8/23/23

 Wednesday, August 23, 2023

The last day of my 82nd year of life, the son and first-born of married, teen-aged parents who were born during the Roaring 20s and grew up during the Great Depression living in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago's South side, he the descendent of Iowa agrarians, she the daughter of poor Irish immigrants, both raised in the bosom of their Church which forbade them to embrace each other's bodies without the benefit of the God-gifted and priest-officiated Sacrament of Holy Matrimony of which they partook at Englewood's St. Bernard's Church on August 3, 1940, and after which they manage to forestall pro-creating (along with God the Creator) me until August 24, 1941, the anniversary of which I will note tomorrow with gratitude to those teen-aged parents who, thanks be to God, had no idea what Life had in store for him, for her, or for their children.  Quia tu es, Deus, fortitudo mea: quare me repulisti? et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus?

In bed at 11, awake at 5:30, moved to brr, up at 5:50, let Lilly out twice. 74°, high of 96°😓, Excessive Heat Warning today and tomorrow, AQI=67, Canadian particulates. The wind is SW at 9 mph, 4-13/23.  DPs 67 to 76😰.  Sunrise at 6:06, sunset at 7:42, 13+36.

Sinead's Rememberings.  I finished the book today.  Some thoughts: (1) I was very surprised to learn that she spent some time at the VA hospital in Chicago as a volunteer in the 'No Vet Dies Alone' program, a program our friend Rita Burns also serves in Topeka.  (2)  In one chapter she refers to herself as a piece of shit' or something similar and in another she refers to her "sins which are ugly and legion",  which made me wonder about self-loathing and, if this were true of her, how it related to her demand that she be permitted to be herself, difficult, off-putting, and self-defeating as that so often was. "I cause a lot of upset on this earth.  Being the kind of person I am."  (3) I don't know what the standards are, if any, for judging whether a memoir is well done, but I think that Rememberings is not very well done.  It seems as - I'm looking for an accurate adjective - as her life was, messed up, disjointed, nonlinear, dis-integrated.  The second half of the memoir is basically a series of anecdotes about, e.g. Muhammed Ali, Lou Reed, her children, et al., although it contains a harrowing description of her time in a 'trauma treatment' facility on Dr. Phil's dime.  Indeed her description of her 'breakdown' is harrowing. (4)  Overall, I am sorry I read the book.  I feel kind of dirty, like a Peeping Tom.  I can't believe she was well when she wrote the book, at least the second half of it which she wrote post-breakdown.  At one point I thought to myself that she is simply a flake, flakey, but I suspect she really was sick, unwell.  And of course I wonder how it was that she died recently at age 54.  And I wonder what led to her son Shane's suicide at age 17.

Headline in this morning's NYT: It Is No Longer Possible to Escape What We Have Done to Ourselves by Serge Schmemann.  It's an op-ed piece about climate change and the massive Canadian wildfires but I'm thinking that headline could as readily refer to urban gun violence, political polarization, income and wealth inequality,  persistent systemic racism, bipartisan distrust of and disgust at our government, and what else? 

LTMW at a large black moth or smallish butterfly hanging onto the sunflower seed feeder.  It seems suicidal to me, i.e., that the moth would make a nice meal for the right-sized bird.