9/14/2026

 Monday, September 14, 2026

2007 Restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass were officially removed in the Roman Catholic Church as Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum took effect

2018 Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort pled guilty to conspiracy charges and agreed to cooperate with Government investigations

In bed at 9, awake at 1:45, unable to sleep, moved to LZB, w/ persistent thoughts of Honor Flight, Mullen gravesite, age, etc.; 0230 203.6 126/79/59 (averages of 4 erratic readings, see today's iPhone vitals Notes); 51/69/5, sunny/partly cloudy, windy afternoon w/ Beach Hazard Warning of waves 5 to 8 feet, "strong structural and longshore currents expected with rip currents possible."  I was awake and out of bed from 2:15 a.m. until about 6 a.m., when I went back to bed until about 8.  

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Entresto at 5:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

Duke Ellington's Sophisticated Lady has been earworming me lately, including in the middle of the night while I couldn't sleep.  I thought about why, for so long, it has been my favorite song, concluding that it's for the same reason I enjoy Elizabeth Strout novels so much.  The song and the novels are about an essential loneliness in life, the fact that most of us at least have some deep loneliness and suffering or pain within us, and that we can never completely know other persons, nor can they completely know us.  In the same vein, however, I thought of how much I like Andrew Lloyd Webber's  Love Changes Everything, because I think its lyrics are about much the same thing.  Love lifts us up and lets us down.  I suppose this was also Jesus's central teaching, that is, about the centrality of love in living.  Paul drove the message home in his epistles: And the greatest of these is charity, 1 Corinthians 13:13, and "If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have charity, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have charity, I am nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:1-1-2.  Isn't it the same message in Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes's song Love Lift Us Up?

Who knows what tomorrow brings / In a world few hearts survive 

All I know is the way I feel / When it's real, I keep it alive

The road is long / There are mountains in our way

But we climb a step every day

Lord lift us up where we belong

Where the eagles cry, on a mountain high

Lord lift us up where we belong

Where the eagles cry, on a mountain high

Lord lift us up where we belong

Far from the world below, up where the clear winds blow

There seems to be much the same message in much art and in much of Christianity, i.e., that it is love itself that is the redemptive, saving force in life.  Wasn't this also the teaching of the Buddha?  Loving kindness as the route to nirvana?  Loving-kindness → diminished hatred and self-centeredness → compassion and equanimity → clearer perception of reality → liberation from suffering (Nirvana).   I know, of course, that Buddha, Jesus, Duke Ellington, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Joe Cocker weren't singing from the same page of the same hymnal, but isn't there an underlying truth that they were all focused on?  The same truth that the echocardiogram tech and I discussed during my procedure at the VA a few days ago: that the reason for being is to help (love) others?  I skip for now the correlative truth that love carries with it always the risk and inevitability of loss and suffering because it's 5 in the morning and my brain is scattered and addled.  In any case, I thought I would record for my future self my thoughts on a sleepless night at the start of my 86th year.  

ChatGPT.  I spent a lot of time with this AI chatbot trying to discover some more information about my maternal grandmother, Catherine O'Shea.  It was a very long and ultimately unsuccessful process, but the chatbot did discover a ton of information about the Healy clan in and around Kilgarvan, Kerry, Ireland.  The searches the program did were not the 2 or 3-second affairs that I have mentioned in the past, but rather a long, tedious-for-a-human-being process of sorting and sifting among a great many Healy's and Dennis Healy's in the townlands around Kilgarvan, a bit like searching for a John Smith/Jon Smith/John or Jon Smyth,/ etc. in all the English-speaking countries of the world.  Maybe worse, as I noted in a footnote in my memoir:

Irish names are tricky things.  The “Healy” name, for example, in its various permutations, could be: O’hEalathaigh, O’Heluightho, O’Healeithe, Healey, Hely, Haly, Heely, O”Healy, O’Healey, O”Hely, O’Haly, O’Haley: you get the idea.

On the other hand, I was surprised that the program couldn't even find a digitized record of Catherine's marriage license, or death certificate, or any information regarding her emigration from Ireland and immigration to America.   Nor could it definitively identify Dennis's birthplace or which branch of the Healy clan in and around Kilgarvan he belonged to. It was disappointing.  I'm wondering if the Mormon genealogy services could succeed when the AI failed.