7/20/2026

 Monday, July 20, 2026

1961 "Stop The World - I Want To Get Off" premiered

1969 Apollo 11 lunar module carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin lands on the surface of the Moon.

1988 Michael Dukakis was selected as the Democratic nominee

In bed at 8:45, up at 5:55, then fell back to sleep after taking 'vitals' until 7:50; 0615 120/73/63 105 202.8; 69/85/60. cloudy,, AQI = 130 Unhealthy for sensitive groups,

Morning meds at ? a.m.    

Geri left for a week's visit in Urbana, IL, with her college buddy and near-lifelong friend, Kate Donovan.  Kate was widowed a few years ago when her husband, Mike, a physician, died.  Within the last year or so, she has had a issues with her heart, and recently had some sort of medical procedure on it (not an ablation.). With Geri gone all day, I've been pretty listless and brain-fogged, uninterested in writing anything until now, which is 8:15 p.m.  I find myself questioning again whether my journaling days are coming to an end.  I hope the answer is 'no,' because I fear that when I stop filling a part of my day with writing something, anything requiring some focussed thought, it will signal the end of any significant mental functioning and my descent into some form of senility.  I may be there already, semi-vegetating, sitting quietly, just trying to avoid pain and discomfort, not thinking of anything, nor meditating, just looking out the window at the birds and the passers-by outside.  I still check the headlines each morning in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and often the Washington Post, but I read very few of the stories under the headlines.  I avoid burdening my heart and brain with more and more news of the depredations, sins, lawlessness, and corruptions of Trump and his cabal of fellow crooks in his cabinet.  What's the point, I wonder.  I check the daily editorials and op-eds, but read only a few.  Ditto the articles in the online editions of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harper's.  Yesterday I gave up on reading Middlemarch, finding the 19th century literary prose of George Eliot, and the focus on the British gentry's social mores concerning "proper" and "right" marriage partners more than this second-generation descendent of Irish peasants can tolerate.  Now I'm in a quardary over what to read next, wanting to find a good story (I'm like a child: 'Tell me a story!') but thinking I'm in a bit of a rut with Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett.  I suspect that my disinterest in reading news stories may come from the same source as my lagging interest in writing in this journal, i.e. a diminishing interest in the world, in life.