youtube.com/watch

“I feel totally unloved.” This is my “default setting”, if you will. J is sleeping upstairs at 11:30 AM. I’m waiting for a train to pull into Ashland on the Virtual Railfan YT channel. Here she comes in all her magnificent chromium steel splendour. Off she goes.

There are medications and vitamins and supplements I need to take. J’s lunch needs preparation

I want a piece of ass, without complications. Females only, please.

June 1, Wednesday, was #2 son’s birthday. He is now 34. I could write a novel about him and how he changed my life. That’s not a big deal. That is what children do, change lives.

Yesterday, my sister gave him a birthday luncheon, where we ate white bean chicken chili and had angel food cake with strawberries for the birthday cake.

K, my sister, and I easily slip into nostalgia about our childhood these days. In the Fifties and Sixties, up to the Kennedy assassination, childhood was an age of innocence. We had space to play and to discover the larger world. Mother would let my brother and me go downtown on the bus to the movies and send us to the store on our bikes to buy groceries. In general, we learned autonomy, without danger from criminals or perverts. The dope nightmare was just beginning in 1958.

Yesterday we talked about television and the commercials . What we didn’t know then was that TV was really about the commercials. The programming was chosen by the advertisers to fill the space between the commercials. Cigarettes, automobiles and breakfast cereal were the commercials we especially recalled.

Almost every adult smoked, except my mother, my Aunt Jean and my Aunt Opal. Aunt Opal had asthma. She was more interested in breathing than smoking. Mom and Aunt Jean didn’t smoke because nice girls didn’t smoke. And they were grown-up nice girls.

Automobile advertising touted a car’s looks, power, and the status the car would convey. They also suggested that women who drove could achieve a certain independence. This is a big deal. There was, or could be, a life for women outside of waxing floors and fixing dinner.

But breakfast cereals advertised on Saturday morning “kiddie” shows were a big hook baited for just us “kiddies”. Sky King was sponsored by Nabisco Wheat Honeys and Rice Honeys. Cheerios sponsored damn near everything. Outside of the Saturday morning time slot, The Beverly Hillbillies had Winston cigarettes and Kellogg’s cereals for its sponsors. We laughed at Jed, Granny, et.al. Then we watched the commercials for Winstons and Special K. Seamless. I even remember Granny sticking a Winston in her corn cob pipe, then puffing on it.

Which brings us to leprechauns and our title. Sometime after the 50’s-60’s time line, General Mills came up with Lucky Charms, complete with leprechauns, rainbows, and petrified marshmallows in the shape of stars, hearts and four-leaf clovers. Lucky Charms were “magically delicious”.They had a notch in #2 son’s World. He ate them and as a single Dad who needed to get him out the door and to school so I could go to work, this was important.

When I saw a Lucky Charms leprechaun Tee-shirt on Amazon, I knew that shirt was a perfect birthday present for my boy. He opened the package with the shirt, took it out of its plastic bag and immediately put it on.

I guess he liked it.

I went to another orthopaedic practice about my issues, my back and my hip. This time the Physician Assistant(PA) ordered X-Rays that included a view of the hip joints. The PA at the first practice ordered X-Rays that neglected to capture a view of the hips. And whaddya know!, there’s is none of that stuff keeps the bone from rubbing against bone. Ugh! Usually the way this is handled is by replacing the joint with an artificial joint. So I have that to look forward to.

And my back? There’s damage there too, but we are going to strengthen my back as best we can to see if we can defer any more surgery on my back.

Meanwhile, I got a new prescription for Diclofenac (sic), another NSAID to see if that offers better, more, any, relief. I am trying to get back on track.

Recommitting to healthier habits seems to be a daily task. I fancy myself getting up earlier than 10:30 AM, eating a nutritious breakfast, going swimming, AA. In other words, I want a Gold ⭐️ for participation

I cringe every time I hear a politician, usually a Democrat (in the USA) or Leftist, began a sentence “We need to have a conversation…”.

It’s like someone wanting “dialogue “ with their spouse, after they’ve hired an attorney and filed papers for divorce. They’re serious about only one track for the dialogue to run on.

But you knew that.

A lovely day, indeed. The sun is warm. The breeze is gentle, persistent, pleasant. I just watched a press briefing from a high level White House official promoting NATO membership for Sweden and Finland, as if surrounding Russia with NATO allies, will decrease, rather than increase, the likelihood of a war with Russia.

Nobody in Washington perceived Russia as a threat when the Obama Administration authorised the sale of our uranium stockpile to Rosatom, the Russian energy company owned by the Russian government. What happened?

Meanwhile, I watched an interesting video on YouTube about a Hindu temple renowned for its erotic relief sculptures. The video put the sculptures into a necessary context for us Westerners who have a very adolescent understanding of the erotic and human sexuality. Our values stand in contrast to the early Jesuits’ attitude to understand different cultures before they evangelised. Still a good idea.

In 1914 a terrorist act plunged the entire globe into a war, the likes of which the world had never seen before. Diplomacy failed and treaty obligations set two chain reactions in motion that could not or would not be stopped.

Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov was Czar of the Russian Empire. His military was beset with massive corruption in the supply services and incompetence in the field command, with the significant exception of Marshall Brusilov. Rather than shift blame, Czar Nicholas eventually took direct command of the military. The losses forced his abdication. He ultimately paid with his life and the lives of his family members.

Imagine paying for the failures of government with one’s life. It is extreme, to be sure. Today the Czar would probably get a book deal, a spot on a talk show, and invitations to all the right parties.

I’m not expecting any American politician from President on down to take responsibility for the spectacular failures we have endured in the past seventeen months. But avoiding even the mention of failure does nothing to mitigate the magnitude of our losses.

It is easier to fire a football coach than it is to sack an incompetent President. Oh well.

I feel old whenever I walk, or sit, or lie down for too long.

I feel old whenever my wife shows no interest in sex.

Sometimes I just feel old.

So I have to force myself to do youthful things, like engage with the culture.

Nothing criminal. I watch The Five on Fox News Channel. I watch the show to check out Judge Jeanine Pirro’s shoes. Love, love, love her shoes!

I feel free, now that I have unburdened myself.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Progress. A little over a century ago, the Progressive movement advocated sterilising the “feeble-minded”, against their consent. The forced sterilisation concept started not in a totalitarian dictatorship but in states of the United States, in the exercise of popular, “democratic “ will. The goal was Progress. Weimar Germany, and its Nazi successor regime got the ideas of eugenics from us.

Today we consider eugenics barbaric, unless parents choose to abort a foetus determined to have a genetic condition like Down Syndrome. Then that bit of barbarism is understandable and excusable. Still the utopian/dystopian vision of a managed future continues to compel and repel us.We may change the goals, e.g. controlling the population of poor people that filled the dreams of Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes in the 1920’s to Al Gore’s vision of controlling carbon emissions in the 2020’s.

Paul Ehrlich wrote an influential book around 1970, The Population Bomb, warning of the dangers of human overpopulation. His answer was Zero Population Growth. Family size should be limited to two children, replacing the parents who begat them. Government policy or economic pressures would further compel families to have only one child, in China, for example. Now, demographers warn of demographic (population) collapse, in Japan, Italy, France, and, ironically, China herself. So much for the Population Bomb.

We love to think we are steering the ship of human destiny. The Soviet Russian Communists were eager to control the population and “liberate” women. So they legalised abortion, even inventing the vacuum aspirator, used in the surgical abortion procedure. When Communism collapsed, the succeeding Russian Federation changed the abortion laws to make abortion illegal after the fourteenth week of pregnancy.

Progress, choice, material prosperity and comfort motivate us today. Or so we are told to want material goods, to become wealthier in order to be happy. Of course, the end of human activity postulated as the acquisition of goods is a goal in direct contrast to Judaeo- Christian principles. “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind and strength. And love thy neighbour as thyself.” My paraphrase of the shema from Deuteronomy and repeated by Our Lord in St Matthew still remain the guiding principles of millions today.

The manufacturers of stuff, huge corporations that they are, have an upper hand in the quest for our hearts and dollars. And we must always remember that we humans aspire for both the material and the spiritual simultaneously. It takes money to build beautiful things, whether a cathedral, mosque or temple on the one hand or a bridge or a skyscraper on the other. Because that desire for transcendent values like love, truth and beauty always persists.