5/18/2026

 Monday, May 18, 2026

1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state triggered the largest landslide in history, killing 57 people and causing over $1 billion in damage

1994 Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip

In bed at 9:20, awake at 4:15, up at 4:45; 0510 124/62/30 120 204.8; 62/77/50, cloudy, awaiting a thunderstorm around 6 a.m..   

Morning meds at 6:30 a.m.,  and half-dose of Besoprolol at 5:30 a.m.

I've started reading Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies, a memoir about her life and her adventures (for want of a better word) with Faith and religion. As I write these words early Monday morning, I'm only on page 38 of the 276 page book.  She is still in her 20s, living in the San Francisco Bay area, her first book already published by a New York publisher, and seemingly heavily into alcohol,  marijuana, cocaine, psychodelics, sex, and sleeping with other women's husbands.  Her mother left the family years ago to go to law school and then practice law in Hawaii and her father, a writer, has died from a brain cancer.  She is a bit acquainted with Roman Catholicism from her early friendship with one girl, Christian Science from another friendship, and Judaism from some college friends, and she believes in a god/God of some sort.  I am looking forward to reading on.   . . .  By noon, I've read what she call the book's Overture: Lilly Pads,   The lilly pads are metephors for stages in her life during which she moved from having no religious beliefs to becoming a Christian.  Here parents were not only non-religious, but in her father's case, fervently anti-religious.  What struck me most about her early life (she's 72 now) was how dissolute it was.  She makes no effort to minimize it.  Indeed, one wonders whether she exaggerated it to emphasize the significance of her conversion, but I'll take her at her word: she was a diry bird.  What resonated (there's that word again!) most with me was her being attracted to Christianity through a Black church in a ghetto outside Sausalito, and specifically about how moved she was by gospel music. It reminded me of course of my return to Catholic practice, if not belief, at St. Francis of Assisi parish in Milwaukee's inner city (We don't like to call our ghettos ghettos), and of the significance of gospel music.  My friend Roland Wright, about who I wrote yesteday, was a member of the St. Francis choir; indeed, he was one of the only three male members.  I've written more than once about the sterility of most Catholic religious music, at least in my youth.  "Tantum ergo makes your hair grow," "Holy God, we praise thy name," and "Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest, in in our hearts take up thy rest."  Compare these with Protestant gospel songs, Black and White, like "Nobody Know the Troubles I've Seen," "Oh, Happy Day," "Wayfaring Stranger," "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," and so many, many more that come into us through our ears and reach down to our hearts and souls.  They're all simple, all powerful, and all somehow comforting.  One of my favorites is "When He calls, I'm going to live with Jesus," sung by Emmylou Harris:

When darkness fills the valley

Fear and dread strive deep within us

But our burdens soon will be lifted

When these old homes turn to dust

When He calls I'm going to live with Jesus

In His kingdom He welcomes everyone

I shall not fear no more earthly perils

For He will carry me home  

Thy lyrics are so heimish, or heimishe, as it is said in Yiddish.  Not just litteraly "homish," insofar as they speak not of going to Heaven, or onto the Beatific Vision, or to one's Eternal Reward, but rather of 'going to live with Jesus,' who 'welcomes everyone,' and 'will carry me home,' but also in its broader sense of friendly, welcomingn and accepting   Can anyone fail to understand those images, those thoughts?  Can anyone fail to understand, and be moved by the lyrics of "Precious Lord, take my hand"?  "I am tired, I'm weak, I am worn."  I was touched by the fact that it was what she saw and heard (the music, not the sermon) in the little Black congregation in Marin City that opened her up to the fact that there is comfort to be found in religion and religious community.  It's not always true for all of us, but it's surely true for many and probably most of us.

. . . . 

Early this afternoon, I started what Lamott called Part 1 of her memoir, which struck me as sort of denigrating the long "Overture" I had just read, but, in any event, in reading it I could see why she is such a popular author.  Among other reasons, she's very funny.  I laughed as I read the following about an airplane ride she took:

I was in row thirty-eight, between a woman slightly older than I, with limited language skills, and a man my own age who was reading a book by a famous right-wing Christian novelist about the Apocalypse.  A newspaper had asked me to review this book when it first came out, because its author and I are both Christians - although as I pointed out in my review, he's one of those right-wing Christians who thinks that Jesus is coming back next Tuesday right after lunch, and I am one of those left-wing Christians who thinks that perhaps this author is just spiritualizing his own hysteria.

"How is it?" I asked, pointing jovially to the man's book, partly to be friendly, partly to gauge where he stood politically.

"This is one of the best books I've ever read," he replied.  "You should read it."  I nodded.  I remember saying in the review that the book was hard-core right-wing paranoid anti-Semitic homophobic misogynistic propaganda - not to put too fine a point on it.  The man smiled and went back to reading. 

It got funnier from there. I think I'm in for a very enjoyable reading experience.   (She later described her born-again seatmate as "rather prim and tense, maybe a little like David Eisenhower with a spastic colon" and the other as possibly from "one Latvian parent and one Korean.  She sounded a little like Latka Gravas, the Andy Kaufman character on Taxi . . ." 

The closest I've gotten to asceticism.  All my life I have been drawn to read about ascetics, especially Christian ascetics, like the early Church desert fathers, monks, Thomas Merton, but also the Jewish Essenes, and the Muslim dervishes.  I have sometimes daydreamed in these pages of living in the North Woods, on the Chain of Lakes, and living a semi-ascetic live, no TV, smart phone, internet, or radio, a more isolated Thoreau at Waldon Pond and Annie Dillard at Tinker Creek.  It's all imaginary, of course, because in real life I have always been terribly self-indulgent.  From the time I was a child stuffing my face with Hostess cup cakes up until the present, I have failed at self-discipline of all sorts.  I've never liked exercise qua exercise.  As a kid, I enjoyed playing baseball and basketball, and as a young adult, I enjoyed playing handball and racketball, but I never got into excercise as such, exercise for exercise's sake, like jogging or pumping iron, or responsible eating for health's sake.  For long periods of my life, I drank too much alcohol, especially wine.  For much of my adult life, I was way overweight, rotund as a hot air balloon.  I still am way overweight.  When I underwent the physical examination for the NROTC scholarship in my senior year of high school, in 1959, I was 2 pounds under the minimum weight requirement for my height.  The hospital corpsman lied on my record, and told me to eat a couple of bananas went I got home.  I don't know how long it took me after I was discharged from the Marine Corps to become a Humphrey Pennyworth, with bottons popping off my shirts, but once I blimped out, I never returned to my "imperially slim body," as my Marine friend Dick Coffman used to describe his physique. (Dick seemed to disappear into the CIA when he was discharged from the Corps.). In any event, I think of my historic self-indulgence this morning as I reflect on the fact that I wantonly allowed myself  a breakfast of three medium-sized slices of sourdough toast with butter and strawberry preserves rather than my normal two I restrict myself to, not to reduce my intake of calories, but to control my intake of sodium, which is to say, salt.  I've been on a low-sodium diet for 5 months now.  Today marks the 5 month anniversary of my daily recording of my weight, blood pressure, pulse, and glucose count every morning upon waking up.  Regarding the weigh-in, it's to see if I "note a 2-3 pound weight gain over 1-2 days or 5 pounds in a week."  If I do, it's a sign of fluid retention in my heart and/or lungs signaling a problem and I'm supposed to call my CHF nurse  practitioner at the VA, Maggie Angeli.   >Sodium/salt = >fluid retention = >ongestive heart failure trouble.  Since almost everything that is "processed" contains salt, restricting sodium means avoiding a lot of stuff I've regularly overindulged in throughout my libertine life, including bread.  Now I even consume Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted No Salt bread that tastes like cardboard but serves as a salt-free vehicle for salt-free butter and salt-free preserves.  This is what my life has come to.😨 I eat a lot more fruit than I used to: oranges, apples, bananas, and grapes, and I've come to very much enjoy them, but they no way take the place of salami sandwiches or of Campbell's or Progresso canned soups😱 or my corned been hash with melted cheese I used to each almost every morning. 😰. In addition to rationing my sodium intake, I also have to ration my water intake, no more than 64 ounces each day.  My fear is that I may be taking in even less than the ration amount of both sodium and water which makes me dehydrated.   The congestive heart failure is complicated by cardiac arrytahmia problems, ventricular tachycardia and bradycardia.  That's what landed me as an in-patient at the VA hospital for 5 days in March, that or more likely the medication prescribed to address it.  The condition itself and its medication leads to another grim step on the way to total asceticism: no wine!  No nightly glass of California zinfandel, sipped slowly over a period of 3 or even 3 hours!  Egad!  Gadzooks!  How much asceticism can an old sybarite take?!?

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? Joseph N. Welch, June 9, 1954 to Joseph McCarthy.  Most of the world today to Donald Trump, Todd Blanche, and the American government in which they 'serve.'

Justice Department Creates Unusual $1.8 Billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’, Wall Street Journal, today.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration created an unusual settlement fund valued at nearly $1.8 billion to compensate people who claim the federal government weaponized the legal system against them, a move announced in tandem with President Trump’s decision to withdraw a lawsuit seeking billions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service.

Trump is also dropping two other claims against the government that he runs, one that sought damages for the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and another about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which loomed over much of his first term.

The president—along with his namesake company and sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump—will receive a formal apology but no monetary payment or damages as part of the settlement, the Justice Department said.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will appoint a five-person commission to administer the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which will last through Dec. 15, 2028, and have the power to issue apologies and pay people who submit claims. Trump will be able to fire commission members. 

The Justice Department offered few details about who would qualify for payouts, but Trump allies and supporters—including many charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol—are expected to seek slices of the fund. A memo signed by Blanche doesn’t specifically address whether members of the Trump family can make claims from the fund. 

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” said Blanche, who previously worked as a criminal defense lawyer for Trump, including in a pair of cases brought by former special counsel Jack Smith.

This is happening right in front of our eyes.  Words fail me. 

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.