10/11/2025

 Saturday, October 11, 2025

D+339/264/-1207

1962 Second Vatican Council (21st ecumenical) was convened by Pope John XXIII

1986 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev opened talks at the Reykjavik summit

1991 Anita Hill testified that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her    

2002 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to former President Jimmy Carter 

2024 Elon Musk and Tesla unveiled the driverless Robotaxi and Robovan prototype in Los Angeles

In bed at 9, up at 6:30.  47°, high of 62°, partly cloudy today.

Meds, etc.  There is still some swelling, redness, and intermittent pain in my left leg, with the pain concentrated mostly in and around the ankle.  Morning meds around noon.   

Errant thoughts.  (1)  I've been a misfit in every major employment in my life, never quite fitting in, never really feeling at home.  I was slight and unaggressive while in the Corps, hardly a model Marine.  I was appointed to and resigned from the law faculty 3 times, and never got into publishing.  I was nonentrepreneurial and never built my own law practice or clientele. And I was always an outsider as a layman, not a member of the club with my Capuchin employers at the House of Peace Community Center.  Never a 'true believer,' always feeling a bit like an imposter.

(2) Excerpts from "Autumnal Tints" in Henry David Thoreau in the OCTOBER 1862 ISSUE:

Fallen Leaves

By the sixth of October the leaves generally begin to fall, in successive showers, after frost or rain; but the principal leaf-harvest, the acme of the Fall, is commonly about the sixteenth. Some morning at that date there is perhaps a harder frost than we have seen, and ice formed under the pump, and now, when the morning wind rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. They suddenly form thick beds or carpets on the ground, in this gentle air, or even without wind, just the size and form of the tree above. Some trees, as small Hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously, as a soldier grounds arms at a signal; and those of the Hickory, being bright yellow still, though withered, reflect a blaze of light from the ground where they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at the first earnest touch of autumn's wand, making a sound like rain.

Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a fall of leaves there has been in the night, though it may not yet be the touch that loosens the Rock-Maple leaf. The streets are thickly strewn with the trophies, and fallen Elm-leaves make a dark brown pavement under our feet. After some remarkably warm Indian  summer day or days, I perceive that it is the unusual heat which, more than anything, causes the leaves to fall, there having been, perhaps, no frost nor rain for some time. The intense heat suddenly ripens and wilts them, just as it softens and ripens peaches and other fruits, and causes them to drop.

The leaves of late red Maples, still bright, strew the earth, often crimson-spotted on a yellow ground, like some wild apples,—though they preserve these bright colors on the ground but a day or two, especially if it rains. On causeways I go by trees here and there all bare and smoke-like, having lost their brilliant clothing; but there it lies, nearly as bright as ever, on the ground on one side, and making nearly as regular a figure as lately on the tree. I would rather say that I first observe the trees thus flat on the ground like a permanent colored shadow, and they suggest to look for the boughs that bore them. A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant trees have spread their bright cloaks in the mud. I see wagons roll over them as a shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just as little as they did their shadows before.

When I go to the river the day after the principal fall of leaves, the sixteenth, I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with the leaves of the Golden Willow under which it is moored, and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I empty it, it will be full again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out, but accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my carriage. When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it were getting out to sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the water for a rod in width, under and amid the Alders, Button-Bushes, and Maples, still perfectly light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river. When I turn my prow that way, and the wave which it makes strikes them, list what a pleasant rustling from these dry substances grating on one another! Often it is their undulation only which reveals the water beneath them. Also every motion of the wood-turtle on the shore is betrayed by their rustling there. Or even in mid-channel, when the wind rises, I hear them blown with a rustling sound. Higher up they are slowly moving round and round in some great eddy which the river makes, as that at the "Leaning Hemlocks," where the water is deep, and the current is wearing into the bank.

Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly calm and full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream, and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove, where I unexpectedly find myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers, which seem to have the same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself. See this great fleet of scattered leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's skill, each nerve a stiff spruce-knee,—like boats of hide, and of all patterns, Charon's boat probably among the rest, and some with lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients, scarcely moving in the sluggish current,—like the great fleets, the dense Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering some great mart, some New York or Canton, which we are all steadily approaching together. How gently each has been deposited on the water! No violence has been used towards them yet, though, perchance, palpitating hearts were present at the launching. And painted ducks, too, the splendid wood-duck among the rest, often come to sail and float amid the painted leaves, —barks of a nobler model still!

What wholesome herb-drinks are to be had in the swamps now! What strong medicinal, but rich, scents from the decaying leaves! The rain falling on the freshly dried herbs and leaves, and filling the pools and ditches into which they have dropped thus clean and rigid, will soon convert them into tea,—green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of all degrees of strength, enough to set all Nature a-gossiping. Whether we drink them or not, as yet, before their strength is drawn, these leaves, dried on great Nature's coppers, are of such various pure and delicate tints as might make the fame of Oriental teas.

How they are mixed up, of all species, Oak and Maple and Chestnut and Birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf's thickness to the depth of the soil. This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I chaffer with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the cost of carting. We are all the richer for their decay. I am more interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens. It keeps our home stead in good heart.

(3) Watching a "The Bulwark"video of JVL and Sarah Longwell simply schmoozing.  JVL asked Sarah what she would do differently after graduating for college if she could live her life over.  I've asked myself the same question more than once based on the thought that ASC and I shouldn't have married right out of college, and blaming myself for improvidence.  I've never thought, however, that, if given a make-over, I would not marry her again because it would be like erasing our children from our lives and their lives.  We make choices in our lives [or do we? Or, are our choices predetermined?] and live with the consequences, all of them, good and bad.  It seems particularly childish to wish away the bad or unfortunate or difficult consequences of our choices, while embracing the good, rewarding ones.   

(4) Game 5 between Brewers and Cubs today.  As of early Friday afternoon, Oct. 10, the cheapest Game 5 tickets are standing room only in the field and loge levels for $193, including fees, on StubHub. In the Terrace 400 levels, the cheapest tickets for two people sitting together are $260 each in section 442, located in the far left field near Bernie’s Terrace.  In the lower level of the 400s (the Terrace Box), tickets are in the $400 range.  Bleacher seats in the right field are going for over $300. Tickets in the 100 level on the far first and third base sides are going for over $500.  You want to have the best view behind home plate in the second level in section 218? Tickets will cost you over $1,800.  Numbers like these always give me some comfort about the relative cheapness of my hobbies of painting and journaling.

(5) I'm not cured yet.  My leg at midday is still quite swollen, red, and warm to the touch.  The Diclofenac seems to help with the ankle and foot pain, and I'm sleeping considerably longer than usual, 9 hours + last night plus a noon nap of at least an hour's duration.  I had hoped to put on a black compression sock on the left leg today but it's too swollen.  I donned white ones at about 1 p.m.

(6)  I've been reading up on Freud and his theories on religion, and also still browsing Judith Viorst's Necessary Losses.  The former suggests how we humans got to a father-image of God, while the latter suggests, though not explicitly, a mother-image of God or of Heaven growing out of the traumatic loss which we all experience from the primal separation that occurs between mother and child.  During infancy, we and our mothers are one, literally during gestation and perceptually during infancy.  Thereafter, a traumatic individuation occurs in each of us.  Perhaps not surprisingly, I thought of Freud's and Viorst's theories and my own early life with my father.  He was drafted into the Marines in February 1944, when I was 2 and 1/2 years old,  still a toddler, leaving me alone with my mothers and later-born sister. He returned, emotionally war-ravaged, in November 1945, 21 months later, when I was 3 years, 3 months old.  He was virtually a stranger to me then, a hostile, scary, unwelcome ogre or wraith.  Whatever progress towards healing he made after returning home was surely stopped on September 30, 1947 when "Jimmy Hartmann" came into our little basement apartment with his knife, threatened to kill Killy and me, slashed my mother with his knife, tore her clothes off, sodomized her, and when the story of the atrocity was published in all the Chicago newspapers, with photos of my mother and our address published along with a map showing just how to find our now notorious little apartment where the "sexual torture" occurred.  I can't help but think back on those occurrences in my early life and to wonder how they affected me, the development of my personality, and my subsequent life.  I wonder too about Freud's "father complex, "the origin of our subconscious ideas about " God," and the effect of those early traumatic relationships with my father.  Of course, I'll never know.

(7) The basement disaster; the end of 'sanctuary,'and painting.  I trundled down to the basement for the first time since the asbestos contractors removed all the floor tiles.  The "finished" middle of the basement, which I had called my 'sanctuary', is totally cleared out, ready to have carpeting laid or vinyl flooring installed.  Everything that had been in that 'sanctuary' space: my painting equipment and supplies, my office area, the television on its table, my many sentimental treasures hoarded over a lifetime, the treadmill, and all of Geri's hobby workspace, has been crammed into the storage space on the south end of the basement and the workroom on the north end.  I can make it down and back up the stairs only with considerable difficulty, always worried that I won't make it up all of them and will have to call 911 for help.  I think realistically that my painting days are over.  The combination of the basement flooding, the week in the hospital with the leg infection, and the slow recovery has been, I fear, life-altering.  Even before the flooding and the hospitalization, I was well on my way to - take your pick - infirmity, frailty, feebleness, immobility, or senile debility, but now I'm there.  It looks like my painting days are finished.  Another loss.