no cups & saucers

just plates

Odd things here and there. “My nazi dishes” I call them, a stack of ten dinner plates, not miss piggy jumbo American size, but smaller 10” old fashioned plates I bought on eBay a dozen or fifteen years ago because I like the design, white and quietly elegant. Bavarian, "Bayern" reads the back, "Hutschenreuther Hohenberg Bayern" and "H.C.Hahn Berlin Leipzigerstr". The ad said they were 1937, which puts them in that era. I do wonder who owned and ate from them back then, and whose portrait hung on the dining room wall, and the thought of it sickens me, but I like the plates, whatever secrets they hide, they’re mine now, our everyday dishes. Plates that is, only plates, no bowls, no b&b plates, no cups & saucers, &c, just the plates

There were times in my life I had an odd enthusiasm to shop for and collect dishes, these are from one of several such sprees, most others sold before moving to 7H.

New congress sworn in, swearing to abolish the Affordable Care Act, and with anything to replace it yet? Is ObamaCare that problematic that we would cancel some semblance of medical care for millions of Americans? Did we think it was going to be tax-free, cheap and painless to care for poor people? If we don't care for our poor and needy, what the hell do we have that's worth dying for? A new nuclear arms race, ayfsm? I know nothing about the medical or admin side or extra costs and difficulties imposed, but I do know that some American families who had no medical assurance before now have some care and hope. Is it true, really true, that the same folks who so vehemently oppose contraception and “choice” for women and families paradoxically oppose AffordableCare for the resulting infants and children? An odd sort of dystopian ethic that calls to mind the people-eaters in The Road. Face it or not, there is a religious and theological element. Christianity is not some selfish crock about saving oneself from Hell by accepting Jesus Christ as personal savior and being as sure for heaven as if you were already there, it’s about living one’s life in love and sacrifice for others as He did. Love and sacrifice are costly, ask Him, He's in the Book, read about Him. Or watch the film The Passion of the Christ. A Christian's call is not to get off cheap, but to take up the cross and carry it to the end and hang dying on it. "Will you respect the dignity of every human being, loving your neighbor as yourself?" To abolish neighbor's medical care is not love, but greed, hatred, eating and drinking κρίμα. 

Watching free movie on YouTube. Crime and Punishment part one yesterday, Tuesday. God. OMG, film noir, movie even darker than the book, and monochrome, black and grey shadows, deepen the darkness. My project for today, Part Two. What terrible, dark, dark darkness, living into the hopelessness that one has got oneself into such a nightmare from which is no way out, but only menace, terror, fear, discovery, darkness. 

Joe’s gift box came yesterday. A company jacket, I've always enjoyed things from his company shop, and weather later this week looks jacket-promising. Bit of porcelain, soap. I didn’t especially smell Linda’s soap, but my bar of soap is exquisite, sharp as a pine forest on a hot summer day, lemongrass, nettle and alkanet root. Retiring my present face soap, I’ll use it before applying shaving foam, 2017, make it last a year.

Making my way ever so slowly through Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove. Even in the translation from Swedish to English there are gems, phrase gems, life philosophy, wisdom, bits of theology. From yesterday:

"Maybe their sorrow ... should have brought (them) closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don't share it there's a good chance that it will drive them apart instead."

But fearsome to me: whether Swedish government council, the tyranny of administration, white shirts, the bureaucrats, our own American direction, is indeed so insidious, evil.

In theguardian, recently read a piece, "News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier". It's true, may enhance my happiness by not reading or watching the news and lugging it around as mind luggage and a chip on shoulder. Of a mind with that, I once recalled here that the owner of a firm I worked with part time for a year after retiring from the Navy told me he never turned on the car radio on the way to work because the news was depressing, because there was nothing he could do about it, because it would bring him in to his workday feeling down instead of enthusiastic. I emulated that in my own life a few years after and wonder if, as a sabbatical exercise, I might reestablish it as a life’s daily way. As for as the effect of bad news, my mother had a habit of repeating stories about awful things that had happened to people in the news until one day I asked, “mama, please don’t tell me about that, there’s nothing I can do about it, it will make me feel terrible, depressed, ruin my day, and I can't do a thing about it except feel sad.” Though she needed constant stopping and reminding, she did try to cooperate to some extent.

With a near despondency that civilization is sliding into new Dark Ages of ignorance, greed, selfishness, hatred, bigotry, anarchy, certainty and sudden death, I wonder if, sans going off straußische, life can be made better by somehow shuttering the growing darkness around, to seek one's own light. I wonder what historians will write of us in fifty years? Twenty, a dozen? I wonder if the new parade cars are ready. Queasy of stomach and sick at heart, I wonder. 

Wednesday 20170104 and not counting.

DThos+ in Stoppage Time