05 Tuesday Jun 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
“Consider the lilies of the field,how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, yet I tell you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” St. Matthew 6:28-29
This is the time of year when this passage particularly comes to mind. It is in that portion of St Matthew’s Gospel where much of Christ’s teachings, like The Sermon on The Mount, are found.
The power of the metaphor of lilies is compelling and broad in that nearly all of us can relate to the beauty of flowers.
04 Monday Jun 2018
Posted in Exercise/ Fitness, Relationships, Sport
Yesterday, I shared with MrsCorC? my episode of sleep interruption early Sunday morning. She had no idea how her movie watching affected me and resolved to improve. Now twenty four hours later, I again couldn’t get to sleep. I was in pain from my day. My back was simply not cooperating. So I have another morning of insomnia and sleep deprivation. Oh well. But the whole atmosphere is different. I did communicate. She is not to blame. She is again my partner, not my adversary..
Yesterday, I did not make it to Mass. I did watch the Mass on EWTN. It’s not quite the same, but sitting for an hour would have been too much for me.
I did a four mile walk yesterday, completing it in 58 min:33sec. It was my first walk of the year, since I have been swimming for exercise of late. It feels good to walk; it’s different from how I feel after I swim. The muscles worked are different. I experience the sweat from exertion, so I feel like I’ve done something. But in both forms of exercise, I feel the exertion and the endorphin high.
I watched NCAA Women’s Softball for most of yesterday. It has become my favorite spectator sport. I like the enthusiasm of the players and their athleticism.
So that was my yesterday and early morning. I’m feeling sleepy. The Silver Meteor #98 Northbound just passed through Ashland as reported on Virtual Railfan LLC. I will wait for #86 to stop in Ashland, then go back to bed.
Turning the mind off, so I’m not meal-planning, scheduling my day, having erotic reveries (dirty sex fantasies) or otherwise allowing my thoughts to flow full force is a challenge. It’s OK to just chill.
03 Sunday Jun 2018
Posted in Relationships
It is almost 430. My wife came home from work about 1230. She decided she wasn’t sleepy and decided to watch TV in bed, whilst I’m attempting to sleep next to her. This doesn’t work for me. I have been awake about 2 hours. I want to go back to sleep. I do not want to spend most of Sunday in a sleep-deprived fog.
What comes up now is loneliness and frustration. As much as I love her, I see she lives in her own world. It is a world centered around sleep, work, television, and McDonald’s Sweet Iced Tea.
My temptation is to retreat into the world of my construction, swimming, cooking, AA, Church, the internet, and my friends.
Mutual Assured Loneliness.
01 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in Family
Marci, over at KoolAid Moms is celebrating her daughter’s birthday. Today is my younger son’s 30th. We are going to an Indian restaurant. My sister is joining us. I am pretty exctied, because once a child hits adulthood, seeing him/her is sketchy.
He is adopted. But he has been with me (us) since his birth. His mother and I did a private placement adoption, that side-stepped adoption agencies. In the thirty years, there has seen my recovery from alcoholism, divorce, the passing of his mother. He has ADD and Asperger’s Syndrome. But he is not his diagnosis. He is just a wonderful young man.
I believe I will go get the makings for root beer floats and we will come home and have them for dessert. He likes them.
31 Thursday May 2018
Posted in Civilization, Relationships, Uncategorized
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You don’t hear much about the Shakers anymore. Sure, you can sing The Simple Gifts (think Copland’s Appalachian Spring ), collect some fine baskets, or acquire some superb furniture. But the Shakers are extinct. Why? They practiced celibacy on a grand scale. They eschewed reproductive sex. So in order to survive, the Shakers needed to attract new members from the world outside of their own ever-shrinking sphere.
Today, we live in a culture, poisoned by the ruminations of toxic intellectuals, like Paul Ehrlich, who decry the natural human impulse to procreate and perpetuate, not only the human species, but human cultures. These cultures are not merely the Western European cultures; Japan, through the practice of birth control, is experiencing a demographic collapse. China has a bleak future, brought on by the Maoist “One Child Policy”. As college students in the Seventies, we were constantly advised to adopt Zero Population Growth as a cultural value. Having more than two children per family was, at the very least, bad form, morally irresponsible, at the worst. Men became little more than human drones (“sperm donors”). Women, in the name of feminism, rejected what defined them as women. And for anyone, man or woman, to state this, is to invite anger, fury, and scorn. A child became The Ultimate Pet. About 35 years ago, in the mid-1980’s, I noticed more and more people refer to their dogs and cats, their pets, as their “babies”. Again, many of you will minimize or ridicule this observation.
The culture has rejected its own survival, guaranteeing its decay. Thanks to wide availability of artificial contraception, and the cultural value of sex as little more than primal recreation, we are dying out, much like the Shakers.
Except there will be a remnant who will survive at first, then ultimately flourish. Much as a forest regenerates itself after a calamitous fire, those who reject the contraceptive paradigm will preserve Western, Judeo-Christian, Catholic Civilization, where both males and females will be valued. And these humans will be valued from conception til natural death.
31 Thursday May 2018
Posted in Catholic Life, Sacrifice
St Thérèse of Lisieux and St Joan of Arc are here depicted kneeling before The Blessed Virgin Mary.
St Thérèse, The Little Flower, and St Joan are Patron Saints of France. The turmoil in Western civilization, including France, today is exacerbated by spiritual decline and down right decay. We would be wise to remember these two Saints. The Little Flower, St Thérèse, proclaimed that we can bear witness to Christ, in the smallest of deeds and prayers. We need not accomplish the great, merely do the small things well, like a meal lovingly prepared for our families or a Rosary prayed from the heart.
St Joan’s witness is all about courage. She was a soldier. Arrested by the enemies of France, she was put on trial, where, in the face of martyrdom, she professed her faith, remaining steadfast to it, as she was burned at the stake.
For our time, we need to proclaim The Gospel with simplicity, discipline, and courage. Pray that we can emulate these two Saints.
29 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in Catholic Life, sleep
Tags
It is early, 0331. I’ve been awake maybe an hour and a half. I have had the experience when I wake up, lie in bed a bit and sleep doesn’t return, so I “try” harder to sleep. What is that about? If I can “will” sleep, that would make me exceptional as a human. I am not equipped with an ON/OFF switch. None of us are.
I prayed the Rosary. Serenity crept back in. And my eyelids are a little heavier. I did some channel-surfing, and decided I didn’t need to see the same footage of the Wehrmacht on the Russian Front in the summer of 1941 that I had seen many, many times before. So I switched to watching for trains. Maybe a freight will pass through before I go back to bed..
I always have a sense of failure when the wake-ups and insomnia assert themselves. It is as if sleeping is my job. Sleeping is one of my few regular daily activities, along with eating.
28 Monday May 2018
Posted in Relationships, Sexuality
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My wife got in last night a little before midnight. She wanted to “unwind”. For her, this means watching crime drama TV shows, where people get murdered or disappear. De gustibus non disputandem. (There is no disputing matters of taste.)
I chill with her for the night. I know it’s just fiction, but still killing as entertainment doesn’t do it for me. I have a rather exhaustive knowledge of the wars of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and the more I learn about killing, the more repulsed I am. It is truly the stuff of nightmares; so a TV show that ends in murder by blunt force trauma won’t send me to dreamland.
So now I sit. It is almost 1300 Hours (1:00 PM) My eyes have yet to adjust to wakefulness, I need to sleep some more. The pain of life without a physical, sexual lover, the platonic Hell, if you will, seizes me fully. How she lives as she does is a mystery to me, Yet I persist, because the other expressions of love are powerful also, perhaps more powerful than Eros.
28 Monday May 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
The tradition started after the American Civil War of putting flowers and flags on the graves of the war dead. So the story goes, the graves of both Union and Confederate dead were “decorated” and this common gesture of remembrance helped heal the wounds of the most catastrophic war in American History. Sometime in the 1950’s Decoration Day became Memorial Day. And in the 1970’s the day celebrated moved from 30 May to the last Monday of May. We remember the dead from all our wars on this day.
At least we say we do. Mostly, we start “Summer” on this day. This weekend is when the public outdoor swimming pools open in the parts of the country where year round outdoor swimming is not possible, We start eating outdoors with backyard barbecues. All in all, the tempo changes to summer mode.
Virginia and particularly Richmond, where I live, has many sites of Civil War battles and, consequently, cemeteries for the war dead. Arlington National Cemetery is on the site of the Custis-Lee Mansion, seized by the Federal Government for just such a purpose.
In the Culture Of Fun which is America in the 21st Century, remembrance takes a backseat to Fun.
28 Monday May 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
Yesterday, a wonderful picture composed itself. The first day lily of the season bloomed with the red roses on the trellis in the background.
And with Sunday being our 17th wedding anniversary, what a marvelous picture to text to Mrs CorC?.
She worked a late shift, arriving home after midnight. She was in no way ready to get to the 11:00 Mass. I went alone, a little begrudgingly. Church reaffirms my commitment to my marriage, the calling to live for something larger than myself, the bond between my wife and me.
Sunday was Trinity Sunday, wherein the Church reaffirms its teaching on the Three Persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) within the One Godhead. Father M said the interwoven nature among the Three Persons is all about relationship. OK. Enough on that.
After Mass, I head home. We go to lunch before she goes back to work. We share a tasty almond cream cake at an Italian restaurant.
Tonight, If you ask me to define Love, I will tell you that Love is the ability to transcend resentments, to aspire to a higher purpose, such as an enduring marriage.
