Moods

Seven thirty five.

The sun through the window is right in my face, a strident blast of golden star-shine. It was very cold for my travel to the store; I finally got wise and wore a pair of gloves against the 20 degree snap. At least it was dry and not slippery. My business at the market was routine except for the Snapple for Gloria, since she is coming this morning. My mind has been all over the map lately, quite scattered and perhaps incoherent, but hopefully it’ll coalesce into something like organic sense and system. Then again, usually life itself resists organization. But my dog definitely knows it’s breakfast time when eight o’clock comes around. He has a sense of structure probably better than mine, which keeps us both on track. Funny but I used to operate like a clock at work, a total creature of habit and ritual. How quickly a routine becomes a treadmill that can destroy you.

Quarter after eight.

I have no idea what the day might bring me today. It’s kind of an exciting prospect. The sun meanwhile is indomitable and cheering to see. Sometimes I think I have total recall of the events of my life: blessing or curse? And every new day is different from the last one. Sometimes it seems like anything can happen, like some quark of the constellations, or a scene from a Thomas Hardy novel. A real artist of fate is at work in our daily lives, and we’d be none the wiser to it. To us spontaneous, to the gods it’s a fait accompli… Outside, the sparrows make jerky movements like little automatons wound up at the beginning of time. All this time, an old tune like a circus ditty plays crazily in my head. But for this, the design would be perfect.

“God doesn’t make junk.” A sign on the wall of Harmony House long ago. My mood suddenly swings down as I pity myself a little. The sun and the birds are indifferent, even the mourning dove that coos for no one in particular.

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Theodicy

Ten o’clock.

Doing my best to stay awake. Meanwhile, some people are just getting up. This isn’t much fun. I’m killing time but there’s nothing ahead for today; I might as well go to bed.

Eleven o’clock.

I just got a duplicate package from my health insurance company, a kit of odds and ends in the interest of wellness. I don’t need two of them, so I don’t know what to do with this one yet… Yesterday I saw a mourning dove feeding on the ground under the magnolia: the most beautiful sight. Milky and gray with a small silky white head and long tail. It was there again this morning and a little junco stood nearby, while the sparrows kept busy about their birdhouse. Clouds have moved in since early partly cloudiness and they said rain for late this afternoon. My dog Aesop has been sulky and bored the past few days and his mood gets me down as well. Tomorrow I should get Gloria again and we might go out to lunch. Till then I’m sort of treading water and marking time. It’s become a gray day, rather glum and cheerless as I wait on the high sea for the ship to come rescue me. I can give the other wellness kit to Gloria. And to stay awake there’s hot Lipton tea. 

It all works out for the best in the end (although I waver on that point). And then you begin to wonder about theodicy: the existence of evil in a good world. Maybe life is tragicomic in itself, before we try to figure it out and shape it the way we like. Maybe there’s no endpoint from which to judge the meaning.

I still haven’t solved Aesop’s problem. In the meantime, my friend will be reading Pollyanna… 

Cosmickall Historie of the Wurld, by Robert Fludd

Seven o’clock.

I awoke to a view of the harvest moon shining redly in my bedroom window at four in the morning. Earlier last night, I’d felt compelled to pull out books of astrology and numerology, seeking what I could find on Aries and the number 1. Then I made the connection with the full moon when I saw it outside. Right now, it’s like I’m shaking off a dream of the cosmos while the haze to the east is illuminated orange by the rising sun. I ran to the store when there was hardly any daylight and got foodstuffs for the day. The switch to this month feels rather odd to me, though my brain seems to function better since the change. Still it’s going to be a very hot day this afternoon. Lisa said she wasn’t looking forward to it. I’ve got Gloria tomorrow morning and we’ll probably go to Bi Mart for a few things. But church this Sunday I think is out. I don’t know. I’ve thought about it so much; really overthought it, like Miniver Cheevy in the Robinson poem.

Miniver Cheevy thought and thought and thought and thought about it.

To decide whether to go or not, I could just flip a coin— if I had a coin. Somewhere around the house I must have a coin to decide my fate. It’s a fifty fifty toss, yes or no. And somewhere on the other side of the earth the harvest moon still shines red. 

Come Saturday Morning

Seven thirty.

I’ve got Gloria at nine o’clock this morning, so while I was at the store I bought her a sugar free Snapple tea. They had forecast light rain soon but I was skeptical and left my umbrella at home. At one point on Maxwell Road I was totally alone: no cars or pedestrians anywhere; just me for that stretch between River Road over the bridge to Prairie Road, a panorama of silent grayness above and below the horizon. Inside, I met with one other customer, a man who wanted to buy two coffees and three bagels, then fumbled for his wallet… which he had forgotten at home. Lisa saved his things behind the counter while he went back to get his money. The same thing happened to me maybe twelve or thirteen years ago, at night when I wanted a bottle of wine. So I felt kind of bad for the guy. I bought my stuff, maxing out my food stamps for the month, and headed out the door. I was on the sidewalk when the prodigal customer returned in his pickup truck and crossed in front of me. A few seconds later the rain started coming down, not hard; so I put up my hood, reflecting a bit on situational irony. And just now the sun comes out.

Edmund (with a Cold)

Seven thirty five at night.

I really didn’t want to be sick, but there’s no bargaining with this circumstance anymore; a fact is a fact. I tried to reason it away as just a mouth infection, but it’s acting like a typical head cold, from the sore throat stage to nasal congestion, etc. Okay, so I was an idiot. Now I just hope I won’t be too wretched the next few days.

How easy it is to blame everyone and everything, including the stars, but yourself for bad luck. Putting responsibility off of yourself is the excellent foppery of the world. And yet Shakespeare puts these words in the mouth of Edmund, the illegitimate son of Gloucester, and the misbegotten miscreant with no place in God’s orderly world. I don’t know whether to agree with the Bard’s opinion or subvert it with his own created character. As the centuries rolled on, dramatists turned the focus away from nobility and towards ordinary individuals: indeed the individual, rather than the group, became the point of interest. So then, heroes like John Proctor of The Crucible were made possible, and even before that, Nora Helmer of A Doll’s House. Still I’m stuck on what to do with Edmund the bastard: perhaps he should have written Shakespeare into existence rather than the reverse. Maybe nobody would’ve known the difference anyhow. Which would be the more foppish today, the cosmic dance or Machiavellian plotting? Maybe we made a wrong turn after Shakespeare… 

…All Possible Worlds

Well, tomorrow is another Gloria day, and we said she would take me to Bi Mart for the fun of it. I guess I can make a little list of items to get while we’re there. Things for hygiene, maybe. I’ll think of something. But the real reason I want to go is to see some familiar faces at the store and kind of take a stroll down memory lane. Bi Mart is like a time capsule, a place that resists change if it can help it. The same staff has been working there for years and years. Many senior citizens go there to shop, or anyway they used to. My parents and I moved here in 71, and the Bi Mart was already a business. When you think about it, old people are quite amazing because they have such a long memory and have seen so much in their lifetime. This morning I looked back 40 years to when Rush was still on the radio. I was on the sidewalk of Maxwell Road trying to visualize the old days of being a teenager, but it wasn’t easy to do. Changes come and they are incontrovertible. Reality is implacable and doesn’t give an inch before an individual’s imagination, his dream of happier times. Then again, long ago Carly Simon sang that these are the good old days. We could use some of her optimism today.

The same thing is happening today on WordPress: just no enthusiasm to read stuff whatsoever. So, naturally my mind wanders back to when I actually had fun with my life. The last time wasn’t so long ago; it was when Aesop and I lived in the trailer after the fire, and in the fall I’d go to church with my heart full of hope and optimism, and not an ounce of cynicism. I had trust and faith that everything would be all right for me. Also it was before covid came along, and then a series of disasters. And Pastor’s mood grew a lot darker, and the wheels came off of everything after that.

The question is how to restore that old optimism and faith that sustained most of us up until the time of the pandemic. I can remember some of Pastor’s sermons from before the dark times, and they were really pretty good. Once he talked about the “glad game” of Pollyanna, which was like Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide: everything that happens is for a greater good down the line, and events are always for a purpose. Another expression for this is “teleological,” a belief that Aristotle held, and also Hegel much later. Leibniz argued that “this is the best of all possible worlds,” and God always chooses it for us from his infinite goodness.

So I wonder what happened to all of that in only three years’ time? And I think it’s a case where remembering the past can be quite useful in picking us back up again…

Cosmology

I don’t know if there’s a deus ex machina in all of this. I suppose I could choose to believe such a thing, and yet no good fortune happens without an individual being assertive with the situation and people.

Once, a friend told me something humorous on that head. I’d had a phobia of parking my vehicle in crowded places Downtown or on the campus. Mike said, “You see? The parking gods will be kind to you if you show a little courage.” He was mostly an atheist but a great songwriter, leading the band with me in it. The same year I began dating a woman my age who was a Lutheran working in a bookstore. I did a lot of reading in Herman Melville, starting with Moby Dick, though his worldview clashed with the Tennyson I also tried to embrace. The result was a big mess for me, and in the end I lost those friends plus my best friend and my dad died that year: and on the whole it felt like 1999 was the end of the world.

I don’t know which impulse won the day, the blackness of Melville or the Christian sunshine, however, life went on with my dad’s passing. A few days later I bought two little books related to Epicurean philosophy but this was soon drowned out by the era of the holy wars and incidentally my mother’s death. And then my whole world was transformed, though I fought it as my addiction to alcohol progressed and eventually took over my life. Just today I pondered what the new hub of my life had become, and it seems to be the written word probably more so than music. As I think about it, a lot of living is adapting to sociological changes out of my control, surviving them and holding onto the wave like the old song by Yes says. Personal freedom is a comforting idea but ultimately it’s a tired illusion, so that my recovery from alcoholism really isn’t creditable to me at all, but rather to something like fate that operates within and without the individual person. 

Church and a Question

Midnight hour. Well, tomorrow morning is church. The service is set up in such a regimented way that I doubt I will go. It’ll be like a one to one with God rather than a social event, which doesn’t interest me much. All the fun is removed from it. I might be able to help Pastor if I do go, however. He hasn’t said anything to me about it. The question of an absolute right or wrong thing to do is a good one. For me, it echoes Robert Frost saying, “The bridegroom wished he knew.” It’s like pondering the stars and what is written there.

The bridegroom came forth into the porch

   With, ‘Let us look at the sky,

And question what of the night to be,

   Stranger, you and I.’

The woodbine leaves littered the yard,

   The woodbine berries were blue,

Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind;

   ‘Stranger, I wish I knew.’

If there is indeed an absolute moral code, then what ordained it if not an omniscient God? I only wish I knew what I was supposed to do.

Tuesday Morning

Quarter after eight.

It’s just an overcast morning. Supposed to be cloudy all day, chance of rain this afternoon. I pulled out my book of Frost and read “Design” again, a couple of times. His idea of a malign cosmos brings Melville to mind, also the later poems of Dickinson. Originally, it all goes back to Greek tragedy, about which I’d like to know more. I should review Sophocles, and Aeschylus and Euripides. The ideal would be having total recall of everything I ever read. I can start by reading all the Aeschylus I have.

Nine fifty. Fate in Prometheus Bound is ordained by Zeus, simply enough. But it’s humbling to turn the pages of a drama so ancient and venerable… I’m getting a haircut at eleven o’clock. The name “Prometheus” means “forethought,” which adds irony to a story of fate. The Titan knew in advance what would happen to him for championing humankind. He showed us fire anyway. Now he must be riveted to a rock in manacles of brass as his punishment for disobeying Zeus. With a stake of adamant right through his chest. Till the end he will be defiant and bewail the injustice of his fate. And of all beings, only Zeus is free. But what about Prometheus, when he chose to benefit humanity? Did he will his action, or was it part of his fate?… He is a martyr, as so many figures in antiquity were. Socrates, Aesop, Jesus Christ… The question I woke up with was if the universe is a friendly place. The Greeks believed in the lordship of Zeus, similar in some ways to Jehovah. He was the maker of human fates— but there were also the Fates, the Furies, and the Muses. I wonder how all this worked together? Interesting…

Quarter of noon. Karen informed me that face masks are mandatory starting tomorrow, and sold me five of them for three bucks apiece. I suppose, like death and taxes, it was inevitable… Shasta from the insurance office emailed me the information about earthquake coverage. I’ll call her back tomorrow and approve it. Now I guess I’ll read the rest of my Aeschylus.

Step by Step

Eleven o’clock.

I had a donut at the salon and went to the store. Life seems almost normal despite the lockdown. The radio at the market was playing “Rooster” by Alice In Chains. A few times I stopped and told myself that this is reality. I’m supposed to call Todd in a half hour. Darcy was aware of the situation with Ride Source. So I get to have a phone appointment today. She said that Ride Source will be messed up for the next month. I’m beginning to wonder at the process of life. It seems there’s never a respite from the ups and downs. It’s a constant roller coaster, particularly to a sober person. The only nirvana is the delusion of being on drugs. My parents lived in this house as if it had been a safe haven from a world of chaos.

Quarter of one. Todd was concerned about my hemoglobin being elevated, so I called the office of my hematologist. They are working together on the concern right now. I don’t know what to think about that… I guess it indicates dehydration. Again it’s never a dull moment. The reprieve we’re all hoping for doesn’t come, and then we die. For many years, alcohol was my security blanket and shield from the hostile universe. Eventually it became just another item in the same menacing world. Now the force field has been deactivated and I’m a sitting duck. But so is everybody. We’re all in the same boat of danger and uncertainty. I can understand why people get addicted to things. We find a comfortable feeling and want to repeat it. When that comfort zone is used up, we seek another sensation. We don’t realize or admit that we are defenseless. In reality, we survive by our courage and our wits. The logic of the heart is our best weapon for staying alive. The brain can turn traitor on us, and then what do we do? Put one foot in front of the other…