9/25/23

aakeTjos Monday, September 25, 2023

3 months till Christmas madness😩

In bed by 10:30, after S2 E15 of This is Us, awake at 4:52 and up at 5:09, with nasty back pain.  65°, mostly cloudy, high of 70°, 40% chance of rain 0.1", AQI=40, wind SE at 10 mph,  6-13/22, DPs 59-62.  Sunrise at 6:42 at 90°E, sunset at6:44 at 269°W, 12+1.

The view as I return to the house after putting the garbage cart out for Monday's pickup.  Look at that moon - incredibly bright and blue, looking like a cold sun illuminating the sky arund it.  Perversely, it reminded me of a 1957 song by Teresa Brewer 'Dark Moon'.  She was a huge pop music star in the 1950s, very pretty, very perky, and I had a tremendous crush on her.  She had many big hit records, including Music, Music, Music (Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon), Richochet Romance, Till I Waltz Again With You, and Let Me Go, Lover.  I knew the words to all of them and remember many of them still.  Funny what an old guy thinks about coming bacf from taking out the garbage.

Dora Carrington. with easel, canvas, and palette.  I came across a photograph of Carrington, as she preferred to be called, serendipitously while doing some random reading about the Bloomsbury Group.   I thought she was gorgeous especially with that magnificent bobbed hair and especially as she was engaged in the act of plein air painting in her smeared smock so I'm going to see if I can do anything pleasing on my own canvas from this photo. (Quite a run-on compound-complex sentence😨) It may have too many elements for me to be able to pull it off but I'll try.  I looked her up on Wikipedia and was surprised to read that she was not considered beautiful by her contemporaries.  She was 'queer' and in an 'open marriage' with her husband, but the one true love of her life, a platonic relationship of soulmates, was Lytton Strachey, the gay Bloomsbury member famous for writing Famous Victorians.  Strachey died of stomach cancer in 1932 and Carrington committed suiciede by gunshot a couple months later at age 39.  She didn't sign or date her paintings.  She didn't paint them to sell to others, but rather to please herself.

Rough sketch with blue chalk, working off center point grid

Phase 2

Being There is the title of David French's op-ed essay in this morning's NYT.  French is not the kind of writer or thinker I tend to gravitate toward.  He is a conservative Christian in the evangelical Church of Christ, which believes in the Bible as the guide to proper living and baptism as necessary for salvation.  He graduated from and teaches at Lipscomb University in Nashville, a 'Christ-centered', Church of Christ institution.  He also graduated from Harvard Law School, cum laude, is a respected lawyer, and has served as senior counsel for conservative Christian legal advocacy groups supported by the likes of Amy Coney Barrett, Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Josh Hawley.  He is a very bright guy and a serious thinker, which is how he became a regular columnist at the NYT. 

     His piece in this morning's edition is about friendship and loneliness.  He wrote:

Last week I read a poignant piece arguing that the male loneliness epidemic was afflicting a surprising group: American fathers. In one sense, these were men who were surrounded by love. They were typically married. They had children. Yet they still felt alone. They struggled to make friends.

The longer we march through these anxious, sad and divided times, the more I’m convinced that the bigger story, the story behind the story of our bitter divisions and furious conflicts, is our loss of belonging, our escalating loneliness. And one of the markers is the extraordinary decline of friendship.

According to an American Perspectives Survey, between 1990 and 2021, the percentage of Americans reporting that they had no close friends at all quadrupled. For men, the number had risen to 15 percent. Almost half of all Americans surveyed reported having three close friends or fewer.

His essay strikes home with me.  In my senectitude I find myself often regretting the friendships that I let lapse.  Larry Stack, Ara Cherchian, Vicki Conte, Troy Major, my nun friend at St. Francis who helped me care for Roland Wright and whose name I can't even recall, Bob Hillary, Ron Kendall, Andy Furlong, nd others.  All of them were people who had enriched my life, made my life better,   I admired all of them and shared affection and appreciation with them but I let our relatinships get away for various reasons but mostly because of my own tendency toward withdrawal, or my 'aloofness' as Ed Felsenthal and Cam Wakeman informed me.  And now in old age I have regret.  I looked up synonums for "regret' and found remorse, guilt, shame, sorrow, sadness, self-reproach, and other dire words, all of which accurately reflect my feelings about how foolishly I let friendships slip away.  Those thoughts and feelings haunt me in my vulnerable, crepuscular times, before falling asleep and in the half-awake, half-dreaming waking hours.  French quotes C. S. Lewis: 

 “Friendship is unnecessary,” he wrote, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

Amen. 

The Navy Bean Soup I made on Saturday has turned out to be not as bad as I feared.  It has thickened up after two days in the garage refrigerator and tastes like real navy bean soup cooked with a generous ham bone.  I let the beans get overcooked and mushy but the taste is good and I'm enjoying it as a brunch today.

Nasty sharp shooting pain day, lower and mid-back.