Sunday, October 19,2025
1781 General Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown, VA, effectively ending the Revolutionary War
1987 The Dow Jones dropped 2almost 3% in one day
2003 Mother Teresa of Calcutta was beatified by Pope John Paul II
2016 Donald Trump refused to say he would accept the result of the election during a debate with Hillary Clinton
2019 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Bernie Sanders for president
In bed at about 11:30 after spending much of the day sleeping, up at 6:55, with my still painful ankle, still a dull red and swollen. I got up thinking of my Aunt Mary Healy in the nursing home in Phoenix: "What's the problem, God. I'm ready. And my Grandmother Charlotte in the nursing home in Port Charlotte, with her teddy bear or dolly. And my eulogy for TSJ: "In this short life, which only lasts an hour, / How much, how little is within our power. Two Tom turkeys showed up at our feeders at 7:45, but I failed to provide seeds yesterday evening. Alas. I filled the feeders and scattered seed this morning, and before 9 o'clock, the posse of 5 tom turkeys returned and spent almost 25 minutes cleaning up the lawn. They surrounded a lone gray squirrel, and I was surprised that the big birds didn't chase her away. Rain overnight, 48°, wind chill is 34°, high of 58°, rain this morning, windy all day. At 7, the wind was 19 mph, with gusts to 37 mph, NNW. This is the week autumn arrives in Milwaukee.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 11:30 a.m.
Cassandra? Three years ago on this date, I wrote:
Donald Agonistes. Trump is scheduled to be deposed at Mar-a-Lago by Jean Carroll's attorney in her defamation case against her now defamer-in-chief. Presumably, Trump will say what he has always said of the charge that he raped her in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room back in the 90s, i.e., that he never met her, doesn't know her, didn't rape her, and perhaps his kicker that "she's not my type." What a way to be nearing the end of one's life. He's 76 years old, probably in questionable health because of age, obesity, diet, etc., and besieged by enemies seeking to hurt him - private litigants, federal prosecutors, congressional committees, a state prosecutor, and the NY attorney general. After the 2016 election, he thought he was on top of the world, king of the hill, leader of the free world, and invincible. His always vulnerable ego, always at least tentatively satisfied by being probably the most famous man in the world, able to draw thousands of cheering fans at his rallies, slaking his thirst for affirmation and adoration. And always protected from enemies by the powers and privileges of his public office. He knew there was a tsunami of legal woes awaiting him if he lost the office of the presidency, hence his extraordinary criminal attempts to avoid losing the office. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, as Malcolm X would say. Louis XV's apocryphal saying, "Apres moi, le deluge" might appropriately be attributed to Donald John Trump. His personal deluge of legal attacks has begun and may come to something or come to naught, but the country's political & social deluge pends like Domocles' sword. We'll know a lot more in three weeks with the midterms, which I expect Trumpies will do well in, and even more as 2024 approaches. We're in the middle of the Biden Pause, but I fear it's like the eye of a Trumpian hurricane, with death and destruction awaiting us.
One Year Ago on this date, I wallowed in schadenfreude in my journal entry about the widespread evisceration of Timothy Dolan over his October 17th, 2024, Al Smith Dinner featuring foul-mouthing by Donald Trump. I titled the entry "A picture is worth a thousand words."
My comment to DPL's No Kings in Tucson post on FB today:
Charles D. Clausen
And BRAVO! to every one of those America-hating, paid-activist, Soros-funded, Hamas-loving, Marxist agitators in their tennies, sandals, and flip-flops, out to destroy our one country under God! I would have been out in Milwaukee's riot, or perhaps Shorewood's, but I had a bone spur on my foot, which thankfully, got better as soon as the commie demonstrations were over.
Tim Curry and death. CBS Sunday Morning featured a long interview with the actor Tim Curry this morning. He suffered a serious stroke in 2012 and now gets around in a wheelchair. The interviewer asked him about fear of dying, and I took some comfort in his words: "I don't fear death. I try to avoid it, as I suspect we all do, but I suspect that in the end I will welcome it. I think it may be very comforting to go bye-bye, and I want to earn it."
Ben Stiller, son of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, was also interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning. He has produced and directed a documentary on his parents, which is running on AppleTV. I was struck by the part of the interview in which it was revealed that as Ben Stiller was making the documentary about tensions in his parents' marriage and in their home, he was going through a significant midlife crisis of his own. "I just felt out of balance and unhappy and kind of disconnected from my family, from my kids, and a little bit lost." He was separated from his wife, with whom he later reconciled. He said, "The irony is that I thought I was doing so much better than my parents. When you're younger, you think, Okay, I'm going to do everything better. I'm going to - I'm not going to make that mistake. I found myself at a place in my life where things weren't really in sync." He and the interviewer remarked on the difficulty of comparing himself as a parent with his own parents. The interviewer remarked, "One of the most uncomfortable places you can ever be is in front of a mirror, and sometimes your kids are holding up the mirror." Stiller responded that "It's kind of a bummer because I'm never going to be able to go back," presumably to behave better, more caringly, less selfishly. The interviewer then said, "That's helped him round the edges from his own childhood, finding the grace to give his parents by understanding he might need to seek some of his own."
I earlier wrote that "I was struck" by that part of the interview; probably I should have written "I was stung" by it, because I was so vividly reminded of my own history with my parents and with my own children. Having written these words, I sat quietly and motionless for a long time, looking out the window, and reflecting on my troubled relationship with my Dad, my resolve never to hurt my children like my sister Kitty and I had been hurt as children, and the pain I inflicted on them when I left home, ended my marriage to their mother, and ended my everyday loving relationship with each of them. Love is an action verb, not a mere caring or feeling of affection. The terrible reality was what I tried so hard to deny when accused of it my wife, ti.e., that I had left not just her, but all of them. Leaving the marriage was what I wanted, but leaving the family was the cost. I carry guilt and shame about it to this day, half a lifetime later. It may have been a mistake marrying when I did, at age 21, and why I did, do I even know why? But leaving after almost 20 years couldn't cure the earlier mistake and there were two children to think of. Nonetheless, I didn't have the emotional agility, adroitness,, strength, or resourcefulness to handle what Ben Affleck aptly enough described as feeling "out of balance and unhappy and kind of disconnected from my family, from my kids, and a little bit lost." Or more accurately, very lost and out of control. I was like the lyrics of Precious Lord: "I am tired, I am weak, I am worn." How much of that was becausen of my own weakness? How much was inevitable? Perhaps I am now so interested in Spinoza's theory of determinism, and Robert Sapolsky's, and Calvin's predestination, to relieve myself of Yeat's curse of conscience and vanity.
. . . . .
Responsibility so weighs me down.
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
No comments:
Post a Comment