Various &/or Sundry
Registration of classes, Freshman year. Ah but it clings. It’s one of those rare engraved, not penciled in, memories. I image it a foretaste of Heaven as it mimics the graduation from one state of life (high school) to a far more advanced - at least in my anticipation - (college). Which reminds me of the iconic poster of John Belushi from Animal House that shows him wearing a shirt that says, in a minimalism that speaks volumes, “College”. For the high-schooler on the cusp of college, the next life was when everyone suddenly became better, holier in a way. It wasn’t about dominating others through status but a collaboration of the elect.
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I recall always washing my car while listening to longtime Reds announcer and HOF’er Marty Brennaman calling the game. Washing the car itself was punitive and listening to the game itself boring, but putting them together resulted in a sort of productive bliss.
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They say at the end of your life you’ll never regret the hours you didn’t spend at the office, but that seems to presume a lack of Purgatory. If many Americans work too hard, couldn't many, including myself, work harder? At other times my regrets fall along the lines of “am I drinking enough beer?”. (Allow me, as R. Ricardo once said, to “’splain myself’.) Readers of William F. Buckley’s plasterings of sea, as I have, cannot help but feel a tinge of envy at those hours. One might also consider the great quantities of alcohol one’s father/grandfather/ancestors drank and feel a kind of inadequacy. They worked harder, no doubt, and drank more. I’m not sure to what extent those facts are related but there is a rough justice in it. Still, it is an absurdity for the average blogger to be spending time attempting to solve or come to an opinion with regards to the Middle East crisis. That is a madness. Better to be drinking or praying.
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Tis the Irishfest and I’m loathe to give up the awe that twas once found in a jig or reel and so we go --- but afterward classical music acts as a kind of tonic. What is this need for complexity? Have I so soon “outgrown” the simple? Have I lost the winsome “otherness” of celtic music and now seek, ala Dreher, a novel otherness? I must admit to feeling solidarity with Nuala O’Faolain’s mother, who spent all of her time ‘drinking & reading’. I do surprisingly little of either, given my druthers, but then I suppose there’s a reason Walter Kerr wrote a book called, “The Decline of Pleasure”...
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