Sunday morning, evening, Monday morning

schwarze

Dark chocolate lasts long because I allow myself one. One bit, one piece, one morsel, one truffle, one square. This morning one square. Einzig ein. Auf deutsch, mit dem kaffee, ist das recht? Oder richtig? Die wunderfullen schokolade my German professor liked to say. 

Remember, es ist meiner blog, für mir. Does "for" have an umlaut? Does für make the pronoun dative? IDK anymore. Makes no sense. I don't remember. It's been 2015 – 1955 = 60 years. Moving on, I cannot stand television it's no sort of intellectual snobbery, I just can't stand it. Nor the radio blaring. Maybe it's because of the tinnitus. Except for weather o­r something specific, tv bugs the alphabet aitch out of me. Yesterday afternoon after arriving home from what seemed to me our best ever Backpack Sunday & Rally Day, 

the tv was on, so I opened the MacBook, stuffed in my earbuds, clicked YouTube and watched a segment of Das Boot -- which I first saw without subtitles in a movie theater in Los Angeles in the late 1970s or early 1980s whenever the flick was new, while there on a business trip. The conversation was so normal that it was difficult for me, but I managed to follow the plot. Yesterday was impossible, but I found one with English subtitles and discovered that though I'd followed Das Boot plot in the LA theater thirty years ago, I'd missed some of the human stuff, like the bunkroom conversation between two German submariners about the French women and the black guy in the bistro in Paris. And the sailors bullying the very young religious nut.

Two tugs in the channel waiting, a sign to expect a large ship. And yep, I see the the top of the masts over the treetops of Courtney Point as she moves into the Pass. Big one, enormous. I'll bet she was waiting offshore overnight. Now directly across the Bay from me, in the far channel. One of these days I've got to get an iPhone with a zoom lens. 

Pelicans, dozens of them in several flights heading east for the day. They'll be back this evening, headed west for Pelican Island.

I love being here, living here, both my easy chair by the window on the Bay and this porch. It's like living inside a picture that keeps changing. Living art, eh -- during sunrise this morning --

But I was going somewhere with this. Somewhere not good. Sometimes if tv is especially same-ole-same-ole obnoxious I watch Die Deutsche Wochenschau from the late 1930s into early 1940s. One last evening was from 1940 touting the Reich's glorious (ship's in the near channel now, heading for the turn toward the Port of Panama City. Binoculars. From Alex's Vessel Schedule, Atalanta 563 feet long, 89 foot beam, draft not shown, cargo wood pellets, last port Cortez, ETD Aug 23, next port Tyne. And yep it does say ETA Aug 16 so she actually was waiting offshore overnight) 

where was I?

Die Deutsche Wochenschau, an abnormally long edition from 1940. Hitler's armies had taken France and among other things, the newsreel was boasting about repaying the French arrogance, showing and commenting on the French prisoners of war. There was a long shot, with comments, down a line of captured black French soldiers, with the newsreel's words (English subtitle, so there's no mistake on my part) reporting that the French had taken these "servant class" people in as brothers, "thus contaminating Europe." So this is the stock of my heritage, both from Germany and as the whitetrash rednecks shout while waving the Confederate battleflag, "It's not about slavery, it's about heritage." Subhuman mentality spewing skybalon. Darkest era of human inhumanity, evil racist heritage that I renounce as  damningly as anything Philip Nolan ever said.

Yet it's still there, heritage as indelible as my baptism. 

After sixty years, I've had to download a declension chart of German personal pronouns. Try to remember what casts a word into dative. Worse, mess it up anyway, because I'll never again recall whether the nouns are m., f., or n. But for some reason lurking deep within me, I love this gutteral caveman tongue of my fathers.

End.

W too nasty so no +

Now within the changing picture, schwarze, darkening sky of gathering storm featuring unendingly rumbling thunder drawing closer and closer.