8/19/23

 Saturday, August 19, 2023

Kitty's birthday

In bed around 10, moved to BRR at 2, up at 2:35.  70°, high of 81°, sunny day ahead, AQI=70, wind SSW at 8 mph, 6-14/22.  DPs 55 to 67.  Sunrise at 6:01, sunset at 7:48, 13+47.  

My FB post on August 19, 2021. on my last visit with Kitty:  On this date in 1944, in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, a beautiful and courageous and saintly 21-year-old mother, who was one of God’s gifts to this world,  gave birth to a daughter who was destined to become an image of her mother, beautiful, courageous, and saintly, another of God’s gifts to the world.  When Mother Mary brought the precious daughter home to her little basement apartment, her waiting brother, about to turn 3 years old, is reported to have said “Take her back.  She doesn’t play.”  That was just the first of many mistakes that their almost 3 year old brother would make in his life, but he learned soon enough that that new sister of his, would become throughout their 2 long lifetimes, his best friend, his confidante, his soul-sister as well as his biological sister.  He would come to love and admire her as she grew into a woman like their mother: beautiful in so many ways, courageous in so many ways, and saintly in so many ways.  As they grew older and older, with lifetimes of living behind them, the brother would share his belief in the saintliness of his sister with their father, who would chuckle because he sometimes saw her when she was impatient, or ‘bossy’, or angry at one thing or another, and the now-old brother would suggest to the even older father that he just didn’t know what real saints looked like.  The saintly sister herself would join in dismissing the idea that she was St. Kitty of Emerald Avenue and the brother would have to remind her and their father that real saints aren’t God and they are not angels - they are all human beings who get impatient, ‘bossy’, and even angry at times.  What makes them saints was described by Jesus in Chapter 25 of the Gospel of St. Matthew:  I was hungry and you gave me food.  I was thirsty and you gave me water.  I was sick and you cared for me.  I needed a home and you took you into your home.  So of course the brother, who had made many mistakes in his own life over many years, was not mistaken in describing his sister, whom he loved so much, as a Saint.  Nor is he mistaken in thanking God for giving him the blessing of his beautiful, courageous, and saintly sister, so very much like their dear mother.🙏❤️

At 3:50 a.m., Lilly decides it is an excellent time to be outside in the dark, at her post, lying on the grass and enjoying the night air.  I lure her back into the house offering a treat.  At 7:00, she's out again.

Reading Sinead O'Connor's memoir Rememberings.  It's style is pretty unique, just like the author.  I'm only at page 40 but I think I will see it through till its conclusion.  I'm surprised at the level of stealing she engaged in, a major reason she ended up in the girl's reformatory, old Magdeleine Laundry.  She shames me a bit by her having caught on so quickly to the Irish Catholic Church's BS, mind control propaganda, oppression of women and children and so on.  I've also watched several recorded interviews of her and am struck by her apparent candor and absence of guile.  I never see her stopping to think through an answer before responding to a question.

A poetic FB post on January 8. 2022.

As I sit on my recliner

Eating my corned beef hash and eggs, 

Wearing my favorite nightshirt,

The James Webb Telescope,

Son of Hubble,

Courses through space, 

0.2489 miles per second, 

663,760 miles from Earth,  increasing,

224,882 miles from the orbital destination, decreasing,

Waiting to deploy its starboard primary mirror.

I forget for a time

The State of the Union.

3 a.m. on Kitty's birthday, reading poems by Hayden Carruth and drinking day-old 50/50 coffee, listening to Beethoven String Quartet #14 in C.

February Morning, Hayden Carruth

The old man takes a nap / too soon in the morning / His coffee cup grows cold.

Outside the snow falls fast. / He'll not go out today. / Others must clear the way / to the car and the shed. / Open upon his lap / lie the poems of Mr. Frost.

Somehow his eyes get lost / in the words and the snow, / Somehow they go

Backward against the words, / upward among the flakes / to the great silence of air.

The blank abundance there. / Should he take warning? / Mr. Frost went off, they say,

In bitterness and despair. / The old man stirs and wakes, / hearing the hungry birds,

Nuthatch, sparrow, and jay, / clamor outside, unfed, / and words stir from his past

Like this agitated sorrow / of jay, nuthatch, and sparrow, / classical wrath which takes

No shape in a song. / He climbs the stairs to bed. / The snow falls all day long.

Dead Pulp, Hayden Carruth

After a lifetime of self-loathing, finally / this.  For days he wears only his ragged /

undershorts which ought to be against the law. / What was strong once, and reasonably

good-looking has gone to sag and shrivel / and adiposity in the sweltering heat.

The big trucks grind sluggishly up the hill / carrying dead pulp to the paper mill.

Joe Biden: Liar, confabulator, or B.S. artist?  When Biden visited Milwaukee last Tuesday, he was caught telling 4 falsehoods in his one speech.  He claimed he had significantly reduced the national debt, whereas that debt has significantly increased during his administration.   He claimed to have had a conversation with his favorite Amtrak conductor at a time when the conductor was long dead, among other inaccuracies.  He claimed that his paternal grandfather had died in the same hospital in Scranton where Joe Biden was born 6 days later, whereas the grandfather died in Baltimore more than a year before Joe's birth.  He claimed that he personally witnessed a famous bridge collapse in Pittsburgh on January 28, 2022, whereas the bridge collapsed more than 6 hours before Biden arrived in Pittsburgh.  Biden has uttered these misrepresentations before and has always been corrected in press reports.  Biden has a long history of speaking falsehoods, often ones that enhance his standing like the video of him claiming that he went to law school on a full scholarship (false) and graduated in the top half of his class (false) and that he graduated with 3 degrees from undergraduate school (false) and was the top student in the political science department (false).  In law school, Biden "borrowed" an entire 5 pages of a published law review article without attribution and had to beg not to be expelled.  When he was Obama's VP, Biden told a story about a visit to Afghanistan to honor a heroic naval officer. Biden described the officer’s actions in detail, adding, “This is God’s truth, my word as a Biden.” But according to a review in the Washington Post, no such incident occurred.  The list of patent falsehoods over many years goes on and on and raises the question: what are we to think of the essential honesty of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.?  At best, he is a confabulator (unlikely), and at worst just another BS artist politician which is to say, a liar.

But I shouldn't conflate the two, the bullshitter and the liar.  In Harry Frankfurt's famous essay On Bullshit, he writes: 

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.  Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.  A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.  When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.  The bullshittter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.  His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.  He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly.  He just picks them out or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

So, with JB, we can take our pick: liar, confabulator, or bullshitter.  In any case, his word can't be trusted.