Last night I went upstairs about 11:30 PM. J was watching a show where HGTV’s Illustrated Man, David Bromstad, was showing a couple houses near Punta Gorda, Florida. For all I care, he could be showing them houses on Saipan. But there was J, enraptured with these bungalows Tattoo Guy was showing to the prospective buyers.

I had been watching a DVD, When Jews Were Funny, about Jewish comedy, particularly the old comedians, who appeared regularly on the Ed Sullivan Show. These were men like Alan King (one of my mother’s favourites), Henny Youngman, Shelley Berman, Jackie Mason. The list is long. They told jokes, almost entirely apolitical, Alan King told jokes about the absurdities of suburban life. He wrote a book Anybody Who Owns His Own Home Deserves It. Mort Sahl was the only overtly political comic. He used a newspaper as a prop. Woody Allen did comedy about his supposed neuroses. I miss them. Like my parents, they understood what a blessing it was to simply have enough to eat. The Fifties and the Sixties (up to 1967) was a time when nobody had extra money to buy so-called recreational drugs, like marijuana.This was also a world without cheap and available contraception. Nobody cohabitated with a member of the opposite sex, outside of marriage.

I’m trying to get out of my head, the extent of suburban decay, in an outdoor shopping mall, maybe eighteen years old. We went to P.F. Chang to eat overpriced Chinese food in an “upscale” setting. At least, it was once upscale. The restaurant is still nicely decorated, appropriately dark for its ambiance. Outside the upscale veneer falls off, as the stores are largely boarded up. Brooks Brothers, Saks Fifth Avenue survive. I don’t see how, but they do.Now one doesn’t have to drive all the way downtown to see boarded up retail locations. The pandemic was a stab in the heart of this community.

A little bit of my heart breaks every day.

We are now experiencing the annual phenomenon know as the Major League Baseball Playoffs. This is a month-long series of games used to determine the respective “league” champions, who then play in the World Series.

Of course, the World Series was never that, just a series of games between the National League champions and the American League champions, to determine bragging rights in American professional baseball. This dates back to when the two leagues were separate entities at the turn of the Twentieth Century.

As time went by, and the greed of the owners, players, advertisers and TV networks grew, a playoff system grew from a League Championship Series between two separate Division Winners in the respective leagues. Then Major League Baseball created Three Divisions and a “wild card” team, i. e. the second place team with the best record. Then there were declared two wild card teams who played a one game “play-in” game to determine the Division Series Champs who then played the League Championship.

By now, if you’re aren’t saying “Whatever”, you’re either a die hard “fan” or a compulsive gambler or both.

So those innocent days when The World Series games were played in the afternoon and the country, more or less, took a breather to follow the game or at least the inning by inning score, are long gone.

Now, it’s a big Nothing Burger. Hardly anybody watches. And why should they?

I am awake. I am watching the Ukrainian metal detecting guys , as they work over a recently ploughed field somewhere in Ukraine. They are finding artefacts from a span of roughly three hundred years, from the Romanovs to the Soviet Union. These guys never cease to astonish me.

I am back to swimming, back to feeling alive, somewhat randy, and appreciative of the world about me. The three seem to go together, sustained physical activity, heightened awareness and sexual desire. Go figure.

I’m delayed in my home tidying, decluttering project along the lines of the Marie Kondo methods. I get little support from J, for whatever reasons she may have. I just need to press on.

I have discovered video streaming , having purchased a little device from Amazon. Coupled with video library of the Internet Archive, I can view all manner of stuff to no end, without using Netflix or Hulu or any other streaming service. Today I watched old home movies, discarded by those who inherited them, for whom old movies of Easter, Christmas , or Passover Seders hold less interest than they did to their creators. Our gain is the fruit of their indifference.

Right now, I’m hungry. J and I are going out to eat. I know I want a Coke. That’s for starters, but I’ll settle for coffee or iced tea. Sugar. Ya know?

Later.

My physical therapist wants me to swim as part of rehabilitating my neck with its pinched nerve. Today I went swimming. I was slow, but I felt good. I went a mile. The fears and considerations I possessed seem so trivial now. They always do, once I resume swimming or walking, after a hiatus.

At lunch, while eating a “white pizza” , I realised I may just as well buy a salt block at a farm supply store and lick that for my daily sodium intake. It is almost that ridiculous how much salt I ingest. while we’re on the subject of poor nutrition habits, I confess to eating sizeable amounts of carbohydrates, bread, crackers, whatever.

What I fall back into around my health and fitness is a paradigm about “getting back in shape” that doesn’t serve me. I’m out of shape, overweight, then I “get serious”. I lose weight, work out regularly and attain some goals.Then I stop. After a few months it’s back to where I was, physically, mentally, emotionally at a nadir.

The cycle is mentally exhausting. I punish myself for feeling good

Totally Nuts!

The issues with the pinched nerve and pain, numbness, and tingling in my right shoulder and arm continue. Physical Therapy helps, as does activity in general. I did a walk yesterday. The walking antagonises my left hip. The pain from my left hip complements the pain in my right shoulder.

My wife actually willingly touched, rubbed, caressed my left forearm early this morning. It was nonsexual touching, but it was touching nevertheless.

I’ve been watching lectures and discussions on Tantric. To me it is an approach to sexuality that should fit well with the ideals of sexual intimacy within a traditional marriage paradigm. That’s going a long ways to say it’s good and positive for married couples.

#1 Son continues to progress in his recovery from a TBI. #2 Son calls me when he is grocery shopping, because my familiarity with the Publix store layout helps him find things.

Do couples still pack food in a covered basket and drive out to a pleasant spot on a sunny day to have a picnic? Do they spread a blanket on the ground and just sit down or lie down and talk? Manet did a painting with a picnic as the subject. His painting had strong erotic undertones. ( Manet died of syphilis, by the way).

My head is in one of this spaces where thoughts pass through like an express train. The writing produced there from can be a little disjointed or scatter shot.

It’s Monday. I’m retired, accountable to no one for what I do with my time. If I want to go inside and take a nap, I can. I just might do exactly that.

I was watching a bit of pornography early this morning. It was a display of large breasted women, seemingly as endless as it was lurid.

Then my thoughts wandered as to what the function of breasts are in the first place. We know the answer. Mothers feed their babies with the milk from their breasts. Yet when women do precisely that, some people get all weird.

We have been dancing around sexuality and its purpose ever since reliable contraception became a pillar of modern culture. I’m not deriding contraception, but it does do an excellent job of alienating us from the natural purpose of sex.

In its wake, contraception contributes to the prolonging of adolescence and childhood

My clock says it’s 3:33. Maybe that’s the diet version of 666 , with only half of the demonic evil.

I went to bed early. Then I awoke and went in the other room, tried to sleep there, but came downstairs and watched pointless videos on Internet Archive. I would scroll through, hoping to find anything to watch.

Yesterday evening, I made macaroni and cheese from scratch, just to be doing something. Tasted pretty good too.

The sadness persists. The loneliness. I’m going back to bed.

There is this thing called The Internet Archive. All sorts of information, documents, software, film,have been uploaded. One can watch a wealth of stuff, Free.

People have uploaded sex education videos from the Eighties and Nineties, not “birds and bees” discussions, once the basis for “health” education classes of middle school, but advanced topics, like tantric sexuality These videos are chock full of gratuitous nudity. Apparently, ugly people, with bad hairstyles or missing teeth, don’t have sex.

There’s lots of flute music and pretty pictures, plenty of soft focus shots of flowing, rippling water.Lots of talk about energy and chakras fill the tantric videos. Nobody has to be at work the next day. It’s all perfect, like Walt Disney World or The Villages, Florida.

Plenty of talk about sex, but no mention of conception, pregnancy or babies, as if the domains of sexuality and babies are separated by a brick wall, or, at the very least, a latex barrier. This is how we think today. Thank you, Hugh Hefner. Much obliged, Big Pharma. But just how the Hell does one live consciously while denying one has nothing to do with the other?

When one gets old and procreation is no longer a possibility, there is an emptiness that golf, needlework, fishing or shopping can’t fill. That’s the whole point of it., the sex, I mean.

It’s been awhile. I’ve just been busy, avoiding doing things that afford me satisfaction, like writing the blog, exercising, going to Church. Don’t ask me why. I suspect I have a Puritan’s fear of happiness, as H. L. Mencken pointed out.

I’m going through the annoying experience of a pinched nerve that comes when it chooses and leaves just as capriciously. This evening, before dark, #1Son and his dog, Lila, came by to walk with me. He was quite surprised at the pace I can maintain. I noticed some balance issues, that I can’t quite figure out, but I don’t fall over or down, so we’ll see where this goes.

I want to get back in the pool, and resume getting rid of junk and clutter. I think it better to just get rid of stuff and not not the deep psychological, emotional, and spiritual issues underlying the predicament.

Bedtime soon. I will put laundry in the dryer and go to bed.

I’m lying down on the little bed in the “Daddy Den” as one of my favourite people calls it. It has been hot and the thermostat was acting “uppity”, so I changed the little nickel size 2032 battery again after only ninety days and it seems to be working normally, whatever that means for 2021.

#1 son is doing better. We texted today about not hoarding, since he is an expert on order. I tend to be disorganised and a hoarder.

This brings up what I’ve been doing, which is throwing junk away and giving the local thrift shops plenty of inventory. I seem to recall buying some of the stuff from Goodwill, et al.,, that I’m now donating back to them. Go figure.

I feel like I want to say more, but this is the best I can do right now.