9/4/2025

 Thursday, September 4, 2025

D+303/228/-1234

1957 Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, called out the National Guard to prevent 9 black students from entering Little Rock's Central High School

1970 Marxist Salvador Allende won a narrow plurality of votes in Chile's presidential election

2016 Mother Teresa was canonized by Pope Francis in a ceremony at the Vatican

2017 US President Donald Trump announces the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will be stopped

In bed before 10, up at 4:20, from relentless thoughts of clearing out the basement, the basement stairs, of helplessness and hopelessness.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 7:15 a.m.  55°, high of 63°

A year ago today started out like today, in bed at 9:45, up at with my thinking of Lilly's being 'on her last legs,', Jane Kenyon's Otherwise, and dismal thoughts of Erik Erikson's theory of integrety vs. despair in old age.  I wrote the lyrics to Motherless Child, including "Sometimes I feel like I'm almost done, /  a long, long, way from home."  It's sort of curious that I made a pot of bacon cauliflower soup that day and two days ago I bought a cauliflower and a pound of bacon to make the same soup probably today.  I had also gone 4 or 5 days without watching any televised news, I was so sick of the Trump/Harris election.

Two years ago today was Jimmy's last day with us.  Steve A. was here to accompany him tomorrow to Alexandria and Silverado. "Jim is here for Italian Beef sandwiches, fresh sweet corn, and homemade bundt cake.   When he left, touched me and said "if I don't see you tomorrow, love." He reminds me again of the fact that he has become a friend over the last 3 and 1/2 years, more than an in-law. Tomorrow will mark the end of a chapter of our lives."  He has been at Silverado for 3 years now and we are receiving news that the staff is reporting that he is becoming "difficult," unwilling to shower or change clothing, resisting the nurse changing his catheter, sleeping in the common area, etc.  They want to move him to the second floor where "difficult" demented residents are stored, presumably sedated.  "I weep for Adonais - he is dead."

We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

Kitty died on 3/3/22, Jimmy left on 9/5/22.  Tom died on January 18, 2023, and Ed on June 23, 2024.  A half-litany of losses.

Telling the truth.  The Wall Streeat Journal has an editorial this morning about Trump ordering the air attack on what he said was a speedboat carrying Venezuelan narcotics to the U.S.  This "kinetic response" was ordered instead of the usual pracrtice of the Coast Guard stopping and searching the boat and arresting the occupants.  I assume the attack was illegal: blowing up and sinking a civilian boat on the high seas, the death penalty for all the occupants with no due process.  I don't address that aspect of the act and the editorial, but rather this: "A war on narco traffickers won’t end America’s drug-abuse epidemic, which has ruined so many lives, because U.S. consumption is a demand problem. It would help if public officials at least tried to discourage young people from ingesting mind-altering substances."  We as a people and our government have pretty consistently ignored this fact for decades because it hides the fact that so many of us, and our children, find thier lives in our country and in our culture unendurable (perhaps too strong a term) without relief from drugs.  Perhaps we should add alcohol to the list of illegal drugs, and marijauna with its dual legal/illegal status.  There would be no drug cartels operating in Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere and no lucrative fentanyl supply line starting in China without America's enormous appetite for mind-altering drugs.  We want to believe that it starts with simply a desire for 'recreation' or 'entertainment,' perhaps an illicit thrill, like some sex, but we know it goes deeper than that.  It calls into question our values, our religions, our obscene wealth and income inequallities, the stresses and anxieties of modern American life.   In yesterday's journal, I suggestd that we tolerate much crime and poverty in our cities because it is so concentrated amoung Blacks and Browns.  That is not as true of illicit drug use, but it is nonethless accurate to say that the most powerful, the most successful, the wealthiest and most comfortable of us are not a significant part of the users of heroin, fentanyl, opioids, and methamphetimines.  What we have come to refer to as "deaths of despair" in the United States, i.e., deaths attributable to abuse of alcohol and other drugs, and from suicide, occur mostly to people, increasingly young men, who suffer from a sense of hopelessness, of having no desireable future, or despair.  This, in 'the greatest country in the world, in the history of the world.'   Happy horseshit.

Aging from the inside out.  I participated in the second weekly meeting of this group discussion at the VA.  We lost two participants from last week, "Jay" the Puerto Rican Army vet, and Marvin Pratt.  We gained two new members, Lee, who sat next to me, and J.T., who wore a Jesus hat of some sort.  A. J., Kenyatta, George and I returned.  The racial composition of the group was 4 Black, one White southerner, and me,  It's a friendly group in a welcoming setting, another good experience.