4/27/2026

 Monday, April 27, 2026

1877 Rutherford B. Hayes removed Federal troops from Louisiana, Reconstruction ends

1940 Himmler ordered the establishment of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp

1962 The US performed an atmospheric nuclear test at Christmas Island

2025 orth Korea confirmed the deployment of its soldiers to Russia a day after Russia confirmed the presence of North Korean soldiers fighting alongside them.

In bed at 8:50, up at 5:45; 6 a.m., 144/74/50 118 205.8; 46/36/59/42, cloudy morning and rainy afternoon and evening.  This April has been Milwaukee's rainiest on record, more than 9 inches, with more coming today and Wednesday.  😰

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Bisoprolol at 7 a.m.

Notes from Underground.  I finished it this morning, wondering whether it was the strangest novel I had ever read, and thinking, 'yes.'  From this one work, I see more clearer how Dostoevski is seen as the literary father of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness, Freud's psychoanalysis, existentialism, the Beat Movement, Nietzsche, Kafka, and how many and how much else?  That said, this novella was no fun to read.  Indeed, until the final pages dealing with his realtionship with the prostitute Liza, it was a struggle to stay with it.  It was in the final passages dealing with Liza that Dostoevski developed (not the right word) his main philosophical and religious idea of the redeeming, saving power of Love and Compassion, and only Love and Compassion.  Of course, being Dostoevski, he doesn't provide his reader with a happy ending, one where Underground Man and Liza realize that their present and future happiness depends on their acceptance of their mutual Love and Compassion, marry, and live happily ever after.  Noooo, when Underground Man recognizes that downtrodden, exploited Liza offers him Love and Compassion springing from the Love and Compassion he showed to her, he treats her like shit, unspeakably bad, and drives her away, never to be found.  It is thus that he ends up the guy he describes in the opening lines of the story:  "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."  

My next reading challenge is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  I've never read it.  The closest I have gotten is watching Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now almost forty-five years ago, in 1982 or 83.  It was the first Vietnam movie I could get myself to watch since I left RVN in 1966.  It's strongly based of course on Heart of Darkness, Marlon Brando in the role of Kurtz and Capt. Willard, the Marlowe character.  My feelings were still raw about the whole Vietnam lethal fiasco when I watched it, and, though I wtched it on videotape all alone, I remember not being able to watch it all the way through.  I saw it in three sittings.  From the little I know of Heart of Darkness, reading it will also be a rough experience.  I'm reminded of the madness and horror in the mind of Dostoevski's Underground Man and think I'll find it replicated, in spades and in numbers, in Heart of Darkness.

Catheter Abrasion.  I called Dr. Singh's nurse this afternoon to let her and him know that I've decided to go along with the recommended surgery.  I visited with Dr. Ryzka of the Rheumatology Clinic this morning as a follow-up to my poymyalgia rheumatica illiness.  In the course of our discussion of my recent hospitalization, he informed me that he has worked closely with Dr. Singh and commented that Singh is phenomonally knowledgeable and skilled at dealing with arrythmia cardiac problems, and the two of Ruzka's uncle only recently underwent catherter ablations in Poland, and that they felt better afterwards.  I suppose it was in some measure based on Dr. Ryzka's comments that the called Singh's nurse today.  I suppose I am always free to withdraw my consent to the surgery right up to the time I'm in the operating room but I'm unlikely to do so.  I admit nonetheless that I feel some real anxiety about the idea of someone threading a catheter up from my thigh through my torso into my heart, the lower chamber at that, zapping some portion of the inside of my heart, and then pulling the catheter back out through my groin.  I shudder thinking about it.  (I know: Don't think about it. Count your blessings.  A typical catheter ablation in Milwaukee costs about $30,000-$35,000.  I'll not pay anything, because of the VA.)

Last year I wrote, after a reflection on the old scuffed-up shoes in which Pope Francis was buried:

As I read these words, I thought of my mother.  She died 52 years ago, at age 51.  She has been dead now longer than she lived.  After she died, I went into her bedroom for some reason I can no longer remember,  but I remember seeing her work shoes on the floor.  White, clean, but 'broken-in' and well-worn.  I remember seeing them as somehow sacred or perhaps venerable, relics. I was deeply moved just looking at her shoes.  Once she was gone, things that were her's took on a significance they had not had while she was still with us.  Her time was up, shockingly, unbelievably, unimaginably, and so was our time with her. Her shoes, her work uniforms, her clothing, her rosary and prayer book, things that had been so ordinary and unnoteworthy, became imbued with significance and precious.  I think of Emily in Our Town, brought back from the dead, seeing her mother in her kitchen before in earlier times:

Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!... I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another.  I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.  Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. . . Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?

Now that I'm old and living each day in the death zone (the age when no one will say "Oh, he died so young, before his time" but rather "Well, he had a good life"),  I try always to remember and to live Emily's late-found wisdom. Oh, Mama, look at me . . ."  And to remember my Mom's work shoes.  When I see my beloved wife's gardening shoes collected in the garage, or her shoes on the drying pad by the front door, or her shoes in the TV room, way back in my mind, I remember my mother's venerable work shoes and I count my blessings.  When she occasionally says she can't find her shoes, I smile and count my blessings.  When she speaks to me and shares her thoughts about anything, I count my blessings.  Not always, because I am weak, unwise, and inconstant, but usually.  

The "Emily experience" I described has stayed with me this year, and perhaps increased.  Am I being foolish, or chickenhearted, or dramatizing or catastrophizing, thinking that I am getting closer to Death's Door?  Perhaps, but I don't think so.  I was awake and out of bed again last night, sitting on the bedroom recliner, and experiencing rapid heartbeats again, wondering about them, fibrillation? or imagination?  I mentioned to Geri yesterday that the one thing I never really considered to be risk for me was heart disease since, to my knowledge at least, there was no history of it in my family.  Yet here I am still debating whether to undergo the catheter ablation recommended by Dr. Singh.  Here I am wondering whether, if I consent to the surgery, am I trying artificially to prolong my already diminished life, or am I just trying to avoid the pain and discomfort of degenerating heart failure, being bedridden, hooked up to oxygen, a 'basket case'?