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Honey, when you're my age they're all milestones. I don't care if my "special people" ignore it. What I want is for the Grim Reaper to ignore it.  Today I'm going to lay down the boogie and play that funky music.  The Winter Permacloud has descended, along with temperatures and moods.
The other day I raided the grocery store to pick up supplies for my annual Feast of the Leftovers. This feast occurs somewhere between Christmas and New Year's Day, and the goal is hosting a celebration using only Christmas-related items that have been marked down. When I was a young-un, I used to accompany my Mom who liked to swing by the stores on December 26 to load up on half-priced holiday cards, gift wrap, and the like. Embarrassingly, I still have wrapping paper and other things from those long-ago forays. After The Feast of the Leftovers we arrive at The Celebration of the New Year's Resolution. I've finally embarked on my Swedish Death Cleaning project, and that's enough to be going on with in the resolution department. I'll also be doing my best to avoid the various illnesses that are floating around, although that seems increasingly like a losing effort. Nonetheless, have hand sanitizer, will travel.  If it's not one damned thing after another, it's the same damned thing over and over.
On the plus side, earlier today I came across a group of crows who'd found something to eat on my neighbor's lawn. Crows are a skittish bunch, but they paid no attention to me as I walked past them. Obviously I'm not as interesting as a meal. Nonetheless. this brief encounter brightened my day.  I just finished re-reading The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by the late Will Cuppy. This is a hilarious look at the goings on of various historical figures doing the things that put them in the history books. You have to be familiar with world history to get the jokes. The footnotes can be helpful, but often they amp up the humor and you won't get that either. Still worth reading.
I read some more about Will Cuppy, since he sounds like he was someone worth knowing. Unfortunately that may have been difficult for anyone who tried, since he was something of a hermit - and in fact he also wrote How to Be a Hermit, which is next on my reading list if I can run down a copy somewhere. I did find the Kindle version of How to Tell Your Friends From the Apes, with introduction by P.G. Wodehouse. This sounds like actionable information that we all should have, especially since Amazon describes the book as "a survey of life on earth, in all its variety and pageantry, by a very annoyed humorist." My kind of guy. I wonder what he would have made of the pandemic. Many of us curmudgeonly types viewed it as a welcome excuse to avoid everybody, but after a while it can be too much of a good thing. Since Cuppy seems to have made a vocation of living like a hermit, even in a New York City apartment, I want to know how he did it and still managed to keep his sanity. Perhaps he didn't, since Wikipedia informs us that "Cuppy's last years were marked by poor physical health and increasing depression." Praise the Lord and pass the Paxlovid, I guess. So I was lying awake this morning pondering zero-dimensional space, as one does at that time of day. Google tells us that "A topological space is zero-dimensional with respect to the finite-to-finite covering dimension if every finite open cover of the space has a refinement that is a finite open cover such that any point in the space is contained in exactly one open set of this refinement." I used to understand things like this. Anyway, I was more interested in the philosophical meanings of zero-dimensional space than in the mathematical concept. Is it the void that binds? Or, as the late lamented Terry Pratchett wrote: "in the beginning there was nothing, which exploded." The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi believed that the essence of the Universe was “so great that there is nothing outside it and so small that there is nothing inside it”. This sounds like a dandy description of a zero-dimensional Universe to me. The Chinese and the Buddhists in general seem much more at home with concepts in particle physics that often have us westerners scratching our heads. Start with yin and yang, and they're off to the races.   The idiot lights on the driver's info panel finally won: this morning I took Scarlett O'Honda in for service and general beautifying.
The car ahead of me in the service bay queue had a bunch of stickers all over it, which of course I had to read. "Warning: Crabby Old Lady on Board" and "I'm Retired, Go Around Me" were among the offerings. Scarlett is a young and frisky Honda with few miles on her - unlike her owner - and doesn't have all sorts of war paint marring her surface. Her owner could use the war paint, but not the sort that's found at a car dealership. So I had time to kill and thought about risking life and limb by visiting the department store next door to the car joint. But in the end I parked my butt in the Honda waiting area for the duration and played "Musical Chairs". It was fairly crowded with only one other person wearing a face mask, and I tried to keep at least six feet away from people. Ha! First I sat at a small table, and ten minutes later a youngish and unmasked person sat down. And coughed. And coughed again. So I moved. Years ago I'd have worried about obviously avoiding someone, but the pandemic has put an end to that. There was a nice four-seat couch available, so I claimed the end seat. Soon the Crabby Old Lady also parked herself on the couch, and not on the other end. Nope, right next to me. What is with these people? So off I went again. Took a tour of the showroom, considered buying a new car, decided I didn't need a new car, took a walk outside, OMG it's still in the 20s and windy, went back to the dealership, checked out the vending machines, checked out the restroom, and then I found a nice, small table with two empty chairs. I parked butt again and prepared to defend that empty seat against all comers. Fortunately nobody else came over - I assume I was emitting "Cantankerous Old Bat" vibes. If such vibes could fend off viruses and assorted infectious agents, I could bottle 'em and get rich. I miss the days when I didn't worry about infectious agents. Last week I was talking to a couple of folks who were also waiting in the vaccine clinic observation room. We agreed that our lives have gotten much smaller as a result of the covid-19 pandemic, and we agreed that this is maybe not such a good thing. They're even more cautious than I am: they still have their food delivered while I head out to the grocery store. Granted I shop at 6:00 AM when the store opens and there are few people around, but it's still in person shopping. And I visit various doctors' offices as needed. But it's definitely a smaller life. It beats dying of covid-19, but there are tradeoffs that I may end up regretting. Some things haven't changed, though. The couple waiting with me talked about their granddaughter who's a freshman at a state university and who would be coming home for the holidays soon. They both lit up as they talked about her. Human connections are hard to squelch, and they survive even the most determined pandemics. And thank heaven for that. |
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