What I'm doing for fun today
The first thing out of my mouth this morning: what shall we do for fun today?
Since it was raining what I said made us both laugh.
I was going to buy a robot on-line, fully assembled so I wouldn't have to touch it, and teach it how to cut my hair and make a gin martini, but that didn't seem like the right thing to do, like Donald Trump handing out paper towels to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.
The whole day was still ahead of me.
I listened to Jimmy Reed on Pandora from 9:20 a.m. to almost 10.
I texted back and forth with my brother who lives in Las Vegas. He texted me that he puts evaporated milk in his coffee: I hadn't known that.
I started phase two on a painting I've been making, the torture phase I call it in which I rub out almost everything I've painted, hose it off in the bathtub, and start over.
I could have gone to church, but I've forgotten where it is.
A friend had sent me a draft of an essay he's writing for a magazine in Europe and I re-read it this morning. It's very good, as my friend is a highly educated down-to-earth clear thinker, full of serious political and cultural knowledge. I praised his piece, noting especially his calling out the importance of the notion of the ideal and his despair that the ideal no longer seems to have a place in our dealings with one another. He'd taught Hannah Arendt in Berlin in pop-up sessions he called 'polis', and quoted her. There's a gorgeous phrase in the essay--"this upright presence in the present was for Arendt "thinking"--that I thought about for some time. I sent my friend the writer a short email also suggesting he change the title.
I googled 'golf courses in Northern California'.
By this time it was after 11 a.m. I'd missed church.
I read the morning paper for fifteen minutes. Ah, I thought, this is where they stockpile the cliches they bring out in every emergency. There was also a picture of Trump with his red Make America Great Again dunce cap, inspecting a row of emergency ventilators he'd commandered from a third-world country.
Language forces one to think, at least that's what I think language is made for, and silence causes one to feel, and I've got the rest of the day all to myself.