Random Thoughts

This has been a difficult year goes the cliché. Since past March the social world has shrunk and my beloved movie theaters have shuttered. I don’t know when I’ll feel comfortable enough to return to my aisle seat in the center of the room. I haven’t owned a television set in years and have taken to streaming over my 32 inch computer monitor. It is a diminished though adequate enough experience. Sometimes we watch an actual film, but mostly we consume British detective shows: Lewis, Morse, Vera, Mrs. Fisher, Broadchurch. Unforgotten, Shetland, Pie in the Sky, Murder in Paradise, Scott and Bailey.  Lately I’ve thought about purchasing a wide screen set but I’m reticent of erecting a large eye in my living room and draping power cords that would look like snakes crawling along and down the wall.  Daughter suggests that I encase the screen in a cabinet that shutters; that would be, I guess. one solution, but that still wouldn’t address the question of the visible cords. I guess I could sell more of my books (gasp!!) and create a bit more wall space in my office, but that solution though is anathema to me.
     I read a great many detective novels. I have taken to considering why I do so and have tentatively considered that such study of self and them might be a new project. At the center of these novels is always a murder (though in Harlan Coben’s The Boy in the Woods that murder had place many years ago and is not even the focus of the detective’s search), and the character of the detective is a central interest. Death is something in which I have long had interest and even concern, and during this pandemic year a great many people have died. Right now I especially enjoy the Quirke novels of Benjamin Black, the pseudonym for John Banville. And what is so interesting about these books is that they are novels first and detective stories after. That is, they are truly novels with complex characters and the stories aren’t plots driving characters but are characters driving plots.
     I have during these months baked a great many breads and muffins and scones and have taken to gifting these products to friends and neighbors. Even before the shut-in I had returned to baking, but during this perilous and isolated time whenever I would suffer anxiety I would turn to baking. Before the rush to sourdough during the pandemic I maintained a nice rye starter and have since October grown a white sour that ferments even as I write. Yes, anxious am I.

     I desperately await January 20^th and the inauguration of Joe Biden as President of the United States. It interests me that no one refers to him as Joseph Biden . . . he is forever Joe! Even more I anticipate the departure from the White House of Trump and his sycophantic minions. His presidency has frightened and embarrassed me; his language has degraded public discourse, his personal attacks against a whole assortment of good and tried people has poisoned the common air; his toleration of nazis and white supremacists and his obvious racism and misogyny have created in this nation a dangerous environment of hatred and violence. Trump’s paranoid and unhinged rantings about an election he has fairly and decidedly lost has endangered the very foundation of democracy--the vote. Of his almost 50 lawsuits attempting to overturn the election results, he has won none. I think that we will breathe easily again in four weeks but until then I remain concerned. And even after episodes of PTSD resulting from his reign of terror will disturb my rest. He has been and remains still very, very dangerous.

     Of course I have stopped my gym membership during these months. I walk regularly but now I get chastised by my iPhone for walking less today then yesterday, less this week than during the last one, though on the whole I am walking more steps this year than I did last year. The phone measures my distance, number of steps, step length, double support time (?) walking speed, and walking asymmetry (?). Measuring my walk is more tiring than the walk itself.

     And Anxious Am I has been sent to an editor for his advice. Anxious I am.