“It is a common symptom of rank melancholy to keep imagining the past instead of a future, because the future feels both foreclosed and uncertain, whereas the past is all there is, infinitely reproducible.” Aleksandar Hemon, The World And All That It Holds
Coming out of a few down days. I thought the genesis of the spiral might have something to do with summer coming to an end, but I’m not sure. The past several days have been warm in SB, almost uncomfortable at times. Not like Philadelphia where I was a couple of weeks ago, that was a different kind of warm. I should be feeling buoyant after getting my daughter situated for her last year of college, but worries large and small, real and imagined, have beset me. Buying future trouble. I can far more easily imagine a dim future than I can a bright or comfortable one.
Today this thought crossed my mind: You’re OK as long as you still have a card to play.
As far as the future is concerned, all we may be able to say for sure is that it will be different. Most people will adapt, but some won’t. Everything will change, the new will be built on the bones of the old.
My cousin lives in Madeira Beach, Florida, and had to evacuate her home for higher ground in the face of Hurricane Idalia. How much damage will this storm cause, how many lives will it take? Florida is a cursed child under the malign leadership of Ron DeSantis, another morally bankrupt Ivy League product, like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. America’s Best & Brightest? Please. The priorities of people like DeSantis and his ilk, including the Ken-Doll Tech-Bro Vivek Ramaswamy, are out of touch with reality and the needs of ordinary citizens. Ramaswamy switched his entire position on climate change and now claims it’s a hoax, and that the solution is to burn more fossil fuel…because human flourishing is impossible without fossil fuel. This pint-sized Trump pretender wants to be president. DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Pence, Haley, all of them are unfit for office. The litmus test should be this: if you still support Donald Trump, you’re an authoritarian not a Republican.
I came across an Alan Watts lecture on YouTube about letting go and not taking life too seriously. I’ve listened to Watts off and on over the years and much of the time his notions just become jumbled in my mind. I sort of get what Watts is driving at, a deeper recognition about what life is about, but I’m never entirely satisfied and remain trapped inside my own head, which can be a wildly unimaginative place at times. I did understand Watts when he talked about the way we view time in western culture, as a commodity so valuable that not to use it for the purpose of maximum productivity is a sign of sloth. Watts used the example of artists, painters, inventors, musicians, and writers to argue that we need to redefine our ideas and allow more time for imagining, day-dreaming, and directionless wandering. Easier said than done, at least for me. If I’m not engaged in doing something I feel like I’m wasting time; it’s one thing I dislike about my personality. How can I achieve idleness without guilt?
For the third or fourth time I’m reading True North by Jim Harrison. The novel is on my Kindle and every once in a while I’ll turn to it. If you pressed me to name my favorite Jim Harrison work I’d say Dalva or The Road Home, but True North always impresses me for how effortlessly it flows and the deep interiority Harrison achieves with his first-person narrator.
I just finished Last Call, an account of the rise and fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent. I’m reading a biography of James Baldwin by David Leeming and The Pornography Wars by Kelsy Burke.
Four posts to go to reach 1,000 and then I’m done here.
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