It’s Wednesday afternoon, and hot once again: 96 degrees F. and heading for 100 — a bit cooler than earlier predictions. After a relatively mild June and July, a bunch of broiling days in a row.
And yes, another indictment week, full of news plus lots of sound and fury.
I didn’t create this blog to add to or delve into the morass of blog posts, essays, op-eds, sound bites & other self-conscious “takes” on things like the multiple legal charges against our former President, and now many members of his tawdry entourage. I mention that news only because — like the rotten, horribly hot weather Portland’s been experiencing since Sunday — it’s another element of our new reality that can’t be ignored or escaped, merely (if that) survived.
This blog (Substack calls it a “newsletter”) is titled “Learning to Live” not because I’m audacious or arrogant enough to try to teach you, gentle reader, how to live, but because I’m still learning myself, and using this tool to do so.
Attempting to teach myself, by plumbing my past and the depths of my psyche, how I can “live” better, do better, focus more, and — as parents love to say, at least in popular lore — “make good choices.”
For a quick taste of what happens when one doesn’t make good choices, jump into the quagmire mentioned above.
Hard to believe, though, even for a crusty old guy like me, how many people in contemporary America have fallen for such a contemptible con man, and how horribly corrupt and just plain asinine Trump and his enablers have become.
Yes, I said the name, but that’s as far as I’m going to go.
And yet, of course, one could say it’s par for the course. Human history is littered with the damage done by psychopaths like our former President. Many of them, like Fred Trump’s unloved and unloving son, deeply scared and scary people: Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar etc.
And that’s not even counting the billionaires who now run our lives and much of the planet — and even, in Elon Musk’s case, the empty space surrounding it.
I’m not sure where all this is leading me. It’s a journey. In the heat, in the tortured torrent of news — much of Maui in ashes, Lahaina gone, another proof of concept that the world’s climate is in turmoil — where is one to go, what is one to think or feel?
Oddly, like many lucky people on the planet, my life is neatly bifurcated.
My personal sphere is, so far, largely untouched. My wife, kids and grandkids, family and friends are a constant foundation, both old friends, stretching back to junior high, and new ones I’ve made here, one year into this adventure. Except for a few scorching days, Portland’s weather is quite bearable, even when the winter’s greyness and cold chill a longtime (and seriously spoiled) Californian to the marrow.
But the wider world. That’s quite a different story.
Yes. Every word.
"tortured torrent of news"....great line.