This day was kind of meh. I sort of wish something exciting would happen. Exciting, as in wild, passionate sex Exciting. I did some sleeping. Watched a show on YouTube about the Songhai Empire in what is now Mali along the River Niger. This is the first I have heard of this kingdom. I did know about the fabled city of Timbuctoo, somewhat related to to this empire. Thus edified, I decided to sleep a bit after that. Then when I awoke, I put a brisket in the slow cooker. So we had brisket tonight. I fixed corn, tomatoes, and okra for my own enjoyment. J does not like okra.  I also made a fruit salad with honeydew melon and strawberries for my dessert. I ought to be happy. I’m bored, fed up with COVID-19 protocols, sexual denial, all the crap senior citizens like me have to put up with. However, as bad as things seem, the country and the world are not turning to poo! Trust me. This is pretty much the way things have always been. Good stuff and bad happening at the same time. The constant you need to be aware of, in case you are not aware, is that mass media are constantly trying to manipulate how you feel. They will distort, if not outright lie about what is actually going on. This did not start with the advent of #45 on the scene. It’s been going on as long as I can remember. There are heroes and villains, people you are supposed to like, like JFK, people you are supposed to dislike , Castro, for example. Now it may be that the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad, but that is merely serendipitous when it does happen. Truth is the whole purpose of the mass media is to facilitate your buying stuff. Sixty years ago, advertisers wanted people to buy cigarettes. Now the big advertisers are pharmaceutical companies that make drugs for COPD and lung cancer. Get it?

Sitting here, after a good day. My son is OK. That is a big relief.

We went out for a late lunch and I fixed a spinach Canadian bacon, mushroom fritatta for a late supper. I hear the dish washer running now, all electric motors and gears and spray.

I made Earl Grey tea for after dinner. Right now I’m watching a creepy tourism film from Nazi Germany, made in 1938. It is cuckoo clocks and Schühplättler, fröhlicher Volk. Did I say it was creepy? How, after 75 years, do we still get chills watching their lies?

I should go up. Really. I’m tired. Time for bed.

Have we started to look at the world as a giant theme park? We go through life collecting experiences. We go about turning everything into roller coasters, or carousels. (I know. Nobody rides carousels anymore.) Sex is easily morphed into a ride, wherein we collect and store the experience in our bodies.

We are no longer human beings, but, rather, human feelings.

Where is the room to derive anything more than a feeling from anything? An experience. Life becomes a succession of experiences. A trip to an art museum is about experiencing how art makes us feel. Always feel, never think.  Thinking itself is debased into a means to access feeling.

What the experience-collecting paradigm leads us to is a very narrow and selfish focusing into what life is. We look at religion, or spirituality, through the filter of how a rite, like worship, makes us feel. Do we feel closer to God? People are fond of saying they feel closer to God in a garden than they do in a house of worship. I don’t wish to discount that attitude. We all feel that.  But is knowing God more than a feeling?

Feeling is not bad. Rather it is limiting. Can we imagine that there are things beyond feeling? That, say Heaven, goes beyond feeling and experience?

If we are afraid we are stupid, we spend our lives proving to ourselves that we are, in fact, smart.

Or that we are attractive, athletic, spiritual, funny. Insert the negative antonym, then the disproving behaviour will follow.

Diabolical? Yes. But if we know what our fearful innerselves are up to, maybe there is hope. That we can put this behaviour to good use.

Sleep last night was filled with dreams, of fears about my son, expressed in dreams of death and funerals.

The memories of my childhood was a chaos of books and bugs and food and toothpaste, toothbrushes and dental hygiene in general.

I dreamt, last night, I was stuck at my parents’ house, I needed to get my younger son back home, so I could get him to school.

It is the story of my parenting, or so it seems, from the perspective of today.

We carry our own turmoil within us. Eventually that turmoil infects others, or resonates within them. Then we have a riot or a regime change Or a divorce. Or a war.

We make ourselves far too complicated than who or what we really are.

At some point in my adulthood, I came to realize that surviving the home and family where I grew up matched the feeling I had when I walked away unscathed from a head on collision.

My son is OK. But there is some mending that needs to happen around relationships.

I feel like reaching to my blogosphere friends because my son is having a mental health crisis. He is on the autism spectrum of disorders, but the pandemic and the civil unrest it have taken their toll on him. He has some heightened paranoia.

This really sucks.

I am the only one capable of

Ending the lethargy,

Escaping pandemic prison,

Taking control again.

But once the descent to decay begins.

Defeat stands waiting.

Do I have to get up?

Yes.

Go where I should be going?

Yes.

To Mass, and trust the priest is not a fraud?

Yes.

Swim and trust the rules are not too stringent?

Yes.

It is time to stop living behind these paper walls,

while thinking it’s a prison.

Almost evening. Today was about laziness and lethargy. I ate an absurd amount for dinner last night. The stuffed feeling endured well into the middle of the night. I awoke around 0130, overheated. I went downstairs to drink some seltzer and “digest” some more.

I watched WW Two documentaries. I appreciate the absence of moral ambiguity in the World War Two era. The Nazis were as low as humanity could go. And the Japanese were right there with them.

So after some “Napalm Nostalgia” I went back to bed, slept like a log. Next thing I knew it was noon. J wanted lunch or brunch or just food in general. We went to First Watch. I had a vegetable omelette. She had a half sandwich and salad. She wanted to shop. I wanted to sleep some more. So she took me home.

Now I am watching trains. J is napping . I am concocting a grandiose plan, in my head, for clearing junk out of the house. I just need to get up and do something. Here downstairs, while the trains pass through Ashland, Fort Madison, Galesburg, and La Plata. I can work.

But first, more watching, sitting, and day dreaming.

I did little things today. I took a shower. That’s a victory for personal hygiene and grooming . I made iced sweet tea for J, hibiscus (sorrel) 🌺 tea for me. I emptied the dishwasher.

I watched trains. #4, The Southwest Chief Eastbound to Chicago, was already running late when it had to stop for a barge to pass through the open swing bridge at Fort Madison, Iowa. But it finally crossed the Mississippi River.

The laundry I washed is in the dryer.

July means it is hot in Virginia. We are moving toward Autumn. Between the pandemic and politics, it is a crazy time. A lot of sport has been erased from national life. To watch cricketers playing matches in empty stadia, one can see that the fabric of popular culture is torn, perhaps irreparably.

Meanwhile, the debt picture is precarious for the national and global economies. The USA and the rest of the world must return to work as soon as possible.

In the great scheme of things, taking down Confederate statues doesn’t mean much. A woman was shot dead on her porch by a random shooter in Richmond earlier this week. The great moment of metanoia came. And went.

“Same as it ever was“- Once In A Lifetime, David Byrne.

For both my J’s. I made a show of it, for her. I wanted her to see my fingers at work. How I washed my hands first, then dried them. I used the tip of the knife to break the skin, then thrust my left index finger in that tiny slit, while I held the orange in my right hand. And from the opening and initial thrust peel separated from flesh in a long and serpentine strip To fall away to the napkin that lay on the shiny chromed steel tray. The spherical sweetness of pulp and juice and membrane now lost its symmetry as, section by section, the orange became like labial petals And I fed each one into her open mouth.