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  • Ättestupa

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Corona Luna

    Wednesday gratefuls: Garbage collectors, workers at power plants, cleaners in all places, showing us how important “menial” labor can be. Kate in her sewing room!! Yeah. Sewed on some buttons, made some mug rugs. Seoah doing grocery shopping for us. Brenton and his many pictures, videos, obvious joy being with Murdoch. Concerned friends. Upcoming PSA blood draw, Lupron, visit with Eigner.

    Another, grimmer topic. Wanna sacrifice yourself for the economy, grandpa? Any of my readers of a certain age going with Dan Patrick? “‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?…If that is the exchange, I’m all in,” Patrick said.” Patrick is Lt. Gov. of Texas, Dan Patrick. The quote is from a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson.

    Patrick made his senicidic comment after Trump declared he wanted to get the economy going by Easter, “This country’s not made to be shut down.” Only after being told that if he did, deaths would be in the hundreds of thousands, and his lackey Lindsey Graham said, “You would own those deaths.” did he pull back. OK, we’ll open it up on April 30th, he decided. Why April 30? Who knows?

    Last year when Kate had a period of feeling better we went to see, first, “The Kitchen”, a women take over the mob movie with Elizabeth Moss and Melissa McCarthy, in return Kate agreed to go see Midsommar. “It’s Scandinavian,” I said.

    Hmm, yeah. Sorta. I’m a fan of horror movies (not slasher flicks. Ugh.). Hammer Films. The Thing. The Fly. Rosemary’s Baby. The Exorcist. The Shining. The Omen. Creature of the Black Lagoon. Not many get made that are thoughtful, even beautiful. The Horror of Dracula, a 1958 Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee movie in the Hammer Film series, was beautiful. So was Polanski’s 1967 The Fearless Vampire Killers.

    There are now two that are both beautiful and thoughtful: The Wickerman (1973) and Midsommar (2019). The Wickerman has a Celtic folklore background while Midsommar uses Swedish themes. I’ve learned in doing some research that these are folk horror movies. A new genre to me by name, but not by preference.

    Anyhow, in Midsomar, Ari Aster, director and writer, draws on Swedish folklore. Some of the ideas there are familiar to you like the Maypole, the colorful Swedish garments, white trimmed in flowers and runes, all that blond hair, and festive bonfires outdoors. And, yes, naked Swedes can be seen dancing around midsommar bonfires. Look it up on your interweb.

    Aster also draws on one aspect of Swedish folklore embedded enough in the culture to give a name to certain high cliffs and promontories: Ättestupa. In prehistoric times, Swedes believe, elders threw themselves from the attestupa when they were no longer able to care for themselves or assist around the camp. Senicide. Though attestupa may have been challenged among folklorists, senicide is/was real. Elders wandering away from the village to starve, active euthanasia of the elderly, or, as Lt. Patrick suggests, economic senicide.

    The most disturbing scenes in Midsomar come during the attestupa. The Harga collective using seasonal language for life’s stages: Spring: 1-18, Summer: 19-36, Fall: 37-54, and Winter: 55-72. This last season, Winter, is the mentoring season. At 72 Winter ends, and so do you. That, for the Harga, was when you headed for the attestupa.

    Midsomar is on Prime Video right now, free. If these kind of movies fit into your cinema way, I’d encourage you to watch it. It’s a very good example of the folk horror genre. If you watch it, let me know what you think of the last scene.


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  • Seeing

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Corona Luna

    Monday gratefuls: Corn dogs. State Fair corn dogs. The Minnesota State Fair. The Great Minnesota Get Together. The Great U.S. stay apart. The bailout. I think. Being alone with Kate and Seoah. Those pictures of Murdoch from Brenton. Life in a world historical event. Life. Death. The power of Monday.

    Here’s what I’ve seen. A black SUV, a Lexus, next to me at a stoplight. Latex gloved hands on the steering wheel. On the road to Loveland Saturday all the LED road signs read: Avoid Non-Essential Travel. A cascade of it’s gonna be later messages from Instacart. So many maps and graphs and charts. Fewer cars on Black Mountain Drive, especially when I go out for the newspaper around 5:30 am. Empty parking lots. A closed outlet mall. So many e-mails starting with we care about you and that’s why our business is doing X. Friends and family on zoom. The rabbi on zoom, singing about breath. A sign at Bergen Bark Inn. We’re taking care of the dogs of essential workers like doctors, nurses, firefighters, police, grocery store workers. The worker at Starbucks extending a credit card reader so I could insert the card, then remove it on my own. My own gloved hand on the hose nozzle at the Phillips 66. That bottle of hand sanitizer in my cup holder. Seoah with her lysol spray hitting each package that gets delivered.

    When will it ever end? When will it ever end?

    And, yet. A moment in time like no other. Yes, the Spanish Flu. Yes. But, no. Not in this millennia. Not in my lifetime. Not in this century.

    The first quarter of 2020 has not gone so well. What with all the dog bites, then Gertie’s death, then the plague. Yes, the Moronic plague. And, the virus. True.

    However, I find it exciting, too. What will happen next? How bad can this get? Wow. Really? The ways people are coping. The empty streets of big cities around the world. The bravery. The stupidity and the cupidity.

    Like one facebook meme said: This is the first time we could save the world by watching television.


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  • Resilience Strategies

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Corona Luna

    Thursday gratefuls: Kate’s fingers healing, slowly. (due to her Reynaud’s disease) Zoom. The wire that brings in the internet. The internet, making this whole situation more bearable. Books. Authors like Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Isaac Asimov, Neal Stephens, William Gibson. Emotions like sadness, grief. The notion and practice of resilience.

    Here’s an excellent written out Tedtalk on resilience by Lucy Hone*. Three strategies are the focus of the piece: 1. Know that suffering is part of life. 2. Carefully choose where you’re directing your attention. 3. Ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing helping me or harming me?”

    1. Know that suffering is part of life. At seventy plus number one is a lesson most of us have learned. Parental deaths. Serious illness. Depression. Failure. Divorce. Life has difficult, damned difficult moments. The book of Job is an object lesson in recognizing suffering as part of life, not as something happening only to you. That’s the main point here: you’re not being picked on, Covid19 is not the first, nor will it be the last instance of suffering.

    2. Carefully choose where you’re directing your attention. Number two may not be so obvious. I’m going to quote the first paragraph from Ms. Hone’s talk:

    “I’ve found that resilient people have a habit of realistically appraising situations, and typically they manage to focus on the things they can change and learn to accept the things they can’t. This is a vital and learnable skill. “

    And, she says further on: “Whatever you do, make an intentional, deliberate, ongoing effort to tune in to what’s good in your world.” If your media choices right now focus on the next coronavirus news, you might want to consider a diet. Say, reading the newspaper or watching the news or listening to the podcast at a certain time, for a particular length of time.

    I have, for years, kept a good news file. I toss in there certain birthday cards, notes from friends, anniversary cards and notes. Notices from things I’ve helped make happen. Pictures of kids and grandkids, dogs. Anything that’s personal and positive. If I start to turn down the blues trail, I take it out. This could be done on a computer, too. Just open a file, cut and paste into it.

    3. Ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing helping me or harming me?” I read this article several months ago, then slipped it into my resilience notebook on Evernote. I’d forgotten the first two strategies, but this one stayed with me.

    It’s so easy to slip into patterns, habits, routines that are unproductive or down right harmful. With this question though you can challenge yourself, ask yourself, is this worth it?

    I know, for example, that if the melancholy I felt yesterday were to continue, it would be harming me. It’s very instructive to have this question to pose. If it’s not helping me, what can I do to alter it? How can I choose to focus myself differently?

    Once in a while I get stuck in an anger loop with Kate. A perceived slight, an argument, just the frustrations of being together most of the time. I’m imagining this is an issue right across the country now. This doesn’t help resolve whatever is bothering me, or help her. It hinders me, hinders us.

    This question helps me remember that I can choose a different path. We can talk it out, decide to handle things in a different manner. We’re not destined to stay in a negative place.

    Resilience is a key to staying afloat at any time. In this, the time of the virus, it is a necessary skill, one which, if you don’t have it now, it behooves you to learn. More on this later.

    *Lucy Hone is a codirector at the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience and a research associate at AUT University in Auckland. She is also the author of the book Resilient Grieving.


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  • Evil Bastard

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mammon’s dumbest disciple wants to become Moloch’s agent, too. Today’s Washington Post: “Trump says he may soon push businesses to reopen, defying the advice of coronavirus experts” Since infants and the elderly die most, he’s trying to feed infants to the Dow Jones average. I don’t know any gods that wanted elderly sacrifices, though there must have been one.


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  • Thanks for coming to work

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the 1% sliver of the Leap Year Moon

    Monday gratefuls: A chicken! King Sooper had a chicken! I got the second to last one. Drug makers. Pharmacists. Nurses, especially nurses. All health care workers, all around the world. Politicians, in particular U.S. governors and mayors, actually confronting the crisis. Democrat senators holding the line for working people. Fear. Keeps people inside.

    Grateful for Brother Mark, confronting a difficult time in Saudi Arabia, doing well. Staying in touch with his colleagues, learning new tech. So many of us have to make dramatic changes in our working lives. Those who can. Hurray!

    I think about all those folks like waiters and chefs and busboys and retail store workers whose jobs have disappeared. A good time to be retired. A good time to have sold your company. Though there is that falling market thing.

    I’m on daf 8b, the second side of page 8, of Shabbat, the second tractate of the Talmud, a collection of commentary on the mishnah, written legal theory from the older oral tradition. I just got daf 17 of Shabbat today, so I’m closing in on being current. I’ll get back to one a day this week for sure.

    Went to the grocery store, King Sooper, yesterday. Found, 9 days after I started looking, a whole chicken. That means I can make the chicken noodle soup that Kate likes so well. After my workout this morning. No more than 3 chicken products, no more than 3 ground beef. Signs. King Sooper looked somewhat less devastated than Safeway did last week. Perhaps the panicked ones have begun to calm down, realizing this is a marathon, not a sprint.

    Pharmaceuticals. I went to King Sooper because I needed to pick up an albuterol inhaler that I use for exercise. Oh, the clerk said, I have two for you. Of the same thing? Yes, I’ll take the $10 one. She laughed. The other, brand name inhaler, was $94. Same drug, same amount, same delivery method. Which one would you choose? Everybody got a good laugh.

    I tell each clerk thank you for coming to work. We need you and you’re here. At the liquor store I asked the guy how business was. Slow today, but really busy last week. Well. You might have to help out the other small businesses. You’re right, he said. I might.

    King Sooper was not crowded unlike my Safeway trip. In Safeway the aisles were full, people looked dazed. At King Sooper yesterday folks looked like purposeful shoppers, finding what they needed, not in OMG I gotta get to the toilet paper aisle mode. The tables were gone, but the in-story Starbucks was open.

    Tried to get some takeout from Rocky Mountain Wraps, but they had closed. Sunday hours. We’re encouraged here to get takeout from restaurants and tip well, try to help the small business folks. I plan to over the next weeks. It’s nice to have some variety. Seoah made a shrimp and pasta meal last night that was very good.

    Saw today that restrictions need to get tighter if we’re to control the viruses spread. OK with us.


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