I can remember life without a television in the home. Can you? I can remember when colour TV was a big deal. I can remember when damn near every adult smoked cigarettes, except my Grandma, Mom and my Aunt Opal, but she had asthma pretty bad. I never for a moment thought that the Television Age and the Cigarette Age were related, until I learned, almost half a century later, that the tobacco companies all but dictated the content of what we watched.

We were all amazed! Those TV characters were real for me. I willingly suspended disbelief. Marshall Dillon, Uncle Miltie, Barney Fife, Frank Ballenger (the name of Lee Marvin’s character on M Squad), Lucy, even The Kingfish ( Yes, I watched Amos N’ Andy) were all real to me.

In the cities, before TV, people went to the movies almost every week. Then came The War, with all its intensity. And, at its end, people wanted to get on with life, find work, a career, if you will, have babies, and enjoy the benefits of living in an affluent society . Science and technology were our servants. They gave us jet engines, air conditioning, polio vaccines, television, and well , uh, the atomic bomb. But we didn’t really talk about that. We all assumed that Truman, Ike, JFK, knew what they were doing and all would be well.

Yes, we were spoiled. As children we had everything handed to us, no strings attached. We never thought to question what was offered, Popsicles, Kool-Aid, Twinkies, Wonder Bread. Morton’s Chicken Pot Pies. Swanson’s TV Dinners,. Then Budweiser, Marlboros, pot, and for you Ladies out there, The Pill.

Right after the JFK Assassination, we started hearing about Consequences. The Surgeon General’s Report On Smoking And Health came out. You mean Winstons and Salems were bad for you? Who knew?(The companies that made them knew, we learned later. They just didn’t tell the public).

Then came the Warren Report. People started saying that that was a lie too. Took a while to take the Mark Lanes and Jim Garrisons seriously, but now nobody believes the Warren Report is true.

We’re spoiled. Pictures don’t lie. And TV gives us plenty of pictures, so we don’t have to think. Computers do that for us now. We can just follow whatever dream we have, whether it’s a trip to Mars or living on a sustainable planet, (whatever that is.)

So if the Communist Party of the Peoples ’ Republic of China says the Wuhan Virus came from a wet market there, who are we to doubt them?

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It started out innocently enough. I would dog sit for RB and R while they have a work/ play trip to Denver. Lila is a pit bull, a rescue, and a sweetheart. She is incredibly powerful, so much so that RB was afraid she would re-injure my shoulder or back if she pulled the lead too hard if I walked her. So they hired a dog walker. Becca The Walker came and did her magic with Lila.

Meanwhile, word came from R that RB had had a seizure at the AirBnB in Denver, falling, with bone fractures in his face, and a subdural hematoma. We were all worried, and continue to be, until the doctors can determine the cause of the seizures. He had some head injuries from high school football, a fainting spell with amnesia in the Marine Corps.

He is home now, with driving restrictions for several months, and getting back to “normal” won’t be easy or of short interval until its return.

So things will take awhile for all of us to readjust. Just grateful here. Things could be much worse.

My son RB is out of the hospital, with the appropriate medications, and preparing to fly home to Richmond.

Thanks for your prayers and kind thoughts.

My son, who will turn 45 in three weeks, is out in Denver accompanying his wife on a work/vacation. I am dog-sitting his pit bull Lila.

Yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from R, his wife. My son RB had a seizure and fell, fracturing several bones in his face. Preliminary tests show a subdural hematoma, (SH) a bleed between the skull and the brain itself. So he is alert, talking and on a lot of pain medication. But we don’t know what caused the seizure, if the SH is the result of the seizure and fall, or if the SH caused the seizure.

J, Lila and I are waiting for news. That’s all I know right now.

I’m sitting here watching a Latino Male Ogle Fest called Miss bumbum World 2019. Emphasis is on the female buttocks. I know. Sexist, yada, yada, yada. But no animals were harmed in making this video. However the sequin may be placed on the Endangered Sewing Notions List.

I have since given up on Miss bumbum World 2019 and gone back to trainspotting. Oddly more satisfying, for a man whose best years at lechery are behind him.

Today is #2 Son’s 33rd Birthday. Hard to believe but, hey, it’s great. He might come over or we might just celebrate his Birthday at my sister’s on Saturday.

Train #94 is due in Ashland any time now. The passengers boarding here have to determine on which track it is and whether they need to cross the tracks in order to board.

J’s work schedule changed. She works overnights no longer. Now she works from 5:00 PM to 11:30 PM. But she’s asleep now anyway.

I probably should go back to bed, but I won’t.

Toby is the rescue dog a neighbour walks about this time every day. When Toby sees me on the porch he steers his human Mommy towards me, climbs the porch steps for his treat(s). It is my great pleasure to participate in this little game.

The question, “Who rescued who?”, comes to mind.

It is a beautiful day to wait for Toby, pleasant, sunny with a gentle breeze. The bird feeder needs refilling now that the squirrels have discovered it, filled, again. I will need to water the plants too. The roses have bloomed, at least the red buds are opening. The day lilies are getting ready for their show in June.

I had an odd dream where money, sex and power came my way, via some surreal magic, at the Richmond Headquarters of the Fifth District of the Federal Reserve Bank. I once worked in that building for a now defunct insurance brokerage, as my life, career, and marriage fell apart. That was thirty years ago, almost precisely at this time of year.

We always think our deliverance from Evil will be somehow Biblical in its unfolding. More precisely we think our deliverance will come with movie special effects, like The Red Sea parting in Cecil B. deMille’s The Ten Commandments. Deliverance works on God’s time. That was the beginning of the endgame. It needed another three years to play through til recovery and divorce came about, and a new life began. But it began there, when I, carrying a single wall corrugated box, filled with my personal items, was escorted from the building by an armed security guard.

Sadly, I’m rambling. Blogs don’t have editors, so I can ramble, unchecked, as I careen through the blogosphere. Toby isn’t here yet. My coffee is lukewarm and bird feeder is still empty.

Check out the rose. This rose is more precious to me than my whole time in insurance.

How does that sound? Is it pretentious enough? I’m watching trains and, between Amtrak runs, I’m contemplating how established and solid the world of 1921 appeared to be.

Despite a catastrophic war, the British Empire was sputtering back to normal. The Irish and the Indians were making noises, but it looked like the Empire would stay intact.

France was beginning wave after wave of political turmoil, but there was a new modern culture being created, of Picasso, Joyce, Ravel, where word and image and sound were not like that of twenty years ago.

In America, great businesses dominated the economy. United States Steel, Westinghouse, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the New York Central Railroad were more powerful and wealthier than many foreign countries and many American states within the Union.

Today, there is only the British Empire of memory, held together on Cricket ovals, and bankers and financiers in the City.

Modern art has descended into self-immolation, burning whatever aesthetics it tenuously possessed, in its slash and burn migration toward The Modern.

And America? The Pennsylvania and Grand Central are now remembered for their architectural remnants. United States Steel? Westinghouse? All this “power“ has vanished, just like the Preacher of Ecclesiastes said it would.

And people out there want to “cancel” this culture. They desire to reshuffle the cards of learning, politics, religion, and biology and deal anew. People had such ideas a century ago. They forecast their novus ordo mundi would last a thousand years. One lasted twelve years, another about seventy-five.

The curse of freedom is that the ignorant have gravitas because they can vote. And the Faithful and the Pious must endure without supporting evidence until the faithless and impious sandcastles vanish in the surf of their own hubris.

Anyway. Trust, but verify.

12:30PM J just had a nightmare, where she screamed in her sleep about something.

“Honey, you’re having a bad dream.”

“Yes I am!”

“Well, I’ll just leave you alone then.”

So it went. She desired no reassurance that she was simply dreaming, that she wasn’t alone. She went back to sleep. I came back downstairs to trains, blogging, planning, experiencing that aching loneliness of my nightmare called waking.

She will sleep two, three hours longer. I will go swimming. I need to go swimming, at the Y, where I will see my friends, revel in the cool sensual experience of swimming.

Meanwhile I will drink coffee, while watching a trash train passing through Ashland, trash all stuffed in big green boxes. For relief , Amtrak #79, The Carolinian, speeds through, headed to Charlotte.

As quickly as that passing train enters and leaves the camera’s view, my enthusiasm for a swim vanishes. I want to sleep again. Or maybe eat. Or maybe just cry.

Feeling “helpless” keeps that Dysfunctional Fog I wrote about close to the ground. I started with a shift in perspective and attitude. Things are being accomplished.

I cleared the dining area table of junk mail, political circulars, cemetery plot offers, hearing aid offers (If it looks like I’m gonna die soon, why invest in a hearing aid?), offers to listen to an insurance salesman, if I eat the steak dinner he provides., catalogs. And more catalogs.

I prepared a sirloin tip roast, with a mushroom/onion cream sauce, and corn wrapped in parchment roasted with the sirloin. I had a fresh pear for dessert. This is my kind of meal. J liked it too.

I’m back on the porch with coffee, watching the birds, listening to aircraft engines, motorcycles, automobiles. The birds sing. My tinnitus provides additional background noise. It’s cloudy, cool, and I need to put my canvas logger’s shirt and shearling slippers back on.

J ate in bed, fine by me, because her night work schedule puts her at loose ends when she has a night off. I do enjoy her company, it’s really hard to expect a shift in her habits for such a short time interruption.

A little tidying up will occur, maybe a movie, then I’ll fiddle around some more with the Mac, hoping I can move more data over from the Windows PC laptop. That would be nice but maybe I can just network the two, like some nerd, who lives in his parents’ basement, while he works remotely at his Help Desk job, would do.

So right now, a load or two of laundry will get my attention. Later, y’all.

I didn’t sleep well last night, not long enough, at least. We had to take J’s vehicle in for scheduled maintenance. That means I had to get up at a set time.

I’m tired. I look around the house and evaluate the mess, readily fixable, yet I resist putting in the work. It is early afternoon. J’s CR-V is ready. We have to drive down to pick it up. Then I can come home, sleep perhaps.

I should have been a cowboy. Or joined The French Foreign Legion.