1/16/23

 Monday, January 16, 2023

In bed at 9, awake at 3:30, half-slept till 4:30, and up at 4:45. PP a problem during the night. Minnow thoughts darting through my brain: Venmo, ApplePay, credit cards, ABBA's The Winner Takes It All, etc. 😖 36 degrees outside, high of41, drizzly, winds SSE at 14 mph, 9 to 17 mph expected, gusts to 30 mph.

Perineal Pain was a problem during the night and continues this morning.  I'm not expecting fast results from the amitriptyline I'm taking and I'm not experiencing them either.  The prescription calls for a slow start, one 25 mg. tab at bedtime for 1 week, then 2 a night for another week, and finally 3 a night in the third week.  75 mg. is the normal dose for outpatients and perhaps during or after the third week, I'll get some relief.  I note too that I can't stop taking these pills at will, but have to be weaned off them to avoid some nasty side effects from cessation.  The sedative effect of this med seems to be decreasing a little bit and perhaps also the dizziness. All the sources found in Wikipedia tell me no alcohol while on this med since alcohol compounds the sedative and dizziness problems.  I suppose that's good news but I do miss my shot of cognac before bedtime.

Martin Luther King- Robert E. Lee Day.  That's what this day is known as in Mississippi and Alabama.  Until rather recently it was also celebrated this way in Arkansas and Virginia.  Words fail me.

Democracy in America is the title of Alexis de Tocqueville's famous treatise published in 1831 in which he described and praised American democracy,  He used the term 'democracy' variously to refer to (1) representative government, (2) universal suffrage (except of course for married women and slaves), and (3) majority rule. Each of those 3 concepts contains within itself room for a lot of variances, but my attention is focused on that notion of "majority rule" since we are currently in a condition of minority rule, specifically by Republican reactionaries.  Margaret Renkel is a guest columnist for the NYT whose essays appear on Mondays.  Today's offering is titled "This Is How Red States Silence Blue Cities. And Democracy."  In it, she describes how the Republican legislature and Republican governor of Tennessee gerrymandered Nashville, her hometown,  from one congressional district that reliably voted Democratic into 3 congressional districts that reliably vote Republican.  They did it simply enough by carving the city's urban population into 3 sectors and joining each sector with non-urban nearby areas.  Like Madison, Wisconsin, Nashville is not only the state capital but also home to Vanderbilt University, Belmont University (of which Amy Coney Barrett is an alumna), Fisk University (of which, W. E.B. DuBois, Nikki Giovanni, John Lewis, and Ida B. Wells are alums), and Lipscomb University so it is not surprising that, with a great many college graduates, it tends to vote Democratic.  Joe Biden won Nashville with almost 65% of the vote.  "But thanks to a brutally gerrymandered election map, we didn’t send a moderate Democrat, one who could reasonably represent the interests of both Nashville liberals and Nashville conservatives, to Washington this year. Instead, the newly mutilated Nashville is represented by three of the most militant right-wingers the state has ever elected." according to Ms. Renkel.  Because of gerrymandering and the constitutional structure of our federal government, democracy has become a joke in our country.  Our state of Wisconsin is a prime example.