Tag: Camp David Accords

I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me

Thunder woke me up from a lovely deep sleep around five this morning, and we had a marvelous thunderstorm (and downpour) that last for about three hours…and yes, it was snug and comfy in the bed, especially after Sparky joined me in the bed for a cuddle-nap of his own. It now looks as though the storm has passed–and yes, I know Jazz Fest is this weekend, and yes, it sucks for the attendees and acts when it rains, but I still selfishly want more storms. I have to make groceries and get gas today, and would rather not do it in the rain…but it would be lovely if it kept storming this morning. According to the weather, we may have more later today and the drizzle we’re experiencing right now will last another couple of hours. I can also scratch “wash car” off the to-do list. Thanks, rain!

I slept well and feel good this morning. Paul is leaving on Tuesday for a week, and I am heading north next Friday for Alabama and then a few days in the panhandle visiting my recently widowed aunt. Sparky will be boarded (and get those razor blades trimmed), and he of course will be glued to me like velcro the entire time Paul is actually gone. Yesterday was a good day; I ran a couple of errands after work and came home to try to do some cleaning and picking up around here–as well as thinking about the work in progress, whose name may change…it occurred to me yesterday that there was a better title than the one I’m using–but I do love one-word titles and rarely get to use them.

We ordered pizza for dinner last night and finished watching Unchosen, which was, indeed, a wild ride. I am not certain they stuck the landing, but whoever came up with the idea to use the trope “a stranger comes to town” only having the “town” be a religious cult was a genius. It was very well done, though, and it was a fun ride. I do recommend it–Fra Fee is gorgeous to look at, and the acting is incredible–and since “cult”…you really don’t know what’s going to happen, and the surprising twists are all earned; there’s nothing there that wasn’t set up if you were paying attention. And as I said to Paul as we watched, “cults are really about the subjugation of women as lesser” and yup, that even holds true for the national cult we’ve been dealing with since the 1980s–the marriage of evangelicalism to the Republican Party. I’m sure there’s been some political history written about that horrible shift if the 1980 presidential election, and in retrospect, I’d say not electing Carter to a second term was one of the biggest mistakes this country has made. I don’t know whether or not Carter was a good president or not–but he was also trying to clean up the economic mess he inherited from his Republican predecessors and took all the blame for it; and you know, the Camp David accords did end decades of war between Egypt and Israel–and has lasted; the longest lasting peace in the Middle East since 1948. I’m not deregulating the airlines was the right decision–sometimes, regulation is necessary and needed; and what has happened to the airline industry since deregulation is certainly an interesting political and economic example someone should do an in-depth heavily researched history of how it impacted the nation’s economy, whether good or bad. It would be an interesting read.

When I finish this, I am going to repair to my easy chair and do some more reading. I want to read another chapter of Listen for the Whisperer and a short story I started reading this week so I could write about it, and I want to do some writing today, too. As I said earlier, I need to run to the grocery store and get some things, and I should get gas while I am out and about. I think I am also going to watch a documentary so I can write about it–I’ve been meaning to for a very long time, and I think I may have even watched the documentary once already; or maybe I just intended to and never got around to it. My sense of time is very skewed now; it’s very hard to believe the summer of the shutdown was six years ago; at this time six years ago I was already working in the garage, getting to eat donated meals from places grateful we were doing COVID testing (the meals from Waffle House were definitely my favorites; the hash browns were to die for) but it does seem like a million years ago now, doesn’t it? Likewise, things that have happened in the interim since? I have no idea when it happened. Then again, it freaks me out to know that I had those impacted teeth pulled sixteen years ago. Crazy, right? My concept of time, always not the best, has definitely been impacted.

And on that note, I am going to bring this to a close and get another cup of coffee so I can get going on my day. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow. Till then, ta ta!

Somewhere in the Night

Monday morning and the last few days of 2024; won’t be sorry to see this year end, but also remembering to watch 2025 with a wary eye. Bad years have often been followed by worse years before, after all, and there’s never a guarantee that the new year will be any better. It’s cold here in New Orleans this morning, which didn’t exactly have me leaping out from under my warm pile of blankets. I’ve pretty much decided not to shave until New Year’s, just to see how white my pathetic beard will come in now. Usually it drives me crazy with the itching, but so far so good. Yesterday I ran my errands, did some chores, and then watched Hysteria! on Peacock, which is very interesting and clever in how it’s done (more on that later). Basically, I took the weekend off from pretty much anything except chores and errands, and why not, really? I’m kind of glad New Year’s is in two days; it’s a clear line of demarcation, and I can revamp my life beginning then, while lazily sliding into the new year. LSU plays its bowl game tomorrow, and I imagine I’ll have the football playoffs on in the background on Wednesday while I do things. I don’t really care about them, mind you, but at the same time I have an idle curiosity. I don’t really care about any of the teams that are in the play-offs, nor do I care at this point who actually wins it all this year. My money is on Georgia, frankly, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it’s someone else. I don’t really care.

And of course, Twelfth Night is just around the corner and we can have King cake again! I’m not sure how much of it we’ll have this year, but I’ll definitely buy one to ring in the new season. Paul wants to lose weight in the new year, and it’s not a bad idea for me to try, either. One thing at a time, though–getting a normal gym routine in the new year is way more important than losing weight for me right now.

I was very sad to hear that Jimmy Carter finally passed over the weekend, at the age of one hundred. Carter is the first president whose term I really remember a lot about (I don’t remember much of Johnson; Nixon I only remember Watergate; Ford wasn’t around for long, so Carter was the first time I actually paid attention to what was going on in the country, and what he was doing as president); I remember his election and how wholesome he seemed. He was the only president about whom I can remember thinking his faith is absolutely real, and absolutely Christian. It was during the Carter administration that my own faith began to flail and fail, and it was also when I realized an actual practicing Christian’s faith isn’t the best thing for a president to have, because ruling through faith simply doesn’t work. I didn’t vote in 1980, the first time I was eligible to vote, and I’ve always regretted not voting that year–I didn’t even think about it, and really, my wasted vote didn’t matter to anything other than to me. I voted in 1984 for the first time, and I’ve not missed an election since. I always liked Carter, to be honest; he was one of the few presidents we’ve ever had who was actually a good, totally unselfish person–and he went on proving that for the rest of his life, dedicating himself completely to philanthropy (walking the walk, not just talking the talk). He also was responsible for the Camp David Accords, the only lasting peace in the Middle East (between Israel and Egypt). Who knows what he might have managed in a second term? (Don’t even get me started on the 1980 election.) So, of course, since Carter was a Christian whose values and beliefs guided his judgment as president, evangelicals despise him1. Go figure.

Not really a surprise there, is there? Evangelicals hate nothing more than Christ-like behavior.

The MAGA war goes on, with a lot of “I didn’t vote for this” takes left and right and everywhere you look…but au contraire, mon frere, this is exactly what you voted for. We tried to warn you for ten years, but…we’re just sheep, right? Or hate America? I don’t know what the latest insult MAGA’s love to hurl at the rest of us might be, nor do I care, but I do know I’ve been sneered and jeered at for decades by the so-called “real Americans”–who are actually nothing more than the rebranded Confederates. (One of the most interesting things to me about The Demons of Unrest was how much sympathy there was for the slave-holding South amongst the Union loyalists; which made me wonder about whether the stories about Union sympathizers in the South might be true and not just revisionist, we weren’t all horrible people after the fact apologia–and something I am going to write about someday.) Lots of leopards eating faces on the right over the last few days, for sure….but the one thing that is going to get me through the next four years (assuming everything doesn’t go to hell and the economy and the country don’t completely collapse) is knowing that no matter how bad things get, I didn’t vote for this, and the pleasure I will derive knowing that those who did are not only suffering the way the rest of us are but they also will have to live with the knowledge they voted for it, gleefully.

I feel so pwned, don’t you?

I was curious to watch Hysteria because I really liked the concept and thought it was clever; it plays off the old Satanic panics of the 1980s (which I really want to write about); the murder of a teenager in the town of Happy Hollow leads a small metal band in the town to pretend to be Satan-worshippers as a way to promote the band. Great premise, right? But there’s so much more to it than that, and Bruce Campbell plays the sheriff, and Julie Bowen plays the mom of the band’s lead guitarist. There are several different plots running at the same time, and the way the writers have the stories/plots cross and how those stories only serve to make the other ones seem real…it’s very, very clever, and hard to get across without spoilers. Part of the pleasures of the show is discovering, bit by bit, just how deceptively clever it actually is. We have two episodes left, so they could easily ruin the whole thing in the last two–but we’ll be watching those tonight and will be getting back to you about the show tomorrow, most like.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely New Year’s Eve Eve, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back at some point, most likely tomorrow.

  1. Ironically, as a born again Christian who liked to talk about his faith, evangelicals originally turned out to elect him 1976. Republicans saw that, and went for the evangelical base–and the country has been the poorer for it ever since. ↩︎

Stomp

And here we are at work-at-home Friday again today. I have an MRI scheduled at Tulane Institute of Sports Medicine this morning, but other than that I will be here at home, getting prepared for the refrigerator to arrive and doing other chores around my work-at-home duties. It was an exhausting week, both for me personally and for the world politically. I generally don’t comment on world events, primarily because I am at best a distant observer who depends on news reports and because I don’t feel informed enough to have an opinion. I do know that I abhor brutality and think all death is unnecessary, especially in the name of politics, religion, and racism. The situation in the Middle East–volatile for my entire life–is one without answer, I fear. I also remember how foolishly we all were for thinking the Camp David Accords would bring peace to the region. The only peace it brought was between Israel and Egypt–and that has lasted. I don’t have any answers, and I feel making comments that are uninformed without solutions does not add to the discourse nor move anything forward in a positive manner, so I just keep my mouth shut and hope for an end to the death and slaughter and trauma.

Yesterday was an exhausting day overall. Everything at the office was some kind of haywire in an almost “Mercury must be in retrograde” kind of way, and most of it went on while I was the only person there–which was kind of unsettling. It was also Mom’s birthday so my subconscious was already raw and on edge. But I worked through it, there wasn’t a body count, and I stopped to get the mail on my way home–where I picked up the Box O’Books for Death Drop (yay!) and my Ben Pierce Photography calendar “Beneath the Waters: Images of the Atchafalaya Basin Drawdown”. Ben Pierce is an extraordinary photographer of the natural beauty of Louisiana. I follow him on Facebook and often share his work because it’s so breathtakingly beautiful and evocative; and doesn’t Atchafalaya Basin Drawdown sound like a Scotty title? I’ve been meaning to look into what precisely that means and why they are draining the basin since he started sharing images from it earlier this year; I should perhaps put that on the to-do list? While I was waiting for Paul and playing with Tug (trying to wear him out, in all honesty; he was wired like a circuit party queen last night), who met the laser light/magical red dot for the first time last night. He soon figured out where it was coming from, but still chased it none the less, and eventually when I set it down it also became a toy so there’s no telling where it is this morning. I watched another episode of Moonlighting last night which didn’t seem to hold up as well as previous ones–too much speculation about Maddie’s sex life, which was completely untoward and bothered me–and I also got caught up on Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, which I’ve never really watched very much but started this season at the urging of friends. I’ve yet to watch the reboot of New York, either. I think there’s a blog entry I need to write about reality television shows like these, which I had already started after the completion of the most recent season of Beverly Hills. The out-of-touch narcissism of the SLC women still seems fun and funny to me, while the other franchises have kind of gone off the rails with repugnant behavior (looking at you, Lisa Rinna)–but I’ll save that for the blog post about reality television; which is why I don’t really talk about these shows much on here.

I also read some more of Riley Sager’s Final Girls, which I am enjoying–even if it doesn’t seem like it. One of the casualties of the pandemic was my ability to read quickly; I don’t know what happened, but it’s entirely due to my attention span and not the quality of the books I’m reading; look at how long it took me to read Shawn’s book, which was fucking brilliant. It’s going with me to Tulane this morning so I can read more of it, and then I am coming home to work for the rest of the afternoon. I slept really well again last night. I woke up at six (I do that every morning now, regardless) but the alarm was set for seven so I stayed in bed for another hour, which felt marvelous, really. I feel very rested and centered this morning–which is lovely after the chaotic yesterday I had–and am looking forward to the weekend. I have my to-do list, which is necessary; the refrigerator is being delivered tomorrow, so there’s no point in making groceries until after it arrives (so probably Sunday morning, most like); and of course there’s always, always, always housework to do. Boxes started accumulating again in the living room in front of where the bead chest sits (and the floor’s not terribly stable), so those have to go, and I can do some cleaning before the refrigerator is delivered (we currently have an 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. window, which I assume will change tomorrow morning). The LSU game isn’t until Saturday night, and I am not certain there are any other games of interest this weekend…which doesn’t mean I won’t have a game on all day from eleven a.m. on, of course; I most likely will. (Of course, I just looked, and yes, several games of interest–Notre Dame-USC, Alabama-Arkansas, Texas A&M-Tennessee, and of course Auburn-LSU.)

And on that note, sorry to be so brief but I think I am needing to get headed into the spice mines this morning. I may be back later, I don’t know; but stranger things have indeed happened, so one can never rule anything out. If not, for sure tomorrow morning. Have a terrific Friday, Constant Reader!