Maybe I will simply listen to music today. My brother fell last night, not the first fall, but he is banged up. Do you want me to call an ambulance. No. We could both just sit here and die, I suggest. I gather his nightly pills, eight in all. Do you want to see the doctor in the morning. Maybe. I’ll call you, he says.
The cell phone comes in handy—hard to believe we lived functional and often happy lives without it. Read an article this morning about our vanishing attention spans as a result of our grid addiction. The like bing, the you’ve got a message or response, bing—the compulsive need to check the iPhone, even during the middle of a bike ride. It’s becoming more difficult to read paragraphs with whole sentences.
In the meantime Steve Bannon is playing a populist on television, a newspaper editor says on Morning Joe. Trump is playing a president on twitter. Corker warms we are sliding toward WWIII. War with N. Korea becoming more and more inevitable. One wonders if someone is trying to goad them into a first strike—that would simplify—but what would be the cost. Only lives, which have always been expendable.
Fresh water is lacking in half of Puerto Rico, even after the roads have been cleared. FEMA shows up with forms not water and food, Rachel reported last night. 60,000 people in the Houston area are still displaced. The Keys are hardly back to normal.
So I listen to Simon and Garfunkel sing “America.” Let us be lovers. We’ll marry our fortunes together—as if listening to the music will alter the reality of falls and wars. As if by listening to music, the blue fairy will appear and make me into a real boy—capable of being loved. How he has longed for the touch of someone—all come to look for America.
And what if the earth is a living and conscious being, maybe not conscious the way we understand it, but conscious in a self protective way. The earth is too huge, too grand to be undermined by man, Rush once said, or something like that, when he was claiming that mankind couldn't cause climate change if it wanted too. I turned off the radio.
“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”—It was against the law, what the mama saw…
I always prefer peace, he would tell his classes.
I prefer love that’s free, he told his old buddy Saturday as they drank coffee, checking the smoker temperature now and then. But we live in a world that demands something else. This is the world, he says.
Love,
Brady