Getting Late

What do we really know? How do we know it? What narratives do we accept as true for history?

What does this have to do with it getting late? I’m watching a documentary produced maybe 35 years ago, La Belle Epoque. It is an admirable presentation, but it presents a bias, a bias that we think exposes the Truth, rather than obfuscates it.

The premise is that there were, at that time, incredibly wealthy people, and then there was everybody else, living lives of material desperation. That there was a middle class, who owned houses, bought life insurance, educated their children, both sons and daughters. From these educated women, came the suffragettes. It was a middle class phenomenon. That is but one example.

My point is that the narrative exaggerates the class differences and class struggle, by ignoring the sizable bourgeoisie.

The authors and producers of this work, along with many other scholars pay inordinate attention to Freud and Marx. Other figures given attention, Darwin, Nietzsche become the other figures in the pantheon. Were no other scholars and thinkers at work then? Were there other artists besides the ones championed by Gertrude Stein and her brothers? Who else was writing music besides the favorites of the avant garde? There is an assumed narrative that we readily accept.

In the next few years, people are going to challenge the narrative of that age we call The Twentieth Century. You heard it here first.

Master Of The House Part I.

NSFW. Erotic Fantasy. Move along, if under 18.

For Mrs McDaddy

Nothing special about today, I guess. Her lunch is packed. L took her shower, dressed in her store T-shirt and jeans, brushed her teeth with the fancy electric toothbrush. She sort of kissed me, told me to be a “good boy”, and went to work.

I must admit I was a “good boy”. I did not torture small animals. I picked up pet waste left by an inconsiderate neighbour and took out the garbage. But I did masturbate into her soiled panties before I laundered them. And a prodigious load it was, I must confess.

Oh well, another mortal sin, another sacreligious Holy Communion if I ever bother to go to Mass again, let alone Confession. But I digress..

Housekeeping can be pretty damn boring. And certain activities are just plain destructive. Don’t watch television, avoid social media. Just clean and be done with it. So the day went. Until….

As I made the bed, I noticed her book,the one she read in between watching some show about a single mom stalked by a serial killer who works at her daughter’s day care center. Something like that. The book had a plain cover. The title, Where Angela Fears To Tread. , seemed incongruous from her usual selections of Pat Conroy, Maeve Binchey, Patricia Cornwell.

There was the page she had dog-eared. I could not help but look and read.

“So Angie, you have again neglected your duties at the Manor in order to amuse yourself, by frigging your clit like a parlor maid. What have you to say before you are chastised?”

“Sir there is no excuse. My urges are my Mistress, and, I fear my ruin, unless they are corrected by the sternest of courses .”

“Then we should begin. Fetch the strap. Remove your skirt. Lower your drawers. Present yourself to me.

That was all I needed to read. Somehow I had been reading L with complete inaccuracy. She had a certain need, a need I had not seen, nor prepared myself to deliver.

How could I shift gears, to move from housekeeper to Master Of The House?

Just Sitting

I thought of that great Otis Redding song Dock Of The Bay for no particular reason.

Do you ever love somebody and they love you, but the two of you just don’t connect? That song to me represents that frustration. (I’m not disputing any socio-political interpretation one may have for that song. This is just my personal take.)

I’ve been up for about 2 hours. I want to sleep some more.

Right now I’m thinking of all the things I ought to be doing, like giving clothes to the Goodwill, throwing out junk. It never ends, the Ought To’s, I mean. But the loneliness right now is all I feel.

Fire And Ice

There is the Robert Frost poem, of course. One of my favorite poems by Frost. Then there is the heat and the cold I use to manage the pain and discomfort of the pinched nerve.

Tonight I swam, then showered, shaved, headed home. Now I sit, ice on my shoulder. I am watching The Great Train Robbery, the Michael Crichton film of his novel about a train robbery in Victorian England. When one is as hopeless an Anglophile as I am, this is like a trip to Disneyworld for an eight year old.

The ice feels good. This natural satisfaction is a lovely feeling.

Cricket today, Sri Lanka vs. South Africa. I saw some of it. South Africa has had a disappointing series, but they played well today. It is tempting to assign a value to a team, based on its nation’s history. Never mind apartheid is a thing of the past. The team reflects all of the races, tribes, and creeds of the nation. And I have a story for every other nation in the mix.

Thursday at BJ’s I was talking cricket with Mohammed, the Bangladeshi clerk. He likes India. They are very good. I’m beginning to recognize good play now.

Cricket is fun.

Hope all of y’all are having fun,

Friday Feelings

Sorta half-asleep. Wishin’ I was some place else. A bed, perhaps.

The sky threatens rain. The clouds are beautiful.

The World is crazy. Or maybe just this country. It is going to take a century to undo the damage done by The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 and the Leftists at Columbia in 1968. My latest e-mail from the University of Virginia indicates that the vultures of the Left are not through ripping the flesh from the carcass of academia. A National Collegiate Athletic Association Men’s Division 1 Basketball Championship might keep the grousers, critics and malcontents happy for a little while. And definitely keep them from looking too hard at the cultural Marxists who run Mr Jefferson’s University. The old shell game of bamboozling the rich continues.

Somebody has to do something about the size of government. It will collapse of its own weight.

Stop using terms like bureaucrat to describe government employees. People react to the term and lose sight of what it costs to pay for government. We can’t expect our Senators and Representatives in Virginia to downsize the Federal Government. The government employees and federal contractors keep these guys in office.

Unless that changes, we’re doomed.

The Day.

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Here it is, Thursday night. I dropped the car off for an inspection. E., my regular mechanic, is on vacation in Lebanon, visiting family. So the other mechanic in the shop is doing work for two. But he did get it done today.

We went to meet with the financial advisor. We still have a little money. Leave it at that.

Between dropping the car off and the sit down with the financial guy, I got a haircut. 💇. It had been two months and two months of pool chemical infusion meant that what was passing for hair was actually a strange collagen abnormality that looked as nasty as it felt.

Then lunch. I had shrimp. They were pretty good.

A trip to BJ’s Wholesale Club came next where we purchased what seemed to be an insane amount of stuff, the BIG jug of detergent, the Ginormous bundle of bath tissue, the snack multipack, 3 liters of mouthwash. Somehow, we managed to spend $250+. The kicker is, we will use it. All of it.

The swim came tonight at 8:24. It would have been sooner, but I left my towel and bathing suit at home, necessitating a trip home to retrieve them. But it all worked out. I had my fastest time for the distance in the whole month. There is hope, pinched nerve and all.

J’s lunch is ready. I pitted some cherries, sliced a nectarine, so She gets some fruit variety from the usual strawberries, She has to be at the store at 4:30 AM. I wanted it set up so I don’t have to fix lunch at 3:00 AM.

We did a lot of stuff together today. It was basic stuff that people do in the course of living, not a European river cruise, or bungee jumping in New Zealand, or trekking in Nepal. You know it felt pretty good, intimate in its own way. Shared experience.

Things I Did Today

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Got up. Turned on TV. Fixed J’s lunch. Watched Amtrak #98 Northbound Silver Meteor pass through Ashland on the way to New York. Turned to Cricket New Zealand vs Pakistan.

Decided to buy baked goods. Left home for store but went to Mass first. The priest is from Uganda, so understanding him in room with terrible acoustics is sketchy. But, hey, I went to Mass.

I did go to the store, bought lots of fruit. I came home, put the groceries away, then went to AA. I was getting sleepy. My friend Colette was there with her dog.* The dog is very sweet. He is an Italian hunting dog, a spinone. (Look breed up) He is gorgeous and sweet. He licked my face. 🌟. Went to another store to buy J the chocolate mini croissants she likes.

I came home, had a cat nap. The I went to the dentist. He told me teeth #31 and #18, far lower molars, need to come out, because keeping them clean has become increasingly difficult. We want to avoid risk of infection to jaw bone.

Made appointment for periodontist to extract them.

Went to dinner, had street tacos, carnitas. They were good.

Came home. Realizing I’d been struggling through day on 3-4 hours sleep, I fell asleep. I woke up after 2 hour nap. I am watching the British couple who trek around Britain looking for abandoned railway stations or the sites where they once stood. Very nice engaging couple.

Now I have to get sleepy again, real fast.

*Colette, who looks like Julia Roberts, has a penchant for finding off-the-wall dog breeds. Her last dog was a catahoula, a Cajun hound dog. New words today: spinone catahoula