No, it isn't very clear, is it, and you know what? Lots of things are not very clear these days, and not only in my life but in the lives of people I know and love and, more, in people far and wide whom I have never and will never lay eyes on, though just closing my own eyes, I know their angst. Life seems to have abandoned us, yesterday we drove to Tyndall, over and back, BX, commissary, barber shop, and the hurricane's devastation on that side of town is incredible, not quite Rotterdam, Cologne, Tokyo or Berlin in 1945,  but we are looking at a long recovery. Maybe not so much in the pulling down and clearing away as in rebuilding, its planning, designing to new code, permitting, raising financing, construction. And it remains to be seen who all will stay, rebuild, and continue or start over, versus who is long gone, experience more desolating for some than for others.  Along with other cities and towns along the Gulf coast, we now have our own place in hist...

This new condo is directly across the pool area from our last condo, so half a block farther from US98, but the traffic sounds are more noticeable because now we're right on 30A. Though it's identical, exact same layout, furniture and furnishings even to the pictures on the walls, to me it's more comfortable for some reason, IDK, maybe the mirror opposite orientation is better for a right-handed person, maybe the light comes from a better direction. Not that I'm looking for negatives, but the only such factor so far is that the gardenia internet connection won't stay connected, keeps cutting off within ten or fifteen seconds of being connected. Fortunately so far, I'm able to connect to either the network for condo 135 next door, which worked yesterday, or the network for condo 146 above us, which is working for me this morning. Taking up the whole end of the building, this condo is large and spacious maybe twice the size of 7H, there are four generations of us,...

It must be the season, last evening Julie Andrews was on in the living room. "The Sound of Music" came out while we were stationed in Japan, living in Yokohama. We first saw "Mary Poppins" at a theater in Tokyo, maybe we first saw "Sound of Music" in Tokyo also, I don't remember but that seems far more likely than during our next Navy tour, in Washington DC, when I was so totally, and in retrospect absurdly and Time of life wastingly, caught up in my career as a workaholic Naval officer instead of camping up in the Blue Ridge mountains with my family.  A much loved classic with a supposed historical basis, "Sound of Music" was highly romanticized in the events and substantially altered in dating the von Trapp family (see  https://www.history.com/news/the-real-history-behind-the-sound-of-music ). The film brings it into my generation of extreme antipathy toward Germans and Germany in my early years that I have not been able to shed in a l...

We, that is to say, I, I don't know about anyone else, but I was hoping that we would move yesterday to what is supposed to be our fourth and final postHurricane temporary residence, three months, mid-December to mid-March when spring break season begins and all is booked up, and either 7H will be habitable or we will have to try a different situation.  We didn't move yesterday, did we, obvious or I wouldn't be talking about not having moved, would I, and it's now supposed to be tomorrow, into a different building of this resort complex at the east end of where 30A meets US98.  Every time we've moved, circumstance has improved, IDK, maybe that will be the case this time also, a more peaceful view, for example, although this is fine, has been and is fine, okay, good. Traffic outside if one cares to watch. I would out on the balcony but that the weather is too cool comfortably to sit out for long. Maybe the next outlook will be down a shady street. Quiet, it...

In my lifetime I've learned by my experiences and my experiences with others in working with them as their priest and pastor, that we learn by experience better than any other way, including by our Past experiences that we can make it through our Present and, if we have sufficient life's Time remaining, into our Future.  Just so, having  experienced, in my ICU confinement at Cleveland Clinic, what my medic friends told me was "ICU psychosis," a very real thing, I recognize what burst out of me last night as what for the moment I'll call "cataclysm psychosis" or "storm psychosis."  Coming out during overnight relaxation and mental release when I had no control over it, it was equally unpleasant, distressing, in that it kept happening, repeating every time it woke me up thrashing about, to realize that I was awake from it and, after about the second or third repeat, to realize that it would continue recurring and awakening me with its nightma...

Yesterday got away from me before I could get a round tuit. Even early, for once in a century I drifted off to sleep in the predawn darkness, got back in bed, pulled up the covers, slept until nine o'clock. Then up for a bowl of Tuesday night's supper spaghetti that I'd missed because we went to a party, errands, back exhausted, nap and up in no state of mind to write, so, sorry, Self, about my first day in eight years to miss blogging, but this refugee "life" seems to be changing me somehow, mentally &c. Even eo, I've never written anything toxic in my life. Only Frank and Ernest, ho anaginoskown noeito.  Sitting here in the darkness, Life Is Good. Black coffee, which there's a low dresser by my chair. I don't open the shade because light from the intersection shines on Linda's face across the room; so I keep a square of white paper towel on the exact corner. In the black dark I can still see the white square to sit my coffee cup down on. ...

Most anyone who preaches learns over the years how to draw out a Bible story or other text and transform its situs im leben to the present and lives and situations of one’s audience, usually a congregation seated for the sermon. Further, anyone who has participated in and somewhat developed an art called Theological Reflection acquires a habit that becomes almost a sensing instinct, to perceive one’s own situation in whatever one reads. Just so this morning, reading in The New Yorker online magazine, an interview with Esther Perel about her psychotherapist experience with human relationships, I found my own self in a particular question and answer paragraph about an effect of “cataclysmic events.”  EP's situs was Holocaust survivor, but (with apology for reducing the most horrific event in human history to a four hour storm and its comparatively insignificant aftermath) I see it from the inside looking out as a hurricane survivor. My experience throughout life has been, and cont...