I’m married, one month shy of twenty one years. I feel incredibly lonely. I’m going crazy.

That’s all.

So I am an old guy. Things happened with my ability to move gracefully, quickly and without pain. Now I can’t and don’t move those ways.

I went to my neighbourhood cricket ground and watched live cricket for the first time. It was fun until… a ball came in my direction. I got out of the way, but fell on my face, and, well, it isn’t bad, but it isn’t without pain. That and the fact that my lack of agility could get me in even bigger trouble, if I don’t deal with it.

Pain is keeping me awake and I’m obsessing on the mess in Ukraine. Both sides can’t just stop. Barbarism must be dealt with through more barbarism. That will fix it. The USA will continue to supply Ukraine with weapons and Ukraine will supply the cannon fodder. But this situation will persist until it … Who knows?

I was watching a Daffy Duck cartoon wherein he’s fighting the Nazis. Now there’s a cartoon about why it’s a smart idea to re-enlist in the 1950’s Army. Not bad. This was between Korea and Vietnam. There was plenty to do. A commercial came on touting the glories of Door Dash.

I’m not sleepy yet, but I am bored.

Ever since I don’t know when, human beings have been dividing the world into the Us’s vs. the Them’s. Here are just a few of the binaries(1/0): Greeks vs. Trojans, Persians vs. Greeks, Germans vs. Everybody Else, Commies vs. Free World. Now we have the Russians vs. the Ukrainians, and, by extension, Us.

If you believe Joe Biden and/or Sean Hannity, you trust their analyses of geopolitics to know that the corrupt oligarchs of Ukraine are the Good Guys. They bribe the Bidens, and make possible contracts to the armaments industries to restock the Defence Department’s warehouses. They give the media talking heads a chance to air out the same talking points of the Foreign Policy/War template that they’ve used since Pearl Harbour. The other pole of the Them’s has a new name tag (Russians). Everything else about the game is the same.

We don’t understand that the Ukrainians pose an existential threat to the survival of Russia and her culture. By getting chummy with the agnostic, morally flaccid West, the Ukrainians are importing the materialist values that, in the hands of Lenin, Stalin, et. al., nearly destroyed Russia in the Twentieth Century. Marxism was, and is, a Western secularist and atheist philosophy that posits an eternal struggle, with redemption made manifest only in murder “revolution”, starting with the martyred Romanovs.

Think about this. Other nations/cultures might not want what we have to offer. As outsiders, our critics notice the free exchange of ideas has become a joke in the USA. If one disagrees with the CDC, Fauci, Barack Obama, the Clintons, you are giving out disinformation or misinformation. You must be censored, so that the “free exchange” of ideas may continue. It’s another version of burning the village to save it. We talk a good game of freedom, but all that freedom jive is over at the tip-off.

We all know what a sonofabitch Putin is. Just don’t talk about our January 6 political prisoners, who killed Seth Rich, the Hunter Biden laptop, just for starters. Washington is a degenerate, and decadent court. Pseudoscience reigns, as transgender ideology, and climate science resist any legitimate scrutiny or debate. Do what a Yale educated lawyer, (John Kerry), says around climate change. Nobody believes that down means up any more or that 2 + 2 = 5. At least outside the Beltway, they don’t.

The conceit that we are the good guys in all our secular, agnostic, licentious,promiscuous, materialistic, militaristic glory just doesn’t cut it any longer. And if our pole of the binary is false, why are we even playing the game?

OK. We’re coming up on Good Friday. The Crucifixion of Our Lord sickens me. This was nothing out of the ordinary in the Roman World. This was a world where unwanted babies were allowed to die. Some things never change.

J wanted me to spend “time” with her while she watched Emergency!, a 70’s show of fictionalized stories about ER doctors, nurses and paramedics. All in all, it wasn’t a bad series, except the music set the dramatic tone with lots of brass. Completely unsettling. After half an hour of this, I wanted to die.

Two mentions of death in the first two paragraphs should tell you that my head is not in a good space. It got hot in Richmond, not unusual, where Spring morphs into Summer after about three weeks. We’ll sweat it out till about Hallowe’en. 

I might watch a World War Two documentary where the Bad Guys get what they deserve. Or cartoons. Maybe cartoons would be better. The manic antics of Daffy Duck are absolutely therapeutic.

I could not stand another minute in bed with J. There, I said it.

I went to a doctor, a PA, actually who told me the best way to manage my joint pain is to exercise. I need to break the cycle of inactivity.

OK Makes sense. Somewhere, mixed with the physical pain, is the heartache, the tears of tragedy. I can’t call the Russo-Ukrainian War anything else. This is Eastern Europe at its worst. We Americans think more violence fixes violence. But this violence is Redemptive Violence. We’ve figured out a way to prolong a crucifixion.

And that’s just one slow agony among many, some personal, some collective. I guess I’m in the right mindset for Passiontide.

I need this Resurrection, this Easter.

Who in the Taliban government in Afghanistan has the Climate Policy portfolio?

The people across the street fly a Dallas Cowboys “Lone Star” flag eleven months of the year. In June they fly a Pride flag. In a neighbourhood of Steelers and Washington fans, the Cowboys flag elicits more controversy.

In the event of Nuclear War should one go to the supermarket to stock up on bread and milk, as one does before a blizzard or hurricane?

In the etiquette of the Officer/Gentleman Class of the Nineteenth Century, an insult to a man’s wife would follow with that husband slapping the offender. A challenge to a duel was implicit.

The affront would then be resolved on the Field of Honour, where the parties would fight, with sword or pistol, often to the death.

We frown on this behaviour today. Understandably.

Still how do we take responsibility for the gravity of our words? Libel and Slander suits are often litigated between a plaintiff’s attorney and the insurance company’s attorney. An out-of-court settlement, with a non disclosure agreement (NDA) is the rule, rather than the exception.

The absurdity continues.

Back in my mind, I remember stories of corruption within dynastic states, wherein various court factions would conspire to place a weak, ineffectual, or corrupt figure on the throne whose one positive “attribute” was their malleability. This autocrat would be controlled by the parties who put him/her in power.

We are finally discovering the mechanics of a rigged election: a flood of absentee voting prompted by a pandemic, ballot harvesting, ballot counts closed to poll watchers, etc. The end result transformed an accepted electoral process into the means to effect a coup d’etat.

Sounds creepy, for sure. We now have a demented, arguably corrupt, old man, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. ruling the most powerful nation on the planet by Executive Order, aka, decree.

To make matters worse, the Biden Administration is staffed by incompetent individuals who move between either government service, government contractors, academia, lobbying firms, or the enigmatically designated “think tanks”. For example National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, has never worked in the “real world”, i.e. the one we live in where we exchange labour for money to live on. He bounces from government job, to political campaign gig, to work at a think tank, the Brookings Institution , back to government executive job. Not once did it occur to anyone considering Sullivan for a job in the security sector, that service in the military, as an infantryman for example, might be vitally important. Sullivan is therefore eminently unqualified to send a soldier into battle, completely oblivious to either dangers or consequences .

To make things even creepier, big investment funds are buying houses, deemed affordable to first time home buyers, for use as rental properties. This dovetails nicely with the public relations canard that millennials don’t want to own their own home and are happy renting . “You will be happy renting, because you have no choice.”

Oh, wait, have you heard Bill Gates is going around buying farm land, lots and lots of farm land? He’s not starting vineyards, herb farms, or thoroughbred racing stables either. If this were Russia or Ukraine, Gates and his cohorts would be called oligarchs. The CIA would be thinking of ways to kill them.

We’ve now morphed the idea of freedom into the right to pursue delusional ideas to disastrous conclusions. This is transgenderism at its core. Call me a transphobe, but that’s the plain and simple truth. Sorry. The last century saw the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism give us the Shoah, the near extermination of European Jewry. What will this pseudoscience give us?

Placing the idea of transgenderism on the fringe where it, rightly, belongs, the narcissism of our culture, has rendered our nation into a nearly ungovernable mess. A person can now talk about their “truth”. Maybe that person is mistaking truth, for the conditions encountered or perceived in their day to day life. By expanding or bastardising a definition, dialogue is rendered impossible. For example, we can attribute every dysfunctional situation to “racism”, whether racism is the cause or not. And in seeking to fix racism, we are not addressing the underlying issue. The limitations of design in a road system designed by Robert Moses, may simply be a manifestation of its obsolescence, not a nefarious plot. Fix the problem. Skip the sermon.

Very powerful people seek to change public opinion, preferences and tastes to suit the demands of their investment strategies and portfolios. If one is heavily invested in electric cars, an antipathy to fossil fuels is completely understandable. If China is the main source of lithium for electric car batteries, foreign and trade policies favouring China are absolutely necessary.

The Clinton Administration brought us the rise of the “spin doctor”, persons given the job of manipulating public perceptions. Put coarsely, their job is to convince you that it’s raining when the reality is that someone is spitting in your face. We’ve had thirty years of this. It doesn’t work.