7/7/2026

 Tuesday, July 7, 2026

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:40; 0555 140/77/62 129 202.6,  0605 132/74/62;  59/80/57, sunny day ahead

Morning meds at 6:50 a.m., and Eliquis at 6:40 a.m and p.m.

One year ago today, I wrote: 

I like books.  I can no longer read them, but I like them.  I used to enjoy reading them, and even if I didn't care to read a particular book, I appreciated that it was a book.  I appreciated that an author went to the considerable trouble to write it and that someone thought enough of it to publish and distribute it.  I like new books and I like used books.  I have mixed feelings about marking up books - underlining, highlighting, marginalia, etc, but I even like used books that a prior owner has marked up.  A book that has been marked up is a book the reader thought about as she read it, a book she probably intended to keep and not to resell.  It is a book the reader thought she would or might return to with her markups as guideposts to passages of some significance.   I even like it when a prior owner has inscribed her name on the book, and sometimes the year of acquisition.  It suggests the importance of ownership: "This is MY book."  I generally prefer hardbound books to paperbacks, which seem too disposable.  I especially prefer leatherbound books and books in slipcases.  Their bindings and protective cases proclaim, "This is an important book."  Leatherbound books also have heft, which I appreciate - not too much heft, like my leatherbound War and Peace, but enough to signify permanence and importance.  I am also a sucker for collections of books, even ones that were traditional inducements to join the Book-of-the-Month Club.  like Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization.  I managed to hold off on acquiring that magnum opus but did acquire from other sources the works of Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, Elie Wiesel, and Saul Bellow.

I have a good number of leatherbound and slipcased books that I have acquired over many decades.  Many of them I have read; many I have not read.  Some I have gone into more than once, mostly collections of poetry, but also The Great Gatsby, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Crime and Punishment, and even The Iliad ("rosey-fingered dawn"). 

I think about books this morning because I opened my laptop to a page on Ebay with THE COLLECTED TALES OF A. E. COPPARD, offered for $19.95 plus $4.95 shipping.    

I sometimes wonder what will become of my books (paintings journal, memoir)  once I am dead.

I stopped writing this, intending to return to it, when I left the house the VA Urology Clinic and Mental Health Clinic ("subdued mood").  I'm told I need surgery on my penis.  If I wasn't depressed when I left, I am now.   

I feel a bit foolish as I reread these words a year later, because (1) since my last cataract surgery, I've been on a book-reading binge, and (2) I've had the surgery on my penis, an ill-named 'meatontomy', and it was no big deal, no pun intended.  I hadn't dreaded it as much as I dreaded the catheter ablation of my heart, but I was no Braveheart for either operation.

Since CBG got me reading Theo of Golden in the middle of February, I've read The Last Sweet Mile also by Allen Levi; The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Erhlich; The Idiot and Notes From Undeground by Dostoevski; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; The Correspondent by Virginia Evans; 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff; And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and My Friends by Fredrik Backman; The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret; Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott; The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Things We Never Say, My Name if Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, Oh, William, and Lucy By The Sea by Elizabeth Strout; Stoner by John Williams; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Lonsesome Dove by Larry McMurtry; and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.  I have Robert Sapolsky's Determined on the floor next to my recliner.  I don't expect to read the whole work, but only enough of it to give me a better grasp of this argument and the evidence he offers in support of it.

The point is simply that last year's journal entry on this date shows how very little I know even of myself, much less of anything or anyone else.    

The Secret of Elizabeth Strout’s Appeal: How she writes best sellers that are also critical darlings by Ed Begley in the Books section of the current The Atlantic magazine.

    How does she do it? Not just the neat trick of beguiling highbrow critics while at the same time pleasing millions of readers who don’t care about literary bona fides. The real feat is harpooning the reader artlessly (or so it seems), with language as plain as a Congregational church, a paucity of dramatic incident, and a cast of characters no more exotic than your neighbors. They aren’t exotic, her characters, but they’re quirky—some cantankerous, some bafflingly passive, all convincingly real. Thinking about them, I keep coming back to the bedrock of her work, what she has called “the singularity and mystery of each person.” She shows us how strange we are, and how similar (an insight verging on homily but thankfully sugar-free). She’s not a minimalist, but Elizabeth Strout does more with less than any writer I can think of.

Mary Gordon, When Death Comes, 

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular, . . . 

How hard it is to stay aware of "the singularity and mystery of each person."  I believe in it; I know intellectually that each of us is unique.  I know that each of us has his own history, her own story, their own anomalous salience.  I've become more aware of our commonness and our singularity since becoming a regular at the VA Medical Center here in Milwaukee, but also just from shopping at Walmart, Costco, Sendik's, and MetroMarket.   In my old age, I am more aware of the people around me in the aisles, the checkout lines, and in the parking lot.  More aware that each one has or had particular parents that had particular effects on their characters and personalities, had particular teachers and other influencers in their lives, had particular religious and political influences in their lives (or not).  I'm not sure why, but this awareness of our singularity, that each of us is shaped by unique forces in our lives, different from the forces in other folks' lives, inclines me to agree with Sapolsky's position that "free will" is a myth, that every choice or decision we make in our lives flows inexorably from all the combined forces at work on us the moment that we think we are making a choice, a free decision.       

“You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”

“Thus, essentially every aspect of your childhood—good, bad, or in between—factors over which you had no control, sculpted the adult brain you have”

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe. 

I think you get to a time in life where by definition stuff's turning to quicksand and wherever you can get some solid footing of the familiar suddenly becomes real comforting.

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

Sapolsky has also written: "We like our individuality, we like the mysteriousness of us, the essentialism of us, and it can be alarming to see the biological gears turning underneath."  In some sense, the theory of determinism seems to undercut my previous assertion that I believe in the uniqueness and singularity of each of us,  Each of us comes into existence uniquely and is exposed to many unique influences as well as many common influences.  How we emerge and evolve is unique to each of us, and "free will" would seem to have nothing to do with who we are.

Patio time.  It's a beautiful day, and I spent some time sitting on the patio enjoying the view and listening to the birds, along with Merlin, who identified goldfinches, sparrows, cardinals, doves, house finches, robins, chickadees, and a red-winged blackbird.  From inside the house, I watch the birds.  On the patio, I listen.

Two years ago on this date I wrote:

Should I continue?  At the end of this month, I will have made entries in this journal every day for two years, except for the weeks I was laid low by polymyalgia rheumatica, a period from April 22nd until May 13th.  At the beginning of that span, I wrote "Is the journaling coming to an end?  Losing interest, losing energy, losing focus.  There is a broader significance to these losses."  The broader significance then was my nightly thoughts of suicide, a repeat of my experiences years ago with severe pain from Hunner's ulcers.  Now the ulcers are taken care of, at least for now, and the PMR is taken care of, at least for now, but I have that challenge of losing interest, losing energy, and losing focus, finding it hard to think of what to write about.  Or I think of topics, like the challenge of trying the Christian ethic and the impossibility of living it, or the moral challenge of living in the world we live in, with an economy based on the production and sale of billions of consumer goods filling merchants' shelves all over the 'developed' world, billions devoted to military budgets and the production and deployment of ever more lethal weapons with which to kill one another, the demands of climate change, etc.  How much do I sin taking a drive in the country?  using hot water rather than the cold water out of the tap for kitchen clean-up, keeping the thermostat up in the winter and down in the summer, maintaining a large lawn requiring mowing, fertilizing, and herbicides on .62 of an acre, and on and on.  Limousine Liberal, virtue signaling, phony baloney, hypocrite.

My writing has become like Joe Biden's and Donald Trump's speech: discursive, incoherent, meandering, and, as David Branch always reminded me, prolix.  Now I have Grammerly for Safari pointing out to me how wordy my writing is.  

Am I writing in this journal just to fill time, because I am otherwise so inactive?  Especially when I am up in the middle of every night?  Am I talking to myself?

My brother-in-law and friend, Jimmy Aquavia, received the Last Sacraments yesterday.  He turned 92 last month. He has suffered from Alzheimer's Disease for many years and lost his wife, Nancy in February, 2018.  He lived down the road from us from 2019 until Labor Day, 2022, when he moved to Alexandria, VA, to be near his daughter Katherine, his firstborn and only daughter and holder of his powers of attorney.  When Nancy was struggling through her final illness at home, Geri drove down to eastern Tennessee to be with Jimmy, Katherine, and the sons.  As another act of sisterly love, she composed an elegant letter to Jimmy encouraging him to move up here to the Milwaukee area to be near her.  He lived in the Newcastle senior living complex in Mequon for almost 4 years, with Geri visiting him, taking him to all his doctor appointments, and otherwise caring for his many needs that required her personal attention.  He dined with us every Sunday and on holidays, and we watched all University of Kansas basketball games together.  He was my friend as well as my brother-in-law.  Two old men sharing memories, reflections, fears, frustrations, commiserations, and chronic hearing, memory, and bladder problems.  I was saddened to learn that Jimmy is on his way out, though with the mixed emotions that inevitably accompany the death of one whose long life has become more of a curse than a blessing.   I hope his passing will be peaceful.  I am thankful that in his last days and years, he was blessed with the care of his sister and then of Katherine and her wonderful husband, Jordan.