11/15/23

 Wednesday, November 15, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 5:45, let Lilly out, 46°, clear, high of 59°, wind SW at 13 mph, 3-14/25,  Sunrise at 6:44, sunset at 4:27, 9+43.

Treadmill; pain.  I'm having CPP this morning, worrisome.  I took an Advil, keeping my fingers crossed. . . .  Pain still here at 10 a.m., called the VA Urology Clinic to see about moving up my 1/25/24 appointment since this pain seems to be more testicular than pelvic floor.  Got on the treadmill at 11 a.m.   25:00  and 0.60 while watching Dana Bash on CNN.

Thinking about my 'stick' collection.  I have 4 canes and one walking stick.  The walking stick I personally crafted many years ago from a sapling at Bean's Lake.  I keep it near the front door to our house.  My oldest cane is one I bought for my father almost 20 years ago at a pharmacy on Port Road, across from Kopp's.  Perhaps it was presumptuous of me because he never wanted to use it, but I dreaded every time he had to step down from stairs or a stoop.  Now I use it very often but not always when I am out and about.  I keep it in the Volvo.  It has sentimental value for me.  My favorite cane however is one that Andy purchased on a trip to the UK more than 30 years ago.  It's solid wood, unlike my other canes, and is topped not by a handle like the other ones but by a very smooth knob.  Until I bought a rubber cane tip from Amazon, the bottom was capped by a thin metal wrapping that made for hazardous footing.  My Dad once told me not to love anything that can't love me back so I guess I can't say that I love this old wooden cane, but I rely on it every day, especially in the middle of the night and on my early morning wake-ups and it's come to seem like an old friend. I keep it next to me on the library recliner during the day and next to my bed at night.   I have another cane I keep at the bottom of the basement staircase in case I need some support down there.  So far I haven't.  I can't remember why I bought it.  My fourth cane is a metal foldable staff that is taller than the other three.  I saw an old guy at the VA using one and thought it might be useful for strolling, which I never do.  Nonetheless, I got one from Amazon and use it only when I walk outside around our house, on the (to me) treacherously uneven grass-covered ground that can throw me off balance.  I keep it next to the back doors to the house.  I also have two 'rollators' provided to me by the VA because of my balance and gait challenges.  One I call "Judy" and the other "Rachel".  One is taller than the other and keeps me from leaning down on it while walking, stressing my shoulders.  When I used them, which I haven't in a long time, I would say to Geri, "I'm going for a walk with Judy (or Rachel)."  I think I stopped going for walks on Wakefield and environs because I'm embarassed to be using a rollator.  False masculine pride, foolish.   I've wondered recently whether I should put the shorter of the two in the back of the Volvo to use on my many trips to the VA.  I haven't done it yet in part because it seems like an admission of defeat to use it rather than relying on my cane for stability and support.  Plus, walkers and wheelchairs take up a lot of space in the VA waiting rooms, like the many loooonng trucks that are too big for the parking spaces in the VA patients' garage.  They stick way out into the traffic lanes in the garage requiring cars to stop and wait when another car approaches going the other way.  The wheelchairs and rollators are a bit  like that in the waiting rooms, obtrusive.  Of course their users need them and no one begrudges them their use, but I wonder about those trucks in the garage.  Do their owners really need those big trucks or is it a macho thing, real men drive big pickups?  Just wondering.   Also thinking that when the parking garage was built, I suspect the architects weren't contemplating widespread use of pickup trucks by mostly old vets.  (I can be pretty damn snooty, a nasty fault.😢)

Thoughts while reading this morning's WaPo.  (1) What ever happened to Ukraine?  That was went from everyday news to hard to find news. (2) I've mentioned my thought that one major concern in Washington about a bigger, multi-front war in Israel is that Israel would use 'tactical' nuclear weapons if its leaders believed Israel's existence were at risk.  Netanyahu has suspended from his cabinet Amochay Eliyahu, a member who has publicly mentioned such use in an interview on Hebrew radio, saying there is no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. (3) On Saturday,  the Israeli agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, said that the military campaign in Gaza was explicitly designed to force the mass displacement of Palestinians. “We are now rolling out the Gaza nakba,” he said in a television interview. “Gaza nakba 2023.” (4)  Since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, Israeli soldiers have killed 150 Palestinians, including 44 children, in clashes. Jewish settlers, some of whom are armed and informally allied with the military, have killed eight people, one of them a child, according to the United Nations.  Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians since Oct. 7.  (5)  With much of the dehumanizing language employed by Israeli leaders, it's impossible to tell whether they are refering to Hamas or to Palestinians generally.  Most of them would say it's the former, but one must wonder.  (6)  I wonder how does a society, a culture, or an individual, Israeli or Palestinian, recover from what has been going on since October 7th. 

Journalling/Blogging.  This is my 487th day of writing a daily journal using Google's  Blogger/Blogspot app.  I started at the end of July last year. thinking I would try it for a week and then a month.  I mentioned my journalling to Jody, the occupational therapist and Healing Touch practitioner at the VA yesterday, saying that I often wonder why I do it, but that one of the reasons is that writing requires mental activity, activity as opposed to receptivity or passivity, like watching a movie or a sporting event (as if😊) or listening to music.  Ditto with my painting.  Even typing the journal entries requires maintaining a skill, coordinating finger movement, relying on muscle memory but using all the fingers and thumbs on both hands.  But mostly I use it to try to keep tabs on my cognitive decline with age: can I still compose coherent sentences and string them into a coherent paragraph?  Each journal page is evidence of what is or is not going on in my aged brain.  Geri asked me the other day whether I was concerned that some malefactor might use the publicly available blog for identity theft and I said 'no,' largely because of my confidence that no one reads my ponderings and musings other than moi seulment.  I learned that with my memoir.   I suppose this is true for most or perhaps all writers other than those who write for a living (reporters, novelists, poets, professors, et al.) or those who write to a correspondent, an interlocutor; we write for ourselves, to clarify our thoughts (like Flannery O'Connor), to simply blow off steam, or for some other reason.  I print off each day's journal entry so I have a hard copy, probably because of my old timer's need for a paper record, something tangible not digital.  I have a pile of these paper pages on my desk in the basement and the other day I had a vision of someone looking at them after my death and tossing them into the recycling bin or perhaps the trash bin.  So it goes.  Sic transit gloria mundi.  Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.  Or as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer would have  it:   “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Charles (his journal and his memoir); and we commit his body (and his papers) to the ground; earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him and give him peace. Amen.”

RE Trump's use of Hitler rhetoric.  Excerpt from Vanity Fair, :After the Gold Rush", by Marie Brenner, September 1,1990:

by Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.

Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.

“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.

Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”) 

Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda. The Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories. Trump continues to endow his diminishing world with significance as well. “There’s nobody that has the cash flow that I have,” he told The Wall Street Journal long after he knew better. “I want to be king of cash.” 

I remember reading this long and fascinating story when it was published, or perhaps reading about it, especially about the book of Hitler's speeches on or near his bedside, and believing it then, as I believe it now.

Two trips to Port Washington today, one yesterday.   Yesterday to Walmart and Duluth Trading Company for 2 pairs of sweatpants.  Today to True Value Hardware for driveway reflectors and to drop off  some offerings at SVDP on CTH C then again to drive Andy up to Costco to pick up the Subaru after its punctured tired was repaired.  Nice conversation with Andy all the way up.