Planetary Problems

Grocery day. So, it's not that my blurty mood was a quickly passing thing. Just busy.

Clearing my way through my backed-up Twitter feed, I come across a nice quote on the record-breaking hurricanes and tropical storms and runaway wildfires we are experiencing lately.

Patrick Monahan tweeted, "The planet is rejecting the human race like a bad organ transplant."

Komala Hayes responded, "That's straight up George Carlin! You rock!"

For a lot of us, this shake-up of the environment is still mostly just a wild spectacle that we can watch on TV, so that we are free to just banter about it, the ultimate reality-TV. But it is like gallows humor. We might not be caught in it and getting torn apart in these planetary gears quite yet, but I think we feel the uneasiness of knowing that it is only a matter of time and our turn is coming.

Sometimes the sky really is falling. I know I am braced for the blade to drop on my neck at anytime, perhaps not by flood or fire, but a very old man's health and my poverty will work destruction well enough, even if it doesn't make the news.

[Twitter]

Just Regular Flowers, Really

Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil" is back at the top of my little stack of poetry books. I have the tendency to stick it back in the bottom rather than read from it. I expected something very different. I thought I was going to hear the voice of mean poverty that mocks all the conventions and all the gods, and understands that life is a sick joke. Instead, you could have reasonably guessed that you were reading Byron, if you were not told the writer beforehand. The translation is well-rhymed and metered, quite pretty, but ... paeans to beautiful women just fall flat on me at this time.

Carlos

Pop returns late, after getting Kay's groceries, and he informs me, "Carlos is losing two of his toes." Diabetes, presumably.

I said, "Oh, yeah." I said it so coldly that I might as well have said, "Who cares?"

Carlos and I were close in my childhood and teens, or that is how I felt. I sort of regarded him as my big brother. But I never really talked to him again since I began college. I guess that he did not feel that close to me, seeing me more as a distant cousin that he had to entertain when Art came to town. I suppose I resent it that he did not somehow help to pick me up in my failure, showed me that I had a friend. In truth, I don't see how we could have connected in any life-meaningful way, but feelings do not have to be rational.