It is Sunday evening and I am at the dining room table, looking out at the creek, lit by the floodlights I have set up to illuminate the creek at night. Soft, classical jazz plays in the background.
For the most part, Christmas is behind me. The tree is down and headed for recycling now that most of the lights have burned out. I think I’ve had seven years from the tree so I can’t complain.
Though I realize as I look around I forgot a few things which I’ll have to take down over the coming week. There is still a wreath on my door and one hanging in the dining room. How I missed that I don’t know.
My heart is not into taking down Christmas. I tend to become a bit melancholy in the process and apologized to young Nick about my moodiness as he dismantled Christmas while I assiduously cleaned up after last night’s dinner party.
While I sit here writing, the world is gearing up for the Golden Globe Awards, which I won’t watch but is the official opening of awards’ season. I did my PGA voting as soon as it came in because I didn’t want to forget.
The question being asked in this awards’ season is whether “Revenant” will finally propel Leonardo DiCaprio towards an Oscar?
I don’t know nor do I much care, truth to be told.
Since 1992 I have been a member of the Television Academy and my membership is up for renewal and while I suspect I will renew I am not sure why. It feels much less relevant than it did when we were fighting to make cable an integral part of the Academy and then to make a place in the tent for “new media.”
I salute my friend Bob Levi, retired now from Turner, who with Jeff Cole and myself and a few others fought and fought hard to make a place in the Academy for those digital pioneers way back in 1999. Jeff and I were the Founding Governors for the Interactive Media Peer Group though I have discovered since then there are others who make that claim. Excuse me! I was there.
It’s Sunday night and most people are wondering what the market will do in the morning. Continue to swoon or make a comeback? Don’t know. I’ll check the futures in the morning.
Sean Penn did an interview with Mexican Drug Lord “El Chapo” at his HQ in the Mexican jungle. It appeared in Rolling Stone. Some laud it, some hate it but it is interesting reading. Celebrity triumphs in journalism in this case…
Ted Cruz was born in Canada of an American mother. Donald Trump is questioning whether is he meets the legal requirements to be President. Some time ago Ted Cruz renounced his Canadian citizenship but that hasn’t stopped Trump who is currently trailing him a bit in the polls in Iowa.
I think it will get worse between now and the caucuses in Iowa.
The world is an unbroken trails of woes right now – and I’m not talking about the Republicans.
Merkel’s generosity to refugees is under question after New Year’s attacks on women by men described as North African or Arabic.
We have people of white origin holding a bird preserve in Oregon demanding a rollback of Federal control of lands in the West.
North Korea may or may not have tested a hydrogen weapon but it did test an atomic something which is always worrisome.
And, you know, everything is worrisome. It always has been and will always be so and so tomorrow I will get up and live my life as best I can in this worrisome state.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 04 21 2017 The past fights the future…
April 21, 2017Apple blossoms dressed the trees in the orchards as I drove along 9H earlier today, the first, best sign of spring I’ve seen though, once having noticed them, I was aware that small buds of green were appearing on other trees. The ones outside my windows don’t seem to be sporting them and I’m sure they will come eventually, which is how this spring has seemed – eventually we will get there – just not yet.
It has been a quiet sort of day. Earlier I spent some time at OMI, an art center near me that I have known about but had not visited and that was my loss. The two-hundred-acre campus is dotted with sculptures, the main building with art exhibits. Today quite beautiful children were painting, running around in young life’s exuberance, bringing smiles to all the adults. I offered up a thought for good lives for them; the future does feel cloudy right now.
It’s not just that this is a gray day. Generally, I am an upbeat sort of person [or at least I think of myself as that] and today I’ve not been. The state of the world has been weighing on me, both close to home and far from here.
Close to home, I am burdened because a friend sent me suicidal texts and I was incredibly concerned and finally asked the police to do a “welfare check.” They did. He then texted me he wanted nothing more to do with me. Truthfully, I did the right thing and, at this moment, it hasn’t turned out well. For me and, I expect, not for him as he is in deep trouble and won’t admit it.
Candles to be lit; prayers to be said and to continue, as best we can.
Paris is continuing as best it can after a policeman was shot yesterday and two badly wounded by a terrorist who was killed as he was fleeing. IS claims responsibility and France is having elections on Sunday. The far-right candidate, Marie Le Pen, is threatening to remove France from the EU so that it can control its own borders.
She has a chance of winning.
The far right is making its might felt all over the place.
And that is so worrying to me.
For a brief, shining moment in my life it seemed we might actually be headed toward a global society and it has not happened. It was around the time the Berlin Wall went down, a moment I will forever remember. Driving down Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles, headed west, my bestest friend, Tory Abel, called me on my car phone and said: do you know what’s going on? As I was listening to classical music, I didn’t. The wall was falling.
There are all kinds of suppositions about why that magic moment did not result in a better world.
Right now, I am reading a book about “the weekend” in British homes in the 1930’s and one of the revelatory bits was about a British Lord who became a Muslim because he saw Islam as the bulwark against women getting the vote and having shorter skirts and working.
He would probably have a lot in common with IS.
Change is hard. And changing centuries of tradition is hard and people will fight it. IS is fighting it.
When all of this works itself out, I won’t be here. It will take more than a lifetime.
And that is history in the making. It takes lifetimes to work itself out.
If you are not aware of it, Chechnya is conducting a campaign against gays. It is putting us in camps, not unlike the Nazis; there are tales of torture and death. Can this be happening in the 21st Century? Apparently so. The reports are horrific.
The President of Chechnya has declared he will eliminate the gay community by the beginning of Ramadan on May 26th.
Putin has declared there is no evidence this is happening and that is Putin’s view of the world: no horrible thing is happening. There is no sarin gas is Syria, there is no campaign against gays in Chechnya, there is no fill in the blank.
Tags:Chechnya, Chechnya campaign against gays, Far right, Los Angeles, Marie Le Pen, Nazis, OMI, Paris, Putin, Syria, technology, Tory Abel
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