Two Hundred and Sixty Six

You said "We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we in agreement.  When the overflowing scourge passes through, it shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves".  But your covenant with death shall be annulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand.  When the overflowing scourge passes through, you shall be trodden down by it.

Two Hundred and Sixty Five

I tell myself there's no reason to kill myself, because I’m as good as dead already.  But that's not why I'm still alive.

I was born into a dying world.  Everyone I loved has died, and I sat with them all—the killers and their victims.  I have always lived with death.

Two Hundred and Sixty Four

Early Friday morning Trump tweeted that he has a deadly disease.  Now it’s early Sunday morning, and he’s miraculously risen from his hospital bed.  How can those who call themselves Christians not be outraged by such blasphemy?  

Two Hundred and Sixty Three

Early yesterday morning Trump tweeted that he and Melania tested positive for COVID-19.

Why would he tweet this at 12:54 AM on a Friday morning?  Why would he tweet it at all?  If the president has a life-threatening disease, surely his doctor(s) would hold a press conference to announce it—and in prime time, not at 12:54 in the morning.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people are skeptical.  Some of the internet comments I’ve read speculate that Trump knows he did badly in his first debate with Biden, and wants an excuse to avoid the second.  But there’s no evidence that he did badly in the first debate.  Polls show that people who watched the debate had already decided who they were going to vote for, and watching the debate didn’t change their minds.

Polls also show that Trump was trailing Biden before the debate, and was still trailing him after it, so some theorize he announced he has COVID-19 in order to gain sympathy.

Some comments note that Trump asked his doctors to give him an experimental drug manufactured by a company in which he owns stock.  His ‘miraculous' recovery will no doubt increase the value of that stock.

They disagree about his motive for lying, but all agree that Trump is lying.  Usually they contrast his behavior with that of his predecessor and/or his putative successor.  Americans still can’t accept that all presidents lie.  The only question is what they lie about.

I find the campaign ads more interesting than the debates.  The Republican Party’s pro-Trump ads are laughably inept.  The Republican-funded Lincoln Project is creating better pro-Biden ads than the Democrats are.  Everyone knows the USA is headed for another financial collapse, and it's obvious that Republicans want a Democrat to be president when that happens while Democrats want a Republican to be president.

But I no longer find anything that passes for politics interesting.  I’m tired of deceitful politicians and the self-deception of those who vote for them. 

Two Hundred and Sixty One

I watched the Trump/Biden debate last night, hoping it would be an amusing disaster.  Unfortunately neither said or did anything outrageous enough to stop the show.  After four years of Trump, what used to be considered outrageous is now the norm. 

He spouted his usual nonsense, making Biden sound almost reasonable by comparison.  It’s not that Trump can’t lie convincingly, but that he doesn’t even try because he knows his fans enjoy his antics.  

The pundits who followed their debate, and told the audience what we’d just watched, demonstrated that politicians aren’t the only ones who can no longer think or speak articulately.  Pundits used to be articulate, if not always honest, but now they're neither.    

What will happen when we no longer have this buffoon to distract us?  At first there will be the usual honeymoon period, during which the unrealistic expectations raised by the new president’s campaign promises are crushed by his refusal to keep them.  Then we'll be faced again with the same problems we faced before Trump blundered into the White House and distracted our attention from them with his antics.

I can’t believe anyone really expects things to change for the better when Biden becomes president, which they apparently did expect when Obama became president.  The differences between Obama and his Republican rivals were literally skin deep, but the differences between Biden and Trump are even more superficial, so we'll have to work harder than we usually do to ignore reality when Biden becomes president.     

Two hundred and Sixty

We're children, dying young no matter how long we've lived because we never grow up.

We're orphans, survivors of the storm who’ve been cast away on the shore of that sea from which we came and to which we'll return.

We tell ourselves our parents will come one day to rescue us and take us home.  But they never do.

Eventually we forget from where we came and to where we’re going.  We spend our days playing with each other, and killing each other, because we're children and life is a game.

We also work, building castles out of sand on the sand.  And when the sea washes our castles away, we build them again.

But now we know no one’s coming to rescue us.  There is only the sea.  And after we’ve turned to dust, it will dry up.  Then the seabed, exposed at last when no one’s left to see it, will also turn to dust.

Two Hundred and Fifty Nine

She said if I died, she’d die with me.  Now she’s dead and I’m alive.  I thought of that as I watched Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev's, not Shakespeare’s) earlier tonight.

It’s more difficult to translate a play into a ballet than into any other art, because a play is words and ballet's action.  But Prokofiev understood this play's about youth, and ballet is the ideal art in which to depict the physicality of youth.  Children act before they think, let alone speak.

The young love to live, and live to love.  For them, the end of love is death.  They die when they learn to imitate their quarreling elders. 

When I was young, some learned adult claimed children don’t know they’ll die one day.  Children understand death better than adults do because they’re closer to it, having just begun to live.  It’s life that’s a mystery to them.  Only after they’ve learned to love life do they fear losing it, and tell themselves some part of them lives on after they die.  The young have no need of religion.

When I was young, art was for some of us what religion used to be for most of us.  Now we worship the tribe, which is not religion but superstition.

I tried to kill myself after she died, but I won’t again.  She said she never wept because weeping is a display for others, a bid for their sympathy.  So is suicide.