TELEPHONE CALL AND MAKING BREAKFAST

12 of 100

22 March 2020

As you will see, I started this post back in January and couldn't really get it finished. Nonetheless, it stays relevant (as if any of this is relevant) so a real time me will join you again subsequently.

January 20, 11:50pm

Recently, the question "What do I think I am doing?" has been on mental rotation. I am not sure I asked myself that at more appropriate moments or phases in my life when I could have maybe turned the tide towards a more successful and secure life path. Still, it does obtain as I move through the days of caregiving and unburdening myself of a life's worth of gathering burdens. I will return to this question as we all proceed.

"Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?"

— Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads, Farrar, Strauss, and Giraud, New York, 2021

"Today, urbanites must feverishly maximize their economic potential just to maintain a small flat in Hoboken, Somerville, Hackney, Korea Town or Belleville. The economy of the sixties cut us a lot of slack, leaving time to travel, take drugs, write songs and rethink the universe. There was a feeling that nothing was nailed down, that an assumption held was one worth challenging. The meek regularly took on the mighty and often won — or at least drew. Debt-free students with time on their hands forced the Pentagon to stop using drafted American kids as cannon fodder and altered the political landscape of France.

The tightening of fiscal screws that began with the 1973 oil crisis may not have been a conspiracy to rein in this dangerous laxness, but it has certainly worked out to the advantage of the powerful. Ever since, prices have ratcheted upward in relation to hours worked and the results of this squeeze can be seen everywhere. Protesters today seem like peasants outside the castle gates compared to the fiercely determined and unified crowds I joined in the sixties. Our confidence grew out of a feeling that large sections of the population — and the media — were with us and from what we saw as the inexorable power of our music and our convictions. In our glorious optimism, we believed that 'when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shakes.'. And we achieved a great deal before the authorities figured out how to capitalized on our self-destructiveness. Right-wing commentators still spit with anger when they contemplate how fundamentally the sixties altered society. The environmental and human rights movements and the theoretical equality of the races and sexes are only the tip of a huge iceberg. Ideals that remain our source of hope for the future took root in the sixties."

— Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the Sixties, Serpent's Tail Press, London, 2006

14 February

Finding the mental and physical space for writing has been a bit of a challenge these last weeks. The mood has been up and down, but not terrible for any length of time. The longer days and beautiful, warm weather help quite a bit. My insomnia has abated so I am waking up at an earlier time, even if I do just stay in bed to listen to an audiobook and Nina's purring by my head.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled musings and meanderings. DId. you know that there is a Meander River? One in Alberta, Canada, too.

Lordy. I have the Carpenter's version of Superstar floating around in my head. 

This was the first comment: 

Karen was the best of all time. Pure vocal talent. No auto tune, no stage show or dancers needed to make a show. She reaches inside you and grabs your heart ❤. We need the 70s again !

As if. Vietnam! Nixon! Bad haircuts! Cocaine culture which still haunts us to this day! And worst of all, the groundwork for Reagan. (That said, the early to mid-70s had great music. Best era for the Grateful Dead.)

The butterflies are feeding on the Meyer lemon blossoms. McCoy is bug hunting.

This is a far superior version of Superstar. Leon Russell, Eric Clapton, Bonnie Bramlett. And for those of you who want to waste more time, here's an article about the song.

Wherever my train of thought was going, it has been utterly derailed by a telephone call and making breakfast. I will to my writing of my yoga class and leave you to ponder.

And just for the record, I thought Crossroads was a piece of garbage. I found it so infuriating and will never pick up another Franzen book unless I am stuck on a desert isle or an emergency room.

THIS FOR THAT

What will I have for breakfast?

I wish I had some plums

like the ones in Williams's poem.

He apologized to his wife

for eating them

but what he did not

do was apologize to those

who would read his poem

and also not be able to eat them.

This is why I like his poem

when I am not hungry.

Right now I do not like him

or his poem. This is just

to say that.

— Ron Padgett, How to Be Perfect, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2007