Saturday
Saturday's a good day to get everything wrong about the previous 5 days out in the open, processed as it were, so that one can go on to Sunday in a new frame of mind.
1. The annoying habit the airlines have of welcoming you to wherever you're going--SFO in this case--somewhere over Salinas or Half Moon Bay, miles and miles from your destination airport and well before you arrive. Please don't welcome me to San Francisco until I'm here.
2. I like Obama, I'm glad he won, I can't imagine his not being President, but I also find it remarkable that he's been able to purchase The New York Times and turn it into a kind of house organ. The newspaper--our national paper of 'record'--needs to learn how to reach across the aisle and work with the other side.
3. I kind of like David Brooks. What I don't like about him is that he tends to answer a question like a politician-- as he did last night on PBS's Newshour when asked what he thought of Mitt Romney attributing Obama's victory to Obama "handing out gifts"--by not answering the question at all.
4. The link between professional sports and the military industrial complex is now irrefutable, with the 60-sec. 'NBA CARES' tv spot featuring Paul Pierce, Andre Igoudala and others "thanking the troops" for protecting us etc. etc. As stated earlier in another venue, I'm all for the troops but against the wars, and find this form of public patriotism to be a tacit endorsement of the wars to which the troops are sent.
5. I've been reading some Louise Gluck poems. How can you not read Louis Gluck these days with the big ripe paeans in The New York Times and The New Yorker? Each of the poems I've read have some really great lines in them (How can you understand me/when you cannot understand yourselves?, from "Early Darkness") but nothing comparable to what Aunt Lois said the other day as she stood in front of the mirror, getting ready to move from the nursing home in LA to the nursing home in SF: "I'm not sure I'm me."
I look forward to the new week with hopeful foreboding.