10/25/2025

 Saturday, October 25, 2025

w3e

e4r

In bed at 10 and up at 5.  

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at  a.m.  Persistent pain during the night in my right hip.  Significant pain in my left ankle whenever I got out of bed, i.e., when the leg was upright.   

The short-fingered vulgarian.

I am trying to imagine Franklin Delano Roosevelt distributing an image of himself taking a dump on American demonstrators.  Or Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, or even, perhaps especially Richard Milhous Nixon.  I can't do it.  My imagination is not that agile.  No, it's the same for Jerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.  It is impossible for me to imagine any one of them publishing an image of themselves defecating on other Americans.  Of the 15 American presidents under whom I have lived, only one has been vulgar and perverted enough to do such a thing, the one currently defiling the office he holds.

In 1983, Spy magazine described Donald Trump as a "short-fingered vulgarian."  We can ignore for now the question of whether Trump's fingers may be shorter than average.  Who cares?  But we can't ignore his extraordinary vulgarity.  This man who claims to "run the country and the world," and who does indeed, in some measure at least, run the country and the world, is what used to be called a pig, a boar and a boor.  Not in his tailored clothing, but in his low-born manners.  I refer not only to his public use of vulgarisms and obscenities, including variants of the "f" word, not 'fascist' but the other, earthier one.  Nor do I refer primarily to his tastelessness, so garishly and embarrassingly on display in the Oval Office.  No, I am thinking mainly of his gargantuan arrogance, the kind of arrogance that may derive in part from having been born already a trust-fund millionaire and thereafter having become a billionaire New York real estate developer and Atlantic City casino operator.  The kind of arrogance that derives in part from his military boarding school background, where he was permitted to bully and belittle underlings, à la Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline.  It's the kind of arrogance that lets him secretly devise a plan to partially destroy and reshape a national landmark and then to execute the plan unilaterally, imperiously, or you might say autocratically and dictatorially, i.e., with no consultation with, input or 'buy-in' from any other stakeholder in the national treasure.  Only one person's will or whim counted, his.  In my dotage, I carry certain images of my 15 presidents, Kennedy's top-hatted inauguration and funeral cortege, Nixon waving goodbye from the steps of the helicopter after resigning, Jimmy Carter building houses with Habitat for Humanity.  Today, the two images of the current president that are seared into my mind are of the video of him defecating on other Americans and the image of the wrecking ball demolishing the East Wing.  Each symbolizes so well national life under this short-fingered vulgarian.

Katherine is here for a long weekend visit, a delight for both Geri and me.  She has business at Jenner and Block's home offices in Chicago on Tuesday, and so will be with us until she rides the Amtrak to Chicago Monday evening.  She is as vivacious as ever, looking no different to me than she did when she was a student at the law school.  She is only a few months older than Sarah, and the two have much in common in terms of academic and career achievements and even personalities, each being a dynamo.  I am touched that she makes it a point to come and visit us, though I'm sure she principally comes to visit her "AG," or Aunt Geri, whom she clearly loves.  When Katherine's mom was in her last illness and dying at home, Geri drove down to East Tennessee to help her brother Jimmy and his children, Katherine and her brothers.  I am confident she was a huge help and comfort to all of them.  She brings news of her Dad, which is always welcome but hard to hear.  Jimmy continues his downward slide into dementia, requires more assistance than he used to, but seems to be generally OK.  He often doesn't recognize Katherine as his daughter and sometimes calls her "Sis," confusing her with Geri.  He also calls Katherine's husband, Jordan  "Uncle Chuck," confusing him with me.  I enjoyed his friendship for the few years when he was a regular part of our lives and miss it today.  Another loss in this time of losses.

Life in the mid-80s, for many at least.  From the journal this date in 2022:

Circadian Rhythms

Donald Hall, Notes Nearing Ninety, 'Way Way Up, Way Way Down.'  "The next morning I felt wretched, as I did the next and the next, from late September all the way into February.  All day every day I felt down, down, down - exhausted until circadian rhythms took over at suppertime.  I felt almost human until 9 p.m. and bed.  I slumped into sleep.  I woke feeling weak, even moribund.  Was I about to die?  I was a mere 86. . . Now, when I had done 4 or 5 letters or emails, 5 or 6 to go, fatigue began to hollow me out.  I was not merely tired, much less sleepy.  I felt a blackness drag from my toes through my trunk into the follicles of my hair. . ."  

I thumbed through much of a small book I read a few years ago, a collection of letters that the poet Hayden Carruth wrote to a fellow poet (and wife of Donald Hall), Jane Kenyon, during her final illness.  I recall one letter in which he described his decrepitude at age 73, reminding me of course of myself.  I can't find the letter (or maybe I'm misremembering, another malady of the 80s.)  I did come across "Another crisis of aging -  the loss of very perceptible chunks of my mind, and just as painful as the head and back, damn it." And this:  "Already almost a week of the new year is gone.  It's hard for me to assimilate the passage of time now in old age.  I live in the midst of confusion, so time doesn't go fast, as it used to when I was on top of my life; it nearly doesn't exist, everything is the same from one day to the next, and I can't remember in the evening what I did in the morning.  I sit like a frog on a lily pad in the midst of the flow.  Well, not exactly."  For Geri and me both, time goes by at meteoric speed.  We now laughingly refer to receiving our 'daily' New Yorker weekly magazine.  As for sensing the passage of time, or having some sense of it, I seem to get it only when I'm working on a painting, or from looking at various paintings and drawings I've done over many years.  They are a reminder of time spent in days past, creating paintings and drawings years ago, some decades ago.

 

OMG, that was three years ago, and the challenges have only gotten worse! Multiple trips to the VA Emergency room, outpatient surgeries, inpatient stays, PMR and a year on prednisone, months on sarilumab, and a depressed immune system, chronic pain in the back, hips, knees, hands, and now this ankle grief.  There's a constant push-pull of wanting to live and wanting to be done with life, with pain, immobility, frailty, and ever-increasing decrepitude.  Why am I getting vaccines?  Why am I taking antibiotics?  Why do I 'buckle up' before accessing the freeway for another trip to the VA for more products and services designed to prolong a life that is ever-diminishing?  What a goof I am, wanting to live and wanting to be done with it!  In again, out again Finnegan, on again off again, yes one moment no the next.  Mr. Ambivalence.  Fish or cut bait!  Shit or get off the pot!  Yeats's Vacillation.  Flipfloppery, betwixtitude, an old fool bouncing from pillar to post.  Man up!  Snap out of it!  Will Zeke Emanuel be such a wimp when he turns 75?  

First, you say, you do /And then you don't
And then you say, you will / And then you won't
You're undecided now / So what are you gonna do? 

Now you want to play / And then it's no
And when you say, you'll stay / That's when you go
You're undecided now / So what are you gonna do?

David provided his annual gift of cleaning our gutters this afternoon.  God bless him.  A miserable job.🤬

Text exchange with Steve this evening:

Steven:

I went on a historical tour of North Lawndale today and learned a ton about civil rights era Chicago 

Charles Clausen:

Tell me where  North Lawndale  is.

Steven:

Douglas Park, near Roosevelt and California 

Charles Clausen:

Roosevelt as in 12th Street south?

Steven:

Yeah exactly! It's crazy that the apartment MLK rented for his family got bulldozed after he left. Daley was such a vindictive prick

https://www.wttw.com/dusable-to-obama/dr-kings-chicago-crusade

Charles Clausen:

I wish I had been with you.  My mother took me to a clothing store on Roosevelt just north of Halstead back in 1959 to get me some clothes to send me off to college with.  She bought them on credit.  I think I wrote about it in my memoir.  We were a block away from Maxwell Street, still going strong in those days.  Your cousin Katherine is with us for the weekend before a business meeting she has at Jenner and  Block on Tuesday.  I’m thinking that Roosevelt and California isn’t that far from where Fred Hampton was murdered, is it?

Steven:

15th & Hamlin is still a tough neighborhood all these years later  Yeah that wasn't far away

Charles Clausen:

Thanks for the ‘DuSable to Obama’ piece.  I remember making fun of DuSable High School’s cheer when I was a kid and typically Chicago racist.  We did the same about the cheer for St. Elizabeth H.S., the only Black Catholic H.S. in those days.  

Steven:

Always learning from ya Chuck❤️ thanks forever

Charles Clausen:

Love ya, Buddy.  Always have, always will.❤️