Sunday Morning

I start stirring in bed. It’s already after eight. It was another one of those irregular nights. I got up at three and read until five-thirty. I am actually coming to like, and even to prefer, these irregular nights, but it plays havoc with my mornings.

As I lounge in bed, I hear a light pitter-patter outside my window. It could be just the wind, but I get up to check, just in case. Fuck, it did rain! It looks like it was a light rain, but something appreciably more than a few minutes’ drizzle.

I rush to the patio. All the cats are there. I see no reason to worry about trying to get them inside, but I do take the plate of food, in case it starts raining again and I will need to get the cats inside. Though, I relent an hour later and bring the plate back out, refilled with food. There is no forecast for rain and the sky looks steady, and they are as charming as a Rockwell painting they way they are dozing on the patio furniture on a cool rather spring-like morning.

Novels

Here is an old warning about how novels are too good to be true, though in our age this is surely more fitting for movies, especially American movies.

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No wonder the Reverend Oliver Goldsmith instructed his brother that his young nephew “never touch a romance or a novel; these paint beauty in colors more charming than nature; and describes happiness that man never tastes. How delusive, how destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss.” Many readers live in an expectation of love and passion learned from books and misvalue “the little good which fortune has mixed in our cup, by expecting more than she ever gave.”

-- Michael Schmidt, “The Novel: A Biography”

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I do not read a lot of happy, lovey-dovey novels myself, but I find that a good novel can make even failure and hardship seem somehow noble and meaningful. In a novel, there is a shared experience where there is sympathy and understanding, if only between the reader and the story. In real life, your failure and loneliness are all your own, and people will even just step over you as you lie there dying.

Quote of the Day

“We are meaning-seeking animals. And if we can no longer believe in God we will find other things to worship.”

-- Terry Eagleton, “Culture and the Death of God”

Dish

Pop puts on the TV and gets the ‘No Signal’ notice, again. He is upset. He goes and gets the wireless phone and the paperwork for Dish. He wears his ‘serious business’ face as he marches back to his Lazy Boy recliner and calls them.

I marvel that he has shown as much patience as he has. Yet, even now, I doubt that he is prepared to leave Dish and turn to Time-Warner cable. If it were up to me, I’d try cutting the cord on all TV service, whether satellite or cable. I would see if I can be satisfied by relying only on the Internet. Though, this entails mastering the know-how to transfer our videos from the computer to the Television screen, but although we have never mastered this, it seems commonplace and I image we could do it if we seriously tried. Oh, and I think this would also entail a Netflix subscription. Yet, this would leave one big hole in Pop’s TV-watching. I don’t think there would be a way to catch the Cowboys football game without a basic TV-service.