The Long Run

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I had gone for a long run, almost 17 miles, through the forest, and had come home exhausted. My wife was on the phone with no interest in talking to me. I had done something wrong but I didn’t know what. I found out through snippets of conversation that a barbecue was being installed on the fire escape and asked why she hadn’t told me before. She shrugged, angry, feigning indifference. I was exhausted and went to sleep. The spare bedroom had been rearranged in a way I couldn’t understand and had to pull the bed against the wall to get the door closed.

I slept on and off until it was dark and she came briefly in the room and said, “I am watching Iron and Blood tonight” and left. I was disoriented. She was talking to her niece who was staying with us. They both ignored me.

And then it escalated. I asked my wife to speak alone to understand what was going on. She resented this request. She didn’t want to speak, saying she didn’t have to bother with that. It came out that she thought I had organized a series of parties for my students.

I didn’t understand the accusation. But it was too late. She was furious and now engaged with others, the accusations getting worse. It was because I smoked. That was the last thing she said. I didn’t see her again.

Words XIII: Inexorably

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Definition: In a way that is impossible to prevent.

As in: “Despite what some less intelligent folks might believe, Covid-19 will continue inexorably on.”

Existential Thursday: Heidegger

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The being that exists is man. Man alone exists. Rocks are – but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist. Angels are, but they do not exist. God is, but he does not exist.

The proposition “man alone exists” does not mean by any means that man alone is a real being while all other beings are unreal and mere appearances or human ideas.

The proposition “man exists” means: man is that being whose Being is distinguished by the open-standing standing-in in the unconcealedness of Being, from Being, in Being. (Martin Heidegger)

A Return to Innocence

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We agreed to marry in Florida in a small place by the beach. She was everything for me. We had loved each other many years before, my first love, but that had been broken by betrayal and selfishness. The intervening years had only proved what we had missed. It was such an obvious thing, but she reverted to old ways, unsure and scared of coming too close again. She couldn’t go through with it, in spite of my prostrations and cajoling. And then it was back to the old ways, making stands, walking out, calling again, trying to reach across that torturous gap.

It didn’t work. There seemed to be hope and she was still there, but all conversations were through others, attempts at sex were in vain. I confessed that I saw nothing in free love. She insisted that bodies were only that. I comforted myself with games of exploding balloon Frisbee, jujubes and singing along with The Grateful Dead. And it almost worked. A beautiful young woman came to me, undressed to her wonderful glory, and I was into that.

But then she had other things to do and so I entertained a whole retinue, played the role of sage with drinks in the fridge. There were so many, and I never had time to think, even if I did, not able to get the thought of her out of my head, the wonder of what we had, like flying into an unknown land and never waking up from that.

Blogging is Pointless. What isn’t?

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I have been blogged for close to eight years. Sometimes I have been on my game, especially in the post Hurricane Sandy days.

October 30 – One Day after Hurricane Sandy

Other days not so much. Greenland can definitely slow me down.

It appears that these quarantine days have got me back on my virtual pony. I have blogged fourteen straight days now – on everything I can think about and some I don’t as much.

I like the routine of blogging, no matter the irrelevance of it. It is a distraction, like my new spinning routine, part three of my speculative trilogy or filling in the sky of this 2,000-piece puzzle.

I much prefer these things to ruminating on the next steps of the quarantine, watching other people coping on social media, reading about those who have to work and realizing how little society actually cares about them, thinking about how stupid we all are, when this world will finally end, how pointless our existing ever was…

So, yeah, it’s better to stick to the blog. Maybe the puzzle too.

Words XII: Grubstake

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Definition: Amount of material or money supplied to an enterprise (originally a prospector for ore) in return for a share in the resulting profits.

As in: “The US government has decided to give two trillions dollars to corporate America as another grubstake for big business.”

Existential Thursday: French Fellows

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There is nothing like a little 20th-Century French thought to help process just how long this quarantine will go on:

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is. (Jean-Paul Sartre)

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day of his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. (Albert Camus)

Not Saying Goodbye

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She watched her sister getting ready to go. She did everything in tight, well-practiced turns – cinching the strap, adjusting the seat, looking up at the screen, scrolling through the updates – not looking back, not doing anything except what she had to for her to leave.

She didn’t want to say goodbye to her sister. She had to say it right, reach for her hand, wait and then turn to go. It made it worse to think about it. She should have just done it, just say the words and be done with it. But she didn’t.

She was exaggerating everything. She was exaggerating. They had been together too long, forever on this journey, and now they weren’t. That was all there was to it. As much as it might mean later, it was just this moment, the same as the last, the same as the next. She wasn’t going to make it something else. She would see her soon. She turned to go.

“Hey!” Her sister yelled after her.

She turned back. “What’s up?”

“That’s it?”

It hurt to hear her say it like that, like she hadn’t thought when they both knew she had. “Give me a call when you get there.”

She turned away again, back to her screen. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

When In Doubt…Turn to Herzog

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A couple of excerpts from a recent The New York Times interview with Werner Herzog:

Why are you inclined to interpret nature as being “monumentally indifferent”? I advise you to go outside on a clear night and look out into the universe. It seems utterly indifferent to what we are doing. Now we are taking a very close look at the sun with a space probe. Look at the utmost hostility of the hundreds of millions of atomic bombs going off at the same time in its interior. So my personal interpretation of nature comes from taking a quick look at the stars.

How do you derive meaning from life if life is indifferent? Life is not indifferent. The universe is indifferent. But just trying, itself, is something I should do.

Did you ever find out who shot you? I was shot at various times. You mean here in Los Angeles?

Yes. No, I wasn’t interested.

When you pulled Joaquin Phoenix from the car accident, did you know it was him? Yes, although he was upside down in this car, squished between airbags that had deployed and wildly trying to light a cigarette.

That could be an image from one of your films. I knew he must not light his cigarette, because there was gasoline dripping and he would have perished in a fireball. So I tried to be clearly commandeering to him and tell him not to. But I was worried that if you gave him a command, he would strike his lighter even harder. So I managed to snatch the cigarette lighter from his hand. Then it became completely clear that it was Joaquin. But I didn’t want to speak to him after. I saw he wanted to come over and thank me. I just drove off.

How do you see your relationship to Hollywood? I enjoy being marginally involved. Just a few days ago, I did some voice recording for a “Simpsons” episode, and I did it in such a wild way. So wild that the director and some people who sat with me in the room burst out laughing before I ended my line. I had to be relegated into the control room, because twice in a row they started laughing. I said, “Gentlemen, I have not even finished my line yet.” In a way, “The Simpsons” is a bold intellectual design.

Excerpted from New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/23/magazine/werner-herzog-interview.html?referringSource=articleShare

Zooming with Charlie

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I zoomed last with the guys in the band. They had decided to see if they could get back together; they looked relaxed, ready to go. Charlie was there too, even though he had only played bangs with them once. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s always there. I made a joke that The Hothouse Flowers were reuniting with The Black Crowes for a gig in London.

The guys all did this gag of rushing to leave, climbing and falling over each other in a massive comic wave. I couldn’t stop laughing. I knew I’d have to write all of that down, and then lost the signal. When I finally got them back, only Charlie was there. He had lost his coat and needed to go find that now.