God Only Knows

The wind is blowing hard and fast.

Snow plows scrape and pound across the macadam,

And the world is brightly white.

In four minutes I must flee.

I stare at the Buddha in blue jeans  frothing milk,

Off to my side sits the fur lined hat I borrowed from my son.

When I gaze out the floor to ceiling glass all I see is white.

When I just sit I hear John Prine singing...

“Surround me with your boundless love...”

A day like today screams for compassion

For boundless love.

A day like today focuses the heart.

At day’s end there will be a fire in the fireplace,

Hot cocoa sans marshmallows in my hand,
and a comfy armchair.

A moment to recharge accepted boundless love. 

Vampires Pt 2

So after I posted the piece about supernatural television trying to help us with our innermost longing for existential meaning this story popped up in my Apple Newsfeed.  Interesting take on what in my flailing arms style I was trying to convert.  I am just glad someone else noticed what I notices.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/bimadewunmi/good-place-russian-doll-natasha-lyonne-capitalism

Vampire, Aliens and Time Travellers, Oh My.

So What If There Were Vampires?

Took a survey of what I watch on the television last night.  My choices divide between crimes shows and supernatural or fantasy programs.  The latter provides the bulk of my viewing please.  This category break down into about four sub genres; people who don’t die (this includes vampires and people repreating the last day of their lives), people returning from the future trying to save us form what lays ahead, aliens among us and space travel.  The one quirky outlier of this genre is The Good Place which focuses pretty much entirely on moral philosophy as opposed the characters being dead and awaiting judgments.

Note the first category, the cop shows are colder and filmed in grim grey tones.  These tend to focus on logic, intuition and procedure.  I have been watching mostly police shows from Europe, i.e., Spain, Britain, France and Finland.  A murder is usually involved and the sorting out of the horrors takes an arc of six episodes. I think I am draw to these based on the training my mind has received, you know law school and stuff like that.

I really want to focus on the second genre.  Here are a few of shows I have been watching, Humans, Roswell NM (the new one) and Travellers.  I did binge watch most of True Blood. The popularity of these shows implies to me that we the television viewing audience, (well, maybe it is the television writing class), have trouble with the issues of potentially finite mortality.  Also, we (they) are also struggling with what is moral and what is not. Most of the plot lines involve powers both wonderful and frightening and extended if not eternal life confronting what motivates and animates us of ordinary flesh and a short span of existence.  Why do we do good is implied in almost every story line, sometimes it is express, but impliedly it is there every single episode. 

True Blood had characters that were purportedly 2000 and 3000 years old.  The. writers implied that living over that period stripped these beings of any sense of the burdens, fears and joys that most of us mortals live with day to day.  Travellers had characters who were filled with purpose, they were hellbent trying to avoid a dystopian future.  These beings once they came from the austere dark world of synthetic food and cowering in glorified huge yurts to be protected from the befouled environment. However, they become enchanted with the choices we humans currently have as to lifestyle, diet and philosophy. 

Religion in our modern world is fading.  Those in standard Protestant denominations refer to the current generation as the great unchurched mass.  Pews are empty and coffers are drying up.  I wonder if the prevalence of such programming is sort of bubbling up and out of our desires for more than a span of 70 odd years. In the past we had clerics to dazzle us we heaven or threaten to damn us all to hell; in either case we existed after our mortal bodies failed.  I wonder if the tales of aliens and the undead are our creation of a new cannon of hope to stand against existential angst.

Me, I am not looking at these programs for that bulwark against the meaninglessness of life.  I am watching the programs because they have attractive women with slim figures, taunt bellies and perky breasts all wearing beautiful clothing.  But I think an argument can be made that people have always told stories of the supernatural to express fundamental concerns about the limitations of human life.  From Grimm’s Tales to H.G. Wells to H.P. Lovecraft to indigenous peoples origin stories of fantastic eagles and other beasts from the sky, humans have looked for more than the existence that what is found between the forceps and the headstone. 

Maybe I am wrong but I really do think the popularity of these programs is tied to so innate will toward life plus more hard wired into our psychological makeup.  Time to go back to work.

Another Day

Ice storm came through last night.  The roads are a mess.  Apparently, this is the first part of a one/two punch.  As the day goes on it will get above freezing and some melting will occur.  As the night comes on the temperatures will drop and there will be more freezing rain.  Welcome to the Midwest in February.  

It is lunch time and I am hanging out at the coffee shop.  The place is a refuge from my workplace.  Me, I am a firm believer in having that clear split between morning at the office and afternoon at the office.  There is just something important about being away from your desk that keeps the mind from growing truly numb.

Today I am listening to an old Willie Nelson recording called God’s Problem Child.  The current song has nice lyrics,

I followed you to hell and back
I'll follow you again
No matter where you take me
It's someplace that I ain't been
And I'll go to hell believin'
True love, you're still my friend
From the start to the finish
And until the bitter end
I lived my life believin'
True love, you're still my friend
When the whole damn thing is over
And we reach our journey's end
I'll leave this world believin'
True love, you're still my friend.

Great sentiments from the old dope smoking, cantankerous, grizzled old singer of songs for the average person.  Willie’s thought are thoughts that cross all our minds.  Willie’s voice is like a well-worn leather coat, soft comfortable and maybe just a little bit ragged but made with enough style and craftsman ship that you will never abandon it.

My wife is out of town and so I am acting as housekeeper to my two sons. This requires making sure they are off to appointments and that they are fed.  Someone, well my wife, left us about a week’s worth of prepackaged meals that I just must warm up for the most part.  The issues are not that I have to do this, but it comes at a price.  At days end after a full day of work’s draining activity, after the 30-40 minutes of prep and the 20 minutes of clean up after dinner I am dead.  This usually leaves me lying on the couch watching Netflix on my iPad (and occasionally playing with the cat).

I watched the series Russian Doll over the weekend.  I loved it.  The basic conceit is the same as that of Groundhog Day.  The lead actress dies 30 minutes into the first episode, and she keeps reliving and reliving the 30 minutes to a day between the starting point and her death.  It is funny, it is dirty, it is rude, and it is imbued with tons of moral philosophy issues.  About every two minutes there is an issue of what or wrong that surfaces.  Russian Doll is not governed by the normal rules of what these kinds of stories and that is a good thing.  Some reviewer called it magical realism.  I am willing to say yeah to that.  The story has a feel that it could have come from someone like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s mind.

Having finished Russian Doll, I have moved onto the Finnish cop drama Bordertown’s second season.  I watch this with subtitles.  I find the tone and the inflection of the voicing some important in a drama.  Watching a dubbed version cuts so much away from what the actors are trying to do.  An actor acts with voice and tone and gesture and the interaction of all three is needed to be seen to capture the art of the performance.  I am only a couple of episodes away from the end of this season.  It is good, but the first season was better.

Willie is singing, “I woke up still not dead today, the gardener did not find me that way…”.  Cute song.  I can empathize.  Not a bad disc.

Oh well, it is back to the old bump and grind.  Four people.  Four stories. Four decisions. My emotions are not really steeled for this, but I will be ready once I sit down in that chair.

Old Riders of the West

As I am doing the dishes tonight I am listening to the New Riders of the Purple Sage.  For some reason the combination of the ritual of dishes and music made me think of an old high school friend with whom I occasionally correspond.

I think the reason she came to mind was because back in high school the only person I could get to listen to this New Rider’s album (when I brought it into my junior year third period English class) was Bobby Romano.  Bobby died a bit back, at least according to my class’s webpage. Yeah, the fact that he is gone started me thinking about how my corresponding friend and I keep firing notes back and forth when another classmate dies.  To my mind the class of 1974 is losing a large number of people just way too early.

Oh well, the country strains of this music soothes me as I deal with the issues of my life. Funny about that though, it is more the general feel of the music than the music itself.  Listening to the music now it is quite simplistic structurally.  Listening to the lyrics the songs are either sexist or naïve.  But as long as the music is simply in the background acting as aural wallpaper it is like an old worn coat, comfortable and comforting, but a bit ugly and way out of style.

My hope is for a period of quiet in the notes on deaths of those we have known.  It would be nice to find a period of gentle breezes, warm sunlight with nothing to mourn.

For a taste of my worn out of style coat click the link.

https://youtu.be/Mdtp34c_RMs

Me and Gordon

The Gordian Knot is a legend associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem (disentangling an "impossible" knot) solved easily by finding a loophole or thinking creatively ( I.e., Alexander using his sword to cut the Gordian knot as opposed to untiring it).

My psyche is a Gordian knot. The tangled ball  is equal parts guilt, lust, insecurity, self aggrandizing, religion and drive for achievement.  That last bit and the second bit have both been tamped down some over the decades.  When they rip your prostate from you, lust may mentally remain but the physical issues the absence of the organ raises temper the raw sexual urge.  Nearing retirement the desire to receive attaboys also fades.  I still want to be good, I still want to be relied on, but I really don’t care for the hassle that would come with a promotion.

Guilt and religion, those two take the primacy. The fear of nothingness if religion is wrong looms large at the edge of the precipice.  And there are the things that I did that were wrong, really wrong.  Do these hang out in some fabric of human experience for all eternity out in space?  Religion says once forgiven always forgiven.  Alcoholics Anonymous says make amends.  Existentialism says it does not matter.  Buddhism urges being in the now, not really forgetting the past but applying loving kindness to one’s self and to all those in the world including those so horribly harmed in the years gone by.  Ah, for some clarifying event or sign as to what is the right path.

Perhaps if I keep reading poetry from the 15th century and essays by Nobel laureates I will catch a flash of the light of truth.  Maybe I will do this clumsy dance of life just a tad better.

I can’t go back and relive the moments of my past, not in any real meaningful sense.  I can however act with compassion as atonement for the wrongs done. The concepts set forth above are so bound up it seems like I need a sword to slice through the tangled mess that they are.

Going, going, gone....

On my phone there is a timer doing a countdown. The current position stands at the number above. As you can see the time to go is less than a year. Come Wednesday the time. we begin with the countdown with the number 10 in the month’s position.

The time will fly by. No doubt about it. The time since my boys were babes to the men they are now went by in a flash of light, much light one you experience from a camera. Poof and 23 years are gone. What I know is that in a similar “poof” my life will be gone. Not trying to be morbid, just saying it is what it is.

My decision to go to Portugal for part of my remaining time is tied to the fact that before I die, I want to immerse myself in another culture, another world. If you would, I want to shed this skin of 62 years

It was only last September that I really bought in to the idea of a major move this late in life. The 10 days I spent in Portugal in September  were a delight. The place is a great deal like the best of my youth.

Seafood, sunbathing and the surf are just a short stone’s throw away. Some of the shore towns have the same half carney/half townie feel that Ocean City had when I was a lad.

One of the biggest regrets about the upcoming that I have is the distance that will be between me and the people I love. I guess I am an existentialist. What is, what has been, what may be just need to be accepted.

My life has been driven by serendipity and there is no reason I should give up on that being my guiding force now.