Pessoa

“In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.... If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling.”

-- Fernando Pessoa, “The Book of Disquiet”

30. Reading Life

I still have some tendency to get ambitious with my reading life and the books I read. I tried to slip some non-fiction back into the bedtime reading, thinking that time is too short to squander on empty fiction. As much as I like the new Edmund Burke biography, however, I need something more warmly human and easy to digest, something more dreamy for the end of the day when I am practically brain-dead and sleep won’t take me in yet. This is a lesson that I have had to relearn a few times over the past couple of years. I got to stop it and just take it easy. If I haven’t been able to make myself smart by now, it just isn’t going to happen, and reading an extra few pages of non-fiction certainly isn’t going to do the trick.

Hillary

“Hillary Clinton eats scandals for breakfast. If the Republicans keep this up, she’ll not only be president, she’ll appoint Bill to the Supreme Court.”

-- Bill Maher

In the air of scandals surrounding the White House, it is understood that the controversy of the Benghazi attack is also being pushed by Republicans to soil Hillary's 2016 candidacy. But the Dems aren't shaking in their boots.

31. Love

Lorie!? It must be about a year since we last saw or heard from her. I thought things didn’t work out for her and Pop. She does not seem to be easygoing about sex, or maybe Pop just doesn’t rock her world. Anyway she is here. And no doubt Pop loves playing the two-timing Casanova, a real legend in his own mind. Meanwhile, my life is more crowded and they are so loud, watching TV and drinking in the kitchen, where I cannot even close the door on them.

And I will say this. I have been trying to appreciate Pop’s relationship with Kay as being about love, as something serious, something that commands more consideration on my part. But now I can see that I have been trying too hard. Hell, I do not think that Pop even loved Mother.

But how many of us know anything about love? I certainly have never felt it, nor seen it. But maybe my idea of love is beclouded by the fairy dust of movies and novels. Maybe no one loves like that.

Wait!, now that I think about it, I may have seen one clear case: Mother genuinely and deeply loved Jack, her white bastard son. If that is correct, it does not say much about the health and glory of love. Maybe this fully realized idea of love is like a psychotic obsession, and it may be a good thing that it is not very common.

Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment"

32. So-Called Food

Is that the “veal” going through me? An annoying bout of diarrhea. Pop brought home some breaded beef patties. He calls it veal. He recognizes the need to diversify our diet. We cannot eat chicken all the time, or at least we should not have to. But this is worse than the meat you find in TV dinners. I just hope it is all out of my system before I go to bed.

Daily Fun

( Read more... )