Here it is , Tuesday morning . NFL football has a hiatus until Thursday evening the Thursday game marks a new week, grinding ever closer to the regular season end. Manufactured drama for our starved souls helps fill the Great Emptiness.

My great fear is that the human race will decimate itself out of sheer boredom. We will have a catastrophic struggle, leaving enough people surviving to watch the movie version of the disaster.

In the coming year, we in America must learn to play well with others again. It’s a challenge. We kinda sorta want a civil war, just for the drama.

People are buying large quantities of Bibles today. With any luck we will read them. And pay attention.

Autumn means football on Sunday, roughly from noon to midnight. It all gets tedious with the celebratory noise from pregame(foreplay) to the orgasm of touchdowns to the final cheers and fireworks of the final whistle. Football is not yet an obligatory affirmation of American culture, but it gets closer with every season.

Portugal is famous for its three “F”s: Fatima, Fado and Futbol, (soccer).The three F’s unify the Portuguese culture as cuisine, Evangelical Protestantism, for both white and African American communities, and good ole football unite us down Soutb. We’re all fans, no question about that.

Lots of chickens have died and been fried proclaiming the Good News of Jesus at plenty of church suppers.And we like it that way.

We get comfortable around food, faith and football. We have differences, sometimes acrimonious, to be sure, but our three F’s call us home.

What if the winner of the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes was a death row inmate? How would the Prize Patrol handle the visit? That’s a lot of body cavity searches. The inmate might have trouble deciding how to spend the money. I mean a new house is out of the question. Scratch an around the world cruise off the list, too.

The lawyers could always use the money. Maybe the governor would appreciate a sizeable campaign contribution. Maybe the Anatomy Department at a state medical school would appreciate money more than another cadaver.

Maybe I just need to think about something else

The culture proclaims today Black Friday. After our day of obligatory gratitude, we resume are quest for stuff to give to impress our friends, family and acquaintances with our shopping savvy or good taste, or the closest approximation of love our bruised and battered hearts are capable of.

I’m sitting in a lobby or sitting room of a bed and breakfast or hotel or inn in Corolla, North Carolina . I had a muffin and container of yoghurt at their breakfast bar. The breakfast, such as it is, comes with the room. The people hanging around are pleasant enough. There is a dog, a yellow Lab bitch, going on with her doggy life, being adorable and friendly.

I just heard Bob Dylan sing, Don’t Think Twice or whatever the title is. We’ve come a long way from William Faulkner, as Nobel laureates go.

This place is a bourgeois Walhalla. Having fought our figurative Agincourt, we retire to this Demi- paradise, this earth, this realm, these Outer Banks. Shakespeare was working when these parts were first explored. It took four hundred years to turn this beachhead into a suburb, but we’ve succeeded.

And it’s really not bad. Americans have mastered comfort, bountiful food, warm houses, fast cars, jet planes.

The empty part is our own problem. Don’t think too much and enjoy the free breakfast.

6:36. AM . I’m sitting here, showered wearing clean clothes , watching a video on Brazilian waxing. The presenter is speaking Dutch. It is YouTube in all its eclectic splendor.

I need more sleep, I also want to cry. Loneliness grips me.. I’m think of things I have to do, like throwing crap out.

I would like to cook more but my wife will only sit at the table with me under extreme conditions. Her world is the television, the bed and a book. And she sleeps about twelve hours a day.

My marriage is an empty vessel.

I don’t hold much hope for a culture that can’t distinguish between a hat and a cap.

Why would someone call me from Switzerland? They left no message.

Today I received my first Swiss Butt Dial.

I’ve been wrong before. Lots of times. Thanks to sites like Substack , folks who think they’re smart can post their thoughts and deride anyone who disagrees with them.

Why are these people who are so smart, just hanging out on Substack? Uh, maybe their inflated opinions of themselves overestimated the depth and breadth of their self-assessed genius.

Anybody can dislike politicians or generals or movie stars, et cetera. But the rise of Donald Trump as a political/media Superstar has been The Gift That Keeps On Giving. He can do nothing right, in their estimation. One denizen on Substack calls DJT “The Bloated Yam”. Yams are orange. Get It.? I know y’all are all in awe of this genius, as I am. And he has an MFA in Creative Writing.

Ignore.

Gosh, all this space to post, umm, thoughts is a real windfall for these bozos. And post they do.

I’m 73 years old. Men like Lyndon Johnson , Richard Nixon The Bushes,pere et fils, have been POTUS in my lifetime. Trump’s body count comes nowhere near LBJ’s or Nixon’s, Yet the Trump haters ignore these facts.

Hating on Trump will get you a column , followers, or the coveted “like”. And you can use that MFA to post thoughts shallower than a kiddie pool.

Rant over.

There are persons on Substack who opine about politics. I hope I never meet them in real life.

I’ve been sitting here, watching independent media webcasts like Redacted with Clayton and Natali Morris, and Dr Steve Turley with Steve Turley. I think they and other independent content creators are responsible journalists, free from the prejudices CNN or MSNBC or FOX News Channel. Still, they have editorial biases, even though they readily acknowledge such biases. More importantly, it takes time to watch these presenters, and that’s time taken away from my own thinking.

We seem to get lost in the weeds exploring who else, besides us, wants to destroy this perfectly good planet. And it’s a useless and futile exercise. The Medici, Tudors. Bourbons , Hapburgs, and countless others, have all had a crack at attaining power. Historical novels and doctoral dissertations have both been written about their hi jinx. It’s a maddening avocation following these power games.

Time to stop. Like my hippie siblings of fifty years ago they, I’ve wondered how to walk away. Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll were appealing alternatives, but not very effective.

Maybe the literary imagination is a limited alternative. Wells, Lewis, Tolkien and Dick created other universes for us to consider. But pursuits in letters won’t stop atom bombs from being proliferated and perhaps used.

“How” is the question.