My Shovelful for 1/12/12 (A Revisit 9 Years Later)

It's Thursday afternoon. Fine snowflakes are coming down, blown fiercely by the wind.  TV weather boys predict a blanket of snow tonight and early tomorrow.  Good day to stay in and write.

(1)  The woman I love just wrote a scathing internet comment to a local white-supremacist who calls President Obama "the Mulatto Messiah."  I find that nickname offensive because "mulatto" slurs the President's race, and because "messiah" assumes that the President has a grandiose opinion of himself.  First, the President's race is irrelevant.  Second, as for the President's opinion of himself, the writer, I believe, knows nothing about it other than what he assumes.  To ASSUME is to make an ASS out of U and ME.  I think the one who suffers most from asshood, however, when I assume things I don't know, is ME.  Ergo, the writer is an ass.

The writer, with commendable candor, states that he despises the President.  He is entitled to express his opinion and my wife and I are entitled to express ours, which is that we like the President, care very much for his success, and dislike his being vilified by a self-ascribed "Caucasian," which word I am entitled to interpret as "racist."  Ass dismissed.

(2)  Snow has now accumulated on roofs and grass but not yet pavement.  I'm glad I got back home from Florida on an afternoon of warmth and sunshine.  I left Chattanooga on the morning of the 10th in gloom, fog, and rain, which prevailed until I got almost to Nashville.  The daylight in Music City was strong, and Kentucky up I-65 got ever sunnier as I drove north.  "Johnstown, Indiana" was all blue skies and sweet sunshine and there was little need for a coat when I got out of the car at home, sweet home.

I'd visited with my son and his wife in Pinellas County.  We had a nice visit, several great meals -- we went out a couple of times and both kids are great cooks -- and we rode around some -- the weather was nice.  My son has an open-top sports car and weren't we the blades riding around in that?  We also watched some good, irreverent TV and laughed.  It's always good to laugh with my kids.  Almost forgot: saw just one pelican, but I did see a pelican (whose beak holds more than his belly can).

I told them I wish I'd been better company during the visit.  I've been in low spirits for quite a while.  It has to do with my default status as depressed, and it has a lot to do with my contemplating my decline and death.  I've thought too much lately about drinking, which for me is tantamount to suicide "on the installment plan," as my comrades who talk about such things like to say.  I've thought about drinking anyway.  I'm a fool.  God help me not to take the first one.

(3)  I've read many wonderful books in the past year and more: most of the novels of James Lee Burke, Ed McBain, Jeffrey Deaver, Colin Dexter, 11/22/63 by Stephen King, almost all fiction, but nonfiction too: Life Itself by Roger Ebert, And So It Goes, a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, On Writing by King.  I've read the biographies of John Cheever and Bill Wilson of AA by Susan Cheever.

Reading makes me want to write.  What?  Anything.  In The Elements of Style, E.B. White wrote that writing is a "way to spend one's days."  I could write a "column" every day on this blog.  I am retired, I have 24 hours each day, I have a state-of-the-art word processing program on a wonderful laptop that allows me to make letter-perfect copy anywhere.  (That used to be an excuse for me because Garrison Keillor had a laptop and I didn't.)  I am a good writer, good enough.

And how do I spend my days?  I watch TV.  I work crosswords and sudoku.  I listen to music.  I read, some good stuff and a lot of crap on the computer the spelling and grammar and exposition of which are by and large abominable.  I spend entirely too much time on the internet.  I eat too much.  I sleep too much.  I have no self-discipline.  None.

The snow has stopped for now but there is a pretty cover of it.  Snow helps the gray day to be not quite so dreary.  We have bird-feeders out now and sparrows, nuthatches, finches, woodpeckers of three kinds, mockingbirds, cardinals, and bluejays have been eating from them.  I'm not sure where the starlings and grackles are right now.  They usually abound and my wife kvetches about them but I don't.  They're birds too.  I see myself as a sort of starling or grackle.  Too many of us, I suppose, and we don't amount to much.  But here.  Something to be said for that.