Thursday

Even when I wake up early enough and have milk on hand to put together a full breakfast for myself, I am taking only a few genteel bites of the apple these days. I never ate it to the core, but I used to do some real damage, so that a worm would have had a very rough time finding a hiding place from me. Well, I suppose it's not that big of a health-differential anyway. I used to think that I was fighting off diabetes as well as helping my waistline (an apple a day keeps the doctor away), but this was doubtlessly just another riff in my lifetime role of the fool. Sure, an apple is better than a candy bar, but probably not by that much. Vegetables are where it's at, particularly those leafy green ones that I cannot stand, such as good old broccoli and Popeye's spinach. I still want to try to be better and will eat what I can stomach, though. A quarter of an apple is better than another slice of cake. Besides, it is strangely true, however counter-intuitive it may seem, that one can get tired of cake.

Cats

It bugs me that the cats prefer to sip their water from a deep puddle rather than from the clean dish that I considerately lay out for them. It is not difficult to imagine that it might be more natural to take in earth-collected rainwater than piped in city water in a plastic bowl, but watch them get sick! Illness and death and me-suffering-from-a-broken-heart are very natural, too. Of course, I don't suppose that drinking municipal water is necessarily healthy, but at least the illnesses that flow from it are very long-term and subtle, like old age itself.

Kay and Pop

Kay arrived unusually early today, before lunch time, and she is not in the door for more than twenty minutes before she and Pop are going at it like monkeys in heat beneath the jungle trees, or college kids in dorm rooms (other college kids, never me - I just get caught masturbating). I know this, because I was just preparing my lunch when I went to the bathroom and could hear her growling groans and blissful moaning. What does he do to her? Is he using sex toys on her?, or is it possible that Pop is actually quite an enthusiastic cunnilingus-giver? Maybe I do underestimate him - the cowboy hats and football-watching perhaps signifying a real testosterone charge seeking to signify itself in an Anglo world that marginalizes little brown men. In any case, a couple of hours later, they come to the kitchen, with Pop suffering from one of his sugar-crashes, desperate for juice and donuts. I don't think he had any breakfast, save a cup of coffee, and it was after two in the afternoon.

e-Life

In Mann's "Reflections", I came across a fascinating passage about how a life is more embittered if one suffers from deafness than if one suffered from blindness, supplying anecdotes and reports. He even relates an episode in which blind men are seen tossing their false eyeballs at each other, all in good fun, like junior-high girls at a slumber party enjoying a pillow fight. It is part of a larger discussion on how war and crippling misfortune can have its upside, even its sublime side with the spiritual elevation of suffering and hardship. This discussion particularly captivated my attention, because I used to wonder whether I might do better if I could have my hearing surgically cut off, preferring the quiet. By contrast, the possibility of going blind always struck me as being the more horrifying.

I was tempted to type the long passage out for the benefit of the few readers I have, but I thought of those few old folks skimming the post, and it just did not seem worth it. Remember, I no longer feel the need to book-blog those books that are in my collection of 'rereadables', since I will be coming back to these passages again and again in the course of my reading routine, as long as time and life permit. Still, I imagine how such a post might have given birth to a fun little discussion back in the autumn of 2003, back when the world was young and I was like one of the cool kids, joking, flirting, having crushes, trying to sound smart and witty, dreaming a little that maybe my life could still work out yet.