22 Tuesday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
I am awake, have been since 3:30. I ate fruit, oatmeal and a snack size stick of Sargento Cheddar. I have drunk more coffee than I should have. A train is pulling into Ashland, #86 Northbound to Washington and, ultimately, New York.
The exhaustion continues. I do little to ameliorate the condition. I am going back to bed, I think. Very soon.
I need to find a counselor. Who or what kind, I don’t know. I will reach out to friends first
Sleep. Did I say I was going back to bed? Later, folks.
21 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in Erotic Writing
Tags
I dream of the women with bellies, and asses they think are too big. I dream of their tits deemed saggy, but whose nipples respond nonetheless, to a pull or a tug or the fervent suckle from this grizzled and hungry lover.
The timid end the game too soon. To let the buzzer sound on joy itself. But the fierce and ardent lovers seek eternity with every play and drive. To seek the timeless in the loins’ fusion.
21 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
I want some good reason for being awake at 0240. There isn’t one. I was in the big bed, sleeping beside J, more or less. I was using a pillow for back support, since I am a side sleeper. I woke up, voided my bladder, then went to the other bed. I read some blogs, couldn’t get warm, dressed and came downstairs.
Two freight trains, moving in opposite directions just passed through Ashland. Now we are back to the nocturnal quiet. I feel sleep coming back. A yawn comes, then another. At the same time, I consider sleeping in my recliner. Night all.
21 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in Aesthetics, Modernism, New York
Tags
I was going to go up early. J is still feeling badly, but believes a doctor visit at this point would be of little value. She is trying to sleep while she has a DVD of I Love Lucy episodes playing in the background. Not wishing to hear the ossified jokes and agonize through the banal situations, staying down here where I can listen to the music (the best part of ILL) is the smart choice. I can put a DVD of old cigarette commercials in the downstairs machine and pretend I’m 8 years old again.
I will always associate these Lucy episodes with my recovery from back surgery. We played them almost every night, along with The Andy Griffith Show. Reading or other stuff was reserved for the day time. We did not have FIOS then. I can’t remember exactly what I was reading then, four years ago. Stefan Zweig, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein., most likely.
I considered myself something of a sophisticate four years ago. Any modernist idea received a full and rather uncritical consideration and acceptance. So I would lap up a PBS presentation on modern art as if Picasso were the equivalent of Raphael or Giotto. It’s all art, right? And people pay good money for all of it. The modern world, I am afraid, is like Alice falling down the rabbit hole and wondering what happened to the truth. But that was how I thought then.
There will be one more passenger train passing through Ashland. #97 Southbound Silver Meteor, headed to Miami. One Winter’s night we will make the full journey. We will stay in an Art Deco hotel in South Beach and pretend 85 years of history never happened. No Hitler, no Bomb, no Castro. If only.
Right now, we have the yellow orange sodium lights reflecting off wet pavement and wet slate roof shingles. It is a static moment anticipating the dynamic conjoined chrome steel cars of the passenger train. The horn sounds. It won’t be long now. Less than a minute of speed, and a rush of sound, then stillness til morning and Northbound Silver Meteor #98 will work its way toward Manhattan, Penn Station, Times Square, The Empire State Building, Radio City, the Northetn artifacts of that hopeful time, now perhaps as anachronistic as the biplane, the Zeppelin, these very trains for which we wait.
20 Sunday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
This culture, not just America, but the whole global popular culture, is obsessed with sport. Soccer (football), cricket, baseball, ice hockey, American football, basketball, just to name a few. The Turks are nuts about wrestling, the Indonesians badminton, Canadians love curling. Now after spending six months following baseball, I can say enough.
I was this worked up around baseball about twenty years ago, then I settled back to a slow simmer. This summer, when I added cricket to the menu, I got all jazzed up about lots of sports again, but there is only so much any of us can take.
Exercising for fitness may take on the appearance of a game, but there are differences. I swim, love swimming, love the time alone in the water. I time myself, chart my times. If I’m competing, it is against myself, in past performances. I don’t want to compete, against any opponent.
We have, more or less, built American culture around three team sports baseball, football (American), and basketball. All the others are opening acts or sideshows. Colleges are as much about sports teams as they are about intellectual inquiry or professional education, maybe more so.
Sport is the All You Can Eat Buffet of Popular Culture. We eventually become engorged, long before we are satisfied. When I go to such a buffet, especially when I am paying, I feel like I have to get my money’s worth, whatever that is.
So it is time to unplug, dial back. I will swim more often, continue watching cricket (since I pay extra for it), but baseball, American football, basketball, and ice hockey, I’m out of the office.
20 Sunday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
It has been awhile since we have had a long soaking rain. Today we have just that. And my joints ache. I made coffee. J is at work. I am alone.
I am still processing this weekend. Maybe because I am sober and count among my mentors the illiterate poor who stay sober and live lives in the brutal shadow world of the other America, but I have no feeling for the American collegiate subculture.
But I find little joy in pondering my alienation. Rather the falling rain shall be sufficient cause for joy today.
19 Saturday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
This trip to Williamsburg is over. We are home. The dirty clothes from the trip have been laundered. Drying is next. I am exhausted, so I will nap. J had been resting since we got back.
I wish she wasn’t so attached to Williamsburg. I knew Charlottesville was an armpit from the day I first laid eyes on it, Mr Jefferson’s architecture being the exception. I never want to see my alma mater again, ever.
But we drive around in the congested streets, clogged with the Yuppie alumni on pilgrimage, plus the Colonial Williamsburg tourists, checking things out.
I need a nap.
19 Saturday Oct 2019
Posted in #Grief, alcoholism
Yesterday was spent on a trip to Williamsburg. We went to a memorial ceremony for J’s brother D, a graduate of The College of William Mary, Class of 1968. He died on 29 March, 2019 of ALS. J needed this as part of her mourning for D. She has had bronchitis most of this past week. Some of this congestion, I suspect, is grief unexpressed. It is a long process, this grieving. This College was one of J and D’s common bonds.
I realized, in walking around this lovely setting at this very old College, that college is an alien world for me. I have the degree. I can “pass” for educated. Yet I kept asking myself, “What am I doing here?” A lot of the alumni seem to be asking the same question, because they need alcohol to tolerate this Homecoming Weekend. I don’t go to my homecomings at The University of Virginia for similar reasons. I had to drink to tolerate the whole undergraduate experience there.
We are staying at a rather nice bed and breakfast. However, the room can either be chilly or overheated. We elected overheated. I said it is nice. It is quiet, with some cattle mooing in a front pasture. We don’t have cattle back home in Richmond.
I tried sleeping earlier. That lasted about two hours. I awoke, assessed my body pain, then dressed. After praying a Rosary, I cut my fingernails. The clippings fell on the red carpet, a red slightly darker than cherry Kool-Aid, for which I now suddenly and oddly long. Nails trimmed, I then picked the clippings out of the carpet. That ingathering of the nail clippings became the most meaningful thing I did all day. I guess it holds meaning because it signifies a task completed. And I did it sober, after prayer, after contemplating the Sufferings of Our Lord.
The Rosary has a tie to academia, through the Dominican Friars, like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Dominic. Not only did they champion these prayers to Our Lady, but they more or less invented the university itself. Ironically, let us contrast today’s modern university, with their multi billion dollar endowments, exorbitant budgets, ever-rising tuitions to the work of mendicant friars. What if the faculty had to seek alms before the very first book was opened? What if the students had to go around begging for their tuition before they matriculated?
It sounds odd, weird even. But maybe we would value learning as something other than an entitlement of class, status, or intelligence. Imagine all of our leaders, humbling themselves, as part of a life experience.
17 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
Today at lunch when I was about to get a scene by scene summary of a particularly tragic death that was the subject of a TV show, I told J I did not want to hear about it, nor do I want to hear about any murders, adultery, infidelity, or suicides at lunch any longer.
I feel completely liberated from that junk. Never again.
17 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in History, Uncategorized
I don’t know precisely the right word to describe what someone in The Netherlands did with their movie camera over 100 years ago. They filmed a busy port of Amsterdam, freighters, passenger ships, lighters, warehouses, quays, trams, freight trains. Now I see a lateen rigged schooner pass through the camera’s view. It is a busy harbour in a city that would escape the catastrophe of The Great War.
The women wear long skirts in the Edwardian style. The men wear suits, ties, bowler hats, flat caps. There is no litter on the street. That suggests either a cultural value of fastidiousness, or a society that did not produce items deemed unworthy of retaining. Were there no pop bottles, beer bottles, potato chip bags, cigarette packages, newspapers?
The scenes had moments that looked like a scale model train layout. Now there is ferry taking a horse and wagon across the harbour, now a ship in dry dock.
We could call it modern. Children filmed in these movies could have lived into the twenty-first century, suffered under Nazi occupation, seen the transformation of the Dutch East Indies into Indonesia, the advent of passenger automobiles, air travel, satellites, women’s emancipation, radio, television, computers, artificial hormonal contraception, antibiotics, just for starters. Oh, and nuclear weapons. Let’s not leave those out.
We have our eye on the future and whatever it may bring, but we should always remember that the old culture was not that long ago.
Dispatches From Dystopia 