know too much. I cannot turn off that grisly movie reel playing in my head. The images cause my brain to howl at me to “do something!” The shrieks are loud and getting louder. But there’s nothing I can do. If I had access to a nuclear devise, I might be able to grab the world’s attention by detonating it in just the right place at just the right time. I have no such device, though. I don’t even have more conventional tools like dynamite and rocket-propelled grenades. And I would be hesitant to attempt to blow up oil refineries, even if I had the necessary equipment. I could record myself screaming, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” That might have worked in a 1975 movie, but it’s too tame and too subtle in today’s live-murder, video-driven world.

Even with my attempt to ratchet-down the flood of disturbing news, it continues to flow freely all around me. And simply closing my eyes and ears would do nothing more than keep me in a state of temporary blissful ignorance for a while. I have to acknowledge that I can either be a responsible member of society by paying attention and doing something, rational, to right the ship or I can quietly withdraw and let it sink along with me.

COVID-19 seems, now, like an inevitable, unstoppable scourge, in light of the fact that we’ve acknowledged that the economy is vastly more important than human life and that the right to assemble can be asserted only by refusing to wear masks. If a police officer puts his knee on your neck, your obligation is to accept his supremacy and your impending death. Any criticism of the president of the United States is hereby declared treason. The rich deserve every penny they steal from the college savings funds of parents trying to secure their children’s future. The minimum wage should be lowered. Corporate employers should be encouraged to engage employees as unpaid interns for the first six years of employment, after which the interns should be summarily dismissed without severance. Food should be supplied, first, to the wealthy and well-connected and only then, after sufficient spoilage, made available to the rest of us riff-raff.

Hope. Less. Weep. More.

I have watched videos of eels undulating, like living ribbons, through the water. Those movements are like my moods, oscillating between enthusiasm and despair. Or, perhaps, my moods more closely mimic the rhythm of EKG machine output; regular peaks and valleys with the occasional upward spike and sharp dive. Manic one minute, depressed the next. I think there’s a psychological term for that. How frequent must the upward and downward spikes be to meet the definition of  “abnormal?” At what precise increment in the measure of frequency does “normal” become “abnormal?” Is there a “borderline normal” frequency or a “borderline abnormal” frequency of those peaks and valleys? Do those mood swings mirror the ups and downs of the EKG chart? In other words, are the undulations of eels ever borderline…anything? Or do we only classify human behaviors as natural or deviant? So many questions. So little value in answering them.

I’ve been watching Carolina wrens that built a nest atop an awning that attaches just below the soffit. The birds are now, I think, feeding their young with worms and bugs and such. The birds do not spend their time worrying about their moods, nor about other birds murdering their young without reason. Those birds are not concerned about greedy capitalists cornering the market on worms.

We have the capacity to achieve the same degree of intelligence demonstrated by Carolina wrens. We do. All we have to do is feed our young bugs, break the knees of psychotic policemen, and regulate the market on worms so capitalists cannot control the supply. It’s just that easy.

Last night’s storms shredded leaves and tore branches from trees. Leaves and twigs and broken limbs litter the streets this morning. The forest floor outside my window, normally a sea of brown leaves, is speckled with green leaves and sprigs, casualties of the fierce winds and biting horizontal rain that accompanied a series of powerful squalls.

As I drove to the grocery store this morning not long after daybreak, I had to dodge pieces of trees along the way. When I got to the store, I was surprised how few people were in the aisles; but the flow of humanity continued after my arrival.

A couple of items on my list were from the area around the pharmacy. While looking for shampoo and a specific dosage of a vitamin, I heard a man at the pharmacy counter say to the pharmacist, “Let me go home and get it; I’ll be right back.”

As I turned to go up an aisle, the man approached me. “Excuse me, sir, would you have $12 you could give me to pick up my prescription? I left my wallet at home”

I was in a charitable mood, so I opened my wallet. I did not have $12 in bills, but I did have a twenty; I handed it to him. He thanked me and said he would bring me the change. I went about looking for the vitamins and glanced over at the pharmacy counter. He was there. I continued looking. No luck; they were out. I looked back at the pharmacy counter. The man was gone. I looked around the area a bit; no sign of him. Apparently he left with my change. I’m not absolutely certain he was actually at the counter to buy anything; I may have been scammed. Oh, well. My guess is that he needed either the prescription or the money or both more than I needed that $20 bill.

I thought about that man as I drove home with the groceries. I wondered whether his life had been shredded in some fashion. Perhaps the corona virus had put him out of work. He was dressed in what appeared to be the type of uniform an air conditioning service person might wear, so maybe he’s back at work. I could venture a million guesses about him and be wrong about every one. For whatever reason, I felt and still feel compassion for the guy, even though he took my money and left.

I feel a different kind of compassion for a neighbor, a woman for whom I picked up a few items at the store this morning. She is dealing with a husband whose health is in steep decline. She told my wife that a hospice worker is coming today to talk about next steps in putting her husband in hospice. I don’t know either of the two of them especially well, but I imagine the idea of hospice might be shredding their peace of mind, though she must feel a sense of relief that part of her difficult duties in tending to her husband will be reduced. Yet feeling relief can trigger a competing sense of guilt, even when the decision is in the best interests of everyone. Ach, reality can shred serenity into threads.

When I delivered the neighbor’s bread and milk and orange juice, she gave me $12 in cash for the $11+ I spent on those items. I felt guilty taking that money, knowing what she is going through and thinking that I gave $20 to a man who might well have been scamming me. My faith in humanity sometimes comes unraveled. That disbelief in the innate goodness of humankind stares at me as I look in the mirror, wondering whether I, too, am unworthy of the confidence that I am, at my core, good. Should I have refused the $12, looking at the expenditure as a payment for a lesson learned?

I don’t know. Morality seems to be laughable these days. Decency is evidence of weakness, a badge of powerlessness. Mother Nature’s storms last night are not the only forces tearing the world around me into shreds. Emotional storms are doing the same thing. They are not as visible, but they are just as destructive. The fabric of nature heals itself. I suppose the fabric that clothes a scarred psyche does the same; we just have to give the scars time to tie the shreds together.

I quote from a post I wrote five years ago; my opinions have not changed:

Memorial Day is dedicated to the men and women who lost their lives in defense of the USA, it is not a celebratory welcoming of summer.

It doesn’t matter your politics, we owe a debt of gratitude to those people who did as they were asked. They may not have agreed with the politics of the wars they fought, but most did. Regardless, they followed orders and did their duty. Well over one million men and women have died while fighting, or supporting, wars in which the USA has been engaged. I offer my respect and admiration for them; I only hope their sacrifices lead, eventually, to peace and to an environment in which war is recognized as the ultimate insanity.

I still maintain my appreciation for the women and men who have died in service to their country. Many of them, in my opinion, died needlessly in unnecessary wars. Still, they responded to their country’s call to service, even when that call was misguided or utterly amoral. Their sacrifices remain awful reminders of the unholy costs of war.

Civil society cannot condone war. Decent human beings cannot condone war. If attacked, we legitimately can fight back, but we cannot provoke the attack simply to justify war. Leaders worth following acknowledge the idiocy of war and they do their best to avoid it. They do not glorify war, nor power, nor military might; those who do should be autopsied so we might learn what deviance might have caused their insanity.

Yesterday’s muted grey milieu proved the perfect atmosphere for working outside the confines of the walls of the house. The cloud cover remained for most of the morning and into mid-afternoon, sheltering me from the sun’s brutal rays while I power-washed the deck, the wrought-iron deck furniture, and the porch screen. The latter was the most challenging, as I had not given the screen a thorough cleaning since before my lung cancer diagnosis—so, November 2018. Well before that, I am sure; probably the Spring of that year. Oh, I’ve done some perfunctory cleaning since then, but nothing like the intensity a good cleaning demands. Finally, though, I tackled the beast. The effort involved moving very heavy tables and chairs, potted plants, grill, smoker, etc., etc. Quite the undertaking, I say.

I started after breakfast and finally, around 3:00 p.m., admitted I could do no more. I did not complete the job to my full satisfaction, but I am pleased with it, nonetheless. The view through the screen is clear, the pollen is gone from the screen, the chairs, the table tops, and the deck’s wooden planks. This morning, as I sat on the porch, sipping my coffee, the difference was stark; I am surprised I had been able to enjoy my time on the deck before the cleaning. Now, though, the experience is a delight. Oh, it could be better and it will be better as I continue the process of cleaning, repainting, and replacing a few more boards. Yet it is now sheer joy to sit there, listening to the birds and hearing the occasional lowing of cattle on the farm below us.

The process of a very late Spring cleaning continued this morning when I opened the kitchen windows and noticed that the screen were terribly dusty. So, I vacuumed the dust from them and was astonished at how much clearer a view I had to the outside world. I may have to go into full-scale cleaning mode.

The fierce winds and heavy rain that began around dusk yesterday afternoon continued the cleansing of the deck. After I had hauled all the cleaning gear out to the garage following my admission of exhaustion, I noticed a few places on the deck where I had failed to wash away dirty water that had accumulated when I washed the screen. Last night’s storms took care of them for me.

Mother Nature probably figured I did not need the aggravation of washing the deck again today, especially in light of how sore I am. Oh, yes, I am sore in places I had forgotten could be so unfriendly. My lower back, my shoulders, my wrists, and my neck are complaining loudly of the abuse I heaped upon them yesterday. A full-body massage, followed by soaking in a jetted soaking tub full of hot water until wine-time, would help with the aches, but I have neither a masseur nor a masseuse at my disposal, nor do I have access to a hot-tub. Ach, the awful injustice of first-world, middle-class poverty. I will survive even this affront to my comfort.

I’m in a philosophical mood at the moment, but not in the mood to write about my philosophies. So, I’ll stop writing and devote my time to thinking and, perhaps, reading about remedies for tired, aching, overworked muscles.

Even on this drab morning, when the sky is a muted, muddy grey, the sounds of birds singing lifts my spirits. When I awoke, much later than normal at around 6, darkness had already been washed from the sky, leaving in its wake a dim grey glow. I went out to hang the hummingbird feeder (I take it in at night to discourage raccoons from greedily drinking the nectar) and was immediately enchanted by the way the cool air enveloped me and asked me, ever so gently, to stay for a while. Though I wanted to sit outside and drink in the morning, I opted instead to return to the kitchen, make some coffee, and sit in front of my computer screen. Some mornings, I think I’ve lost my mind; my head would be clearer and my thoughts more precise and pleasant if I simply let myself relax and absorb what Mother Nature wants me to know.  But, in spite of my decision to come back indoors, the sounds of birds and the coolness of the morning fed me with a little more composure than I am used to. And I like that. (And, perhaps, the dim grey air helped.)

Having returned to the house and having sat in front of my computer, though, I have decided to make this a short-lived engagement with the keyboard. Maybe I’ll feel more inclined to blog later in the day. But for now, I need more coffee and the serenity of birdsongs and a cool, grey morning. Back to the deck.

It’s only 6:30, yet I am three hours into my Saturday. The gods of heaven and earth, at war earlier in the day, woke me from a troubled sleep during which I emptied a pistol into a substitute teacher who stole a child’s lunch money. The thief was somehow unharmed; that was even more troubling than the discharge of the weapon. The gods, by the way, remain engaged in periodic skirmishes at this hour.

I awoke to an electric sky, a thousand crooked fingers of lightning streaking across the darkness.  Echoes and rumbles that  trailed off into deep, angry growls followed claps of thunder that produced concussions that shook the floor and walls. The flash of lightning was a rapidly pulsing strobe light shining in my closed eyes, making sleep impossible. Not that sleep would have been possible with the chaotic noise that accompanies the collision of the firmament with the planet in its way. When such a story plays out, though, I do not want to sleep. I want to be a part of it. I want to be involved in some way, at least as a witness.

The power of the storm made me wish I could transport myself in time and space to the year  1800, into a deep indentation on the side of a cliff in what is now New Mexico. There, from a ledge on the side of the cliff, I will have a one-hundred-eighty degree view of the sky. From that vantage point, I will watch the lightning and hear the thunder and absorb the power of Mother Nature’s fury. With no artificial lights to intrude on the darkness, my view is pristine. I see only what Nature reveals to me. I hear only the language of the earth and sky in a battle to determine dominance. And, of course, I know Zeus will triumph. I just know. It’s interesting to me that I’m using future tense in a conversation with myself about going back in time to a place I’ve never been. A place I long to be. Fernweh, again, but taken a step further, longing to return to both a place and a time I’ve never been.

If desire took physical form, it would be wrapped around me like a thick ribbon; no one but I would know it was there, though, because in spite of its tactile qualities, it would be invisible. Unseen Fernweh with form.

Eine Reise tritt nur an, dessen Fernweh gegenüber der Angst vor Veränderung überwiegt.

This German sentence supposedly translates as “A journey occurs only when the desire for distant destinations is stronger than the fear of change.”  I have a different interpretation. To my way of thinking, here’s what the sentence means:

A journey begins only when the longing for a place one has never been outweighs the fear of staying mired in the present moment.

I’ve taken extreme liberties with the translation; it’s more an interpretation than a translation, as I said. I could have embellished it even more by investing Fernweh with physicality, but that might be over-the-top, even for a free-wheeling translator.

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Yesterday, I facilitated a Zoom conversation in which interested people from my church revealed a bit about what matters to them and how they are spending their time (in these times of pandemic). It all went reasonably well until, at the end as I was attempting to wrap up the conversation, someone mentioned that I had not spoken about my own perspective. For some reason, when I began to say what matters to me, I almost was overcome with emotion completely inappropriate to the moment. I felt like a deer in headlights, unable to control myself as the oncoming car approached at full speed. I think I recovered fast enough that people might not have noticed, but I suspect not; these people are more perceptive than the average person on the street. I can write “what matters” dispassionately; for some reason, though, I cannot speak it without melting. That unflattering character flaw has accompanied me for as many years as I’ve been alive, as far as I recall. And it annoys me and embarrasses me. I think it’s one of the (many) reasons I tend to get close to an extremely small cadre of people; I’ve survived my embarrassment with them.

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One of the people on the Zoom conversation yesterday spoke reverently about a book she is reading. It sounded interesting, so this morning I began listening to the audio-book version of The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History (the physical copies of the book are not immediately available from the Garland County Library). I’ve only gotten through a very little bit of it, but that little bit is fascinating. The author is the one reading the book aloud, which is helpful in that he is able to speak in the Lakota language so that it sounds like it is spoken by a native speaker, not someone trying to sound like a native speaker. Duh, I wonder why that is? My difficulty with audio books checked out on Hoopla from the library is that I am confined to listening to them in front of my computer; I would much rather listen to an audio book while driving in my car. I can’t, now that I’ve downloaded it to my laptop. I may have to buy a physical copy of the book.

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I am going to attempt to form a Zoom-based interest group, though the church, to discuss spicy/fiery foods. Whether there will be sufficient participants remains to be seen. The group will not be announced until next week, at the earliest. While I’d much prefer to meet face-to-face with people who have an interest in spicy/fiery foods, this might get the ball rolling for a time in the future when I may not feel like I’m putting my life and my wife’s life in danger by exposing myself to people over whose engagements with others I have no control. That’s a long and laborious sentence. It should be sliced in half and surgically reconstructed into two or more sentences. Like much of what I write.

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Aimless writing spills scraps of disconnected thoughts onto the keyboard, thereby polluting the screen with shreds of unrelated ideas. Those ideas blend with concepts unbecoming even a note scribbled hastily on an electronic napkin. The napkin, wet with the perspiration of the writer, gets stuck to the pages of an unfinished novel. The book tears the napkin the book is moved to make room for a mug of cold coffee and long-buried memories.  And it all comes down to this. This. What is this? This is an exercise in futility, causing me to decide to exorcise the demons that forced my fingers to strike the keys. And so it ends.