Friday the Someteenth
OMG I love this Bay. Supposedly, one can love only creatures (living creatures, or memories of creatures whom one has known), and can only "like" objects, but I don't believe that and neither do you. I love StAndrews Bay, a living Being.
The picture is hazy because it's hazy this morning, hazy and humidity 95%. Here on the Florida Gulf Coast the weather, Father Nature, has an ongoing struggle with himself about whether to let go of summer so it can be autumn for a while, or keep on being summer; seldom do we have an autumn leaf spectacular, and some years we get a few hours of winter, or it can be bitter cold for days on end. As a boy, my favorite was summer, because school was out from the end of May to the Tuesday after Labor Day. Grown up and work years I loved the seasons year round except for the snow and ice and shoveling my car out every morning of those cold winters living way up North. Anyway, here's another picture of my Bay, looking west from 7H at the end of a day.
Not Friday the thirteenth, it's the twenty-second of October, a month of the year that now comes menacing, a threat. What?, keep my toes and fingers crossed all month, or make sure not to step on any cracks in the sidewalk? I don't think so. Halloween heralds the start of the holiday season, so I'm not giving up on October even if Thanksgiving this year means leg of lamb or baked red snapper so the turkey can be held for Christmas. Have you tried to buy a turkey yet?
Friday the 22nd with a blank calendar brings the opportunity to pop FuroForty and stay home. As usual through my life, I need to lose weight, and the "water pills" are the easier part of it than daily trying to eat a few less calories than I use. Right now, I'm trying my eating habits of my Navy years (except my years at sea, when an enormous breakfast in the wardroom was every day's highlight): black coffee for breakfast, whatever for dinner (dinner is at noon, I'm still a Southerner, lunch is a Yankee word) except minimize the bread and other carbs. Then supper out on 7H porch, something lighter than what I'd prefer and a glass of water.
Yesterday I wrote a blogpost that didn't get published because I ran out of morning. When I returned to 7H, the HVAC technician was just finishing up putting our unit back in operation after its being broken down for nearly a month. It needed two parts, a fan and a circuit board, and only the circuit board had arrived, so that's what he installed. So far it seems to be working perfectly. Fingers crossed, and he'll be back to install the fan if and when it arrives. Why the backorder and further delay? As we are finding out, everything these days is blamed on the pandemic. But which lets me put aside my usual excuse for everything and save it for later: my age. Ever since I turned fifty, I've been blaming everything on my age.
But that blogpost. I'll delete it, but first a couple of things from it. One is finding out that like everything else in life, for every loss there's a gain, it applies to the pandemic as well. With fewer commitments, I seem to have more discretionary Time. Yes, I waste too much of it sitting here staring across the Bay, but reading also is an exercised option. Reading books online is a treat (I can make the print size whatever my eyes like), and we've subscribed to a few old favorite magazines, including two I used to buy at the magazine stand at Washington National Airport before hopping my flight for wherever. The Atlantic. The New Yorker. Yes, they've changed and sometimes seem more obnoxiously overboard than I ever noticed before at being socially and politically correct instead of appealing to strange intellects. Still, though, nevertheless, notwithstanding, and anyway. I recognize the old character that I used to enjoy. Besides, I don't buy cars anymore, so if I want to subscribe to a magazine I don't have to make sure the budget can take the hit.
In one yesterday, Atlantic, I read a book review that presented a new book so appealingly that I ordered it, to be delivered online so I can read it on my laptop with my Kindle app. The review was almost predictable Atlantic essay length, but here's the end of it:
The Dawn of Everything is not a brief for anarchism, though anarchist values—antiauthoritarianism, participatory democracy, small-c communism—are everywhere implicit in it. Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity.
“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.
The idea that we've always had everything about history all wrong appeals to me. Especially politically, with my observation and unshakeable mindset that All Government is Always All Ways All Bad. Governments perpetuate themselves and grow exponentially by making sure there are always problems, always something to fight about, always someone to hate, always another government to go to war with, the old men sending the young men to die. The young men should take charge and retire the old men to rest homes and make peace. But that won't happen until only grandmothers are allowed in government. Anyway, I sort of spotted myself in the review and am looking forward to reading the book.
Meantime, I've taken off my bookshelf and am going back to read again Melvyn Bragg's "The Adventures of English: the Biography of a Language".
Time, discretionary: it's what I have. A Gain.
ABC&PTL
T+