Obsessions of a Split Mind

Keeping a blogpost, somewhat like keeping a frog, is in the same stadium with a journal and a diary, but has a different name because it’s not the same as either just as a frog and a toad are different. We don’t eat toad legs, so in the Resurrection, better be a toad than a frog if those are one’s reincarnation options. Better yet, be a pelican if that's offered, or an osprey. 

Outside on the porch this morning, sunrising in the east, and to the west, gazing right past Courtney Point, those high-rises at Bay Point and on round to the Gulf-front high-rise condos along Thomas Drive. It was not so when I was a boy here, and while the old ways were best, I also love it the way it is this morning. One blessing I love most is that Tyndall Field came to us with WW2 and has stayed, thus preventing greedy development of the land across St. Andrews Bay that I see between Redfish Point and Davis Point.

Here comes a shrimp boat, heading in from all night at sea, someone will eat good today. Is there a moral ethical difference between boiling the fresh shrimp I can buy at Gandy’s or Tarpon Dock, versus boiling what one of the Barber boys used to offer me, knocking on the front door of the rectory at dawn and me buying five pounds of darling little jumbos with their feet still moving? 

This is my all time favorite place to live. The notion of it first came to me, planted itself as a seed and kept growing, in 2007 when we drove down to central Florida on the Atlantic Coast to officiate a wedding. The family kindly lent us a brand new Chevrolet Equinox for the drive, and when we got there it was covered head to toe with lovebugs; and I remember The Man joked, "You get a lovebug on it, you own it!" Anyway, they graciously put us up in a wonderful hotel room high up, looking out over the harbor and right down into the sea and I said, “I could live here.” The upshot is that it don’t git no better’n ‘nishere, and here I am, here we are, living high.

Low and far out clouds over Shell Island are pinking up now, their top peaks welcoming Wednesday dawn. Large dark gray cloud coming at me from over the Gulf, but it’s getting pink shades also.

Two consuming early morning obsessions before starting to blog. Reading again an article a friend sent, “The Tetragram and the New Testament” by George Howard, discussing use of the divine name 
in pre-Christian Greek manuscripts of the Jewish Bible; and theorizing about its use in early Christian documents, with subsequent text editing and development that has  interesting implications not so much for the issue with Psalm 14 that was bothering me yesterday, as especially for responding to the Sunday School and Bible Seminar question “When and how did Jesus of Nazareth become the divine Son of God, and the second figure in the formula 'God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit'?"

Bit hazy out beyond Shell Island, but may clear up, depends on the humidity, I reckon.

The second obsession is from a link in an antique automobile magazine another friend sent me. Studying pictures of 1928 Buick cars.

The popular and pricey models for collectors are convertibles, roadsters and touring cars and I also like those. But my two favorites are closed cars, the four door sedans



and the two door cars — not so much the square two door sedans or the three or five window coupes, although I love them too, but a style that’s sometimes labeled “victoria” —



it’s a two door car with more inside space than a three-or-five-window coupe, but, unlike the square two door sedans (often called “coach” body), has a gracefully curved rear end.



Eat your heart out if you wanted a sunrise picture this morning, and the pictures are really wonderful, especially the long, low, purple clouds moving slowly east beyond Thomas Drive. 1928 Buick, this is your day.


When better automobiles are built, Buick will build them.



TW