6/5/2026

 Friday, June 5, 2026

1912 US Marines invaded Caimanera, Cuba

1967 Six-Day War began between Israel and the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria

1968 Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy, shooting him 3 times and wounding 5 others at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Kennedy died the next day.

2018  President Donald Trump's administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families violated international law, according to the UN

2025 The United States imposed sanctions on 4 ICC judges in retaliation over the war tribunal's issuance of an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

In bed around 9:15, up at 5:20.  0540 122/60/31 126 202.2; 63/71/63, rain throughout the day.

Morning meds at 7 a.m.  Trying to cool down my coffee before sipping it to swallow my bisoprolol, I blew the tiny half-pill of bisoprolol into my coffee😢😷😧.  I drank the coffee and wondered if the powerful beta blocker would have the same effect diluted in coffee as it would have if swallowed with it.  Who knows?

I have started reading Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout.  I guess it's called a novel, but it's more like a collection of short stories connected only by characters each of whom has played some role, however tangential, in Luc Barton's life.  I'm stuck on the fourth story, "The Hit-thumb Theory," about Charlie Macauley.  Charlie is a Vietnam veteran, the only one in the various stories about Lucy Barton and those around her.  The title of the story refers to Charlie's theory that, when one accidentally smashes his thumb with a hammer, there is a split second of painlessness before -WHAM - the pain hits.  In this story, he meets with his sex worker paramour, Robin/Tracy/???,  in a seedy hotel where she hits him up for $10,000 to bail out her druggie son who is in trouble of some unspecified kind with his supplier(s)???  He had gone to the motel intending to tell the woman that he wanted to end their relationship, which he had come to believe was based on mutual love.  They originally met through a personal ad, and Charlie felt right at home with her, more at home than with his own wife and children, or with himself.  The sex worker originally went by the false name "Robin," but purported to reveal her true name of "Tracy" later in their relationship, but in the motel room, she disclosed that even her "real" name was fake.  Charlie ended up giving Robin/Tracy/??? the $10,000 but threatened to kill her if she ever contacted him again.  Afterwards, he checked into a B&B, where

. . .  he waited.  It would come: the wave upon wave of raw pain after a blow like this, oh yes, it would come. . . . And so it was coming closer, yes siree bob.  He knew what it was, he had been there before, and then it would be over.  And yet: It was taking longer than he thought it would.

     You never get used to pain, no matter what anyone says about it.  But now, for the first time, it occurred to him - could it really be the first time this had occurred to him? - that there was something far more frightening: people who no longer felt pain at all.  He had seen it in other men - the blankness behind the eyes, the lack that then defined them.

    So Charlie, a tiny bit, sat up straighter, and he stared pretty hard at that television set.  He waited,  . . . He waited and he hoped, he practically prayed.  O sweet Jesus, let it come.  Dear God, please, could you?  Could you please let it come?

I had a hard time with this story.  I had to read it twice to get a better grasp of its message of inauthenticity and emotional deadening represented by the concluding paragraph.  

 Micaela stopped over for a short visit with her friend and my former law student Dave Geraghty around noon.  Dave graduated from MULS in 1977, in the same class with David Lowe.  Dave and I schmoozed during the entire visit while Geri and Caela did the same.  I was sorry that the visit was so short, though they were on thier way to Michigan for the weekend, or at least part of it.