Seven Quick Takes

Maris is the rabbit scholar of the family. Of the dogs we’ve had, she’s the most dedicated to keeping them clear of our forty acres divided by a hundred.  She’s watchful as she waits, sitting in prime locations for hours.  When she finally sees the tell-tale white tail, she springs into action, running with abandon along the muscle-memorized contours and detours of our backyard.

After the rabbit is far gone she rests not: she does a post-mortem, sniffing the path the animal went as if looking for clues next time on how to prevent the next infiltration.  She treads the ground with her nose to the grindstone, er, I mean the ground, and like Detective Bosch attempts to solve a mystery.  Then she waits anew in case the criminal returns to the scene of the crime.
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Our neighbor is to noise-making machines (leaf-blowers, edgers, lawn mower, hedge trimmers, etc...) what Pete Rose was to base hits.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  Every night between 6:30 and 8 he’s cutting one-inch high grass or trimming invisible leaves from perfectly square bushes.  He’s actually getting worse with age which is the general trend I hear:  you get more “more” when you hit your 70s and 80s.  His major hobby in life is making noise, and he’s doing it more of it of this year.

But the irritation I feel at having to retrieve my noise-cancellers is immediately assuaged by the very effective blocking combined with some good jazz or classical music.  It’s actually an opportunity to hear more music. It does feel “wrong” somehow that you can buy your way out of irritations like neighbors.  Although it’s kind of fitting: the first world gave us omnipresent engine noise but also gives us noise-cancelling headphones.

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Reading moon book and newly amazed that astronauts covered 240,000 miles to moon. One way trip. That’s equivalent to going from Ohio to Australia twenty-four times.

Also impressed USSR could pull off a feat like going into space far ahead of us.  I thought we were ever the technology super power.  But it’s true that although they put a man made object on moon in 1959, we were only ones to actually walk on moon.

As a symbol of American greatness and excellence, the moon mission seems like peak America.
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Did a really strong elliptical workout due to the unlikely reason of goosebumps listening to every Youtube version of Toto’s Africa, especially one involving a huge choir. Really the song feels full of that “holy longing” with lyrics blessing the saving rain (the word “salvation” is even used):

“The moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation...I stopped an old man along the way / Hoping to find some old forgotten words or ancient melodies / He turned to me as if to say, "Hurry boy, it's waiting there for you"

Has the scent of Heaven on it, the forgotten words of the gospel, the ancient melodies of the psalms, the “old man” like the one who’s on the cusp of Heaven and can already taste it.

And then I dared imagine Jesus saying to me, ala the “hound of Heaven”:

“It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do.”

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The undeniable thing about Trump so far as president is that he possesses a fresh set of eyes on the issues of the world.  It’s hard to imagine a career politician having the chutzpah or vision to do small things like recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or big things like a trade war with China.

And say what you want about the tariffs on China, it’s at least a helluva lot more defensible and cheaper than war with Iraq or Afghanistan. And after being burned by both Bushes on Supreme Court justices, so far the outsider Trump has done a much better with that crucial part of his job.

It’s certainly been eye-opening and even world-altering for me to go from Trump hater to having a grudging appreciation and thankfulness for him.

It’s going to be a hard path to re-election though.  For one thing, it seems like whenever a party plays to it’s “type” or “reputation”, it gets burned.   The Democrats were perceived as being weak on defense during the ‘70s and Jimmy Carter played right into that with the Iranian hostages and lost re-election. Similarly, Republicans have always been unfairly accused of being the party of racism and so Trump plays into that with “go back to where you came from”.  So we could easily get burned.
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The fascinating thing about Pope Benedict was how he was both optimist and pessimist.  Or more properly perhaps a pessimist regarding earthly things and having optimistic faith in God.  Both dreamer and realist.

Decades ago he said that the Church would become much smaller and have much less influence.  And yet a recent biographer who knew him well said,

“To me he was like a like a child, always dreaming but on a higher plane,  like someone coming down to us not from another age but another sphere... He told me one time that ‘believing is a resistance against gravity’, against the force of gravity.”

_

So the force of zero-gravity (i.e. zero-gravity chairs and infinite laziness until a Saturday 1:30pm) finally forced me to take the dogs for some exercise.  We did two miles to dog park; just enough to earn a beer I guess.

Normally our summer vacation comes in early June which can feel pre-“full summer”, while during the August week our vacation feels like fall is near, with school and cicadas and football season imminent. So to take some days off in July this year was nice.

July is unabashedly peak summer.  I’d say June 15-July 31st is the most quintessential summer period there is and yet I rarely take much take time over those six weeks.  It’s crazy to slog to work every day during the best weather time of the Cloudumbus year.

By mid-July you’re starting to get a feeling of satiation of great days - you’re not so stunned by the good weather that you can’t even enjoy it as can happen in the manic period of early June.
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This Facebook phenomenon is kind of odd in some ways.  It feels wrong, like the blood/brain barrier breached, when I see a friend suggestion for my general physician.  I find myself looking at pictures of her husband, kids, politics (not good!), camping photos, etc... It’s sort of invasive and tmi but I can’t, naturally, look away.
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Reading some of Kevin Williamson’s new book The Smallest Minority.  He seems bitter. He says we are "monkeys with wifi" and has gotten increasingly elitist and snobbish over the past decade, although quite likely his views are not wrong.

Live from Hilton Head It's Saturday Not

 A tawny Sunday at the island, the air not the bright yellow hue we expect. Rain showers predicted and the sky currently overcast, alas.

Rainy but no problem when you got an insti-tent. Ingenious. Keeps the rain off when need be.

Checked out the waves and just really incredible not in terms of size by in water force east-to-west. Really hard to simply walk against wind and water in even three feet. Managed a token 15 min jog, with last half against sledgehammering wind.

We squeezed out five hours on a deck laden with the misgivings of weather.

*

Listening to the Bob Dylan song with refrain "Everybody must get stoned" a few times triggered by thoughts on how "everybody must get pruned."

Background: Heard that ol' warhorse Fr. Hayes on the gospel about "I am the vine, you are the branches."

Fr. said grapes un-pruned, bear no fruit. Grape vines bear fruit when their reproduction was threatened, and because this vine was allowed to grow freely where it will, it felt no compulsion to spend its energy towards the bearing of fruit.

"If you are not a part of the vine, you will be pruned completely at the judgement. If you are a part, you still will be pruned."

Everybody must get pruned.

But what I've realized is God even prunes himself.  From Erasmo Levia-Merikakis:

In keeping with God’s own internal law of love, Jesus never invites anyone to do anything that he himself is not already doing. “It is called the law of the Lord”, writes St. Bernard, “either because he lives by it or because nobody possesses it except as a gift from him. It does not seem absurd for me to say that God lives by a law, because it is nothing else than charity.”

*

Hurricane Harvey

The tropical hellbent

Nature owns nature

Hundreds of miles away.

*


Where have you gone Aurelio Rodriquez?

A island turns its lonely eyes to you

Rue, rue, rue...

What's that you say Mrs. Clementine,

Aurelio has left and gone astray.

no, no way...

no way.


*

From the catbird seat ahigh the stern,

I peer a grey sea with toothy caps,

towards the long grey line of horizon.

*

A pastiche of florid greens and tall sea oats

bend before wind and sea

while giraffe palms hold sway

just beyond the balcony.

*

Down the shore the lifeguard stores

her tanned and dimpled leas

I query her and she responds

in perfect Austrailian-eze.


*

Young gal comes down to deck with some sort of green mask/cream on her face. Apparently for purposes of skin revitalization or facial self-improvement, but seems like it takes a good level of self-confidence to appear in public like that.

Monday:

Weather not fit for man nor beast. 25-35mph winds with gusts to 40mph. Rip tide warning in effect by national weather service such that supposedly: "These rip currents will be life-threatening to anyone who enters the surf."

Which means I have to get in the surf if briefly just to see what this is like. Or not. Call it chicken blood, or maybe it's just because rip tides are supposedly impervious to swimming skill and strength. If pervious to the latter, I'd be in in a heartbeat.

Anyway I can't recall Hilton Head having a rip tide warning while I was down here before. No rental umbrellas either are out due to wind speed.

Hopefully we'll lose just one day of vacation here, though "lose" is a huge exaggeration since I'll still be able to read, relax, have a cigar, watch some baseball on the 'tube.  And of course South Carolina could be experiencing a hurricane directly, like poor Texas.

At 3:30pm torrential downpour and there's nobody on the beach for as far as the eye can see in either direction. But wait! Two people in black-hooded plastic rain gear and heading out of Seaside Villas toward the beach right now. Diehards. Gluttons for punishment. Truth be told, I'm glad to be dry after the soaking from this morn. It was fun to get wet, like being a kid in the rain again, but also nice to be dry.

*

My outdoor office suffices

seeking mysteries from the quotidian

tranquil hours reading Fermor

concerning the Landsknecht.


*

I run-laufen the way the Deutsche do,

lope by the Konditories

pastime with pastries

beergarten many brews.

Tuesday

And now I know where the phrase "Holy cow!" comes from. St. Brigid, contemporary of St. Patrick, was discouraged by her pagan parents from becoming Catholic, but she did so and afterward blessed the family cow that had never given milk before. The cow did then give milk, making her family much happier about her decision to convert. And thus the literal holy cow is pictured with her in paintings and images.

*

All clouds, all day. Nicht gut. But the lack of cold-pelt rain facilitated more exercise than normal; ran 2.2 miles and walked a couple more.

*

It occurs to me the decision on whether to have children/another child could be argued to rest mainly on the husband, or, alternatively, on the wife.

It could be said the wife must drive the decision because she's the one who has 9 months of discomfort and massive disruption. She also has more natural incentive due to the "maternal instinct".

On the other hand you could say the male is determinative since he's biblically the head of the household, and since he doesn't bear the physical price of bearing a child he needs to be an enthusiastic (not neutral) lobbyist for children.

*

Garrison Keillor writing in WaPo gets to the heart of why Donald Trump (and Bernie Sanders, I would say) are popular: self-pity and the diminishment of stoicism:

"I was an ordinary 1950s misfit, scrawny, squinty behind wire-rim glasses, bookish but not so smart, timid, a daydreamer, a frequent moper, and once, when my mother was tired of my moodiness, she gave me a book to read, “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in which good Bible-believing Christians like ourselves were tied to the stake...prayed that God would forgive their persecutors and, as the flames enveloped their bodies, sang hymns in praise of the Savior with their dying breath.

Somehow, this cheerful stoicism seemed to lose traction in the culture and we got bombarded by neurotic anger — the Beat poets, bad boys in movies, outlaw mythology, troubled rock stars, spectacular burnouts, the wounded, bitter, addicted, nice middle-class kids trying to be tortured artists.."

Wednesday

"Life hack" is one of those phrases I thought I would never use, along with "impactful". But I do find "life hack" impactful in the following way: "I want to life-hack my mornings." Because they are infinitely better in Hilton Head than in Columbus.

There's a lot of motivation to get up in the morning here given the instant pleasure of the balcony: reliably warm temperatures and a million dollar view. Today I spy a hawk calmly surveying from a branch of the one tall pine on our Seasides side. Highly picturesque.

I think the hack would be to do as much stuff the night before as possible. Of course that could ruin the night ha.

*

We're semi-plagued by a plague of love bugs down here. They only live three days it's said. They swarm the deck and balcony, two flying insects hitched together (hence the love in love bug). They don't annoy us too much. They don't sting or bite, which is a good thing.

Got down to the deck by 8am, a record. The love bugs drove me away right quick, but felix culpa since it allowed a nice walk on the beach. Felt like I was walking on the water, the illusion of walking on a thin 3-inch sand bar covering. Just beautiful to be out there next to the water in the morn.

Finally the resumption of true Hilton Head weather. Tropical at last. Today was half-sun and half-clouds and the people rejoiced.

So I was at the beach from 10:30 till 5pm. A highlight was the run - it felt so good to run like the horses for 30 minutes without worrying about the injured calf (now healed). I think half the magic of Hilton Head is simply the invigorating exercise.

My phone battery died during the run but at least I got to hear to the end of Message in a Bottle by the Police on the '80s station.

Thursday

Its a true-blue Hilton Head dog-day of summer day. Rode bike a little extra time since the sun through the pines and fronds is so rich.

Funny sign next to the 1-foot deck: "Use at your own risk". I should write on it: "Brought to you by lawyers, the same folks who put warning labels on plastic bags saying not to cover your head with them."

*

My gut reaction is to see life as finding inspiration in perspiration, but that neglects the indispensable place of Christ. Perhaps to see Inspiration in perspiration.

*

I take a beach walk, and see pellucid water magnifying hurrying fish. I see the shimmer of sparkling sand below, dotted with glitter. I see the gladsome splash of repetitive wave. I see the jewel of wild nature's edge.

*

A bit of bible commentary reading, specifically the monk from Spencer on the image of Jesus as "the thief in the night". The thief imagery rankles mainly if we see ourselves as our own property, St. Therese of Liseux referred to Jesus as the thief many times in her last days. How could I not know that, especially after having read Heather King's book? For Therese, it's practically a term of endearment, proving saints are different from us.

Friday

I wonder if the true enemy of old age is not infirmity but loss of a childlike innocence. Cynicism and resulting in being unimpressed by small things. A lack of curiosity.

Oliver Sacks said: "I thought being old would be either awful or trivial, and it's neither." He said what makes it not so besides loving another, is thinking and writing.

His partner mentions how he had joy and surprise on his face when he opened his first bottle of champagne at age 80-ish and saw the cork explode. To have a sense of wonder around a champagne opening suggests a childlike aspect that belies his attribution to his success in old age to writing and thinking. Methinks it is the former.

*

Last day spent amid the sweet ecstasy of those shining waters. Gave my soles their soul workout on the Low Country sands. Twenty minutes. Playing "Rocky Top" in my mind. Because the best country lyric of all time is "ground's too rocky by far / that's why all the folks in Rocky Top get their corn from a jar."

Shades of "for medicinal purposes only."

*

Noon Friday we did our annual bike ride to Lawton Stables. Rode into heavy beach wind until marker 47, then cut through and headed to see the great and hallowed Clydesdale-like Harley. His hooves are a force of nature. Eternal blue skies.

*

Jonah Goldberg writes about how ideas are much less impactful than technologies:

As I’ve written many times before, the car and the birth-control pill have — for good and ill — done more to overturn settled institutions and customs than Nietzsche or Marx ever could. But pills and automobiles are hard to argue with, so like drunks searching for their car keys under the street lamp because that’s where the light is good, intellectuals focus on the stuff they can argue with.

He quotes Irving Kristol as having said, “When we lack the will to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the obvious.”

Saturday: 

Twenty miles south of Charleston, WV. Stopped for a restroom break in a nice travel plaza. Yes they do have Starbucks in West Virginia, and a black gal was running the souvenir shop. Two stereotypes quashed. The people look real here, and interesting looking. A urinal that featured a couple of nicely typed Bible verses taped to the top (John 3:16 and the verse about you must be born again).

*

Heard this on a podcast on why WW2 was won by the Allies: "British stubbornness, American industry, and Russian blood." Amazing how much it took in the way of all three to defeat (primarily) the Germans. German exceptionalism I guess.

                                     

The Hot Dog Eating Contest

Our department is having a hot dog eating contest to feed the hungry. I wanted to enter but eventually concluded I don't need the gastric indiscretion. It comes down to speed more than stomach size since it's how many you can eat in five minutes.

I bought a ticket and you pick which contestant you think will win and if they win you win a prize. I was hovering over the buckets, trying to decide who was worthy when one of the participants happened by:

Su Su (slim Chinese girl): “Vote for me!”
Me: “I can't, look at you, you're too thin!”
Su Su: “Didn't you see who won the big hot dog contest? A small Asian?”
Me: “Oh I think I remember that, yes.”

So I ended up putting my ticket in her bucket, thinking maybe a lifetime in food-deprived China has made her a good speed-eater.  Perhaps she comes from a large family. They always eat fast.

*

Took a lunch walk and there was so much stimuli, the irrepressible lushness of a fountain and sun on green leaves at a downtown condo near the cathedral. Impressed me to the point I stopped to take a picture though it doesn't do it justice.

The urban shops and streets were vibrant in the bright noon atmosphere. It made me wistful for travel during this quick-perishing summer, namely to pretty places like my alma mater.

There was also the stimuli of the impressive gothic church, one I'd not been for awhile. And I forgot about the Holy Door! Where devout millennials take selfies while walking through!

Hastag MakeAMusicGroupCatholic

I spent too much time yesterday trying to come up with offerings for #MakeAMusicGroupCatholic after seeing Jeff Miller of Curt Jester tweet a couple witty offerings.

Here are mine:

Pure Chastity League

The Allman Franciscan Brothers

Meatless Loaf

Emerson, Lake & Palm Branches

The Communiondores

Nitty Gritty Girt Band

Nuns and Croziers

Narrow Straits

Others I didn't tweet since they seemed lame even by my generous standards:

The Kentucky Godhunters

U3

Bead-les

Seven Short Takes

Amused by a new bone found in a yard owned by our neighbor's dog. They passed the contraband through gaps in the fence, like adjoining cellmates.

*

Nature has favored us with a bounty: more peaches than we can eat, plenty of tomatoes, raspberries. The peach tree reminds me of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, so much do we have leftover. There's rarely ever a case where we have much more food than we can eat. Normally we buy or make dinners individually, enough for one meal, and so we never have that feeling of bounty. The closest I've come to it is with books, since I have more books than I can read, and at Half-Price sale this summer there was more than I could even look at let alone purchase.

Whoa, the new normal goes thus: wake to pitch dark at 6:30 accompanied by temperatures of sixty degrees. That's no summer I know! Fall has come – in attitude if not in name.

*

The sunflower strikes me as the most Christian of flowers, a silent reproach to selfishness. She moves her head towards the sun, facing east in the morning, west at dusk until that time her seed-laden head dips from the weight, like Christ's on the cross, sacrificing her wont for others.

*

"Look up Luke 24:11!" she told me over the phone.

This was the day after I had said that the apostles didn't disbelieve the women who said Christ had risen simply because they were women.

"But the text says nothing of the sort. Says merely they thought of their talk as 'idle chatter'. Not 'womanly chatter'.  Likely the message itself would be the source of disbelief."

There's a lot of sensitivity out there.

*

In high school I was once given a punishment of having to write a 500 word essay for skipping gym. I wrote 5,000 words. Definitely the wrong "punishment” for a would-be writer.

*

I have this utterly irrational desire to spend a couple hundred dollars and complete my Chesterton collection, via his complete works by Ignatius Press. This is foolhardy because I read GK only occasionally; I should far more since a saner voice one could scarcely imagine. This mania for ownership was prompted by an offhand comment in a book that mentioned his essay on Macbeth.

I'll lie down until the feeling goes away.

(Later): Funny Chesterton comment on a lesson to be taken from Shakespeare's Macbeth:

“Distrust those malevolent spirits who speak flatteringly to you. They are not benevolent spirits; if they were they would be more likely to beat you about the head.”

That from his book The Spice of Life and Other Essays which I managed to snag for $2.99 on Nook (read via Nook app on iPad). A $35 out of print book!

Chesterton goes on to say how man cannot separate his life into separate parts and that free love doesn't work: “We can't talk about abolishing the tragedy of marriage when you cannot abolish the tragedy of sex….The basis of all tragedy is that man lives a coherent and continuous life. It is only a worm you can cut in two and have the separate parts live.”

More: “Macbeth has all manner of physical courage…and even moral courage. But he lacks spiritual courage, he lacks a certain freedom and dignity of the human soul in the universe, a freedom and dignity which one of the scriptural writers expresses as the difference between servants and the sons of God.”

*

I took one of the grandboys with me to pick Max and Ermas because he wanted to go with (go figure). We hopalong'd and then dined on the back patio. Then off on bikes to the ice cream store. The skin-caressing heat left me hungry to bike  longer, but 5-year old was sweaty, which, along with insects, he takes as disagreeable. He's all Brahmin.

24 Hours in Hocking County, Ohio

FRIDAY:

Whoda thunk I'd be sun-starved in mid-June? Whoda thunk that every day last week no nice one-season-room patio time?  Call it a "half-of-one-season" room?

Even in Cloudumbus that's pretty rare in June. But we've had just a remarkable string of gray, cloudy days. Temperature-wise it's warm, but man doesn't live by temperature alone. It certainly brings home why I visit Florida and Hilton Head.

June weather rebounded with a giddy-up briefly on the 23 and 24th, just in time for my going back to work, naturally if uncannily. But it's pinch-me time, the solstice, which literally means “sun stands still” and it was nice to further that aim by taking my birthday off and spending time relaxing, making time stand still, to some extent. "The best day of the year is the longest, June 22," wrote poet Donald Hall.

Forewarned is forearmed they say, but despite being forewarned that the time between my birthday and July 4th and then the end of July is whip-fast, there's not much I seem to be able to do to slow it down. It is what it is as the great modern philosophers say.

*

Quick-pack on Friday afternoon and by 5pm we were on the road, arriving in the hock of hills (aka Hocking Hills) by 6:30. We're staying at a modest place (no wi/fi and no phone coverage) about 9-10 miles beyond Laurelville, which is about 20 miles beyond Circleville. In other words, out in the boondocks.

There's nothing quite like exploring a new place and this one has a killer gravel hill driveway requiring 4-wheel drive when it rains. It's a cement block structure with cement floors, so that's good for our dog since she'll be tracking mud all over sooner rather than later. The place with a postage-stamp cleared backyard surrounded by deep and enthusiastic woods. I tried a bit of the trail with Maris (for "Stella Maris", but aka “Mare-bare”, aka “Nightmare bare”).

We crated her briefly while we headed to the fabulous next-door biker burger joint. I got a black and blue burger to go, and Steph a black bean burger. Yummy. And homemade chocolate cookies for dessert. The mom & pop diner had a decent craft beer selection, including the oddest beer I've ever had. It's called “Not Your Father's Root Beer” and it tastes, I swear, exactly like root beer. And yet it's like 5.8% alcohol. Crazy how you can have that amount of alcohol with no bitterness, no hops, no beer aftertaste. A novelty drink for me, since I obviously prefer the taste of beer to root beer, but quite an ingenious concoction.

I'm reading the new encyclical down here because it jibes so well with the beauty of this natural environment. “Nature is nothing other than a certain kind of art, God's art…” he writes.

Francis argues that the best way to ensure man doesn't harm creation is to speak of an all-powerful Father who alone owns the earth. This reminds me of how the only way to ensure the rights of the unborn any American for that matter is to insist that our rights do not come from government but from God, as stated (but sadly ignored) in the Declaration of Independence.

That rhetorical device of the Holy Father's seems pretty brilliant evangelistically, to ask nonbelievers to take a more positive view of religion because it's the best way to stop people from damaging the earth.

I marvel at some of the trees here, how straight they stand! Their trunks as freakishly and unwaveringly vertical as telephone poles.  It seems four black bear sightings were confirmed last year in this county. There's a picture of one in cabin, in what looks like area woods, not far from a wall-mounted 22 rifle.

SATURDAY:

Mega-rain this morning, from light to heavy. No worries though with a nice porch - sipped coffee and played tunes previously downloaded via amazon prime. 'Round 10am breakfast of peanut butter on toasted English muffins with milk.

Went on a noontime three-mile hike with Maris down the main drag, right through beautiful downtown South Bloomingville, ha. The rain was omnipresent, to varying degrees, but I didn't care. In fact I took off my hat and let the rain descend on my head, a primal childhood feeling that I experience every twenty years or so in adulthood.  Another benefit of the rain is how deep in green and shiny all the leaves look. (To make lemonade out of lemons.)

The “town”, using the term loosely, seemed a collection of perhaps a couple dozen houses slung along the avenue. One looked like the Walton's homestead but for the confederate flag. It's a place rich in local color and I saw two young boys in a small greensward between house and outbuilding with a bat and ball. They looked so “Appalachian-y” that I felt like I was in a Walker Evans photograph. Mulleted, unabashedly country, pale-white as if they'd never seen the sun (as well they might not have living in this canopied forest), high cheekbones and narrow chinned like Jefferson Davis. They praised my dog and asked the name and I told them, and they told me the name of theirs.

P.C. it ain't. 

Unfortunately as good and as relaxed as my time has been so far, (with miles to go and books yet to read) my wife has been killer bored. I see hottub, burger joint, beers, music and reading on the horizon, but she sees home. I suspect the boredom is due not only to the poor weather but the lack of internet connection.

Speaking of boredom, I read recently in the New York Times that the huge heroin problem in Vermont is due to teenagers feeling bored. Which is sort of counterintuitive given how ubiquitous entertainment is now. Maybe we're made for work, and when it's missing we get bored. Maybe we've evolved to work.

SUNDAY:

An amazing sight was beheld this morning: the sun. Whoever wrote that song from the musical Annie, about the sun coming out tomorrow, was obviously unacquainted with Cloudumbus. But today magic happened.

Sailed our yard from 4 till 6pm, by which I mean walked from corner-to-corner, enjoying even the shady parts given how hot the sun was. Savored the breezy if mosquito-laden spot in far right corner, then spent some time in the center of the tree line. Got bit multiple times despite putting repellent on. I'm a mosquito magnet. They are said to be attracted to those who eat bananas and drink beer and I do a lot of both, though never at the same time.

Even Columbus can occasionally produce an azure sky and the surreal clarity of a sterling day: temperature in the mid-80s, sun just beaming down beamily. I love the feel of heat-soaked pavers on my soles, the sheerness of summer. I hit the block for a walk in the golden, our dog Maris accompanying me and drawing significant (too much?) attention. Her fan club awaits: went a half-mile and three people greeted her.

*

Later, mid-week, tripped to the minor league park. One of my favorite days of the year if partially due to the novelty of having a summer afternoon mid-week workday off. It's rare as snow in Jamaica. Let's play two!

Arrived at ball orchard pleasantly early: 11:40 for the 12:05pm start. I relish the pre-game atmosphere, the lack of crowds, the ministrations of the grounds crew (watering the infield to keep the dust down) and eating a hotdog and Crackerjacks ala the song of yore. And there was the sweetness of expectation. So soon came the National Anthem followed by the rather anticlimactic first pitch.

The uber-handy MILB app allowed me to study the pitchers, and I expected a duel given these were two sharpies, especially the Norfolk Tides hurler (Tyler Wilson). He's pitched in the majors and is expected back up. Ours was Nick Maronde, a respectable prospect. But Maronde gave up three runs in less than 5 innings, and Wilson pitched a shutout through 7.

There's something poignant about a minor league game. They try harder, the stakes feel higher. In the majors, you've made it already. It's sort of like March Madness college bball compared to the NBA.

Lamentations and Exaggerations

 

OR

Perhaps too few blogs complain about the weather, so I'm here to exploit the niche. 

This just in: we are officially getting ripped off weather-wise. The overcast and chill'd showers of July 3rd and 4th were tolerable, even if the weather from the 6/23 to 7/3 was likewise lame. This feels like weather we're never really going to get back; we've effectively shortened summer.  It's rending the fabric of what makes summer so special: that series, seemingly unending, of beautiful sunny days, one after another which coax one into a beautiful sense of denial that bad things, or bad weather, happen.

It's always the cumulative effect that tries one's patience, and the cumulative effect has really been effective in this case. It was bad enough to spend Memorial Day weekend in the 50 degree rains but then to have July 4th weekend destroyed by chill & rains?

The killer, as always, is a sense of feeling entitled. And in July, hell yes I feel entitled to good weather.

*
 

Back to Work
 
Grunting at sleep's descent
the bear brunt of gravity's fall
shaking the remnants of ashy dreams
before the mirror of thankless tasks:
shave, floss, shower, brush,
rinse and repeat,
the overhead costs of civilization.
Motivation spare, I pick up Inspiration
Song of Songs chapter three
tryin' to get that feeling again
to borrow from Barry.

*

Colonoscopies are kind of interesting. Not the procedure itself, which looks from the outside to be hideously invasive, but the risk/reward ratio.  The chances of getting colon cancer are about 4%, and the chances of a colonoscopy "working" is about 50%.  So the 2% effective rate is an interesting over/under line - how much pain and inconvenience is worth avoiding a 2% risk? I've heard the procedure involves something like a 24-hour liquid fast and the downing laxatives like they were hotdogs at a hotdog eating contest.  Even the Church doesn't require any fasting for those over, what 55?  I kind of wonder if folks would put up with this back in the 1940s or '50s.

*

They drank more back then. And speaking of alcohol, some fun quotes from Kingsley Amis:

THE FIRST, INDEED the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree. Well, and it should be simple: no charts, tables, menus, recipes. None of those pages of fusspottery which normally end—end, after you have wasted minutes ploughing your way through—“and, of course, no alcohol” in tones of fatuous apology for laying tongue to something so pikestaff-plain. Of course? No alcohol? What kind of people do they think we are?

Nearly all diets start with the exclusion of bread, potatoes and sugar. This one goes on to exclude vegetables and fruit as well, or nearly. But remember, remember that drink is in.
Alcohol science is full of crap. It will tell you, for instance, that drink does not really warm you up, it only makes you feel warm—oh, I see; and it will go on about alcohol being not a stimulant but a depressant, which turns out to mean that it depresses qualities like shyness and self-criticism, and so makes you behave as if you had been stimulated—thanks.

          Alcohol gives you energy, or, what is hard to distinguish from it, the illusion of energy. 

          Such power hath Beer.
The heart which grief hath canker’d
Hath one unfailing remedy—the Tankard.
—CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY

*

I felt connected, in communion, with my fellow Americans via communal rituals of parades and fireworks on Thursday. This was magnified by the thought of so many soldiers having given their lives for the freedom we now enjoy. I don't normally feel this way on Memorial Day, when there are no public, communal rituals. Some patriotic souls go to cemeteries to remember the fallen in battle, but July the 4th seems different because of the spectacle, the ritual.

And I thought of how wise it was for Jesus to institute a ritual, the Eucharist, in which we might feel similarly connected, and also via a sacrifice, in this case His on the Cross.


3-year old Sam memorably got up close and personal and asked if that was hair I had in my nose and I said yes and he wanted to “get it for me”. “Not necessary Sam”, ha! Reminds me I ought groom better before he comes over. We enjoyed the early afternoon in the hottub and little kiddie pool, then the eye-pad in the later afternoon (it rained again;  the sun is starting to feel revelatory). Sam watched cartoons and we rented Scooby Doo. Will was charming as the day is long, fascinated by my remote controls and a happy-go-lucky fellow who can go under in the pool and still not be afraid of the water. Nice quality to have!

*

My brother-in-law's nephew Luke and his retiring Japanese wife were at the party on the Fourth. An odd-seeming match, this blue collar worker at the beer plant and this rail-thin, shy but friendly Asian. Stereotypes usually have some bit of truth to them and the stereotype of Asian women as being very compliant seems to hold in this case.  She's pregnant, but offered her chair (the last available) to her husband! He laughed and said something like only she would offer her chair despite being pregnant.

I forget how they met, but their wedding in Japan a couple years ago turned into a mini-disaster. He noticed symptoms of H1N1 flu just as he arrived in the country and at a pre-wedding party ended up giving the flu to one of her co-workers. Japanese government workers locked him into quarantine, forbidding he leave where they were staying and following up with visits to check on compliance and symptoms.

At the party I asked what Japan was like and he was at a loss until saying, "lots of Japanese people" which sounds similar to how I described Mexico City ("lots of Mexicans").  It's impossible to get the feel of a country or a people when you're there a short time and you don't understand the language. So sounds like he didn't spend a lot of time indulging in Japanese cultural activities, ha.  Something tells me I'd be really bored in Japan. None of the cultural tropes interest me, not sushi or samurais or sumo wrestling. Not their art or music or sports, with the exception of baseball. The language barrier wouldn't help and I don't know that people go to Japan for the scenery or the sights too much, though I could be mistaken.  Countries I would like to visit come in one of two flavors: either they are industrially modernized but are culturally similar enough to America for me to be able to grasp, or they are in not quite fully modernized (China, old Soviet republics) and thus are interesting even with the language barrier and lack of a shared culture.   It still feels crazy I haven't been to Germany yet, a land of half my forebears.
*

More Kingsley Amis:

Reading must be combined with as much drinking experience as pocket and liver will allow.

It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handomest, and in every way best races of all times.’ George Saintsbury.

I think Saintsbury must've been sloshed when he wrote that.

What's in a Cover?

As you can see at right, they settled on a cover for the upcoming Heather King book, "A Shirt of Flame". The only flame I see is the flaming red hair of the observer in the foreground. A very modern book cover; youth is served (since the woman gazing at the wall looks young) and coffee as well, a drink that merely by its presence connotes the sort of warm feelings you get when you drop by a coffee-cum-book shop. The young lady also seems to have two shirts on for some reason. Maybe it's cool in the room.

It seems a highly marketable cover, and I suppose that's what counts since you want to get the message out. One might've wished for something a bit more edgy, though. It's attractive but looks a bit chic-flicky.