Coping With Victory

 I spent three hours this morning on X, formerly Twitter, both reading posts and making ones of my own. Never has it been so much fun. It reminds me, in some vague way, of what it was like to be a child, and to voraciously gobble up the news from the newspapers and television, because I wanted to know as much as possible about the world out there. It also reminds me of being in New York City back in the 1990s, and walking amidst the crowds pouring out of the ferry terminal in the Battery, the warm bath anonymity, that one is a small nobody, but that's ok because everyone is on the same level of nobody-ness. 

Except we aren't a nobody to God. That's the piece of the puzzle I have now, that I didn't back then.

In any case, it is great fun rejoicing in the impending massive victory of our side. I pray our great victory will be put to good use.

Area Code 503

 Overnight I got a text message from an old friend. I almost didn't see it because I thoought it was Spam. I get maybe thirty a day, most of them because of previous political donations.  I thought the text was one of those. I didn't recognize the number and I almost deleted it from the notification on the screen

The area code was 503--Oregon, but that meant nothing because that is still my area code from the phone I bought in the mall in Beaverton ten years ago when I got first i-Phone Then I saw the name at the end of the message and I knew who it was. 

I have gone many years now without conversing with him. But we did not see each other many years after college as well, and once you have a long gap with someone, followed by a time of reacquaintance, one knows that at some point time doesn't matter. Both of us have a bearing on each other's characters that stretches of time, in a temporal triangulation over decades, such that, especially after a certain age, we can never be strangers to each other.

He still lives in the small small town outside of Portland where he and his wife have operated their law practice for many decades. Since I last talked with him, they sold the law practice, and the building it was located in, and are now retired. 

He asked if I was still in Oregon. I haven't lived there for eight years. I told him I lived in Arizona now. He asked me if I liked Scottsdale. I said it had great medical care---best specialists in the world---which is something that can be plus especially as you get past a certain age in life. That's all I said about it.

I explained how we wound up here, and how we moved here for Jessica's job, and later for her practice, but now she is completely remote, whereas I am the one with the hybrid office job. Also it is quite enjoyable that Jessica's parents live in the Valley now, in a 55+ RV and trailer-house park in Mesa, which is like a non-stop Boomer party and summer camp eight months out of the year. The community of it is amazing. I tell them I don't think Generation X can pull off a continuation of it. Starting with my cohort, youth lost its communalness of youth culture, until it came back with a vengeance with the current rootless  identity tribalism of today's young folk.

I told him I'd love to come back to Oregon sometime, and to visit the suburbs of Portland. 

My Favorite Creekbeds

 Woke up in the darknesss last night as I regained consciousness I noticed that a rainstorm had started. A more beats of consciousness brought to me the awareness that it was a ferocious storm of heavy hand and strong winds, the kind found at the front of the storm as it comes in. My instinctual reaction to panic slightly that something might be getting rained on, that I would prefer not to get rained on, kicked in, and it was confirmed in my conscious mind by the remembrance that I had used the rice-paper folding screen on the porch the previous day but had not put it away the night before, but left it out by the edge of the patio. Even in mild winds it is prone to tipping over, and then of impaling itself (yet again) on the posts of the bamboo folding fence, which is sturdy in all winds, but not high enough to provide the necessary shade for the sun in the morning hours. The rice paper folding screen is higher, and serves that purpose well in the morning despite multiple punctures from my negligence.

The rain was hard and I sat outside savoring it in the pitch darkness, on the rustic rocking chair that belongs technically to her mother, as it sat on their porch in their log cabin in Ohio before they moved to Arizona.

The peak of the ferociousness of the wind passed and gave way to mild gusts amidst a heavy steady downpour, which splashed onto the tilied roofs of the building and the asphalt and concrete below. Such a rain here is rare. "A monsoon rain at last," I said. We had gonie long into the summer without one, even as storms hit other parts of the Valley. We had seen dense dark clouds over the mountains, and rain had come to the far side but not to us. Finally we got some relief. 

I imagined out in the darkness the stream beds gathering up into a laminar sheets of water in the depressions, and then elongated into longer sheets until they connect and like a train, begin rolling downhills on the soaked ground, held above by the surface tension of the water. My favorite creek beds would begin flowing, even they have been re-engineered by the landscaping needs of development.

Gen X Work Pride in the Days of the Remote Longhouse

The lobby lounge at the Element Reno

 

Yesterday on our last day in Reno,  I was in the lobby of the hotel waiting for Jessica to come back from her last session of her drawing class, for which she had flown to Reno to attend, and which the official point of our trip. Jessica had called our hotel "Millennial hipster", and the description seemed perfect. It was a brand new modern place, with Deep Elm style furniture, located amidst similar new apartment complexes, in a mini-walkable neighborhood on land in the center of the city that I recognized as having once been an old shopping center. I have enough of a history in Reno, going back 40 years as of this year, that I know places by what used to be there.

In the lobby, with its deep backed couches that force one to use pillows are to recline back, I had been working on my laptop for my dayjob, as if I were in the office. I have enough freedom that I can take off for a couple days and tell my boss "I'm working from Reno for a couple days", and everything is cool. Part of it is that I am very good at what I do, and provide tremendous manifest value to my company.

I have believed nothing about recent Millennial and Gen Z work trends about having all sorts of privileges. "You guys have no idea what it will be like when the pendulum swings back." My strategy is as it always has been---pure Generation X---I am as valuable on my job as what I provide day to day. So I will so fucking valuable that my leash gets longer and longer, by earning it. "How would we get along without him?" I want them to ask. Of course they would get along without me. I'm not indispensable, so that keeps me humble and focussed on work. I am survivor of multiple rounds of layoffs in a tiny company down to a skeleton staff putting out and supporting a complex platform of sensitive data transmitted over the Internet.

The last time I was in Reno almost three years ago for Dick's funeral, I worked for a horrible company (Satan Inc.) of 1000 employees where almost everyone was remote. That meant the Longhouse controllers (the young women in HR) also worked remotely and this ruined remote work for everyone. Now remote work is as bad as the prison of the office, but the young women of HR know only slavery. They are born slaves, and in the Longhouse everything trends to towards the feminine values of accepting slavery and submission and being happy about it, and in turn getting be the enforcers of all the rules. (see "What is the Longhouse?" here)

I remember working from the airport and getting scolded by my boss for it, for no reason at all. All they could do was scold me. I was made to feel awful. They tried to put me on a performance improvement plan to get to me to quit, so I did just that. Within an hour of my resignation, the laptop they had supplied me via registered mail when I began working restarted itself and "bricked" itself, removing all my accerss from everything company related immediately.

The company was a billion-dollar startup. Within six months of my leaving, the company laid off three quarters of its staff and all but shuttered its doors.

In reality I'm convinced it was a CIA-funded spook operation designed to hook into the data of all the hospital systems in the country and gather all the patient data from their databases. It was a Deep State scam. Good riddance to it. The low point of my recent career.

My new job is demanding but much more rewarding than the billion-dollar operation I worked for in 2021. As much investment money my current company eats up, it can never be as big of a boondoggle as Satan Inc. 

(See https://x.com/shagbark_hick/status/1824818147381149858

Down to One City

 After having spent my life wanting to travel America to every state and city, and fulfilling that, to the sacrifice of many other things, I am down to one city in which I feel at home, and could at the moment, contemplating movin to--Reno.

I did not see that coming, but it makes sense. Reno and I have a long history together, good history going back to the 1980s. The last of my family I can be with, and be relaxed with, not on guard against things that might blow up the conversation, is there. This is despite my great-uncle Dick passing away.

I didn't get to see my second cousins this time, but I got to spend a lovely evening with my my mother's cousin (Dick's daughter), and her husband. I last saw them when visiting for Dick's funeral and memorial service (two different things) in 2021. It was a rough time for many reasons, not the least of which was a dreadful day job that felt like I was working for Satan Inc., but I soldiered through, wearing the leather jacket that Dick gave to me the last time I saw him. Right as I was walking out the door and knowing I would not see him again in this life. 

We talked about him, and about his parents. I knew his mother, my great-grandmother, but I never met his father, my great-grandfather, and the great-grandfather of my second cousins. One of them lives in town and turned Dick's old house into an AirBnB after renovating it. Dick's daughter showed me photos of it. It looks very nice and new. I recognized the shelves where the photo of his mother used to sit.

Jessica and I both loved the cool nights. Such a break from Phoenix, where neither of us feels truly at home, for various reasons. We moved there for her job in 2016, when I worked remotely. Now she works remotely and I have an office job here. Hybrid situation. I worked remotely from the hotel in Reno, while remembering all the good vibes I have felt here over the years.

My Latest Favorite X Account

 @shagbark_hick for the win.

How to Be Free

"I'm so disappointed in you, Matt. I thought you were smarter than that."

This is what one or more of my old acquaintances might say on Facebook post, if they saw it, and cared to reply to it. 

The feminization of men results in a men who are super-bitches. They know how to go for the jugular, like a woman, but with the strength of a man. It reminds of what my choral music director in college would say, about the castrati---they took the alto and soprano roles, including all the female roles in opera, because their voices were so much stronger, like a human coronet. The women simply couldn't match that. No we are making new castrati, by telling young boys to cut of their sexual origins. Perhaps taking female  hormones will keep them from become good singers in their prime, that can out-match the young women for the leading lady roles.

The modern feminist castrati of Facebook, which includes many men of my age who fancy themselves smarter than average, would know how to get to me, so the above comment at the top of this post would be a good play against me. 

For I am vain over my intellectual and prideful. Or least I have been, and I still have a tendency towards this. They would see my weakness, because it is close to my mine, and go right for the throat. A one-bullet kill shot, in front of the rest of everyone we know, taking me out of the game. 

No doubt they would indeed make mince meat of me. But I wouldn't care about that. I would confess to being stupid and slow. I would turn it into comedy.

Such fantasies come from ego, and pride. I must renounce such things.

The number reason I would not do that Facebook stunt is that it would probably drive one or both of my sisters back into the "red zone".  They just stared talking to me again, after two years silence. I wouldn't want to make them have to negotiate their Facebook reputation among their own crowd, and their "crazy brother".

I don't mind that at all. Like I have said, we will be ready, on the this side of the wall, with a mini net, like in the circus, where you will land and be caught in a soft landing, and for a moment, you will feel free.

The Frontier Ladies of Facebook

 Somewhere in the recesses of the settings of my web browser are the login credentials for my Facebook account. Ihave not used them, at least consciously, for almost eight years, after being active on Facebook from 2009 to 2016. Before I left I deactivated my account, jumping through all the hoops they make you do before you can leave. I made no announcement to my "friends" before I did. I did not want to. I wanted to make the Facebook version of the "Irish goodbye". I knew my avatar would then just be a grey featureless silhouette on people's friends list. I wonder if any remain. Sometimes I am curious to see who might still have me as a friend.

The temptation today was strong, as it sometimes is, to return to Facebook. I would reactivate my account and make a single post, and see if anyone notices. People might friend me again, as they did long ago, not because they are my friends, but because I am a member of their high school class, or maybe off by one. year. My high school class, which graduated in the perfect town in the perfect state and the perfect peak of civilization, is a cult. 

I compared Facebook to going to a high school reunion where they locks the doors of the gymnasium and they don't let anyone leave. 

In high school, most of my classmates did not care strongly about politics. I probably cared about politics the most of anyone I know. It was rare to meet anyone in my league, as far as awareness of current events, and my passion for America to follow a certain political course. Perhaps Molly, bur she only came to our high school in our senior year, a transfer from our cross-town rival, where all the "cowboys" went (Reagan was probably very popular there, but in the default sort of way). 

Most of the lukewarm ones, the smart college-bound kids, were liberals, like our history teaches, but only weakly so. Everyone "hated" Reagan, except the ones who explicitly liked him. 

It is ironic that the politicization of my cohort, the Class of 1983 resulted in so many of them becoming just the way I was in high school---an obnoxious clueless Democrat fanboys and fangirls. This was clear by the time I left Facebook. It included not only my close friends---the ones I kept in touch with, and stayed in contact with, until I was no longer invited to their get-togethers. The Facebook crowd included plenty of acquaintances with whom I had warm relations in high school.

I had warm relations with everyone in high school, or tried to. I had a very idealized vision of my high school class. It felt at the time like a little utopia. I suffered like any teenage, the usual heartbreaks, etc., but I knew it was all the consequence of my own actions. I loved all my classmates.

I left Facebook because I knew it would take heroic acts of charity on my part to continue loving them--to heroic for what I was capable.

Today I was fantasizing, as I sometimes do, about logging into Facebook using my old credentials buried in my web browser settings, reactivating my account, and making a post: "One thihg to say: Make America Great Again!" 

I would wait for the snarky replies to come in. Perhaps a message like this would from one of the effeminate feminist-truckling liberal men of my cohort, who are the bitchy enforcers of the opinions that everyone is supposed to have, the latter being guarded by the sturdy liberal women, who are the modern day counterparts of the frontier ladies who marched through downtowns smashing windows of saloons. Not much has changed, except in the old days it was done in the name of Christian principles and now it is done in the name of Anti-Christian principles. 

Let's Be Real

 Oh, I love politics. Rather, I love it again. Years I used to love it. Then for a long time I hated it. Now I love it again. I love watching the story of America play out in its politics. I spent a lot of my childhood fascinated by this, which I which I can speak about the mood of the American electorate, as observed from first hand experience, from about 1967 onward. The politics of that era is familiar to me, even though I was three years old. Except in the times I've tuned out politics (like during the mid 1990s, when I was distracted by the demands of graduate school and the decadence of Austin), I have a direct recollection of most of the story. 

The last couple years have felt like a holding pattern in the story of America and civilization, setting up the pieces for the next chapter. Many people have a strange sense of time since 2020, where everything seems to have happened very quickly. For older folks like me to experience this is nothing new, but the young are reporting the same sensation, ones of age who should have a very slow-moving sense of time during the years of childhood. Something has been wrong. I'm intrigued by theories of why this has happened.

The funess of politics, I believe, is completely synonymous with the joy of following the characters of the drama.  There have only been two interesting characters recently, for many years. One character is Donald Trump. The other character is everyone who hates him, who is a mob-lke entity where individuals take utter direction, like a swarm of insect, from the leaders. 

None of the Democrats has been interesting because they are all the same person, repeated over and over without deviation in any expressed opinion. Being a Democrat is about recognizing what you are supposed to believe and say at any given moment. Intelligence is measured by how quickly and deeply one adapts to whatever opinion has been introduced into the "program."

Most Republicans are secretly Democrats. To the rest of us, in the Real Resistance, the Republican-Democrats (not to be confused by the Democratic-Republicans of the era of Jefferson), are the worst of all because they pose as opposition, when in fact they simply want the same thing as Democrats (which is to be admired by other Democrats for their intelligence [see definition of intelligence in previous paragraph]) . Lukewarm. Republicans want to be applauded by Democrats (via the media) for their courage in going against the other Republicans.

Trump broke the paradigm because he was willing not be applauded but condemned by the Democrats.  Being condemned by the Democrats used to be political death sentence. Even Reagan gained their applause by the end of his term, which is why the nation elected his successor George Bush in a landslide, and after that we were thoroughly fucked as a nation. There was no return from his Presidency.

Bush was a dictator, the secret point man of the Global Elite that had reformed in a new internationalist coalition of the wealthy banking and aristocratic classes after the Second World War, during which many of the old Establishment were wiped out. It was great for America because our Elite moved in and took over. Americans led the global Establishment.  America built an Empire and we all lived its benefits.

Now it's coming apart. in part because the designers and creators of this order have long since left the scene, and only their watered down successors are left. They are watered down because they could not possibly duplicate the intellectual rigor and psychological discipline that curated among the first wave of Americans after World War II. Americans had to do this, to outcompete their rivals, especially the British, who were the top of the pyramid of the pre-war Establishment. Americans knew they needed classical training. You couldn't just fake it until you made it. You had to be, at least partially, real. Absent that you were liable to get your head blown off by someone who knows the true consequences of failure to be real.  

So why is politics interesting again? Because the Democrats, for the first time, are at each other's throats. It's the best thing for country. They are trying with all their might to remain "one person", with a common voice of opinion about say, whether Biden should stay or go, but the constant sloshing again is creating tidal frictions that result in permanent, acrimonious fissures in the party. These fissures will save American, and civilization. Once their unity is broken, they will scatter.

WAKE UP

 What is happening to America right now is very sad. I mean what is happening to Joe Biden.  No matter what he has done, he is one of the last standing members of the cohort of Americans born in the first half of the 1940s, that is during the Second World War. That this is how that cohort exits history is very sad.

For he must go down, and he will go down hard. As hard as those of us on the "right" have been with him, the Left will be ten times worse. They need to rip him to shreds, in part to justify the coup they will stage to replace both him and Kamala.

Kamala must go down hard in order to make way for another politician from the party among the group who are now vying to replace Biden. They will take down Kamala the same way they will take down the rest of the Bidenistas---on the grounds that they lied to America about Biden in the most disgusting way, "hiding his condition" from the public in the most self-serving of ways. 

But of course this is a delusion on their parts, because to most of the rest of us, Biden's condition has been publicly obvious for several years, since before the 2020 election in fact. They just chose to ignore it for political reasons, because Trump had to be stopped at all costs, even the point of self-hynosis into believing Biden was not advancing into dementia.

Maybe in the end, all of the power hungry part bigwigs, with the backing of the elite whom they serve, will keep Biden and Harris around in order that they lose to Trump, who is limited to a single term. If Biden goes down hard, it will be easier for the party to move on with a fresh face. Kamala can be taken out of contention for 2028 if the loss is bad enough. Like Geraldine Ferraro. Nobody talked about her 1988. The stink of the 1984 blowout was too strong.

Democratic politicians are to an individual, utterly self-serving in their political motives, all of them gifted with the ability to know what issues to dangle like carrots in front of liberals. Their gift is knowing what those things are, and presenting an image of someone who can bring that to them. When they fail to bring it, at least in the way people want, they can always blamed it on the "right", which is simply a term for anyone who is standing in their way. 

Democrats like being fooled that way. It's a junkie fix to believe an election result is going to bring happiness and justice to the world. Those things are possibly only by the GRACE OF GOD. Anyone saying anything else is acting in the spirit of Anti-Christ. 

Men and women cannot bring you that world of justice. Only God can, as much as He allows, responding to our pleas.

Wake up. It's not too late. Don't be the last in the bunker. The vast majority of those of us on this side are willing to help you make it across the bridge to safety, while you still have your wits about. Many, if not most of us, were fooled a long time too.

Pine Therapy

 Tonight is our fourth and last night up here in Summerhaven, the little community up at at 8200 feet in the Catalina Mountains outside Tucson.  The location are quite remarkable. Along the twenty-five road up from Tucson, one goes from saguaros to pine forests, as if one is driving north over hundreds of miles. The change is dramatic and beautiful. 

Being up here is always a special treat, but it also reminds me of how much I hate the desert and wish we lived somewhere with more trees like this, especially pine trees. It will be poignant to leave tomorrow, and descend back down to the desert.

The relaxation has been especially nice considering the burdens of my job over the last couple months. I didn't even think I'd be be to get out of town on Wednesday. I was sure some emergency caused by too agressive pushing of new code releases to the production server would cause bugs that would be "company-threatening." In fact I was listening in on conference calls to frantically fix issues as we drove south of Phoenix. 

I would write more but the sun is beautiful on the mountain tops around me, and the air is cool.I am going to sit outside on our patio, where we watched the Fourth of July parade two days ago. The bells from the nearby Byzantine Catholic shrine of Mary Undoer of Knots just sounded.  I can see the Eastern Cross on the building out of the balcony amidst the trees. 

Tomorrow we must go down again. But tonight we have the pines and the cool air. 

I'm Here to Save Your Company

 Since returning from California, life has been filled with constant, unrelenting work, and stress over work. At the beginning of June, we were informed that investors had given thumbs down on giving any more money to the CEO to waste on the six-year experiment that the company is.  We were informed this by a notice that although the most recent paycheck had been sent to our accounts, the money was simply not in the bank to make the next payroll. Effectively it was over.

Dazed from the sundown shutdown, we prepared our resumes and promised to give each other recommendations on LinkedIn. Some of us were in positions to make the transition to unemployment gracefully. Others not so much, especially my direct boss, who has three kids. He had used up much of the family savings before finding this current job. 

I was among the few who kept coming into the office. It was actually a beautiful time because the terror-like grip that management had held over, making us always feel as if we are not doing our jobs properly, suddenly ceased. They needed to be gracious to us.

All this because the one clinic using our system had just "gone live" with our software. Keeping this tinder fire going was the only possibility to save the company. 

I took this as a challenge. I had nothing better to do during the day than go into the office and volunteer to save the company by continuing to do coding work, alongside the front end guy, all while being treated nicely and with the kind of respect of a professional I had not experienced in years.

It took giving up my slack lifestyle and re-entering the hell world of current corporate workplace to understand how bad things have gotten in the country.  The corporate workplace is the sum of dysfunctions of the social media era. LinkedIn is the kingdom of hell (and yet it's the only site where long lost friends have re-established contact by reaching out---something about the workplaceness of it makes it less threatening). 

I was not at all worried about income, because I know God will provide for my needs. It was a joyful duty, to throw my care about this onto the Lord.

Three days later the funding came back. My frontend coworker and I were informed directly the CEO coming into the huge empty backroom (it/' most huge and empty on a normal day). We looked at each other, disappointed that the great three-day adventure was over and things would be back to normal.

Except things were not back to normal. They got more intense, because the CEO was now promising the Moon to the clinic using our software. This is his style to do this, I have been told by ex-coworkers ormer employees--to scuttle a promising trial with a clinic by accelerating the new features, instead of stabilizing the current software, and making it perfect. We are dealing with medical data--of people's kids.

But we have funding "for the foreseeable future" we were told. So I will continue to do my work as if the fate of the company depends on it. I'm very good at what I do. "When they hired me, they didn't know they were hiring the guy that would save the company," I told an ex-coworker at an unoffical happy hour with company alumni.

Bit Player at a California Wedding

 

Seeing my old friends in the pew of the church after so many years brought up a quick of series of strong emotions in various directions, not all of them of the character I would have wanted to experience in the holy setting of the Divine Liturgy. I had anticipated that these turmoil would arise in me upon seeing them, but the Lord arranged for all my preliminary rehearsals of the event to be thwarted by the sacred ritual going on around us. It was a new twist of humility, one that I welcome in retrospect. 

Fortunately this initial encounter with the old familiar crowd I had once been part of was the most challenging aspect of the rest of the weekend, save for a few twinges of pain of sadness. 

The wedding, in the same church two hours later, was lovely to experience---including the ritual exchanging of crowns above the head of the bride and groom.

 After the ceremony we followed the instructions to find the home of the bride's grandparents, where the reception and dinner was to be held. It was an opulent property on the north edge of Modesto, where the land begins sloping down to the valley of the Stanislaus River. It was the kind of property that seemed to be characteristic of the "grandfathered" wealth of California---breathtaking in the garden-like property amidst tall cedars that I called "bonsai versions of Sequoias".

It would have been easy to feel jealously, or worse envy, at someone owning such a property, but I was only happy in a serene way that the bride could grow up experiencing such a place. I lacked for nothing in my own childhood, as far as sanctuaries provided by grandparents, ones that felt like opulent gardens. It felt like a victory.

For the dinner, Jessica and I were seated at the same table as all of the group of old high school friends. We were of marginal importance in the scheme of things, being unrelated old friends of the groom's father. It felt good to be marginal, to be a supporting character. I had not even met the bride, let alone any of her family, until I had seen them in church that morning.

My news clothes were very comfortable. There was much dancing on the tennis court from the D.J.. My cohort held it's own amidst the kids in the soc-hop that ensued.  

It was beautifully auspicious for the new couple, who were set to take a long honeymoon route back to New Mexico, where they are set to begin married life together while preparing for their third year of college. Rumors came to me that they were intending to have children  sooner rather than later. I hope they are true. Of course I didn't ask the groom about that, when he dropped by our table while making the rounds. He will be a great man, and great father, as his own father has been. 

Old School Family Starting Techniques

 

The old lodge of the Peter Strauss ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, as it would have looked in 2003, when I attended a wedding there. The lodge was later destroyed in a forest fire.

As I stood at the end of the row ---the high school reunion, Class of 1983--my concentration on the Divine Liturgy going on in the sanctuary was interrupted by a pssst from across the aisle. I turned my head and saw my friend Randy, who had been the student body president of our class, looking at me with a grin, and next to him were his wife Heather, two years behind us in the class of 1985, as well as their two sons, one of whom was the groom, and beside him his bride, in her home parish church.

Because this was not the wedding yet, there were not in a special position, but were sitting back in the same rank as us. Now it was a full reunion, it seemed. Randy is the lynch pin of the group in fact, as everyone else is still a group who gets together for events and trips on a regular occasion, despite living on different continents, while I have been estranged from all of them during these years, except for Randy, who kept calling me. Heather and I are the outliers, politically and culturally---especially on a certain health freedom issue that was greatly divisive among us.  Heather is very vocal and unashamed in her opinions. I can speak frankly with her. She was my daughter in a high school play, when I was a senior and she was a sophomore. 

I was at her and Randy's wedding 21 years ago in the Santa Monica Mountains. They had not been high school sweethearts but had encountered each other by chance years later while living in Los Angeles. I as drafted to be part of their ceremony at the last minute. From the bag by the altar, I had picked the rock labeled "love"and read it aloud to the guests. Heather could not believe it, as I was the last to go, and there had been many rocks left in the bag. She had stooped in her wedding dress to pick up the rock I I had put down, to verify I had read it correctly, which I had. 

After that ceremony, as we played group frisbee among the trees of the National Park Service property, the new groom had announced in a whisper to his old high school friends that his wife was already with child. The boy would be born the next spring and was the young man standing next to them now in Modesto with his bride. He waved back at me in recognition to me. We have been corresponding for some time privately. We talk about classical studies and scientific issues.

"How young they are," must have been the words of so many who heard the news of the couple acrosss the aisle from me, set to become one flesh in the eyes of God later that day in the same church. 

"So young! Still in college. Two years to go." With dissuasions they did receive? Perhaps none?

I am greatly in favor of it, I would have said, had anyone asked, which no one did. It's very old school---everything they told our generation not to do. Yet it is how my parents made their family, which endured despite much financial turmoil and drama, with three children and grandchildren before they died. It is how most people did it.

Civilization depends on it, I believe.

Holy Orthodox Reunion

 

The next day, Sunday, was the wedding. The ceremony was to be in the afternoon at a local Orthodox parish church. Guests of all faiths were also invited to attend the Divine Liturgy at the same church in the morning.  No way were we going to miss that.

We left our hotel just in time to get to the start of the ceremony---which isn't strictly mandatory for Orthodox faithful, and people typically come in during the ceremony. Among to the rules are that to receive Holy Communion, one must be a charismated member of a recognized Orthodox Church denomination in communion with the others, and that one must fast of both food and water from midnight until one receives the sacraments. I knew that the bride and groom would be there, and that the groom, a recent convert, would take the fasting rules seriously, and I can only assume the bride did as well.

It was childhood parish church---her family being of Syrian background, having lived in Modesto for generations. There were multiple priests officiating at the liturgy. Later we learned that one was the brother of bride, and had a parish of his own in Portland, Oregon.

The best part was that as we enterred, and waited in line in the lobby to receive bulletins from the young woman at the table, I saw my old friend Charles, whom I had not seen in over decade. He came in right behind us in line. He didn't recognize me at first. I had to tap on his shoulder, and he turned around in shock and delight, and we gave each other a big hug.

Then we went into the main part of the church. I wasn't sure they would have pews. Some orthodox churches do not, but this is a fairly modern one, and there were aisles with rows of seats (but nothing to kneel on, as one would find in a Catholic church).  The church was almost full already. Charles immediately made for a row along the far wall, where he joined his wife, who waved to me, and I saw as well my friend Karin and her husband John, who are also dear friends. 

It was the most beautiful circumstance for a reunion as I could imagine. Here we were, me and my friends, whom I had not seen in so long, and whom I thought I might never see again, and never have meaningful speech with each other if we did so. We were all together, standing in a row, in a church in Central California, facing the holy altar and listening to the same holy words that have been said since Antiquity to turn the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

Coffeeshop Maid of Honor

 

We landed at Sacramento Airport in the mid afternoon, claimed the rental car (which is a big hassle at that particular airport),  and drove south towards the state capital itself, then on to Modesto, where we checked into the a brand new residence stay inn on the north edge of the city, just off highway 99, which is lined with flowers on the berm in that part of the state.

The next day we had to ourselves. We drove downtown in mid day and explored the old streets. We went to the historical museum, which was a delight. Then we drove the downtown streets along the route of the old cruisers circuit, which was made famous in the 1973 movie American Graffiti, which was written and directed by local native George Lucas, who would go on to make Star Wars. The movie takes place over the course of a night in 1962, following a group of high school classmates who have just graduated. Jessica hadn't seen it yet, I described it for her.

We parked and had lunch at a local restaurant that she chose. It was apparent it had stared in a food truck and moved indoors. After lunch walked across the street to a delightful tiny coffee ship. We almost didn't go in. As we ordered our drink to go, I chatted up the staff, a young man and a young woman, of college age, asking them if they were locals. Yes, they said. 

They asked about us. Scottsdale, we said. What brings you to town? A wedding. 

Who, they asked? I said the son of one of my high school friends. 

Jessica interruped me. She knew they were asking about the local angle, and she supplied the name of the bride. They recognized it. Oh yes, we know her. Her maid of honor works here.

It was a delightful moment. I felt we'd been rewarded by the city for our earnestness in learning about its past.

The Importance of Nice Clothes

 In the midst of all this Godlessness, tomorrow I fly to Northern California to attend a wedding. It has been very stressful at work---multiple rounds of layoffs leaving a skeleton crew, and tomorrow will be as such, but I am to board a plane at noon and from when we arrive at the hotel, I will not have the luxury of being in a bad mood, or being tired. I will be all smiles. I will call no attention to myself that is undue.

I wlll see multiple old friends, some of whom I have not seen in many years, from before I left Facebook, and stopped being aware of their personal opinions, and let them forget about me. 

At least I have new clothes, nice ones. The best way to feel comfortable in public is to wear nice clothes.

You have to pack them though, in a suitcase that you must shepherd through a crowded public place, wearing normal clothes because your nice ones are packed in the suitcase, as you are saving them for when you need to be social among friends.

A Godless World Goes Mad From the Monsters of Reason

Tomorrow night (May 22. 2024) on Episode 69 of Spellbreakers. Among other things we discuss this movie from 2011. The mother ata the wedding opposite of the Divine Feminine. She is the witch from Sleeping Beauty (whose heroine is Aurora in some versions). She knows only how to poison youth, to fill the void in her soul. She is willing to destroy the Earth to satisfy her pain. This is what makes Lars Van Trier's films so exquisite. Probably the best movie I saw during my two-year nomadic cinema obsession was Antichrist, which came out in 2009, and is considered the first of a trilogy that includes this film below. I thought Antichrist was brilliant, but I wanted to unsee it. I'm not exaggerating. Afterwards I wished I hadn't seen it. But that is what it takes to make art these days, in the age of denial of the reality that stares us in our face, and truth that we know to be truth, but which we mock as ridiculous, lest we be seen as a weirdo.

"Our Lady of the Magnetosphere"

That's what I call it, at least, when I saw it two years ago. It almost maybe weep as a depiction of God's mercy.

"Magnetosphere" by Rob Rey on display and the 2022 National Exposition of the Oil Painters of America in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. (link to artists site)

Featured on tonight's episode of Spellbreakers.

https://rumble.com/v4v9fit-spellbreakers-ep.-68-the-science-of-solar-flare-killshots-730-pm-et-.html

You and the Land are One

original theatrical trailer

Perceval in despair.

 

I love the puzzlement on the knights' faces. What on earth is the king talking about?

Lost in the wasteland, Perceval is attacked by a mob led by an old friend who has gone made. But look what Lancelot throws at him (apologies for poor quality of clip).

The only way this makes sense in a Christian way to me is that the figure he is addressing is Christ. When he says "you are Arthur," he means "You are present in Arthur, who, in a rightly ordered kingdom, must act as Your regent on Earth." 

The Grail is the Divine Feminine, which has been lost to the kingdom through Arthur's actions, having been forced by his own law to banish his queen.

Arthur drinks from the cup and is revived (a scene that recalls Tolkein's depiction of Theoden's miraculous recovery in The Lord of the Rings). Yet the kingdom is not yet saved. The final battle lies ahead.

The battle is tense, and bloody, and at one point seems lost. Then at the bleakest moment, Lancelot, having recovered his wits but barely cleaned up from his madness, returns, fighting like a berserker with the strength of a dozen men,  and turns the tide of the battle. His line here, "it is the old wound," was mysterious to me as a young man. It is no longer mysterious to me at all.

"Guinevere, is she queen again?" This is all Lancelot wants to know before he expires.

The battle is won but the king is mortally wounded. He needed to die that the kingdom would be restored. But now the sword is too powerful. This scene makes a lot more sense to me years later. Arthur is sparing Perceval the burden of being king. His pulling the sword from Mordred's corpse is a degraded and profane echo of the divine moment Arthur pulls the sword from the stone. The look of temptation on Perceval's face is unmistakable. King Perceval will rule! Being king s not a duty any man can take upon himself, except by supernatural power.

The Lady of the Lake, like the Holy Grail, is the Divine Feminine, but a different aspect of it. She is Divine Justice, the intervention of God's mercy by the delicate hand of woman when the powers of men have failed them and nothing else can save them. At that moment, she bestows great power on men, so that they can (temporarily) do what needs to be done to restore order and justice. That it comes from a woman is significant in that in a sense, they are granted God's approval ahead of time, through His mercy. Such a weapon granted this way can never fail.

There are many retellings of the Arthurian stories. The 1981 movie Excalibur remains my favorite. I saw it as a high school student in 1981, twice when it first came out---I think it was playing at the CSU theater on campus as part of their semester film program. It is campy, flawed, and at times uneven. It crams a great deal of material into two hours, compressed for purposes of the story. In many ways it is a typical medieval fantasy genre of that era, when we saw such films at the drive-in. It has scenes of gory violence that can turn one's stomach, as well as raunchy almost explicit sex scenes between witches and knights. But there are few movies that have stayed with me over the years like this one, including the lines I have quoted above. I went looking for them again recently and found these clips.  It is little surprise to me that despite its flaws, it has become a cult classic.

Making Perceval the hero of the story was brilliant. That he initially fails the last task Arthur gives him, He began as lowly commoner, a page, and winds up being the hand by which Excalibur is returned to the Lady. In that way, the story is very democratic, and, fittingly, very American, even though it is a British film.

Here perhaps is the entire movie in one scene, where Guinevere, now betrothed to God, furnishes the missing puzzle piece of redemption.  Arthur pulls the sword one last time, this time from the swaddling cloths of a child---perhaps the holy ones of the infant Christ. 

"In the hereafter of our lives...It is a dream I have." They will not meet again on Earth.

The great power here is that Guinevere is not the Divine Feminine. She is a mortal woman. 

Some say Guinevere was a Pict. My people!

All We've Got Left

The exchange of letters between friends and intimates no longer being a thing possile for humanity, we limp along with the next best things, a pastiche of emails, texts, social media posts, and above all, the last tool we have to effectively communicate one person to another, which is the telephone. I have noticed that the last friends I had, who gave a hoot whether I was still alive, tended to catch up with me with calling me on the phone. It is awkward for me to admit how much I now treasure phone calls, because I was on the early edge of pathological phone avoiders, preferring text the same way the young generations now do, almost a stereotype. I have memories of vivid phone calls recently. I have screamed at over the phone, by people who inferred my ideologies, and stood with zipped list while I listened to the pleas of friends who honest-to-god believed I had become a baddie out of 1930s Germany. I now realize the depth of their anguish. They actually freaking believed all that bullshit. But I loved the human connection, the warm greeting, even if it devolves into agry screaming. In one case, sitting on the beach of Lake Tahoe right after the 2020 election, 

I was able to talk my friend down of the ledge of bewildered rage and confusion. In another case, a friend used the amicable endings of our strained phone calls---which he was alway the one to incite---to lie in wait for me to see visit him in person at his home, at which time he lowered the boom on me, and we haven't really spoken since. I don't expect to see his What's App number pop up again. I think he is done. I forgive him   Nevertheless we had good phone calls for a spell, when I needed that. Now, when I dream of reconciliation with long-lost friends, I sometimes wish for a surprise email, as I did from Janusz, after we fell out of the habit of writing to each other years ago. We don't call each other. Instead I went to visit him in Poland. Otherwise, phone it must be. 

 Sadly, however, even our phone calls these days are diminished, for all of us who still use the phone. They have effectively abolished analog phone lines, by which the electromagnetic representation of the human voice and other sounds was captured in a travelling wave form . Among other things, this allowed for true duplex communication---the sound could travel both directions at once down the copper wires. You could hear each other, even as you both spoke. You could hear silences, and sighs. You are no longer allowed any of this. The human voice is reduced to 1s and 0s, and the sound of one party tramples on another. We effect clumsy attempts to communicate important things, as if we are back in the time of Meet Me in St. Louis, half-yelling over the wall phone long distance.  One must confirm that one was heard. Mostbrutually, one begins to open up, speaking from the heart, and one goes on a two-minute monologue sharing something of great value that was not shared before, maybe to another human being. And one then realizes the call has been dead for some amount of time. 

Downright inhuman. But it's all we've got left.

How Civilization Fell

 

Postage stamp from the late-stage era when people still wrote letters to each other. 

As the years pass, more and more I am convinced that civilization is not about to fall but rather it has already fallen. Somehow we have managed preserve the material trappings of civilization--the working economy and its comforts and convenience, at least for most people. Yet it feels as if we live in a time of barbarism.  When one looks for certain hallmarks of civilization beyond the economic, one sees that certain aspects of our culture that were continuations of phenomena from the earliest days of human civilization have disappeared.

One of these things that has disappeared is the written word. The hand-writing of ordinary language is happening less and less by the day. We press buttons on a keyboard and pixels on the screen in front of us change their luminosity and hue. Pixels on monitors elsewhere in the world may change as well. This is not writing. This is pixel manipulation.

Hand writing has all but disappeared except for white boards in corporate offices, where the scrawl is often barely legible. Is there anything more pathetic that a white board with someone's brainstorm ideas from two months ago? Likely no one really understood it at the time, not even the person doing it.

What no longer exists at all is letter writing, the kind that friends, family, and lovers wrote to each other since the invention of the postal service.  Email destroyed it but without replacing it. It has been a barbaric conquest, suitable only for business communication. Among intimates, it only serves to highlight the separation. It would drive lovers mad with frenzy, this false sense of connection.

I am one of the last letter writers, holding out while others fell by the wayside.  One day I got sad thinking that my nieces, born in 2005, will never get a love letter, nor any of the young women of their cohort. 

None of them will know the joy of true correspondence, which as opposed to email, happens at a human pace. We build up thoughts in our head, one's we want to put into the consciousness of people who we know and love (or hate, etc.). At some point they build up enough that we feel compelled to write these thoughts  down, and they never come as we intend, but as some shadow of what we meant to say. Yet we know the joy the other person will have, to receive a letter, and with all the groundedness of material existence, we fold up the paper, words inked out, written over, with arrows and inserts, and we put it in an envelope, perhaps one of fine material befitting our esteem for the other person. Perhaps we add festive extras. We lick the envelope and seal it, knowing they will open it.

We place it in a mailbox and we wait. Days go by. We know the letter is en route, but it has not arrived. It will be found by the addressee at some time unknown to you. They will read it, and be guided through the thoughts and emotions that were manifest in in by you, the writer, but days or weeks before.  It is like a boat going through the locks of canal, taking its time on each stage.

Perhaps the addressee holds the contents of your words in mind, for days and even weeks, returning to consider them, and building up an itinerary of reflections and responses to your words, one they wish to share to you. Or perhaps they let them go, leaving only the intention to write back to you at some point.

Perhaps they do write back, at some frequency of time that is appropriate to your friendship, family relationship, or otherwise. One need not leap to action in most cases. One savors the build up to writing a response. 

As such one experiences, a mental and spiritual overlap of brain states with another person, asyncronously and at a distance, over time. Such a thing can be very healthy for one's mental health. My great-uncle Dick wrote to his surviving sister, ping pong back and forth almost daily from Nevada to Nebraska and back,  until around 2018, when his last sister died. 

With good friends, the time lag need not be constant, frequent, nor even all that regular. Six months or a year may go by. Yet the friendship can be retried at any moment. We could not only follow, but participate in, each other's lives over time. Become small or large characters in chapters of each other's lives.

None of this is possible anymore. Email destroyed all this. It gave us an illusion of connection. And yet that was only the start. If we still had only email, and not text and social media, we might have stumbled our way through the darkness. Now email seems retrograde.

Email friendship and love affairs exist only in the movies. They cannot happen in real life. They can only say hello to each in passing. They "drop in" and move on, until next year, or several years later, when digitially "drop in' again.  In contrast, by text and private message, people hook up.  Text is superb for clandestine love affairs with sexual contact. Imagine the insanity of a long-distance text relationship.

The functions of a working society, a civilized one, that were once supplied by letter writing, continuously so for hundreds of years, even back to Antiquity, have been abolished. 

The seduction of technology is strong. Some have begun revolting from it, including apparently youth. A couple weeks ago I read about a historical society where school kids can use typewriters.  Typewriters are fascinating technology worthy substitute for hand writing for intimate correspondence, I think. Some folks have terrible hand-writing, after all, and typewriters tend to bring out the poet in all of us.