dark with a pink promise

Saturday 12th August 2017, at 80° 88% and almost deathly still, a morning too warm comfortably to sit outside on 7H porch with black & dark. Tug with its telltale row of three lights slanted down to stern slowly pushes a barge by. Oddly, especially for a lazy one, life is somewhat sweeter if a task is pressing, distracting, which is not so at the moment.

Just before the internet, something was written about a dawning new electronic age when everything imaginable, anything one could want or imagine, could be called up on one’s computer to watch, study, read. It would be through something to be called the world wide web, now nicknamed the internet. I thought that was ridiculous, impossible, but last night I watched incredibly mediocre war films, likely truer than a contrived drama to the real life of those who lived it and died there, Yugoslav partisans against Yugoslav Home Guard, rounding them up, letting volunteers change sides, sending the rest home stripped to their underwear and keeping their uniforms and weapons, killing traitors who changed sides too often, infiltrating a Home Guard fort and slaughtering everyone inside after visiting back and forth with old neighbors; Yugoslavians, Hungarians, Serbs and Croats still and always hating each other even while wearing the same uniforms; and the German enemy, whom all sides hated but whom the partisans were fighting and with whom the Home Guard were forced to ally, never showing up at all. English subtitles because, while it’s possible to follow some German language films without subtitles, Hungarian, unless you heard it from your mother’s womb, is totally alien, just sounds, only sounds, nothing but sounds. 

Life may be mediocre, but something thrilling, dark, and incomprehensibly irrational is always happening offstage.  Ask anyone who’s lived more than eight decades of it.

DThos+

• Friday breakfast, memories and a dozen fried oysters 
• Saturday suddenly clouding, raining and cooling enough to go sit outside after all
• Saturday clearing through with a pink promise and a bit of blue