7/23/2026

 Thursday, July 23, 2026

1973 Richard Nixon refused to release Watergate tapes of conversations in the White House relevant to the Watergate investigation

2020 US President Trump said he could send 75,000 federal agents to deal with violence in American cities like Portland, drawing backlash

In bed at 9:10, up at 4:25; 0440 203.2 116/71/64 109; 55/76/55, sunny morning, partly cloudy afternoon

Morning meds at 2 p.m.

A Confederacy of Dunces.  The title of the satire comes from an epigram of Jonathan Swift's: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."  Early in the narrative, Ignatius J. Reilly cites the epigram in reference to himself as the "true genius."  He considers himself as without peers, a savant having a unique and accurate take on all aspects of life and human history.  All the people intellectually and morally inferior to him, which includes everyone else in the world, comprise the confederacy of dunces.   I'm less than halfway through the book this morning, and, recognizing that I've written that I'm struggling to push through it, nonetheless find myself enjoying it more the more I get into it.  

Toole skewers intellectual pretentiousness and 'limousine liberals. He himself had a bachelor's degree from Tulane and a master's from Columbia.  He taught at three different schools, the University of Southwest Louisiana in Lafayette, Hunter College's Bronx campus, and lastly, Dominican College, a small, Catholic girls' school in New Orleans.  He was both liked and admired by his students.  He is reputed to have brought a terrific sense of humor to the classroom.  So he was personally well acquainted with academic culture, including all of its happy horseshit features.  Despite repeated efforts on his part, his novels were never published during his life and, at age 31, he committed suicide by inhaling carbon dioxide from his car's exhaust.  It's unclear to what degree his failure to get published contributed to his suicide.

One wonders to what degree Toole was satirizing himself in the character of Ignatius J. Reilly.  Like Reilly, Toole had a very close and not altogether easy relationship with his mother.  Each of them had both a bachelor's and a master's degree and was widely read in English literature.  Reilly taught for a very short time but was canned.  Toole taught for several years, but wrote no notable academic writings and declined the offer of a three-year doctoral fellowship at the University of Washington.  He apparently considered himself more an author than an academician, and his failure to get Confederacy published surely weighed on him.  On page 116 of the novel, we read this exchange between Ignatius's mother and a friend: "Ain't he thirty years old?" Mother: "My heart's broke." "Ain't he writing something?" Mother: "Some foolishness nobody never gonna feel like reading."  Was he writing about himself?

Ignatius has a near-universally grim view of modern life, especially of the world's failure to recognize what a great, profound thinker he is.  This grim outlook is reported humorously in the book, but one wonders if the humorous depictions of Ignatius's psyche really represented Tool's own mental condition that led to his suicide.

Re 'limousine liberals,' I got a big kick out of re-reading the chapter about Ignatius Reilly's rallying the African American workforce of Levy Pants to rebel against their working conditions.  His condescension and contempt for them while claiming to champion their right to a living wage and better working conditions is priceless.  Ditto his descriptions of his former college classmate and love interest, Myrna Minkoff, crusader for noble causes of all kinds, so long as they were liberal and disruptive of order.  Ignatius looks down his nose at her causes, believing as he does that the world took a wrong turn when it moved away from medievalism and into the Enlightenment.  Ignatius reminds me of a former student of mine (and old friend) Ron Hofer, who used to half-joke that the last great music was composed by Henry Purcell (1859 - 1695) and the last good book was Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).  Perhaps not surprisingly, before coming to law school, Ron had been a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at UVA.  Ignatius Reilly's preferred readings were Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy and Thomas Aquinas.

In any case, many passages in this novel make me laugh out loud.  It is often hysterically funny.

I took the Volvo in for its annual maintenance.  Not surprisingly, the cost was almost $600.  The car is 12 years old, but it runs well, and I expect it to outlive me, so I'm pretty careful about maintaining it.  I declined, however, the recommended coolant flush that would have added more than $200 to the cost and 30 to 40 minutes to the 2 hours I spent waiting for the service to be completed.  

The New Red Scare.  I still remember growing up in the late 1940s and the early and mid-1950s when first the House Un-American Activities Committee, and then Senator Joseph McCarthy, former circuit court judge in Appleton, Wisconsin, and then Robert Welch and his John Birch Society beat the bushes of American organizations and institutions to flush out communists and 'fellow travelers.'  They had Americans believing communists were hiding under every rock and behind every tree, all committed to overthrowing American democracy and subjecting all Americans to "Godless Communism."  Now Trump, desperate to avoid losing power, is raising the Red Scare again, but broadening it by accusing every member of the Democratic Socialists of America (starting with Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani) and Democrats generally of being communists.  He has congressional leadership falling in line behind him, folks like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Republican Whip Steve Scalise, who once famously compared himself favorably to David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK.   (I note that Johnson is a devout, practicing Southern Baptist and Scalise is a devout, practicing Roman Catholic.  Consider that for what it's worth.) Communism is, to the president, the single greatest threat to the safety, prosperity, and integrity of the United States.  How many of our neighbors will fall for this happy horseshit?  Lots.   

7/22/2026

 Wednesday, July 22, 2026

1946 Militant Zionist organization Irgun bombed the British headquarters for Palestine in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people and injuring 46

1991 Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to killing 17 men in 1978

2025  Trump announced a trade deal with Japan that would let Japan invest $550 billion into the United States and reduce the tariffs to 15%

2025 Trump announced a trade agreement with the Philippines that set a 19% tariff on Philippine exports to the United States, while U.S. goods entering the Philippines would be exempt from tariffs. 

In bed at 9:15, up at 6:05; 0615 203.0  122/72/61. 118. 203.0; 58/71/56, sunny morning, then partly cloudy.  

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m.    

I've come to a sad realization, an understanding that the reason I am not enjoying reading A Confederay of Dunces is that I see myself in the shlubby protaganist, Ignatius J. Reilly.  I'm quite confident that when I read it back in the 1980s,  I never identified myself with Reilly.  Now, however, I do, especially in his habit of writing down and saving his thoughts, his personal judgments, about the world, and Life, Modern Culture, and Other Human Beings.  Reilly is  a supreme marsicssist, with opinions about everything and everybody.  He is the center of his universe.  He thinks his opinions, his judgments, his analyses, are important enough to record and save.  In this regard,and othes, he is pathetic and delusional, but how am I different?  In one week, I will have completeda 4 years, almost 1500 days, of  daily journaling, but to what end?  I have often written little essays about why I engage in this effort and usually end up wondering whether it is not simply a futile effort to avoid death?  To have something of me to survive my corpse's becoming part of the composted soil in Fortest Home Cemetery's 'green burial' prairie?  This, even though I've long recognized that the few thousand pages of the journal that I've taken pains to print and save in looseleaf binders will all end up in an incinerator or landfill once I'm gone, along with my drawings and paintings, and other evidence of my existence. Vanitas, vanitatem, et omnia vanitas.  How am I different from Donald J. Trump vainly and foolishly trying to leave his imprint all over Washington, D.C., to survive his time in the White House, or Ignatius J. Reilly?

7/21/2026

 Tuesday, July 21, 2026

1925 John T. Scopes found guilty of teaching evolution in the “Scopes monkey trial”

1930 US Veterans Administration formed

1940 Soviet Union annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania

1954 Geneva Accords for Indochina divided French colonial territories into the countries of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

2024 Joe Biden dropped out of presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris

2025 The Venezuelan attorney general's office opened a formal investigation into Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele and his government's alleged mistreatment of Venezuelan migrants detained in the United States and sent to the CECOT megaprison, built to hold alleged gang members. 

In bed at 9:30, up at 4:05; 0420 119/67/65 117 203.6;70/80/61, mostly sunny, Beach hazards warnings - waves 4 to 9 feet, dangerous currents  

Morning meds at 9 a.m.

A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole.  I read this farcical novel many decades ago, shortly after it was published, or perhaps after it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.  I enjoyed it very much on that first read, but I'm finding it a bit hard to plow through on this read.  It's a great satire of guys who spend many years in higher education, accumulate more than one degree, and are useless.  The 'hero' is Ignatius J. Reilly, a morbidly obese, flatulent, eructatious, gluttinous slug who, at age 30, lives with his mother in her home in New Orleans.  He spent 8 years at a university earning a bachelor's and a master's degree and has held a paying job for only 2 weeks.  "You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”  He is forced to seek work when his mother damaged a French Quarter balcony, the owner of which threatens to sue her.   Gainful employment, he laments, will interfere with his life's calling, which is writing a magnum opus criticizing all of modern life and culture, indeed criticizing every development in the world since the collapse of the medieval world.  "Employers sense in me a denial of their values...They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe."  That's where I am so far in the novel.  Alas, I keep falling asleep while reading it..

Watering duties.  I watered the potted plants on the patio (and the hydrangeas) and the impatiens on the front stoop plus the several tufts of new grass where the two spruce trees once were.  

I spent the day feeling like crap again, half dead and approaching full.

7/20/2026

 Monday, July 20, 2026

1961 "Stop The World - I Want To Get Off" premiered

1969 Apollo 11 lunar module carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin lands on the surface of the Moon.

1988 Michael Dukakis was selected as the Democratic nominee

In bed at 8:45, up at 5:55, then fell back to sleep after taking 'vitals' until 7:50; 0615 120/73/63 105 202.8; 69/85/60. cloudy,, AQI = 130 Unhealthy for sensitive groups,

Morning meds at ? a.m.    

Geri left for a week's visit in Urbana, IL, with her college buddy and near-lifelong friend, Kate Donovan.  Kate was widowed a few years ago when her husband, Mike, a physician, died.  Within the last year or so, she has had a issues with her heart, and recently had some sort of medical procedure on it (not an ablation.). With Geri gone all day, I've been pretty listless and brain-fogged, uninterested in writing anything until now, which is 8:15 p.m.  I find myself questioning again whether my journaling days are coming to an end.  I hope the answer is 'no,' because I fear that when I stop filling a part of my day with writing something, anything requiring some focussed thought, it will signal the end of any significant mental functioning and my descent into some form of senility.  I may be there already, semi-vegetating, sitting quietly, just trying to avoid pain and discomfort, not thinking of anything, nor meditating, just looking out the window at the birds and the passers-by outside.  I still check the headlines each morning in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and often the Washington Post, but I read very few of the stories under the headlines.  I avoid burdening my heart and brain with more and more news of the depredations, sins, lawlessness, and corruptions of Trump and his cabal of fellow crooks in his cabinet.  What's the point, I wonder.  I check the daily editorials and op-eds, but read only a few.  Ditto the articles in the online editions of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harper's.  Yesterday I gave up on reading Middlemarch, finding the 19th century literary prose of George Eliot, and the focus on the British gentry's social mores concerning "proper" and "right" marriage partners more than this second-generation descendent of Irish peasants can tolerate.  Now I'm in a quardary over what to read next, wanting to find a good story (I'm like a child: 'Tell me a story!') but thinking I'm in a bit of a rut with Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett.  I suspect that my disinterest in reading news stories may come from the same source as my lagging interest in writing in this journal, i.e. a diminishing interest in the world, in life.

7/19/2026

 Sunday, July 19, 2026

1692 5 more people were hanged for witchcraft (19 in all) in Salem, Massachusetts

1848 First US women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, NY, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott

1984 Geraldine Ferraro became the 1st US female major-party vice-presidential nominee, officially joining Walter Mondale's Democratic Party ticket

In bed at 10, up at 5:15;  0530111/70/66 117 202.8, 0541 112/57/68;  64/77/64 mostly sunny, Beach hazards warnings, AQI =175 Unhealthy.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  

Dinner last night with the Lowes at the Goldbergs

Life in a wildlife sanctuary.  While waiting for my coffee water to heat up, I saw out the window over our kitchen sink a passel of wild turkeys, 7 hens and 19 chicks, strutting across our side lawn, from east to west.  They reappeared later in the morning in our backyard.

Out of sorts again today.  Little thinking, no writing.  I started reading George Eliot's  Middlemarch yesterday but gave up today after 50 pages.  The Victorian writing style, the focus on 19th-century social customs among English propertied people and how it affected marriage choices by men and women - I just can't get into it.  The novel is almost 800 pages long and I don't want to force myself to read it.  I'm kicking myself for not getting a library copy of the book to check it out before wasting money on the Kindle version.  Not smart.

m

7/18/2026

 Saturday, July 17, 2026

1870 Pius IX and the First Vatican Council proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility

2024 I renewed my driver's license until 2032😱

2025  The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in a statement published by IRNA, reported that two oil tankers have exploded after hitting mines south in the Strait of Hormuz.

In bed at 9:15, up at 4; 0425/72/63  108,   202.8, 0435 113/65/62; 77/83/68, cloudy; Beach hazards warning, waves 3-5 ft, dangerous currents

Morning meds at 10 a.m.     

Today is the anniversary of the dogma of papal infallibility, proclaimed by the First Vatican Council in 1870.  I grew up with the dogma and with photographs of the dour Pope Pius XII on the walls of seemingly every Catholic classroom, rectory, convent, and diocesan office.  I relate a humorous story about the dogma (to me, at least) in a moment, but first I note that perhaps what has been most persistent about this dogma has been the words in opposition to it penned by the British Lord Acton, one of the rare Catholic peers in the UK, in a letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton:

       "I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. "    

My humorous (to me) story:  My friend Katie McManus, another born-and-raised Irish Catholic, told me this tale.  She was at a party with other Catholics, and somehow the dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven came up.  One of the friends said it was unbelievable.  Another pointed out that it was a dogma and belief was required of Church members, to which the sceptic replied: "Well, I may have to believe it, but I don't have to think about it."

Today I remember Katie and her sceptical friend but mostly I remember Lord Acton's "Great men are almost always bad men . . . .."  Was he too cynical, or a realist? 

For many of 'the Faithful,' especially children, Catholic priests are men with authority, indeed absolute authority.  They are men with the power to miraculously convert bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Jesus.  Indeed, they are surrogates of Jesus Himself at the Last Supper in the Consecration during the sacrifice of the Mass.  The Church can't stop trying to sanctify its human clergy.  As Pope Pius X wrote in his 1906 encyclical Vehementer Nos:

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

The most docile in flocks are the lambs, the children.  Until the Church abandons its theology and ecclesiology of the priesthood, children and others will continue to be sexually abused by Catholic priests. The Church's existential problem is that it can't recast its sacerdotal doctrines without destroying itself.  Despite the Vatican II romanticism about "the Church" being "the people of God," in real life, what separates "the Church" from all other forms of Christianity and indeed from all other religions is the priesthood and the hierarchy.  Take away the special divinely-appointed status of the priests, bishops, and popes, and what is left of "the Church" with a capital C?  The popes and bishops all know this; they are the Church, and they need to keep it that way or go out of business.  The role of the folks in the pews is simply to pray, pay, and obey.

Unsettling day.  I've been unsettled all morning, slightly anxious with no apparent cause, unsettled, queasy stomach, etc.  Very unpleasant feelings.

7/17/2026

 Friday, July 17, 2026

1917 Royal Proclamation by King George V changed the name of British Royal family from German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor

1959 Paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered the partial skull of a new species of early human ancestor now called Paranthropus boisei, which lived in Africa almost 2 million years ago

1962 The Senate rejected Medicare for aged Americans

2025 The British government announced it would lower the voting age to 16, allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in the upcoming general election

In bed at 9:15, on La-Z Boy from 9:35 till 10 (low glucose alarm), up at 5; 0515 203.0 136/83/63 108, 0525 114/77/62?!?

Morning meds at 9:10 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 9 a.m.

Trump's election security speech last night.  Old lies were repeated, with claims of non-existent proof, evidence, facts.  He is setting the stage for massive interference in and subversion of the November election and the 2026 election.  He had powerful members of his cabinet in the room as he delivered the lies, and they gave him a standing ovation at its conclusion.  His administration is a den of thieves, a cabal of criminals, a confederation of anti-democratic conspirators.  My country is in deeper shit than it has ever been in my lifetime.  Stand back and stand by.  

Tell Me Everything.  I finished this novel at midday today.  As is so often the case, I am not quite sure what I think about it.   A novel is just a long story, and Elizabeth Strout tells a good story, and this one was surely a good story.  I was already pretty familiar with Lucy Barton and with her first husband William from reading Strout's 4 previous novels about her, but I was not familiar with Bob Burgess or Olive Kitteredge, not having read her earlier novels about them.  I'm now inclined to go back and read those earlier novels to learn more about what made them the way they were.  We did watch the HBO Max 4 part series based on Olive Kitteredge, but it left me scratching my head about what made her tick.  There is no way a movie or TV series can get inside a character's heart and soul the way a good novel can, and Elizabeth Strout excels precisely at getting inside her characters' characters, what makes them tick.

Tell Me Everything is more about Bob Burgess than any other character.  He is a lawyer, indeed a criminal defense attorney, as is his brother Jim.  He is a good man, a mensch, and much of the tension in the story arises from his never-realized desire to have an affair with Lucy.  He has been married to his second wife, Margaret, a Unitarian minister, for 15 years, but he has a serious crush on Lucy.  Bob is a compassionate guy, as is his creator, Ms. Strout.  So are Lucy and Margaret. There are no pure villains in her stories; even the bad guys have reasons for their badness.   A telling scene in the novel is when Bob chews out his nephew, Larry, for treating his father, Jim Burgess, as an evil person.   He instructs the nephew that his father is not evil, but rather a broken person, and that we are all broken.  

“These are broken people. Big difference between being a broken person and being evil. In case you don’t know. And if you don’t think everyone is broken in some way, you’re wrong. I’m telling you this because you have been so fortunate in your life, you probably don’t even know such broken people exist.”This is a central point in Strout's novels.  That, and that we never really understand each other.

This is a central point in all of Strout's novels that I have read.  This, and the fact that we can never really understand and communicate with each other. 

“Lucy said, looking at him now, “My point is that every person on this earth is so complicated. Bob, we’re also complicated, and we match up for a moment—or maybe a lifetime—with somebody because we feel that we are connected to them. And we are. But we’re not in a certain way because nobody can go into the crevices of another’s mind, even the person can’t go into the crevices of their own mind, and we live— all of us— as though we can.”

She writes that we are all lonely people, yearning for real connection, communication, understanding one another and being understood, but never quite making it, even with those to whom we are closest.

Her stories also always subliminally raise the question of to what degree our actions are the result of free will.

 “We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they may not be completely so. We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.”

I enjoy her writing and her focus on questions of free will & determinism, how difficult or impossible it is to really know one another or even ourselves in some ways, and loneliness as a part of the human condition.  Although I'm glad I read the book, I thought it was not as well-written as the other 5 books of hers that I've read this year.  It seemed kind of forced or contrived, especially the conversations between Lucy and Olive and even the weekly walks taken by Lucy and Bob.