1/28/24

 Sunday, January 28, 2024

In bed at 9, awake at 2:20, unable to sleep with pain in my right wrist, hand, and forearm, thoughts of 'Moon' Mullen in Vietnam and Laos, minnows in the bait bucket of my head, up at 2:42 & let Lilly out.  35°, high of 36°, cloudy nigh & day ahead.  The wind is N at 13 mph, 6-14/23.  Sunrise at 7:11, sunset at 4:58, 0+46.  Solar noon at 12:04, altitude at 29°. 41° lower than at the summer solstice (70°).   

Treadmill; pain.  The right wrist pain has been daily since sometime before January 10, when I first mentioned it in this journal.  So @ 3 weeks.  I'm glad to be seeing PM&R on 1/31.  30:01 & 0.66 while watching the concluding parts of OVID's documentaries on Edward Said, "Out of Place".

I'm grateful for so much and to so many, thinking back on Wally Halperin and Ed Felsenthal and Brother Coogan and so many others, but my mind is unfocused today, unable to think and write amply or coherently.  Too much insomnia, or was it simply the wrist and arm pain, in the middle of the night?

Alan Jacobs in an interview in The Atlantic in 2017 about his book "How to Think":

I think the primary moral fault of the left is a kind of smug contemptuousness toward people who don’t agree. And I think that’s a bad fault. But the primary fault of the right at this moment in America is wrath. I worry about the consequences of wrath more than I worry about the consequences of contemptuous smugness.

Is that me, smugly contemptuous toward all those who disagree with me?

Conspiracy theories tend to arise when you can’t think of any rational explanation for people believing or acting in a certain way. The more absurd you think your political or moral or spiritual opponents’ views are, the more likely you are to look for some explanation other than the simplest one, which is that they believe it’s true.

One category that’s gone away in America is “wrong.” Nobody is just “wrong.” They’re wicked, they’re evil, they’re malicious, they’re the victims of these vast subterranean forces.

But sometimes we get things wrong, because politics is hard. Knowing the right policy in any case is difficult, because you’re having to predict the future and the variables are astronomically complex. But we want to believe that it’s obvious what to do to fix our social problems.

. . .

I also want to be aware of the ways in which a plea for civility can be a way of consolidating power. It’s pretty easy to be me in America. I grew up in pretty poor circumstances, and in a mess of a family. My background looks like the background of a lot of African American men, but I’m not African American. Once I learned how to talk a little better—once I didn’t sound like so much of a redneck—and dressed up a little bit, it was easy for me to overcome that. There really is a tremendous benefit to being white when you’re trying to rise in the social order.

AJ on blogging (12/4/2023):

The original blogs, or “web logs,” were just lists of links to interesting things a person had found on the nascent internet. But then – especially after the creation of the Movable Type web publishing software in 2001 – the blog became, for many people, especially those who didn’t aspire to journalism, a kind of online diary or journal. And while I don’t want to bring back the blogosphere, I definitely want to bring back the blog.

Now that the white-hot fire of Twitter is burning itself out, and its various alternatives (Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon) are generating merely gentle (or sputtering) flames, and TikTok (which is not a social-media site in any meaningful sense but rather a media-consumption platform) is still going nova, this is the time for people to rediscover the pleasures of blogging – of writing at whatever length you want, and posting photos, and embedding videos, and linking to music playlists, all on your little corner of the internet.

I often think about why I keep writing in this journal, exactly what is it I'm doing and why I am doing it.  Often I am simply blowing off some steam.  Sometimes I am simply trying to ascertain what my thoughts are, like Flannery O'Connor not knowing what she thought until she read what she wrote, and then rethinking what she wrote.  Sometimes I copy a favorite poem simply because I like the poem and writing it down in the journal provides me an opportunity both to enjoy it anew and to preserve a copy of it in my journal.  Sometimes I think that these 18 months of largely random entries in the journal reflect who I am at the end of a long life, for better and for worse, warts and all.  But so what?  There is no reason to think that anyone, other than I, will ever read what has become hundreds of typed pages of text, for I know that there are few narratives less interesting to read than another person's idiosyncratic journal.  "Dear Diary, . . ."  Very often I write simply to chronicle, without any consistent principle of selection,  some of the things happening in the world, in my personal and family life, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the U.S., and the world.  Random, arbitrary choices.  Sometimes I write to reflect on my many failings, my sins; sometimes to blast the sins of others, especially of those in positions of power.  Perhaps mostly I write simply because what else would I do in retirement?  David Lowe plays golf, Dan Goldberg does cross-country cycling and skiing.  Many read, or knit or sew or do macraé or engage in volunteer work with charities.  Some poor souls watch hours and hours of network television 😰.  I spend much time writing words that won't be read, unless by me.  Maybe I'm doing it just to check on my cognitive decline and loss of executive function.  Perhaps a form of lunacy?  I think about this often, imagining after my death the printed pages of this journal ending up in a trash bag in a landfill or incinerator and the same kind of fate for the many drawings and paintings I have hanging on walls in my bedroom, in the basement, and in the tv room.  They will all end up trashed as will I and everyone eventually, burned or buried.  Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris. . .  Sic transit gloria mundi.