10/3/23

 Tuesday, October 3, 2023

In bed by 9:20, CPPR night spent mostly on brr, awoke about 4:15, back to bed but unable to sleep, let Lilly out at 4:30, Venus shining brightly, solely, at @ 90°E,  63°, clear skies, high of 77°, AQI=44, wind SW at 5 mph, 3-12/20. Sunrise at 6:51, sunset at 6:29, 11:38.

LTMW.  The first bird arrived at the sunflower/safflower feeder at 6:45, shortly before sun-up, but I couldn't ID it, probably a chickadee.  Definitely chickadee, more showing up one after another for the 'early bird awards.'

Yesterday's start

Workspace

Freehand from midpoint dot, colored chalk sketch

the paint in the reference photo is lush, wish I could use oils instead of acrylics

Worst Health Care System, Not Best.  The WaPo, with many expert, knowledgable collaborators, conducted an extensive and comprehensive study of life expectancies around the globe, focused on premature death among those aged 35 to 64.  In the U.S., these ages have the greatest number of excess deaths compared with peer nations.  "The portrait that emerged shows a nation beset with chronic illness and saddled with a fractured health-care system that, compared with its peers, costs more, delivers less and fails at the fundamental mission of helping people maintain their health" and specifically:  (1)  It is a chronic illness that looms as the paramount threat to Americans in their prime.  Chronic illnesses erase more years of life among people under 65 as all the overdoses, homicides, suicides, and car accidents combined.  (2)  The divide in life expectancy between the nation’s poorest and wealthiest communities is dramatically wider than it was in the 1980s but people in wealthy communities in the United States live shorter lives than their peers in Canada, France, and Japan. The same is true for people in the poorest communities.  (3)  Big surprise (not!): states controlled by Republicans have significantly higher excess death rates than other states.  Negative correlation with public health regulations and spending.

    The WaPo coverage includes a graphic that provides the average life expectancies based on age, gender, and state of residence.  A male Wisconsin resident at age 82 on average will live another 8 years, to age 90.  Same end age for a family Wisconsinite aged 79.  Jimmy A. will be 90 next June and he'll probably make it.  Is he happy about this?  Should we be?  Or is this a devastating probablity?  Decrepitude, disability, dependency: movement from cane, to walker, to wheelchair, from independent living to assisted living to nursing home?  Eskimo, The Ballad of Narayama, Zeke Emanuel, , . . .

Joe Biden and his German Shepherds (and his mansion and his Corvette and his reelection bid.)  Joe Biden lives in a mansion, not just the Executive Mansion known more commonly as the White House, but also his personal mansion in Delaware.  He 'has a thing' for mansions.   He also has a vintage Corvette that he keeps at his Delaware mansion, next to his wrongfully-garaged classified documents.  He also has 2 German Shepherds, guard/attack dogs more properly known as Alsatian wolfdogs.  One, named "Major," has attacked and bitten so many people at the White House, mostly Secret Service agents, that he has been banished to the Delaware mansion.  The other, named "Commander," has bitten Secret Service agents in the White House 11 times but Joe and Jill (read: Joe) keep him at the White House under a "leash protocol" presumably developed to forestall the 12th attack.  Commander replaced another of Biden's  German Shepherds named "Champ" who died in June of 2021.   What is it about Uncle Joe that makes him think he can keep in the White House attacking his help an aggressive dog that in most situations would be euthanized?  What is it that makes him think he should keep himself in the White House until age 86?  What sense of Entitlement?

     I confess to many biases, one of them being against German Shepherds.  In the 1970s, I represented a 9-year-old girl who had been attacked without provocation by a neighbor's German Shepherd.  She required 41 stitches.  She was the second little girl the dog had mauled, both girls being on the sidewalk off the property where the dog was kept.  Cieslewicz v. Mutual Service Cas. Ins. Co., 84 Wis. 2d 91, 267 N.W.2d 59 1978).  I learned in that case that the dogs were originally marketed as "Alsatians" or "Alsatian wolfdogs" but did not sell well until they were rebranded as "German shepherds."  There are reasons these dogs are used by law enforcement and the military for guard and security work.  Queen Elizabeth II loved her Corgis, which BTW are herding dogs, and Joe Biden loves his German Shepherds.  Why does Joe choose the German Shepherds rather than corgis, or labradors or golden retrievers, beagles, or Portuguese water dogs?  Is this a fair question to ask?  What, if anything,s does this tell us about Joe?

    In 1996, Biden purchased four acres of secluded, lakefront land in  Greenville, an upscale suburb of Wilmington, Delaware, and built their 6,850-square-foot home.  In the summer of 2017, the Bidens bought a house on the Delaware Shore for $2.7 million.  Upon moving out of the vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory at the end of his term in 2017, the Bidens began renting a house in McLean, Virginia, the upscale suburb outside D.C. where Jackie Kennedy grew up.  Sprawled out over 12,000 square feet, the five-bedroom mansion has a gym, sauna, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a driveway big enough for 20 cars.  In 1974, as a young senator and recent widower, Biden purchased a 10,000 square feet, former DuPont mansion in tony Greenville for $185,000.   Is it a fair question to ask why Joe throughout his life has splurged on opulent real estate?  

    I wonder about questions like these because I don't trust Joe Biden.  I like his policies as president but I don't buy the persona he has worn throughout his political life, Uncle Joe, just a middle-class guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, with ancestral roots in coal mining.  I'm inclined to think of him like Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:  "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.  Such men are not to be trusted."  Cassius won over Brutus to his perfidious cause by convincing him that Caesar was overly ambitious, dishonest, and greedy, qualities that Cassius himself possessed and which I attribute to "Uncle Joe" Biden.  Like most politicians, he is very willing to sacrifice a lot to advance his own advancement in power, prestige, and the trappings of wealth.  I think he's doing it now, running for a 2nd term at his age, freezing out any competition from any younger, potentially more popular candidate who might have a better chance of defeating Donald Trump and preserving whatever form of democracy we have here in America.  Is Joe's need to be surrounded by opulence,and adulation, to be the most powerful guy in the room, his ambition boundless?   We'll never know for sure, but, in any event, sorry, Joe, I'm just not that into you, your mansions, your Corvette, or your dogs. 

I wanted the music to play on forever

Have I stayed too long at the fair?

I wanted the clown to be constantly clever

Have I stayed too long at the fair?

I bought me blue ribbons to tie up my hair

But I couldn't find anybody to care

The merry-go-round is beginning to slow now

Have I stayed too long at the fair?

The music has stopped and the children must go now

Have I stayed too long at the fair?

Oh, mother dear, I know you're very proud

Your little girl in gingham is so far above the crowd

No, daddy dear

You never could have known

That I would be successful, yet so very much alone

I wanted to live in a carnival city

With laughter and love everywhere

I wanted my friends to be thrilling and witty

I wanted somebody to care

I found my blue ribbons all shiny and new

But now I discover them no longer blue

The merry-go-round is beginning to taunt me

Have I stayed too long at the fair?

There is nothing to win

And there's no one to want me

Have I stayed too long at the fair?

McCarthy's out as Speaker of the House.  A bit of schadenfreude but what does it mean?

10/2/23

 Monday, October 2, 2023

In bed at 9:10, up from brr w/ back pain, left side at 3:10, up from bed at 3:38.  63°, high of 78°, sunny morning ahead, then partly cloudy.  AQI=45, wind SSW at 5 mph, 3-10/16, DPs 57-63.  Sunrise at 6:49, 94°E, sunset at 6:31, 266°W, 11+41, 2.5 minute daily decrease.

Awaiting rosy-fingered Aurora.  At 3:38, the sun was 34° below the horizon, at 58°ENE heading south.  Solar noon will be at 12:41 p.m. CDT with the sun at 180°S and only 43° above the horizon, less than half its meridian altitude on the Summer Solstice but way above its 24° meridian altitude on the Winter Solstice.    I'm thinking already of logs in the fireplace in the early mornings, but probably not till November.  As I looked out my bedroom window this morning, the ground seemed white, as if covered by snow, perhaps a result of the patio door nightlight.  In any event, it reminded me of what is to come, our dreaded winter precipitation.😰

The Synod on Synodality begins in 2 days.  It may be a big something; it may be a big nothing.  It is already groundbreaking in that it includes what the Church bigwigs call "lay people," i.e., men and especially women who are not members of the clergy.  Not cardinals, not bishops, not priests or even deacons.   By itself, this is a really big deal but whether it has any longterm significance or is rather just a one-off institutional eccentricity attibutable to the often controversial current occupant of the papal robes is anybody's guess.  There is something like an open rebellion going one for the last 10 years against the Argentinian Jesuit and his radical thoughts like "Who am I to judge".  The popes, cardinals, and bishops have been calling the shots for Catholics at least since the time of Emperor Constantine and most of them want to keep the power they have exercised for centuries.  For most of them the jobs they have are lucrative.  Bishops basically own their dioceses and the substantial revenue they produce.  Most of them live in opulent surroundings, tended to by servants.  Many Catholics still bow to them, kiss their rings, and call the cardinals "Your Eminence" and the bishops "Your Excellency."  The Church's organizational and hierarchical structures are quite feudal with the Pope (and his 'curia' or court) at the top, the bishops their vassals, and the lay Catholics just the lay Catholics.  As Pope Pius X put it in  his 1906 encyclical Vehemter Nos:

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

The flock is not as docile as it was when I was child growing up under the stern rule of Pope Pius XII, Chicago's racist Samel Cardinal Strictch, and St. Leo Parish pastor, Patrick J. Malloy.  Cardinal Stritch, like his predecessors and successors, lived in splendor in an elegant Victorian mansion at 1555 North State Parkway on the “Gold Coast” of Chicago.  The three story, 19 chimneyed mansion occupies a city block on the southern border of Lincoln Park and is probably the most valuable and desirable living quarters in the City of Chicago.  It is a dwelling fit for a feudal lord, which is what the Archbishop of Chicago was and is.  It is no accident that the State of Illinois each year since 1930 has assigned to the archbishop’s limousine the license plate bearing the legend “Illinois 1.”  

    The issues under discussion at the Synod will include priestly celibacy, married priests, the blessing of gay couples, the extension of sacraments to the divorced and the ordination of female deacons.  I suspect that the most liberal participants in the discussions will be the lay people and the most conservative the hierarchs, especially the American hierarchs.  Stay tuned.

Another dystopian dimension of  life in America.  Today's WaPo has a featured story entitled "U.S. to Rein in Technology that Limits Medicare Advantage Care."  It is a horror story, one that is repeated daily across the country.  In sum, it reveals (surprise, surprise) the Medicare Advantage Plans, which are basically HMOs owned and operated by private health insurance companies and not by the government and which enroll more than half of all Medicare beneficiaries, increase their profits by denying needed health care to their members.  This has always been the problem with HMOs, the inherent conflict of interest between the companies'  profit-making raison d'etre and providing care to their patients.  According to the story, the problem is especially acute with respect to nursing home care, where the companies' use of 'predictive technology' often results in patients losing coverage that traditional, government-provided, Medicare would cover.  It used to be the case and perhaps still is that the primary care docs who could authorize high-cost medical services for members were financially incentivized to increase the insurers' profits by denying needed care to patients.  Now the companies are using 'predictive technology' to terminate care even when the patients' doctors say that continued care is required.  The examples given in the WaPo story are terrible.  My brother-in-law Jim Reck was enrolled in a Medicare Advantage Plan for some time, found it was unsatisfactory, and had to jump through all kinds of hoops to disenroll and get back into regular Medicare Parts A & B.  The problem is exacerbated by the false and misleading advertising by the health insurance companies and brokers suggesting to seniors that they are "missing out on benefits they are entitled to", or on lower premium costs, or on higher social security checks" by not enrolling in the private Medicare Advantage Plans.  Christine Huberty, supervising attorney at the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources Elder Law & Advocacy Center in Madison, Wisconsin, said “Advantage plans routinely cut patients’ stays short in nursing homes,” she said, including Humana, Aetna, Security Health Plan, and UnitedHealthcare. “In all cases, we see their treating medical providers disagree with the denials.”  This is a form of nationwide corporate elder-abuse perpetrated by the very companies who lie to the public about what they are about, i.e., maximizing company profits rather than providing needed care to elderly members.  Big hospital organizations, like Ascension Healthcare, a 'nonprofit' Catholic hospital network, are guilty of the same kind of inherent fraud on the public, focused on reducing costs (like nurse staffing levels) and increasing revenues.  Even some life insurance and auto insurance companies are sleazy.  Consider the ubiquitous Colonial Penn television ads for 'guaranteed coverage $9.95 per month whole life [as opposed to term] insurance regardless of age and health' without mentioning what the customer gets for that $9.95.  Or the Progressive auto insurance commercial with the lovable Flo, Jamie, Alan, and Mara or the Liberty Mutual ads with the lovable LiMu (get it?) the Emu, ads digitally created by CGI technology.  These ads all focus on low cost premiums, (like the Colonial Penn ads) and never about claims experience.  They are all expert at collecting premiums, not all so good at paying claims.  Premiums = revenue, claims = expenses.  This is life in a consumerist, capitalist economy: huge companies, often parts of even huger conglomerates, employing experts at mass marketing persuasion to get us to buy their goods or services.  I'm reminded of  Lenny Dubin, our local counsel in the Waste Management - Occidental Petroleum case in Los Angeles who told us: "Out here, everybody's got a scam or is looking for one."

10/1/23

Sunday, October 1, 2023

In bed at 9, awake at 3:50, unable to sleep, and up at 4:50.   62°, hgh of 77°, clear skies, AQI+46, wind SSW at 6 mph, 3-9/13.  Sunrise at 6:48, sunset at 6:33, 11+44.

Forget your troubles, c'mon get happy, chase all your cares away!

Gorgeous Sunday, all day, wasted.  I don't know why but I've been a slug since I woke up this morning before 4 a.m.  Lay in bed for an hour wishing I could fall back to sleep, but forget about it.  Got out of bed tired, and stayed tired much of the day.  Two accomplishments for which I am grateful: I cleaned up the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher, dealt with the pots and pans, etc.  I also filled the short-tube birdfeeder with sunflower and safflower seeds and the long tube with fresh niger seeds.  Later I will take the trash cart out to the street for tomorrow's pickup.  I'm too mentally moribund to think or write so I will indulge myself by copying Roger Rosenblatt's op-ed piece from this morning's NYT.

What They Don’t Tell You About Getting Old

    I recently turned 83, and while there are many joys to getting older, getting out of taxis is not one of them.

What you don’t want to do is get your left foot caught under the front right seat before you try to swing your right foot toward the door; otherwise, you’ll topple over while attempting to pay the fare, possibly injuring your ankle, and causing the maneuver to go even more slowly. If you make it past the taxi door, there is still the one-foot jump to the street. You’re old. You could fall. Happens all the time.

And that’s when it’s just you in the taxi. If some other old person is with you — a friend, a spouse — there’s a real possibility of never getting out of the vehicle. You might live out the rest of your days in the back seat, watching Dick Cavett do real estate ads on a loop.

“Old People Getting Out of Taxis.” I was thinking of making a film with that title, if I knew how to make a film. Figure it would run four hours. I asked an actor friend, also old, if he’d star in it. His response: “If I can get out of my chair.”

It’s no joke, old age. It just looks funny. Mel Brooks latched on to this in his 1977 film “High Anxiety” with Professor Lilloman (pronounced “little old man”), a stock character who moves at a turtle’s pace, mumbles and whines as he goes, equally irritated and irritating.

I used to find the professor a lot funnier than I do now. Slow? Merely to rise to my feet in a restaurant takes so much angling and fulcrum searching, the waitstaff takes bets on whether I will do it at all.

Old age isn’t what the books promised it would be. Literature is littered with old people for whom the years have brought some combination of wisdom, serenity, authority and power — King Lear, the ageless priest in Shangri-La, Miss Marple, Mr. Chips, Mrs. Chips (I made that up), Dickens’s Aged P, crazy Mrs. Danvers. In fiction, old folks are usually impressive and in control. In life, something less.

I can’t think of anyone who has come to me for wisdom, serenity, authority or power. People do come to sell me life insurance for $9 a month and medicines such as Prevagen, which is advertised on TV as making one sharper and improving one’s memory. Of course, that is beneficial only to those who have more things they wish to remember than to forget.

One thing I need to remember is which day for which doctor. Two years ago, my wife and I moved back to New York City after 24 years of living by the sea. The city is safer, we thought — just in case we may ever need to be near medical facilities. Since our move, not a day has passed without one of us seeing a doctor, arranging to see one or thinking or talking about seeing one.

On one day last week, I had a vascular sonogram in the morning, consulted my ophthalmologist in the afternoon, made an appointment with a retina specialist, spoke to my primary care physician about test results and put off my dentist. As a result of such activities, my vocabulary has increased. I now can say “occlusion” — and mean it. Has anyone seen my oximeter?

Activities such as getting out of a taxi are not only degrading and humiliating; they take so much effort, they simply make you tired. You may reasonably say, “Why not take the subway?” I would, except for the two hours needed to get up and down the stairs. Still, it’s all a matter of adjustment. It took me three or four years of taxi rides to finally admit to myself that I’m old.  Old. Even the word sounds like a sigh of surrender.

I wrote a book called “Rules for Aging” 25 years ago, when I used to leap in and out of taxis like a deer, if you can picture such a thing. The rules were less about aging than about living generally, one of the first being “Nobody’s thinking about you.”

In old age that’s true in spades. And that’s another of aging’s unnerving surprises. You disappear from the culture, or rather, it disappears from you. Young women and men shown on TV as world famous, you’ve never heard of. New idioms leave you baffled. You are Rip Van Winkle without having fallen asleep.

To be sure, old age has compensations. Grandchildren. Their company is delightful, partly because they think you have something useful to impart, if you could remember to impart it. Waitresses tend to treat you sweetly. Doormen and maintenance crews show respect. And there are positive or harmless activities for the over the hill. Women take up watercolors and form book clubs. Men find loud if pointless camaraderie in diners and on village benches all over the country. Hey, old-timer.

While here in the city, we hail taxis. And cringe to see whether the one we have hailed is a normal car, for normal people, or one of those sliding, clanging door jobs that require a forklift for entry. I’m not exaggerating — much.

My point is: Who ever expected to spend time wondering if Madison Beer is a beverage honoring a founding father? Who ever expected that one’s social circle would consist of Marie, who does blood work, and an M.R.I. technician named Lou? Who ever expected that getting out of a taxi would be so momentous an issue that one is a bundle of nerves planning exit strategies halfway through the ride? Who ever expected old age?

This essay seemed so perfect to me today, although it applies to every day of old age.  Today in filling the bird feeders I experienced yet again the unsteadiness on my feet that I experience every day, more specifically, the fear of falling and of not being able to get up.  I'm more alert to it when I'm alone as I am this afternoon while Geri is dutifully at the store getting the hamburger fixings she needs to prepare this evening's main course on the patio grill, enjoying this summery day at the start of October.  This dread of falling is an everyday fear triggered simply by moving from Point A to Point B.  Part of it springs from lack of balance but a lot of it comes from muscle weakness and muscle stiffness, especially in the leg, back, and core muscles.  I tend to lean and hunch forward when walking and thus have a regular tendency to pitch forward, which is to say, to fall on my face, 'ass over elbows'.  How smug I was in earlier years when I would smirk at the old lady lying at the bottom of a stairwell moaning "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up!"  Now I wear on my wrist an Apple Watch  SE only because it features an app that supposedly will call 911 for help when it detects me suddenly and involuntarily on the ground and I wear around my neck a 'MedAlert' device provided by the VA that supposedly will do the same thing.  I can be grateful for one thing at least: unlike Roger Rosenblatt living in NYC, I don't have to get in and out of taxis.  I suspect the last time I took a taxi was the last time I was in NYC, decades ago.  I do have to deal with the slightly elevated floor of my SUV which is a challenge at times and which 2 and 1/2 years ago led me to obtain a steroid injection in my right hip from the VA PM&R clinic so I could raise my leg enough to gain access.  I see the PM&R doc again on Wednesday to see if there is any relief available for what has become chronic back pain.  I suspect this won't be taken care of with a cortisone injection but one can hope.

In View of the Fact

A. R. Ammons

1926 –2001

The people of my time are passing away: my

wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it's

Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

it was once weddings that came so thick and

fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

now, it's this that and the other and somebody

else gone or on the brink: well, we never

thought we would live forever (although we did)

and now it looks like we won't: some of us

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don't know

what they went downstairs for, some know that

a hired watchful person is around, some like

to touch the cane tip into something steady,

so nice: we have already lost so many,

brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

address books for so long a slow scramble now

are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,

Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

at the same time we are getting used to so

many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

to the ones left: we are not giving up on the

congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on

the nice old men left in empty houses or on

the widows who decide to travel a lot: we

think the sun may shine someday when we'll

drink wine together and think of what used to

be: until we die we will remember every

single thing, recall every word, love every

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to

others to love, love that can grow brighter

and deeper till the very end, gaining strength

and getting more precious all the time . . .

9/30/23

 Saturday, September 30, 2023

In bed at 9, up at 5:30.  Let Lilly out.  60°, high of 75°, clear skies today, AQI=41, wind S at 8 mph, 2-12/18. DPs 57-64. Sunrise at 6:47 at 93°, sunset at 6:35 at 267°, 11+47.

Peter got his driver's license yesterday, a big step in life for him and his parents who will have some of their schlepping duties relieved.

LTMW.  By 6:45 the chickadees arrive at both the short tube and the long tube.  A gray squirrel forages under the feeders.  It's 8 o'clock before the nuthatches and finches arrive.  It's a perfect morning and by 9 o'clock a young couple is walking up Wakefield with their baby in a stoller and turn onto County Line Road.  They all make a beautiful sight, one of faith, hope, and charity - faith that life is worth living and reproducing, hope that the future will be good for their baby, and protective and nurturing marital & parental love.  I have such mixed emotions seeing young families, seeing children with parents or on their way to or from school.  Paul's letter to the Phillipians 2:12 ' . . . work out your salvation with fear and trembling.'  Soren Kierkegaard's FEAR AND TREMBLING.  Abraham and Isaac?

The Dry  The title of this 8-part Irish series refers to an alcoholic's living life without alcohol, 'on the dry.'  It describes the situation of Shivaun Sheridan (played by Roisin Gallagher), an alcoholic artist returning from London where she had been living to her troubled and unwelcoming family in Ireland for the funeral of her grandmother.  Her mother is an alcoholic, her father a philanderer, her brother a gay wastrel. and her sister a cold, unhappy physician.  The background fact that looms over the entire narrative is that her old brother, whom she loved, committed suicide at home some years past and it was Shiv who discovered his body. She runs into her former boyfriend/lover Jack who helps to get her a job helping his current lover Kristen run her art gallery.  We see all of her relationships go downhill except for that with her AA sponsor Karen.  She falls off the wagon and into a bad relationship with Jack, whom she recognizes by the end of the series as simply" a selfish prick and a mediocre artist."  She interrupts her trip to the airport to return to London to attend her sister Caroline's engagement party where she delivers an alcohol-fuelded, half-disrobed monologue, a diatribe against her family, against herself, and against Life.  " I'm tired of bullshitting.  I'm an alcoholic and I'm drunk.  And this is my Moral Inventory where you write down all the shitty things you've ever done and then you tell someone, like a confession.  And then, then you recover.  Ha!  As if!  I mean what does that even mean, recover?  Like how are you supposed to recover, from life.  How do you recover from being raped or molested or . . . losing a kid?  Or finding your brother, who you love more than anything in the whole world, dead!  Dead in his bed because he didn't want to be here one more day.  You know, given all the circumstances we all live in, is it any surprise we reach for a drink . . . and then we just keep on reaching,and reaching and reaching and I have destroyed my life.  My mother's angry with me.  She wants me to go away, go back to London, disappear, not be her problem anymore.  I really don't blame her because I would like to disappear too.  I'd like to get away from me too.  I'd really like to forget every single disgusting thing that's in that book that I did. [Her AA Moral Inventory] I did it, it makes my skin crawl.  I really want to get away from me too.  And that's why I drink.  But I was sober for 6 months.  I didn't have a drink.  I don't have a man and I don't have a job and I'm 35 and I slept with a pregnant woman's boyfriend but I didn't reach for a drink for a whole 6 months and, well, that's something, huh? So I just wanted to say, what was it I wanted to say, oh yeah, Happy Anniversary."  Whereup she fell off the dais and passed out.  She is taken up and taken home by her parents and some healing and reconciliation occurs.  Her mother asks her father "Were we bad parents?"  He answers "We were parents."

It's a powerful existentialist drama depicting the lives of many unhappy people trying to soften or escape Lif'e's pain, some with alcohol, some with sex, including especially pain coming from self-knowledge, consciousness of guilt, and of powerlessness.  I was struck by what finally caused Shiv to take up drinking again - overhearing her mother wanting her to be gone.  I also wondered what was the significance of the relationship between sister Caroline and her boyfriend/fiance Rory and their sex fantasies.  Mostly though I was moved by Shiv's giving up, throwing in the towel when the world she lived in ground her down, even her aunts Rita and Ag and uncle Joe disparaging her as a failure, unmarried, unemployed and childless.  The film ended hopefully with Shiv back at her AA meeting and her mother joining her there, while the other family members waited outside to drive them home after the meeting but overall, it is a mighty bleak picture painted by this movie.

More pain today, back and pelvic floor.

9/29/23

 Friday, September 29, 2023

In bed at 9:25. up at 8:35 after a night of pain.  62°, mostly cloudy, till 3 p.m., then sunny,  high of 70°.  AQI=41, wind S at 3 mph, 1-10/16. DPs 56-62.  The sun rose at 6:18 & will set at 6:36, 11+50.

Dreadful night of GERD, back pain, peripheral neuropathy pain in the big toe on the left foot.  Part of the night was spent on brr.  Painful getting in and out of bed, in and out of brr. . . I fell asleep on the tv room recliner midday and my back has seemed almost 'normal' this afternoon, though a bit stiff.

Diane Feinstein, George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Dan White.  Sen. Diane Feinstein has died at age 90.  She came to political prominence in November 1978 when former police officer and former county supervisor Dan White climbed through a basement window at City Hall with his loaded pistol and extra ammunition, went to Mayor Moscone's office, and murdered him, and then county supervisor and prominent gay activist Harvey Milk.  White 'finished each of them off' with close shots to the head.  It was about as premeditated and cold-blooded a double murder as one could imagine, but a San Francisco jury found White guilty of voluntary manslaughter based on 'diminished capacity' which was based on White's so-called 'junk food defense' or "Twinkies defense, which meant he would be released from prison in 5 years.  The community, and especially San Francisco's gay community, were outraged at the jury and at the way the prosecutors handled the case.  In any event,  Diane Feinstein succeeded Moscone as mayor of San Francisco and in 1992 was elected to the U.S. Senate where she served until her death yesterday.

    On January 9, 1984, Dan White was released from Soledad prison. The details of his release and his destination upon release were tightly guarded secrets.  I was in San Francisco for the annual law school conference.  I had a room at the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square.  Union Square was the site of a huge afternoon rally attended by outraged members of the local gay community which I attended as an onlooker.  There was another rally that evening in the Castro District.  Speakers at the Union Square rally called for the assassination of Dan White.  They were enraged and they called for White's blood.  I had never seen anything like it in my life, thousands of people calling for, expecting and demanding the murder of another person.  My most vivid memory is of the gay activist and drag-nun Sister Boom-Boom holding up and then throwing out into the audience a package of Twinkies shouting "This this and eat it, this is my defense!" referring the Mass's words of consecration and to White's defense of diminished capacity to form premeditate and form malicious intent because of a mood disorder caused by eating too many Twinkies and drinking too much Coke.

    White committed suicide in his garage on October 21, 1985.

9/28/23

 Thursday, September 28, 2023

In bed before 10, awake at 3:40 and up at 3:58, unable to sleep.  60°, mostly cloudy day ahead, high of 65°.  AQI=19, wind ENE at 8 mph, 5-9/14, 0.35" of rain in last 24 hours.  Sunrise at 6:45, sunset at 6:38, 11+53.

Woke with back pains as usual.  The pains have moved from my right side below the kidney area to the left side, lower and mid back, occasionallly sharp, stabbing, shooting pains starting yesterday in the car driving away from Meijer's in Grafton.  I don't recall having a pain problem in the store while shopping and wasn't aware of having strained anything while loading the stuff into the back of the car (2 gallons of distilled water, 2 fairly heavy bags of groceries) but the stabbing pain started before I was out of the parking lot.  Geri applied a 5% lidocaine patch at about 5 because I was having some bad pains again.

This Is Us; Jack, Vietnam.  We watched episode 3, series 3 last night, focused on Jack's time in Vietnam in 1970 and his relationship with his mother and father.  I skipped most of the 'in country' scenes, keeping busy in the kitchen.  I've been largely turned off by the hokey unreality of the story's dialogues for some time, especially Jack's perfection in his role as loving husband and loving, nurturing father.  Ditto Randall's  perfections, and even Toby's.  I'm thinking the story may have 'jumped the shark' generally. But this episode's treatment of the Draft Lottery, of men moving to Canada to avoid being sent to Vietnam (like Mike McC.'s brother), of the certainty by 1970 that "we" weren't going to "win" the war, the horrifying futility of the war and the randomness of the dying.  Random in the sense of the lottery based on birthdays, not so random in term of class & caste-based deferrals, including as we now know Donald J. Trump's "bone spurs" and Dick Cheney's multiple  deferrals.  It was a terrible, and for many, a terrifying time the land of the free and the home of the brave.  The time of Dick Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Henry Kissinger, and "Peace with Honor."  Of  the invasion of Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State, the bombing of Sterling Hall in Madison, the SDS and the Weathermen.  Of My Lai.  It was the year I graduated from law school shortly after the dean of the law school asked me and two former Milwaukee police officers, Freddie St. Clair and Leroy Jones,  to stand 'sentry duty' at the school all night because of threats of bombing because of the Cambodia invasion.  I was remined of that time as I watched Jack's 'little brother' Nicky's birthday come up as #4 in lottery.  There was also a scene in the episode in which Jack & Nicky's faather threatened violence against their mother and Nicky had the courage to tell him to stop, which reminded of a similar terrible incident in my life when we lived at 7307 S. Emerald which I still remember pretty vividly.  The depiction of Jack's father throughout the series reminded of my father though my father was not as wantonly cruel as Jack's father was; he had other problems that impacted my sister and me for the rest of our lives.

Irish peasant lineage.  I am of Irish peasant stock.  My roots are working class, blue collar, proletariat, commoner, plebian. hoi polloi, the great unwashed. When my grandfather Dennis Healy came over from Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland in 1904, his passage had been paid for by an unnamed brother, he had $6 in his pocket and a ticket to Chicago where he had a sister Mary living in a room in the Lakota Hotel at 30th Street and Michigan Boulevard.  The immigration records make it clear that the emigrating Healys were almost certainly poor, landless and with no prospect of acquiring land.  Their ‘occupation or calling’ is always listed as ‘laborer’ or ‘servant.’  According to some anecdotal evidence I found on the internet, most of the Healys in Kilgarvin were not native Kerrymen but had migrated to Kilgarvin after evictions by the Earl of Donoughmore during the “Penal Times.”  The barony of Donoughmore lay about 25 miles northwest of Cork City, about 40 miles east of Kilgarvin.    Kilgarvan is now a town of about 550 people in a mountainous area with scant possibilities for eking out a living.  I suspect it had a considerably larger population in 1904 but even fewer opportunities to scratch out a living.    There was a workhouse in Kenmare, down the road from Kilgarvan, and chances are the only options Dennis and his siblings saw were the Kenmare workhouse or emigration.  My mother grew up during the Great Depression and attended but did not graduate from St. Martin High School, which prepared Catholic girls for office work.   During much of her life, she worked as a waitress and then as a factory worker in a plant that made Kool-Aid and other products.  My father worked at a great many jobs none of which lasted very long because of his war-related PTSD until he settled into a maintenance job at a Continental Can factory.

    I think almost reflexively of my Irish commoner roots whenever I see or read news coverage of the British royal family.  I recall what I have learned of the treatment accorded to the Irish people through the centuries by their English conquerors usually under the banner of the British royalty (or of parliamentary authority under the cruel savagery of Oliver Cromwell.)  Thus I am inclined to puke when I see the attention lavished on the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and the coronation of King Charles III.  And thus I was delighted to see in this morning's WaPo the story of the British royal families direct involment in and profiting from the trans-Atlantic slave trade: "A Crown Branded onto Bodies Links British Monarchy to Slave Trade."

The broad outlines of that history were already known: For 270 years, British kings and queens, as heads of state, oversaw a commercial enterprise that denied people their basic humanity and condemned them into bondage, sending them across an ocean to be exploited for their labor — though thousands died as a result of the brutal conditions of the passage.

But new investigations, based on records scattered in libraries and archives on multiple continents, are revealing that successive British monarchs played a more intimate role than previously recognized, reaping profits that continue to benefit British royals today. . .

Edmond Smith, a historian at the University of Manchester, said that the discovery of the brand in the South Sea Company records — like other kinds of physical evidence, including iron rods or shackles — helps to highlight the “horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and really bring it to life. … We can talk about the transatlantic slave trade in terms of millions of people, but that can somehow bizarrely diminish the emotional impact.”

Newman, the Virginia-based historian, said the brand was emblematic of royal involvement.  “It’s not just even that they invested in these companies and made dividends off of or got customs revenue,” she said. “It’s that they were willing to have their brand literally branded into the flesh of people. This was because, at the time, the slave trade was seen as the way to build an empire and the way to make money to funnel money back into the royal pocketbook.” 

Lest we forget, the heritage of the British royals is barbarism.  The title of the song that the Brits so love to sing "Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! / Britons never, never, never will be slaves" should be changed to Cruel Britannia.

 

9/27/23

 Wednesday, September 27, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 6:20.  63°, drizzling, high of 66°, Beach Hazard again, 3 to 6' waves, currents, especially at Bradford Beach.   AQI=25, wind ESE at 14, 11-15/26.  0.65" of rain in the last 24 hours.  DPs 60-61.  Sunrise at 6:44, sunset at 6:40, 11+55.

Have I stayed too long at the fair?  A lesson I learned long ago is that it's easy to ruin a painting by not knowing when to stop.  I'm fearing that I may have wrecked Dora Carrington by giving her a Fauve smock.  In the photo I worked off of it's clear she used her smock to wipe brushes, knives, and maybe her fingers just as I use my brown denim apron, and I wanted to reflect the color cacophony one sees on painters' aprons, smocks, wipe clothes, etc.  But by using smears of paint right out of the tubes directly on primed canvas I have created this Fauve riot of deep, bright colors that would not appear on an absorbent cloth ground. I'm wondering if I have wrecked the painting.  I liked the painting as it was with her wearing a clean white smock, but I also kind of like it with the brilliant colors.  Do I leave it alone, try to cover the colors with layers of opaque titanium white, or subdue them with a glaze?  I better step away from the painting for a while.

I thought of Barbra Streisand's great 'I Stayed Too Long at the Fair" song as I wondered whether I have wrecked this painting.  Now I'm wondering whether that sad but beautiful song couldn't be an anthem for so many old folks with the same problem painters face, when to call it quits.

I wanted the music to play on forever
Have I stayed too long at the fair?
I wanted the clown to be constantly clever
Have I stayed too long at the fair?

I bought me blue ribbons to tie up my hair
But I couldn't find anybody to care;
The merry-go-round is beginning to taunt now
Have I stayed too long at the fair?

The music has stopped and the children must go now
Have I stayed too long at the fair?
Oh, mother dear, I know you're very proud
Your little girl in gingham is so far above the crowd;

No, Daddy dear, You never could have known
That I would be successful, yet so very much alone...
I wanted to live in a carnival city
With laughter and love everywhere

I wanted my friends to be thrilling and witty

I wanted somebody to care;

I found my blue ribbons all shiny and new

But now I discover they are no longer blue...

The merry-go-round is beginning to taunt me

Have I stayed too long at the fair?

There's nothing to win

And there's no one to want me

LTMW at 8 a.m., I note that there has been a single house finch perched on the sunflower/safflower tube for what seems like 15 minutes, carefully checking each available seed so as to select only the best ones without interference by any other finches, sparrows, chickadees, woodpeckers, cardinals, jays, or nuthatches.  She holds onto the tube with her anisodactyl feet and claws (3 facing forward and 1 rearward) and braces herself with her tail pressed onto the wire mesh.  I'm wondering where the neighboring birds are.  It's a quiet, gray, drizzly morning with a steady strong breeze coming off Lake Michigan, the air humid with its dew point in the low 60s.

Navy Bean soup that I made last Saturday has provided my breakfast today and a brunch the other day but I have to chalk it up to failure, a thin, watery gruel.  At least I learned that one pound of dried navy beans doesn't work with 4 quarts of water, even with a $13😱 ham bone and lots of saltines.   I can't imagine how the recipe I used got and remained online on the Allrecipes website.  I should have known.

Life in a savage land.  From this morning's WaPo, "In Texas, guns are everywhere, whether concealed or in the open."

NEW BRAUNFELS, Tex. — To live in Texas is to live surrounded by guns.

Each morning, men here strap guns inside suits, boots and swim trunks. Women slip them into bra and bellyband holsters that render them invisible. They stash firearms in purses, tool boxes, portable gun safes, back seats and glove compartments.

Neighbors tuck guns into bedside tables, cars and trucks. They take guns fishing, to church, the park, the pool, the gym, the movies — even to protests at the state Capitol. The convention center hosts gun shows where shoppers peruse AR-15s and high-capacity magazines outlawed in other states. Texas billboards offer an endless stream of advertisements for ammunition, silencers and other accessories.

It has been legal here to openly carry long guns like rifles for generations. But Texas’s gun-friendly attitude isn’t just a relic of the Old West and ranching: Many restrictions on handguns were loosened only recently. Two years ago, state lawmakers gave those 21 and older the right to carry handguns without a permit . . . 

Unlike California and some other blue states, Texas has no state firearm sales registry, no required waiting period to buy a gun, no red flag law guarding against the mentally ill or violent having weapons, no restrictions on the size of ammunition magazines and no background checks for guns purchased in a private sale.

While a majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws and say it’s too easy to obtain a gun, many Texans see guns as a solution to the problem, not the problem itself. 

England is a cup of tea.

France, a wheel of ripened brie.

Greece, a short, squat olive tree.

America is a gun.

Brazil is football on the sand.

Argentina, Maradona’s hand.

Germany, an oompah band.

America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.

Hungary, a goulash stew.

Australia, a kangaroo.

America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.

Scotland is a highland fling.

Oh, better to be anything

than America as a gun.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick,  is a satiric essay by Jonathan Swift, published in pamphlet form in 1729.  Swift, an Anglican priest and dean of the Church of England's St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin,  proposed that the country ameliorate poverty in Ireland by butchering the children of the Irish poor and selling them as food to wealthy English landlords.  I thought of Swift's notorious essay as I read a story in this morning's NYT: "In Rare Alliance, Democrats and Republicans Seek Legal Power to Clear Homeless Camps."  Cities out West have been desperate because of their inability and/or unwillingness to cope with the thousands of homeless people living in tents in public places.   Reading this story right after reading in the Washington Post ("In Texas, guns are everywhere, whether concealed or in the open") about everybody in Texas packing heat made me think: why not round up all those unwelcome, dirty, smelly, often mentally ill homelesss people in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle and bus them to Texas to be used as live targets on shooting ranges?  Many, perhaps most, of the people we would occasionally like to shoot are moving once we aim a firearm at them so why restrict shooters to stationary 'bulls-eyes' or silhouettes of human figures at shooting ranges?  Using live homeless people would simultaneously increase the marksmanship skill of the shooters while reducing the need for paper targets, landfill space to dispose of the used targets, and the need for trees supplying the nation's smelly, polluting paper mills.  Most importantly, it would reduce the homeless population interfering with commercial activities in our big Western cities!  A win-win solution!  It is surely clear by now that the homeless in America's cities found shamelessly sleeping atop grates in flagrante delictu or secreting themselves in tents engaging in God-only-knows-what perversities contribute nothing to American society and economy while detracting much from what would be, without them, American's most desirable cities.  America's gun owners, on the other hand, are Second Amendment patriots, dedicated to standing by as America's Good Guys ever-ready to take down the Bad Guys who would subvert the true purpose of firearms as instruments marketed only for the protection of American families and the killing of dangerous white-tail deer, elk, mourning doves, mallard ducks, etc.  So can't we all get on board with this win-win solution to reducing the ranks of America's homeless while improving the marksmanship of American Good Guys?  Now that I think of it, how about all those dirty, smelly, often wet immigrants invading our country intent on stealing our jobs?!?  Thanks to Jonathan Swift for his 'modest proposal'.

Back spasms while driving.  A new worry, very painful back spasms while driving back from Meijer's in Grafton.  Too dangerous, worried about losing control of the car, especially on freeway.   I called the VA PM&R clinic to request that my appointment on 12/8 be moved up.  The receptionist said she'll leave a note for the nurses and they'll follow up.  Keeping my fingers crossed. . . Good news: Nurse Julie called back at 4:50 and I got an appointment for 3 p.m. next Wednesday with Dr. Chang.