After the puppy’s 5:30 a.m. constitutional, I lay down on the sofa in the basement to catch a little extra sleep before starting the day. While fading to sleep and then dreaming, I remember several thoughts and ideas occurring to me that made me wish I’d brought pen and paper along.
But I was too comfortable. I remember concluding that the ideas likely would bubble up from my consciousness again when they were ready, if I’m just patient enough and keep thinking and writing.
I’ll never know if that’s true, of course, because now I forget what those thoughts and ideas were. My only evidence and reason for optimism is the frequency with which I put down an idea only to discover later that I’d already written that years ago.
From time to time I’ll wake in the night and jot something down, then go back to sleep, only to find in the morning that the note is incomprehensible I didn’t write enough. “The Memphis frog”? Really?
Our subconscious mind is full of messages from dreamland, waiting to be tapped when the time is right.
Saturday night and not a creature is stirring — Summer is out like a light but within stroking distance should I want to pet a puppy. The wind chimes are chiming up a storm outside the window; it’s not storming, but the wind is blowing and so — music!
Part of me is thinking, after 575 consecutive days of posting something on the blog, shouldn’t I have a plan by now, shouldn’t I know what I’m going to post a little sooner than 140 minutes before it goes live? All the fancy “how to blog” blogs tell you to have a mission statement and a schedule and a reason for people to come back again and again. And by a schedule, they mean something more than a commitment to post something-anything-whatever by 12:01 a.m. every day.
Another part of me is thinking, for 67 years and 5 months and change, I wanted to be a Writer, not “just” a community journalist but someone who wrote for the love of writing, every day, all the time, and I did a lot of Writing but could never sustain the habit. And so, saying something in one place for 575 days in a row is a triumph, whether I pack the queue for six weeks ahead of time or write a Great American Novel one blog post at a time or whether I sit down on Saturday night after laughing and loving the latest two episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, look at the clock and say holy crap I haven’t written anything for the blog.
Mrs. Maisel, by the way, is one of the most delightful TV shows of recent years. Once upon a time I would say it’s one of the best shows on the air, but TV shows aren’t necessarily ON the air anymore, are they?
Am I the last person on Earth to realize that they don’t make Triumph sports cars anymore? If I can believe Wikipedia, the brand name was retired in 1984.
Have I ever told the story of how I passed up my one chance (so far) to drive a Studebaker Golden Hawk, my favorite car design? Maybe I’ll tell it the next time I find myself banging out a last-minute blog two hours before midnight.
While I was typing, Summer got up and explored the rest of the house for a while, but she’s back by my side and fixing to curl up for the long haul. That’s probably my cue to wrap this up, post it, and sail my way into La La Land myself. Thanks for stopping by, and see you tomorrow, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.
As I come within spitting distance of my 70th birthday, now 13 months away, I increasingly am convinced that the ruling class of this world, like all sociopathic criminals, is always looking for ways to decrease the surplus population.
The phrase is from Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Representatives of a charity approach Scrooge, saying, “a few of us are endeavoring to buy the poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth” for the holidays. The then-miser asks if the prisons, workhouses and Poor Laws have been shut down.
“I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there,” Scrooge said.
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Much as our political betters have decided Nineteen Eighty-Four has a happy ending — Winston Smith finally loved Big Brother, after all — I think they also forget that Ebeneezer Scrooge was in need of reform, and in fact becomes a good man in the end. They seem hellbent on decreasing the surplus population as fast as they can.
Weapons of mass destruction, gain-of-function viruses, and sketchy vaccines and magic pills proliferate in the hands of not very subtle bullies who manipulate people into believing the most amazing lies, the biggest lie being that their top priority is protection of the people.
When we left Scrooge, he had become “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them, for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.”
We should aim to be more like the reformed Ebeneezer Scrooge, who “lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle ever afterward; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us.”
In seeking more information about what might be described as “the Total Abstinence Principle” in 1843, I mostly found commentators who concluded Dickens was making a pun on Scrooge having “no further intercourse with Spirits” (get it? Spirits? Abstinence?), but I did find one site, easierwithpractice.com, a “bank of knowledge,” that suggested the Total Abstinence Principle might refer to “abstinence from being bitter, mean-spirited, angry, dour, greedy, grasping, self-centered and unforgiving.”
That’s a Total Abstinence Principle I could get behind.
