3/16/2026

 Monday, March 16, 2026

1968 My Lai massacre occurred when American soldiers killed ~400 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in one of the most controversial incidents of the Vietnam War

1977 US President Jimmy Carter pleaded for a Palestinian homeland

1978 US Senate accepted the Panama Canal treaty

2019 A beached dead whale was found to have 88 pounds of plastic inside it, including 40 pounds of plastic bags, in Mabini, Philippines

2025  President Donald Trump signed an executive order shutting down multiple state-funded broadcasters, including Voice of America, Radio y Televisión Martí and Alhurra, and ceasing grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.

In bed at 9, up and on to the LZB again at 2 with back/flank pain, no chance for sleep, out to kitchen to unload and reload the dishwasher, tidy up counters, and do a load of laundry.  BLIZZARD WARNING!  25/+1/29/13  112/70/58  112  205.8  18,000 WE Customers w/o power.  We're OK so far at 0430.  Last24 hours: 6.7 inches of snow following 0.9 inches of rain.  Next 24 hours: 2-3 inches of snow expected

Morning meds at 5:30 a.m.

Bruce and me.😊  Yesterday I wrote about the commonality shared by Bruce Springsteen and me: loving, supportive mothers and alcoholic, mentally ill, unloving and rejecting fathers.  We also shared a common gender and a Catholic school upbringing, in his case only elementary school, but in mine, elementary, high school, college, and law school (19 years, egad!)  It would be wrong to think, however, that we shared anything else.  Indeed, it's a stretch even to think of our Catholic upbringing as a shared background.  Bruce was raised in an Italian Catholic family, whereas I was raised in an Irish Catholic family, and the two cultures were not very similar.  The biggest differences between us lay in when we were born, me in August of 1941 and he in September of 1949.  That difference made me a child of the 40s and the 50s, and him a child of the 60s.  He was a baby boomer, whereas I was a member of 'the silent generation,' and in more ways than one.  I was struck by the significance of our age difference in reading the section of his autobiography in which he mentioned the impact of The Beatles on him,  It was 1964 and he was 15 years old, a high school sophomore living at home in Freehold, NJ.  I was 23 years old, a college graduate, a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, living in Yuma, AZ.  I was married and hadn't lived with my birth family for 5 years.  The following year I would be in Vietnam.   The even bigger difference between us, of course, is his immense artistic,, musical, and songwriting talent of which I share not one whit.  Another difference is that Bruce avoided military service during the Vietnam War by purposefully failing his induction physical, which he described in his autobiography.  There are a thousand other differences between Bruce and me, but in reading his bio, I am becoming one of his millions of admirers, a fan.  I checked out 4 of his albums from the Whitefish Bay Library yesterday, and will be watching YouTube videos of his concerts today.  We are both old men now, he 76 and I 84, far from our early commonalities, but better late than never.  

An entry from this journal one year ago today:

My journal entries, or daily notes, for the last 2 and ½ years in the  binders, with my holographic chronicle of "Life in the Time of Covid" about Tump and the pandemic in watercolor sketchbooks on the right

Former selves.  There is a guest essay by the novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro in today's New York Times, "I Don’t Want Anyone to Read My Diaries. Yet I Can’t Burn Them."  She relates that she kept diaries and journals for years and some time ago decided to burn all of them but discovered that she couldn't do so.   

I grabbed more pages from the 1990 box, but before I had a chance to incinerate them, a few sentences caught my attention. I was writing about what it had been like for me as a young writer in New York just starting out. . . I stopped feeding more pages into the fire after making acquaintance with the self who wrote them. It felt like killing her somehow, to destroy evidence of who she had been. Maybe she still had things to teach me. . . Joan Didion wrote “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not" 

She added: 

As the author of multiple memoirs, I was accustomed to controlling my own narrative. People would often tell me they knew everything about me. “You didn’t read my diary,” I’d joke. “If you had, I’d have to kill you.” . . . 

I had always thought of my diaries as garbage cans into which I tossed all the detritus: the obsessions, petty jealousies, fantasies, secret crushes, stinging rejections, all to clear the path to my “real” work, which is to say the attempt to make meaning and even beauty out of the chaos of being human. Memoirs are crafted, edited stories, no matter how close to the bone. The decision to include or leave out certain details or scenes or even characters are strategic literary ones. What serves the story? Whereas diaries are, at least initially, dumping grounds. And yet dumping grounds can yield the most fertile soil.

The essay made me wonder again why i bother writing words that I expect no one but myself to read.  Some day when I've got a little energy and nothing else to do (including reading and writing), I hope to browse through the 2 and ½ years of daily entries in these notes ("journals" seems too presumptious, maybe precious) to find out how often I have reflected about why I keep writing into the void, to no one.  I write and post them on the Blogspot/Blogger platform but not to attract "followers," but rather because (1) I could never manage to write as much as I do by hand, or holographically as we lawyers say, and (2) the blog format allows me to include photos which please me, as in the case of my paintings and drawings, or which have some relevance to what I write about.  In any event, the most common reasons I have come up with for composing daily notes are (1) it's a poor substitute for the text conversations I had every morning with my sister Kitty, also my dear friend, (2) it's a way to try to clarify my thoughts about whatever I am writing about, and (3) it's a way of trying to keep track of how many of my mental marbles I am losing.  Dani Shapiro and Joan Didion suggest another reason: it's a way of "staying on nodding terms with" [the guy] I used to be, whether [I] find him attractive company or not."  This is to say, it's a bit like lying on a couch in a psychiatrist's office where I am both the patient and the psychiatrist.  I suppose that was what I was doing yesterday when I reflected on whether I was "a quitter," comparing myself perhaps unjustly though not maliciously to my Dad.  It's what I was doing whenever I reflected on my troubled relationship with my Dad from my earliest memories of him after the War until we became friends, thank God, late in life, or when I reflect how I kind of deserted my birth family when I left for college at age 18, and to the Marines at age 21.  Tom St. John, Ed Felsenthal, David Branch, and Kitty are all gone now.  I don't often see friends anymore and those I do see are considerably younger than me, none with similar backgrounds, and all busy with their own lives, children, and grandchildren.  So, I pick up my laptop early each morning and start writing to myself.