1/23/26

Friday, January 23, 2026

1973 US President Richard Nixon announced an accord had been reached to end the Vietnam War

2023 Tom St. John's funeral

2025 United States federal law enforcement and ICE agents arrested nearly 500 undocumented migrants with arrest warrants in sanctuary cities, including in New Jersey and New York

2025  President Donald Trump signed an executive order to declassify files related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

2025  Federal judge temporarily blocked President Trump's executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, calling it "blatantly unconstitutional."

The end of an era and the beginning of an era

In bed at 10:05, up at 4:10, but awake much earlier to move and half-sleep on LZB troubled by dreams of ICE becoming and being an American Gestapo, a well-funded, poorly disciplined gang of official domestic terrorists with a budget larger than the Marine Corps, purposefully recruited from demographic sectors oriented towards White Christian nationalists, i.e., nazis.  -11/-31/+1/-13.

 Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 9:20 a.m.  Yesterday, I removed the potassium pills and chlorthalidone from my pill box and replaced them with magnesium and new diuretic pills.

Wastrel.  Reading the Wall Street Journal this morning, I realized how much of my remaining life I am wasting, perhaps almost all of it.  How many days, weeks, or months do I have left?  I've lived 30,833 days, or 4,404.7 weeks (pace ChatGPT), with 213 days to go before my 85th birthday, and 5 years, 7 months, and 1 day till my 90th birthday.  My age cohort’s average expected lifespan at birth was ~70.5 years, which I have already far exceeded.  Only a minority (around ~30–35%) of similar white males in my cohort reach ages in the mid-80s and beyond.  For men of my current age, data suggests a remaining life expectancy of 5 to 6 years, but that is based on averages, not on my particular aggregation of chronic diseases and history of acute diseases.  Today's average lifespan is approximately 4, 000 weeks, so I've been playing with house money for more than 400 weeks.  How much time do I really have left?  What should I be doing in that shrinking time?  How should I live while waiting to die?

I should explore this in writing to stimulate, focus, and clarify my thoughts on such an important question, but again, I'm not up to it.  Out of steam, fading.

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