3.12.2025 – there was something

there was something
very real, work-like about
this new phase of it

Adapted from the passage: About this time Mr. Bixby appeared on the scene. Something like a minute later I was climbing the pilot-house steps with some of my clothes on and the rest in my arms. Mr. Bixby was close behind, commenting. Here was something fresh — this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all. I knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never happened to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them. I began to fear that piloting was not quite so romantic as I had imagined it was; there was something very real and work-like about this new phase of it.

In Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1883).

In the book Mr. Twain recounts his adventures as a student or ‘cub’ pilot on the Mississippi River around 1855.

Pilots stood a four hour watch on and four hour watch off through out the day that required getting out of bed at Midnight every other day.

Mr. Twain writes that on his first day, “The watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed. At midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the night watchman said —

‘Come! turn out!’

And then he left. I could not understand this extraordinary procedure; so I presently gave up trying to, and dozed off to sleep. Pretty soon the watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff. I was annoyed. I said: —

‘What do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of the night for. Now as like as not I’ll not get to sleep again to-night.’

The watchman said —

‘Well, if this an’t good, I’m blest.’

The ‘off-watch’ was just turning in, and I heard some brutal laughter from them, and such remarks as ‘Hello, watchman! an’t the new cub turned out yet? He’s delicate, likely. Give him some sugar in a rag and send for the chambermaid to sing rock-a-by-baby to him.’

It is at the this point that we get to the above quoted passage.

This morning I got up.

I have had to get up in the morning most of my life but there it was today.

Standing in the shower, I had time to ponder the act of taking a shower.

Using the Google I learn that home hot water heaters (as we might recognize them) were invented in 1897 but still by 1920, only 1% of US homes had indoor plumbing or even electricity.

One online article states: The establishment of standardized plumbing codes in the 1940s finally paved the way for widely available, safe indoor plumbing that relied on the storage tank water heater.

My Dad was born in 1920 and I wondered when did he get used to a DAILY hot shower.

In 2024 I expect … EXPECT … to take a morning shower in not only HOT water but hot, fresh water.

I stood under the gush of water and tried to imagine all the I’s that had to be dotted and T’s that had to be crossed to make sure this minor miracle of the industrial age was so thoughtlessly made available to me at a rate that I was able expect my morning hot shower to work

If it didn’t work, it was some kind of an emergency for somebody.

But I digress.

I had a day yesterday and slept heavily last night to wake up a minute before the alarm and was able to switch that off before it sounded and woke up my wife.

Got the coffee going in the dark and into the shower.

Out in my robe, got my coffee and tablet and sat in the dark ready to find out how much the world had changed overnight.

My tablet glowed in the dark.

Morning coffee and reading out of the way I got dressed and packed up and off to the car to get to work by 7am.

Something was wrong or at least I thought it was as I am mostly confused in the morning anyway.

It was cool almost cold and it was dark.

But what was going on?

Something wasn’t right.

I felt, like I like to say, there was one boot off.

One boot off but I couldn’t tell which one.

Up in the dark and off to work.

I do it but I never get used to it.

I do it but I have never liked it.

Getting up and going to work in the dark adds something very real and work-like about this phase of a job.

And I pulled out on to the parkway and drove to work.

Between me and work are several high bridges over the Inter coastal water way.

From the top of these bridges I can spot the eastern edge of the United States and the Atlantic Ocean and the sun coming up.

And this morning was cold and dark and no sun.

Wait just a minute.

What was going on here.

Not any clouds or anything, but the Sun wasn’t coming up or something.

Something wasn’t right.

I checked the clock and I was on time.

I checked the traffic map and traffic was as it usually was.

I got to work and parked.

I got out in the dark, got my bag out of the back and locked the car.

As I walked the walkway to the front door I hauled my watch out of pocket and popped it open.

I held it in the light of the doorway light to read it.

6:00am!

I looked around the dark.

I looked at my watch that I hadn’t looked at since last Friday.

6:00am?

Boy Howdy, I hate the time change.

3.11.2024 – if taxes go up

if taxes go up,
I’ll live, if democracy …
it goes down? I won’t!

Based on the line, “I used to be a middle-of-the-road Republican. Nowadays, I think of myself as a Scoop Jackson Democrat — and my views have barely shifted. If my taxes go up, I’ll live. If my democracy goes down, I won’t.“

As expressed by Bret Stephens, an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues, writing in the weekly column, The Conversation (with Gail Collins) titled And the Award for Best Performance at the State of the Union Goes to … March 11, 2024 in the New York Times.

3.10.2024 – on the level sand

on the level sand
between the sea and land … what
shall I build or write

Based on poem XLV. Smooth between sea and land in More Poems by A.E. Houseman, (New York, Alfred Knopf, 1936)

Smooth between sea and land
Is laid the yellow sand,
And here through summer days
The seed of Adam plays.

Here the child comes to found
His unremaining mound,
And the grown lad to score
Two names upon the shore.

Here, on the level sand,
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?

Tell me of runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design
For longer date than mine.

Shall it be Troy or Rome
I fence against the foam,
Or my own name, to stay
When I depart for aye?

Nothing: too near at hand,
Planing the figured sand,
Effacing clean and fast
Cities not built to last
And charms devised in vain,
Pours the confounding main.

3.9.2024 – at times seems there are

at times seems there are
no national principles
just partisan ones

I recently read the New York Times Opinion Essay, This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West’s Defeat by Christopher Caldwell.

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

The “Prophetic Academic” in the headline is one Emmanuel Todd, who is, according to Wikipedia, a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris. His research examines the different family structures around the world and their relationship with beliefs, ideologies, political systems, and historical events.

The article itself was interesting in its gloom and doom for the United States and it had many interesting points, it was one short paragraph that had me take notice.

Mr. Caldwell writes that Mr. Todd has said:

Fighting a war based on values requires good values. At a bare minimum it requires an agreement on the values being spread, and the United States is further from such agreement than it has ever been in its history — further, even, than it was on the eve of the Civil War. At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.

At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.

At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones.

I grew up in a time there WHERE principles that transcended politics.

At my Church there were both Republicans and Democrats as members of the congregation.

Can’t see that much today it seems.

I cannot imagine two sides of the same party being members in the same Church let alone, opposite parties.

Well, for a least one party one section of the Church.

(According to Pew Research More than eight-in-ten of this one group of voters who attend religious services frequently (85%) voted for this one feller in the most recent election.)

Mr. Caldwell also writes that Mr. Todd says: “… educational progress has brought educational decline, because it has led to the disappearance of those values that favor education.”

I don’t know quite what to do with this.

I had to read a few times to get to the understand the point.

It reminds of something John Cleese once said along the lines of you to have be smarter than you can be to understand how stupid you really are.

You have to have national principles to understand just how fair we have fallen from having national principles.

You have to have values, shared values to understand just how fair we have fallen from having any shared values.

And that’s where we are.

Hard to see any comeback.

3.8.2024 – vexatious world of

vexatious world of
people were whole world, would not
enjoy it at all

If the vexatious world of people were the whole world, I would not enjoy it at all.

But it is only a small, though noisy, part of the whole; and I find the natural world as engaging and as innocent as it ever was.

When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do.

Or what the weather does.

This sustains me very well indeed, and I have no complaints.

From a letter to Carrie A. Wilson, May 1, 1951 in the Letters of EB White ( New York : Harper Collins, 2006)