Go Noles & Camo Lives Matter
America was at our old-time best Normal last evening as I was drafting this, life seemed nearly perfect. Or one could have that sense of it, at least I did here in 7H. Nation at peace for the first time in twenty years. Fall semester, college football on television, Florida State v Notre Dame, the only way the night could have ended better would have been cool to chill really fall football weather, and if ND had not been able to slow the Seminoles' final drive to a game tying field goal instead of the winning touchdown. Or overtime had ended 41-38 instead of 38-41.
If you only watch one football game this season, that was the one. And if there's no covid burst from it, we'll know prayer is efficacious.
++++++++++
FSU 7, Notre Dame 7, GO NOLES! (Blood is thicker than diplomas and history).
There was a time when I thought the ideal retirement would be to have a balcony stateroom on a cruise ship, stay and live there cruise after cruise, walking the main deck for exercise and eating in the various restaurants on board, steak one night, lamb chops the alternate night. No longer do I feel that way: covid has made the idea scary, and having done four or five or half-dozen Bahamas cruises on a couple of sheer opposite cruise lines, the repetition gets pretty damn boring, not nearly as enjoyable as living here in 7H, like a cruise ship docked in port, watching water traffic from my balcony and never waking up in the middle of the night as the vessel changes course or encounters rough seas. Perfect retirement, I've found it. Don't have to dress for dinner either. The only thing I miss, which I did on two of those cruises, is the breakfast buffet in a cafeteria on a high deck aft on the Disney Wonder.
But then, I had smoked salmon and scrambled cheesy eggs before church this morning, so I'm good.
Irish 17 Seminoles 14. Go Noles!
At least once I've noticed here, with apologies to the folks who've suffered terribly from covid, or lost loved ones, or lost jobs, that you can bring good, see blessings coming out of almost anything in life, including covid. We've missed going out to eat, though for a while covid seemed to be waning and we relaxed and ate out at a few favorite places, Hunt's Oyster Bar, Holi Indian Grill, Alice's on Bayview, The Station in Apalachicola. And I'll be glad when Captain's Table finally recovers from Hurricane Michael.
But with covid, now the variant resurgence making us again cautious about venturing out it's pretty much just for groceries and church, so that an adventure is variously to Publix, Sam's, The Carousel, Fresh Market, Grocery Outlet, or TAFB Commissary.
However, and this is the good thing, I've sort of picked back up on reading that I so enjoyed during my two-month sabbatical in January-February 2017, reading and films, Youtube and Amazon Prime Video, and we need to use that subscription to BritBox that we're paying some $5 a month for. Magazines, besides eternal Consumer Reports, new subscriptions to The New Yorker and The Atlantic, print and digital access. Also, I think Linda mailed off a subscription to Smithsonian or National Geographics. Again, for reading, I'm getting back into free books online, reading on my laptop, got a couple going right now, The Hotel New Hampshire being one as I get to it.
So anyway, one of the things I enjoy doing related to reading, is copy-and-paste sometimes entire articles or essays, from online magazines or news media.
ND 37 FSU 20, Noles, go dammit!
Over the weekend I read, turned out it was again, had first read it in 2019, a piece in The New Yorker, "My Childhood in a Cult" by Guinevere Turner, who grew up in The Lyman Family cult or commune or community (nobody calls themselves a cult) that had compounds across the United States. Some of her story was scary, some heartrending. Good sounded her childhood living together in a crowd of many other children, the daily life they had and loved with each other - - which brought back the excitement of visiting my grandparents in Pensacola when all the cousins would come over, all us cousins from my mother's family of four siblings. How many? From Wilbur, Louise, Charles, Edna, to Mildred, 2 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 4.
All religion is the ultimate truth for its insiders, and the religion side of Guinevere Turner's cult was intriguing, focused on their future in which spaceships would arrive to take them all to Venus. As a religion thinker, Christian clergy but no shaman and sure as hell no fundamentalist, my attention was especially caught by what Turner wrote. From my own Anglican/Episcopal orientation of
"Seek The Truth Come Whence It May Cost What It Will",
"just because I believe it, that don't make it so",
"no manner of belief makes something a fact",
and realize that nobody has all truth in a box, we Christians have various sets of traditions by denomination, Judaism is different though related, so is Islam, different but related as the Prophet (who knows our stories better than most of us do), in the Koran, mentions people from our Book, and every religion has its own traditions that, held over Time come to be assumed truth. I was taken by Guinevere Turner's thoughts, words, memories, assertions:
But, to be fair, the notion that U.F.O.s are going to take you to live on Venus is not obviously crazier than the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, not to mention the unscientific beliefs put forth by other mainstream religions. Sheer popularity and longevity can do a lot to render odd convictions reassuringly familiar.
As individuals, how well are we positioned to say which systems of belief are right or wrong? When I was a teen-ager, I would ask my mother, “Did you really believe we were going to live on Venus? I mean, just for starters, we know that Venus is uninhabitable by humans.”
“It’s complicated,” she would say. “You can hold a lot of conflicting ideas at once sometimes.”
Yes, we hold conflicting ideas, Paul's imminent parousia, the Son of Man coming at the End of Days on the clouds as all humans, living and dead humans of all Time, are raised up to meet him in the air for judgment, "We remember his death, We proclaim his resurrection, We await his coming in glory", words I love ->
God of all power, Ruler of the Universe, you are worthy of
glory and praise.
Glory to you for ever and ever.
At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of
interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses,
and this fragile earth, our island home.
By your will they were created and have their being.
From the primal elements you brought forth the human race,
and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us
the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed
your trust; and we turned against one another.
Have mercy, Lord, for we are sinners in your sight. ...
Remembering now his work of redemption, and offering to you this sacrifice of thanksgiving,
We celebrate his death and resurrection,
as we await the day of his coming.
in an age that has sent humans to the moon, has an International Space Station circling the earth,
an explorer sending back analyses of soil samples from Mars, space vehicles crashing into Jupiter and circling Pluto, Hubble and other explorers heading out into the cosmos, evidence of hundreds of billions of galaxies in this our one vast universe, speculations of a multiverse, innumerable universes beyond our own, our Big Bang but one of eternal and infinite bursts, and sciences of Time and Space that boggle the mind.
“It’s complicated,” she would say. “You can hold a lot of conflicting ideas at once sometimes.”
If we cannot contemplate ourselves, chuckle and smile, see but enjoy conflict, shake our heads at ourselves, sing the hymns, stand for the Creed, pray the prayers, eat the Bread, and rush in on Christmas morning to see what Santa left under the tree and love it all anyway, we are indeed most foolish.
One of many things I love about being an Episcopalian is being okay with having mindful questions instead of mindless answers.
The Hotel New Hampshire may be the only John Irving I read, but I have Shaw's "Candida: A Pleasant Play" arriving this week, and two weeks of The New Yorker fiction waiting. Short stories, most of their fiction is okay, some is pretty noir for my taste and all of it is rawer than forty years ago when I used to read it in the sky between Washington and Los Angeles.
ND 38 FSU 35 Q4 04:15, FSU ball 1st and 10 at FSU 20
This afternoon in The Atlantic digital version "The New Puritans", a distressing discussion of what has been obvious throughout America recently, and which Jonathan Turley* constantly speaks against. Opening by recalling the tale of Hester Prynne as told in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter: Hester damned, ostracized in a merciless society of self-righteous judgment and condemnation by the sanctimonious including the guilty man himself. Anne Applebaum speaks against the "thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered up to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage" in today's climate of intolerance for differences of opinion, view, expression.
Creeping into everywhere, showing up perhaps most prominently at universities as students (and faculty colleagues) take up vicious games of ruin against professors who express views out of synch with whatever is currently politically and socially correct, especially traditional and conservative views that, once Normal, do not adhere strictly to far-left political and social agenda, CRT, cancel culture and all the rest of it.
Black Lives Matter is countered with All Lives Matter, which altogether misses the point; or Blue Lives Matter, which yes I affirm, knowing and loving more Blues than Blacks in my lifetime, though I do not see Blue Lives Matter as Instead-Of BLM but as Also. Of course Blue Lives Matter, and also every military life, Camo Lives Matter. Blue, Camo, Secret Service, FBI, police, fire, sheriff deputies, everyone on the front lines career and daily risking life to protect all that we have and are. All Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter is a fact, not a political retort to BLM, which is a Cause not a slogan or Tax Exempt 501.c.3. Five days from 9/11 and we will not forget the Tuesday when Blue NYPD and NYFD lives mattered and were sacrificed to terrorism in a morning or horror.
BLM and yes, Blue Lives Matter too. If Applebaum's pious gods of outrage damn me, to hell with them.
It's a beautiful day. Every Day Is A Beautiful Day, even as something, a yellow X, threatens to circle in the lower Gulf of Mexico and send a cone our way by week's end. Jeepers.
RSF&PTL