Gray

To blog is not a commitment really, not any longer as it was to myself and others for some years. I've given myself permission (that's trendy, creepy psycho talk, I can't stand it) to blog when so moved, which is most days with one thing or another straining to be set free; and to give it a miss when I DWP, which comes along from time to time. Yesterday was not a day to give it a miss, I fully meant to blog, where to blog or not to blog, my intent was to blog. But first the morning and then the afternoon piled up and covered me over, and after shoveling all the snow, I returned to 7H so exhausted that blogging didn't happen, and I decided to be fine with that. 

Yesterday dinner a gem, Mullet Special at Gene's Oyster Bar on Sherman Avenue in Millville: from left to right, Linda, Susan, Gina, & me. Arriving a few minutes early, we, for a marvel, got four stools in a row. There are no tables, Gene's is a dozen or maybe fourteen bar stools with half facing north and half facing east, both east and north facing the shuckers, and cash no credit cards. Mullet obviously picked right out of the cast net. Perfect, the oysters were from Cedar Key, I had two dozen half shell, and we brought home two mullet specials, mullet for supper too. 

For breakfast, second mug of black, and, supper Wednesday evening there was leftover turkey and brown gravy, so I brought home enough for two breakfasts. Turkey & gravy breakfast Thursday,  roast beef sandwich breakfast at Cahall's Friday, rest of the turkey & gravy for Saturday breakfast.

At the moment, 59°F and overcast, Bubba is bathrobed, hooded and bundled up outside on 7H porch contemplating the gray.

This was not meant to be about food. 

Pearl Harbor Day, Sunday morning, December 7, 1941 that began what, by legend a Japanese admiral mused ominously, "I fear all we have done is woken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve" (nobody knows who started that, no evidence Yamamoto ever said or thought it) and with horrendous Tokyo firebombings, we ended prophetically at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Latter and present day bleeding hearts, of whom I suffered one as my Ethics course professor at Michigan and told him what I damn well thought of his viewpoint and still got an A, either were not there at the time and/or did not know the bottomless depth of our Hatred and Rage and, as Yamamoto is quoted, Terrible Resolve. Things happen in war that later generations who were not there feel obliged to judge. "Let's remember Pearl Harbor ... " and let's never forget what we are capable of, have done, can and will do if/when pressed. Take that as you will.

SEC conference championship today. On CFB 2019 season opening day when the argument was whether Alabama or Clemson was Number One, and my hopes for Michigan were high, who would have thought it. But football is the game where anything can happen, does happen, and this season did happen; yea, even unto the unthinkable. WTH happened? Blue seems to have dropped more or less permanently into a different league where expectations are C+ or B- anymore and forget about stomping the enemy into buckeye butter (it's poison, don't spread it on your biscuit). And has Alabama lost the recruiting attraction, edge, image and pool access that Ohio State seems to have picked up? IDK, in fact, as anyone who truly knows me will attest, I know nothing.

What am I reading? Just finished, though tried to drag it out so it never ended, Andy Catlett - Early Travels by Wendell Berry, which seems too close to personal memoir to not be so, took me so far back into memories, even beginning and ending with the first bus ride alone as a young boy who suddenly realizes that he's growing up, as myself that summer of 1950 at the drug store that was the bus stop in Fort Walton suddenly discovering and buying my first copy of Motor Trend, that I May or May Not read more of Berry. May, if I'm willing to be taken down into homesickness for a past that now exists only in my synapses and in due course will be nevermore forever. May Not though, because once there I find myself unwilling to come back, even to this beautiful place. I mean, there was a Time even in my memory, when the Bay was filled with living creatures to be fished, and StAndrews was a fishing village that disappeared in my own Time just as Apalachicola did a generation or two later in my middle and older Time. 

Also reading Antioch 268 and Its Legacy in the Fourth-Century Theological Debates, about early development of what would be the doctrine of the Trinity. A paper by Dragoș Andrei Giulea of Concordia University, Canada. Mistakenly crediting Nicaea 325 as first against what in the next century came to be known and reviled as Arianism, I've still got a lot to learn. If interested, there it is. If not, no matter, who cares. IDK and open to being beat down, but invariably find Lutheran scholarship far outclasses anything from Anglican sources. 

It's still sitting on my desktop but haven't finished Franny and Zooey, finding Salinger so captivating in Catcher in the Rye can trickle off not so.

Also sitting on my desktop and I read a page or two now and then,  Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. whose autobiographical writing in his memoir The Teacher reminds me of Harry Bernstein's The Invisible Wall. The poignancy in memoirs can be emotionally overwhelming. Especially if you've sort of Been There.

What else this morning?

There was something else, another topic or two that I sat down to blog about in the first place, but they slipped away, es tut mir leid.

I stand by my original intemperate words condemning Saudi Arabia and the Saudi junior officers in flight training at Pensacola, and every gardenia fool who thinks they are our allies. Those people, who sponsored 9/11, hate us. Our world views and life values are totally opposed. Navy also obviously has reservations and unease about the Saudi trainees:

"The Navy grounded Saudi military trainees indefinitely in the wake of a fatal shooting at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla.
Tuesday, December 10, 2019 4:24 PM EST

"The suspension will affect Saudi students at three bases in Florida. Classroom teaching will continue, and other international students will resume flight training, the Navy said.


"The “safety stand-down” was issued pending the results of an F.B.I. investigation into a shooting by a member of the Saudi Royal Air Force on Friday that left three young sailors dead and eight other people wounded at Naval Air Station Pensacola".
   Dismay comes in reading that a 200 million dollar grant is forthcoming to restore, recover, the oyster industry in Apalachicola Bay. What comes to mind is the charming little book Miss Jesus and the Sweet Pilgrim Baptist Church, the little town where oil was struck and the shoppers went wild. Having lived and served in Franklin County for more than a decade, my vision of what will come of this is countless orders for new top of the line pickup trucks, S-Class Mercedes-Benz and 7-Series BMW cars and twelve passenger Lincoln stretch limousines to park beside the trailers and hovels of East Point. It will be a lottery win gone berserk. 

RSF&PTL

T