7/22/2026

 Wednesday, July 22, 2026

1946 Militant Zionist organization Irgun bombed the British headquarters for Palestine in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people and injuring 46

1991 Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to killing 17 men in 1978

2025  Trump announced a trade deal with Japan that would let Japan invest $550 billion into the United States and reduce the tariffs to 15%

2025 Trump announced a trade agreement with the Philippines that set a 19% tariff on Philippine exports to the United States, while U.S. goods entering the Philippines would be exempt from tariffs. 

In bed at 9:15, up at 6:05; 0615 203.0  122/72/61. 118. 203.0; 58/71/56, sunny morning, then partly cloudy.  

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m.    

I've come to a sad realization, an understanding that the reason I am not enjoying reading A Confederay of Dunces is that I see myself in the shlubby protaganist, Ignatius J. Reilly.  I'm quite confident that when I read it back in the 1980s,  I never identified myself with Reilly.  Now, however, I do, especially in his habit of writing down and saving his thoughts, his personal judgments, about the world, and Life, Modern Culture, and Other Human Beings.  Reilly is  a supreme marsicssist, with opinions about everything and everybody.  He is the center of his universe.  He thinks his opinions, his judgments, his analyses, are important enough to record and save.  In this regard,and othes, he is pathetic and delusional, but how am I different?  In one week, I will have completeda 4 years, almost 1500 days, of  daily journaling, but to what end?  I have often written little essays about why I engage in this effort and usually end up wondering whether it is not simply a futile effort to avoid death?  To have something of me to survive my corpse's becoming part of the composted soil in Fortest Home Cemetery's 'green burial' prairie?  This, even though I've long recognized that the few thousand pages of the journal that I've taken pains to print and save in looseleaf binders will all end up in an incinerator or landfill once I'm gone, along with my drawings and paintings, and other evidence of my existence  Vanitas, vanitatem, et omnia vanitas.  How am I different from Donald J. Trump vainly and foolishly trying to leave his imprint all over Washington, D.C., to survive his time in the White House, or Ignatius J. Reilly?