May 18, 2018

It is 9:50pm and it has been raining.  I stepped outside a moment ago into a cool and dark night of no moon or stars.  It smells vaguely fishy from all the worms that have sacrificed themselves on the wet altar.  Allie would enjoy these “bacon bits” on the driveway the next morning! 

The garden is in and I took surplus tomato plants to work to give them away.  Amazingly, all of them were gone today.  My travails continue.  I have 40 days to go.  I’m reading the Dhammapada “way of truth” to try to make some sense of what’s happening.  Also much of Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes but there is no relief or understanding.  “Take the pain” is my only advice to myself.  While reading about W.B. Yeats, I came across a statement about him by Virginia Wolff, “Human character changed.”  I feel like this has happened to me as well.  At 62 years of age, a change has occurred and I don’t foresee a return to the previous me.  Sometimes this seems to be a tempest in a tea pot.  I cut a quote from Esquire recently and read it to my wife who rejected it out of hand for its pessimism.  From Paul Fussell in “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb”:  “Some exemplary facts are these:  that life is short and usually ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can’t have your own way; that if you do get what you want, it turns out to be not the thing you wanted….”  Etc. etc., etc.

(editor:  upon reviewing Fussell’s statement, it reminded me of Hobbes statement in Leviathan about man’s life:  “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

I frequently tire of myself and my thoughts.  But for one with high expectations, and perhaps a bit of Narcissism, this world is small consolation for the possibilities that once existed….then I think of the luck I’ve experienced just to be whole, sound, unscathed physically in a world of armless, legless veterans who carried out the will of the Beast and lost parts of themselves.  Are their souls intact?  Seems as if some carry on like the soldiers they were. They’re like the sparrow in the winter tree who will die from the cold with no remorse or self-pity.  They are good men but I wonder if they saw the big picture before their sacrifice.