Criterion Collection has a marvelous collection of the films of Jacques Tati.

He was (is) a genius. Watch these instead of the drivel you have to pay to watch in the prisons they call movie theaters today.

Trust me on this.

It cost me 43 cents. 43.cents, I remember when a packet cost a nickel and was devoid of stigma. The Jonestown mass suicide was facilitated by grape Kool Aid mixed with cyanide. We call that a Public Relations catastrophe.

I bought cherry, not grape, added my cup of sugar, poured in 2 quarts of water and stirred thoroughly.

And….,,

I tasted it. Not Bad at all,

Adults have to swill alcohol at cocktail parties, pig roasts, wedding receptions, They pretend they like it and some do.

But that taste of Kool Aid brought forth innocent memories. Before I knew about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Water Gate break in, marriages and divorces. Joint custody. The long list of nightmares that is adulthood.

Next on my list Cotton Candy,

To my left , as I sit in my “comfy chair” is a box, filled with books that I ordered from Amazon and I’ve been intending to read, but have yet to read.

Well, doggone it. I am going to read them.

Expect book reports.

Having just completed Stay Alive, Ian Buruma’s history of Berlin during the war years, 1939-45, a memoir of a gay man hiding in Berlin An Underground Life. (Gad Beck) seems like a logical segue.

So here goes.

thiugh

I can’t find a better word for how I feel

One adjective says it all.

This is the toughest question I’ve ever asked myself. Does it mean giving your body to someone else,of putting up with their alcoholism or showing them the path to recovery? Does it mean losing the person, you thought you loved forever?

More will follow.

O

Paul Cooper is a podcaster who uses that term as the basic premise of his stories. He describes the fall of cultures throughout the world.

A lot of cultures accumulated very little garbage. They constantly found uses for things before those things became effluvia.

Today, we can watch freight trains hauling containers of trash to giant trash pits on their way to becoming giant trash mountains. We can decry this need to manage our waste, or we can see it as a giant jobs program for future archaeologists. ( The children of the rich who aren’t managing the inheritance will need something to do.)

I can see this phenomenon take place in my own personal living space (lebensraum). “What do I do with my trash?” has become an existential question. Not that Sartre or Camus fretted over their egg shells and old newspapers, but you get the idea.

Happy Canada Day to any Canadian readers I might have.

I‘m plowing through Antony Beevor‘s The Fall of Berlin 1945. Can one suffer from shell shock, simply by reading about The War (The Great Patriotic War) ?

Sleep? Maybe later.

I’m reading Antony Beevor’s The Fall Of Berlin 1945. The full horror of the war on the Eastern Front is brought to light. 27 million Russians died in World War Two. I just noticed that 85 years ago today 22 June, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded The Soviet Union.

This book is a small glimpse into the unspeakable horror that was W W Two. If your father or grandfather never talked much about The War, this book will give you an idea why.

I’m sitting on the porch, drinking an iced coffee with heavy cream, somewhere between a dessert and a beverage.

The UPS guy came with a box of Caswell- Massey Soaps , affordable luxury for an old man

Where is that wife of mine? Oh yes, at lunch with The Girls. Never mind they are pushing eighty. There are times when we are all ageless

Touch yourself. Your Self. You know what I mean. The image in your mind of a lover, long dead, or abandoned or severed.and a memory of time, when you possessed them.

Maybe you had your lover anally and you thought it was your show, since you did the penetrating, But maybe not, since you were indulged.

Maybe , if you’re a male, you’ve done your best thinking with your prick. But that hardon has led you to unknown territory, to your own private Victoria Falls. And you have your own story to tell at the Explorers Club that is a Bull Session.

You haven’t made love in twenty years, because you stopped listening, or you’ve tightened the standards for the entrance exam.

Just get the lube and get to work.

There’s a Sinatra song “In The Wee, Small Hours Of The Morning”, that Barry Levinson used in one of his movies about Baltimore Tin Men.

I wish my insomnia were so rich and romantic that Sinatra tunes were featured in my sleepless episodes, but no, or, at least , not yet.

I am waiting for AMTRAK’s Silver Meteor (#98) to pass through Ashland on the Virtual Railfan You Tube site. While waiting , I’ll fantasize I’m on my way to New York , and The Big Apple will be permanently romantic and not teetering on fiscal disaster. The Astors and The Vanderbilts will perpetually hold control and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby will be as real as Grant’s Tomb and Central Park.

The consolation tonight is the richness of cinema. Whether a Flash Gordon serial from the Thirties or a work by a master like Fellini or Spielberg, the movies have been The Great Escapes of modern times.

Monsters like Hitler or Stalin have allowed geniuses like Riefenstahl or Eisenstein to give at least a glimmer of excitement or legitimacy to their machinations .

We can imagine ourselves Someplace Else, out West with Duke Wayne or at Tara with Scarlett O’Hara, or in Never Land with Peter Pan. The movies can do that.

And The Good Guys can win. And Hope can stay on life support a while longer.