The world is a sheet of white paper again this morning (4-3-18). No bunny trails. No traffic. Weak wind. It was clear with an almost full moon when I went to sleep. Same moon, different side of the sky, in the last of the early dark hours.
I was having a long narrative dream about the Sixties when the conspiracy of cats woke me up. I was dealing with one of the penumbra of opportunists at his auction house on the edge of Great Falls. I had just managed a coup, buying a few of the fabulous jewel encrusted costumes of Delores Mezyk, our glamorous high school ice skating dancer and Rose Festival queen. In the Fifties. The dealer had a stooge, who was debating stealing the dresses from my car.
In the dream Bob Scriver had just created a new little “prairie buck”, a pronghorn antelope figure, and I was putting that on his page in the computer which was anachronistic because computers weren’t invented yet. It was before Christmas. He was selling them for $150 each, no patina because everyone wanted everything to be gold. I was helping with all this. Then I drove off on I-15, which wasn’t built yet in those days. I left my card with the crooks. This dream was the usual jumble of television and history.
In reality, the three big cats (Bunny, the mom; Tuxie her daughter and mother of Thimble and Thread; and Douxie who is entering tomcat erotomania again) slept in a row on my blue satin comforter. The Tinies were chewing on my zebra-striped slippers. Yesterday they found the grownup catfood in its saucer and got in to stand on it for convenience. Today they made their first poop. So far the big cats are willing to clean up.
The forecast is blizzard until midnight. I’m not entirely sure what year this is, what planet this is, and what my agenda today is supposed to be. The forecast has been the same for days and is the same for a week into the future.
As usual, it takes a few minutes sitting here to remember how to turn the computer on. Then I have to remember my usual order of protocol. We’ve just gone through a period when nothing I intended worked anyway. There was a spinning planet earth, then there was a cryptic list of DXL channels along with one named for a neighbor. I have two email accounts and never am sure which one will open with which password. My three pages of typed passwords, carefully assigned to venues I hardly remember, are thumb-worn. Some of them are defunct. My computer use could not be more simple because my only social media is Twitter and it’s severely limited.
Earlier I dumped many of my correspondents. Some have died. Few will take me seriously. They have the idea that blogs (that funny name) are toys, emails are toys, Google is a toy, everything is a toy unless it is the New York Times (which IS a toy!). They survive by not taking the world seriously. It’s all watching television on four-foot-long screens to them: passive, invented, without any consequence. Like elections. Like weather, sometimes inconvenient. They are racist, sexist, elitist — to them those are the markers for what is true. I don’t qualify for any of them: I’m not just white but Scots/Irish; solitary; low income — such people are irrelevant.
More than a year I’ve been closely following the national politics, mostly through Rachel Maddow because she explains the inscrutable in ways I can follow. Every morning I get up believing that this will be the day that we’ll see the really crucial arrests, knowing that most of what is happening is super-secret, badly skewed by a media that’s confused, on-the-run, and too damn young to be smart — anyway they drink like fish. But at home. (Fewer DUI’s, more abused women and children.) The nation, like a physical body, is sealing off the infection in ways no one controls but that is necessary if any of us are to survive.
If only there were sunshine. If only the snow would melt. If only most people were over fifty.
My television was discarded long ago. Coordination is taken for granted. Collusion is just “natural.” Now we’re talking Treason. It is a Capital Offence: that is, a death sentence. Of course, footsie with Putin is already lethal. And Russia manages to kill people more efficiently than we do.
We’re still “norming” to high school rules but with real-world consequences, which are often illusions. Ordinary people are demanding to “know”. If given a few facts, they think they do, but never have a grasp of world order because they don’t take into account anything that isn’t in their own small circumference, not even the fact that it is small. Maybe there’s no such thing as world order anyway.
Maybe the planet has an algorithm of its own, not at all based on any written rules or body of deciders. Certainly the respect and prestige that used to control the more idealistic endeavors is eroded to the point of being cynical, only based on money. If you’ve ever sat in a really experienced committee of big-church canvassers for pledges, you have seen reality. Each person to be visited is represented with a card. On the committee will be a doctor, a banker, a legislator, and a politician. Each person will be considered. How much do they make? Do they or any of their family have serious diseases? Who is going to college and how expensive is that particular institution? Is their house paid for? Do they have friends in high places? Then the expected pledge is suggested by the committee.
There is nothing about devotion, clear thought, consistency, love of being, or whatever you think reflects high religious value. Some decisions will be more “commercially” potent than others, particularly the illusion of wealth. The committee may meet apart from the professional minister, who might have too many scruples. No worry on that score in the US or Russia these days.
It’s warming up. Maybe some of the snow will melt.
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