early Thursday ruminations

Over the almost 2025 - 2010 = 15 years that I've been writing these +Time blogposts, there are several, I don't know how many, not a lot but at least a few, blogposts that I've written but then either pressed Publish on +Time but not linked on Facebook, or that I've pressed Publish and then immediately gone back and pressed Revert to Draft and never published. IDK, this could be one or the other, it's going to be obtuse, probably, too stupid to let anyone read and draw conclusions about me. I mean, one can tell too much about oneself, nomesane?

This issue of +Time is my thoughts about what I've been doing this morning, starting at 3:41 dark-thirty when Father Nature finally forced me to get up and turn on the coffee.

For early breakfast snack I had one of my standard favorites, half of it pictured above, Roquefort cheese on a saltine cracker. There are many cheeses that I like, my two blue cheese favorites are English Stilton and French Roquefort; the Italian blue is okay too. I usually manage to have some in our refrigerator cheese drawer for whenever the taste hits me, which of late has been a couple Times a week. Usually early dark snack with coffee; or for supper instead of a big meal if I had more than a sufficiency for noon dinner. Roquefort cheese on a saltine cracker square, usually two squares, as this morning.

Lightly butter the back side of the cracker so as to hold the cheese securely, then a nice square of the cheese, as thickly sliced as suits my taste at the moment. Why the back side of the cracker? Because I like my tongue to touch the salty top instead of the plain bottom, I always do that with saltines.

For blue cheese, it has to be either the legitimate Stilton from England, or the Societe certified from France. Maybe I slightly prefer the Roquefort: why so? I think it's because there's hardly anything that's more distinctive in taste and saltiness than Roquefort cheese. Maybe appeals to me because with the progressive CHF these years, I don't salt anything with real salt except steak, which we seldom eat, and mullet, and oysters if they're not salty enough. Otherwise, for less worthy food, I use a product NoSalt, which is hundred percent potassium, maybe helpful to me because the Furosemide pills to fight fluid accumulation in feet, ankles, legs, drain off potassium; so the NoSalt helps, and I cleared it with my doctor.

So, back from wandering down that lonesome trail, I've wondered if the reason I like Roquefort cheese so much is its saltiness?

The Stilton cheese from England is just as tasty, but doesn't seem quite as salty. I nearly always have an extra bit, a little package, of Roquefort in my cheese drawer. If you don't want to pay the high price for the snobby little exclusive triangular wedge at Publix, you can get a large package at Sam's Club for reasonable - - at least for the moment, in the 23rd Street store, it's in a large cheese bin that's behind the booth where the Japanese contractor makes their sushi; which also is quite good, and addictive.

Other. Second reading of "James" by P Everett, a rewriting of Mark Twain's discredited classic "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" but from the viewpoint of Jim, the slave who escapes with Huck and they have the river adventure together. It's credible except that I know from growing up in The South not long after Mark Twain's era, that it would not have been possible for a black slave from Hannibal, Missouri to be as self-educated and sophisticated as Everett's James is; intelligent and preceptive, yes. James knows human nature, and he certainly knows the nature of White folks.

Which hasn't changed.

Also ongoing with C Wiman's book "Zero At The Bone - - Fifty Entries Against Despair" chapter by chapter. A poet of strange poetry and a professor at Yale for several decades, Christian Wiman, who does not have a PhD, has been dealing with, fighting, cancer since his thirties, and fending off the despair that he encounters with it. Or he may have always had the black dog of depression even without the cancer. Anyway, an acquaintance is a retired professor from Yale Divinity School, and I may one of these days get round to asking about first hand experience with Wiman. Where am I in the book? - - just this morning finished entry 32. Not that Wiman is slow reading, he's too interesting to speed read like I did all that Top Secret stuff at Navy war college back at the end of the 1960s. Lots of Wiman bears pausing and going back to read over that again. Some of it's downright goofy, to just get it out there.

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Also last evening and this morning. Over the past dozen years or so I've led several Bible study groups in reading and grappling with "Secret Mark," a fascinating discovery by scholar and one-Time Episcopal priest Morton Smith, set in Mark chapter 10, it clarifies several things in our canonical Mark. Now reading details about Smith, including a long article in The Atlantic, I'm somewhat disillusioned. Which is better than working under illusions, though, isn't it?

Professor Smith may have perpetrated a number on the community of New Testament scholars, eh?

What else?

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Well, I'm reading that the military parades may start soon, with tanks and missiles rolling, and saluting troops marching, down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Not surprised, in fact I predicted it for last Time but one of the generals stopped it by pointing out that the streets of Washington, DC are not suitable, and would be badly damaged, by the weight of tanks and their rolling tracks. mox nix mir, eh, T89&c is just watching and counting. Sieg, right? means "victory" doesn't it.

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Was there more? Did I have anything else in mind this morning? Yes, lots more, but it's gone.

Breakfast may be a sardine sandwich, sardines and mustard on wheat bread; or I may put that tin of sardines back in the pantry for another day.

Nap Time.

- - baruch ata, adonai eloheinu, melek ha-olam

T89&c