10/10/2025

 Friday, Ocober 10, 2025

D+3338/263/-1208

1938 Germany completed its annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland

1954 Ho Chi Minh entered Hanoi after the withdrawal of the  French troops

1961 "The Bob Newhart Show" premiered on NBC in the US

1973 Vice President Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to allegations of tax fraud

1981 Anwar Sadat's funeral service was held in Cairo

2023 President Joe Biden pledged support for Israel in the wake of Hamas' attack on the country and its retaliatory bombardment of Gaza

In bed by 9 after sleeping on the recliner, awake at 4:20, and up at 4:39.  Geri is also awake with heartburn or GERD.  My leg and foot are less swollen and red than they were last night when I took the compression sock off, making me think I may have been on my feet too much yesterday.  The left side of my ankle and upper foot are still sore, as they were during the night, but the skin is cool to the touch, unlike last night. 49°, high of 66°, rainy morning.

Meds, etc.  Some big mistake was made somehow and by someone, because I received a HUGE delivery of meds from FedEX last night.  It looks like, though it isn't, some of everything on my medication list with the VA.  A mystery.  Morning meds at 6 a.m.  

Ecclesiasstes 3: 1. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Scattershot thoughts.  (1) Alpha and Omega.  I got to thinking how much time I have devoted in retirement to chronicling the early and late years of my life, the alpha in my memoir and the omega in my journal.  To what end?  I wrote the memoir, initially at least, for my children, and in large measure so that they might have some understanding of their paternal grandfather, who was coming to live with Geri and me, and of their grandmother, whom they never met, of their paternal ancestry, and of their father's life before they were born.  It's clear to me now that I was driven by a sense of curiosity about myself and by a sense of guilt over ending my marriage with their mother, two senses that have never left me.  The process of writing the memoir did provide at least some satisfaction of my curiosity about myself and my parents, though it left me, as perhaps it leaves every memoirist, with many questions forever unanswered.  I came to realize how little anyone knows about their own parents, how little parents know about their own children, and how little we know even about ourselves.  Why did I start keeping this journal more than three years ago, in the midsummer of 2022?  I can't remember, but I suppose it was in large measure the same desire to better understand myself.  I have often questioned in this journal why I keep adding to it, what I am up to, what's the point, etc.  I know the hard copy is destined for Omega Hills landfill (What a fitting name for our local landfill!), just as I am destined for Forest Home Cemetery.  I suppose the blogspot/blogger blog will endure, but again, so what? to what end? for whom?  Ultimately, I am only talking to myself, like the poor old vet in a wheelchair who sat next to me in the Gold Clinic waiting room last Tuesday.  

(2) The Truth Hurts, or, The Best Government Money Can Buy, or, America's Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

(3) An ad for a coffee cup on this morning's FB feed, or His Eye Is On The Sparrow, or God has a plan for me, or I'll leave it in God's hands, or predestination.

This morning's Facebook ad for a coffee mug reminds me of the eternal mystery of all religions, or at the theocentric ones professing a personal, loving, paternal God conceived in the image of Man.  It sent me to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on "Sigmund Freud and Religion," Freud's theories on psychosexual development, and thoughts of my father's traumatic return from war when I was four years old, when, in Freud's theory, I was in the phallic stage, experiencing the Oedipus Complex, out of which should have come an identification with my father, a healthy sense of sexuality, and 'the father complex.' "“The psycho-analysis of individual human beings,” he thus stated boldly in Totem and Taboo, “teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father. ”  Aha! No wonder I have had such a troubled relationship with God!  And a good relationship with women.  I'd better not buy this coffee mug.😳

    It's interesting that believers in the God of this mug do not see a need for precatory prayer.  Fahgidaboutit!  It's all taken care of.  Catholics are taught that precatory prayer is both good and efficacious.  “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Matthew 7:7)  The Church teaches that prayer is not a way to sway God's mind or will, but only a way to align ourselves with His will.  This is so., of course, because God, unlike us, is changeless.  “Prayer is not an attempt to change the divine will but to obtain what God has already willed to grant through prayer.” (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q.83 a.2).  Is there something circular there? Or is it simply converting every prayer for relief from pain, or a cure from cancer, or for anything personal to the pray-er into "Thy will be done"?  But isn't this itself a form of Determinism, like Calvin's, or Spinoza's, or Sapolski's, all of whom tell us essentially, like Donald Trump, that the game is rigged?

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name;

thy kingdom come,

thy will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, if that's what you want, and have wanted from all eternity,

and forgive us our trespasses, 

as we forgive those who trespass against us; if that's what you want and have wanted from all eternity,

and lead us not into temptation, if that's what you want and have wanted from all eternity,

but deliver us from evil, if that's what you want and have wanted from all eternity.

Amen.

So, Dear God, let me want this painful burn and the disfigurement it will leave so long as that's what want and have wanted from all eternity, and let me want my child to die from the cancer in her brain iso long as that's what you want and have wanted from all eternity, and let me want those thousands of children in Gaza to die or be orphaned so long as that's what you want and have wanted for all eternity, and thank you for loving me by letting me share by my prayers in the mystery of divine providence.

“Ask, and it will be given to you (so long as it's what I and my Father and the Holy Ghost want, etc.); seek, and you will find (so long as . . .); knock, and it will be opened to you (so long as . . ..” (Matthew 7:7)  Was it Jesus who forgot to add the "so long as's",, or was it Matthew?  Just askin'.

Do I just have a jaundiced soul, or am I troubled by "the mystery of Providence" because during the phallic stage of my psychosexual development, my Dad came home from Iwo Jima and screwed up my "father complex,"  all of which God had perfectly willed for all eternity?