I have been awake nearly two hours, watching shows on YouTube and now, trains. I just watched a freight pulling both refrigerator cars full of orange juice and empty refuse containers. To CSX, it’s all freight, tonnage.

As a culture, we define ourselves as much by what we discard as by what we manufacture. And this train is symbolic of our endeavours. All of what we make is ultimately waste. We even have come to delight in disposing of our waste. Recycling is the apotheosis of garbage. Technology has turned our civilisation into little more than a metaphorical digestive tract, as goods progress to garbage.

In 2019, a significant portion of Notre Dame Cathedral burned. The building was now a structure rendered to waste. The cathedral became a husk, the outer shell of a moribund idea, that there should be, and that there exists space dedicated to the worship of God. We lost a sense of the sacred at about the time of the Protestant Reformation. Today, the faithful must fight to preserve Notre Dame as a sacred space, proclaiming the Gospel (“good news”) in its art and architecture. To the secularists, the Cathedral’s purpose as a sacred space disappeared when the cathedral burned, The renovation plans proclaim not the Christian message of the Redemption of humankind through the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but the narcissism of humanity. It’s all about “us”, don’t you see? Notre Dame must be transformed into a shrine to the cult of human experience.

The Cult of Experience has as its central rite, the attainment of orgasm. Sex was once about procreation and bringing life into the world. Ultimately, sex was how human society continued. Now sex is about orgasm. “Did you come (“cum”), i.e. experience orgasm? “ is now the governing principle of sexuality. Orgasm has replaced salvation as the existential quest of humanity. The triumph of narcissism is crystallised within that inquiry about orgasm. Pleasure now trumps survival. And Truth. And Beauty. And God.

NSFW 18+.This is an erotic work of my imagination. For Olivia.

I’ve been wakeful, then sleeping since Five AM. J is still sleeping. She will awaken around an hour from now. Train #89, The Palmetto, just passed through Ashland on its way to Richmond, ultimately Savannah.

My lustful mind spins a fantasy of taking the train to Savannah., perhaps not this train, but the Silver Meteor, where I can book a bedroom. In Savannah, a woman will join me. I will use her on the train, taking her body whatever ways it may please me.. I am a man, after all.

We will ride the train to its terminus in Miami. We will stay in an Art Deco hotel on South Beach, and pretend it’s 1938 and I am William Powell, the woman is Myrna Loy. We are Nick and Nora Charles, solving a murder between various couplings. Asta will not bark as I thrust into “Nora’s” luscious cunt.

We board the train Northbound. When it arrives in Savannah, the woman hikes her skirt, removes her knickers, then before handing them to me, rubs her pussy with them, her scent marking them, gifting me with the ultimate souvenir.

I’m sitting on the porch on a sunny day, with a bit of a chill. It’s is a perfect day for Autumn, moving toward Thanksgiving and Winter. My neighbour just pulled up with her boy friend. Her son, almost 3, is not with her. Maybe he is at his father’s, maybe his grandparents’. Who knows? It’s not my place to ask.

I’ve been in a similar predicament, a single part-time parent, whose concept of parenting and family life was ripped away. An intact nuclear family was a notion that was belittled and maligned in the wake of the Sexual Revolution. I was a willing participant in that “revolution”. Only now, half a century later, can I see the personal, cultural, and social catastrophe that the Sexual Revolution was.

Madness is very alluring. Giddy mania, perpetual Mardi Gras, is the endless season of our time. No Ash Wednesday ends the revelry, no fast, no penance comes to insert reflection about our sins. There can be no sin, if we deny there is a God, just inappropriate behaviour.

Jesus used his miracles to cure the demon-possessed, even casting demons into a herd of swine, who then proceed to run off a cliff. We make movies about our demons. Computer generated special effects make them real celebrities. The Hallowe’en creepy season offers an annual showcase of depravity

Virtue? What’s that? Power? Now we’re talking. Who can I control? What can be destroyed in the name of justice?

Dysfunctional families make for ideal prisons. Managing a life of shared custody, child support, sparking a new romance or coping with loneliness offers distraction aplenty. And a talking head will happily present a lie for truth. And we’ll believe that head.

Instead of an election in 2024, why don’t we allow the Prophet Samuel to anoint a king from the House of Jesse?

What makes time “Ordinary”? I’m too lazy right now to look up the ecclesiastical answer, and it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I went to Mass, and sat among these beautiful families, fathers, mothers, children of all ages.

My body doesn’t always cooperate. Pain centers in my lower back and in my left hip. I sat in the pew, hurting, but praying, listening, chanting the Gloria, Sanctus, Pater Noster.

Despite hurting, despite wishing those children were my grandchildren, I knew I was home.

We’ve spent a century pursuing the idols of hedonism. I’m glad I lived long enough to walk away.

That is the name used to commemorate the day the Armistice was signed , ending The Great War 1914-18. We limp along, bearing the cultural, political, and societal scars of this catastrophe, even today.

The legacy of that war is the carnage of its spawn, the brutal second act of 1937-45. Her memorials need only names to convey the horrors, Nanking, Katyn, Coventry, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima.

A peace that gave monsters free reign to wreak havoc was no peace at all. Yet the pipe dream that was Versailles continues to seduce us. We’ve moved the locus of reverie, from Geneva to New York and Brussels.

I don’t have a solution to alleviate the consequences of human sin. We might want to keep the swords in the scabbards, the drones and the bombers on the tarmac, and the aircraft carriers in port. But even those gestures are but more of the same simplistic fantasy. Maybe I will reread Auden’s September 1, 1939…….

And remember the compassion of St. Martin of Tours, whose Feast Day is today.

I’m tired, frustrated, lonely. I don’t want to leave my house.

Folks, am I the only person in the blogosphere watching this? This is absolutely incredible. You can watch it in real time on YouTube.

Beats the Heck out of football (American and soccer), politics, and gives sex a run for its money.

The cone has partially collapsed. The lava flows will destroy everything in their paths.

That is the title of a Protestant hymn we sang in the Presbyterian Church of my youth. The hymn was an expression of gratitude, oddly lacking in our contemporary culture of entitlement and grievance. How can the entitled and aggrieved express gratitude for anything? We either think we deserve our gifts and therefore expect to receive them or we resent that we have been denied what is ours by right. I suspect that the rigidity of the thinking of Grievance Culture does not allow for Thanksgiving.

So I made it through this week safely. My week culminated in a colonoscopy this Friday. My colon looks pretty good, one small polyp, snipped, most likely benign. Anybody who has experienced a colonoscopy knows the procedure itself is a holiday, after undergoing the preparation. The prep, at least here in the U.S. of A, involves a purging of the colon by drinking about three litres of water, after taking a course of purgative salts. At the end one is dehydrated and exhausted from the purge. General anaesthesia is a “consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Post procedure, I had a meal, my first solid food in about thirty six hours. I enjoyed a bowl of soup that tasted a tad salty, but I actually needed the salt. Then I came home, texted friends and family that I had the procedure and was OK.

The solid foods fast was not bad at all. I realized we build up a lot of anxiety around not eating. We in the developed world can afford to fast for a day and probably should, not necessarily as a religious obligation, but to allow our bodies to use some stored fat, and to rest. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have prescribed fasts of varying lengths. So if G-D expects it, fasting isn’t such a bad idea.

I’m looking forward to working out again, recommitting to healthy eating, and learning new stress reduction skills.

My next round of medical examinations and procedures will be as simple as an eye exam, and as complicated as a hip replacement.

Laissez les bon temps roulez!

I’m waiting around for a colonoscopy, four days away. I had to get COVID-19 tested today. They recommend I self-quarantine so I won’t be exposed to the virus after the testing.

But wait! I’ve been vaccinated! Doesn’t matter, I suppose. So why did I submit to the jab if these doctors are dubious enough about its efficacy to advise I self-quarantine. It’s a question for the ages.

I found this website The Internet Archive. It is the world’s digital attic, with billions of pages of stuff. I can waste hours rummaging around in it,which I did tonight.

I finally found Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus, starring Marlene Dietrich and a young Cary Grant. I was pleased to identify Sterling Holloway in the opening scenes. His distinctive voice can be readily discerned. I believe he later became the cartoon voice of Disney’s Winnie The Pooh.

J texted. She was headed home and wanted me to heat some of Sunday dinner’s leftover spaghetti, which I did.

I switched out some dry clothes for wet ones in the dryer. I have a cup of decaf beside me, that I fixed in the Keurig. I should go to bed.

But I really just wanted to acknowledge the deep loneliness in my life, the ennui, the sexual frustration. I lack the courage to risk being rebuffed by my wife. So I sit.