2.29.2020 – Reading Anxiety

Reading Anxiety
excessive interest
Bound box of Moonlight

I suffer from reading anxiety.

Abibliophobia.

Maybe it is a made up but it fits.

The fear of being stuck, somewhere, some place, with nothing to read.

When I was a kid I had this green metal case about the size of a small typewriter case.

When we went on family trips I would stare at my piles of books and carefully assemble a travel library.

This was harder than it sounds as I also had to predict what book I MIGHT want to read.

I did this whether it was a day trip to Sleeping Bear Dunes or a 10 day odyssey to Washington DC.

I never went anywhere without something to read.

The invention of the Kindle, the iPhone and the iPad would seem to be the answer.

Instead my anxity has new manifestations.

Now almost any and every book is just a few clicks away.

What I am missing?

What MIGHT I BE missing.

Maybe someone has a phrase or description or combination of words that, well, will not change my life, but my life might be somewhat less if I never read it.

Hemingway’s description of setting up camp in Michigan’s Upper Pinnesula in the short story, “Big Two Hearted River.”

I love those paragraphs.

Maybe it is the memory of where or how I read and re-read those paragraphs.

I remember reading some of The Nick Adams stories to my son’s Frank and Luke as bedtime tales.

After the scene with the camp, Frank says to me, “Dad, Nick needs a camper.”

I have what might be called excessive interestingness.

I stole those words from a review of the acting of Sam Rockwell for his role in Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men (2003).

Excessive interest.

Interested in everything.

My dear wife has to pay the price as she never knows when I will set down my book, kindle, iPad or Iphone and say, “I can’t believe it. I was taught that FDR first said ‘Unconditional Surrender’ at the spur of moment at Casablance in 1943 and this book shows that he was thinking of it in early 1942.”

Mr. Thurber writes in “Back Home Again” about making table conversation out of odd facts, “I don’t know what my table companion could reply to this, beyond a polite ‘Indeed’ or an impolite ‘So what?’”

But my wife listens.

I go on and on.

I can’t help myself.

Books and books and more books.

Each one a mystery.

Each one filled with new things and never emptied.

Bound boxes of moonlight.

I feel better knowing I have one nearby.

Books, of course.

And my wife.

2.18.2020 – Words for commute

Words for commute. Brief,
unpleasant experience
My mauvais quart d’heure

Each work day I make my drive to work.

It isn’t the worst thing in the world.

It is brief.

It is unpleasant or at least less than pleasant.

It is an experience.

It is my mauvais quart d’heure.

Mauvais quart d’heure (moʊˈveɪ ˈkɑr ˈdər/) is not french but an english term borrowed from the french.

According to the Online Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, it means, a short period of time which is embarrassing and unnerving; a brief but unpleasant experience.

A bad quarter of an hour.

Perfect.

I had never heard the term before.

Not surprising that the frequency of its use (as measured by the OED) is band 1. Band 1 words is made up of extremely rare words unlikely ever to appear in modern text. These may be obscure technical terms or terms restricted to occasional historical use, e.g. abaptiston, abaxile, grithbreach, gurhofite, zarnich, zeagonite.

Mauvais quart d’heure.

An obscure, technical, unused term.

Yet I feel a mauvais quart d’heure, experience a mauvais quart d’heure, go through a mauvais quart d’heure, twice a day.

2.14.2020 – There is a place where

There is a place where
love begins and where love ends
and love asks nothing

Is love worse living?

Is love worth living?

Is life without love worth living?

Is that so hard?

Why is that so hard?

In the movie, “Shenandoah”, Doug McClure ask Jimmy Stewart for permission to marry his daughter.

Jimmy Stewart, who is sitting on his front porch, tells McClure to sit down as he doesn’t like people looking down on him, says to McClure, “Do you like her?”

“Sir, I ….”

“No, no. You just said you loved her. There’s some difference between lovin’ and likin'”

Why is that so hard?

Why is that so hard to understand?

Alicia Keys is the same ball park with the lines, “I keep on fallin’ In and out of love with you. Makes me so confused.”

All these questions.

Even after being married 30 years, all these questions.

I am in love, no question there.

Am I making this way to complicated?

It’s a bit of shock that I had the answer 30 years ago.

Back in the day it was a big deal to have the wedding program laid out on a computer.

What today is a word document with different fonts and sizes was seen as really cool.

My soon-to-be-wife asked me if there was anything I would like to included on the program.

I asked that Carl Sandburg’s Poem, Explanations of Love, be on the back.

The final line of this poem?

“love asks nothing.”

Explanations of Love
Carl Sandburg

There is a place where love begins and a place
where love ends.

There is a touch of two hands that foils all dictionaries.

There is a look of eyes fierce as a big Bethlehem open hearth
furnace or a little green-fire acetylene torch.

There are single careless bywords portentous as a
big bend in the Mississippi River.

Hands, eyes, bywords–out of these love makes
battlegrounds and workshops.

There is a pair of shoes love wears and the coming
is a mystery.

There is a warning love sends and the cost of it
is never written till long afterward.

There are explanations of love in all languages
and not one found wiser than this:

There is a place where love begins and a place
where love ends—and love asks nothing.

2.7.2020 – Humiliate, don’t!

Humiliate, don’t!
Humility, live; avoid
Humiliation

It all begins with humble.

Humble the adjective.

Not proud or haughty : not arrogant or assertive according to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Solomon wrote (maybe), When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.
(Proverbs 11:2)

I would like to think I live with humility.

Humbly.

Humble.

To paraphrase Mr. Churchill, I have much to be humble about.

Such knife edge differences in the words.

Such knife edge differences in the actions.

Humiliate.

Humility.

Humiliation.

All begins with humble.

I am not sure what comes to me when I humiliate anyone.

Remembering times when I did makes my stomach hurt and my skin crawl.

And I remember.

I hope the persons involved on the other end don’t.

I guess that is why its called scarring.

Humiliation is awful.

According to Wikipedia, ‘A study by researchers at the University of Michigan revealed that “the same regions of the brain that become active in response to painful sensory experiences are activated during intense experiences of social rejection.” In other words, humiliation and isolation are experienced as intensely as physical pain.’

Maybe more awful is that it is so often self inflicted.

In so so many ways.

I think of ways to feel humiliation.

To feel humiliated.

Humiliation is supposed to result from a deliberate act by a person to belittle someone.

To often, most often, that person, is me.

The humiliation is in my mind.

That doesn’t make any less real.

I am humiliated that I need to use the bathroom.

Is that stupid or what?

Felt that way most of my life.

As a little kid.

As a big kid.

As an adult [sic].

I can stop at a public rest area off the freeway and I stop TO walk around JUST TO STRETCH MY LEGS.

“OH LOOK,” I think, “there is a restroom. Well, since I am here, I might as well use it.”

OH COME ON!

The secret is, EVERYONE HAS TO PEE.

Get over it Mike.

Lately, I have.

I laugh at myself.

I know the secret.

Everyone has to pee.

If I were King, I would make a proclamation.

BE IT KNOWN, THROUGH OUT THE LAND, EVERYONE HAS TO PEE.

And let it go at that.

Here is the point.

I know this example, while real, is comical, compared to other things over which I punish myself with self humiliation.

But there is a response to this.

Comical as it might sound, the answer might be the same to a lot of those other things.

I have to remember always, everyone has to pee.

[sic] from the latin sic erat scriptum, or ‘thus was it written’ or, ‘as it understood’. Use of [sic] made famous by the student newspaper of Georgia Tech whenever referring to University of Georgia in print, IE: University of Georgia [sic].

2.2.2020 – Palindrome day!

Palindrome day!
OH! 2 2 2020
Bolton is Notlob

So I had to hammer that 2nd line to get it into place.

Its my blog.

According to Wikipedia, “A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward, such as madam, racecar, or the number 10801. Sentence-length palindromes may be written when allowances are made for adjustments to capital letters, punctuation, and word dividers, such as “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!”, “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” or “No ‘x’ in Nixon”.

Composing literature in palindromes is an example of constrained writing.

The word palindrome was first published by Henry Peacham in his book, The Truth of Our Times (1638). It is derived from the Greek roots palin (πάλιν; “again”) and dromos (δρóμος; “way, direction”); however, the Greek language uses a different word, i.e. καρκινικός, to refer to letter-by-letter reversible writing.

Such a great word!

Such a great word history.

Such words are the buried foundation blocks of our language.

Two things always come to my mind when I think of palindromes.

The first is that Harry Carey, when he was still with the White Sox, had to point out that Toby Harrah’s name was spelled the same forwards and backwards.

Then Harry would say, “That’s a palindrome!”

The very first time I heard Harry say that, I was impressed with Harry’s erudition.

The next time Harrah was up and I heard it again, I was a little less impressed.

By the end of the game, having heard this now 3 or 4 times, I began to wonder if Harry remembered who Harrah was and if he had every mentioned Palindromes before.

After a season of White Sox games, including 10 or 12 with Cleveland, I no longer wondered.

Neither here no there but much of the fun in listening to Harry Caray was his natural excitement for all things new.

The excitement of a kid at the ballpark.

It suddenly strikes me, that for Harry, each game was new.

He couldn’t remember yesterday if he tried.

Not a comment on his thinking but on his drinking.

But I digress.

The other thing that always, ALWAYS, comes to mind, is that THE PALINDROME OF BOLTON IS NOTLOB.

I had a good friend, actually a friend of my brother Pete.

Sad to say this friend recently passed away.

I would run into him from time to time and he would always start the conversation by disclaiming “THE PALINDROME OF BOLTON IS NOTLOB”

I loved this.

The phrase “THE PALINDROME OF BOLTON IS NOTLOB” had always been one of my favorites.

Often times in meetings that I had long since lost connection with, I would be called on to comment and I would say, “THE PALINDROME OF BOLTON IS NOTLOB.”

Is it any wonder that I found myself locked away up the attic away from other workers who might catch my particular brand of insanity.

It’s almost a code phrase.

THE PALINDROME OF BOLTON IS NOTLOB.

You either know of don’t.

If you know it, you know it.

If you don’t know it, it would take volumes to explain and the effort would be fruitless as it is most likely that after learning what it means and why, you would say, I’don’t get it.

Or worse.

Something like, is that all?

But that is where I cam going to leave you.

But one last time in memory and thanks of the late great Eric Richards, THE PALINDROME OF BOLTON IS NOTLOB.