News I can watch before I start thinking crazy thoughts. You know, the kind of thoughts that will bring federal law enforcement to one’s door, if acted upon.

So I turned the news off. I’m back to watching The Russians at Church. There is beauty and reverence, plus magnificent choral music.

“But you told us already,” I hear you saying. And you are correct. But it bears repeating.

Some, maybe most of you, have the capacity to filter this fertilizer, but I don’t. So listening to the lovely meter of a Russian Orthodox homily, in a language I hardly understand, comforts me. The Russians. who lived in the fire of Communism for eighty years, find the frying pan of Putin, relatively comfortable.

So I’m going to chill.

Maybe some cartoons will be on the program tonight. Some reading, perhaps. Some beauty, balance, symmetry will be on the agenda. These are the things the arts, in the classical sense of the term, provide. I will consider Raphael and Michelangelo tonight, pass on Picasso and Chagall.

What I will be doing is repudiating the false promise of progress. Progress is the bait on the hook that we hit on. Who baits the hook is another question I will not explore tonight.

Last night , I woke up around  Three AM., stayed awake for three hours, then went back to sleep. That is not unusual. But when I awoke again around Ten AM, I had no idea what day of the week it was. And I really didn’t care.

Chalk it up to Covid-19.

Auden wrote in September 1, 1939 of a low mean decade coming to an end. Were it only a decade.

How much can the heart take? The swirling, all-surrounding drama doesn’t end. Ever.

We await the promise of The Manger yet again, as we have these many years.

He always comes.

And we are never prepared.

I was born ten years later,

In an alien land.

How could I possess even a tribal memory?

A hint that my yet to be formed heart could bleed at Brest, Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov, Orel?

St Petersburg froze and bled and starved while bearing its pseudonym.

As did Tsaritsyn.

God welcomes all His martyrs.

It had been awhile, since March? Who knows? I kept waiting for the rain while not only my throat, but my heart was parched.

Maybe you think you picked the right side in this fratricide. Maybe you think the wounds to your soul weren’t fatal, because there is no blood lost in this ersatz exsanguination.

Maybe it isn’t too late.

We have all lost wars.

And we have no monuments to our bombast and vanities

Whether our hair is kinky

Or straight.

I sleep at completely odd times. I sleep a little while, wake up,fritter away a couple of hours, sleep some more. This is, so I’ve heard what old guys do. And I will be 70 in approximately thirty-three days.Is that old?Not as old as Biden. Or Trump. Older than Buttigieg, by a lot.

So this stokes my anxiety level, particularly when the Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air and I might have to get a vaccine made from aborted fetal tissue. Nothing like moral ambiguity, exacerbated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. If manufacture of life-saving vaccines depend upon abortion providers and their, uh, “output”that is not an insignificant moral quandary. Tell me the pharmaceutical companies did not use fetal tissue in research, development and manufacture of the COVID-19 vaccine. Please. Tell me.

Well, anyway. Refocus. That is what The New Year is for.

The Old Year is where I am stuck. My car is on loan to my son, has been for almost two weeks. Now I am beginning to miss it. It will be back soon. I hope. It would be nice to get it back so I can resume doing stuff.

The current dystopia is beginning to feel comfortable. It fits like a old shoe. Mask at the ready? ✔ Socially distanced? ✔. Is there space available in the drug store? ✔ At least, when I’m home, watching old movies on TV, I can tell myself, “Things really haven’t changed all that much?”

They’re just things to lose sleep over.

I went to bed around 11:00PM. I slept three or four hours. I stayed awakr, watching a documentary on La Bellle Epoque, the period from 1890 to 1914, that described the cultural history of Western Europe and North America.

Almost decided to go back to bed, when I flipped the channel to cricket, (Willow) where Australia and India are involved in a test match in Adelaide. The Indian side has a 71 run leader over Australia. Josh Hazlewood is the #11 batsman and he is making a good accounting of himself.

I love watching these world class cricketers. They seem to be having a good time. Virat Kohli, captain of the Indian side, smiles readily, and maintains a pleasant banter with the Aussies. Understandable, I guess, he’s been competing against tbese Australian cricketers for years, in all formats of the game.

Cricket is part of the cultural glue, that keeps what was once the British Empire together. Remarkable, after all the tumult of the last century, that this game thrives. Cricket is a sublime mix of simplicity and complexity, so characteristic of all great sports.

I really should go back to bed, but, for now, there is no electoral fraud, COVID-19, Great (or not so great) Resets. Sensitive to my need to sleep, India just took the last wicket. At the end of the first innings India leads by 53.

Janet is on her way home. That’s another good reason to go back to bed.

Thank God for sport. I feel like the crap of the past year never happened.

This is The Mother Of All Industrial Films

It is a moving, loving depiction of fruit cocktail, as if Dole’s commitment to fruit cocktail was all consuming.

Who knew?

It had been a long dive looking at whatever wonders the reef afforded her visitors.

“She’s alive, you know.”

So the divemaster/ marine biologist said. “Coral is a living thing. The part we notice, at which we marvel, is but the skeleton, the frame, the architecture.”

We forgot the lecture the minute our eyes turned downward. As we descended to this magic place, our air, our life came from the bottles on our backs. We were just visiting. This could have been Eden, had God preferred fishes, turtles, anemones to pomegranates, tortoises, or bunnies. What would have tempted Eve in this Garden? What proscribed fruit would tempt her in the depths, to bestow wisdom upon her? Maybe sin comes easier on dry land.

We can be awestruck only so long before the scales reencrust our eyes and we return to the show between our ears. But for the moment, we were enlightened in the depth where the sun still cast her rays.

We began the trip home, to limitless air, to food, to wine, to bed. Upward, we swam, our fins propelling us. We had not been down too long, before the air we nursed from from those bottles would betray us at our joints.

We removed the neoprene armour, the glass mask, the aluminum carapace whose contents sustained us in our piscene reverie. We had our time and mortality returned, along with appetite and lust.

After the depths, her body was new to me again. Naked, in the shower, we cavorted, grabbed, suckled, pulled, tweaked. I reclaimed her as mine.

In that night we forgot the lectures, the speeches, the polemics from those we gave our malleable wills. Two became one, in hope there would be three. The same longing possessed by Abraham, by Sarah, in that tent pitched on the gritty earth of Canaan, was ours in that room in that motel.

Throughout the Nineteenth Century, China, in the waning days of the Manchu Dynasty, was systematically exploited, her sovereignty trampled on by the Western and. Industrialized Powers, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States.

The U.S. thought in terms of trade and Christian evangelization. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American missionaries who brought education, medicine and Christianity to China’s millions.

Well the Chinese can hold a grunge with the best of them . And all that Westernization, welcomed or not, hurt Chinese national pride. And we have payback, now. The Chinese have “invested ” for years. Wall Street made a lot of money selling our country out from under us

If the West could tamper with their sovereignty in the 1800’s, well the Chinese can mess with the sovereignty of Western nations here in 2020. When America is completely ravaged, our money worthless, our political institutions mere husks, our military in shambles, then perhaps when there is nothing left to steal, the Chinese will leave.

Maybe there will be a free and fair election in the U S of A again, but don’t bet on it. Whoever controls the election computers now control the outcomes. As long as the money holds out, we should be OK.