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.
August 26, 2009 - 3:52 p.m.
It has finally happened. I'm not going to be perplexed about where the day has gone. I'm not going to rant about the chronoklepts. I am just going to accept that my day disappears.
Let's go back a bit to Monday night. When I walked back from the subway after seeing Loudon at the WFUV concert I saw a woman walking a dog, a familiar face, on the corner. The problem is that I couldn't put a name to the face and wasn't 100% sure it was her out of context like that. I looked at her and smiled figuring that she'd say something if she knew me. I walked past then she said, "Gordon?" It was Nancy (I asked her name). She's a WFUV volunteer. We didn't know it but she lives across the street from me! I now have a friend in the neighborhood. I know lots of people from the station but she's one of the ones that I really enjoy talking to. So of course we talked for quite some time on the corner. Good thing she got the dog or we might have never realized we were neighbors.
Yesterday I was taken to lunch by another neighbor of sorts, Mark works across the street, right next to Nancy's building. Mark is a friend of friends that I got to know at The Budgiedome. That's where we discovered we were neighbors.
We met at the the Kosher steakhouse that Mark thinks is the best restaurant in the area. It was very good. The conversation was even better. He's an interesting guy. He's in the band Spuyten Duyvil, he has worked in high tech start ups in the 90s, and now is in real estate. That's how a musician can afford to take me to lunch.
After I had the great lunch things went down hill. I had the rumblings of a Crohn's disease attack. It never got too bad, I never felt the malaise, but I could feel the lump in my belly where the food couldn’t make it through my intestine. It passed last night around midnight. That's when I ate my dinner. I'm fine today.
I'm always happiest sharing my thoughts with you, not my narrative. My mind was racing on the subway ride home on Monday. Let's see what I can remember.
Wise Madness is the closest thing I have to a therapist. I'm saying Wise Madness, not you, my gentle readers because there is much that I write in my head that never makes its way onto the web. That includes much of what is most important to me emotionally. If it involves other people I have to be circumspect about what I write. I used to write far more freely when all my readers were from a narrow area of my life and didn't know the other people I was writing about and there was no chance that those people would read about themselves. Now thanks to Facebook my life is an open book and anyone I know might find Wise Madness.
Writing the blog makes me a better person because every time I consider doing something I think about how it will look to you My Gentle Readers. You are like the little angel sitting on my shoulder.
Now I lost part of my train of thought. Somehow this led to my thinking about Huckleberry Finn. It has to do with Huck's conscience so it isn't out of left field.
My favorite element of the book is Huck's internal debate about helping Jim escape. Huck has pangs of conscience for helping him. He thought only an ungrateful low down person would treat Mrs. Watson, Jim's owner so bad. Then he'd think about all the times that Jim helped him and was good to him and resigned himself to being bad. It's beautiful. He was taught something false by society, that Jim was property, not a person, but his own innate goodness wouldn't let him deny the evidence of his experience so he did the right thing and felt guilty about it. It tells us more about ourselves and our relationship to society than all of Freud's writings on id, ego, and superego.
I'm reading Bernard Malamud's The Natural. That got me thinking too. I loved the film but have resisted reading the book because of the ways they differ. I like the happy ending. I should have read it ages ago. I love it. Baseball is the perfect setting for a fairytale. Baseball is a fairytale. The glory of baseball isn't in the action but in the expectations it raises in our minds. It isn't a game of action but of anticipation. Like the Maltese Falcon it is the stuff that dreams are made of. When we dream we are at our most divine and least bestial. More than anything else what separated man from all other living things is that we alone live in the future.
Ted Kennedy died today. To my surprise I felt the emotional impact. I have always been a supporter of his but I didn't think of him I was emotionally connected to. I was wrong. Is that the essence of being a Kennedy? That we feel they are one of us? They have virtues and flaws far more obvious than most of us. Yet somehow we feel they are ours.
As so often happens, this was far longer and more poetic in my head. I wish you could just read what goes on there. Until they come up with a machine to read minds you'll have to make do with reading words.
A Retro-Walk Into My Soul - August 31, 2009
Class Dismissed - August 30, 2009
I Can't Not Be On A Boat - August 29, 2009
Lockout! - August 28, 2009
Playing God (How about James Earl Jones in the role?) - August 27, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile August 26, 2009
