Hateful

 

One of the worst things one can be called in today's America is "hateful." What does that term mean?

I got called "hateful" by a commenter in the live feed of my last podcast. I was expecting, even hoping, that this might happen, although the source was not what I expected.

After my show two weeks ago, titled "Did Muhammad Exist?" (the precise title of a book I was discussing), I figured the title would draw many people to sample it in Rumble, much more than my usual tame topics, and that I would get some angry blowback from Muslims or their white liberal enforcers. Perhaps I did, in the comments, but I never read those. Like the feedback forms from my students when I tought, I am so little interested in that. If someone tells me point blank they like my show, I will thank them, but I don't read comments. Many people who are Youtube streamers say the same thing, because their comments are sometimes extremely vicious and discouraging, and it is easy to get obsessed with one that is particularly negative.

Since I extended that question about the origins of Islam this last week, and I figured now I am the radar screen of people who police opinions that regarded as "Islamophobic," another word whose meaning we never define, but which we are supposed to understand as a guide to what is acceptable public behavior.

Such accusations as "hateful", "Islamophobic", and other ones have the potential to end people's public careers, stripping them of public stature and even their livelihoods---cheered on by a mob that includes the mainstream media.

Being a blissful nobody, I probably don't have much to fear. In fact, the absence of push back that I have received even as I broach certain controversial topics has indicated to me what little impact I have. Having "haters" is considered an inevitable consequence of any opinion expressed online that reaches a significant audience. My ego was bruised a bit, even as I dread strongly opinionated interactions online. I truly believe I could stand on stage in front of an audience of 100,000 and speak on any subject, and somehow connect with a good chunk of the audience. Yet these anymous asynchronous exchanges in comments and social media are things I find as palatable as sewage water. When I still on Facebook, I always regretted any comment that elicited a response.  I dreaded seeing a response to controversial opinion in general. It was typically one of my old high school friends, one who cared not at all for politics back in the day, but who had become a serious enforcer of liberal thought. Such a person would deem it necessary to "correct me", as if somehow I hadn't gotten the memo about what I was supposed to believe.  They were informing me out of respect for our friendship, that I needed to educate myself and reset my thought. 

This is why I got off Facebook two months before the 2016 election and never have logged in again. I could not bear to see people I loved descend in that kind of thought thuggery. Before I left I began to see my old friends begin to ignore, even celebrate, violence against people like me, even our extermination. They didn't know they were talking about their old friend Matt. It would never occur to them that someone they had considered a friend, who was sane and intelligent, could be that way. I have experienced the meltdown of several such people, coming to frantic years in my presence, as they discovered that I was one of those people. 

I forgive all of them, and pray for them.

On my show I know that even among our side, there are people who disagree strongly and passionately. Perhaps the biggest is the Protestant-Catholic divide, something that I have lived and experienced since the moment of my birth, perhaps before. So it is no problem for me to thread that needle, especially being raised as a "traditional" Episcopalian in a way that would now be part of the breakaway Anglican Church of North America (just because everyone back then was "traditional" by today's standards). On my how talk favorably about the Catholic Church very often, especially in regard to certain theology, liturgy, and traditions. Yet I know if I mention Mary, or any form of Marian devotion, it will provoke anger among certain evangelical Protestants who consider such things to be idolatry, and who cannot restrain themselves from denouncing it as such. I ran into such a woman at the Badlands conference last year, stumbling into the subject while being naive of the strength of many people's opinions. Again, I was simply considering the opinion Catholics (and Orthodox) hold about Mary without condemning it. But condemn it she did! I could sense she was offended that I mentioned it in a neutral fashion.

On my show, however, we have dived deep on my show regarding Church history. As many people know, once you start looking into early Church history, it becomes apparent that for a thousand years or so after Jesus was born, all Christians were Catholic/Orthodox, and followed practices of those churches now abhorred by many Protestants.  As I explore these topics on my show, I do so under the cover of neutral history, and so far it has worked. It helps that I have also been able to discuss other branches of Eastern Christianity, including the Church of the East and Oriental Churches, who also consider themselves to be apostolic, and which has an ornate liturgies and saintly devotions. 

Somehow it is easier for evangelicals to find common cause with these Eatern Churches, whereas the Catholic Church is worthy only of condemnation.  Thus I can sneak in talk about saints, and Mary, without offending them. It is hard to speak against churche which existed in ancient Hindu and long Muslimized lands, holding forth to the faith for a thousand years, all under the threat of extermination even up to the present. Who would tell the Maronite Catholics of Lebanon, who have seen their country reduced from being the only Christian-majority nation in the Middle East to one with a non-Christian majority in their own lifetime, that their devotion to Mary is actually worship to a Pagan goddess?

I enjoy pointing out that many present-day traditional Catholics think the current Pope has lost the faith, and some consider him downright Satanic. I have a friend who was reading Windswept House, a hard-to-find novel written by a priest that is a fictionalization of the satanic rituals in the Vatican and elsewhere by the modern factions whose have ought to turn the Church to the Evil One. I hear it's a tough read. 

Of course if you are a hard core evangelical, or even perhaps a Baptist or an old-style Lutheran, you might say that the turning of the Catholic Church towards Satan happened centuries ago. The Orthodox would not go so far as that, but only point that heterodoxy ultimately is a path to Hell, but perhaps not as steep a one as the evangelicals would attribute to Catholicism. The Anglicans---being a Church founded on the necessity of granting a divorce, but which quickly degenerated into a intolerant slaughter of English Catholics, would simply mumble and try to ignore the issue. Won't someone please consider our Holy Orders to be valid and apostolic?

But it was not anything like this that provoked the accusation of my being "hateful". What finally provoked that accusation came not from anyone commenting on my remarks about the origins of Islam or Christianity. Instead it was the fruit of my discussion of Jerusalem in the context of the Biblical archaeology of the Second Temple, the possible building a Third Temple, and the desire by many Jew and Christians to undertake a project in the near future.  I tried to give a balanced look at the topic, and simple try to become familiar with the Red Heifer controversy. I even mentioned the theory that the first and second temples were not at the location commonly ascribed to them, although I went only so far as to see that it is not considered to be reputable scholarly archaeology, which doesn't make it false, but there are apparently good arguments in favor of the current assumed location coincident with Al-Aqsa Mosque. If you are going to swim in those waters, like Jay Smith, you better fucking know how to be a scholar (pardon my French). You better fucking know to dot your eyes and tie your shoelaces. Otherwise you will get eaten alive for wasting people's fucking time (pardon my French again). Believe me, I know.

I think of Jay Smith, the American Christian pastor-scholar and Youtuber who has mostly strongly asserted claims the academic claims that Islam as we know it was invented out of a heretical Arian Christian breakaway that was ret-conned to be about an Arab prophet in a place that didn't even exist at the time he supposedly lived, but had the effect of making that place into a wealthy and powerful center of pilgrimage.

Did I ever tell you that I fucking love the history of the Late Middle Ages and the Dark Ages (Pardonne maye Medieval Frenche)

On my show, as part of the Temple discussion, I had occasion to discuss the 1973 Yom Kippur War, something I've done in previous shows, and pointed out again that n those harrowing days of October 1973, the Israelis feared running out of ammunition, and succumbing to the Egyptian-Syrian offensive. "The Third Temple is in danger," said Moshe Dayan, the famous eye-patch wearing Israeli minister of defense (see photo above).  

Fortunately for them the Americans came to their aid with giant transport planes bearing resupplies. Nixon had agreed to this on the condition the planes arrive at night, so as not to poke the eye of our Arab allies, who were willing to look the other way. But according to the story, weather delayed the planes in the Azores, and the U.S. Air Force planes with their big logos landed smack in broad daylight for the world to see. The Arab street was outraged. The Arab leaders were forced to act on appeaement of this, and this is how the 1973 Oil Embargo was born. This is the moment that the postwar period of American prosperity ended for good. We have never recovered from this. It set in motion the cycle of modern history in many ways.

Reviewing this again in my research for last week's, I had become fascinated with Moshe Dayan and had to learn more about him. He was quite a badass in the Israeli independence struggle, a subject I knew little about, expect for the broad outline of it, and having read Exodus twenty-five years ago (and boy, did I get shit for that later--but that's a story for another day).

Reading about Moshe Dayan and the activities of the Israeli "terrorist" operatoins against the British in 1944 brought to mind the curious fact that exactly as the British were fighting the Germans in Europe, the Jews were fighting the British.  This is an oddity of history that is not widely known outside Israel, nor even discused. Somehow it is considered inappropriate to point this out, even hateful.  Well, that's mind reading. I can at least asert a truth that  discussion of it is one of those things that opens one up to being called "hateful" in comments on a podcast.

I probably deserve it. Next time I will do better.

Connectedness and Momentum

 Since starting this blog over fifteen years ago,  I have gone through periods where I have written entries almost every day, sometimes multiple ones per day. At other times I have gone months without writing.

Even when I go through months without writing, it is usually not because I don't have something I want to say. Rather it is just laziness and forgetfulness, of letting the days go by. I am thankful there are people who still drop by to read what I have to say. That fact motivates me to keep going. It feels like a conversation in a strange way. If I imagine someone is reading this, someone I know or otherwise, then I can communicate to them directly and that feeling is a joy. I can't imagine not having this.

I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago lying in bed, after waking in the middle of the night. In those times I often find myself of things I want to say, words to express to anonymous world out there, or to old friends with whom I am estranged.

At that moment I had an insight that the reason I write is to get these thoughts out of my head, because if I do not write them, they will keep swirling in my head, night after night. If I write them down, then the void will allow for new thoughts to form, which themselves need to be written down. It is about keeping the flow of thoughts going through my head lest I find myself in the stagnation of thought circles.

These very words I am writing are part of that, for I was thinking about all this last night again---why I write this. Ultimately then it is about a feeling of connectedness to other people, as well as the desire to feel an internal momentum to my life. 

Love One Another

Today is Orthodox Easter---Pascha. 

For the last month on my Badlands podcast show, I have been on a run about ancient history and Christianity in late Antiquity that started with examining the deep question why the East and West use different methods for calculating the date of Easter. Coming up with ideas for shows that I can legitimately research and prepare for during the week while holding down a more-than-forty-hours-a-week day job is an ongoing challenge. Usually I go for the lowest-hanging fruit of ideas, often ones that build off the previous week. This is tempered by my knowledge that I tend to become fascinated with topics that may be rather niche to my audiences. They seem to humor me, however, even a I geek out. 

I spent two show discussing ancient church councils---Nicaea, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and how the various major branches of Christianity came to split from each other.  I did a show examining 7th century history and the scholarship over early Islamic history, specifically the question of whether Muhammad actually existed, or whether the name "Muhammad" was originally an epithet of Christ that was later applied to a fictional Arab prophet that became the center of a religion. I originally stumbled on this via this facinating book. I turns out there is a lot of scholarship in support of the idea, as generally the subject of the historicity of Islam has been off limits (as opposed to Christianity and the historicity of Jesus, which has been put under great scrutiny in that fashion since the 18th century in the West). As I told my audience, the idea that Muslims may actually revere a heretical form of Jesus (specifically Nestorian) makes it easier for me to have empathy with them as fellow "Crypto-Christians". 

The mass conversion of Muslims to Christianity is something I can easily foresee at some point, especially as many Muslims move to the West.  We should not do things that keep them from making this transition, but neither should we be shy about our faith. For what good is it, if we do not share the Gospel with others? What good are we doing for God if we say it is perfectly fine to be Muslim and to reject Jesus as Savior? If we say we are fine with it, are we, in fact, watered down Muslims ourselves? I don't have easy answers to these questions. In all things, we must act with love towards one another. Christ commands that of us. Personally I would never raise the topic with a Muslim unless they directly asked me about it. In that case I would trust the Holy Spirit to guide me in a gentle manner to provide my own testimony as a witness to the resurrection.

None of this exactly hot-off-the-presses news, but it has been fun to go through the material with the audience. Last week we examined the Dome of the Rock and its origins, as well as the efforts by Israelis (and American evangelical protestants) to promote the building of the Third Temple in its place. The earliest inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock apparently refer explicitly to Jesus and contain pre-Koranic "Koran verses" sprinkled among them. Fascinating subject.

I figure I can get one more week out of this run of topics. I could probably stay in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages indefinitely. I feel the constant need to bring in current events. The timing of my shows wa such that I was able to discuss the attack on Mar Mari Emmanuel in the context of the origins of the Church of the East, a subject I knew nothing about. 

I told my audience I would probably do one more show in this run, as I mentioned, and that it would probably be about the Crusades. I would like to discuss the counter-narrative that the Crusades were a singularly horrible incident in human history, and then in many respects they were a justifiable response to Muslim aggression. At least it will give people something to think about it. Trying to shame Christians over the Crusades has long been a vector of attack by non-Christians, including secular folk in America who want nothing more than to point out how hypocrisy of Christians.

I don't know how much of a deep dive I'll do over it. I barely have time to scratch the surface of any topic during my show.

As I write this next to me is a copy of Jerusalem Pilgrimage 1099--1185, Volume 167 of Series II of the Hakluyt Society, which is a summary of primary source from pilgrims to Holy Land during the time of the Crusades. It is amazing to see that a thousand years ago, there was a "tourism" industry of westerners going to the Holy Land to see the sights, just like today. The book is a fine volume, well bound, published in 1988. I had to look up the Hakluyt Society online. 

The copy I have still has the in-house paper slip from the Burnside Powell's in Portland, priced at 21 dollars. I bought it the last time I was in Portland in 2017. There is something pleasing about having bought this book about Christian pilgrims in Portland, which has gained a reputation as a city that has rejected God entirely. I pray regularly for that city and the people there. I would like to go back there and see what it has become.

May Baskets

 When I was a kid in the 1970s, May baskets on the first day of May were still a thing. One made them with construction paper---a simple cone with a paper handle taped or stapled to hold the cone, which was then filled with candy treats of various kinds. One left such baskets on the door handles of friends, neighbors, and relatives. This was in the Midwest.

I was thinking about May baskets because they had sprung into my memory, and upon doing so, I realized that it had been many years since I had heard anyone mention them, in person on in the media. May baskets had disappeared from our cultural consciousness.

It is easy to see that such a tradition would not survive the 1980s, which is when so many aspects of culture began disappearing from our shared experience. It is not that such trends began in the 1980s. Rather they typically began by the 1960s. It's that traditions that began dying out in the 1960s still had enough momentum from the living generations of the time to continue for another decade or so.

What I just said is one of the most poignant, vibrant constant experiences of my life---that I was born at a time to see many aspects of life in America and western countries which had existed for decades and centuries, begun to be phased out?

Isn't this always happening? Perhaps, but it was unmistakable that the 1960s saw a massive acceleration in the wiping away of old thins and the replacement with new things. For example, I am somewhat of a freak for foreign language learning, especially small ones spoken only in a localized region, and which are endangered. It is a fact that there are tens of thousands of languages in the world which have been spoken for centuries but which are dying out and which, all things being equal, will not survive a living languages into the 22nd century. This includes even ones in the US which have existed for over a hundred years as niche languages and dialects, but which are severely endangered. There are still people alive who speak this languages natively and fluently, but there is a lower bound on the age of such people. There are no native speakers, or very few, younger than a certain age. This age is almost universally that of people born in the early 1960s.

Children born at that time and later ceased obtaining these languages as living languages. Perhaps they heard it spoken among adults, and they can recognize words and phrases, but they never learned to speak it themselves. It was not necessary for them to do. Universal electrification, and especially the proliferation of television, had reached a point where kid naturally used a larger language, like English, and found the use of their grandparents' tongue to be out of date and old-timey.

As I write this, I am thinking about Missouri French, which I just learned about. But it applies to probably most Native American languages, and a great many 'small languages' of Europe, especially those without status as a national language.

Even official national languages may be in danger. I recently read that Icelandic children typically speak English with each other on the playground, reserving Icelandic when they have to speak to adults. There are only 300,000 people in Iceland. Their language has been spoken in some form or another for a thousand years on that island. Will it be spoken 100 years hence? It feels like a fading dream one remembers upon waking, that one knows one cannot return to. The conditions are no longer in existence.

Are May baskets still a thing anywhere, outside cultural reactionaries who keep alive old traditions in isolation, to the bemusement of their peers. "I know someone who still does it?" doesn't count. That's a symptom of the late stage tail end of a tradition. Will children today care to keep it going, even for nostalgia, or are people my age the last one to remember? That is---is their a community in which May baskets are still a common, expected thing, and is undertaken even by children as a expected holiday event? My guess is no.

Of course I am talking about many, many things beside May baskets. But I can't think of a better example of a tradition, dying out even as I participated in it as a child, and which is apparently dead in common use. 

But at least May Day is still a holiday! A Communist one to be sure, but that goes without saying. All our holidays have been Communist versions of their former selves.

Up to Cottonwood

 Probably the most fun I had while stumbling around was the weekend trip we took on the weekend of the 14th of April, which gave me a chance not only to experience a long car ride as a passenger, as Jessica drove us up I-17 to Cottonwood, but then to spend all day Saturday on an old steam ride as it went up a canyon into the wilderness.

Before we left I was wondering if I would make it. Supposedly my vertigo/nausea combination was what people experience with motion sickness, which I have never experienced in my life, to my recollection. I have never been car sick. I can sleep during any car ride. The worst I get are leg cramps from being cooped up. 

Now would motion sickness catch up to me. I monitored myself as we left on the 101 and headed towards the junction with I-17, and then went northward. It was a beautiful day, not too hot yet. I felt no nausea. So far so good. 

It took a little over an hour to reach our destination. We had been to Cottonwood previously on one occassion and knew it would be a nice get-a-way. Jessica had booked a room in a new hotel there of her own initiative and planned the entire trip. Moreover we have been to Sedona, which is nearby to Cottonwood, on multiple occasions. 

Jessica had gotten a double gift certificate for the train ride for her birthday, as a gift from her mother. She had wanted to use it before the temperature got too hot. She does not do well in the heat (unlike me who thrives in the heat but who shuts down in the cold).

It was only mid April but it was well hot when we parked by our hotel on the street in back. I got out of the car and felt ok at first. Then I grabbed by small backpack and slung it over my shoulder. It was not very heavy, but immediately it sent me reeling like a drunkard, and I almost fell onto the pavement of the street. I felt a wave of nausea and could barely contain myself while standing in the reception as Jessica checked us in. Nevertheless I did not need recourse to vomit. Nevertheless it was a bit of downer, as I wondered if I'd be good company for the weekend.

The next day we drove to the Verde Valley Railroad station---a legacy locomotive, as they call it. At the gift shop I bought a pleasant map of legacy locomotive routes in the United States. I was anticipating an awful experience, sitting on a wooden bunch seat for four hours as we bumped along uneven tracks.

Instead on board the train I found it completely in a lush style with padded seats and small tables and lounges. As I would discover, the purpose of the train ride is to allow oneself to drink from an open moving bar. The bar tender---who yelled her instructions to us at the top of her lungs while standing next to us---implied that she expected all of us to consume our fair share of drinks.

There was free champagne at our little table, in little plastic cups. I picked my own to toast and as I did so, I experienced the weirdest sensation because the sides of the cup began erupting with a fountain of champagne. It took us a second or two to realize my plastic cup was broken along the sides and that by picking it up, I had forced gravity to send it out of the cracks. It was actually beautiful in a strange way, this fountain of champagne.

We probably drank the least of anybody in our car (in all there were 400 people on the train in various similar cars, each with their own bartender). When we got to the turnaround point in the canyon, at a ghost town inaccessible by normal vehicles, she ordered the bartender's special drink for us to share, with ice cream, because it was a desert treat and also we didn't want to keep saying no to the bartender, who probably makes her living off the tips. Times are tough for everyone.

Recovering My Balance Using the Internet

 The last couple days have found me in good spirits, as I've concluded that eventually I will regain my equilibrium in walking completely. For a few weeks it was touch and go. It seemed to go away, but it would come back with a vengeance if I got hot or tired, as I did a couple times. Thankfully the nausea has mostly gone away, with only a slight twinge at times that I would barely notice otherwise, but for which I am currently well attuned to. 

Anything on my body that "breaks" in any way sends me to an obsession over it, as I want to gauge how big of an issue it is. It has taken me most of my life to realize I am far more connected to my body than the average person, in that I tend to notice anything out of whack. Also, as I told my current dentist when I went to see him last year, I'm very much into my original equipment as much as possible. I feel an obligation to God to do so, part of repentance for ignoring certain issues for so long, and treating my body---which is supposed to be a temple of the Holy Spirit--with disregard as if it would last forever.

Losing the ability to walk fluidly, as I did upon waking on the morning of April 7, felt like a warning jolt to what might lie ahead in my later years.  I did not like it all. The idea that my mobility might give out is terrifying, as the thought that I can ultimately get anywhere I need with "my good legs" has long feel central to my self-conception.

Is this what dying feels like, I thought to myself? At that moment, I realized the disequilibrium I was experiencing, and the accompanying other symptoms, were a gift. Memento mori. 

Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. BPPV for short. Jessica diagnosed it for me. Her step-father had it. He had keeled over on the toilet and had thrown up. He went to a physical therapist and learned it had to do with dislocation of crystals in one's inner ear. There is a maneuver that therapists can perform, called the Epley maneuver, that will "reset" one's crystal. He explained it over breakfast the other morning. He said when the therapist did it, it released everything immediately and caused him to vomit, but after that he was ok.

Just knowing this existed put my mind at ease. I looked it up online. Many people had positive testimonials. It can even be done at home by oneself.

At that moment, I felt as if I'd been given a great gift of mercy. It will probably go away on its own, but the symptoms can be treated by oneself at home! 

Of course I haven't done the maneuver yet. I'm letting the symptoms go away naturally, because I want to learn how long it takes my body to kick it.

That I can look such things up on the Internet gives me great peace, just as it does to write this blog and throw the entries out into the digital sea wrapped in a bottle for anyone to read and retrieve I thank God for such conveniences and mercies, even as I wish I could write letters to my old friends with a typewriter, and mail them with a stamp.

As far as civilization got without the Internet

 I just watched 

this video on kids in the Phoenix area discovering the usefulness of old typewriters.

How you can not love what these kids are doing. I commented in the video that my belief is that civilization peaked with the advent of the commercial laser printer. For a generation raised on manual typewriters (they were still teaching that way in 1980 when I took typing), and even for those who used the later more convenient electric ones with automatic correction, the laser printer was a dreamlike technology that enabled new creative output beyond anything anyone had dreamt of.

All you needed was a laser printer and a little Mac SE, the old mini post office box style, and you could pretty much mock up anything. The first time I saw that set-up was in 1988 working on the campus newspaper in Salem. I was blown away. It changed newspapers almost overnight, antiquating centuries of established and evolving production techniques.

For a season, in the early nineties, it created a craft industry of published materials. Portland as we know it---the Portland of the 1990s---was created on this industry.

What happened? Well as I like to tell people, the thing about the 1980s, and especially the late 1980s, is that they represent as far as civilization got without the Internet. 

Or more specifically, the world wide web, which was invented in August 1989, the same month that Hungarians started pouring across the Austrian border, trampling the barbed wire, and no one was stopping them on either side.

The Bimmer Years

 As I write this, taking a break from work for a few moments, Jessica is in the next room breaking up with a client. She is closing down her private practice, in women's health, at least the level that she can do with a physical office. So she is reaching out to her existing patients, some of whom she known for years since coming to Arizona.  Some of them have been with her a while. Some are out of state.

It reminds me of much of life is saying good-bye to people in various ways. One day you no longer see that person. Sometimes you know it at the time, sometimes not.

In my youth the good-byes were mostly due to geographical separation. Sometimes moving from one neighborhood to another, and changing schools, meant one day a friendship was over, never to be in contact again. 

For a season of my life, up to about ten years ago, I made it a point to overcome, at least temporarily, the good-byes of geography that had accumulated over the years.

At the same time, I had the distinct feeling that civilization was collapsing, because the bonds of social interaction were disintegrating due to social media. I wanted to see people before the madness set in, which it id.

I found victory in this. I found both great joy and also pain. Reunions are only temporary it seems, even when good, and definitely when bad.

My effort--the Bimmer years--could not be sustained in the form I had achieved. I am now rather fixed, and again find many limitations of fellowship due to geography. 

The last decades have brought an increasing load of separation due to death. That was rare and abstract in my younger years, experienced mostly vicariously, seeing my parents mourn the grandparents, whom I knew, but not intimately. Later were my own grandparents, who loved me, and whom I deeply loved---one by one they went from the early 1990s until the last one in the fall of 2010, the occasion of which sent me into some kind of mania to see everyone I knew again.

Eclipses Make You Sick

 Today the eclipse came and I found myself waiting for 11 o'click, when it when the eclipse would be well underway here in Phoenix, and thinking I should got downstairs to the parking lot and get the eclipe glasses that are in the small plastic pocket in the car, leftover from the trip tot he New Mexico last year.As

As I waited, I wathed Youtube video on my ipad and Youtube suggested a live feed of a stramer showign the eclipse through a camera right here in Phoenix, so I was able to monitor how long I had to wait until it reached its maximum which would be about 65% coverage here.

I was in no hurry to go down, because I was not feeling well. I had woken up the day before, early on Sunday morning, and gone about my morning routine making coffee and praying, when I noticed something very weird. I noticed that I was losing my balance as I walked across the floor to the kitchen. It reminded me of being on a ship that is rocking, so that one is staggering bit to each side.

Then I immediately started feeling nauseous in the pit of my stomach, and I immediately hied to the bathroom, where I began retching dry heaves into the toilet, the stomach acide burning my throat as it came up.

After ecovering my wits, I tried walking again and found the same unsteadiness (not a spinning dizziness, jsut lurnching around like onboard a ship), and almost the same thing happened.

Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Jessica lager told me I probably have some kind of viral infection of the inner ear, which would account for my symptoms. It persisted all day Sunday,w hich ws spend mostly sleeping, and in the evening I was running a fever and got the violent shivers, as I do when I sick.. It was somewha ta relief to have a fever and know that I was sick. I told myself that meant I could recover from whatever it was that had hit me.

I'm at the point of my life where something new---a new condition or physical ailment---is something I dread. Since 2018, when I first started having issue with me left eye, I have shifted drastically in my self perception, rom the assumption of indestructibility of my youth to one of knowing that body is slowing falling apart as a I age, and that at any moment, out of the blue, something might arise in my body that could change my lie utterly going forward. It count it as a blessing, to be aware of this.  Our bodies are not mant to last forever, and the decay of flesh is a gentle way for us to let go of this world and concentrate on the next one.

Nevetheless I'm very happy if I can heal or recover from someting that happens to me. As I write this, I am now able to walk again, still lurching somewhat, but without rushing to the toilet, 

This was not the case even earlier today, when I went down to see the eclipse. When I got the bottom of the outside stairs, even taking it low, the nausea had welled up me and I wretched on the ground, trying to hold it in, and then I approached the car, I could not contain it and out came the coffee I had drunk ealier. IT was all over the concrete. Anyone looking at it would not have assumed it came from a stomach, but ws just a spilled drink. 

I quickly steadied myself against the car and unlocked it to get the nylar-paper glasses, and then put them on to look up at the sun, almost at its zenith above th nearby buildings. What a spectacle I must have been to anyone watching. I imagined some scenario where they might tinterpret the eclipse as causing me to vomit. 

No Eclipse for You!

 As I write this, millions around the country are gathering along the path of totality for the total eclipse of the Sun today. Jessica and I will not be among them. I had asked her last year if she wanted to see it. I had seen the one in 2017 in central Wyoming, but she had not seen one. Given the rarity of the spectacle, I did not want to deprive her of the chance to see it,

My personality, as I've learned throughout my life, is either to far in advance in planning, or last minute scrambling. In this case, about a year ago, I realized the eclipse would happen in April 2024 and did research to find a good place to see it. I figured Dallas was the best shot and researched hotel rooms there on Booking.com, finding that even a year in advance, many places were sold out. I tentatively picked out some decent hotels in downtown but did not book them. That's the "way in advance" part of my personality---figure it out and then wait, not taking action until the last minute.

Last fall, when we went up to New Mexico to see the annular eclipse, I made doubly sure that Jessica was not interested in going, as I figured we could still get hotel rooms at that point but it would be a harder with each passing day as people woke up to the event that coming in April.

Once upon a time in my life, I would have been disappointed to "miss out" on the rare spectacle, even though I'd seen a total eclipse. These days I am more relieved to stay home. The younger me would look at the older me and say, "what happened to you, man?"

So it was with mixed feelings that I read last week that the forecast called for cloudy skies in Texas during the eclipse. On the one hand, I was pleased that we had done gone through the expense and effort of traveling here just have a suboptimal experience of the event. From my experience in Wyoming in 2017, the most thrilling thing was to see the solar corona during totality. The tendrils of the corona were a type of beauty in patterns I had never seen anywhere in nature. They reminded me of an ancient Indian design, the kind girls try to emulate in henna tattoos back when I was in college. Without that, it would feel like not really seeing the eclipse at all, and that is apparently what people in Texas will experience this morning. 

I feel bad for them. I wish everyone along the route has the kind of experience I had in 2017. I would rather that, and feel like I missed out, then feel justified in not going. Many people will go away from the event today feeling like it was a giant nothingburger. There's no real consequence from that I suppose, but it would be more fun if everyone got to see it and delight in it.

The Computus of Bede: Christ is Risen

Modern stained glass at Gloucester Cathedral, England
depicting Bede dictating to a scribe

Easter morning came with rain, blessed rain. Sunday found me sleeping in, to the sound of it outside.  Easter Monday, the first day of April--the second driest month of year here--gave us more rain. If I don't hear it again for several months, it will be all right.

I just got done with this week's Spellbreakers Podcast. The subject was computus. It may be my favorite show so far, because I got to speak about God, Jesus, and the Church. I started off by showing a video of an Orthodox priest in England talking about the Jesus Prayer, proceded to a video of an Orthodox monk on Vashon Island describing the activities of the Othrodox patron saint of the Americas with the natives of the Aleutian Islands (the cradle of Orthodoxy in America) and ended with a Youtube video of a young woman in a Lutheran Church in Cincinnati singing a famous modern hymn written by a Catholic priest.  It also threw some Jack Chick and the Venerable Bede. I love Bede. Bede embodies computus as much as any man in history.

I'm a fan of these types of Lutheran worship service, where the pastor is tie-less and the music is supplied by a band with keyboard, drum, and guitar. There is something earnest about these Lutherans, in the desire to find a meaningful liturgy amidst the loose of the modern world. I would rather attend such a Lutheran church than go to a most modernist Catholic masses with similar music and church decor. The Lutherans of today at least seem like they are trying to pull something together out of the wreckage of postmodern western culture, whereas the modernist Catholics seem like they are trying to tear down the parts that are still standing.

I was very nervous before the show that I would not do justice the topic, but I think the Spirit helped me out.

The best part---I didn't finish and plenty of slides for part two next week. 

The Ultimate Opening Day

 

Working class sports hero Pete Rose

This week---yesterday, to be specific, was Opening Day of the major league baseball season. For several years now, Jessica has been telling me how big a deal is Opening Day in her hometown of Cincinnati. The franchise there, the Reds, is the oldest in major league baseball and for over a century, Cincinnati was given the honor of being the first game played, and always at home. They have suspended that first part in recent years, but still the Reds are always allowed a home game, as they were this year.

Moreover there is a parade--a huge one--through downtown, with many groups of marchers in costumes and marching bands from around the area. We watched it yesterday morning, streaming it from the major league baseball app, on which Jessica has an account that will allow her to watch all the Reds games this season. It was great fun to have it playing in the morning. Then in the afternoon they played the game and the Reds, in their brilliant white and red home uniforms, won handily, satisfying the hometown crowd. It has been lean far for the Cincinnati fans in recent years, but last year, about six weeks into the season, they were sparked by young talent and went on to win over a dozen in a row, I think, and missed the playoffs only at the last minute. This year expectation are much higher.

The lead-up to yesterday prompted me to dedicate by podcast show this week to baseball (link to show), specifically to the history of the Reds focussing on the part I remember best, which is the "Big Red Machine" dynasty of the mid 1970s, and in particular the spectacular unmatched 1975 World Series between the Reds and the Boston Red Sox. I talked in my show about the idea of baseball as representing the America of the past, before the mid 1960s, but that in 1975, it was still in perfect equilibrium, between the past and the future. 

It was the first World Series I watched, I told my audience. I wanted the Red Sox to win because they were the underdogs. Now I am much happier that the greatest World Series ever was won by Cincinnati. The idea that any team from Boston could be an "underdog" to a team from Cincinnati seems ridiculous to me. Cincinnati is a small market, a city in middle America that is part of the flyover country. 

That Big Red Machine was the last of its kind in that the players were working class athletes. Some had to take jobs in the off season. It was before the era of sky-high superstar salaries, when Americans knew that the well-known players were rich. Back then the players were much closer to the lives of ordinary Americans. This was especially true of the star of the Reds, Pete Rose, perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time. He was a hometown kid from Cincinnati who wound up playing for his hometown team, and winning a World Series for them (and was named most valuable player). 

Thanks to Jessica I know he was from the West Side of Cincinnati, which is the less-desirable working-class part of town, as opposed to the wealthier East Side. 

I was delighted to share all this with my audience and talk about the era of the past that baseball represented, and that I was lucky to meet some kids in fifth grade who drew me into an interest in baseball, and baseball card trading, just in time to see the 1975 World Series, and burn into my memory that moment of equilibrium in America.

It was a fun show.

Of course it is also Holy Week in the western churches. As I write this it is Good Friday. Sunday is Easter, the ultimate "opening day."

I Lie Awake Thinking of You

 (citation)

Waking in the middle of the night last night, I remembered my Lententide vow in the previous post to roust myself for prayer, no matter what the hour it might. It turned out to be almost exactly three o'clock, which is not an unusual hour for me to awake, and moreover for many, as I learned from a Youtube video of the late Fulton Sheen. This automated reader version of Sheen's words I found last week does not do him justice. Who sh'd?

I think of how good it will feel to deny myself the pleasure of staying under the covers. To deny one's appetites is to be able to step outside them, and see how much--at least in my own case---that I have gone through my life as a slave to my appetites, pulled by them by impulse, one to the next, to satisfy them like an animal roughing to a trough. I lack patience, discipline, a sense of duty and obligation. I am disgusted at myelf.

I sit in my office chair without turning on the space heater. I would hardly need it anymore at this time of spring, so that is hardly a deprivation. Without a kettle of water heating for coffee,  I struggle to keep from falling asleep in the chair. I direct myself towards prayer, towards love of God.

It doesn't feel particularly rewarding this morning, the whole thing. It is not about feeling. Feelings will lead one right into the abyss. 

It is not about self-improvement. Can something be about other than your own life pursuits, sweetheart? For once, can you put aside your postmodern need for Me-Me validation? Can you just fulfill your duty to render justice God (i.e. give God what is due Him) by worshipping, praising and adoring Him?

I am dust.

Palm Sunday Rain

 Woke up last night in the small hours, as I do most days, and heard the sound of steady rain bearing down the tiled roof and dropping from the eaves on the pavement.

We have had many good rains the last two months, to the point that the annual golf-tournament-slash-roving-cocktail-party turned into a drunken proto-riotish mud bath that made the civic organizers question the validity of the overall concept going forward.

A couple nights a small front came down the the north in an inverted v-shape, the apex bearing down on us as we were out walking in the park and the soccer fields going down to Bell Road, to which I have gotten accustomed after the trauma of seeing the desert floor razed and graded.

The lightning was heavy in one wing of the v-shape. We could tell all this with Jessica's smart phone, on an app showing lightning strakes. I like leaving my phone at home when I can.

Now it is raining again. I can hear it out my window as I type. It is a sensual pleasure, like a space heater on a chilly morning, or a warm blanket. This being a season of repentance and fasting, I try to be aware of my desire for material comforts and sensual pleasures, and if possible to purposefully deny, or at least delay, myself the satisfaction of it. Or at least not jump to enjoy it so readily.

Waking up in the early morning hours then, with a rain outside and a warm blanket over me, must be God himself intervening, for it is little sense to get up at that hour. Perhaps tomorrow morning I will. I will go rise and go to pray, without making coffee yet, and certainly with no half-and-half until Easter---even to the Orthodox Easter this year. I will examine my sins and repent of them. In this is freedom.

Good Day in Goodyear

 My flight to Burbank had been come at the tail end of what seemed like a barrage of activity from mid February, starting with the trip to NewYork City, that followed almost immediately by the arrival in town of Jessica's father and his wife, who flew from Newark. We try to get together with them at least once a year. Last year we met up with them in New Mexico. This year they came to town, as they have done in the past, and stayed this time in an AirBnB in north Scottsdale not far from us. 

It was a great time seeing them.  On the Saturday of their stay, we went to a Spring training baseball game, of which there are many here, each in separate quaint stadiums, some of which are designed to mimic the grander structures where the teams play their regular season games. We were making. return visit to the same stadium as five years ago, which is the one far on the southwestern edge of Phoenix, in the community of Goodyear, where the two Ohio teams, Cincinnati and Cleveland, both play their home games in the training season. All of the trainig stadiums, I think, are doubled up in this way, shared by two teams. 

Jessica got us seats in the shaded section. It was opening day of spring training. As it custom, the two Ohio teams that share the stadium will play each other on that day, with this year at least, the Cleveland team being the official home team (which meant the stadium announcer had to behave as a Cleveland home announcer in front of many Reds fans sitting on the other side). 

That's where we were, because the shaded premium section was on the visitor side and we could see down at the Red's dugout. I knew some of the players because we had been watching the Reds last year. Jessica purchased a season pass to watch the Reds games on cable. It was fun to see all the players whose names I knew. The players are very friendly with the fans, and many people hang around the entrance to the training facilities, where the players interact with the crowd after the game.

Jessica's father is not a Reds fan, despite living in Cincinnati for many years. He is from northeastern Ohio, in the area of Youngstown, and he is a passionate suffering fan of the Cleveland team. Unlike the Reds, they have not won a World Series title in living memory, despite coming extremely close on several occasions, losing in heartbreaking fashion. He was wearing his Cleveland hat. They used to be called the Indians, but they had to change their name because of political pressure.

On this day, the Reds walloped the erstwhile Indians. I don't remember the score. We ordered chili dogs in the Cincinnati style using our phones to scan a QR code mounted on the seats in the premium section. They were perfect and delicious, and enjoyed in the shade of the canopy above us.

Death in San Marino

 Today finds this part of Arizona poised on the edge between spring and summer.  It was slightly cool these last few days but in between the coolness are the bursts of heat and bright sunshine that let one know that the hot days are not long in coming, and then it will be six months before we see coolness again. 

Last week I did my Spellbreakers podcast/telecast on California, southern California in particular, as I was just traveling there. I flew to Burbank on the 1st, on a late Friday afternoon, and then flew back to Phoenix on the afterrnoon of Sunday. In between those flights was an Uber ride from Burbank to downtown Pasadena, where I checked into the Pasadena Hotel and Pool for two nights in what amounted to a pleasant room in a pleasant hotel in a pleasant part of town. 

On Saturday morning I went to the memorial service of a man I knew for many years. He was a pediatrician in Fort Collins, my hometown in Colorado. He was, however, a native Californian, born in 1929 in Orange County, when it was a very rural place. His temperament marked the men of that generation, a quiet acceptance of duty, and the recognition that life is unfair and difficult, but complaining about it is counterproductive. He became a doctor via the Air Force and lived in Thailand with his wife, and is his eldest daughter was born there, in the late 1950s. Then two more children were born, another daughter in the early 1960s, and a son in 1965. 

I know all of his children, and I adored his late wife, their mother. She passed away just a week before my father did, at Christmas time 2015.

The man whose memorial service I went to had passed away in November in Austin, Texas, just after his 94th birthday. He had been in assisted living. He had moved down to Austin at the insistence of his son, who had been living in Austin since the late 1980s. He had been living a splendid old age until recently taking a bad fall. 

His son flew his ashes to California for the memorial. His two older sisters live there as well. His oldest sister went to splendid well-known East Coast schools, got a law degree, and became a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles for years.  His second sister became a school teacher and taught in Pasadena until retiring. 

So it was natural to have the memorial service there. It was a Presbyterian Church in the nearby community of San Marino, which is just south of Pasadena, as the neighborhoods get nicer and more expensive.  Later I learned that San Marino is where George Patton grew up, when it was rural. He rode horseback on the open hills that became the fancy houses. In the second World War h was our most feared commander by enemy, and perhaps the respected by his men. He remains the face of American military prowess and victory on the battlefield.  In San Marino, I thought how Patton was a phenomenon of those times, and nothing like him will be seen again. 

The memorial service included a video presentation of slides by his son, who has taught film production at a community college in Austin since the 1990s. Before that he went to graduate school in film at the University of Texas. 

Before that he went to the University of Chicago, and other institutions of higher learning, doing the Gen X college switcharound that suddenly became epidemic among my cohort, even the high achievers. 

Before that he graduated from high school in Fort Collins, and before that he went to junior high and elementary school there, all while his father ran a pediatric practice across Lemay from the hospital, and attended regularly in the maternity ward, as they used to call it.

Later he left Fort Collins and worked for vaccine manufacturers. He also worked for the CDC. He helped develop one of the vaccines that babies are now given.  I learned his from his nephew, who is a pediatrician in southern California. He spoke a long encomium of the deceased in the reception in the other wing of the church (a nice complex, as one would imagine).  The deceased should be known to history for what he did, said his nephew. The rest of the family, his three children and other cousins, spoke not a word in response, but politely accepted the accolade of their father and uncle. It was as if they knew the deceased would be uncomfortable hearing himself described as such, out of modesty.

I got to attend two nice evening dinners with his family, on Friday and Saturday, where I sat next to his son, who is my old friend dating from junior high school in Fort Collins. 

We talked about old times.  He has photographs of two of us taken by his father at Mile High Stadium in the summer of 1983. The three of us went to see the first championship of the USFL, between the Philadelphia Stars and the Michigan Panthers. It was mostly local football fans in the stadium---Broncos fans who were rabid for a championship.  The deceased and his son had gone to many Broncos games together. The end game, between two teams nobody cared about, was exciting and ended on a heroic play at the last minute. There was such a release of emotion among those in attendance that they stormed the field and tore down the goal posts. The Denver Police were called and dispersed the crowd with incendiary devices of some kind.  The three of us beat a retreat. Like me, his son is mostly the type to recognize a bad situation and leap out of it. Definitely the deceased was like that

Snowy New York Valentine

 As I write this, I am getting used to being back in Arizona after a five-day trip to New York last week. We flew up there last Tuesday, to JFK, and stayed through Sunday at the Hilton Midtown on 6th Avenue. The occasion was a conference for Jessica's work at a natural supplements manufacturer.  So the hotel was paid for by the company.

It was the first time I'd been back in the city in five years, and the first time I've stayed in Midtown maybe since...forever. Wow, I can sure understand why people like that part of town.. We had some good food, although we slummed it on Valentine's Day since every restaurant was booked. Instead we grabbed hot dogs and onion rings from the cart outside the hotel. Seventy five bucks!

I worked during the week from the hotel room, taking short breaks to walk around the vicinity, including an obligatory visit ot Trump Tower, which I hadn't visited since 1989. 

On Saturday we enjoyed the freshly fallen snow with a walk through Central Park up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art---Jessica's first time. It was a wonderful way to spend our final full day there, after our work obligations were done for the week.

All in all, a great experience. I saw nothing of the degradation and troubles that have befallen the city lately. We both anticipated a return visit for next year's conference.

I was impressed by how much Times Square had changed.Way more pedestrian f riendly than the old days. It really feels welcoming.It felt much cleaner and more alive from the old days, thanks to modern video screen technology. It was like looking up at a 100 giant smartphones playing videos on the sides of buildings. The ads featured musicians I had never heard of. Who is Zara Larsson? No idea. It felt good to be ignorant with such trends. I couldn't get used to seeing "2024" as the year up by the famous New Year's ball (see very top right corner of the screen).  I feel like this is not real, that real time stopped sometime in the last century, and we are living in some kind of parody of time.

We arrived at JFK on the day before Valentine's Day (Shrove Tuesday, as it happens) into a snowstorm. IIn Phoenix the night beore, I half-joked with Jessica that our flight was going to be diverted and we were going to be stuck overnight at the Cleveland Airport. Or Louisville. We both busted out laughing when the pilot came on and announced we would be landing temporarily in Indianapolis until the snow cleared. "Here we go!" we thought. But the plane took off again after an hour and by the time we got to FJK, everything was clearing out fine. We got a cab up to Midtown and hundered into the next few days of cold chilly weather, which was nice to experience. A chance to wear warm clothes. On Saturday, delightfully, we got a second round of snow, just to stop everything off, and this made our walk up the Met Museum through Central Park a wonderland. Children were sledding like in old paintings that we later saw at the Met. It was Jesssica's first time in the Park. Of course we stumbled upon "Alice in Snow" as seen in this photograph I took. 

Pygmalion (1938) vs My Fair Lady (1964)

 

Caught a showing of Pygmalion (1938) on TCM last week. First time seeing it. I very interesting experience. I expected My Fair Lady (1964) but stripped of the delightful gaiety of the musical numbers in technicolor, and the spunky ferocity of Audrey Hepburn's Eliza Doolittle.

 I did not expect to be blown away by it. Both Ginger and I were in awe of it, and wondering what had possessed me to overlook this, based on false assumptions regarding its stature relative to the later musical remake.

First off, the screenplay is not just adapted from Shaw's play. Shaw wrote the screenplay. Like Hemingway and others, he fancied himself able to compete in Hollywood as a writer. At this he was successful, and in 1938 he won the Academy Award for adapting his own 1913 play by the same name.

It is not a straight by-the-numbers adaptation. He greatly improved it, and it is clear, wrote it with a cinematographic eye. Among the whole additions for the movie was what would become known as the "Ballroom Scene," where Eliza is presented to a duchess, all the while menaced by the intrigue of Karpathy, the former student of Henry Higgins.

In Shaw's original play, Karpathy is a minor character mentioned only in the final scene For the screenplay, Shaw promoted him to a major supporting role completely contained within the Ballroom Scene, where he is given the assignment--to his great delight--to investigate the origin of the mysterious Miss Doolittle.

The biggest thing in favor of the 1938 non-musical black-and-white version, versus the 1964 Broadway musical technicolor version, is that the contest between the two Elizas is lopsided.  Wendy Hiller is so far superior to Audrey Hepburn, it will be difficult to go back and watch My Fair Lady (1964) anytime soon, because I would find myself cringing at Hepburn's over-the-top caricature of the role.

We agreed a fair thing to say would be that whereas in My Fair Lady (1964), Eliza (played by Hepburn), transforms from a flower girl to a lady, in Pygmalion (1938), Eliza (Hiller) is revealed to have been a lady all along. It's much more subtle and powerful.

Hepburn is a great actress but she has better roles.  She is completely believable as a flower girl (she grew up malnourished during the Dutch Famine during the war, and her constitution never recovered). By contrast, Pygmalion (1938) is Hiller's signature role as a film lead (she had an expansive theater career on stage in London).  

Hiller saved a great supporting role for her later years, in the 1970s, not surprisingly as a princess, as if cashing in on the 1938 role like an artistic savings bond. 

Check out the intro the Ballroom Scene. The rack focus when Higgins (Leslie Howard) and Colonel Pickering turn to see Eliza (Hiller) emerge. Then watch Hiller ascend the staircase and speak with the duchess.   We are so rooting for her at this point. By extension we are rooting for Higgins. Pickering is rooting for her in fatherly fashion, even though his wager with Higgins is against her. We are rooting for everyone---except Karpathy. Except at the end of the scene Higgins (Howard) is clearly egging Karpathy towards experiencing a triumph of ego. Methinks this scene shows how Higgins actually does understand rules of social behavior very well. He just chooses to flout them whenever it pleases him. A great pretzel of motives brought to life by great actors. Howard co-directed this. Hewas year from Gone With theWind

What did I miss from My Fair Lady? No knock on Harrison's acting, but Howard was so delightful it was hard to miss Harrison's character. But I did miss his singing greatly. "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" is one of the great masculine musical performances in the history of Hollywood film.  Likewise I missed "I'm Getting Married in the Morning" and other upbeat numbers. Hiller wipes the floor with Hepburn, though.

My Blissful Journey to Ordinariness

 When I was young, in my childhood and young adult years, I fancied myself quite an extraordinary person with special talents not possessed by other people. Buttressing this confidence were the statements made to me by other people, who told me I had extraordinary talents.

I realized lately that lately I felt as if I have made a journey to considering myself hardly extraordinary at all, but rather typical, especially as a specimen of my cohort within the flow of the passing generations.  Of course this has been a hit to my ego, on the hand, but on the other hand it has given me great peace to know how ordinary I am--almost a stereotype in some ways---and it has strangely given me a feeling of meaning to my life.

I had thought the meaning of my life was to use my alleged extraordinary talents to provide some great contribution to humanity through creative uses of my intellect. Somehow this never happened. The years went by. Judged on the standards of my childhood, and what people expected of me, I am nearly a complete washout.

But as an ordinary man, I have found new purpose is being, well, ordinary. Even this blog I write, and have written for over fifteen years now fits into this. I imagine this blog will disappear into the aether at some point when Blogger shuts down and the database is destroyed. Or I will leave this earth and my dormant account will be removed. This does not even include the inevitable end of all material things in the universe, however that happens, but certainly which no computer server can survive.

Even many years ago, when I was a scientist I have said to myself, "suppose there is some end to all of our civilization, and years from now there is an archaeologist or archivist who stumbles upon old writings preserved in some means, and suppose, by some pure random act, they include everything I have written. Suppose however that one's one name and identity is not preserved---only ones writings---so that they are effectively anonymous to people in the future who find them. What I would I then bother to write?"

In thinking about Classical Antiquity, it's clear that many of the most valuable writings are anything that preserves a sense of the life of ordinary citizens.  Do you see where I'm going with this thought?

Here then is a typical man. I have the advantage of being a white man, which according to current thinking means there is nothing special about my "identity" that needs expressing or explaining. Too much ink, phyical and digital, has been spilled by and about people like me, So that's another way I'm free to be ordinary. No respectable publisher would be the least bit interested in my story, or any of my stories, because of my sex and skin color disqualifies me. What a burden has been lifted from me, to attempt to publish anything by that route! I say that without irony. 

Instead I can just write to you, my dear readers, especially the ones who keep coming back here, and also to anyone reading this in the distant future. 

Streamcaster Stage Fright

 I've mostly gotten over the flare-up of my ego crisis from last month, fretting that I was not cutting as a streamcaster, at least to some arbitrary standard I had developed in my mind, and therefore my life was somehow deficient.

Even thinking such thoughts, I know they are absurd. Yet the demands to be excellent, or at least passingly good, in some many worldly things seems so obvious and overwhelming at times, especially in the modern world. We are supposed to be able to master these tools we have created.

I am way behind the times in tool-making. I am a downright fossil by tech standards. That I still make a living using standard and cutting-edge tools, and therefore need to keep up with their usage, is an outlier for a man of my age. I was supposed to go on to other things, a long time, according to some calendar that someone keeps about such things.

That calendar I always chose to ignore, in part because following this path gave me so much freedom in other areas that made up for the ongoing struggle of being a tool-user. 

But that's my day job. Also in my weekly streamcasting gig, I am also a tool-user. The platform and website through which one streams felt like the controls of a jumbo jet when I first starting using them. Well, that's exaggerating, but because I am such a perfectionist, my fumbling in using them were humiliating.

The age thing is surely the thing at the heart of this. I feel envy regarding the ability of the younger generation to get streamcasting--to give the audience what it is looking for, which is a legitimate concern of show business. It is not the technical tools which stymy me,

But fooey on that. I reality I do have an audience, a great one. I've discovered that in my last streamcast in which I realized I had greatly underestimated the value of chatting with the live chat in the minutes leading up to the start of the broadcast, which is at the bottom of the hour.

It was greatly relaxing, and put my mind at rest about the start of the broadcast, when we have gone live and sound is going out over the air. I am ever pessimistic that it won't happen, but being the live chat before we went live made that fear go away completely. I'd already connected with the audience. Now it was just time to come out on stage.

Conversations During a Long Winter's Nap

 This morning I woke up, as always do, well before 4 AM, but being that it was Christmas Eve, I decided there was no reason to get out of bed yet, and with the apartment a bit cold, I crawled back under the covers and recovered the warmth there, my thoughts straying into the things I think about only in those hours of the morning before daylight brings my attention to the agenda of the day.

This morning there was no sound of rain, as there had been the previous two nights.  We had a front come through that lingered and brought not just showers but a true soaking rain over several days, not only at night but during the daylight hours. The sound of that type of rain is one of the things I miss most severely about where live--the heavy patter on the roof and windows, and on the pavement during the day. One learns to savor it when it arrives, because one may not hear it again for many months.  

This morning in my thoughts I reflected on things I wrote in my previous entry here, about my struggle to build an audience for my show (playlist), and my fears that this will lead to its being canceled. These feelings are true, and in prayer, when we are to be honest with God, I confess my desire to find a greater audience. It is not out of ego fame--I truly don't care for that. But still it is ego--the need to feel as if I am doing something impactful on Earth. The last couple years I had come to regard myself as perhaps "the least influential person who ever lived," and had told myself that this was ok, since all power comes from God. 

Being an influencer is of course the aspiration of our age.  Fame is the coin of the realm.  I know people who truly judge others by how many Twitter followers they have, and how many likes they get on their videos. This latter metric is in fact what determines the pay scale at my network, which means I get a miniscule piece of the pie, barely enough to pay the electric bill in winter and certainly not in summer.

I am thankful for that. God is our father. By faith and baptism we are adopted sons and daughters of God. He provides for us what we need and will deny us what is not good for us. So many things that I have desired in life have been denied to me, even as great blessings have been heaped on me at every turn. The things that have been denied to me now look likes graces. They were denied to me for my own good, by a loving heavenly Father.

Certainly I am glad I did not become famous in a media sense,  at least in my youth, for I no doubt would have succumbed to the snares that draw down so many of those people, almost all of them, into something akin to a demonic cesspool. I might be one of them.  Even at this stage in my life, when I have put on more of the armor of God, could I resist temptations of satisfaction from attention.

God has given me as big an audience as I can handle, I guess, which is far more than I could have built on my own. My audience comes from the network. I did not build it organically through my own bootstrapping. I have nothing to complain about.

Still, being honest with God, as Jesus did in the garden in expressing his desire that the cup would pass from him, I would ask God to show me how to reach out to more people. In my head pops the question why?  Just so you will feel better? What do have to say that is so important that people need to hear it?

Christmas Greetings to Whoever is Reading This, Known to Me or Otherwise

 It has been a long since I wrote in this blog. Months have gone by.  This does not mean I have abandoned it. In fact just the opposite. I find myself, in bed at night, composing a blog entry and thinking I will write it down. Then during the day I forget, and another day goes by, and at night I am composing again.

I know of none of my old friends who read it anymore, who once read it. So I have no one to whom I can direct the open letter. At Christmastime I pretend I can write to them once again. 

In the time since I wrote, life has seemed amazingly constant. My day job has been demanding, with long hours and putting in extra time to keep ahead of things. Only in the last couple weeks has it felt like things are leveling off. Yet there are still long days, which mostly means I get up as early as 2 AM, when I first awake, in order to get a jump on things, and to work during the hours when I can work in peace without demands or distractions.

My weekends are taken up entirely with preparing for my weekly show on Wednesday. Lately this has morphed into not only preparing a Keynote slide presentation but also a short intro movie using iMovie on my mac. I have become an amateur film maker. Having a short intro film helps me calm my nerves as the broadcast begins. 

Between these two activities---my day job and preparing for my show---almost all of my time is taken up.  The idea of fitting anything else into that schedule seems impossible.

Somehow in October we managed to squeeze in two weekend road trips. Over my birthday, we went up to the top of Mount Lemmon, the "sky island" near Tucson with pines at the top. Like last year, we stayed in the small community of Summerhaven, this time at the new lodge which has opened this year. The next weekend we went up to Gallup, New Mexico to see the annular eclipse on October 13. To see the actual event, we drove out ot the visitor's center of the El Malpais National Monument. 

Other than these two events, it has felt mostly the same week to week. My show, Spellbreakers, is still on the air on the  Badlands Media Channel on Wednesday evenings, and of course the broadcasts are available after that.  Here is the playlist for my show. I take it as serrously as if it were a show on a major radiio network. I love doing the sponsors. I have come to love interacting with my audience. I feel so much stress leading up to the show, mostly out of perfectionism---something technical always goes wrong. Then afterwards I am on such a high and can't wait for the next time.

I don't know how long I'll get to keep my show. I often wonder. I am not exactly one of the favorites of the guy who runs the network. I'm lucky if he even reads my emails. My view numbers are low compared to the other shows, especially the number of "likes" I get. I tell myself I do not have the "touch". Were this a real network, I would probably be canceled by now. That's show business, I tell myself. I have given it my best shot.  However long I get to do this will be a gift.

I once craved variety in my life, like people do when they are young. Now I take it as a blessing if I just keep doing what I'm doing--working my job, paying the bills, and doing my little show with it's itsby bitsy audience.