I turned off the TV. The Smartphone is next after this post. I’m tired. I’m sick of most of the crap I see or read or hear about in this country, from automobiles to politicians to the cowardly bishops in the American episcopate of the Roman Catholic Church.

Mostly just tired. J has a second job. She took a week off job #1 to take down “sun care” endcaps in the area Publix Stores, (They are a chain out of Florida, nice stores). She has only about seven stores but these are huge undertaking. The shelves are crammed with bottles and tubes and aerosol cans of sun tan lotions. Plenty left over. Evidently melanoma won out this Summer around here. It’s a six hour job taking the junk down, counting it, letting the receiving clerk take it out of stock and boxing it.

So I’ve been sitting around getting frustrated about being more or less ignored. I’m feeling crazy. Stuff that shouldn’t bother me is bothering me. I need to sleep.

Maybe looking at the world through the prism of conflict and struggle between or among parties or factions supposedly in opposition isn’t a particularly valuable or useful way of assessing the state of the world.

I fear that many of us have lost the ability to see or think beyond that paradigm. Consider how much of your world view is colored by such an assessment. Is there or can there be another way of looking at things?

There just might not be the conflict “out there” in the world that you are told exists. Where such conflicts live are “between your ears” and somebody put them there. Some, but not all of the culprits are political parties, so-called “activists”, Marxist educators, Madison Avenue, Clergy of all creeds, Hell, even Satan himself, (if you are a believer).

We all need to honestly look at how we think. And it is deuce difficult. This kind of introspection leaves open the possibility that we might have been wrong at some point in time. This kind of introspection takes honesty, courage, tolerance, and kindness because we are all people up to the same silly self-defeating game.

Just think about it, OK?

Who ya‘ gonna believe?

We grow up believing narratives about events. We accept prevailing mythologies. I use “mythology” with no derogatory connotation. The Myth of the valiant Confederate soldiers, fighting overwhelming odds defending their homes (and a morally reprehensible social order) is the postbellum theme for the New South. It’s why some sketchy characters had some beautiful art erected to honor them. At this point, getting rid of this art is like purging France of monuments to Napoleon Bonaparte, a war monger of the first order. Just ask the Germans or the Spanish or the Portuguese, for starters.

Consider the supporting narrative behind the Federal Reserve System. The Fed was created by Wall Street financiers after the Panic of 1907. The fiat currency, control of the banking system and money supply is supposed to stave off financial panic, until there is another financial panic. We still live with this one every day. We live with the belief in the necessity of a central bank. Maybe we do need the Federal Reserve System, but there is nothing wrong with challenging the system if we disagree, and can support our arguments with, uh, facts. Yeah facts.

So other narratives are imposed on us that we assume to be true. Russia before the Bolsheviks was backwards, needing Marxist economic theory, to usher in the full flower of industrial modernity. Historians with contrary evidence are ignored. Franklin D. Roosevelt and The New Deal are what ushered in Progress and economic recovery. Contrary evidence? Thanks, but no thanks.

We believe any narrative that incorporates a struggle between the forces of Progress (whatever that may be) and the forces of reaction. That notion pretty much sums every other movie made in Hollywood, some of them very good, by the way. Mr Smith Goes To Washington comes to mind. If one touches the base of Progress in an argument, one has eager adherents. We believe the Progressives are the winners.

I was writing a blog entry about how today didn’t go quite the way I wanted it to go. My energy was depleted, my optimism and enthusiasm had been exhausted. Then Word Press crashed. So I am starting over.

I am watching Popeye, my go-to DVD, for mental health reset. I just love the cartoons, especially from the 30’s with the great musical scores.

Anyway, after fixing a pot of decaf and eating an orange, I am back to this post.

I know nothing of love, marriage, sexual relationships, and anything else in that domain.

That’s all for tonight.

I swam tonight after doing a bunch of stuff like heat leftovers for dinner that needed to be eaten, getting J a sweet iced tea at Dunkin’ Donuts, buying more Tate’s Bake Shop Cookies. It was a good swim, very refreshing. I am tired now, not overstimulated, which is always a possibility with an evening swim. I was thinking of all sorts of reasons for not going, but I went swimming. That is what counts. The usual sore places are sore.

I am watching a Fleischer Studios Superman cartoon. These are incredibly cool. Look for them on YouTube.

There was a Rogers & Hammerstein musical by the name Pipe Dream. It was based on the short novel Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, a sequel to his novel Cannery Row. My mother liked Pipe Dream. There was a song with the lines, “whether you like it or whether you don’t, you’re stuck with the whole damn lot.”, that resonated with her. That made an impression on me too. I guess that is an example of stealth child rearing. An adult is raising a child simply by being an adult. The child assumes, rightly or wrongly, that the adult knows what they’re doing, whereas the kid doesn’t and is looking for tips about this whole Living Life thing.

J had to be at work at Five AM to unload a truck. That means I had to be up at Four AM to see her off. She will be off at 1:30. I may go back to bed and sleep til then. Why not?

There is a man named Tomasz Bykowski who walks around video recording other people walking around on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. People have done this in the past with movie cameras as far back as 1896, in London, Paris, and Manhattan.

What else can be said about people walking around? Plenty. But I’m too tired to say it right now. Except the streets of Manhattan are an endless spectacle and cause for puzzlement Why, for example, would someone park their Lamborghini on the street as if it was a Ford Festiva? Are they that rich or that stupid? Or both.

The weather change isn’t happening soon enough to my liking. It’s like waiting for a baby to be born.

One other thing, now that I’m rambling. We have an incredible number of things. Think about that. Why would you want more? I mean what are you expecting from possessing them?

Later, товарищи.

For about three hours this morning I did not look at my Smartphone. Now for two of those hours, I was sleeping, but for one hour, I consciously avoided referring to my phone. I turned it off, making an effort not to use it to see who won the ball game last night, whether that obscure politician, athlete, or celebrity was still living or not.

We live, as we well know, in an Information Age, kind of like Fred and Wilma Flintstone lived in the Stone Age. They lived in Hanna-Barbera’s made-up Stone Age in order that Welch’s and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company could sell us grape juice and Winston Cigarettes. (They were two of the original sponsors). Now, in the Information Age, in our use of the internet in our quest for information, we are creating information about ourselves that the creepy tech companies sell to businesses. Surveillance marketing is the name. We are the information in the Information Age.

Where is the ideology in this? I think people could be in completely opposite identity groups and be mutually offended by the intrusions of the techno/information industries. But no. We all let ourselves be dehumanized. We morph ourselves into consumers, trading our dignity for digital coupons and Facebook “likes”.

I feel for those who are lonely, whose chance to awaken beside a lover is ripped away, whose hope to sleep naked next to that other naked one is dashed, not by an indifferent world, but that other’s cudgel of fear.

When “I’m scared” wins over another chance to cum, just plain fuckin’ hurts. Like you never want to know how deep that dagger plunges.

The weapons of Love’s enemies are always concealed. Until they are brought out.

We went to an Italian place where I had an Italian sausage sub and a Pepsi, (no Coke products, no problem. Prefer Pepsi). J got manicotti. She informs me that the Ken Burns Country Music documentary is on PBS. Comrade Burns is not my cup of tea.

I’m still tired.

J