5/28/23

 Sunday, May 28, 2023

In bed at an unnoted time after falling asleep on the recliner during a strange Olivia Coleman movie set in Ireland, au at 6:07 with nasty back pain, emerging from a misty dream set in Washington with a group associated with Rastafarian music.  49℉, high of 67℉, wind N at 4 mph, 1 to 7 mph and gusts up to 12 mph.  The sun rose at 5:16 and will set at 8:21, 15+4.

Double Dip at my age?  I started my day thinking of the upcoming 'double dip' colonoscopy & upper GI endoscopy on 6/1, wondering if this is a good idea for a guy in his 80s.  The internet tells me 85 is the widely-accepted cutoff age. with those 75 to 85 in a gray zone depending on health, history of colon cancer in the family, and history of polyps in past exams.  With my Dad's colon cancer and my history of polyps, I'm a fit candidate.  Do I feel good or bad about this?  

I am reminded of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel's article in The Atlantic (October 2014) "Why I Hope to Die at 75."  For some reason (why???) I printed a hard copy of the article and saved it in a file folder. 

"Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic."

 He was 57 and in excellent health when he wrote the article.  

The picture he paints of life for someone my age isn't pretty. 

"Half of people 80 and older [live] with functional limitations. A third of people 85 and older with Alzheimer’s. . .  The good news is that we have made major strides in reducing mortality from strokes. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of deaths from stroke declined by more than 20 percent. The bad news is that many of the roughly 6.8 million Americans who have survived a stroke suffer from paralysis or an inability to speak. And many of the estimated 13 million more Americans who have survived a “silent” stroke suffer from more-subtle brain dysfunction such as aberrations in thought processes, mood regulation, and cognitive functioning. Worse, it is projected that over the next 15 years there will be a 50 percent increase in the number of Americans suffering from stroke-induced disabilities. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon is repeated with many other diseases. . . Aware of our diminishing capacities, we choose ever more restricted activities and projects, to ensure we can fulfill them. Indeed, this constriction happens almost imperceptibly. Over time, and without our conscious choice, we transform our lives. We don’t notice that we are aspiring to and doing less and less. And so we remain content, but the canvas is now tiny. The American immortal, once a vital figure in his or her profession and community, is happy to cultivate avocational interests, to take up bird watching, bicycle riding, pottery, and the like. And then, as walking becomes harder and the pain of arthritis limits the fingers’ mobility, life comes to center around sitting in the den reading or listening to books on tape and doing crossword puzzles. And then …"

Emanuel's personal policy, he says at age 57, is

"At 75 and beyond, I will need a good reason to even visit the doctor and take any medical test or treatment, no matter how routine and painless. And that good reason is not “It will prolong your life.” I will stop getting any regular preventive tests, screenings, or interventions. I will accept only palliative—not curative—treatments if I am suffering pain or other disability.  This means colonoscopies and other cancer-screening tests are out—and before 75. If I were diagnosed with cancer now, at 57, I would probably be treated, unless the prognosis was very poor. But 65 will be my last colonoscopy. . . What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. . ."

So here am I with my chronic pain in the ass looking forward to the acute pain in the ass that comes with a colonoscopy, or at least the preparatory cleansing it requires.  And an upper GI endoscopy prompted by my GERD and Barrett's Esophagus.  And having recently sought out and obtained my SIXTH covid-19 vaccination.  What am I, nuts???  I'm like the Pushmi-Pullyu in Doctor Doolittle, not wanting to live as I do but medically pushing off death.  Which is it? Wihat's the status of my Living Will and my HCPOA?  I need to get some focus but I'm not prepared to grapple with all this before breakfast and before reading the papers on a sunny Sunday morning of a holiday weekend.  Maybe not ever.

Dinneer With Caela and Saul, B'Thumped.  Lovely.

5/27/23

 Saturday, May 27, 2023

In bed at 10:40 and up at 6:10 from a dream involving surviving a plane crash on the way to Paris with Mike Hogan, Janine Geske, et al. We had Lilly with us and had to protect her from a feral canine of some sort.  Mike and Janine were tending a baby, derived from the baby in A Man Called Otto.  46℉, high of 66℉, sunny first ½ of the day, cloudy thereafter, the wind almost calm, 1 mph to 8 mph today, gusts up to 12.  The sun rose at 5:17 and will set at 8:29, 15+2.

A Man Called Otto starring Tom Hanks and produced by his wife was our television choice last night.  The storyline centered on Otto Anderson played unconvincingly by Hanks, who was miscast in the role of chronically unhappy crabby misanthrope embittered by the loss of his wife to cancer and the earlier loss of his child in utero in a bus crash. The teaching of the film is solid, i.e., that personal misery and profound loneliness are overcome only by helping others deal with their challenges, their misfortunes, and their miseries.  I need to keep this in mind when I throw an occasional pity party for myself in old age, especially after Kitty died, and now Tom.  Otto needed a Kitty in his life to tell him to SNAP OUT OF IT as Loretta Castorini shouted as she slapped Ronny Cammareri in the great Moonstruck.  Otto's Kitty/Loretta was his across-the-street neighbor Marisol.  The film was produced by Tom Hanks' wife Rita Wilson and I suspect it was a labor of love for both of them because of its message/teaching but it surely would have been a better production with someone other than the pretty lovable Tom Hanks as the protagonist.

Damoclesian Debt Default continues to loom overhead.  After watching the movie last night I turn, ed into MSNBC and CNN to catch the news about debt negotiations.  Joe Biden had said earlier in the evening that he expected some good news before midnight which gave me a little but not a whole lot of optimism.  Wrong.  Neither Lawrence O'Donnell's time slot nor CNN's carried a news program.  Lawrence was replaced by a rerun of Nicolle Wallace's show from 6 hours earlier and CNN had a special report on Uvalde and school shootings by Anderson Cooper.  A check of the headlines in this morning's NYT and WaPo revealed there is still no agreement, probably because Janet Yellin after the securities market closed extended the X-Day from June 1 to June 5.  

Poetry ain't beanbag.  I wish I had been more exposed to poetry as a child, not doggerel stuff - roses are red, violets are blue - but real poetry.  Perhaps this is a foolish thought.  Perhaps children, precisely because they are children, are just too inexperienced in life to experience poetry, the kind of art that touches your heart, that lifts you up or punches you in the belly.  I think of Walt Whitman's Come Up From the Fields, Father and Maggie Smith's Good Bones, but also of inspirational poems like St. Francis' Prayer and the classic Serenity Prayer and 'easy' poems like some by Robert Frost.  I suppose the same thing is true of great literature generally.  Poems like novels and short stories mean different things to us on different readings; 'meaning' changes with the age and the life experiences of the reader.  I suspect it wasn't until I went off to college that I started getting into poetry, perhaps from John Pick's histrionic English Lit classes, (Ode to a Grecian Urn, the importance of language: c'est bon vs. das ist gut and the projectile hocker) or Roger Parr's Chaucer class, or Father Bruckner's class on the English Catholic Literary Revivalclass and my introduction to the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. 'Glory be to God for dappled things / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow . . ."  How and when would one begin to try to inculcate develop an appreciation of poetry in a child?  I suppose the same question obtains with respect to developing an appreciation of the study of history and philosophy and religion, subjects that involve judgment, a sensitive understanding informed by expereince(s), something more than the 3 Rs of 'reading, 'riting', and 'rithmatic.'  In my elementary, high school, and undergraduate education we were exposed to the 4th R, religion, or as it was styled at Marquette, theology.  As to that R, the verb I eschewed above, 'inculcate', was the appropriate one, implantation by repetition or brain-washing.  "We are tattooed in our cradles . . ." and "You can take the boy out of the church but . . ."  But I'm rambling.

I came across a short poem by Walt Whitman some time ago and tried to compose a knockoff of it as follows:

Queries to My Seventieth Year by Walt Whitman died at 72

Approaching, nearing, curious,

Thou dim, uncertain spectre - bringest thou life or death?

Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis & heavier?

Or placid skies and sun?  Wilt stir the waters yet?

Or haply cut me short for good?  Or leave me here as now,

Dull, parrot-like and old, with cracked voice harping, screeching?

Queries past my Eightieth Year by Chuck Clausen died at . . 

Approaching, nearing, inescapable,

The clear and certain spectre - diminished life and death.

Touch, taste, hearing, sight, and smell abate.

Mobility, memory, and sense of self  dull and fail

And surely cut me short.  I cannot stay as now.

Amyloid, plaque, or neoplasm sure to see to that.

Working on composing that knockoff was a very interesting experience which I relived when I found the notebook page on which I worked, full of alternative words and phrases, me trying to get just the right and accurate expression of a thought.  It was challenging and reminded me of the challenge always facing poets doing poetry, finding the precise word to express the precise thought, the precise memory, the precise emotion. This morning I came across another person's knockoff of a more famous poem.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

Interpretation of a Poem by Frost

BY THYLIAS MOSS

A young black girl stopped by the woods,

so young she knew only one man: Jim Crow

but she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister.

The woods were his and she respected his boundaries

even in the absence of fence.

Of course she delighted in the filling up

of his woods, she so accustomed to emptiness,

to being taken at face value.

This face, her face eternally the brown

of declining autumn, watches snow inter the grass,

cling to bark making it seem indecisive

about race preference, a fast-to-melt idealism.

With the grass covered, black and white are the only options,

polarity is the only reality; corners aren’t neutral

but are on edge.

She shakes off snow, defiance wasted

on the limited audience of horse.

The snow does not hypnotize her as it wants to,

as the blond sun does in making too many prefer daylight.

She has promises to keep,

the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,

the promise that she ride the horse only as long

as it is willing to accept riders,

the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,

the promise to her face that it not be mistaken as shadow,

and miles to go, more than the distance from Africa to Andover,

more than the distance from black to white

before she sleeps with Jim.

A Memory of Lake Como Triggered Under Patio Chair.

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower -  but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sunny Saturday Afternoon Drive in the Country.  I was blessed today by being able to take a leisurely drive through northern Ozaukee County and southern Sheboygan County.  I had thought I would drive up to Waldo but got only as far north as Random Lake and the environs east  (Six Mile Road) and west (Waubeka).  I drove through the main road into Port Washington and admired, as I always do, the beautiful Painted Ladies, the big Victorian homes.  The beauty found in those rural areas inevitably almost takes my breath away.  It thrills and elates me, hokey as it sounds.  Acres and acres of rich farmland, some lying fallow, some already producing what I'm guessing is a first crop of alfalfa or perhaps even soybeans.  No sign of corn yet., except for last year's stubble in many fields.  Many stands of deciduous and evergreen trees in full leaf, thousands and thousands of lush green trees and hundreds of dead trees, most probably ashes, more noticeable now against the living green trees than they were before the living trees leafed out.  Also occasional clusters of Dame's Rocket invasive wildflowers and wild poppies alongside the country roads., I drove past two large farms bearing the family names of former students of mine at the law school,  the Depies Farm on Jay Road (Kathy Depies, Law 1994?) and the Opitz Dairy  Farm on County I and Shady Lane Road, due west of our former home on Deerfield Drive in the Town of Saukville.  When the wind was westerly after Farmer Opitz manured his fields, we were visited by the fragrance of the fertilized fields, a matter of pleasure to me and of displeasure to Geri.  Charlie Opitz was a student of mine in the 1970s and my main recollection of him was my being insulted by his brazen reading of a newspaper during one of my classes.  He was admitted to the bar in 1975 and disbarred in 1990 by the Wisconsin supreme court for multiple serious incidents of professional misconduct.  In any event, on the drive I enjoyed seeing farmhouses, barns, sheds, silos, tractors, tillers, cultivators, seeders, etc., and most of all the gorgeous gently rolling farmland. some green, some brown.

    I felt some sadness on this excursion, as I always do, remembering how my father and I enjoyed going for rides in the Wisconsin countryside, just enjoying the beautiful farmhouses, outbuildings, and fields.  He and I were the only ones who derived deep pleasure from a simple drive in the country.  Now he is gone of course and if I suggest a ride in the country to anyone, I get a pleasant 'no thanks' but with an unspoken subtext of "Are you kidding me?."  I felt a bit of grief too when I drove past The Bog Golf Club west of Grafton on CTH I where Tom St. John took me golfing as his guest many years ago.  I have misplaced a favorite framed snapshot of Tom deep in some heavily-vegetated recess where he had hooked his drive, about to stroke one of his famous recovery strokes.  I looked for the photo when I prepared my eulogy for his funeral but couldn't find it.  In any case, the memories of Tom and me at The Bog and my Dad and me on the back country roads were bittersweet.

     I was also struck, again as I always am on my country drives, by the deep gulf between the folks who live in the rural and small-town areas and the people like me who live in cities and nearby suburbs.  Two different and very separate worlds, much of the separation based on race, especially the Black-White divide, but also on population density and the need for regulations..  Is the divide bridgeable?  I don't think so.   I suspect it will get more unbridgeable as cities become more the home of Blacks and Browns and immigrants and younger people and the country and small towns stay Whiter and older.  Urban liberals like me need to get into their cars and out into the country roads where rural and small towns live within an hour or so of their urban roots to see and sense what is so radically different about how the countryfolk live.  Of course, the converse is true: rural and small-town folks ought to drive through the cities to gain a sense of what conditions there require in terms of active government intervention to make life sustainable in an elbow-to-elbow environment.  Can the two sets of Americans find common ground on which to fashion an effective government governing the whole diverse polity?  I don't think so.  Alas.

5/26/23

 Friday, May 26, 2023

In bed at 10:30, up at 5:50 from some weird immediately forgotten dream set in Ireland.  43℉, high of 61℉, sunny, calm day, wind only 4 mph,k 2 to 7 mph during the day and gusts only up to 11 mph.  No rain expected for 10 days.  The sun rose at 5:17 and will set at 8:19, 15+1.

Crooked Banks, Crooked Bankers.  JPMorgan Chase was Jeffrey Epstein's bank for 15 years during which he was found guilty of being a sexual predator likely to re-offend.  His estate is being sued by the U. S. Virgin Islands, where he owned a private island on which he carried on his predation, and by some of his victims.  The plaintiffs allege that the massive bank was complicit in funding Epstein's long history of sexual abuse and child sex trafficking.  The banker in charge of Epstein as a client admitted she was informed on at least 6 different occasions of his criminal and civil law history but did not think it was her responsibility to remove him as a client, launch an inquiry into his accounts or refer them to compliance officials. JPMorgan has a separate process for dealing with client-related legal issues, she said.  Her supervisor supervisor and one of Epstein’s close friends, did investigate the allegations against Epstein by asking the financier about them, according to records read during the deposition.  Where did Epstein move his accounts when JPMorganChase finally booted him?  Where else, to an even more crooked bank, Deutsche Bank!  And let us not forget the bank that, alas, holds the mortgage on our house, Wells Fargo.  In 2016, the bank was hit with a record fine for covertly opening some 2 million unauthorized customer credit card and deposit accounts, draining real accounts to fund them, and charging fees for services the customers didn’t request.  “Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses,” said Richard Cordray, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “Because of the severity of these violations, Wells Fargo is paying the largest penalty the CFPB has ever imposed.”  The CFPB’s action came hard on the heels of revelations that the bank misapplied student loan payments to maximize fee income.  The federal agency (which Republicans want to abolist, of course) slapped a $3.6 million fine on the bank and demanded that it pay $410,000 in restitution to student loan borrowers who paid inflated fees and charges as the result of the bank’s improper actions. Wells Fargo settled the student loan action without admitting or denying guilt, saying that it disagreed with the CFPB but settled “to put the matter behind us.”  The agency also wanted Wells to pay full restitution to all victims and a $100 million fine to the CFPB’s Civil Penalty Fund on top of an additional $35 million penalty to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and another $50 million to the City and County of Los Angeles.

On June 22, 1936, H.L. Mencken wrote the following in The Baltimore Sun: "The insurance of small deposits, even if the insurance is actually paid when it is needed, will certainly not suffice to prevent wildcat banking...What is to be done about crooked banks, nitwit banks, bad banks in general?"  His answer to his own question made sense then and still does: "(One approach) is that, when a bank suspends payment, it would simplify matters to hang (or, in any case, to jail) all its officers and directors at once, whether its suspension be due to its roguery, to their stupidity, or only to their bad luck."  What a quaint idea!  That bankers, not just the corporate banks they run, should be subject to harsh penalties for their crookedness and/or stupidity, in all events tied to avarice.  Let us remember all the bankers who went to jail after the 2008 debacle caused in large measure by bankers - none.  Thank you Barack Obama, Tim Geithner, and Eric Holder.  More H. L. Mencken: “ . . . it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.”

Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime.  " . . . painting is a friend who makes no undue demands, excites to no exhausting pursuits, keeps faithful pace even with feeble steps, and holds her course as a screen between us and the envious eyes of Time or the surly advances of Decrepitude."

Micaela, an oil painted decades ago

Jim Harrison, "The Land of Unlikeness" in The River Swimmer.  "Now he was speculating whether Laurette would pose half-nude on the car seat.  The whole idea was preposterously silly but why not?  It was no more cheeky than the idea of his resuming painting.  Part of the grace of losing self-importance was the simple question: "Who cares?"  More importantly, he didn't want to be a painter, he only wanted to paint, two utterly different impulses . . . Clive didn't want to be anything any longer that called for a title.  He knew how to paint so why not paint?  Everyone had to do something while awake."

Micaela with ferkrymter wrist after a skiing mishap

1202

 Friday, December 2, 2022

In bed at 9:15, up at 3:00, 2 pss, 1 B&B.  31 cloudy degrees, high of 45 expected.  Woke with thoughts of Trump and the 11th Circuit case.

Trump and the 11th Circuit  The 11th Circuit 3 judge panels, all Republican appointees,2 Trump appointees, reversed Judge Aileen Cannon's assertion of jurisdiction in the Mar-a-Lago papers case and did so in no uncertain terms.  It seems inconceivable that the Supremes would revers though we remember that Clarence Thomas is the Circuit Justice so a short delay is possible.

The Blue Angels are coming to town for this summer's Air Show.  I'm not a fan of the misnamed Blue Angels or the Air Force's Thunderbirds.  I don't see the justification for pilots risking death for entertainment, especially since I had a friend at the TACC in Vietnam who died in an air accident while assigned to the Blue Angels after leaving RVN.  I'm also not in favor of lethal instruments, like the F/A 18 Super Hornet aircraft, to make military service glamorous, masking the fact that these aircraft are, by design, weapons of death and destruction.  These aircraft and pilots are 'Angels' of Death and Destruction, not stunt performers.

Driving After Dark has become more difficult, especially in the construction zone near the freeway.  Lane markings are difficult if not impossible to see with no street lights.  The whole question of driving after 80 is becoming more pressing.  I blew a stop sign driving Peter home from work the other day and almost drove past the turn onto the street where their house is - all in the dark and no street lights.  I had some difficulty driving in the heavy traffic around the Spectrum office on Prospect Avenue and the Metro Market on Oakland Avenue yesterday.  I don't think I have 'lost a lot of marbles' yet - some, but not a lot - but I need to stay alert to this issue, especially since my eyesight continues to worsen, dry eyes, especially in the car, presbyopia.

Lands End shopping adventure.  Bought a navy blue turtleneck and it fits,  Maybe another tomorrow.

Favorite Economics writers & Liberal Arts.  I perk up when Catherine Ramped has a column in the WaPo and when Rana Faroohar is a guest on television programs.  I've been a huge fan of Rampell's for years, ever since I would watch her eviscerate Stephen Moore, the right-wing economist who regularly twists data to favor Republican causes.  I'm delighted by the educational background of these insightful writers on economic issues.  Ramped majored in anthropology at Princeton.  Faroohar majored in English Literature at Barnard.

Quiet Day, with about 5 and 1/2 hours of sleep overnight, plus nodding off in my recliner.  Did a lightbox drawing of Sinead O'Connor, bought a turtleneck at Lands End, and did some reading.

5/25/23

Thursday, May 25, 2023

In bed @ 9:30, awake at 4:10, and up at 4:24, thinking back about the  the publication of  my law review article on new civil procedure rules with DPL in 1976.  46℉, beach hazards warning still in effect until 9:00, high of 57℉, wind E at 9 mph, gusts up to 20 mph.  Sunrise at 5:19, sunset at 8:18, 14+59.

I 43 Project  Looking out the kitchen window this morning I saw two semis hauling big earth-moving equipment up into Mequon.  I wondered whether the equipment was destined for a project in the upscale residential neighborhood north of us, or was from the freeway reconstruction project just west of us.  In any case, the heavy equipment reminded me of how impressed I am by the enormity or the magnitude of the highway project.  It extends from Capitol Drive in Milwaukee through Glendale, Fox Point, Bayside/River Hills, Mequon,  all the way up to Grafton.  Miles and miles of heavy construction, roadways and bridges, entry and exit ramps, narrowed traffic lanes, and concrete guard rails.  Seemingly millions of traffic cones and stanchions, hundreds of heavy tow trucks, dump trucks, other trucks, hundreds of powerful earth moving, earth tamping, pile driving, tall cranes, bulldozers, frontend loaders, trenchers, hundreds of construction workers wearing bright yellow and orange vests and hard hats, unimaginable numbers of months and weeks and hours of planning, monitoring, supervising, scheduling work and workers.  I find it all thrilling to see.  I'm reminded too of ballets and symphonies, especially symphonic chorale performances that require the joint, coordinated efforts of so very many artists, all having studied and rehearsed hundreds, thousands of hours to deliver a live performance of a work of art.  Add to those hours the time and effort devoted by the composer of, say, Bach's Mass in B minor, or Mozart's Mass is C minor, or Verdi's Requiem, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  These works requiring and obtaining such quanta of coordinated human effort still astound and thrill me.  Deo gratias.

Some Hopkins to start my day.

Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Casey DeSantis, Melania Trump, Madame Nhu.  Why is it these women remind me of Madame Nhu?  There is the physical similarities, of course.  They are (or were) all conventionally beautiful, dark hair framing symetrical faces, dramatic eyes top-framed by notable eyebrows. lips highlighted and dramatized by lipstick.  Blondes may "have more fun," but dark-haired beauties have all the advantage of contrast framing, definition, and highlighting.  I became more aware of this when I started pencil drawings of beautful faces, beautful heads like, e.g. Ingrid Bergman's and Margaret Brennan's.  A pale blonde head of hair over a pale face with blonde eyebrows lacks dramatic definition and framing and  is highlighted only by red lips and to a lesser extent unframed pupils - hard to draw effectively.😕  But beyond the physical similarities, all three women are (or were) married to powerful, autocratic, ruthless, and cruel thugs.  Why would anyone marry and bear the children of a Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, or Ngo Dinh Nhu?  There are marriages of course in which the partners are very different in personal values, attitudes towards others, etc., but I suspect it is more common for marital partners to share, at least generally, basic values, outlook on life, attitudes towards others.  Without such shared values and outlooks, it's hard to sustain a long relationship.  Pares cum paribus congregantur.  So one assumes that Melania and Casey share many of the moral characteristics of their husbands and it is in that respect they remind me of Dragon Lady, or Madame Nhu.  From her obituary in The Guardian:  "She accumulated vast wealth and power, but was reviled for her puritanical social campaigns and her callous dismissal of Buddhist monks who burned themselves to death to protest against the brutal rule of Diem and her husband Ngo Dinh Nhu. "I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show, for one cannot be responsible for the madness of others," she wrote in a letter to the New York Times. The world was stunned by photographs of monks sitting shrouded in flames; Madame Nhu simply offered to bring along some mustard for the next self-immolation. She later accused monks of lacking patriotism for setting themselves alight with imported petrol."  Can it be surprising that I am reminded of Melania's "I really don't care, do U?" jacket which she wore after visiting a migrant children detention center at the Mexico-Texas border?

A gouache sketch I did of the infamous jacket in 2018

1220

 Tuesday, December 20, 2022

In bed around 9:30, awake around 3:30, up at 3:50. several pps, no toddy. Winter itchiness all around midsection, shoulders.  Awoke thinking of Peter's Christmas Bucks sweats not arriving before Christmas, Andy, Lizzie, maybe Drew aversion to Lilly.  Lilly's morning outing a short one with temp at 25 drizzly flurried degrees, high of 27 today, wind chill at 15 with wind out of SW.  Sunrise at 7:28, sunset at 5:24, 9 hours, 56 minutes of daylight.

Geri Returned on time at 5:35 yesterday. very short wait in the cell phone lot and easy ride home, stopping for McDonald's at BrownPort. Her visit was a very good one, Katherine and Jordan putting her up in their bedroom despite her protestations, Steve and Maggie timing their visit to coincide with Geri's, lots of warm feelings all around.  Jimmy recognized Geri Saturday through Monday, but he's not in good shape. Skin and bones, his daily unhappiness continuing, no happier at Silverado in Alexandria near K & J than he was at Newcastle near us.  Geri's description of other residents at Silverado made me think of buying a gun to avoid the 'blessing' of a long life with ever-fading capacities.  Lilly as expected was overjoyed at Geri's return, me too.  I remembered to have her coffee ready for her when she awakes.

January 6 Committee DOJ referrals of Trump (and John Eastman) were no surprise.  I suppose they will both be indicted but I'm not betting the farm on that, nor on the likelihood of an indictment in the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case.  It's hard to imagine Trump being arrested and perp-walked out of one of his golden palaces without serious, maybe deadly, consequences from the wackos who still support him.  I wonder how hard it would be to seat a jury that would convict him.  He has courted legal danger his entire adult life and dodged many bullets with his money, celebrity, and stable of enabling lawyers and underlings.  He is a master at speaking in code and acting through agents, as the creep Michael Cohen loves to point out.  He personally escaped the consequences of his many business bankruptcies and business failures.  He has been living proof of falsity of the cliche that no one is above the law.

The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose off the common/but leaves the greater villain loose who steals the common from the goose./The Law demands that we atone when we take things we do not own/ but leaves the Lords and Ladies fine who take the things that are yours and mine./The poor and wretched don't escape when they conspire the Law to break/This must be so but they endure those who conspire to make the Law./The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common/but geese will still common lack till they go and steal it back.

Our Town set another record yesterday, 211 homicides so far this year.   Most recent: 4 year old girl on the Southside.  29 year old caregivers both arrested, suspected child abuse.  Third straight year the city has set a homicide record.  AND,  a 22-year-old is hospitalized but expected to survive after being shot during a road rage incident on the city's north side, police said.  The incident happened Tuesday around 3:50 p.m. on the 2400 block of North 27th Street.  According to police, a suspect fired shots into a vehicle striking the victim. The man was then transported to a hospital with non-fatal injuries.  Police do not have anyone in custody and are asking anyone with information to contact them.  211 homicides, how many non-fatal gunshot wounds?

Blizzard Coming?  Big storm likely heading our way for Thursday, 6 inches or more of snow, wind gusts may reach 45-50 mph.  Projected wind chills Friday, Saturday 15 to 25 below zero.  Yecch, when should we stock up on???  My Mormon larder is depleted.  And how will we deal with Lilly's plumbing needs?

Looking out the window, seeing a lovely mourning dove and several beautful slate and white snowbirds feeding on the ground, while half a dozen goldfinches perch on the tall niger feeder, an English sparrow in the globe feeder.  I wonder whether they can all sense an approaching storm with decreasing barometric pressure or other clues.  From a posting on FB I see Eastern bluebirds are still in the area.  Maybe we'll get lucky, maybe the storm will fizzle, maybe, maybe, . . 

Aging Thoughtfully is a book by Martha Nussbaum and Saul Levmore.  One chapter is "Living the Past Forward:"  "As people age, they often spend more time thinking and talking about the past, usually their own past.  That's hardly surprising: after all, they see less life ahead of them, and more life behind.  Planning and hoping, even fearing, seem less productive than before - or productive only in an altruistic mode, as aging people hope and fear for their children, grandchildren, and other younger loved ones.  And to the extent that aging people spend time looking backward, they also tend to spend time with backward-looking emotions such as regret, guilt, retrospective contentment, and of course retrospective anger."How do I plead?  GUILTY AS CHARGED, much regret and guilt, no anger, no particular 'retrospective contentment' that I can think of.  W. B. Yeats' Vacillation, stanza V:

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

5/24/23

 Wednesday, May 24, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:15, on a blustery morning with a beach hazard advisory along the Lake Michigan shore with 5 to 7-foot waves forecast from 9 a.m. through the morning.  50℉ with a NNE wind at 15 mph gusting now up to 27 mph, later up to 38 mph.  High of 58℉. Sunrise at 5:20,, sunset at 8:51, 14+57.

A Little Niebuhr:  "In modern society the basic mechanisms of justice are becoming more and more economic rather than political, in the sense that economic power is the most basic power.  Political power is derived from it to such a degree that a just political order is not possible without the reconstruction of the economic order.  Specifically, this means the reconstruction of the property system.  Property has always been power, and inequalities in possession have always made for an unjust distribution of the common social fund.  But a technical civilization has transmuted the essentially static disproportions of power and privilege of an agrarian economy into dynamic forces. . . . Whatever the defects of Marxism as a philosophy and as a religion, and even as a political strategy, its analyses of the technical aspects of the problem of justice have not been successfully challenged, and every event of contemporary history seems to multiply the proofs of its validity. . .  The methods which must be used to achieve such a new property system raise the question of violence and the Christian ethic. . . .  a Christian's concern with the violation of the ethic of Jesus must begin long before the question of violence is reached.   It ought to begin by his recognizing that he has violated the law "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."  Out of the violation of that commandment arises the conflict of life with life and of nation with nation.  It is highly desirable to restrict this conflict to non-violent assertions and counter-assertions, but it is not always possible.  Sometimes the sudden introduction of a perfectionist ethic into hitherto pragmatic and relative may actually imperil the interests of justice.  The Christian who lives in and benefits from a society in which coercive economic and political relationships are taken for granted, all of which are contrary to the love absolutism of the gospels, cannot arbitrarily introduce the uncompromising ethic of the gospel into one particular issue.  When this is done we may be fairly certain that the unconscious class prejudices partly prompt the supposedly Christian judgment.  It is significant, for example, that the middle-class Church which disavows violence, even to the degree of frowning upon a strike, is usually composed of people who have enough economic and other forms of covert power to be able to dispense with the more overt forms of violence." Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935).

I picked up this book this morning as part of my project of clearing up the rat's nest around my tv room recliner.  I bought the book many years ago and it is heavily highlighted, underlined, checkmarked, and post-it-noted.  What caught my attention on the page (114) that flipped open was the sentence  "The Christian who lives in and benefits from a society in which coercive economic and political relationships are taken for granted, all of which are contrary to the love absolutism of the gospels, cannot arbitrarily introduce the uncompromising ethic of the gospel [i.e., non-violence/pacifism] into one particular issue.  It calls to mind the American Evangelicals and their embrace of Donald Trump, Trumpism, and right-wing Republicanism, but also my failures as one who by nature or nurture tends toward agnostic or atheistic Christian socialism.  How hard it is to be a Christian, indeed, how impossible it is, as reflected in the title of  Niebuhr's Chapter 4: "The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal."

Chronic pelvic pain, interstitial cystitis, etc.  In addition to Neibuhr, I also pulled out an old Walmart notebook in which I had written notes about the chronic pain I was experiencing back in March and April 2009 and I don't know for how long before that.  Partial notes from 3/26/2009: "intermittent pain during the night... received a call from Dr. Silbar's office to schedule 'a look inside your bladder' on 4/1.  I informed the caller of my bad experience at Froederdt with the urodynamics test.  I don't know whether trainee-nurse was particularly ham-handed or whether the intense pain was a result of my bladder-urethra-prostate-perinium-penis anatomy but I hope never to have a similar experience. . . By 2:30, the pain has increased to 5/6, L.T. and perineal, walking becoming painful. " There is also a note about zonking out on amitryptiline as I did several weeks ago again.   I think the CPP started 20 years ago, when I was still at The House of Peace.  The good old days.

Call from the VA.  A call from a nurse at the VA informed me that the covid-19 test I had scheduled on May 29 before my 'double dip' on June 1 was canceled because of the cancellation of the covid pandemic emergency regulations.  I asked if the 2nd bivalent covid booster vaccines were available yet and was told that they arrived yesterday.  I made an appointment to receive one this afternoon at 1 which I did.  Afterwards I took a slow drive through Wood National Cemetery, as I have so often done.  I thought volunteers or groundskeepers might be starting to plant flags at each headstone with Memorial Day just a few days away, but nothing was going on except two men on riding lawnmowers moving among graves.

A robin stands sentry duty atop a row of headstones

A shanda fur die goyim: Carmalite nuns sue their bishop!  Texas nuns have sued a bishop and the Fort Worth Diocese over an allegation that one of the nuns — who is seriously ill and uses a wheelchair and a feeding tube — broke her vow of chastity with a priest.  The Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Arlington have accused Bishop Michael Olson of waging an overzealous investigation into the alleged chastity vow violation, confiscating the nuns' phones and personal devices, "spying" on their texts and even personally showing up at their monastery to spend hours interrogating them.  The nuns' attorney, Matthew Bobo, said he believes that Olson has ulterior motives in levying such an allegation against Sister Teresa Gerlach.  "They're 72 acres in Arlington, Texas, on the Trinity River in the middle of the metroplex.  It's worth $20 million or so. That's what he's trying to do."  A representative for the Diocese said that Gerlach "admitted to violating the Sixth Commandment," which forbids adultery. The representative declined to comment further.  Bobo denied that Gerlach made such an admission. He said the Diocese has released no information regarding the alleged violation, such as when or where it would have occurred. Additionally, the nuns said in their court filing that Olson interrogated Gerlach immediately after she returned from a surgical procedure, in which she was put under general anesthesia, intubated, and given fentanyl.  Gerlach said in an affidavit that she is severely ill and requires a central catheter line, feeding tube, and intravenous drip for 10 hours a day. Yet despite her condition, she said Bishop Olson "forced himself onto our peaceful community" in late April, interrogated her and other nuns for several hours, and "threw a temper tantrum" in which he yelled that the monastery was shut down and no mass would be held.  Why is it so easy for me to believe the nuns and disbelieve the bishop?