1025

 Tuesday, October 25, 2022

In bed by 10, up at 4, 4 pss, 2 glasses of red,  unable to sleep, my left hand with a lot of pain, started yesterday, no idea the cause of the pain, but it's pretty bad.  Doesn't seem to be arthritis, centered in knuckles but rather muscle pain or maybe tendonitis? Problematic for a left-hander.

Dirty Bomb, Dirty War

Putin and Shoigu spread the word that Ukraine is planning to detonate a 'dirty bomb' and blame the Russians.  This seems unmistakably a cover for the Russians to do in fact what they accuse the Ukrainians of planning.  At the same time they are making this accusation, they are withdrawing (retreating) their military from Kherson, the west side of the Dnieper River and evacuating people into Russian-held territory.  Kherson is a city of more than 250,000 people, a shipbuilding center on the Dnieper River leading to the Black Sea.  Before the Holocaust, it was home to many Yiddish-speaking Jews (30%.  I fear that the Russians will detonate a 'dirty bomb' and make the city uninhabitable for the Ukrainians, a form of scorched earth strategy.  Carthago delenda est.  If Putin's Mother Russia can't have it, Putin's Mother Russia will destroy it, make it into another Chernobyl.  The downside of course is that Russia would lose the city too as a valuable Black Sea port and terminal for traffic on the Dnieper.  How could NATO respond?  How can this war end?  How much of Ukraine will Putin and the Russians make uninhabitable rather than accept defeat?  If President Zalensky is to be believed, the Russians have already packed the dam 40 miles upriver from Kherson with explosives which, if detonated, would release a tsunami on the land and inhabitants downriver.  How dirty must the war get to satisfy Putin's and the Russians' bloodthirst?

Dead Heats

The U. S. Senate races in Ohio (J.D. Vance v. Tim Ryan), Pennsylvania (Mehmet Oz v. John Fetterman), Nevada (Catherine Cortez Masto and Adam Laxalt), and Wisconsin (Ron Johnson v. Mandela Barnes) are in a dead heat 2 weeks before the election. The races in New Hampshire and North Carolina are also very close and could go either way.  The pessimist in me, or the realist, sees most of these races breaking for the Republicans down the stretch and the Republicans regaining control of the Senate and the House next January.  Crime (a dog whistle for race), inflation (especially gas and food, and housing prices) will trump (pun intended) abortion, strong employment, and legislative accomplishments.  I can't help thinking that we have crossed the tipping point and the country has moved from a center-right/center-left polity towards right-wing authoritarianism a/k/a some variant of fascism.  As I said 100 times to Kitty, I hope I'm wrong.

Circadian Rhythms

Donald Hall, Notes Nearing Ninety, 'Way Way Up, Way Way Down.'  "The next morning I felt wretched, as I did the next and the next, from late September all the way into February.  All day every day I felt down, down, down - exhausted until circadian rhythms took over at suppertime.  I felt almost human until 9 p.m. and bed.  I slumped into sleep.  I woke feeling weak, even moribund.  Was I about to die?  I was a mere 86. . . Now when I had done 4 or 5 letters or emails, 5 or 6 to go, fatigue began to hollow me out.  I was not merely tired, much less sleepy.  I felt a blackness drag from my toes through my trunk into the follicles of my hair. . ."  

I thumbed through much of a small book I read a few years ago, a collection of letters that the poet Hayden Carruth wrote to a fellow poet (and wife of Donal Hall) Jane Kenyon during her final illness.  I recall one letter in which he described his decrepitude at age 73, reminding me of course of myself.  I can't find the letter (or maybe I'm misremembering, another malady of the 80s.)  I did come across "Another crisis of aging -  the loss of very perceptible chucks of my mind, and just as painful as the head and back, damn it." And this:  "Already almost a week of the new year is gone.  It's hard for me to assimilate, the passage of time now in old age.  I live in the midst of confusion, so that time doesn't go fast, as it used to when I was on top of my life, it nearly doesn't exist, everything is the same from one day to the next, and I can't remember in the evening what I did in the morning.  I sit like a frog on a lily pad in the midst of the flow.  Well, not exactly."  For Geri and me both, time goes by at meteoric speed.  We now laughingly refer to receiving our 'daily' New Yorker weekly magazine.  As for sensing the passage of time, or having some sense of it, I seem to get it only when I'm working on a painting, or from looking at various paintings and drawings I've done over many years.  They are a reminder of time spent in days past, creating paintings and drawings years ago some decades ago.

Lost Day

Too little sleep, too much pain, discomfort, too much pity party, too little gratitude.  If I were sharing a morning exchange with Kitty, she would remonstrate with me: SNAP OUT OF IT.