Journal
Hello darkness my old friend …
Unrequited love themes have settled in on me during these dreary winter doldrums. I am thinking that perhaps they are the key that unlocks the trigger to my winter desolation. One theme is the hero who plugs away at a steadily declining hippie commune, and wakes up one day to discover that he is the only one who isn’t getting laid. But being that he is a plugger, he finishes up the incomplete projects, makes his goodbyes, and rides off into the sunset. Or in one version, soars off in his bush plane.
I just hate the dreary sadness that settles in on me, yet I seem to delight in wallowing in it. December is bad, but by January and through February it really gets to be heavy sledding. I have made a few efforts to describe the Satanic heaviness, but finally gave it up. If you haven’t been there, you wouldn’t know. Attributing spiritual forces as the cause if it seems to make more sense to me than trying to make some sort of psychological sense out of it.
Eventually, I succumb and let myself sink into the pit. It is easier than fighting it off. It is relentless.
So, I may write. Or I may not. I may go on facebook. Or I may not. If not, I’ll see you in Spring …
NewYears confessions are better than NewYears resolutions.
I wanted to write this New Years Day journal at daybreak, but coffee, breakfast, a couple of video games and a couple or three facebook flame wars quickly ate up the morning. So this gets started at the crack of noon, or perhaps a few minutes later.
New Years is always a puzzlement to me. Especially when my cosmic conscious friends start telling me what it portends. I don’t think Pope Gregory was all that prescient when he arbitrarily decided that the winter solstice was the beginning of the year. Turns out that he was a few days off on that calculation too, not to mention some four decades that he couldn’t figure out what to do with, and with the dash of a pen, just eliminated them.
Such power!
One of my mystical friends was telling me what the numbers 2018 added up to, and how the alignment of certain planets and the moon was going to do to that vibration of the cosmos. I don’t want to mock my friend, but frankly, I can’t see how the selection of December 31st is going to impress the cosmos very much.
I can weakly admit that it is remotely possible that the cosmic streams and the pull of the moon on cerebral fluids would influence humanity, but a dimly remembered Pope’s declaration of the beginning of the New Year having any impact on the body and mind is a long stretch for me.
Those who know me know that I do have very strong religious convictions, and that I put an inordinate amount of faith in the ancient scribblings on parchment, paper and papyrus, and perhaps the faith in those scribblings would seem to be just as ridiculous to many as my friend’s musings about cosmic vibrations are to me. I am just as lost in defending my beliefs as my friend is in hers.
I try to not cast my pearls before unclean animals, though. I save the discussions and arguments for those who do understand those scribblings. Some of my scoffing friends sometimes read fragments out of those writings, and use them to mock believers, but I see no reason to give them the additional passages that debunks their understanding. Let ‘em scoff.
Faith is one of those odd things that you either have it, or you don’t. Even in my own experience, when faith is high in me, it seems like I have always had faith. And when it is low in me, it seems like I have never had faith. It is impossible for a man without faith to see the hands of God moved by faith. And a man of faith finds it incomprehensible that someone would not see those hands move.
One bitter January night in North Denver some five decades ago, I lay in my bed and asked myself if God was as insane as he seemed. Of course, that God was me, and since I was insane at the time, so was God. And if you have an insane God, you have real trouble. I don’t want to detail the follow-up from that questioning, it was intensely personal. But over the course of the following months I was changed, and so was the world around me.
I would like to tell you that I became a real sweetheart, sort of a mixture of Saint Francis and Moses, but no, I really didn’t turn into a nice guy. I did turn into a more peaceful one, however. But I merely had better manners.
Only with age have I developed any sort of pity for mankind and the terrible morass that has befallen him. It has taken me almost half a century to gain enough humility to ask what had happened to us. The answer hasn’t been a very comforting one, even with the promises we have been given. I look back at my early years of setting out on this path with a little embarrassment. Even from the miserable circumstances I was in, I swaggered in ignorant arrogance.
I am beginning to see that it is in age and infirmity that true wisdom and humility can come, if we let it. Not that I am presenting myself as any sort of paragon of wisdom and maturity. Follow me around on facebook, and you can see much of my old ignorant swaggering. My former pastor used to say that he didn’t put a religious bumper sticker on his truck because of the way he drove. Yeah. That is me. I am better off not wearing the robes of piety …
But still, old men dream dreams, and God reveals himself to them in a very unique way. Often in spite of themselves.
Happy New Year!
or
Spring follows winter … ‘til it doesn’t.
… a pause, then Armageddon
Evening falls on Christmas day. The dishes are put away, the dogs given their evening treats, Snookums TV shows play in the living room, and I sit in my studio in that last hour of wind down before bedtime. Odd how the air feels different on this chilly holiday night. I am not such a big fan of Christmas for a whole host of reasons, but I am not antagonistic toward those who feel it is a special day.
But any day is a good day to stop and thank God for a Messiah, be he come or yet to come. I find no huge heresy in that idea. I normally observe it in a weeklong immersion in a DVD of Lord of the Rings, but for some reason, I just wasn’t up for it this year.
It is a time for me to ponder beginnings and roots. That imperious urge that sprang from God’s first command to man to be fruitful and fill the earth eases a wee bit with age. The urge to impregnate every unpregnant female fades to the background, and I can spend a bit more time examining that curiosity of God’s creation, man.
Half jackass, and half child of God, my old mentor used to say, and we are never sure which one is in charge at any given moment of time. I just hope in this last stretch of life that I don’t catch myself braying too often.
But too soon this magic moment will fade, and the world with its woes will rock merrily on its way toward Armageddon. May the year to come be a kind one for you, and the real peace on earth inhabit your soul.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night …
The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life
It has been awhile since I wrote one of these little ‘coffee’ posts. In time, chronicling about my day gets tedious since I don’t do great and wondrous things anymore. I have retired from rescuing distressed damsels and refocused on rehabilitating the poor, much maligned dragon. We have too many rescued damsels, but no one cares a fig about the abused dragon.
A long time of navel gazing has led me to believe that I didn’t have the purest of motives in rescuing the damsels anyway, and the damsels promptly went off to find a new dragon to capture them, leaving both the dragon and I in a very befuddled state.
My winter doldrums have arrived on schedule, but they don’t seem to be as severe as they were in the past few years. I am still rising with the sun, and retiring for the night soon after it sets. But my voracious appetite for factoids reveals that sleeping is good for old men. I just wish the transformation had happened earlier in my life. As Willie Nelson sang it: “The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life”. As miserable as it often was, though, I still recall living while the rest of the world slept fondly. I don’t know what it is about the darkness that calls so seductively to me and envelopes me in its murky anonymity.
Yeah. I admit it. I loved the sleeze.
One band of winter rains has come and gone, and another is soon to come. I am glad to see them, though I wish we had a hard freeze before their arrival. The ground seems to stay moist longer after one. This morning dawned chillily in the low 40’s, but bright and sunshiny. It will climb into the mid 70’s later in the day, then cool to the 60’s at night. Yeah. The horror of winter. They still talk of the terrible snow storm of 1938 here, when they got 24” of snow. It shut things down for two days before it all melted off.
And I see that I have my 250+ words, and can close this little missive off.
Good morning!
Old Dogs of War
Thursday morning arrived a bit late for me after a restless night. I began a planned withdrawal from the NSAID’s I have been taking for years to relieve a rotator cuff injury. It seems that my old pal Ibuprophen® is very bad for me, and if I don’t want to destroy my kidneys before go naked in a nursing home, I had better go cold turkey on them.
Without them, I itched. I ached. I lay there wide awake until I finally just got up and indulged my news addiction. That’s not very conducive to a night’s rest either. I see no peaceful way out of the North Korea mess. It should have been handled in 1948, but the US was war weary and just wanted that horror to go away. But I am too old for war, and someone else will pay the price for our inability to face uncomfortable truths until terror lands on our shore.
And so I sip my late morning coffee while Snook patters about on her morning chores and the day warms up from the 40’s to the 70’s. Today, one of Linda’s co-workers may be coming by to look at my pickup. I am reluctantly selling it. I doubt that I will ever use it again and it is an expensive ornament now. But a man without a pickup loses a large chunk of his masculinity down here, and I very reluctantly await its sale.
Not that I mind aging so much. I am weary. Though I still hear the drums and bugles calling me to ride out with each new team at Fort Hood deploying, the blood no longer runs so hotly in my veins. Like an old dog on the porch, I watch the parade go by, then drop my head on my paws and go back to sleep. War, valor, impregnating females and winning at poker are just pleasant memories now. Mostly fond memories, but regrets … I got a few.
… but the coffee cup is empty and needs refilling. The time is passing, and I have chores.
Good morning!
There aint much gold in that thar stardust.
Dawn arrived at 6:30 on the tick tock machine with a gentle breeze and a cool 63° (17C). Jenna, the big white something-or-the-other was outside barking at the kids walking to the school bus stop. Annie was curled up on my daybed in the studio. And Snookums was valiantly attempting to sleep in, but that isn’t going to last long when all the mutts are up.
I was off my writing schedule for a short time, though I did try to bang out a few paragraphs each day, I didn’t journal them. I think that sort of qualifies as writing. I think.
Snook sets up the coffee pot for brewing the day before, so all I need to do on those mornings where I rise early is flip the toggle button on the brewer, do my morning ablutions, pour a cup and stagger back to the studio carefully balancing the precious cargo on its way to its perch on the desk.
For the last few years God has been teaching me in the interstice between sleep and wakefulness. I suppose that is the only quiet time he can find in my fevered brain. Those little vignettes become the source of a greater understanding of my relationship with him, and unsettling revelations of just how far we have fallen from the ideal.
I was one of those fools who put his whole soul into the promise of the 60’s. I honestly believed that man had finally arrived, and my generation would finally bring peace and love into existence. Yeah, such colossal hubris, I know. But we believed it, and worked towards it. As I pen this, Joni Mitchells refrain from Woodstock (song) runs through my head.
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Joni probably had no idea of how just the opposite was true. Or maybe she did. Poets will lie to you, I once discovered. But to continue. We might be stardust when our constituent parts eventually break back down into dust, but there aint much gold in that thar stardust.
And as for the Garden. There are these two really fierce thingies with flaming swords that guard that gate, and a puny pile of bleeding dust isn’t going to find its way past them. Mankind is a beast. An animal. And his fate is the same fate of that other animals.
Unless, of course, a really unusual thing happens to him. But that is another tale for another day.
Trite Offerings and Preparation Day
… got around to writing a little late this morning. I am in an interesting conversation with a friend concerning the Great Flood and Tower of Babel myths in so many cultures. I’ll leave it to others to debate the veracity of the myths, but the cross-cultural similarities are an interesting topic, and for the sake of debate, I treat them as factual prehistory.
But like an old mentor and poormans sage once told me, if the philosophy doesn’t get you to work in the mornings, it is just speculation. Well, you would have to know Dell and had to have been there to understand the profundity of that statement …
I had ordered a replacement device for my hearing aids that will allow them to connect to my cellphone a few months ago, and they were backordered. Last week, I left a message at the audiologists asking for an update on the order. I waited for a return call, and didn’t get one, so this week I called back, and politely but firmly berated the secretary for not calling back. She said she had called back and left two messages because I didn’t answer the phone. I checked, and discovered that I hadn’t unmuted the phone after services last Saturday, and there were indeed two messages in my inbox.
I humbly apologized, and she graciously accepted the apology. But I suspect that she told her coworkers what a #%!! head I was. I go in Monday to get the device paired to my hearing aids, and get a checkup hearing test. I am thinking of getting a candy basket as a peace offering to her. One offends the secretary at their own peril.
It is brisk outside, and your humble hero forgot to set the heat on last night, so the house was a bit beyond chilly this morning. I am surprised to not find a frozen parakeet in my studio this morning. I turned on a small heater by Kippur da Budgie’s cage, and was rewarded with scolding. I guess I did deserve it, however. I wasn’t innocent.
The day is deceptively sunny. When you step out in it, it sucks the heat right out of you. But the plants seem to thrive in the coolness after a long hot summer. Trees grow rapidly down here because of the mild springs and falls provide two growing seasons. Quite often we won’t have a killing freeze until January, though they can happen early in December.
Today is preparation day, so lunch is often late since we don’t set the Shabbat meal until six in the evening. Snookums has done her morning chores of coffee brewing, feeding dogs and birds, exercising dogs, and bird-bath filling, and is now facebooking and game playing on her PC. Soon she’ll rouse and feed me breakfast. We fervently hope.
But we’ll write, muse and sip coffee ‘til she is ready to do so.
Good morning!
Drug and dragged, kicking and screaming
Thou shalt write each and every day. The profound, and the banal, thou shalt write of it.
Wednesday dawns with bright blue skies and a brilliant yellow sunrise that sends its streaks across the sparkling grasses, and backlights the pecan and acacia tree in greens and golds. A pot filled with sweet alyssums shows its tiny blooms on the stoop. The rumble of a 50-gallon trash barrel being dragged* out to the lane by Snookums interrupts the idyll. Yep. Wednesday is trash day.
Little routines like that are the only marks of passage of time for me now. Sunday is brunch day, Monday is Snooks shopping day, Tuesday Snooks volunteers at a local food bank, Wednesday is trash day, Thursday is my shopping day, Friday is preparation day. And … Saturday is Shabbat.
And so goes the little reminders that time has not ceased yet.
The news feeds are full of hidden references to Fusion GPS and the political machinations around it. I am still not clear on who the players are, but given the climate of confusion and political counterstrikes, truth has become subjective. I suppose in time it will all play out. When I automatically assume that they are all lying to me, I get less worked up. Evil is good and good is evil is the meme. Trust no one.
But for the moment, a cottony softness surrounds me. Snooks talk radio natters off in the distance. Anonymous banks and bumps remind me that this is a home full of pets going on about their day. Kippur da Budgie nags me for noise, but I don’t want to turn the radio on yet.
I just wanna sip coffee in silence, and pound out my 250 words for the day.
Good morning!
* I prefer trash barrel being drug out to … but I can hear my old English teacher, Mrs. Ginder, primly telling me that drug is not a verb, but rather a noun. Dragged is the preferred word.
But drug just feels better. Damned yankiesms anyway …
… and a time to cast away stones.
It has warmed from a frigid 43° to a balmy 53° this morning. The humidity falls out of the skies at these temperatures, and a winters bright blue sky peeks through the greenery while a weak but bright yellow sun valiant strives to warm the dewy fields. Eventually it will succeed later in the day as it climbs back up to 84°
Monday is Snooks grocery day, but she has her morning chores of dressing, feeding dogs, cleaning the bird cage, throwing the ball for the dogs and feeding the old man before she can leave. I, on the other hand, have discovered delivered groceries. We grocer shop separately because I can’t live with her pantry system. When I plan to serve green beans, it messes up my whole day if there isn’t any and I have to serve creamed corn instead.
I have spent the last few months learning how to cook from scratch via meal kits, but now that I am cooking without them, I have discovered why God created canned and instant foods. I don’t find a lot of joy in cooking. I find it to be a very inconvenient way to transfer food from its natural state into my belly. Why snap string beans at $1.28 a pound and wash, string and cut them before cooking them, when a can of string beans cost 79¢ and you just nuke it?
OK!. OK!. … I have seared taste buds. So sue me.
We finally made services after a long hiatus from the congregation. We really missed them, and even though I couldn’t sit through the entire service or stay for the meal afterwards, I did enjoy being around them. I hope my health holds out enough to do at least that much each week.
We are at a place where it is time to cast off stones. Our stuff has stuff. The weed burner, most of the pistols, the bicycles, even the pickup truck all go unused. Snooks has been slowly tossing unused clothing. And I am ready to do with less stuff. I just need something to read, maybe a game to play, something to write on, and email to stay in touch with family and friends.
But as always, the first chore of the day is to empty the coffee pot.
Good morning!
Another Bat Kol
Sunday starts the first day of the week. Again. Just as it has from the time we first began counting the weeks. The sun set, the sun rose, and a silent click marks one more step until the last one. Everything’s time is numbered, and an eternal clock ticks of that number, no matter what its allotted time is measured in.
One day, I do believe that clock will make its last click for itself, just as it will make its last click for my allotted time. Some time ago, I actually heard that click. A solemn voice said, “We shall not pass this way again”. I think I know what that voice was referring to, but since it didn’t seem to be a message for anyone in particular, I stored up the voice and the accompanying vision.
Since then I have closely watched the seasons pass by with ever ever-increasing rhythm. World events began unfolding with that same increasing tempo. Political boundaries have expanded and retracted. Mighty kingdoms have arisen, only to fall again. Ancient kingdoms that disappeared have arisen, some even with their former names.
And a people have appeared that don’t remember the former times, nor the lessons they spawned, and they too will make the same tragic errors that their ancestors made, and they know it not. Mankind, with his mighty intellect has increased in knowledge, but grown weaker in his wisdom.
And I don’t have the power to say “Stop! Don’t you see where you are going? Is it that hard to discern?”
But to them, I am just a cranky old man who sits on his porch and remembers the old days. And they are right.
The bat kol continues to wake me night after night, with simple words packed with images and meanings that are unutterable, so I remain mute, except to tell you I heard the click of a clock that was marking the passing of time.
Rusty's Armory 