A Glum Day



(I started this post last Friday and couldn't finish it then but I am going to keep working on it until it is finished)

After holding up in what I thought were pretty good spirits most of the week I woke up today (Friday) to this depressing rainstorm and realized that all of the events of the week had finally left me deflated, mainly of course because all of the things to dread about it have not actually happened yet. In New Hampshire we are still going to school, for now (as of Monday, the high school is closed, but my younger children's Montessori school is still open, for the time being), and work, and most businesses are still open, and my oldest son is still going out tomorrow to work on his Eagle Scout project, which he has about 2 months left to finish. Bigger events certainly are being canceled, but for now we are not under lockdown yet. I just got a new phone, because I had dropped my old one on the ground and broken it, and even though I still wish smartphones had never been invented I do need to have some kind of telephone, so I decided to try to cheer myself up by taking the first pictures on it as we were going to school.

I work in a hospital, and while everything there was carrying on pretty much as usual up until last Friday, which assuaged much of the anxiety I was picking up on in the outside world, things were starting to amp up when I came back today, though we still do not have any cases of the Covid-19 that I am aware of. Due to my recent heart attack I am there quite a bit at other times for rehab and follow up appointments. I went to my cardiac rehab class this morning as usual, though I suspect this will be canceled before the next one, which is a shame, as I only had one session left to attend and I was looking forward, for some reason, perhaps because I have not graduated from anything since leaving college, to get my little diploma of completion. I will be pleased if I can continue working through this, not only so that I can keep getting paid, but I have been there for over 20 years I am used to it, it is part of my routine, and I do not like the idea of my routine being taken away, especially if it is to be substituted by my being confined to the house for an extended period of time (or serious illness/death)

A number of people on the internet have been reminiscing about their favorite plague literature and relating it to the present moment. Camus's The Plague is a popular choice, and while it is a fine book and is about modern man's diseased soul, a topic dear to many commentators, the book I have been thinking of the most in this vein is Manzoni's Betrothed, which I just read last summer. It of course takes place in Lombardy (about 400 years ago) which makes for an obvious comparison, but it is also about characters who are, like actual people, either laid low in the midst of actively living or, for those that survive, have to go forward into the future, whereas my memory of the Camus is that any idea of the future is rather blank and that the characters were not leading especially passionate or meaningful lives in the present. There was also a long plague sequence in Forever Amber that was not as profound in meaning but was described in considerable detail.

This picture is of the playground at my children's Montessori school. This is our twelfth year having children there, since our oldest was in first grade. I am hoping this is not the last year, that we will find a way to keep sending the younger children there, as our oldest boy is a senior in high school now and I hope will be going to college. Before this crisis came on, he had gotten into St John's, where his mother and I went. While traditionally it hasn't been especially hard to get accepted there, something I read claimed that the acceptance rate last year was down to 54%, and combined with the possibility that are still people around campus who might remember my undistinguished academic career there, I had some mild doubts about his chances. He doesn't seem especially excited about going, but he doesn't seem especially excited about anything else either, and he certainly doesn't have any more attractive options. Having observed for thirty years the phenomenon in our society of letting boys and young men drift through their teens and twenties--having been to some extent one of those boys--I am not a fan of it, and I do think he would benefit from going to a place like St John's, so unless he comes up with some plan that is equivalent in its potential benefits, I am going to make him try it. (He has not shown himself to be one of these young men who prefers to do things with his hands or other work of a physical nature who is being forced to go to college--he could get something out of academics)   

This crisis has really brought out the people who love to scold and tell everybody else what to do, which I hate, because I am not this kind of person. I am sure there are people out there who can grudgingly appreciate the necessity of the rather extreme measures that are being taken and are also self-reflective, and can have empathy for the various disappointments that this shutdown has laid on some people, but the scolds aren't having any of it. We all must shut up and agree with them on everything one hundred percent. For one thing, there was a lot of bashing of young people who went out to bars and so forth over the weekend or when their college classes were cancelled. For my part I am amazed at how easily this cohort has on the whole fallen into line. When I was in college I thought the three months of summer vacation were interminable. If it had been announced, in any of the years I was there, that the school year was shutting down in March, and I was going to have to go away from my friends, my booze, my girlfriend, or, if I didn't have a girlfriend, the chance to get one in the frenzy at the end of the year ("The Spring Offensive") and be forced to go home and be trapped in my mother's house for three months (or more), devastating does not really describe how that would have affected me. I don't think I ever would have recovered. I had nightmares well into my thirties that I lived with my mother in which I wake up thrashing about and trying to scream with great violence. And anyone who remembers how the young baby boomers, who are now in the forefront of commanding everyone to stay inside, carried on in the 1970s cannot possibly imagine that if this crisis had broken out in 1975 or thereabouts and the elders and middle aged women were ordering everyone into a prolonged lockdown with limited opportunities for partying and sex with people one's own age that the bulk of that cohort would have quickly and soberly complied for the overall good of society. My second son qualified for the New England swimming championships, which of course are canceled. He is disappointed, though as he was not going to be among the contenders for medals, qualifying was probably his main accomplishment, but for many of the teenagers, and their parents, who have spent thousands of dollars and endless hours over the ten years going to practices and meets all over this area building up to this (and don't have five other children), it was really crushing. I know we are in a global health crisis, and everything else is unimportant, but I think it is all right to be sad about something like this, and even to express it. Everything does not, and should not, have to be joylessly correct all the time.

It is now Tuesday. I am feeling more optimistic, probably because nothing terrible happened today, and I took the steps of passing through the to me big psychological barriers of holding my little children out of their school, which has still not closed, and banning everyone from attending what few appointments and meetings that had still not been canceled, which was difficult for me to do. Everybody else in my family is now homebound, though as we live in a fairly sparsely populated area we are allowed to go outside and walk around (I think). I am still going to work, as a result of which I have been quarantined in the empty bedroom in the attic for the duration of the crisis. I even feel pretty healthy. I've lost 20 pounds since my heart attack in December and am down to about 205, which is the lightest I have been since 1997 or 98. I don't expect this sanguine state will last, however.

It's Time For My Quadrennial Primary Post

As a resident of the first primary state, in an era when many people believe that not only the quality of their lives, but in some instances their very continuance, are directly affected by the outcome of Presidential elections, I feel some obligation to explain my present mindset and make an account of what I am likely to do next Tuesday tomorrow. But I am going to warm up for this by recalling an election year from a long time ago, when I did not feel any obligation to account for myself, or even to vote at all.



In the fall of 1992 I was a junior in college and it was in this season when I was, I suppose you could say wooing, but at least beginning to talk to my eventual wife. I do remember this election as a background to the romance but apart from a few people whom I at least tended to regard as a little fanatical the emotional intensity and absolute horror of the opposing side was not in evidence to anything like the same degree that it is now. As almost all of my family and most everyone else I knew were Democrats I associated that faction and its supporters with being generally good and the Republicans and their followers as otherwise, and as I was 22 years old and other than the one term of Jimmy Carter, who was regarded as something of an aberration from the great history of the Party in the 20th century, there had not been a Democratic President the entirety of  my life, I imagined that if one were ever to be elected again that it would be a tremendous boon to the quality of life of the non-business-driven people like me whom the Republicans, in their avarice and indifference to the quality of public life, were not allowing to thrive as they should have been. But on the whole the level of antagonism was not that pronounced. A couple of members of the faculty at school held a debate on the question of allowing gays in the military--one of whom actually took the side opposing it!--and while there was one forerunner of today's progressives who made a show of storming out of the hall in disgust at this, my sense was that most of the audience regarded this as drama queen behavior and not helpful in promoting his favored position. Clinton won that year, of course, over the first George Bush, in what now we see was a very significant and transitional election, to an extent that I did not perceive at the time. When I think that my grandparents and their World War II generation era cohorts were still alive and not actually "that old" (my three living ancestors were 68, 69, and 71 that year), and how quickly after that they seemed to grow incapacitated and die, you realize what a demographic shift is coming in the decade ahead now as all of the Baby Boomers just entering their 70s begin departing the scene en masse. I don't know what I was doing on election night (probably drinking), but whatever it was I was not paying much attention to the results. I was with some of my friends and I remember we walked by or perhaps stopped briefly in a room where some people were gathered watching the coverage on television and the supporters of Clinton on the TV were solemnly holding hands and singing "The times they are a-changin'". When we moved on from this scene one of my friends quipped that if the times were changing, why are we still singing the same songs we sang thirty years ago? Of course the times did change very much, but nothing much like the way I imagine the people singing that night thought they were going to change.



I am going back to this memory in part because I am a total loss as to how to vote in this primary. I feel like I am only a Democrat at all anymore because I am obviously not a Republican, or don't feel that I would be able to become one at this point, but almost all of the people running on the Democratic side I don't really recognize as sharing a lot of my political values either. By process of elimination I can say I am definitely not going to go for Mayor Pete or Yang (too alienated from their worldview), no on Steyer (who is he? what exactly does he believe in that is of any interest to me? Sorry, I can't pretend I care enough about climate change for it to have any effect on my voting). I don't really want to vote for Bernie Sanders and heaven knows I am being warned on all sides, by intelligent and presumably well-informed quarters as well as hysterical ones, not to dare even thinking of doing so for myriad reasons, all of which lead to catastrophe. But I admit, he talks my language more than any of the other candidates do, and as I often do feel unsuccessful and excluded I am drawn to his expressions of anger towards the wealthy and powerful. At the same time I feel that I am supposed to try to resist this and be stronger but there is a real issue surrounding social acceptance, or more the lack of it, that is causing people on all sides to make these reckless, irresponsible votes. But I have to be stronger.


Warren is similar to Bernie Sanders, right, but more socially acceptable, perhaps because she has a more responsible and professional base? I was leaning towards her at the beginning. She has not been particularly inspiring on the campaign trail and the ranks of her supporters have turned out to be a crowd that is by and large almost as distasteful to me as the much-derided "Bernie Bros" (none of whom I have ever actually encountered in real life, however) are to a sizable segment of the Democratic electorate. She is still in play though. I can't see a way to vote for Biden in good conscience, and while I know where he comes from, both geographically and "culturally", more than any of the other candidates, he's never come off as either a great intellect or a great leader, and especially now. Bloomberg, never. Who is left? Klobuchar, I don't know anything about her. What has come out in the campaign to me (and I have not been following as closely as I could have) is that she is a centrist, she is smart, she'll know how to run the bureaucracy; I need something more specific. "Smart" means almost nothing in itself nowadays, especially where Democratic women are concerned, other than perhaps Gillenbrand, who was seen as flaky, they're all smart enough, there just isn't enough differentiation to make me feel that this person's particular smartness matters in some way that I can't get from any other smart person. I am tempted to vote for Klobuchar because a lot of sensible people seem to like her and it would be for me kind of an unorthodox, risky vote. But nothing she says or that I read about her makes any impression on me. I'd have no idea what I was voting for.


Oh Tulsi (Gabbard--she just goes by Tulsi on her signs though) is still on the ballot. All the respectable people seem to hate her, which makes her interesting, and I have watched some of the videos of her working out--she'd certainly be the fittest president we've ever had, given that Washington, Jackson, Eisenhower et al, were older men by the time they ascended to that office. But the media blackout of her has done its work, as I had forgotten about her until I just looked at the ballot, and obviously had not been considering voting for her.


So I guess for me it really is between Sanders and Warren, and maybe Klobuchar if I can find anything she has ever said or done or any position she has that has any appeal to me at all. But this is really not a great set of candidates to try to take down the most hated and dangerous President of all time (though I still think George Bush II may have been worse, and certainly I got more worked up over him than I do over Trump--I've kind of emotionally checked out at this point).


 

Unfinished/Abandoned Posts Saved On My Account

1. Post I began writing about my reaction to the Trump election (main point--I didn't vote for him, but the extreme reactions of so many people alarmed me, blah, blah, blah)


2. Post attempting to explain my views on immigration (confession--I would like less of it and to preserve more of the old America and its culture. The developments of the past thirty years have not done much for me.)


3. Post examining why so many people hate college and seemingly want to pressure/shame people likely to be underachievers into not going (always devolves into me trying to justify my own past attendance, which had no measurable value other than that that I [dubiously in the eyes of all my potential evaluators] try to claim it had for my personal development and experience apart from economic benefits, as well as the future attendance of my children, provided of course that they want to go). Quite simply, I conceive of myself and my family as college-going-type people, and not welding or plumbing or whatever other practical pursuit I am supposed to encourage-type people, and I am probably not going to get out of that mindset without a pretty extreme nudge from society saying "no!" which I am probably unlikely to get.


4. Post asking "Is there anything to look forward to in the future?" inspired by an observation I read somewhere on the Prince song "1999" which stated that it was almost impossible to conceive in the present day of an artist anticipating something taking place in the future as being fun. I thought this was an interesting point and concurred that even though people are miserable and bored and unfulfilled in every era, there do seem to have been times in the past--the 1920s, the 1960s, to some extent even the 1940s because of the intensity and purposefulness with which much of day to day life was infused, parts of the 80s and early 90s--where there at least existed the possibility of fun or earthly delights to be had that I do not feel to be the case, for a person like me anyway, in the present, even if I were twenty years younger. But this premise seemed absurd and vulnerable to easy assault--my children's conception of life before 20 years ago is that it must have been stupefyingly boring--so I abandoned it.


In truth, this blog has probably run its course, though I will continue to keep the record of my reading on the other blog. However I still think of myself as the kind of person who writes and who must have something inside me to say even when I don't, so I can't just stop entirely. But I don't really have many thoughts about anything at all. I crave experiences and to travel and to have intelligent interactions with people and I don't know what else I crave, something, but I cannot hold up my end in these pursuits or be persuasive enough to bring these things about so they never happen. And all the regular humdrum things I have to deal with are becoming, I won't say overwhelming, but too relentless, too distracting. And it will probably be a month now before I post again...

Making a Belated Record of April Vacation



I had another vacation at the end of April. I did not actually do very much during it but due to my state of mind over the course of this past year it felt significant to me and I wanted to make a record of it. I will start by putting up a picture from just three summers ago (2015). While the location is not of particular relevance, this picture was taken in front of the at that time former country store in Grafton, Vermont, though it looked then as if someone were trying to get it up and running again. I don't think we have been back there since, though over the years we have probably gone there at least five times, as it is near our camp in Brattleboro. There is a small low tech, what I supposed could be called dusty nature museum there that we always visit, and that it is one of those places I think of fondly now...   

This is all sort of apropos of nothing, however, the point of the picture is to see how little everyone still is just three years ago. They all really were children. The two older boys are definitely not children anymore, at least not like they are here. So that is a significant change. And of course I feel that I have departed a certain phase of life since then and entered a new one that, to be blunt, seems even less personally exciting than the previous ones seemed to be. Three years ago I was 45, but how young 45 seems compared to 48! At 45, especially if you have not had any indications of real physical decline set in yet, you can sort of persuade yourself that you still have more than half of your life remaining to you, during which you are somehow going to feel more or less the same, energy and health-wise, as you always have. At least I did, which obviously was insane, though I guess I can console myself that I made it to nearly fifty feeling relatively youthful. Up until four or five years ago as well a few reasonably attractive women in their thirties would still, if not exactly be flirtatious with me, at least give me cause to wonder whether they had some inclination to be so. But even this kind of supremely mild speculation of possible sexual tension seems to be over now. Especially when I am out with my youngest daughter, women increasingly ask me if I am the grandfather now. So I am experiencing a lot of ambivalence and distaste as I go through this adjustment.

On the first activity day of this vacation I loaded my children in the car and drove an hour north to Lincoln, New Hampshire, the gateway to the Kancamagus Highway and the White Mountains. The main destination of this trip was a thrift shop in a shopping center along the main strip, which I had alighted on during one of my internet search games, but after going to that we were free to improvise. The thrift shop visit was a success. I did not find anything for myself but several of the children were able to leave with presents, for a total cost of under $15. Unfortunately I neglected to take any pictures there. We proceeded thence to the White Mountains Visitors Center, newly re-opened for the season. I have to confess that I love Visitors Centers, and always try to find an excuse to stop in them when I can. It's the idea of having arrived at the destination but not having yet plunged into the experience, but being in a limbo between anticipating the experience and having any part of it behind you. So I love that sense of having momentarily suspended time, even if all I am doing is the most mundane activity such as going to the bathroom or drinking water...

Needless to say the picture above is at the White Mountains Visitor Center, which I consider a superior representative of the species. There are numerous appealing visuals and displays, nostalgic touches, a large 3-d relief map set out on a table. The bathrooms are calm, quiet, and reminiscent of the past. I wish I could find a tavern that worked for me half so well.    

From the town of Lincoln we drove a mile or two into the White Mountains National Forest and pulled into a parking area. As one of the children refused to leave the car we were unable to walk anywhere where we would have lost sight of the parking lot. Despite the still profuse amount of snow cover it was 60 degrees on the day we were there. Most of April was still essentially winter this year where I live as well. I'm still not entirely caught up on my heating bills and it is nearly July.   

Though it does not look it, this is very close to the parking lot. Even for just a few minutes, it was good for me to be out in this beautiful country and air after the long winter with all of its obligations and other problems. 

The view from the bridge pictured below. It is a sad truth that I only live an hour away from this place yet I usually only make it up there maybe three times a year, and most of those for rather short and haphazard visits. I just have too many other things to do. It's madness, really. I think it is peak madness right now and for the next couple of years, perhaps, but who can say I will ever have the time for slower and more contemplative days of travel in a state of comparative health again?

Some of the children on the bridge. My son is wearing the hat he got at Fenway Park. We had already gone to a game there about a week before this outing (baseball season starts early in New England). It was my first time ever going there as well. I had previously been to baseball games at Veterans Stadium (Philadelphia), and the old Memorial Stadium and the then new Camden Yards in Baltimore. I also went to a football game at RFK Stadium in Washington once. This is my sum experience of famous baseball and football stadiums. 

The next day we headed to Vermont, stopping along the way to climb a small hill with a view of Lake Sunapee. As you can see the snow was melted here. This first "hike" of the year was about 1/2 a mile up a paved trail. As we grow more numerous (and temperamental) our walking is becoming less ambitious, I am sad to say.

View of the still slightly iced lake with the ski slopes of the mountain resort visible as well. I don't know what the children make of "views". I assume it makes some impression on them.

On the third day we are finally arrived in Brattleboro. It rained all day, so we went into town. I went to the used book store (not pictured) to pick up a book that I had been monitoring for 15 years because it was finally coming up on my reading list, and it was no longer there! After this disappointment we went to a restaurant on Main Street that was vaguely hipsterish I guess. The people in it looked like they had all spent a lot of time in modern liberal colleges and other strongly left-leaning environments. I really have not, so I find this atmosphere somewhat stimulating because I feel like something of the social life I never had could have been found among this class of people even if I have trouble understanding a lot of the driving passion and motivation behind this type of education and political position. The sandwiches were of the artisan bagel variety, with an underground selection of juices and other drinks. We had to mix and match quite a bit to satisfy everybody. Someone's sandwich was loaded with sweet potato which no one, including me, could get down. In the end I think we ended up sharing two or three egg oriented concoctions.

After the restaurant we went bowling, which took us quite away from the degreed lefty crowd (though we once went to a bowling alley in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that seemed to have quite a few people there who were something of a variation, and overall a more attractive one, of this type, appearing more affluent and less socially sour than the standard version. Don't ask me to explain how they came to be bowling). 

When I looked at this rather melancholy sight outside the bowling alley, the phrase "the era of big parking lots is over" popped into my head. The mountain visible in the background is in New Hampshire, on the other side of the Connecticut River, which would be barely 200 yards away.

On the fourth day we went to Deerfield in Massachusetts, which is about a 40 minute drive from Brattleboro. We had gone there before to visit the Yankee Candle world headquarters and superstore, but this was our first time going to the historic village, which consists of around ten or fifteen preserved houses dating from the 1700s, some of which are furnished in period style, others of which hold special collections such as furniture or silver pieces, or have craft demonstrations. This is the sort of thing we used to do a lot before there were so many of us and it became both expensive and difficult to appeal to so many varied interest levels. However I wanted to have one outing of this type during the vacation and this is one of the places out that I have long had an interest in going to, so we took the plunge. It cost $61 for all of us to get in, which is not too bad. The guides at the various houses, who looked to be retirees and who are almost certainly volunteers, were very good. Personable human guides are a commodity and attraction in themselves in today's world.

The picture above by the way is of the town's Civil War monument--every village and town and city in New England has one--with one of the old buildings of the Deerfield Academy prep school in the background. 

Still in the center of the village, turned 90 degrees from the view in the previous picture. I think this is the Unitarian church. The Unitarians of course were very prominent in these old well-educated Massachusetts towns. Beautiful New England sky as well. I believe this was around April 26th, and still no leaves visible. 

The two older boys, not exactly mesmerized by the history or other circumstances of the village, but the assumption is that exposure to the general atmosphere will leave some kind of impression that produces a jolt of recognition or insight in later life. 

There were too many of us to even contemplate taking lunch at the historic Deerfield Inn, which seems to have been the only restaurant in the village, but the museum shop had a little sort of tea room, pictured here with its pretty windows and curtains, where you could get a muffin and a drink.

A little footpath through some of the local farmland as well as the playing fields of the Deerfield Academy down to the river.

The whole group spent about 20 minutes hanging out and exploring the river. At this point my camera (actually my phone) ran out of picture space. This is an ongoing problem for me when I go out, since it seems like I have to delete 20 pictures to clear out enough space to take three. 

This is back in Vermont. The two girls who have so many good qualities we don't even have to talk about them make some homemade pizza.

Here they are standing outside the then still-covered pool, which is open now. We were even in it the other day (June 17-18th) when it was 93 degrees.

This picture is from Easter. The building blocked by my head is the New Hampshire State House. I'm still getting used to my sudden transition to looking old. I do think I look like someone who in a past age might have been a writer or local intellectual of some kind, at least in this photo.

I probably shouldn't put up so many pictures of the girls, but, on the other hand, the years go by fast and one forgets. I have a decent little archive of pictures on here for the last ten years or so, many of which commemorate times that are especially meaningful to me.

Daisy scout uniform. These two are my fifth and sixth children, and a lot of environmentalists and other sour people are pretty open in their belief that they shouldn't exist, but while acknowledging that every child is a gift from God and without praising my own children too effusively, because you never know how things are going to turn out, I suspect in the overall balance of human society and civilization they are going to be overwhelmingly positive additions.

Little DIppers and Other Songs

Another 1950s-ish pop instrumental that I have lately stumbled upon. This footage appears to have been shot somewhere in our mountainous Northeast. The people in it, if they are still alive, would be around 80 years old now. Some of the girls are admittedly goofy-looking, but a few of them are quite lovely, though one wonders whether they ever really knew it (or maybe they were progressive enough that they didn't care). I am still kind of depressed but I think I am slowly coming out of it. My wife indulged my low feelings for a couple of months as a common side effect of going under anesthesia and some other reasons, but at a certain point in March she said it was time to snap out of it, at least around other people. So I am doing much better compared to what I was feeling in January and February, and I don't feel right now like I am going to die or become incapacitated within the next couple of years at least, so I am going to try to be in a good mood during this time now and enjoy living, especially since I really don't have any terrible problems. I have the usual problems people in my position have, many of which are only "problems" as far as you choose to regard them as such. You must excuse me, this is my pep talk to myself to project more joie de vivre. I'm becoming more attached to church and related events as a sort of comfort. Yet what do I need comforting for? While I am increasingly appealing to supernatural powers to help me, none of my wishes are for particularly spiritual or noble or disinterested things. When I recall the past my major regrets are still not that I was a better person, but rather that I wish I had been more successful at being somewhat immoral. But I am finding the rituals and trappings of religious practice to be more and more essential to my psychic well-being.



I still think of this as a "new" song, but it is from 2001. This is a very cheerful video. I don't know much about the people in this group, but I like their faces, which is something that I am not often struck by. The video is full of good faces, actually, which the world seems to be sorely in need of. Even though this band was quite popular in the late 90s/early 00s, I haven't found any other songs of theirs that I like.


There are times, often provoked by some pop culture artifact, when the 80s feel as remote, or even more so, in time to me than the 60s or even the later 50s do. Perhaps this is because I do not have actual real life memories of the 60s so that there is no sense for me of that time being lost, as it has always been lost. Or perhaps it is because so many of the familiar songs and images from that period are still ubiquitous enough that they seem to exist on some kind of continuum in the lives of many of us into the present, having never exactly gone away. One is unsure. However, this song does not have the same kind of life independent of their time I don't think, and even in its hour was only a hit among a much smaller segment of the population than most famous songs are. I don't know where this was filmed--it appears to be a Mediterranean locale, but in which country even I cannot pin down--but it is a quintessentially 80s vision of travel, that due to all of the changes we are all aware of, including the eclipse of exclusive Euro-American economic domination, can never be recaptured. It still very much informs my ideas when I dream about traveling however.
 
One of my missions in the upcoming months is to become familiar with more jazz, at least the more famous artists and pieces. I usually like it when I hear it in a restaurant or on a film soundtrack, but I haven't followed up. For one thing, as here, the individual cuts tend to be pretty long, and I am somewhat harried for time. But there is a spirit in it that I often like, so I have to try to carve out a space to immerse myself in some of this. This piece of course working off of the familiar Rogers and Hammerstein tune is a good starting point for me and my particular needs. These are not the greater society's needs and they certainly aren't any artist's needs, but I am fully outside of all of those kinds of discussions now for my own purposes. But I am out of time and this needs to go up now...

March Thoughts

This is supposed to be my monthly check-in, but once again I am going to use the occasion to try to finish something of a post I have been working on in one form or another for several months. I am always trying to figure out and write little commentaries on various of the issues that command the headlines and the passions of the rest of the populace, but being as it seems ever more self-absorbed I find that I don't care about most of these things very much one way or the other, apart from that almost everyone's position on these matters is about equally unsatisfactory to me. So I want to get at why I both don't have any strong opinion on most of these things, yet think everyone's else's opinions are unconvincing.
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Guns! I've never had a gun nor had any experiences where I've regretted not having one, and I am nearly fifty years old and grew up in a time and in an area where violent crime rates were much higher than they are where I live now. Given current lifestyles and the number of children, and especially sons, that I have, the dangers of having any firearm in the home far outweigh those incurred by not having them. Likewise I am skeptical that there is a social good in allowing ordinary citizens to possess assault weapons that outweighs the unnecessary carnage that they inflict in these criminal types of mass shooting events. I am in general afraid of guns and other highly potent weapons and am attracted by the dream of a society that is effectively free of them. I am not however unswayed by the arguments that given their existence there is at least symbolically some imperative for men who would be free to have the capability and willingness to own and use them, and I don't like the idea of police and militaries being the only entities with access to these weapons, especially as they seem to be less and less responsive and subject to the will of the population than may have been the case formerly. I grant a personal handgun or rifle will not avail an individual man much against any kind of professional modern day force with a legal right to violence that has any determination to dominate him, however the symbolism of this right to self-defense and resistance has a sacred aspect to its adherents, a fervor that is no doubt exacerbated by the ongoing assaults on what is considered by many to be traditional masculinity. Many on the 'left' seem to consider the truth of this last assertion to be some combination of dubious, irrelevant, or pathetic, and perhaps it is, but since progressivism does not offer a particularly compelling vision of what it thinks manhood should consist of going forward and as it does not seem to recognize much in the way of limits where the transformation of the culture is concerned, it stands to reason that some portion of the population would gravitate towards guns as the point of resistance. Perhaps in the end the NRA and the pro-gun faction will be as deftly outmaneuvered as the forces of reaction have been in so many other arenas and will meekly submit in the face of progressive pressure without recourse to violent or dogged resistance. Something of the sort seems to have taken place in other countries, where surely some people must have relinquished their prerogative to bear arms with some reluctance...




Sexual Assault. I guess we have to say that whenever it happens it's really that bad, but is it really happening enough that colleges and other institutions have to adopt policies and take on attitudes that express a kind of blanket hostility towards heterosexual male behavior even when it is not explicitly sexual (my alma mater issued a statement on the subject recently which included issues like male domination of class discussion). It might be nice to hear some more input from women with a more positive experience of intersexual relations, which I believe there are some who exist; especially with regard to the college report, the place comes across as having been a total nightmare for women I guess since time immemorial, which is now to be corrected by enacting policies that at the very least operate under the assumption that men possessing even a hint of what used to be considered normal (non-criminal) masculine attitudes and behaviors are at their very best and most inadvertent potential problems that require strict governance. I don't think this can go on, at least in the sense that men are going to be willing forever onward to submit to the social position vis-a-vis their female peers that these kinds of policies impose on them. It's infantilizing and ridiculous, not the stands against actual assaults and rapes, obviously, but the seeming imperative to effectively neuter them and manage/dictate all interpersonal relations in what should be one of the most vital and expansive periods in life for those sorts of things  




Immigration. I go back and forth on this one because I generally like the pro-immigrant people better than the anti-immigrant people, and they are so deliriously in favor of ever more immigration and virtual open borders. I don't really understand why they feel this way so strongly, however. In my heart of hearts in the past at least my wishes generally trended in favor of less rather than more. The population of foreign-born in the U.S. now is well over 10%, which is about the same level it was when policy became more restrictive in the 1920s. By the 1960s the percentage was under 5%, and indications were that livelier people at least thought day to day existence was getting a little stale at that level, though from my vantage point it doesn't seem like it was that terrible. I have no doubt that there are specific environments and times of life, especially at higher levels of intellectual and artistic ferment, where the interplay of global-class talent is truly exhilarating, but for more regular people cut off from these worlds so much change tends to be stressful and destabilizing and alienating, especially when direct emotional or material benefits from all the changes are hard to perceive. Clearly a lot of people are definitely at this last stage now.




Universities. I see repeated often the idea that the main purpose of a university is to challenge people to wake up from their complacency and make them uncomfortable. Perhaps this has become the case, though my impression was that their primary function was to impart knowledge and instruct students in the processes and approaches to thinking which are characteristic of the most intelligent minds. Perhaps this includes actual moral and political indoctrination, though the idea is that the acquisition of the habits and basic learning of a liberal arts education will provoke the student to examine all of his attitudes and proclivities in the comfort at least of knowing he has some of the tools to do a decent job of it. Even if it is incorrect, having one's worldview exposed and ripped to shreds as a kind of sport with the expectation that, stripped intellectually naked before the world, the student must either submit to the new worldview ready-provided for him by his teacher or slink away in a kind of exile and disgrace, which sounds to me to be what a lot of people mean by insisting they need to make people uncomfortable, does not seem like an especially effective way to educate an undergraduate.




Trump Chaos.  It certainly seems like it must be very bad, but bear in mind people voted for this. The supposed competence of the Hilary Clintons and Mitt Romneys of the world, to be frank, has become a little terrifying to many people, who can see their lives in these kinds of expert hands being discovered to be not efficient or productive enough for the modern world and summarily disposed of. That said, the constant Trump chaos does seem like it must be really bad.

Life With Six Children

This is supposed to be my monthly update, but I am going to continue on with a post I was already working on about having so many children. I've really been a basket case lately. Very sad all the time, overwhelmed with nostalgia, fear, anxiety. I suppose some of it can be laid on seasonal mood disorder, which has really begun to effect me in recent years, and some of it on the circumstance that I haven't felt that great since December when I had my kidney stone, but in truth a great deal of it is because I am really very happy, and I am suddenly overcome with terror that it is slipping away and that all these disasters are going to befall me, mostly financial in origin, but also now health-wise, that are going to rob me of my happy life with my children. Of course to some extent I have always felt this way. Looking back at 2005, or 2006 when I started this blog, I thought myself fairly plagued by misery, yet now I think of those years as an impossibly happy and simple time, the golden years of my life. But I was very fearful of the future then as well, I never imagined I would have made it to at least 2018 without some catastrophe befalling me from which I would not be able to recover.


Part of this melancholy is tied up with my second son's finishing 8th grade this year. 8th grade seems to be a big milestone for me, I was also quite overwrought two years ago when my oldest son finished that year. Of course I am deeply moved at seeing them grow up, and also these schools, and paying for them, consume so much of your energy, they become your whole life almost. But I still have four more children to go, including a just-turned-three-year-old who hasn't started preschool yet. My life is hardly over. But the older ones do take me back to when I was younger and more energetic, and it's sad to see them get big. They are very unsentimental about these things themselves though. For people who only have one or two children, every grade they complete, every sport they finish playing or toy they outgrow, that's it, the end, forever. It must be unbearable. Or maybe they have ordinary adult lives and hobbies to return to or continue with. I really don't after 15 years of having babies in the house.


I am even sad that technological changes have made the tapes and DVDs that my older children watched obsolete. The younger ones watch everything through streaming.


One downside of having six children without being extremely wealthy is that I am probably not going to be able to leave them very much, and since I had them mostly later in life, I will likely die when the younger ones are still in their 30s and 40s at best. So they'll be on their own, which in today's world is a scary prospect. However, I still do believe, largely because I have to, that our culture and economic arrangements are going to improve from the near-dystopia that they are today. I would feel guilty about having brought them into the world only to doom them to a wretched, hopeless existence. But I don't think they feel that way yet, or have occasion to, though neither do I and I often do anyway.


When I hear people saying they don't want to have any children because of concern for the environment I think that they must really be hammering this into people's brains in college, and that it's too bad. The world, or at least my part of it, desperately needs young people, especially smart ones. The rapid aging of the population while the number of people under 30 or even 40 continues to shrink is really becoming visible in New England. My children and their sports and activities are probably keeping me from descending into total existential despair.


I could write so many more things here, and maybe I will sometime, but I determined that when I reached my time limit, I would publish what I have, so here it is.  

Robert E Lee and Others

While I am not angry about the Confederate statues being taken down, I am not exultant about it either. The responses I have upon each new episode of desecration indicates that I would prefer on the whole that some of them remain standing. It is true that they belong more to the Old America, in which the Civil War was an outsizedly meaningful event in the formation of the national character and mythology, than to the one that is coming into being, but if you are one of those people who retains a strong identification with that old bad America in spite of all its deficiencies, these memorials can have an arresting and even eerily alive quality. I recall when I was in Atlanta, a city that does not have a lot of visible reminders of its pre-1970s self, I was wandering over the grounds of the state house and found half buried among bushes a stone with a memorial on it to a veteran of the Confederacy who later become a judge and had a distinguished career in politics lasting into the 1910s at least. It was pointedly noted at the end of the testimonial that this gentleman was the embodiment of the spirit of the Old South, at which point, if you didn't know it before, you knew this was a very, very bad man, racist to the core, complacent in the face of injustice and all the rest of it, yet to me there was a certain force emanating from this old bronze plate that was more powerful than that of the perfectly pleasant and prosperous modern city I had spent the previous several hours walking around in. The scale of the war, of the death and destruction, the absolute and seemingly necessary quality of it and the acceptance of this as a fact largely on both sides during and for many years afterwards are circumstances that I cannot dismiss that easily, even admitting that the perpetuation of race-based slavery was a motivation for some portion of the most dogged of the fighters. Yet in the aftermath these were largely welcomed back by the men they had fought against as fellow Americans, and several of their leaders admitted more or less by the same to the pantheon of American heroes. The Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx, for example, an artifact of the early to mid 20th century (i.e. it figured prominently in the reference books of my childhood) that still exists, albeit in a neglected state, enshrined Robert E Lee as early as 1900 and Stonewall Jackson as late as 1955 (though the Hall has been largely forgotten since the 1970s, someone alerted New York governor Andrew Cuomo to the presence of the busts of the two Confederates there, which he has duly ordered removed, though I cannot tell if this order has been carried out yet).


Robert E Lee himself of course by 1950 had famously come to be considered by much of the establishment and book publishing class to be one of the most outstanding Americans of all time. Digging through some of my favorite childhood books that I have saved confirms that I and the many others who have weighed in on this were not deceived. Here is the opening paragraph of the Lee entry from the 1968 edition of the Illustrated World Encyclopedia, from which I have taken the reading list I record on my other blog:


"Robert Edward Lee is ranked among the greatest generals. He was one of the best-loved and respected men in American history. During the Civil War he commanded the Confederate army. Though defeated, he became a symbol of the highest courage and devotion."


Most of the books adopt a similar tone. If it were more convenient for me I would do a more extensive inventory of these testimonials, which are almost stupefying to read in the current environment. Here is another snippet from the IWE article, on the immediate aftermath of the surrender at Appomattox:


"When Lee returned from this historic meeting, his men met him with tears in their eyes. They all wanted to touch the hand of their beloved leader, and many men petted Traveller, Lee's big gray horse, which had been with him through the long and terrible years of the war."


While I know I am supposed to take a story like this and dismiss it as sentimental bull---t, even assuming there is as much as 10% in it that is remotely true, there is probably nothing more emotional, in the subdued post-cathartic sense, than the end of a massive war. People today--and I will even limit this to people whose backgrounds are somewhat similar to my own, since perhaps it is not reasonable to expect others to be moved by such scenes from American history--seem to me to be emotional in a histrionical sort of way, but not sentimental, and stories like this don't make much of an impression on them. The salient points that I absorbed about Robert E Lee in the course of my childhood go about as follows:


1. He was the greatest student in the history of West Point and was still held in reverence there as recently as the 1980s, in spite of the now oft-recited circumstance that he earned his greatest renown as the leader of an army opposed to the United States. I always had the impression that down to that time he had been the only cadet to graduate from the Academy without a single demerit, though there seems to be some dispute about that now.


2. His abilities and leadership in own time were as universally acknowledged and admired by significant men as those of almost anyone in recorded history. Most of the extant legends indicate that the men who served under him were unusually devoted to him even in defeat, and even when it was obvious that defeat was inevitable.


3. Though he is criticized endlessly by internet historians especially for his generalship skills, the consensus of him that I grew up with was that his was the most gifted military mind that this country had yet produced.


4. He was admired, in a similar manner to George Washington, with whom his life had many parallels, for his patrician bearing and manners. This is run down now because the social position and way of life out of which this arose is so bound up with slavery.


There are probably other things, but I'm going to end this post and move on. Maybe I will come back to it at some point. After all, I can't pretend that I am doing anything more than writing down musings and trying to get through this part of my life, if I ever get through it.


On the whole I am not persuaded that many of the qualities for which Lee was admired were not in fact admirable, and certainly I don't think he comes off terribly unfavorably in comparison with most contemporary leaders and powerful people. I do believe these latter are genuinely against slavery as a social institution, not that that is a particularly risky or otherwise inconvenient position to hold in present society.


For all their faults, the old books seem to have the intention, at least where the likes of me are concerned, of wanting their readers to grow up to be somewhat strong and successful men, the future backbone of a great and proud nation. Whatever role the correctors of the historical record envision people like me fulfilling in the future, it is clearly not as rousing or inspiring as this.




I couldn't even get to Stonewall Jackson, who was an interesting case himself. He was renowned for a piety that seems to have approached biblical intensity, yet he was a master of the arts of war. Of course the link between fanatical religious belief and a talent for military endeavors has a long history, one that seems to be underappreciated among the modern educated classes. The professed hatred of these people that has become fashionable I guess seems to be heartfelt enough in some cases. I should like to have it, since it appears to be empowering in those who do have it, but I don't seem to be able to be pushed to such an extreme position if I haven't started on that way from an early age.




I am going to try to get something up every Friday at least, even if it is only a fragment... 

Some Things I Would Like to Do This Year

As the dates on the postings will bear out, this has been the longest hiatus in the history of this site, at nearly three months. Of course I thought I ought to say something about the election, and all of the ensuing drama, but for the time being at least the subject with all of its various aspects has defeated me. There is too much to it, and I don't have the concentration anymore to be able to organize all of the material I wanted to address. I still hope that some day it may come back, but I suspect it isn't (going to).


The problem I was having in my political essay was that while I acknowledged all of the awfulness that Trump is inflicting on the country, I am not seeing any element of the opposition to him that I would want to align with or desire to see in power all that much more either. The whole country is clearly a mess, and if there is one particularly evil side, it is not like there is a more reassuring one to turn to, at least if you are me. Even the supposedly good and caring people on the left have become absolutely vicious in their various antagonisms to an extent that I think has become counterproductive and seems at times to be verging on Jacobin territory in its rage. It is going to take a while now to sort all of this out and find some reasonable basis and common ground on which people can sort of begin to relate to each other again, men and women perhaps most urgently. Trump is a product of these underlying problems and certainly seems to be the catalyst for an escalation of the hostilities currently at work in society, but getting rid of him and replacing him with someone slightly less volatile does not fix the serious issues, it just moves them along more (less?) rapidly to whatever form they are going to take next.




The issues themselves I find myself constrained to talk about, because while I don't exactly agree with most of what Trump is doing, and especially with his manner of doing it, I am not as insanely angry about it as everyone else is and I think his opponents go too far in the other extreme on many things as well. Trump and his supporters would probably point out that this kind of nervous response in men--confused, reactive, revealing a lack of intestinal fortitude and control--is emblematic of some of the problems that have spurred his political ascendance. However I am not going to attempt to go on about this any more. I'm sure I will have the opportunity to give some sense of my thoughts on various of these matters in the course of writing about other things, if anyone cares about them. In truth I am still much angrier about my personal failures than about the country's descent into fascism. Maybe this will change if people are forced to choose a side or ideology and accept that the consequence for choosing the wrong one will be death.


I am going to write down some things that I would like to do, that I feel like I haven't done in a long time. I feel like I have not had any real adult fun in some years. I am going to Florida in a couple of weeks and I am looking forward to that. Most of my ideas involve going places and seeing things and not really doing activities. I like (or liked) activities if I am doing them with some kind of egalitarian group and there is a party or going out on the town afterwards, though I guess I am getting too old to do that now anyway.


I am keeping my ideas in the realm of plausibility. I would really (like) to go and wander around Spain for a few months or something, but I am a ways off from (being able to) do anything like that.




1. Go to a brew pub. I haven't been to one of these places maybe since before my children were born. I don't really want to be educated in beer drinking by some twenty four old bartender, but apart from that I generally like the atmosphere in these places. Related to this, I would love to find a Czech restaurant or beer hall somehow and have a meal there. There aren't too many in the northeast, that I am aware of. There was one in Astoria, Queens, New York in the late 90s that I went to. It looks like it is still there.




This segues into #2, which is to go to New York City again. It has evidently only been 3 or 4 years since I was there, as I have a photograph on my bookshelf of five of my children, including my still just 5 year old daughter standing upright and with fully grown out shoulder length hair, standing on the piano at the late lamented FAO Schwarz toy store. It seems like it has been longer than that. Besides, I am getting older, and there are only so many more times I have left to go there, and so many things there I have still not done. I should really make a point of getting there this year.




3. Long rides to see rocks. This is something we used to do a lot when my older sons were little, before everybody was in school and had activities and all of that. There are a lot of famous rocks in New England, and they are usually free to visit. I enjoyed those times quite a bit. I forget that the family stamina for long drives is not what it was in those days, people fighting and so on. We are driving to Florida, though my oldest is going ahead on a plane, because we can't all fit in our car anymore, and it is cheaper to buy one plane ticket than to rent an eight-passenger van. So there will probably be a lot of fighting on that trip though much of it is at night and we try to break it up (the ride, I think, not the fighting).




4. I have got to get to Cape Cod one of these years. Last summer we went to Newport, Rhode Island, which is in that general direction, and which we had also never been to, for a few days, because my wife was possessed with the inspiration/desire to see some of the mansions there, so maybe we will get to the Cape, finally, this summer.




5. The Stowe area in Vt. We did go there once about 12-13 years ago. It's only about 3 hours away and I think it's time to go back. I would like to try to climb Mt Mansfield. It's a famously beautiful area, and pictures of it feature prominently in all of the old 1950s and 1960s Vermont Life/Yankee Magazine compilations I have collected over the years. I should spend more time up there.


Along similar lines we should get over to see Lake Champlain and all the stuff going on there sometime, which we have also not done in our family, though I was there once as a child.


(Addendum--6. I've never been to a real deal steakhouse with big booths and big servings such as men's men are wont to frequent. I've always wanted to go to one of those too).




Hopefully now that I have started I can get back to blogging on a somewhat regular basis again.


(This was one shaky post. I hope to God my writing can come back a little stronger than this).

Music Death Spiral and Not Finding the Cure For What Ails Me

It's time for another music video post but I seem to have either run out of things I like or, in keeping with my general weariness of life, have ceased to like anything at all. The old familiar veins appear to have been mined clean, I have not hit on any new lodes in recent months that perk me up, and I am not hearing anything randomly or on the radio that is nudging me in new directions. The AM station I have been listening to in the car changed its format from Golden Oldies to political talk, which has left me with a plain old Oldies station which, besides having worse music, does not even have hourly syndicated news broadcasts or affable program hosts. This has been more of an ongoing cause for sourness with me than I might have realized. The differences between Oldies and Golden Oldies may appear minor, but "Golden Oldies" covers a much broader range of songs, from the crooners of the 50s to the Rat Pack and Nat King Cole to movie themes and showtunes as far back as Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman and Judy Garland and even mixing in some modern elevator music and versions of standards and other new releases by museum acts, while "Oldies" is restricted pretty much to top ten pop hits from the 60s. It would seem that the time would be ripe for me to begin a serious immersion in the real classic genres of music, Bach and untamed-period Louis Armstrong and all of those kind of people, but if I am going to write about them I need to connect with them in some way that is both meaningful with regard to what they really are and I don't think I am in the right mind frame to do this right now, I am too distracted, jittery, disorganized--I need a program for this serious music like I have for other serious things--to reach my aim.

I had not known that Pat Boone and Laurence Welk came together one night in 1961. I always kind of liked this song ("Moody River"--it evokes things about the texture of life at the time that I associate with my grandparents' houses, their neighborhoods, the books and furniture they had, that holds some pleasantness for me) though like "Love Letters in the Sand", I never realized the singer of the most familiar version was Pat Boone until I was well into adulthood. If I had caught this at a more intense and impressionable age when if I knew anything I knew that it was of vital importance to despise the music of Pat Boone, I think I would have taught myself to despise them, as I learned around the age of fourteen/fifteen that it was meet to despise Billy Joel's music, and found it easy enough, if not quite to hold the man and his fans in absolute contempt, to be indifferent to and unmanipulated by his efforts. It is very odd, but I am much more fascinated by Pat Boone than I ever was with the late David Bowie, who was clearly a man made to speak to other people. But with Boone there is just as much to marvel at in the perfect execution of supposed Caucasian inoffensiveness (though his existence has certainly always been plenty offensive to many), the clothes, the extreme state of clean cut-ness--his haircut and shave are so pointedly neat and unthreatening as to be almost belligerent. In these old clips too the sexual attraction that the girls and women feel for him seems to be genuine as well, the lesson of which is that if women are sheltered enough from real, pulsating sexuality, they will go for any surprisingly weak version of it that may offer itself...

Depeche Mode, "People are People". They've been playing this a lot lately both on the "80s on 8" and alternative/mew wave channel on satellite radio, I find the sound bearable, though the message of brotherhood and love, delivered with a perfect sneer, doesn't sound as if it is intended to include me. But I keep telling myself, it is I who am strong, who (undeservedly) has everything everybody else wants. who has all the power and backing of society, if I ever want to tap into it. They are hostile to me because they fear me, and my latent superpowers.

This was on in the supermarket the other day. I always liked this song, though it doesn't fit with any particular memories or times or experiences, and doesn't seem like it could fit with any such things, it is a song that evokes an eternal waiting for something to happen, in which nothing ever does or could happen.

Failure to produce art is a failure at living and understanding life and being human, one kind of failure among myriad others, but a significant one insomuch that it is a failure that collectively weakens and diminishes the surrounding culture.

I had run out of Lennon Sisters videos, and hadn't found anybody else who could cheer me up in quite the same way, but then I came across this. It is not a secret than many of the cuter girls you will meet are at bottom rather corny. I don't mind it obviously though the corny types don't usually go much for me, as they prefer someone more demonstrably masculine in all ways. It is not like there is a type that consistently goes for me as it is, but most of the women who seem inclined to at least put up with me (and are not insane) seem to be pretty matter of fact, self-directed, witty, do not need to be constantly entertained and excited, etc.

I was tagged on Facebook a few weeks back to write 25 things about myself. Being a narcissist and luster after attention of course I was interested in doing it, rationalizing the undertaking by saying it was a good exercise, but I don't really have time to do it there (the thing would take several hours to write and you don't seem to be able to save posts in progress), and the nature of that space makes me wary--the majority of the people who seem to read and comment on everything I write there tend to be the people I am least interested in letting in on my secrets, and they are never the people I am thinking of when I am considered whether to put something up. But this is such a private space--I think my last comment was in 2012--that I am considering maybe doing it here, for as far as I know, the people who read this blog are not the people I am trying to avoid on Facebook, though you never know I guess. I'm not sure if there are 25 things about me that anybody who reads this would not know or have guessed already however.