Vanity of vanities

All is vanity and a chasing after the wind, Saith the Preacher.

The Boyo has a workmate who would not go to see Avatar because it is too violent.

Got a jar of homemade marmalade composed mostly of the lemons from my backyard, along with blood oranges and ginger. Nice. Made by the partner of a friend and erotic partner of mine; I was best man at their gay wedding.

That's a true fact.

Who says all right-wingers are one-dimensional? Or consistent.

Long ago a mentor of mine pointed out that I hold lots of strong opinions about things and about groups of people, but if you put an individual person in front of me, it's a whole new ball game. Strikes me as a typical conservative attitude. And one I like.

Which punishment is more cruel? The fate of the Titan Prometheus, whose regrown liver is eaten out each day by an eagle or that of the half-human Tantalus, who is fixed forever in Hades, with cooling water and ripe fruit close but always out of reach?

Having to finish up my CE requirement for my license renewal. I really hate fulfilling tedious tasks for large organizations, especially when they cost me money and involve filling out forms. Like doing my taxes.

I am glad Howard Zinn is dead. Couldn't have happened soon enough. Ungrateful Jew. See Item Three here. (Does this put me in the same moral category of caring activist and Hugo Chavez adoring actor Sean Penn, who hopes people who criticize him die of rectal cancer? Although, mercifully, he only wants you jailed if you call His Excellency a dictator...)

I like waking up, now that in the mornings the sun is up before I am.

I miss my car.

I like American porn much better than Euro porn. The men are far better built and better looking. And they at least appear to be enjoying themselves or to be engaged with one another with some intensity. Most of the Euros look like homely skinny bored sleepwalkers doing housework to schmaltzy mall muzak.

Cajun music. Great stuff. Hard not to move. Can make an accordion sound like Mozart. In an alternative life, I wouldn't mind having some Cajun ancestry.

Why are so many of the women characters on television angry unhappy castrating bitches, right out of the gate? A lot of them need to be smacked, hard and fast and regular. All this unmotivated rage. That's supposed to be strength? A stellar exception is "Angela Montenegro" on Bones. She is smart, beautiful, playfully sensual, self-confident, talented but enjoys life and the people of both sexes around her. Her power does not rely on humiliating others.

That H1N1 really kicked the shit out of me in January. Back almost to normal levels of performance at the gym, but it's taken six weeks or more. Must be getting better; a hunky 45 year old seriously hit on me there the other day.

As a religion, I find Protestantism utterly boring, though they have some good music. But since there would have been no America without the Reformation, I am retroactively glad of it.

Speaking of music and America, even if you take a dim view of the Brits, past or present, it's hard not to be moved by "Jerusalem, Parry's transformation of Blake.

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

And even if you take a dim view of the Mormons, same thing for "Come, come, ye saints." Always brings tears. "All is well. All is well."

Come, come, ye saints, no toil nor labor fear;
But with joy wend your way.
Though hard to you this journey may appear,
Grace shall be as your day.

And this soul-trembling sound from the American South, Protestant and white, primitive and powerful harmonic chant, the Sacred Harp lament, Idumea:

And am I born to die?
And lay this body down?
And as my trembling spirits fly
Into a world unknown

I sometimes think that with age and experience you should find the world easier to take, since the unreal expectations of youth have been worn away and you can flow with less tension. Some days I do. But some days I am glad that we have limited life spans and that I will not have to live here forever as the place seems to get worse all the time. Curmudgeon, anyone?

My ex emailed me a YouTube video of a Japanese taiko musician waling away at a big drum.
He is shot from the back, dressed only in a fundoshi. God, the male animal is a miracle of form and function.

I was always taught that belief in a creator God and acceptance of evolution were not incompatible. In principle, no reason why they should be. Evolution would then be the modality of God's creation. But if you pay attention to the process, you find unimaginable realms of time in which whole worlds are created and then destroyed. (The Kabbalists thought this, too, for other reasons.) To call the process savage, from the human viewpoint, is understatement defined. The God who is revealed in the higher religions, a (mostly!) purposeful, benevolent, wise and powerful intelligence, seems far removed from the vast theatre of eons in which struggle and eating dominate. A religion of principles must necessarily be a religion unable to address the world as it is and has been. That is why the messy narratives of the Old and New Testaments are better guides to reality than deracinated value statements. Perhaps the difference between "spirituality" and "religion" is the different emphasis they place on blood.

So, here I am: a product of more than six decades of living, of aeons of evolution, and the workings of divine grace on fallen nature. Stunning results, no?

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