Watching Wuthering Heights, the one in color with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, and M says she likes the old one best, the B&W with Laurence Olivier. I'm pretty sure it was him playing Heathcliff--he's in every old B&W classic, it seems. But this one is better. The old one was old school: don't get to heavy. This one plays the dark side, both of the gothic and the dark side of human nature, of love that is not caritas but obsession. This one is more to the story. To the writer and her nature and times. This one is truer to its Romanticism. I should put it on my list for people to have to watch for credit. The film version of a classic that is itself a classic. The quintessential exposition of Denis de Rougemont's thesis about Love in the Western World. Liebestod and adultery. Liebestod=love-death. Love is death, or, you cannot have love in this world, it is only true in death. Like Tristan and Iseut, Romeo and Juliet, Paolo and Francesca, Cathy and Heathcliff. And adultery. How many love stories in the western tradition, and now movies, are about adultery? And we cheer it on. We want Cathy to go to Heathcliff, even though she is wed to What's-his-name. Edgar or something.

It said on the package to microwave on HIGH for 5 minutes. So I did. And when the microwave beeped, and the time was up, I thought, five minutes of my life have just passed away. How many more five-minute segments do I have?

I want to go out in style, and when people file by the mortal coil, they will have an unexpressed thought go through their minds: sprezzatura! And smile and move on, and I hope there are refreshments.

I want to go like the old man who went peacefully, with a smile on his face--not screaming and yelling like the people in the car he was driving.

That's a joke. Maybe a cruel joke.

So I'm heading back home on a tiresome trip, four hours down Tuesday night, four hours back Wednesday afternoon, and took just a minute out for some snapshots of snow and cold, and to fire off a few rounds rapid fire out of the new--to me--AK-47 with the folding stock and the Romanian flash that throws the barrel the opposite way of the casing ejection. Smart stuff, that. Anyway, a dead water heater out in the middle of nowhere, off on one of those "Ranch Exits" off the freeway that go nowhere, and I plugged it from the hip at ten meters, maybe twelve, not even a whole 30-round banana clip. But it was a nice little break on a long ride alone with a mixture on the CD deck: Brahms German Requiem, DCFC, Shins, Essex Green, Van Morrison, Coralie Clement, Gounod's Mors et Vita. Nice all the way.

The cover of the Duke Magazine this quarter or bimensuel, or whatever every two months is, has some Buddhist students sitting cross-legged (lotus position) on oriental rugs (quite nice, but hey, they’re Dukies, they can afford it), doing the Ooommmmm thing.

In Duke Chapel.

In front of a cross ☩ on a drapery on a mausoleum in the crypt, where the Duke family is buried, kinda like the kings and queens and bishops in Westminster Abbey. But they are sitting on nice Duke-blue lotus-position-cushions, I see; not on the stone floor.

If Duke Chapel were a Catholic edifice with a font and holy water, would the Muslims wash their feet in there?

Multicultuversity?

The eye can see as far as the word can tell

We search through thoughts though tough to find

The one that brings the water of love from the well

Of body let loose from the sheets of the mind.

Playing on the front porch in the rain,
the little sprays of rain whipping in sometimes with a little lost wind,
just about to be chilly but not yet.
The rain pouring off the roof in sheets,
down into the little rut it has made for itself over time,
between the brick underpinnings
and the camellia and azalea bushes that are as high as the floor of the porch.
Each individual board of the porch,
laid perpendicular to the house and the edge of the porch,
sagging in the middle just ever so slightly,
so that the whole effect of the floor of the porch
is like a slightly corrugated floor.
The rain is making a lake on the stones closest to the steps,
with grass as trees at the edge,
and when it stops we can get some live oak leaves
and make them little canoes,
and sail around the little lake
until in a few minutes it has gone away
into the ground around.
The rain is so loud on the tin of the roof,
and splashing into itself in the dirt
between the camellias and azaleas and the bricks of the porch,
and so we play with our little soldiers,
and one of mine just got killed,
but it's the rain that is really at play.

"Je ris pour ne pas pleurer" -- Figaro in "Le Mariage de Figaro" by Beaumarchais: "I laugh so as not to cry."

“I only laugh as an insincere expression of pity.” --me in my personal journal. Unfortunately, I said it to some people. Whatever possessed me?

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge !

Quand reverrai-je, hélas, de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage ?

Plus me plaît le séjour qu'ont bâti mes aïeux,
Que des palais Romains le front audacieux,
Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l'ardoise fine :

Plus mon Loir gaulois, que le Tibre latin,
Plus mon petit Liré, que le mont Palatin,
Et plus que l'air marin la doulceur angevine.

Joachim du Bellay

What's worst of all? A root canal from a rural dentist? Or coming off painkillers when you are a former heroin user? Even a root canal without Novocaine doesn't compare, since the root canal will be over in a matter of hours, and withdrawals can take a day, or two, or three. The root canal is all in that one place. Withdrawals are all over your body, aching, hurting, stabbing, throbbing, slamming, pulling--and then in your head, with thoughts uncontrollably going here and there and to hell and all kinds of dangerous thoughts. The sweating, the freezing, the shakes, it's an experience that you don't know until you've been there. And the more you tolerated, the worse it is to get off.

Pray for those who are having the courage--the moral courage--to get off, no matter what the withdrawal pains are.

The second or third day of the rest of my life, today. The first day was Monday, New Years Eve. It was lovely. Partied until nearly midnight with two of my granddaughters and their grandmother (my wife) The second day of the rest of my life didn’t count—it was a holiday. If I had been still salaried in my previous employment it would have been a paid annual leave (paid holiday). So today was the second day of normality according to the new normalcy. And perhaps indicative of the way things are now and will be for the future, busy. Well, perhaps that is a relative term at this point. I got up when I woke up—or rather when I woke up again and decided that staying in bed any further was counterproductive, because the pain of lying like that any more went beyond the pain of getting up and dealing with woozy/queasy. Then I ate something—a peanut butter and banana sandwich with mayonnaise and a touch of salt. I got just a hair bit too much salt on it this time. And Fresca and mango nectar to swallow the one aspirine a day (neurologist’s orders), and the two fiber pills a day (G/I’s orders). Then sat for a while until I got my sea-legs under me (not that I’ve been on a boat for many years—but spent a week crossing the North Atlantic in the gales of mid-winter half a lifetime ago, on the Queen Elizabeth, with 90-ft waves…do you call those waves, or walls???). Then did some paperwork, Internet work, and housework. Then went downtown to take care of financial matters with the financial people. Then came home to frozen dinner crap, but watched a fine film rented from the local movie purveyor as we ate the little frozen-reheated mush and had a thawed piece of lemon meringue/plastic pie.

Does aspirine have an e at the end? It does in French.

Between loquacious and laconic, I would hope to be accused of being laconic. KYDMS. And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity…. But the tongue can no man tame. I spent so many hundreds of hours in solipsistic silence long ago that I began to, or realized that I love it. It has always been hard for me to express myself orally. But then, after marriage and working with true friends, I began to talk—perhaps too much. I can carry on, given a subject of interest and an appreciative audience. But, sinking back into obscurity, and left alone, I can very easily be silent. As I have said over the years, “Left alone, I would a solipsist be.”

The new year is upon us.
Now what?