And walking into the sunset, grabbing the sun, and pushing back

After a life of having so few serious issues, so many great days, so much luck on friends and family and career... then, the last few years, especially the last few months, especially the last few weeks, especially the last few days...  facing the possibility of a drop, into an ocean, into some level of loss of all the things that used to fly me high up over the water.  Yes?

No.  No.  No, not going there, not giving it up, not even a mild concession.  Not letting any of this take me, or pull me down, or slow me down, or be a last chapter.  It is not the last, or the second last, or an end in the farthest sight.  Showing me the bottom and asking me, hey, ready to cave in?  No.  Me, pulling my head up, dropping the smile, giving instead a stare of eyes back to the devil, to the death angel, and saying once again, now, tomorrow, next month, next year - not even close, not now, not ever.  Will fight on and on and on.

After Thanksgiving

The problem isn't lack of gratitude.  It's more like suspicion of New Year's resolutions.  What is there to resolve?  A graceful decline?  The late matinee?  What happened to... a killer band?  Bringing home justice?  Saving a stranger?  I'm thankful for what's home, but not for what I haven't brought home yet, or that it may never be.  Thankful for the future, but not convinced that it will be a new and righteous chapter, epiphany, celebration.  For now, not yet coming back, not yet fading away.

Early check-out

It was a term I used to use more often, back when I considered self-destruction a more arguable proposition, but didn't want to give it more seriousness than I thought it deserved.  OK to consider, but not OK to consider gravely, so to speak.

Now as I am sailing through completely different waters, with a lot more natives chucking spears at my ship from the shore, I am thinking more about involuntary early check-out, and wondering about a new term.  Early departure.  Early exit.  And maybe not so early?  If I go tomorrow, it isn't a case of the good dying young, even if I were to claim "good."  Not yet at three score and ten, but not early.  Lincoln was 56, Kennedy 46, Mozart 35, Alexander 32.  Now that's early.

So just, as my mother always recommended, leave 'em laughing?  Tipping the cap, glad for what you had, and with a smile?

There's the ticket.  The late matinee.

The tedium of old guy medical stuff

Once more into the ring.

Used to be that I was a healthy dude.  Always, for years and years, maybe a cold, maybe a broken bone or a gash, but nothing light's out.  Nothing even light's dimmed.

But for the last five years the dimmer has been twisting back and forth, letting me know that this health thing that everyone seems to know about is something I should know about, with big bills and scary prospects and a lot of science that is, at least, interesting, and language that catches on and catches up.  Like, a few years ago, vertigo, then cancer, metastasis, and radiation.  Last summer, a clavicle, then a stroke, or no maybe not.  A flock of acronyms: CT, PET, MRI, TIA, EEG.  And now a new one, a word that I never really thought medical, but now learn is.  Very medical.  Seizure.

I guess my first thoughts about seizures are combative, or at least physically assertive - he was seized. The platoon was seized.  Or credit remedial - the assets were seized.  Taking possession by force. 

But now I learn  that it's about a whole panoply of stuff that can happen to your brain.  The wonderfully European gran mal and petit mal.  Epileptic.  Partial.  All of it, more or less, an electrical fault across the circuits.

It is now my current diagnosis, this time of a short period of really falling off the vocabulary/grammar bus, unprovoked, just something that happened, just something.  Couldn't talk right for a while, then it came back.

J’étais saisi. 

But you really don't want a seizure, 63 years into the play.  You don't know the lines and you really, really don't know the last scene.  They really don't know how you got there, or if you will get there again, or was last summer a seizure, and this, or just this, or neither.

J’étais saisi.

Sounds better in French, non?

Baseball has been very good to me

I live in a great baseball town.

Just an example from the stats (and baseball is all about stats):

Boston has about 7.9 million people in its SMA, and attendance at Fenway Park this year was 2.8 million.  St. Louis has about 2.9 million people, and at Busch Stadium this year the total was 3.4 million.

And Boston isn't bad.  It's just that we are different here, the Cardinals are a civic asset that identifies us.  In Boston, the Red Sox are great but they probably define the city less than do the Celtics or the Bruins.  The Cardinals were for years the westernmost team and still are the team from just south of Chicago to north of Dallas, west past Kansas City (Oklahomans are big fans) and east into Eastern Tennessee.  It's not just KMOX and its amazing reach, it's all the territory of Cardinal Nation, with stations all over the Midwest.

So tonight there is a deciding game of the World Series, and if the Cardinals win there will be another, all at Fenway Park in front of a crowd that will be... well, impolite.  Boston may not be as bad as Philadelphia, where they toss batteries at the players, but they will show a lot more love for their team that for the sport.  As opposed to the fans here, who applaud when a guy from the other team makes a really good play. 

Whether we win or lose - and it looks like a tough road - the Cardinals will come home to a welcoming city, happy to know that the Winter Warmup for 2014 is less than 3 months away.

The scent of fresh Lenin

The way the class issues in America are coming up - food stamps, one percent, 47 percent, etc.  - sooner or later, seems to me, will coalesce not with the old Marxism we knew, but with what really may be an inescapable fact.  We and the Chinese and the other smart econo/socio/politico engineers are putting together societies with a huge, increasing gap in income and wealth.  It may be forever.  It may be inescapable. We all get the idea that free unregulated markets are a good way to balance supply and demand.   But are they a good way to balance wealth?  All the evidence says no.

Sooner of later we have to face the fact that there will be many more people than jobs, jobs that are worth a damn with incomes that are enough to raise and educate children and put away enough to create an annuity that will enable old people to live well.  Walk around in America.  Ask the working guys you know in their fifties and sixties if they are really going to accumulate enough money to do anything but work until they drop. And that's the middle class.  The poor folks will just look for handouts.

That's a really big failure, and I think it's coming everywhere, over the next few decades.  The way these things have been addressed in the past have always been through the Four Horsemen.  Are they the only ways out?

Seems bleak, I know, and I'm a basically pretty cheerful dude, but I really can't solve this one.  If this is how America looks, what about the rest of the world?  Asia's markets seem to be based on the US Federal Reserve System.  What?  Don't they have their own central banks?  Is it all here, all dependent on Harvard and Chicago grads?

 Trouble, my friends, trouble.  Right here in River City.

Terrorism, the label

The baby-gassing leader of Syria refer to his opponents as "terrorists" and it makes me wonder - is there a definition?  

Evidently there are hundreds.  And there is a big political issue baked in - can a state be a terrorist?  Can a state be the sponsor?  The answer is hell yes, with plenty of examples, like Lockerbie.  Or is a terrorist someone who is domestic, and only violates the law of the state?  Timothy McVeigh - was he a terrorist or just a criminal?

I'd say he's a terrorist, for two reasons.  The first has to do with the true origin of the term - it seems to come from the Terror, La Terreur, in the French Revolution, when the idea was to use terror to win at revolution and to rule.   Said Robespierre:

"We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

"If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs."

McVeigh thought this, that his action was somehow civic.  So did Bin Laden.  So, I suppose, do the Syrian revolutionaries.

But to me the second and equally necessary test is whether there is the deliberate slaughter of innocents. 9/11 yes, Oklahoma City yes, and now, Damascus - yes.   So it's Bashar Al-Assad, who's the terrorist. If the shoe fits, Mr. Baby-Gasser, wear it.

Swimming to Nantucket

Spalding Gray died nine years ago but for me he's still around, still showing that life is humorous enough but maybe not humorous enough to survive.  When we were at the beach a few weeks ago I looked across to Martha's Vineyard, and knew that Nantucket lay beyond, over the horizon, but there.  It's a distance you can put in your head and wonder -  if that were the test, would you pass or fail.  Probably no sharks. But a long swim.

Spalding jumped off the Staten Island Ferry.  Was he going to see if he could make it, swimming back to Manhattan?  I guess not, but still  I'd like to think so.  Otherwise it's just too linear.

Back to summer

Every year I do a post of some kind about the summer heat in St. Louis.  But this year we haven't had it; you'd think we were Michigan.

Is that why we had practically no Japanese Beetles this year?  (Or was it the nasty chemical I sprinkled at the base of the most JB-savory plants?)

Now, late August, we seem to be back to days with that oven-like heat blast when you walk outside.  But with this very  decent summer, we seem to still have cool mornings and even the occasional dew.  This much hot summer, this late, before September walks in .  Good with that.

Isabel

I guess there is something pathetic about saying your dog is your best friend, but I do think that, as to Isabel now and as to Valerie before and pretty much back to my first dog.  Whose name I can't say because he's the answer to about 50 security questions.

But not really a friend, right?  Because a dog's a dog.  We don't know really what they are thinking, whether they are self-conscious, whether what looks like devotion is really a sense of making sure the relationship is strong with the guy who puts kibble in the bowl.

I have pretty much lost all attitudes based on what people are thinking, because I don't know what they are thinking.  I never did; I only thought I did.  Now, I basically try to base my convictions on what people do.  And why not the same with dogs.  I don't know what they think.  I know what they do.

Isabel hangs around me, most of the time.  When there are children or other dogs, she will hang with them, but come back to me when she's called.  She runs after varmints.  She sleeps.  She drags herself across the grass, looks up, rolls over.    She wakes me up in the morning by standing on my chest and licking my nose, once.  When we are out in new territory she sits and looks around, like a sentinel and a guard.

This is not doctorate thesis material.  It's just peaceful and doggy, and also it is doing things - not thinking things - that to me constitute friendship.  So yeah.  She is a friend, a great one.

Clambake

The idea was to do a clambake in a Weber kettle.  I looked, and of course there was a pretty good guide on the Internet.  Is there anything left with no guide on the Internet?

In fact there was a big complicated version that made you wonder why you wouldn't go a beach with a shovel and do the real thing.  But the simpler version... as elegant as beer can chicken.  Stuff a burlap bag with seaweed, lobsters, clams, spuds, corn, and onions, wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil so it's like a big ass pillow, and put it on the grill for an hour with a lot of charcoal.

Came out great, looked like we'd done it on the beach in Maine.  But not entirely lucky.  I did a trial the day before, and it kind of sucked, and I made adjustments.

• Not too riverine.  Rinse the bejeesus out of the seaweed.
• Hot.  You don't have to worry about too much heat.  That's a lot of moisture.  It will be hard to dry this stuff out.
• One lemon, not sliced, in the sack.
• Corn in the stalks but with the silk removed.

So the good part wasn't just that we could do a clambake without turning it it into a WPA project.  It went beyond the letter of the Internet.   A hundred bucks of lobsters came out looking right.

Dexamethasone

You'd think that when you go into the hospital and they think you've had a stroke, they'd give you more than an aspirin.  Or later, a couple of Tylenol.  Hey guys, I've got a big headache!  I need to develop my complaining techniques.

Finally a doctor in the field showed up and she said "you've only had that? Sure, we've got something better."

Indeed it was.  Called dexamethasone.  It didn't work right away, and I had to develop another nmemonic (my brother, whose name is like "dex", snorting meth in a school zone), but it turns out to be remarkable stuff.  While I was at the hospital, by injection, and since by pill.  A declining amount over a week.

No more headache.  After a few days, no scary word loss.  (OK, c'mon.  I'm 63!  I'm still going to forget where I left the keys once in a while.)  In fact I feel really good.  I think just as clear-speaking, if not more, and a lot of thinking about life and liberty.  And it clears up my nasty psoriasis.  I'm looking fine.

It's a steroid!  Finally I get to be like a pro athlete.

So........... how about I stay with this stuff for the next, oh, 15 years or so?

When you read about it in places like Wikipedia it sounds strongish but not brutish.   But when you ask the doc about the idea of longer prescriptions they look at you like you are nuts. Lots of bad physical things and it could make you crazy.  Bad idea.  Bad results.  OK OK.

I don't want to destroy my body.  But the other thing - the mind?  Is this some kind of Awakenings? Once I stop taking this stuff, will I go to dumber and dumber?

We may find out soon enough, because today is the last day of the prescription and there ain't no refill. But they say no.

And I don't think so.  I think the drug is great and I'm sure it brought things around.  But I think that as to the mental consequences - I really have been re-examining life, and facing choices - I think it's about having had a second chance to seriously greet the Reaper once again and say nope, still not now, still not yet.

OK Mr. Death, here's your green-eyed boy, and he ain't on your plate yet

I had hoped to get back into Strays more frequently.  But something came up.  Over the past days I've been told I had a stroke, brain cancer, and maybe something else they really don't know about, and maybe it was stroke, or a TIA, or a not too important thing.

I guess the history matters.  About 10 days ago I woke up around 4 am.  Not odd.  Usual reason. But when climbing back into the sack, I stayed awake and found I couldn't remember some names.  And I had a headache, not a huge sharp one, more of a big one on the left side.  OK.

Up later, off to the regular breakfast at the diner.  And I found my story-telling ability just sucked.  Hard to remember names and places.  One of my friends said later that I was having a hard time "reaching for words", which is about exactly right.  Plus the headache, still.

So I got back to the house, nervous, and called my doctor.  He barely let me finish the first sentence before telling me to go the emergency room.  So I did, and into another trip through the American medical system.

I'm not going to dump on the fact that these places now look like some combo of a hotel and a fortress and a corporate headquarters.    I guess I just wish that all the hospitals in the world looked like this; so do we all, and maybe someday they will.  Our American versions reflect that they involve landslides, avalanches of money.

They figured, of course, that I'd had a stroke.  A lot of testing and holding out your arms and asking who the president is.  All my physical stuff seemed fine, but I was still having some word gaps.  And for a guy as proud, absurdly proud, of his ability to speak and write as I am, that was not good.

So then begins the series of being inserted on contoured platforms into very large machines.

As it happened, one of them said I had a thing in my brain.  So after day one - maybe not a stroke. Maybe brain cancer.   This is really not sounding good.

In fairness these guys were dealing with a guy who looked like he had a problem.  The two or three regular members of the Strays audience will remember that I had head and neck cancer a few years ago, a lot of surgery and radiology and lots and lots of words here about the whole trip.  But as to a stroke... there the issues are, they say (1) my smoking (again!  these docs just do not like the fact that I smoked 30 years ago, and started when I was 15.  OK!  Bad!); and (2) my parents.  I love my parents and their stroke stories are sad but kind of beautiful,  but not mine, so not here.  But they had strokes.  My dad's was at 63, it killed him, and I'm 63, so hmm....

Oh, the word "stroke."  Incredibly it was one that I had a real problem with.  I had to come up with a physical image  - a batter's swing, a strike - to remember it.  Worked fine.  But I also looked up the word and holy smoke what a widely used and differentially meaning word.

And another thing, similar, about this ability to remember words.  We aren't remembering most words, we are just using them.  I didn't have to remember "using them, " or in any event it doesn't seem like remembering.  I'm thinking and out it comes in words, boom, right away.  But then you get to this stuff - placenames, people's names, things in punchlines.  That's what was hit.

Back to the hospital.  Going well into a second day, and I was still pretty concerned.  I mean, a brain surgeon came around to talk to me about brain surgery.  This is not a confidence-building event.  I asked if there were different looks to the different stuff in the brain, so he'd know what to take out. Answer is not really.  All brain tissue is brain tissue.  You mostly do it by looking at what the images tell you, the location, and by research as to what stuff does when it's there.  Oh, and maybe if it's near a fold.

And in my case, not likely to be an operation that would make sense.  They are not sure that what's there is what's wrong, whatever is wrong.  So it's tough to decide to what to excise.  Plus the image shows it in there pretty deep, pretty near language central.  A place I care about a lot.

The next day I got out.  The cancer guy was busy, and my regular doc, a righteous guy, said go home. On Monday I went in and the cancer guy's judgment was, probably a "vascular event".  I love that. Sort of sounds like what teen-aged boys used to hope for.  But just to know, say the docs, how about a PET scan?  (Your what? tenth? in the past five years.)  Sure, why not.

Now, PET results are in:  no cancer, but man really you really did break your clavicle last month.

Next:  dexamethasone!

Verb sap

OK, I guess the verb "to motor" kind of dates me.  But it has good roots.

If you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

 - Bobby Troup

Motoring

This is the time of year I motor to the East.  Usually with a dog, and a lot of books on tape.  20 hours, more or less, Missouri to Rhode Island, through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut.  Sometimes New Jersey if I take the southern route and sometimes Massachusetts if the northern.  Every summer, every one for years.

These are highways that I have driven dozens of times, starting in my Mom's Impala in the '60's, through my bachelor cars, the Mustang and the Thunderbird, through a raft of family wagons, minivans, SUV's.  Occasionally passengers, friends, hitchikers, girlfriends, spouses, children - and usually a dog or two.  This time, for the third time, Isabel.  She's a fan.  Her and me, we talk some, listen to stuff, and try at least once or twice to find a place where she can get serious about sniffing up the local fauna and flora.

The idea is to bring a car to where the family stays, then fly back home to the practice, then fly back for ten days or so, sometimes more, then drive back.  It's too focussed and compact to be an odyssey, but there is some of the road's mixture of romance and boredom and looking around, back, forward, inward, out to the horizon, up to the hills, and at the end of the trip out, the sea.

More jazz

But this time all in one tracking shot, a long breathless phrase, trying to capture the end of the day, a hot day, when you hate coming inside to the artificial but hate going outside to the steam and the heat, only just keeping the pace, three men at lunch all agreeing that we live our lives only keeping the pace, not really turning out the fine and magic results we dream about, back to work, back home, looking ahead to bed and dreams, more dreams.

Be bop

But if this is about writing, does it have to make sense?  The poet's dilemma.  We think it is the sound of the words - the sound in your head, the sound in your ears - and the way they fit against each other, or don't.  Not meaning.  The meaning comes from the sound and the fit, not the other way round.  With ancient Chinese writing there was no punctuation, just blocks filled with characters, line after line, beautifully drawn.  The idea was art and transcendence, not a point of view or a plot.  But the other idea is to forestall the weakhearted, the ones who look at a fat gray block of words and think I do not have to climb up and into that.  Just bop bop bop, letting it wash, letting the words pour over.  Not thinking.  Breathlessness.  Courage.  An incendiary clause, a devastating proposition.  Go away.  Come here.  Touch foreheads.  Blink.  Blink.

Weeks clipping by

Yet another Friday.  It's a good day, offering a reprieve from whatever oppressed the week, a close of a paragraph in the chapter in the book.  But as so many of us have found, they just rocket by.  Not that they come quickly - few things come more slowly than Friday - but when they're here it seems so soon, the time is so compressed.  Maybe because Friday is a day with hope, and those hopes are what are flying past.

Back in St. Louis

It's hot, July, no rain lately and none coming.  The river is back down and barge traffic seems about equal, going upstream and coming down.  Two bridges across are in my window, a third is just to the south, and a fourth is soon to be completed, but this river is still a real border as it has long been.  An old slave state on one side, an old free one on the other.  Slaves were sold on the steps of the courthouse right below me; Lincoln lived on the other side.  There was a lot of back and forth, though.  Dred Scott's trial, which was also in the courthouse below, was about his going back and forth; Sherman lived here; Grant settled here; Robert E. Lee lived here and built a dam that saved the city from losing its landing on the river.

NYC 4am Monday

The city is hot now, so it's going to be a killer day.  The people up are car-movers like me, serious partiers, early shop owners, and the poor souls we used to call bums and now call homeless.  It's quiet, for the city, but you feel the thunder of a city day rolling in.

Not with a bang but a whimper

I think Eliot is mostly right.  Many do not - evidently even he revoked the idea - because they see an explosion ending the world.

Worlds, societies, networks, friendships, love affairs.  Their endings may start with a bomb, but there is always some measure of life in the rubble, and it isn't until that life dies, until there's nothing, no talk, no love, no life, that it's over.  And that sounds to me like a whimper.

Busted clavicle

For a teenage boy driver, the metal horses they put on subdivision streets are racing gates, allowing you to slalom through the neighborhood.  I recall it vividly.   But for middle ager on a bike, his head hanging low because the ride is getting long and sweaty, the horses are bad critters.  I ploughed into one the other day and went airborne, slo-mo, reconsidering my many faults, and landed with a crunch on my shoulder.

A broken collarbone, the left clavicle.  On the x-ray it looked like a busted branch.  May need surgery, but in the meantime I'm in a sling, looking like a kind of disabled vet.  I tried to spruce up the sling by using a madras necktie, but it looked a little crazy.  Like I really didn't know what to do with a tie, and so used it to hold up an arm.

Recalibration

This business of writing up in the Internet sky has changed a lot in my 10+ years of doing it, and I have tried to navigate the head winds, but the methods have spread me too thin and the result is really nothing I care about. So I could go back to writing for the drawer, but as I've posted here plenty of times, for me writing for the drawer means no writing at all. I still need the - what? - the mixture of choice, and risk, and spraying-my-tag-on-a-public-wall I get from putting my stuff out into the ether.

So now I'm out there, lots of ways. I'm in Google and Facebook and Twitter and wherever my Mac Air puts me. But I'm sick of seeing that I have become a dossier, a big fat file of marketing opportunity. I'm really sick of seeing other people - and their programs - attributing pictures, items, articles, places to me. I could go further up into all these social network levels, and many newer ones, and I probably would if I wanted to have, sooner or later, my own 15 minutes of fame. But Andy - I don't. I want what I deserve, no more, no less.

I hope I deserve the occasional reader, who will almost always be a friend from the rest of my life. So for the next tranche it's back here, back to this one place, Strays. Where I started. The readers will come and go one by one, via word of mouth. If it falls back to just one - me, when proofreading - and stays there, fine. This isn't a survey, or a convocation, or a collection plate. It's words, slung sidearm or overhand and curved, changed up, or fast. That's all.

Big Snow

When it's like this, the shrubs are smashed down and the trees lose their limbs.  Other than that it's simply radically beautiful, especially the day after, when the sun comes out.

Something about this is so evocative of childhood.  Maybe because I grew up in the land of Lake Effect, east of Cleveland, where like Eskimos we had different names for snow.  Yesterday it was what we called Good Packing Snow, hell to shovel, fair for sledding, and great for snowballs and snowmen.

Maybe also because it means you go out bundled up and come back wet, tired, and looking for hot chocolate.  Like a kid.  Only now the reason for the outdoor effort is to make sure the paths are clear and you can drive to work the next day, not in order to snowface your brother.

Heaviest snow we've had here in St. Louis, heaviest since a blizzard in the early '80's.  But everything is pretty well organized, no one died, and the world is covered with meringue.

Hiding from The Big Guy

There aren't many stories from the Bible that stick with me but two do clang in my head, off and on.  The first is right up there early in Genesis, when Adam hides from God because Adam knows enough to know he is naked.  The second is the terrifying parable of the talents, where one servant hides his talent (a nicely ambiguous term) rather than putting it to productive use.  In both cases, the hiding man suffers.

I do know enough to know that I'm still hiding myself and my talent and that, well into my seventh decade on the planet, I'd better come out and start to produce something with meaning or I'm looking at quietly sinking beneath the waves, with nothing but a reputation for being a pretty nice guy.

It's more than sitting in the front row and raising your hand a lot, because I did that.  It's more than volunteering for tricky assignments, because I've done that too.  It has something to do with coming out and standing in front of The Big Guy, and standing up to that authority.  Saying, here's my best shot.  And pulling the trigger.

Waking in the middle of the night

4 a.m., and try to think through what's worrying me, or what's worth planning.

One day, years ago, I said to a woman co-worker:  "My best thoughts come to me in the middle of the night."

To which she replied:  "Not me.   Mostly what I come up with the middle of the night isn't worth a damn."

Now I think I was wrong, misquoting something I'd heard in another context, and she was right.  With quite a few healthy decades of middle-of-the-nighters behind me, now I know:  by the next morning (a) what seemed brilliant seems, by morning light, pretty ordinary and (b) what seemed scary now seems like no big deal.  And it's a stew, of everyday reality and that night's dreams, brown and complicated.

Damn

Snow coming back.  This winter thing is just going on too long, as usual.

I wish Global Warming would sort itself out.  I was nurturing a theory for years that we were really in a secular cooling trend, and that putting all that greenhouse gas up there was cushioning the blow.   The contrarian in me would still like to believe that; or, conversely, that in fact the waters really are rising and before long St. Louis will have a view of the ocean.

But the truth seems to be that it's just weather.  This winter isn't going to be the longest or shortest or coldest or warmest or wettest or driest we've ever had.  Just the usual, pain-in -the-butt winter.  A big, grey view to the east, over a leafless landscape, to the horizon; no ocean. A blast of cold at the end of the day, as I march into the garage, heading home.

Leading shoot

More of the ideas that lead me.  I just want to stand on shoulders.

"In fact I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes  and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.

"In such a vision man is seen not as a static center of the world - as he for long believed himself to be - but as the axis and leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, from the Forward.

Lent

I always give things up for Lent.  Always tried to be creative.  Last year - the year before? - I gave up the Internet.  Made for a less interesting 40 days, and it didn't do the things I thought it would, like impel me to spend more time with books and music.  Or one year, alcohol.  Which didn't make my life much less interesting, but it made me less interesting - or so I was told.

This year, I'm giving up giving up things for Lent.  I'm continuing to indulge in the usual give-up candidates, and with each one thinking, is this really a vice, or is it a virtue... Because someone (with a lot more piety than I have) once told me:  you don't give up the bad things for Lent, you give up the good ones.  Otherwise it isn't sacrifice, it's self-improvement.

Back

Gone away too long.  But I had thinking to do.

Starting back, with the General Confession, an old version.

My mother loved this, especially the "left undone" part. I was happy to be a miserable offender.

Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.
We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
We have offended against thy holy laws.
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.
Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.
Restore thou them that are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord.
And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name.
Amen.