6/11/2025

 Wenesday, June 11, 2025

 D+196/139/1319

1898  Marines  landed at Guantanamo, Cuba, during the Spanish–American War

1963  A Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức immolated himself at a Saigon intersection

1963 Gov Wallace tried to prevent blacks from registering at the University of Alabama

In bed at 9:45, awake and up at 4:50.   59°, high of 81°.  AQI is 93, moderate.  

Kevzara, day 2/14; Trulicity, day 5/7; morning meds at 7:30 a.m.; Blink pill at 7:30 a.m.; Eye wipes at 5:20 a.m. and   p.m; Eye mask at  a.m. and  p.m.; Eye ointment at bedtime.    I applied the eye ointment for the first time last night on my right eye, or I sort of did.  I seem to have missed the target again, as I sometimes do with the drops, and ended up with much of the ointment on the outside of my lower lid. 

On Facebook this morning.

My Dad was a Marine on Iwo Jima in 1945.  I was a Marine in Vietnam in 1965.  My Dad’s gone now but I know he would share my shock and outrage at Marines being deployed operationally to Los Angeles in 2025.  Despite their fancy dress uniforms, their ceremonial and security  presence at the White House and at embassies around the world, the business of the Marine Corps is visiting death and destruction on real enemies of our nation and our people, i.e., killing people and destroying stuff.  It’s what Marines train for from the first day of boot camp.  Although in close order drill Marines may look like mechanical soldiers, they are not toys.  They are not to be played with, even by or especially by their commander-in-chief.  The same is true for Army soldiers and other members of the nation’s armed forces.  Whether in deploying Marines to the streets of Los Angeles or in ordering a wasteful and destructive parade of soldiers  on the streets of Washington , D.C. to celebrate his birthday in a manner befitting Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin, the current C-in-C, a draft dodger during Vietnam, plays with our soldiers and Marines, like a child moving toy soldiers around an imagined battleground.  He does it simply because he can and because it provides some temporary gratification to his insatiable and perverse ego.  Shame on him.  Shame on us for giving him the power and authority to abuse and misuse our military men and women.  Sorry, Dad.  Sorry, fellow Marines and soldiers.  You deserve better.

Micky the Mope, Denny the Downer, Charlie the Churl.  If anyone should happen upon this journal/blog/set of notes and read more than a couple pages of it, the reader would probably think that the writer was a chronically unhappy person, a complainer, a woe is me, poor me, life is so unfair mope, downer, or churl, and maybe I am.  Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy, and all that.  That being acknowledged, however, the impression of persistent dreariness while true enough, is at least incomplete because I find that in my old age I am much more appreciative, indeed almost newly infatuated, with much in my life to which I heretofore was totally oblivious,  I've mentioned some of them in these pages: clouds in the sky, individual homes, commercial buildings and factories, trees, birds that frequent our feeders and those that stop briefly on their way to somewhere else, white-tail deer, bunnies, chipmunks, even field mice, Geri's beautiful gardens that provide sustenance to neighborhood wildlife, our backyard, neighbors and friends, but also strangers who are kind or helpful to me, or who would be if they thought I was in need of some kindness or help.  Though I mope about loneliness and the absence of those who were dear to me, I appreciate solitude and silence.  (You can't please some guys!)  I enjoy poetry that touches my heart or that kicks me in the stomach.   I enjoy painting, not that I am 'a Painter!; but simply and sufficiently because I am a guy who like to paint, like a kid who like to draw or to color.  Although these daily scribblings demonstrate it too seldom and too little, I am blessed with an attitude of gratitude, for my mother and my father and my sister, for my wife, and my children and grandchildren, for the friends that I have and the friends that I have lost. and for all the men and women who have helped me in one way or another as I sought my way through life.  Although it often stings me or weighs me down with painful remorse and regret, I'm thankful that I was brought up to have a conscience.  " . . . not a day / But something is recalled, / My conscience or my vanity appalled."  The house we live in and almost own is wonderful.  So was our last house, and the lakeview condo in the Knickerbocker, and our houses in Shorewood, and my first home on Newberry Boulevard.   I have enjoyed every place I have ever lived in , except perhaps the tent and the corrugated steel hut I lived in in Danang, and even those sorry venues were not without value.  In sum, I have so very much that I am thankful for that I oughtn't be mistaken for an unmitigated Micky the Mope.

A Bitter Truth.  From Tom Friedman's op-ed in today's NYTimes, "This Israeli Government Is a Danger to Jews Everywhere"

Israelis, diaspora Jewry and friends of Israel everywhere need to understand that the way Israel is fighting the war in Gaza today is laying the groundwork for a fundamental recasting of how Israel and Jews will be seen the world over.

It won’t be good. Police cars and private security at synagogues and Jewish institutions will increasingly become the norm; Israel, instead of being seen by Jews as a safe haven from antisemitism, will be seen as a new engine generating it; sane Israelis will line up to immigrate to Australia and America rather than beckon their fellow Jews to come Israel’s way. That dystopian future is not here yet, but if you don’t see its outlines gathering, you are deluding yourself.

 . .  . . 

If . . .  Israel goes ahead with Netanyahu’s vow to perpetuate this war indefinitely — to try to achieve “total victory” over every last Hamasnik, along with the far right’s fantasy of ridding Gaza of Palestinians and resettling it with Israelis — Jews worldwide better prepare themselves, their children and their grandchildren for a reality they’ve never known: to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state — a source of shame, not of pride.

I'm afraid that time has already arrived and may be irreversible.   It's not merely Gaza and the IDF; its the West Bank, the settlers, and the IDF also.  

The House of Peace.   I took some shirts down to the House of Peace this afternoon and was able to visit with Linda Barnes, who is its director now.  When I held the job, Linda was a social worker, stationed full-time at the HOP, but an employee of Catholic Charities.  When CC was having some budget problems, they cut her position, and her employment was picked up by the HOP.  We visited for 20 minutes of so and got nostalgic talking about the years when I was working there.  We both loved Father Matthew and Gerry Sheets-Howard.  She took my telephone number and said she would give it to Gerry, who I hope will call me.  Her 'boys' are now in their 40s, and she has 7 grandchildren.  She herself is 68 or 69, ready to retire in a year of so.  Gerry's boys, Joshua and Isaiah, are also grown men now (of course.)  Father Al Veik is still living in Brother Booker Ashe's apartment upstairs at the HOP and is still the Vicar for Religious at the archdiocese.  When I departed, I took one of my nostalgic drives through 'the old neighborhood/' which now almost resembles a suburb with all the new middle-class housing, but the 'old' neighborhood is never very far away: old homes in bad shape and vacant lots where homes used to stand.  There used to be a home converted into a fresh fish store next door to us on the west.  It was owned and operated by an old lady.  We tried to buy the property for the HOP, but she asked way too much to sell it so we took a pass.  I don't know when the HOP finally acquired it, but the space is now vacant and owned by the HOP.  I have a pretty vivid memory of going into the shop with Gerry Sheets-Howard to see if the owner was interested in selling the property, and Gerry almost passing out from the smell of the fish.  Actually, I have many memories of Gerry, all good.  I have more memories of my days at the HOP that I can relate here.  I wish I had kept a journal during those 2 and 1/2 years.  It would be very interesting indeed, as was my life during that time.

I picked up my 'post-cataract surgery' eyeglasses at Costco this afternoon.  There seems to be a noticeable improvement in my vision.