I still feel somewhat sick. The bronchitis and allergies. Ugh. I’m going to try going to bed early, see if I can turn this around.
Discouraged
17 Sunday Mar 2019
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Unplugged
16 Saturday Mar 2019
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I spent the morning attempting to unplug from my Smartphone, television, and the cyberworld. Sleeping helped. Otherwise, no luck. I think it is a matter of discipline. What works against me is that so many of the activities that satisfy me come from the digital world.
After a surprisingly good meal of corned beef and cabbage at Cracker Barrel, I came home and had another nap. The low energy I’m experiencing is attributable to the pollen making its presence felt. Good Old Mother Nature.
I’m doing some trainspotting, watching the Ashland Virtual Railfan LLC Channel on You TUBE.
Early Spring is a great time of year. I have plenty of fond memories, especially when my younger son was little and I was a single parent. His mom’s Healing Touch practitioners group met on Friday nights and we would start our weekends then. Sometimes I would fix homemade macaroni and cheese. Other nights we would pick up a pizza at the restaurant next door to the apartment.
We would watch a Flash Gordon serial or Disney’s Darby O’Gill And The Little People, featuring a yet to make it big Sean Connery. This was in the Dark Age of VHS on videocassette players. Remember? He would fall asleep in my bed. The days when my children always wanted me around them were the best.
My point is that only twenty years ago, the digital incursion into daily life was smaller than it is now. Yet we considered ourselves highly advanced and sophisticated. And we were.
Now I have to check my Smartphone regularly. I am writing this post on the same phone. I’m sure that Aristotle, were he alive today, would be fully engaged with this digital universe. So maybe I will just enjoy the modernity.
Damn
15 Friday Mar 2019
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There was a shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The Bangladesh National Cricket Side was in town for a test match. I hope they’re safe.
The perpetrator is an avowed white racist, not a Muslim. 49 people were killed.
Every time a shooting like this occurs, any murder really, part of me dies too. A little bit of hope that we really are rational, sensitive, loving creature shrivels up, withers away. Maybe that’s necessary.
Up
15 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
I woke up to urinate. And look at my messages as if some incredible news affecting me is about to happen.
But no. I guess that’s a good thing.
I did read Porngirl3’s post about her children. I miss the days when my children were little.
Then again there is a lot about my past I miss. However I don’t miss who I was then.
I went back to bed, lay there for about ten minutes when I realized I like being awake in the predawn night. The silence is so compelling.
I’m not one for nude selfies, but I like wearing my logger jeans from Key Apparel and long sleeve tee shirt from L L Bean. So here.
Unfinished
14 Thursday Mar 2019
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I ran into a friend of my deceased ex-wife yesterday. She reminded me that the secretive nature of her final months left me kind of incomplete around our relationship.
I don’t know precisely what it is I’m trying to say. Maybe I’m saying that I have been striving to be a better person than the lecherous drunk I was when we were married.
Maybe she’s out there in the ether watching. Who knows?
4:42 AM
14 Thursday Mar 2019
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I wake up
Start to think
And wonder
What am I doing up?
Do I want to sleep, renew, restore
Or sacrifice this time for a new experience?
With the wakefulness comes the longing.
Self-Expression
14 Thursday Mar 2019
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For some reason, I can’t seem to chill. The world of Word Press has me happily engaged. I can take an idea, , think it through,write it down, hit the send button and people all over the world can read it. Amazing.
Aristotle or Aquinas, John Locke or Karl Marx couldn’t do that. Not that what I write approaches any of their works. Maybe therein lies the problem. I can put it out there for the millions or billions to read and maybe seven or eight actually do.
Very sobering, I love all you guys, but these exercises in thought and self-expression can merely start here.
Egalitarianism vs Hierarchy
14 Thursday Mar 2019
Posted in Class
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This college admissions scandal is a real head scratcher. I mean, is an Ivy League diploma worth committing a felony for? Apparently, for some, it is.
The big deal is power and being part of a ruling elite. Go back almost a century when the underclass of America included the Irish, the Catholic Irish. Millionaire plutocrat and gangster Joseph P Kennedy Sr. got his sons into Harvard. With the Harvard degrees came recognition, connection, access to the powerful and power itself.
We talk a good egalitarian game here in America, but who really wants to be equal? We want to be better, to have an advantage, to get priority seating, an upgrade.
No sooner does the government mandate equality than a law adjudicating advantage accompanies that law. It’s called Affirmative Action. It proves the Orwellian dictum from Animal Farm.
“All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
When a brash, intelligent and highly successful oaf enters politics, gets elected President of The United States, then makes the Pedigreed Elite look impotent, their grip on power is weakened, undermined. Donald Trump is merely the latest example of a man who shows that power in a political system based on individuals voting gives no inherent advantage to an elite. Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln were two other examples. They completely revolutionized American politics. Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were others.
The mass media, America’s propaganda infrastructure, claims to control those “masses”, but they have been showing only limited success with increasing frequency. Nobody wants to spend big money on instruments of fallibility.
Trump happens. Oh well. But the nagging fear of the hierarchy is that there are other Trumps, more Trumps, even smarter Trumps, who have no need of their artificial prestige. Nobody wants to be a laughing stock because their claim to power is as empty as, say, the British aristocracy.
A Naked Conundrum
13 Wednesday Mar 2019
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Mature Topic, Of A Sexual Nature
He liked the idea of service. Whenever he performed a service that pleased his wife, he would smile, absolutely glow, at her words of approval. Gradually tasks and duties became his responsibilities. He hoped the nature of certain tasks would convey to his partner that he was being more than helpful, more than responsible.
One day, Sara Beth (his wife) returned from a trip to the green grocer and fishmonger to find Rupert (him) scrubbing the toilet bowl, stark naked, wearing only the long rubber gloves he deemed necessary for sanitary considerations.
“Why are you naked?”
“I don’t want my clothes to get stained by the bleach and other chemicals.”
“Is that why you have an erection I could hang clothes on?”
Rupert had no answer.
Sara Beth was truly puzzled. “Who would get turned on by this drudgery?” she thought. But her Rupert? He was strong, assertive, successful. Rupert had retired at 55 from a financial services career, was a dedicated fitness buff, a devoted father and grandfather. And faithful. Not even porn movies or magazines had ever entered the house. His e-mail box, to which she had access for ease of maintaining financial accounts, never had any lewd or obscene materials.
She had heard about these subservient types, from television’s pop psychologists or the magazine articles she had read while waiting at the hair salon. Submissive, they were called or simply subs. The sub would have, or want to be under the control of, as the magazines pointed out, a dominant. Someone the sub would obey. But she didn’t feel particularly “bossy”, hardly at all.
“How in Heaven’s name can I punish a man who does nothing wrong? How can I be one of those dominants in the leather corsets and fishnet stockings? I’m no more one of those than I am a circus clown or a beauty pageant contestant?”
She admitted she didn’t have answers to the riddle that her husband had now shown himself to be. At least they didn’t have to hire a maid. That was a plus.
Wednesday
13 Wednesday Mar 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
How can one have a “Hump Day” when there are no humps in the week? Such is my predicament. The days don’t really all run together, but there are rarely tasks for me to complete, except for swimming and writing.
When I started writing, I was worried I couldn’t tell a story. Now I’m worried I can’t write anything other than erotica (Porn).
I feel a little sickly today, like the cold has rejuvenated itself. I have to fight the urge to keep going. I suck at self-care.
Dispatches From Dystopia 