Some mornings, and this was one, take one’s breath away, usually, and this was one, before the camera can be grabbed and a shot snapped. Some August mornings, today again, are so stiflingly humid as also to take the breath. But the walk was good anyway.  For the first time in thirty-five or more years, this morning I parked my car, dropped keys in lap instead of pocket, locked car door, got out, and realized what I’d done just as the lock clicked. So rode to Big Mama’s on the Bayou in Robert’s truck, ordered an extra breakfast, for Linda, phoned her with the bad news she must come get me and bring extra keys. She laughed before I got to a punch line. No matter. Panama City is accommodatingly small and convenient. Not so much as Apalachicola our years there, but still as&c. This was basically from one end of Beach Drive to the other.  Best recent dream. Reporting aboard a cruiser as a commander. Alles ist gut until I realize I'm in a lieutenant com...

A problem with legalizing merciful euthanasia (Greek for good death) is the potential for its abuse as a cover for murder, for getting rid of undesirables, and for hastening one’s inheritance. In like manner, while the time has come for doing away with freedom of speech in the United States, similar to what has been done in post-WW2 Germany and in England, for peace and public safety and to reduce violence, I wouldn’t want anyone but myself deciding what is acceptable speech or defining undesirables. Certainly not some Tweeter in Chief. Nevertheless - with what is arising in America, far right fringe purposefully getting their parade permits and legally abusing freedom of speech and freedom of assembly to attract and incite violence, and now the stirring, waking, and uprising to power of the violent left who are far more than a fringe element and whom politicians dare not oppose because currently the left are politically correct, where the prospect is more and more Charlottesv...

Three evenings, two hours, 8/7c Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, History Channel. But that a friend told me, I’d have missed my only kind of program. As well as fascinating car pictures, highway and street scenes from early 1900s right on through the 20th century, interesting observations of typical History Channel that remind me of things I learned in seminary about OT Bible stories: don’t let it bother me if plausibility, details, chronology and historicity are overshadowed by enthusiasm, fascination and imagination, because such didn’t in the least bother those who first told, heard, and later wrote it down. The story was the thing, not its minutiae. The program I loved, all three evenings. What did I notice. Not only evening to evening, but clip to break to clip to break to clip there was an enormous amount of backing up and coming forward, like dancing the two-step in grade school, two steps forward, one step back. So many scenes played numerous times. No matter, I loved them a...

Again a little more warm and muggy than comfortable for starting outside on 7H porch. Summer predawn Life is Good though, and a favorite is to wake to a churning panorama of lightning and thunder in clouds over the Gulf. No fireworks, just hot and close this Tuesday morning. After the cup of black and bite of dark, the stairwell exercise. News shared with me by the person reading PCNH from the opposing chair: three different white supremacist groups seeking to speak at venues in Florida, Texas, and Virginia. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, America a nation of racist, sociological, and religious bigots, once largely closeted but under our emerging dark and menacing political climate where evil is good, people are picking up symbols, flags, now statues, outing themselves, showing their colors. Who can say why they're not content to bottom-feed on angry white trash, but now targeting white college students for conversion and confirmation, der frei J...

Above is the moment and place of my heart. Who missed it missed an unimaginable blessing.  Blogpost below is completely unrelated to picture above and picture below it.  Though the blogposts aren’t continuous from day to day, an exception this morning, the weekend’s furor over CSA General Robert E. Lee in mind.  What we were taught, learned, lived, believed, cherished and knew growing up - -  evilly dead wrong first on slavery then on segregation that we “knew” was so right in the South because it was the way society had always been for us - - we should be mindful that we as a culture may have been wrong on anything or even everything. Including our heroes. Flannery O’Connor, fiction author of southern noir, much of which reads so depressing ludicrous dark and rings so outrageous absurd familiar, writes a story about us, a dysfunctional family where one does not know truth from imagination and reimagined reality, where our past, dead and gone, is whateve...

It’s easy to be on the wrong side of history, all you have to do is be born there. I don’t know whether any statues of Stalin are still standing in cities of Russia and the former Soviet Union, and I expect Hitler statues are illegal in Germany. But I did grow up in an era when Robert E. Lee was named softly, respectfully, affectionately, reverently. Unlike Jefferson Davis, General Lee was our eponymous father in an age when our grandparents were still struggling with the idea of honoring Abraham Lincoln; and General Sherman was reviled. I may be the last generation of that, but we grew up when family feelings were still raw, and I loved them, and I am what I am.  Who are my people? I remember, still love. A large portrait of General Lee hung over the fireplace mantlepiece of my college fraternity house, and KA pledges were taught that we should emulate his integrity and his honorable character as southern gentlemen. Religion aside, we were taught, and believed, tha...

Saturday 12th August 2017, at 80° 88% and almost deathly still, a morning too warm comfortably to sit outside on 7H porch with black & dark. Tug with its telltale row of three lights slanted down to stern slowly pushes a barge by. Oddly, especially for a lazy one, life is somewhat sweeter if a task is pressing, distracting, which is not so at the moment. Just before the internet, something was written about a dawning new electronic age when everything imaginable, anything one could want or imagine, could be called up on one’s computer to watch, study, read. It would be through something to be called the world wide web, now nicknamed the internet. I thought that was ridiculous, impossible, but last night I watched incredibly mediocre war films, likely truer than a contrived drama to the real life of those who lived it and died there, Yugoslav partisans against Yugoslav Home Guard, rounding them up, letting volunteers change sides, sending the rest home stripped to their under...