There’s this; and then there’s my little red leather alligator-looking daybook of fine Italian tannery that I write in with ink. And there’s no overwriting that. There’s no losing the file into cybergarbaagge. There’s no worry that it will be obsolete someday, like the floppy disk or the zip-file, or the old Bernoulli files.

Man has been writing on paper, or some surface (I’d love to have a tall stack of vellum sheets to write on) since God taught Adam and Eve to read and write, and then told them to teach their children, and then to write a book of remembrance. Yes, books can get lost, or water-damaged, or burned down in the house; but how old is the oldest book? (And how old is the oldest computer file still electrified somewhere?)

So, double duty. I can’t give up the one for the other, or the other for the one.

Who wrote over that one million -plus-file and lost the last week’s entries? Moi.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

☩

How can I have thoughts of staying to myself when uxorial duties dictate otherwise?

We are all guilty. Culpability is our commonality. What are you guilty of? Is it the same as me? For every human there is a different level and genre of guilt. Some are criminal. Some are heinous malefactors. Some are miscreants. Some are devious. Some are deviants. Some are très annoying. Some are just stupid.

I guess I’m something like that. I went to the electronics store and asked about a USB today, for my new All-in-one I got for Christmas, and when I was served, I said thank you and walked out of the store—almost. Before the outer doors I suddenly thought, “Wait! Did I pay for this? No! I did not pay for this! What the ???” And immediately turned around and went in to pay, thanking Heaven that I was not stopped by thugs-in-blue security guys. What would have been worse would have been to not get caught and realize later that I had walked out without paying. I would have had to make a trip back just for that, and then try to explain what happened. “I am not a crook!”

God forgives people.

“Dieu me pardonnera—c’est son métier.” –Heine

But He forgives to save us from the full effects of the punishments for sin ; and there must be a price for peccancy. Better to have never sinned than to have sinned and … wait… that’s loved and lost than never to have… something.

Dona nobis pacem.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. My last confession was some time ago.

I ate too much. I fell asleep during the sermon. But only for a few seconds. At a time. And I stared too long at a few people. I was reading and nodding off when I could have been having a conversation. About what, I really don’t know. But I should have tried. I bought a big screen monitor and nobody knows about it yet. I think I’ll give it to myself for Christmas. But I can’t say it’s from Santa, so I’ll have to confess that I just went and bought it. But I saved a hundred bucks, maybe more. I’m not ready for Christmas, in a way; and in another way I wish it were already January, and have done with the whole dang thing. I left all the shopping up to her…or rather, all the decisions. But then, what can I do? She says, “What do you think about this for so-and-so?” and I say, “I don’t know, I don’t think they’ll like that so much…” and she says, “You never think anybody will like anything. I don’t know why I even ask you.” And I don’t either. I try to be honest. I really don’t think they’ll like that crap. But at least I do go around most of the time with her, and it’s me what pulls out the credit card and signs my life away. “I have to tell you something,” she says. “This year, I don’t want to have any of your negative attitude about buying stuff for everybody. Every year for years now you’ve made me almost sick at my stomach [she means literally] with your attitude of we can’t afford this or we shouldn’t spend that.” OK. What about all those Christmases where I got sick [literally—and I mean, where one side of my face got stiff and I could barely move my jaw] from the worry of money, where we would get the money for the January house payment, because of spending for Christmas. Anyway, you can see, father, that I am not very repentant on this yet.

Well, that’s all I can think of right now.

I am sorry for these and all the sins of my past life.

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. But most of all because I have offended Thee, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life. Amen.

For His mercy endures forever.

I confess. I am content to be alone. Not, perhaps, a true solipsist, but nevertheless untroubled by solitude. At least for a length of time. But the other part of the confession, if it is to be a true confession: I have learned, through long and arduous grasping and gaining, to love family. All my blood. The evidence is that I have given up what I had for me, what I wanted for me, for them. Time. Money. Comfort. Pride. Justice. Image.

Mea culpa

mea culpa

mea maxima culpa.

mea maxima culpa.

Mea culpa

Mea culpa

Mea maxima culpa

Je naquis sans cœur.

Tout enfant ne s’intéresse qu’à lui-même, et son amour, on dit, n’est autre que l’amour propre. Mais moi je crois que le bébé aime sa mère, pas par intérêt mais par affection. Le bébé aime sa mère pour commencer, peut-être, parce que sa mère l’aime à priori. En grandissant, avec le temps qui passe, l’enfant commence à aimer d’autres. C’est peut-être d’abord après sa mère son père ou, peut-être, son frère ou sa sœur. Après encore un peu plus de temps, l’enfant commence à aimer les gens, certaines d’entre elles.

Pour moi c’était peut-être autrement. Je n’étais pas forcément avare ni si égoïste, mais je ne pensais pas aux autres. Je n’étais pas misanthrope, mais je ne sentais pas les sentiments de fraternité envers autrui. Mon cœur ne s’enflait pas d’émotions envers aucun autre, même ceux de ma propre famille.

Autant je manquais en matières de l’amour, autant je manquais aussi en matières de la haine. Je ne haïssais personne. J’ignorais carrément cette émotion. A vrai dire, si je manquais en matières de l’amour ou de la haine, c’était plutôt que je manquais en matières de l’émotion.

Jeune homme, j’étais pris des passions de jeune homme, des émotions plutôt physiques. Mon premier amour, l’amour pour une jeune fille, ce n’était pas vraiment l’amour, pas du tout, c’était une passion émanant en entier de l’amour propre et des passions et sentiments du corps. Et je ne me souviens plus du tout d’ailleurs, de qui aurait pu être mon premier amour.

Bien sûr j’aimais, jeune homme, ma famille, mais pas suffisamment. La plénitude de l’amour c’est, dans les mots du Christ, que Personne n’a un plus grand amour que celui-ci, savoir, quand quelqu’un expose sa vie pour ses amis. Ou selon la version en anglais, donne sa vie pour ses amis. Je n’aurais jamais dans ma jeunesse eu le courage de penser une telle chose. Il y avait cette fois-là où j’ai fermé la porte de la voiture sur la main de mon frère Michael, et je me sentais si triste de lui avoir causé une telle douleur.

C’était quand j’étais missionnaire que je commençais à éveiller en moi-même mon cœur. J’avais de la peine à voir quelqu’un d’autre qui souffrait. Ça me faisait mal de voir des gens qui étaient en fait des étrangers refuser la vérité que je leur offrais. Pour moi ce n’était pas des étrangers, mais proprement dit, mes frères et mes sœurs, bien qu’eux-mêmes ne l’aient pas admis. Je voyais qu’ils auraient pu avoir un bonheur qui les échappait, et ils refusaient. Plus fin, j’avais de la peine à voir que quelqu’un faisait un mauvais choix. Est-ce que c’était de mes affaires, ça? Oui, parce que je les aimais. Je commençais à aimer.

Et puis j’ai vu Marlyn. Avec le peu d’amour dont j’étais capable je l’ai épousée. Et cet amour, sapin d’amour, croissait, se développait, grandissait parce qu’elle m’aimait en retour. Et ensuite les enfants, mes enfants, qui me forçaient à aimer encore davantage.

Quand on dit “amour,” et surtout quand on l’écrit en français, on pense tout naturellement à l’éros. Mais je n’ai aucunement parlé ici de cette sorte de l’amour. Et pour en finir, j’ai compris, enfin, comment j’ai trouvé mon cœur, et pourquoi je peux maintenant aimer: Nos ergo diligamus Deum, quoniam Deus prior dilexit nos. Jean IV.xix.

I understand how certain medications can have a palliative effect on pain. I am myself the beneficiary of that. I think it is possible that the body could for whatever reason not be producing some bodily chemical, or not be delivering it to the needed organ or area, to affect mental attitudes and then perhaps even actions. So I suppose that certain people who have been diagnosed as bi-polar might be suffering quite simply from a bodily dysfunction. But even though I can see that this is quite possible, and even though I want to believe it, I am always suspicious of the doctors when it comes to the things that deal with the mind, and therefore with actions or choices. But let us suppose that’s true—body chemistry manages or affects mental conditions.

So when one is suffering from physical pain, it is a good and proper thing to take medications to palliate the pain. To ‘manage’ the pain, as they say in med-speak. And I suppose that it is a good and proper thing to take your meds if they keep you mentally stable.

However, I just can’t see the difference, other than legal or criminal, in taking medications or any substance to forget your troubles, and the junkie shooting up heroin or the boozer knocking down a fifth, or the pot head smoking weed—to forget your troubles.

I have felt the onset of an anxiety attack. It was when I took a medication to alleviate physical pain. I took some pain medication with the added something that makes it PM. Something—PM. I suppose the PM stands for “post-meridian”, ergo night time, ergo sleep-aid. In the darkest of the night I woke up thinking something was wrong. At first I thought it might be physical, and I sat up on the edge of the bed, in the dark, and immediately concluded that it was not physical. Then my thoughts turned to the possibility of an intruder; but there was no indication of that. I sat there worrying, and soon came to the thought that I was anxious—and therefore I was having an anxiety attack. A few months later I forgot all about that experience and took another dose of Something—PM. And I had the same experience. So I’ve never taken any since. Nothing with PM, and nothing to help me get to sleep (except chocolate milk with a third of it heavy whipping cream).

A medication caused my mental condition. Can a medication do the opposite? Take away your anxiety? I suppose so, since there are many anti-anxiety medications prescribed by doctors. But I suppose also that that’s one way of looking at weed or heroin or alcohol.

Is there a legitimate medication that works solely on the chemical, medical contributors to anxiety, that does not remove you from reality? If not, if the medication is to keep you from having an anxiety attack when the cause of anxiety is behavior or the onslaught of life, the consequences of the actions of self or others—not some chemical condition of the body—then what’s the difference, like I said other than legal or moral, between that medication and self-medication through pot or whiskey or heroin?

I said last year—to myself—If my problems are chemical, my solutions might be chemical. So if I have an imbalance in my body chemistry, I could take some chemical medication to correct the problem, be it physical or mental. But what if my problems are the conditions surrounding me? Exterior, non-bodily, conditions, the choices of others, or my own, or social conditions, or a reversal of fortunes—do I take a medication to relieve the pain of mind and heart that comes from the actions of others? Or to avoid the consequences of my own actions, guilt, sadness, regret? Do I take a pill so as not to have to deal mentally with sorrow and regret, guilt?

What time is it?
That depends on where you are. If you are in London it's 5:36am, but if you're in Kansas it's11:37. That's because it took a minute to figure out the difference. But really, if you are in western Colorado and at the very end of the time zone, isn't it earlier than somebody over in Hays or even Denver, where the edge of the sun has already gone by at some point? I mean, if it's one hour from Mesquite, Nevada to somewhere out in the ocean off the coast of Cali, isn't it later in Mesquite than in Monterey, just because they are on different ends of the time zone? and the time zone covers an hour?
So what do you do with that extra time if you live on the far side? And who gets the nine-tenths of a cent that goes with a gallon of gas?
And if you die, do you have on a robe when you go over into the spirit world? Or the clothes you had on here? And if you were in a hospital when you died, do you stand over there, newly arrived in that sunny place, in a hospital gown, with the crack in the back? Or do you have on clothes typical of the kind of clothes you wore the most here? Or just the standard issue white robe?
And when you get there, do you even remember that you were doing something here, and left in the middle of it? Even if it was sleeping?
And is there some sort of jet-lag getting there? It would seem not, since it's not far, you just go from one plane into another, from gross existence into a superfine matter that is totally undetectable with all our gross-matter scientific stuff here? I mean, you don't really go anywhere, you just change matter. You leave behind the gross matter and your spirit, made of that stuff so fine it is undetectable, goes over there where it's on a par with all the rest of the matter over there, so what could not be discerned much less handled here is phenomenologically real over there. Like clothes and stuff.
Anyway, I guess I'll know soon enough.

Mea culpa

Mea culpa

Mea maxima culpa

Ubi sunt qui ante nos in hoc mundo vivere?

Where have they gone ? I know full well the answer. We pass from this life into the next. We are still in our Second Estate there, just as here, there still in the existence that took on mortality here. We are mortals. Mors=death. Mortal=you’re going to die. We are mortals: we are dying. “I die daily.”

« Tous les jours vont à la mort; le dernier y arrive. » —Montaigne, in his essay Que philosopher c’est apprendre a mourir.

Do we need to learn how to die ? I think it comes kinda automatically. Coulda said naturally. But then some are not natural. I’ll choose natural, given the choice.

Where are they? I will soon follow, and then I’ll know all about it. Farther along, I’ll understand why.

There on the other side of Jordan, when I reach that Canaan’s land, and meet with all who have gone before. Thing is, what separates paradise from prison?

I was born during the war, and brought up in the War. I was born in 1942, and my father was wearing the uniform of the United States Army Air Corps. When I was a baby he was in North Africa and Italy. I was three years old when World War II ended. But I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, when the Civil War was still going on. The Boys in Gray furled their flags and took down the Stainless Banner in 1865, but that was not the end of it. (It was also called the "War between the States.")

It's very difficult for me to express what the mentalité was that I had and that I grew up in, but it's even more difficult for people to overcome their prejudicial view of anyone who grew up in the South back then, or even today. Look at movies and TV shows about Southerners, and they’re all portrayed as ignorant, bigoted hillbillies or mean prejudiced people. That’s because the people who made those movies and TV shows are all bigoted, mean-spirited and supercilious Liberals, mostly Yankees.

When I was in elementary school, we started every day off by reading a scripture, saying the Lord's prayer, saying the pledge of allegiance to the flag, which was on the right hand corner of the blackboard, then turning to face the Confederate flag on the left hand corner of the blackboard and singing "Dixie."

When I was in the sixth grade, we learned all of Stephen Foster's songs. I went to Stephen Foster Elementary School in Gainesville. We moved to Jacksonville, on Green Street first, and then to King Street, and I always regretted that when I was ready for high school we moved to Arlington, because on King Street I was headed for Robert E. Lee High School. From an early age I revered General Robert E. Lee.

When we went to football games, we stood when they raised the American flag, and as it went slowly up the pole we sang with all our hearts "The Star-spangled Banner." (First verse only.) Then the very second it was over, automatically, everybody sang "Dixie" —then when it ended everybody gave the “Rebel yell.”

I was taught to reverence the memory of the "Boys in Gray"; and the monument to the Sons of the Confederacy, the soldiers fallen in the Civil War battles, was a beautiful part of most city parks and squares. Cemeteries had little Confederate flags on many of the old graves.

That flag, the battle flag of the Confederacy, was a treasure of heritage to me. I grew up with it. Nowadays people see it who don’t have my background and they think KKK, or neo-Nazis and skinheads; or they think it stands for an approval of bigotry, prejudice, hatred, even slavery. In a way, that flag has been sullied by stupid, small-minded people, like those in the present-day KKK or the skinheads. And they are certainly not all, not even most, Southerners. Or to use a modern word, that flag has been “co-opted,” like the rainbow, which stands for God’s covenant and our obligation to keep the commandments, that has come to mean acceptance of sexual perversion.

But to me the Confederate flag—the Stars and Bars, the Stainless Banner, or the Battle Flag—still evokes a thrill of the kind of pride I also feel for the Stars and Stripes. It’s a patriotic feeling. My feelings for that flag do not diminish at all my feeling for the American flag, nor for the country for which it stands. It would be the same thing as someone who reveres their state’s flag as well as the flag of the United States. In fact, there is all the more reverence for the Stars and Stripes than for the Confederate flag.

To me that flag never stood for slavery. It was never a pro-slavery, pro-bigotry, pro-hatred symbol. It was a symbol representing a tradition, a heritage, a region, a culture, a language. And when men carried it freshly made into battle in the Civil War, it didn’t mean they were fighting for slavery. If any man of them thought that, it would only have been a handful in an army of thousands—as many historians have noted.

Rather, to those Boys in Grey it stood for loyalty to home and family, and a way of life. It stood for the right of self-determination and a struggle against domineering oppression. It stood for states’ rights, for home and for family.

I didn’t know much history when I was a teenager thrilled to see that flag wave; but I certainly didn’t think of slavery or prejudice. It didn’t mean I wanted to bring back slavery; it didn’t mean I was sad the days of slavery were over. Slavery never was associated in my mind with that flag. Yes, I was naïve in many ways about a lot of things, but I also saw that my peers, the kids around me in school who stood and cheered the Confederate flag, thought about it kind of the same way as I did. I never heard anybody say different. Nobody I knew thought of slavery as anything but evil and heinous, no matter who might be the slave. But we all felt a pride of place, of people, in that flag.

Now, many people who did not grow up understanding what that flag means, want to ban it, eradicate it from history, and blot it out of my heritage. That flag is not a swastika. The Boys in Grey—the Confederate soldiers—were civil and disciplined when they marched into towns or villages or farms. They were by and large respectful, and did as little harm as possible, as an army, by general orders, to the populace. This is noted by many historians, and contrasted to the Union soldiers. There was no equivalent by the Confederate soldiers to what the Yankees did, especially General Sherman as he marched through Georgia to the sea, with his campaign of total destruction. The Confederate flag does not stand for destruction and pillaging. It does not stand for pogroms, concentration camps, SS or brown-shirts, like the swastika. There is no vile culture to be removed by removing the Confederate flag and its tradition, as with denazification and the swastika. Banning the Confederate flag, removing it from tradition and history, is more like the Soviet edicts against Christians when they banned worship, imprisoned and executed thousands of priests, and burned thousands of churches or turned them into barns.

At the end of WWII in Europe there were the Nuremberg trials. At the end of the Civil War, upon hearing the news of the cessation of hostilities, President Lincoln asked the United States Army Band to play “Dixie.” What a contrast.

The Conquered Banner

Furl that Banner for ‘tis weary,

Round its staff ‘tis drooping dreary,

Furl it, fold it, it is best...

For there’s not a man to wave it.

And there's not a man to wave it.

In the blood that heroes gave it,

And its foes now scorn and brave it,

Furl it, hide it, let it rest.

My great grandmother told of when she was a little girl fleeing out to Talbot Island to escape the murder and rapine and "total war" of Sherman's Yankees. They went through Georgia to the sea, and to Jacksonville, where they fought a skirmish and burned the city. Talbot Island was an island in the sea, out from the mouth of the St. John's River, a safe haven.

When I saw Yankees, they were tourists coming from New York or New Jersey, and their manners (or rather lack of), and their rough speech and brusque, rude ways convinced me that everything I'd ever heard about Yankees was true.

People now stereotype me and Southerners as racially bigoted—that is, as possessing a hatred of blacks and a penchant to mistreat them. But I was always taught, in very pointed ways, to respect them and treat them kindly and with courtesy. And looking back, even though there was a great gulf between black and white—including separate bathrooms and drinking fountains in Woolworth's—and even some antinomic antipathy, there was also a sort of symbiotic understanding.

Once I was talked into going with a schoolmate to his father's work after school and getting a ride home with him instead of taking the school bus home. We lived in Arlington, on the east side of the St. John’s River, and in a new area of subdivisions, and there was not yet a school ready for us. I think I was in the ninth grade. We were bussed across the Matthews Bridge, over the St. John's River, to a school right in the middle of a black area of town. (In the days of segregation, there was "colored town" and no whites lived there, and no blacks lived in white neighborhoods. The lines were quite distinct. But when I was ten or eleven we lived on King Street, and I remember that only a few blocks away, across the creek, there were colored people in their unpainted shanties.)

So this boy and I didn't get on the school bus one afternoon to go home. Instead, we started walking toward the St. John’s River and then toward the place where Fords came off the ships to be sent to dealerships all over Florida and half of Georgia. (We used to say "He looked everywhere. He looked all over hell and half of Georgia," because that denigrated Georgia, which we were wont to do.) That's where the boy's father worked, for Ford Motor, unloading the ships.

On the way, we were walking along railroad tracks, minding our own business, actually lost to ourselves and not paying any attention to anything else, when a rock the size of a big potato clacked right near us. We turned around and saw about five black boys throwing rocks at us—rocks they picked up from the rail bed, rocks that had been imported, since Florida didn't have any rocks at all. We started running, and the rocks were flying all around us, and they were chasing us. Along to the left of us was a long dike, about ten feet high, and on the other side was a huge field of dried, caked, cracked mud—sludge dredged up from the bottom of the St. John's River to make the channel deeper for the bigger ships. My friend said, "Let's go up and over." So we did, and we took a running leap out onto the open field of mud, with cracks four and five inches deep. We sank up to our knees. We couldn't move. The colored boys came up over the top of the dike and had handfuls of rocks, that they commenced to throw at us. Those rocks sank down past that first half inch of powdery, dried mud into the thick, black, gooey stuff we were stuck in. Where the rocks, hit the goo curled out like cake icing around the place where the rock sank in. We yelled and asked them why they were trying to hit us. (Actually I don't remember that either one of us ever got hit with one of the hundred rocks they threw.) They said they thought we were the white boys that had ruined their kites, or something. We said we weren't. We hadn't ever been here before. So they quit, and said, "Well, OK then." And they helped us out, and they went back, and we went on.

I believe I had prejudicial contempt for Yankees rather than for blacks.

But time can blur your perceptions, especially if you don't want to admit some peccadilloes.