[Above photo: Sand crabs on the beach in Mozambique. Move quickly and they will disappear in an instant, into a hole or the surf. ]
5 February 2023
The title refers to my experiences, November 2021 and this January, of having great visits to New York and returning with the plague. Well, it was covid last time; this pass it is merely a cold. But such a cold! I won’t describe the symptoms, but suffice to say I was ill enough that I tested myself for covid twice, 4 days apart. It is interesting, given my WASPish New England background despite spending most of my life on the other coast, that my response is as if Jonathon Edwards wrote my script. He was the early American Connecticut River Valley preacher who described life’s process as [walking over rotten boards with the flames of hell licking at your feet and good deeds will not save you]. Not a fun guy at the beach or a party; I’d not invite him to the island for a visit. Not much given to pleasure.
It is worth it and I’ll return to NY whenever. I forgot to mention the mariachi threesome on the Red Line. They play and sing wonderful songs that bring hope and inspiration to the subway denizens, timed perfectly for one stop. They get off the train, enter another car, and try their luck again. I gave them $10, which is more than usual, just because my fellow travelers looked so glum. About ½ are on their phones, the others mostly stare, dead-eyed, attempting to avoid contact with anyone else. Then there was the guy—-straight out of Oliver Twist—in dirty ragged clothes, a malnourished wraith, who played a very strangely modified version of ‘Greensleeves” on a battered violin. I encountered him twice and he played the same improvisation. His situation looked impossibly sad to me.
On a brighter note, it has been cold here, because of a polar vortex or some such, for a couple of days. It was -14F the other night. I’d turned my thermostat down for the night from 67 to 57. When I arose the house temperature was 57. I turned the thermostat back up and by 6 PM it had risen to 65 only. And I have a fairly new, excellent German natural gas furnace. With the outside air so cold and a pretty good breeze (the windchill correction was -35F) I easily found all the air leaks—around light switches, some of the windows, and the back door. I taped them and stuffed the back door with a dishtowel and folded paper towels in the cracks and placed a door draft stopper at the bottom. I’ll do a real fix when the weather warms up. Then I lowered the thermostat at night only to 62F. More than you want to know, of course. Frostbite would occur on exposed skin in 10 minutes at a windchill of -35. It is fun to see dogs in their winter blankets racing around.
You know when Joe Biden looks really tired and old, like a sort of vacant, pale fuddy-dudddy, his cerebral cortex glistening and smoothed out (if seen at autopsy)? My discount Senior Metro Pass just arrived and I look like that in the photo. I almost jumped! It had been a bit of a hassle getting to the Battery Park office—-rush hour subway, rain, wind flipping the umbrella inside-out, a walk—but, wow, I’m truly getting to that time of life.
I watched “Putin and the Presidents” (5 of them) on PBS last night. I can see how, especially training in the KGB during the Cold War, he might be given to paranoia. I view his fears of us invading him as a projection of his desires for empire. However, our Adventures in Statesmanship in Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Chile, and many, many other countries likely gave him reason to think we might, on a whim, head to Moscow. It is remarkable to see how Shrub first thought he could read Vlad’s soul, and later realized that S-thing seemed to be missing. And what a mistake it was that Obama didn’t go military (with a lot of weapons, if not boots, at least) when Russia annexed Crimea and part of the Donbas. Bullies don’t stop until they are stopped. We’d best not blink or cease our support of Ukraine or he’ll be back into the other republics.
News Flash: The female Downey Woodpecker is just now going after my birdfeeder with a vengeance. I suspect it was too cold for them to move around the past few days so she must be hungry.
Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker has been stepping it up recently, with George Santos, Kari Lake, Kevin McCarthy, and Matt Gaetz all providing plenty of material for laughter. I watched the first season of The Sopranos over the past week. I enjoyed it a lot, thought the psychiatrist was a terrific actress, and had to reflect on how similar to Tony’s sidekicks Donald seems. We who cannot lie easily and with a straight face—no facial twitch as a tell or gaze aversion—are at a certain disadvantage in trying to nail those who do it with ease and aplomb.
A Chinese balloon floating over our country gathering snapshots. It seems kind of quaint in these days of spy drones the size of horseflies and images from space telescopes of galaxies millions—or is it billions?—of light years away. I suppose if the balloon is supporting equipment the size of an 18 wheeler, it’s doing something nefarious. Predictably, some GOPers are squealing that the Chinese never would have dared to do this if Trump were president. Turns out, they did it at least 3 times during his presidency. Toward the end of the Frontline documentary about Putin, members of our State Department were aghast to see him, as we can on the video, play the Donald like a piano. It’s the problem with being consistently driven in the same direction—unless it is toward the truth—, you are easy to read and to manipulate. Donald so predictably wants to be one of the Big “Thug” Boys, a Xi or a Vladimir or even a Kim Jong-Un, and so desperately wants them to like him and accept him into their clubhouse, that it is easy to outflank him and get him to do their bidding.
It’s almost 3PM. I went nuts doing laundry and cleaning the upstairs this morning so I haven’t yet had lunch and I am starving. It is so satisfying to empty the dust cannister of the vacuum after going over one floor of the house. The amount of hair shed—human, dog, you name it—is astounding. But who would imagine a little dust here and there would add up to a small hill! On that uplifting note, Stay warm!
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 