[Above photo: A reefed old-timer in a stiff breeze on Casco Bay, with Peaks Island in the background.]
1 January 2023
I love language slips, malaprops, and written struggles, especially since we are all going to participate in them if using a language other than our mother tongue. An equal-opportunity humiliator. I recall my friend, Andy, addressing the Board of Directors of the Alviso Family Health Center in 1970: Speaking of his embarrassment at his poor command of Spanish, he began, “ Estoy muy embarrassada.” Which translates as “I am very pregnant.” All laughed and the tense balloon deflated instantly. Or the sign on the storefront in Malawi: “Difficult to understand investments.” I’ll take 100 shares, please. I recently purchased an inexpensive radio [Retekess TR604] for the basement, to hear music or NPR when I am building something there. In the instructions it suggests: “When fall across thunderstorm, please do pull out the AC plug.” In addition to a better translator, they could use a product-naming focus group.
Apropos, I hope we all can experience laughter, with others and at ourselves, in the coming year. And love. Power and money aren’t very satisfying substitutes, for me at least. Perhaps I just haven’t tasted either on a grand enough scale to be hooked, but I think not.
My daughter, her partner, and [their] dog visited for the last 3 nights and will be back tomorrow for yet another. He’s buying a very particularly chosen small new Toyota pickup truck. Locally they are only available at one dealer in New Hampshire so he’ll go Tuesday when the banks are open and purchase it. He’s downsizing from a huge Ford F-250 with a massive and elaborate camper on the back.
When they are here, it is a bit like a cyclone. “What just happened?” But I love having them, even if I don’t get much else accomplished during their stay. We have long walks, play Bananagrams, talk, and eat. Pearl is a smart sweetie but I’d forgotten how pervasive the remnants of a shedding dog are. Wear a black coat or sweater? Forget it.
They greatly enjoyed the new Avatar film. It is a challenge to imagine how our country can shift from a focus on individual rights, competition, acquisition, private property, etc. to a more communal, shared, harmonious, and supportive state of being. It will be necessary for us, however, if we want to survive on Earth, to value the flora, fauna, and general context of our lives and to work together to benefit everyone. It sounds very utopian, like a pipe-dream (I think of old men in opium dens in Shanghai, dizzily content in their fantasies.).
Yet, I think we must stop fighting. The environmental, let alone human, costs of war are so high. If only the UN had teeth and could remove and imprison leaders who perpetrate violence without just cause [incontrovertible evidence that the target is preparing an unprovoked attack or has assumed illegitimate power.]. On the meaning of many of the words in the last sentence we’d struggle to achieve consensus, I realize. But there are occasions, such as the military coup in Myanmar, the invasions of Iraq and Vietnam, our support for the Contras in Nicaragua, or the Russian invasion(s) of Ukraine which seem obvious. And the perpetrators obviously cannot be part of the decision. However, our country is, not surpirsingly, unevenly willing to be bound by international rules or conventions. We haven’t even signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1980) or agreed to the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (since 1986), although most other nations have.
The back story of the license plate my friend had made for me at Walpole Super Max includes the three who created it: a drug king pin, a gang member in for homicide, and a spree killer. I’ll treasure it. I can only imagine the back stories on each of them: sordid tales with neglectful, drug abusing parents, lack of love and care, domestic violence, perhaps physical or sexual abuse, likely poor. Whew!
Our current spell of warmth is eerie. It is 67F inside and the furnace has been off for 15 hours. It is sunny and glorious outside. I fear the backyard forsythia will mistake it for Spring and bloom. Perhaps we’ll then get two blooms or maybe it will kill the poor plant. I don’t know.
I’d best go for a walk. I seem to have no idea how to proceed here today.
[After the walk.]
I read an amazing graphic novel—Ducks—by Kate Beaton. It is a memoir of two years she spent working in the tar sands of northern Alberta. She is from Cape Breton Island and loves it there but, like others from the maritime provinces, was compelled to leave home for a decent-paying job. In her case, she wanted to pay off her college student loans.
In a striking blend of line and word, each amplifying the other, she tells a sad tale of environmental devastation and misogyny, of rape and injury, and of occasional kindnesses. It is a remarkable coming-of-age tale. Happily, she is now married with children, a successful artist, and living in Cape Breton again. The two Maus books are the only graphic novels I’ve previously read, unless one can count R. Crumb—more a lascivious comic book, I think. Mistuh Natural: “Hey, Louise, yer nipples is stickin’ out like thumbs.” That sort of thing. Graphic novels are a compelling genre, employing the combination of limited writing and drawing to achieve story, meaning, and depth of feeling. They make truly powerful writing without graphics appear even more amazing.
There is a well-done piece in today’s NY Times about Elise Stefanik’s meteoric rise among the Republicans, propelled by going all-in with The Donald et cie. A determined wish to acquire power certainly can lyse our personal integrity and morality.
My surgical scar is healing, the steri-strips are gradually falling off. I continue to have to restrain myself from lifting heavy objects or exercising too vigorously. How do fibroblasts know that when there is an incision they must step it up? It troubles me to assassinate the mice in my basement; they are so similar to us in their incredible physiology, albeit lacking opposable thumbs, consciousness, and math skills.
Happy New Year to all, with lots of love and laughter! And good health!
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 