5/16/2025

 Friday, May 16, 2025

D+170/115

1990 Eugene Stoner and Mikhail Kalashnikov, the creators of the M16 rifle and the AK-47 rifle respectively, meet in Washington, D.C.

2004 Day of Mourning at Bykivnia forest, just outside of Kyiv, Ukraine where during 1930s and early 1940s communist bolsheviks executed over 100,000 Ukrainian civilians

2017 I started using  CPAP

Lights out at 10:30, up at 5:45.  58°,  high of 76°, sunny after yesterday's severe storm left 3,500 without power in Milwaukee County, 6,500 in Racine County, tornado damage in Dodge County,  

Prednisone, day 366; 1 mg., day 8/21; Kevzara, day 4/14; CGM, day 13/15; Trulicity, day 7/7.  Prednisone at 6:45° a.m.  Other meds at 10:55 a.m.  Eye drops at 6 a.m., 10:40 a.m., and 8 p.m. Trulicity at 10:30 a.m. 

A thought.  If I were a poet, I'd be moved to write a poem this morning about the remaining flower petals falling off the flowering trees around our house after last night's big winds.  They look like big, fluffy snowflakes falling to the ground.

Another thought.  Why am I not a poet?  A short story writer?  A novelist?  A sculptor?  A potter?  Why did I come to painting so randomly and erratically?  Why am I not a dancer or an actor?  For all of us, how much is nature and how much is nurture?  How much is education?  How much is opportunity?  How much is chance?   How much of each of us is shaped by our early environment?  How much by wealth or poverty?  Is Robert Sapolsky corrcct, that "free will" is an illusion and that our lives are all determined for us, not by us?  Is Mary Trump correct that Donald Trump was created by his father Fred Trump, and all the other pernicious forces working on him in his childhood, youth, and later life?  If Sapolsky and Mary Trump are right, should we loathe Donald or feel sorry for him?  Or is the very question based on the erroneous assumption that it is up to us to decide whether we will love him or hate him?  What would Jesus say?  John Calvin?  The Grand Inquisitor? Buddha? Sigmund Freud?

                   Invictus

BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

Out of the night that covers me,

      Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

      I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

      Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

Don't bet on it. 

Another good visit to the VA.  I saw my ophthalmologist, the lovely Dr. Nikita Saladi, this afternoon and my eye looks (double meaning😊) AOK.  On my way out, I had a long chat in the waiting room with a career Navy hospital corpsman in a wheelchair.  He was missing all his fingers and thumbs from frostbite.  He had lived in the Old Soldiers' Home before moving to (I suspect) public housing in Oak Creek, originally from Tomah, WI, where his father was the chief psychiatrist at the VA Medical Center there till he died at his desk. His mother was also an MD.  It was good schmoozing with him and if I had been sitting instead of standing, I would have continued until he was called in for his examination.  Even before I became engaged in the conversation with the corpsman, I thought again, as I seem always to do, of all the individuals sitting in the waiting room, each unique, each with a life history behind him and an unknown future in front of him, each of them, each of us, inherently interesting simply because he or she is a human being with unique influences shaping him or her.  What were the family and tribal influences that contributed to his personality?  What was his schooling, and what did he think of it? How did he come to be in the military?  Why the Army, or the Navy, or the Marines, etc.?  How did that experience shape him, especially his time in Vietnam?  On and on, one question after another, exploring a lifetime that led him today to this waiting room in the VA Medical Center in Milwaukee.  When I schmooze with another vet here, it's usually swapping brief stories of our time in the service, where and when we served, what we did, etc.  The chats are always brief, sometimes in an elevator, otherwise in a waiting room.  I often wish I could get to know the guy better, to know whether he is outliving his friends, to know whether he (like me) could use a friend his own age, with similar military experiences, etc.  Maybe one of these days, . .

 .Earl and his buddy Clyde, schmoozing, like old guys like to do.