Vacuum Thoughts
January 2, 2020
This entry starts with a listing of the units my dad served in while in the Korean War (1950-1951). His records and those of many other vets were lost in the fire that burned the National Personnel Records Center in 1973.
Thoughts while running a vacuum cleaner…the futility of the mental exercise: if you wrote down /described your perfect life at the age of 16, 20, 28, etc., what would it look like, how close would it be to reality and, in the end, would you really care?
Death, he sits on my shoulder and whispers constantly in my ear, “you are mine. All your pretty dreams are an illusion, I am real and I will have you.”
Driving
Jan 3, 2020 12:47am
Driving on a dark and rainy night which throws diamonds on the windshield. Fog settles around the streetlights which cast an other- worldly glow upon the wet pavement. How many nights have there been like this? The road is unending. You are driving through the dark and the rain. The sound of the road and the wipers, the soundtrack of your life which is taking you through this strange landscape that disappears into darkness on each side while the headlights illuminate the road ahead. But your vision is limited and the fog thickens and the night and the road and the rain go on and on and there is no respite. May you find your relief when you reach your destination.
Theology
Jan 4, 2020 9:28am
There is a danger in bending the beliefs of established theology to suit the immediate and changing needs of the individual whose vicissitudes demand their solace. Can’t live by your own rules? No problem, just create new rules and congratulate yourself on your new-found discipline. You will achieve your happiness!
Tristram Shandy
Jan 6, 2020
From Tristram Shandy:
“Inconsistent soul that man is….languishing under wounds which he has the power to heal. His reason serving but to sharpen his sensibilities to multiply his pains and render him more melancholy – struggle against evils which cannot be avoided and submit to others which a tenth part of the trouble they create him would remove from his heart forever.” – Laurence Sterne.
Tristram Shandy is on many “100 best books” lists and while I appreciated it, it’s not on my list. However, it is a great source of language and speech patterns for Revolutionary War/Colonial reenactors.
Tiny Box
Jan 18, 2021
We are all products of our experiences. Our fate is a little under our control but within certain parameters which are determined by chance. You think that you made decisions about your future but the options life presented you are limited. Most of us share those same limited choices but we are so programmed by ego to believe otherwise that we do not even grasp the size of the tiny box into which we are born and which determines the fetters placed on the people we will become.
We just watched a Masterpiece Theater production of “Mrs. Wilson” which at its most basic level is about faith (of which there are many types both spiritual and worldly) and the uncertainty which is necessary for it to even exist. We all want certainty and you may find it but if you do not….and you fall back to your final redoubt, which may be your God, and then you cannot rest in faith, you are lost. The battle is lost because there is no retreat and your foe, that insidious uncertainty that ravages us all offers no quarter and you are destroyed. But even those, who in those final moments, manage to cling to their faith are haunted by memories of their doubt.
Rails
Jan 20, 2020 8:14am
Many mornings I wake before it is light. I lie there thinking and listening. Thoughts occur but nothing is resolved. Then, in the distance, I hear the whistle as the train approaches along the ridge to the northeast. Faint in the beginning as it sounds off at the far crossings and then louder as it nears. On quiet mornings, when there are no other sounds, I can just hear the rumbling as the train rolls down the rails. Then it is gone and I hear soft snoring periodically broken by the furnace which is heating too much space for two people. This seems like a misallocation of resources. If we eliminated all the things we don’t need, we would be fine in half the space. Now that I’m retired I find I wear the same clothes frequently and all the rest sit unused in a drawer or closet. I have things that have been around for years that I have worn one or two times.
Joy Davidman
Jan 22, 2020 1:18pm
Now reading C.S. Lewis “A Grief Observed” which I highly recommend! His wife Joy Davidman is credited with this: “for the first time, my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, the master of my fate. All my defenses – all the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self love, behind which I had hid from God – went down momentarily – and God came in.” – Joy Davidman
For his part Lewis said he sometimes thought he could get over his loss but, “then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this “commonsense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.” – C.S. Lewis
You know that red-hot jab too….don’t you?
End of the Story
Jan 24, 2020
blah, blah…. boring stuff I wrote about the virus, going to a sale, and music…. no one cares!
……other than that, it was a rainy, dreary day that only served to punctuate the awful sameness of life without meaning. I wish it could be different; anything but pessimism seems like wishful thinking. A fight to the death may be a noble cause for some but it is still “TO THE DEATH” and I cannot get excited about this story whose end is known to all. I’m afraid that C. S. Lewis had it right in the beginning and convinced himself otherwise toward the end.