- Suddenly seasonal signals are far less subtle. Many yellows and a few reds creeping into any views, the southward slant of the sun accents its later arrival and earlier departure. Unexpected chills sweep in on shadow or breeze, and settle in during the evenings.
- In my suburbs, it is a quiet time of year. Yard crews _ which still appear like mechanical clock figures tolling the day of the week _ give a perfunctory dusting to grass that does not need to be mowed and rush off. Leaves do not yet require incessant blowing. Families have grown tired of barbeques and mosquitoes, or are simply overwhelmed with work and school, and remain quietly indoors. I roam about our yard, happily recalling the good old days when my auditory world seemed like this all the time.
Sharp
sparkles glaze smooth ebbing tide
Salt scent
thick as breeze blows by
I watch some
seagulls seem to play
I’ve risen
late, swift sun shines high
Though no
one cares, nowhere to go
No chores,
no tasks will fill this day
I should
feel guilty, lax and slow
Creating
naught from all I know
Obsessive
drives have died away.
I wish our
universe might show
What it
expects before we die
What deeds
or thoughts are right to pray
How praise
should rise, what I must say,
No answers
come, to my dismay.
Wednesday
- Overnight low in the fifties, coupled with a morning gusting wind pushing low sixties is enough to require a sweatshirt even as the daylight world warms. Just a punctuation mark on what is known already. No matter how fine it all looks, limits on summer activities have appeared and will begin to be enforced.
- Many folks welcome the break from constant heat and humidity. Others fall into pre-depression, making of each fallen degree a march towards frigid cabin fever. Eventually, we all regain our equilibrium and go back to taking each day as it comes, and restricting our plans only to the extent that common sense dictates. There are a lot of wonderful events around here in fall, natural and cultural, and the carnival can with luck be extended right into the end of the year holidays (which merchants are already putting on display.)
Bill trotted
over, sweating from his jog around the outer paved trail, to join us at the
benches overlooking the Sound on the bluff at Caumsett. His mind was apparently lathered as much as
his sweatshirt, because he panted, “I see one candidate is promising to unleash
four per cent growth.”
Toni snorted
“More like unleashing 10% annual misery.
Crap luxuries for those who don’t need any more, thinner coats and gruel
for those hurting the most.”
“Ah,” I
said, “but economists can’t measure misery, so it doesn’t count. Luxuries, on the other hand, show up on their
biblical GDP.”
“Oh, c’mon,”
gasps Bill, “we’re all better off than we used to be …”
“Maybe not
all,” Toni responds.
“You know
that thing in Plato about people in a cave, trying to make sense of shadows
projected from reality outside?” I ask, looking up at Bill. He nods.
“Well, economists are like that, trying to make sense of economic
numbers while not paying any attention to the human factors that create
them. They make a lot of irrational
medieval assumptions about human nature, and then go play around with the
quantity and price of apples and stuff over time. Besides,”
I added before he could interrupt, “even the assumptions about
production are wrong now. Classical
economics deals with scarcity and unsatiated demand. We live in an era of overabundance.”
Toni adds,
“Maybe for us, and some people, but there are others …”
“They aren’t
the ones being promised four percent growth, though,” I point out.
Bill remains
adamant. “Economists have given us
wonders for hundreds of years, the industrial revolution, mass production,
scientific growth.”
“Wrong,” I
state. “Economists have gone through the
numbers of what happened as other people did all that, and interpreted
everything in light of their holy capitalist texts and dogma. Even you admit they can explain anything and
predict nothing.”
“You’re both
fools,” laughs Bill, “but nice fools. I
have lots to do. Enjoy the day…”- Eating on the dock at Crabby Jerry’s out in Greenport. The North Fork of Long Island still has farms and enough open space to occasionally convince that it is open countryside, although that is rapidly changing with the growth in vineyards and wineries. While it is taking on a Disneyland kind of character along the main thoroughfares, some places such as this remain remote enough from the city to retain a hint of bucolic centuries. That evolves too, as more and more folks think the same thing and move out here permanently, connected tenuously to jobs through instant communication links and relatively easy transportation.
- We like to get out of our town occasionally, and I guess it is only fair to comment on it when we do so. One of the reasons many people continue to pay high prices to live around here is the oddly eclectic mix of possible activities on any given day. We were only here, for example, because the train to New York was having big problems and we decided to find an alternative to eating on Mulberry Street for the feast of San Gennaro. So we ended up in a place that resembled Capri more than Rome.
- To this old curmudgeon, current politics consists of fanatic “born again” hordes whipped into a frenzy by sleazy hypocrites controlled by plutocrats. Sleazy hypocrites and plutocrats are always with us, but the ranks of the reformed get on my nerves.
- I charitably grant that such souls were lost and are now found. Many have written about their various descents into darkness of drink, crime, atrocity, or immorality in general, and I wish them well in their bright new lives. But for those of us who have not thus descended, the preaching is no balm. For example, I’ve always eaten relatively carefully, I dread the onslaught of gluten-free, organic, local, fad-driven TV fare as the standard offering everywhere I go.
- Even if those cheerleaders sometimes have a valid point, it’s not that I need to be forced to follow them immediately. Like St. Augustine, I am a perpetual teenager realizing that I probably should be chaste and temperate _ just not quite yet, not all the time, not to the exclusion of all pleasure except that of self-sacrifice and smug superiority. Besides, I’m not at all convinced that the hordes are always right or superior to my own instincts and behaviors, which I have also acquired and honed over a lifetime.
- Life with all its manifestations including society and government is infinitely complicated, a treacherous balance of competing tensions. Militant simplistic absolute certainty is always the enemy of true human good. I’ll tolerate even the most radical reformer if they entertain an element of doubt, at least concerning the requirements of others. That leaves me free to call down brimstone on those who would do the same to me. Toleration has limits.
- This weekend will mark the end of string of temperatures running ten to fifteen degrees above normal _ if such concepts have meaning any more. A mini-sailboat mini-race grabs a vanishing opportunity near the yacht club. A bit further on, activity on a long bulkhead may indicate another house is about to be constructed to obscure the open view. Change meteorological and human is the rule of the week.
- Once upon a time I felt betrayed as the past became lost. Now I am reconciled to the past as mostly my own internal illusion. The universe is what it is _ the moon is never in exactly the same place, for the entire solar system hurtles through the cosmos at fantastic speeds. The sun never shines identically, for at a quantum level each micro second of its elemental burning is done with different quarks and leptons in different ways. Stability, which our consciousness constructs as some framework for truth, is not reality. I never knew the world as I thought I did, and I cannot understand this moment in totality. That is both disturbing and comforting.
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