0829

August 29, 2022

In bed around 10:20(?), awake at 4:45, up at 5, 3 pss, 2 glasses of red. Day 9 of waking up with pain in the middle of my back, right side.

    Finished reading the long feature piece on Samuel Alito in the 9/5 edition of the New Yorker.  I have this impression that I have some understanding of his personality.  Most of his life a soft-spoken, unobtrusive, deeply conservative, traditionalist living in a rapidly changing world that eschewed his religious, political, and social values and considers him something of a kook, an oddball, a smart but harmless reactionary. tolerated but not really respected or powerful.  Then the world changes when he finds himself with status and power, and in Alito's case, semi-permanent status and power by virtue of his lifetime appointment and the 6-3 supermajority on the Court.  The anger and resentment he has harbored much of his adult life comes out in his judicial opinions, contemptuous of opposing views, nasty and almost sneering.  His attitude was especially evident in the Dobbs decision since the Supreme Court justices onto whom he heaped scorn, indeed vitriol, because of their decisions in Roe and Casey were mostly 'fellow' Republican appointees.  He writes of them as if they were at best dim-witted and at worst knowingly unprincipled.  His majority opinion had what Norm Crosby might have described as 'a reek of getting even'  with all those jurists and others who declined to accept his intellectual, religious, political, and social values and superiority.

    I baited and placed the mouse traps in the basement this morning, but I found one of the 2 mice I saw yesterday dying next to my big easel.  I tried to load him into a box to bring him outside and release him but he seemed to die right in front of me - on his feet one moment, on his side the next.  I hate trapping mice.  I'm not into killing animals (or humans) though I make exceptions for insects in the house. Geri thinks I need to 'get real' when it comes to rodents in the house and I suppose she's right but it does kind of sicken me.  Robert Burns:

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

          Wi’ bickerin brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee

          Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

. . . . . 

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

          Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

          For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,

          On prospects drear!

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,

          I guess an’ fear!

. . . . . 

    Geri and I have both gotten hooked on the AppleTV+ series The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Mark Duplass, Billy Crudup, and Steve Carell.  Terrific acting, often powerful, especially by Jennifer Aniston.  Three dimensional characters. The story line is unabashedly based on the Today Show scandal involving Matt Lauer.

    Tried to work on an ersatz Alexander Calder painting this afternoon.  MUCH more difficult than I had anticipated.  May end up giving up on this endeavor.