With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
September 01, 2009 - 2:39 p.m.
When I left you yesterday I was bringing my car in to be inspected. To my great surprise they were able to do it while I waited. Unfortunately not to my surprise I needed new front brakes. This is the first time I took my car to that garage for repairs. I don't know if I can trust them. I've dreaded this since I moved away from my mechanic. I paid the money but don't know if I've been ripped off. My car has 124,000 miles on it so it isn't surprising that it needs work. The big selling point for me when I bought my Civic was that it was reliable. It's lived up to my expectations. I have had nothing but routine maintenance.
Today is another spectacular weather day. I have to go shopping but I'll figure out some way to enjoy it too. Of course I could wait till Friday to do my shopping as Syms is having a big sale. The problem with that is if I don't find anything it leaves me almost no time to buy my clothes for the fall. I need pants. When I can't wear my linen anymore I'll have only one pair of casual pants.
I have hardly gone to any free concerts this summer. I usually go to one or two a week. Tomorrow I'll get back in the groove and see rock legend John Fogarty at the South Street Seaport. Anyone want to join me?
I finished reading The Natural. Will you lose respect for me if I tell you that I liked the film better? You shouldn't, the film is better. Malamud gave Roy Hobbs mythic powers then put him in a mundane world. He didn't know he was writing a fairy tale. On the other hand, the elements of the film I liked the least, the character of Iris is foreign to the book. I liked her far better in the book where she was a total stranger to Roy, echoic of the woman that shot him.
Now I'm reading On the Road and I'm loving it. Kerouac is not a kindred spirit, why do I connect so well with him? It's because his books are written in the spirit of last entry. His heroes go through life finding magic. Sal traveled across Nebraska and Wyoming on the back of flat bed truck zooming at 70 MPH with a bunch of characters you'd dread finding yourself on a bus with and calls it the best ride of his life.
I love this passage:
… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploring like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
Maybe he is a kindred spirit, a Bizarro World kindred spirit; me if I were a mystic libertine.
Gotta be the Shoes - September 10, 2009
Anatomy of a Murder Crohn's Disease - September 08, 2009
Party of the Second Part - September 07, 2009
Music Has Charms to Heal the Savage Ileum - September 06, 2009
The Child That is Father to the Nerd - September 02, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile September 01, 2009
