March 2026

March 31-April 2, 2026: So – can freedom, lost at some point, be brought back by people who have never known it? Idle question, to be sure, but a world getting on for in extremis seems to have spawned this hmm-I-wonder-moment – in my mind at least. The question was broached in Rome after Nero’s assassination. What people wanted, after his extravagance, after his “looting” and his grotesqueries and cruelties, was the “existing system brought back under moral restraint and a restored respect for law.” (From Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World with respect to Nero’s reign and the aftermath.) Ring any bells? As the Dacians did when they were up against Trajan who was “suppressing the Dacian threat”, perhaps the Iranians have sent Trump an enormous mushroom inscribed (though not in Latin, in Americanese) with their “ultimatum”. Then again, the better part of valour and all that, as when one actor is as shabby as the next in a round of hostilities.

There is an invocation of sorts at the start of Book Two of Virgil’s The Georgics which is near religious in tone insofar as a pagan might indulge what we figure religiosity to be. Come, Father of the Winepress, swiftly pull off your buskins and with me dip your bare legs deep in the bare must. The words might have brought on a smile in ancient days, but to our sensibility they flirt with a “touch of yuk”. In any case, the words are not an invitation to get “plowed”, “snockered”, “plastered”, “pissed”. They are a reminder that wine does not make itself. A field of corn does not harvest itself much less self-plant. There are the seasons and so, there are times when certain things are best done now and not later, say in the summer dog days. Religion was about some kind of human relationship with nature once upon a time, not this Jesus-loves-me variety show, the Hegsethian Way the hour’s motto: I-negotiate-with-ordnance. Gatorade, folks?

The 12th and 13th satires (Juvenal’s) do not, at first blush, seem to have much to do with Present Day, not even at second blush. Just the usual finger-pointing at greed and its consequences intended or not, and some people never learn. The 14th is all what-goes-around-comes-around, the-apple-doesn’t-fall-far-from-the-tree provenance. What he teaches is sadism, pure and simple: there’s nothing pleases him more than a good old noisy flogging, no siren song to compare with the crack of the lash. …. (Addressed to one Fuscinus, person unknown.) At any rate, the old master-slave dynamic, rom-coms and feel-good flicks notwithstanding in their depictions of the relationship against the bucolic setting of a crawfish boil, barefoot cook in the kitchen… Juvenal’s satires came out of his experience of Domitian’s rule (a vicious one), and then Trajan’s and Hadrian’s stewardship when it might be said that Rome was fat and contented, though not entirely pacific. (And some internal political nasties still had sway.) Is justice an innate quality of the mind or an acquired taste? Did I not debate this in my senior year, so-so thespian that I was? When enough people die off who had a memory of “justice”, what then?

Well, on a cold clear day in March, I went up the street to Too Tall Poet’s lair. It was once my lair, but then I was renovicted. I learned that he remembers a world in which poetry was loved. Even bad poets were loved because the bad poems they wrote were written out of a love of poetry. And now? Did poetry perish on account of its success? Of a plague that crept into every nook and cranny and crevice of the culture, narcissism that glommed on and infected? Too Tall Poet made his views plain. He did not believe that poetry is loved any longer for its own sake. What institution is? He shrugged. Poetry. Another tit on some literary cash cow deep in grift, and there you have it, Too Tall Poet having pronounced on the matter, and my, my complexion (as he noted) looked pretty good. I must be eating well. Had I won a prize perhaps? Do I now have readership in Peoria? Consciousness without guilt – is that, strictly speaking, consciousness or just an excuse to play with guns and tabulate acceptable casualty figures? You see, in an eye-blink, Too Tall Poet shifted the conversation from the state of poesy to the state of empire. I was able to keep my balance even so as, inwardly, I exclaimed: what some poets get up to! Man alive, the moves they make. But you would think they would leave presidential fancies to the in-house policy wonks and wonk away on air guitars of their own devising.

Postscript I: Johann Sebastian Bach was born on this day in 1685, his counterpoint still unmatched. Carpenter knows because he plays the drums.

Postscript II: Lunar: … …. ‘I've been in a blur. I figure it's the cannabis oil that has put me there. [By the way], I seem to have won the Tinker debate, at least for now. It helps themself (which is me and only me and no other entity in my aggregate of pronoun selves) to score a win now and then in this [kerfuffle with my editor, “tinker” un-PC by his lights. Tinkers aren’t “travellers”. Tinkers aren’t “gypsies”. What ho, Romany?] Bees, get this, can survive underwater for up to eight days, so far as I understand, and can take hints and prompts and pass knowledge around. Didn’t Virgil regard them as sacred? The Hegsethian? Even his mother can’t stand him (Hegseth). Why in God's name, after being slapped in the face once, twice, thrice is Starmer sending the king to the USA? You would have
thought Trump's insults against this country would be cause enough to cancel the trip, which, after all, Trump is counting on in order to boost his own ego. Also, with his threat to leave NATO where next will Putin strike? We really are poised for disaster.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you are of a sudden assailed by presidential libraries and ballrooms and Trump-autographed currency and dire straits renamed Trump as well. Be prepared to read “em and weep” should LBJ’s ghost materialize, and, a la the March 31st, 1968 version of his sorry self, announce that he will not seek re-election in these here United States, the Vietnam boondoggle a sticking point, here’s looking at you kid, or Trump and quagmire: … …. ‘I need to read more Ovid.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘What? You’re checking up on me? I’m still here. Breathing away. A little less limber but mobile. Been on a Sinatra kick. No good reason. The luck of the draw at the Recycling Depot. Tony Rome, eh? Women will groan, but let them. Percival says hi. The goat has a quarrel with Canada Only. Likes American carrots for his treats. No, I won’t otherwise explain myself. Now where did I mislay that novel? Right. It’s sunk to the bottom of my delete pile….’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘… Nor did Virgil write Night in Casablanca. But I’m sure there was plenty of cheap humour, mordant wisecracks in that Roman air. You know. The one who schleps a fire burns his penis. (Remark unintended for the factotum in the WH, factotum because Orbanized and an on-going project of Putin.) Yesterday, as I went out to my garden shed for a hammer, a bit of snow on the ground seemed to leap right into my eyes. I experienced such a twinge of melancholy (from the smell of old snow and saturated earth?), that it nearly, as it were, unmanned me. It’s one thing to know you’re mortal. It’s one thing to see life as one transient state leading to the next. It’s quite another thing, to feel the crush of failure that weighs on one’s life, to then say “get a grip”, to grab that hammer and get about whatever it was one was going to do: pound a nail or some such, to commit a line that popped into one’s head to paper, to see one’s wife with such raw eyes, to smile so as to reassure her that you are both in possession of your faculties, so far so good, to… but that’s quite enough. Love is unto itself a higher law. &c. I think that was Boethius talking, if memory serves.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘There I was watching a movie called Siberia. It had Keanu Reeves in it. Not the world’s greatest actor but viewable in this instance. I’d paused the action to take my cupcakes out of the oven. As I did so, I thought: “Here he (Reeves) is, in the diamond trade, dealing with gangsters, and the only source of grace in that world of body bags and other corruptions is going to be an affair he’ll have with a Siberian woman, and she may take up with him against her better judgement, but her sense of justice and right and wrong will otherwise be some fierce thing. Too hot for him to handle.” Then I thought I heard my French horn bleep. Surely, I have a Polish cousin or two who know about hazing rituals as take place when a group of males, all local and pie-eyed most of the time, deal with an outsider with designs upon one of their women. It will be said more or less to this effect: “Hurt my sister and they’ll find your carcass in the woods.” I gave up on that book of history you lent me, seeing as we’ve both been reading it at roughly the same time. Redundancy. Not paying much attention to the news. I just know it’s bad and getting worse. Fragments of music continually stream through my head as if looking for an author looking for a character looking for character looking for some virtue as would consecrate a measure to a coherent emotion. A Spanish lullaby as arranged by De Falla took me by storm.…’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘Came across mention (on some news site) as repeated what I had to say to you last week, namely: “Presumably, all those men and women who’ve profited from Trump’s corruption will want things to settle down so that they can enjoy the fruits of their labour.” Otherwise, I went to investigate how the renovations with respect to my café were going and learned that it may be months yet. Do they think they’re building a ballroom? All roads lead to a single orifice, and the lines that follow may provide a clue as to that orifice’s call sign, from Juvenal’s 14th: …if you’re too lazy to stomach the tough routine of a soldier’s life in camp or barracks, if your bowels turn to water at the sound of bugle or trumpet, then trade’s your line: find something that can be resold with a profit of fifty per cent or so. And don’t turn up your nose at the dirtier merchandise kept strictly beyond the Tiber, don’t suppose there’s any distinction between perfume and hides: the stink of profit is pleasant whatever its source. Say what? Have you divined the name of our mystery guest? Well, I’m sure as hell not going to snitch. I watched one of those Iranian movies as was secretly filmed. So bloody anal, though this isn’t meant as a critique. Just that, in that sort of life under the thumb of a heavy-handed regime, fear governs every little act one undertakes or is contemplating. Does one drink the soft drink fizz of the Great Satan with impunity? Actually, I bailed halfway through. Depressing view of an old civilization hanging on by its toenails. Not that we’re so uplifting. I’ve sunk so low as to prefer fluff to gravitas. Fluff doesn’t lie because you know its only raison d’etre is to neutralize thought and feeling and consciousness itself, no worries.’

March 19-22, 2026: Trump has his Truth Socials. Caesar (Augustus) had his Res Gestae, achievements list, his “things done”. Thank you for your attention to this matter. “Res gestae” also shows up in the practice of law, to wit, the “hearsay exception” as allows “into evidence statements that would otherwise be excluded, such as spontaneous out-of-court exclamations (excited utterances)”. Kind of sounds like You-Know-Who as he piggybacks on his golden escalator to his executive suite in the sky, mobile in scrofulous hand, a stint as God’s BFF in the offing. Or would the following remind you of anyone, something and someone closer to earth? Sulla’s memorial stands on the Campus Martius, and the inscription on it, they say, is one he wrote himself, and the gist of it is that “none of his friends surpassed him in doing good and none of his enemies in doing harm. From Plutarch’s Life of Sulla. The quote (on reflection) is not really that Trumpicacious, but adjust for taste, in any case. Wild boast meat is rather nutty. Would you bite (testing, testing) on a Trump commemorative coin if you thought you would taste another fraud? Trump has his towers, his ballrooms. Caesar had his temples (and pretty boys, stuffy morals, too, for which sake women most often paid the price)…

Indeed, are we up for it – more politics and analogies? But unlike Bibulus, Caesar prepared for his year in office by the artful “gentlemen’s agreement” with Pompey and Crassus, a couple hitherto divided by personal enmity. Cunningly, Caesar saw they both had needs…. Straight out of Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World – the Art of the Deal. And it depends on who is playing whom to get the drift of the play action, some names in the mix: Trump, Putin, Xi, Netanyouhoo, or Earp and the “cowboys”. Kushner, Miller, Witkoff, or Curly, Shemp and Moe. So yes, that “history” thing, of the nursery rhyme variety… From the same book: The Civil War imposed choices which are enduring examples in the history of all politics: their results changed world history. It caught many prominent Romans with conflicting allegiances and it tested principles which others had long professed. G-forces with regards to Trump’s slipstream? Checks and balances a vaudeville act high on retro? Lastly: [Cicero’s] head and his right hand (perhaps both hands) were hacked off and taken up to Antony in Rome. There, they were put in the lap of Fulvia, the wife of Cicero’s two great enemies, first Clodius, and then Antony. She pulled the tongue out of the skull, we are told, and stabbed it with a pin taken from her hair. After a woman’s revenge (put Melania in the picture?), the head and the hands were nailed as trophies onto the Rostrum in the Forum, the very platform from which Cicero had spoken so memorably. They are terrible symbols of the loss of “liberty”. Perhaps. But yes, nothing like this has occurred (so far as we know) in our Present Day, at least not yet, but, bearing in mind that what we mean by liberty is not merely freedom to bully and “give no quarter, and geez, those silly rules of engagement”, but that when the ballot box is engineered to tip the scales in one direction, and in one direction only, then we might speak of the beheading and the dismemberment of the body politic. Cicero, after all, as vain as he was of his own political prowess, did care about the health (or lack of it) with respect to the republic. As good a time as any to come to another of Juvenal’s satires – the eleventh.

Whereupon (and do not read too much into this) there is not much to say for the satire on this go round, though that could change tomorrow, next month, five years from now, depending on my fickle enough moods, the screed’s opening salvos on about gluttony bankrupting some stellar citizens (shades of Mar-a-Lago perhaps), or that honest victors in this or that battle for the survival of the republic and civic integrity still prefer a humble supper to being wine and dined as celebrities, as stars, as hot dogs and ringers and raging popinjays a la the Hegsethian. One might conclude from these spectacles that humility is an acquired taste. Virtue has gotten complicated, now that present era philosophy has had its self-pleasuring way with it: way too many angels dancing on the head of that particular pin. There is the human predilection to life, the same for self-destruction. A recently viewed history of the Sunset Strip tells me this, and that virtue, on occasion, gets caught between them, and comes out as arch support for hypocrisy….

Postscript I: On this day in 43 B.C. Ovid the poet was born who, after being exiled to some sh-thole on a Black Sea coast for an unknown-to-us offense against the Imperial Person (some faux pas to do with sex, most likely), partly out of bewilderment and partly out of impotent fury, wrote the most insinuatingly subversive poetry ever written by a Roman. At the very least, he managed to skewer Augustus C in a line or two. Moreover, he did not resort to depth psychology for the registering and underscoring of his complaints; he insulted the man. Seems straightforward enough. Ask Carpenter.

Postscript II: In the meantime, Lunar: … …. ‘[ ] went to Siegfried last night, Siegfried being the dumbest blonde in all opera but the last act was truly sublime, and at the end Brunhilde runs across the stage and leaps into his arms, legs wrapped about him, well, it was hard not to have a little weepie, opera, I suppose, being the last bastion in which one might express what it is to be human. Trump has got himself into such a quagmire he is incapable of stepping back to see the mess he's made.’ … …. And this has been Lunar keeping it simple…

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you spot a strangely lit waffle house. Might be a teleportation event in progress, VIP molecules reassembling. Or else, a comedy jamboree is in session, open mic, seeing as the regime is all open mic, and your leg is always being pulled, everything a joke anyway in those pressers and senate hearings, extra sausages on the side: … …. ‘There [must be] nothing else to read or write. All day, the links land in my mailbox from this outlet and that, every one of them saying the same goddamn thing – Trump's an idiot. As if the world didn't know [ ].’ … …. Dear Drake, links you say? As in sausages? Collaborative verse? As in cheating at golf? As in one joke suggests another, and we all fall down? I like a laugh as much as the next guy – Mr Tudball and Mrs Wiggins and the attendant one-liners… unsurpassed. But the laughs that trigger nausea, as when we know we have been reduced to saying, “Madness, eh?” – those laughs are mostly eaten, bringing on a lot of internal wear and tear. In other words, I sympathize, sir, and wish you well.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Someone somewhere said, “quietism”, in the political sense, and as applied to the Romans, the disinterested pursuit of studies of interest, just that for me it’s driftwood, molluscs, beach detritus in general, rather than the pixels on a household’s various screens, Percival’s nose in the air, sniffing out whatever strikes him as salient and worthy of a little investigation, as if a goat can make as much sense of the stars as humans with telescopes travelling at roughly 100,100 klicks per hour. And I’ve just said as much in this here go as I’ve said all winter. The Georgics, you say. They should be right up my alley, I guess, but I’ve always noticed that when certain poets I’d come across, say, in this or that infamous beer parlour, mention Virgil, their voices would get all funny with either obligatory reverence or condemnation. My novel is in flames. Well, not literally, but you know what I mean. Don’t you? Could I happily subsist as part of some perfectly orchestrated beehive operation maintaining the queen for her life span of 3-5 years, and know I’ve been perfectly purposed? The White House? Or would I go crazy, human consciousness a bitch? What I meant was quietism as opposed to lobbying for an Oscar or dropping bombs on Gaza City or doing undercover work for natural science… Extreme quietism is a suspension of will and ego, let God’s will be done, that sort of thing… But I think not for me. My ego, wearing heavy wool socks and laced-up work boots, requires some puttering about in a garden, and if the roses come up to scratch, I’ll crow, but I’ll continue to distrust crystals and loathe wind chimes… Vancouver is regarded as one of the quieter cities on this planet. That’s not how I recall the place. That it was a town of a great many superannuated egos all drinking and wankering away (intellectually) in the Patricia or the Waldorf but not the Sylvia or the Alcazar, places where the more pure of heart were wont to gather....’ (Inside joke, Generation Z-ers needn’t apply.)’ … …. What, us Boomers were not socially conscious and financially pragmatic? Did we not live for sex and cocaine while calling it music? Are you going to eat those beer nuts?

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘We can say, with confidence, that Virgil didn’t write Duck Soup. He did however do up The Georgics. It was considered a poetic masterpiece then and retains some of that buzz now, despite its didactic nature. Now I’ve had apricots on the brain, I’ll have you know, as if I can taste them at this very moment. Got a yen on. I imagine Virgil best loved those people who’d tell him how things work and how things are best done. Farmers, for instance, who were fallible and yet, fairly wise to the workings of trial and error. (Techno guys who can unfreeze a computer are sometimes heaven sent, but you can’t eat microchips.) I confess to my woeful ignorance when it comes to how to bake bread, grow a bean patch, do a brake job on my old (as the Americans say) beater. Which is to say I can’t abide the oracular in modern literature, but Virgil in The Eclogues, The Georgics – my thumbs are up with respect to those works, and have been for a long, long while. There’s the Homeric with all the heroes (who have their foibles), and then, a la Virgil, there’s how to fertilize fields with natural salts and wood ash, and here I’ll stop before I make an ass of myself, and Hesiod cancel my boarding pass. What do we know? How to introduce novelty into one’s sex life such as, in the end, vouchsafes the boredom? Don’t get me wrong: I much admire a fair number of modern and contemporary poets, but push come to shove and I’m most at home with the unrhymed verse of the ancients. (The better apricots are grown to the south of here. Warmer clime.) I hear the universe in Virgil’s head and Virgil in the universe, and I wonder how he stayed humble… Augustus C, whatever else might be said of him, that he was his own special breed of psycho perhaps, had the sense to let that poet be. Who understood full well the price for the Augustan peace (following upon the vicious bloody strife of decades). Plus the forced uprooting, the relocations, especially of farmers so as to pay off the legions, many of whom most likely had no feel for the land which was, in any case, increasingly the purview of the super rich… Mega farms, corporate welfare… Losing my grip on this rambling drift, so I’ll knock off here. Intellectual criminality, looking for analogies where none exist… Cicero and Boris Johnson? What, I’m supposed to adore Tennyson? My mother used to say if you’ve nothing good to say, zip it. Obviously, I’ve been a poor son to her memory.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. How is it we’re both reading the same book seemingly at the same time? Somehow, I don’t think this is a stellar example of synchronicity. Unless you lent me what is an extra copy of the book from your lending library. Never mind. Cupcakes in the oven by way of an executive decision to have it so. Granados’ Spanish Dances played on the piano, French horn looking on… I know I’ve been reading history when I read: He had ruthlessly killed off his opponents, he had won no glory in battle, and he had cheated and outmaneuvered the proudest men left in Rome. Considering what boots it, present day, crazy echoes, eh? Yes, I can do these crazy echoes without a book headbutting my occipital-temporal cortex. Don’t need a Polish cousin to tell me from out of what quarter and for how long a wind has been blowing and which butterfly effect it’s headed for.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘Presumably, all those men and women who’ve profited from Trump’s corruption will want things to settle down so that they can enjoy the fruits of their labour. No more, what do they call them, “forever” wars? Unlike Sissy G immediately above, I don’t have Polish cousins as will put me in whatever pertinent loop I need to be put into, but there are certain “continuities” that pertain throughout history, from generation to generation, one of which is corruption out of which one at times obtains the hazy, sleepy siesta times of country villa life. But I see we’re on about Virgil and his poetry, speaking of latifundia… This is all I have to offer on that score: One side of Virgil’s nature could not be satisfied with the impersonal idea of the state. He is here moving toward the Aeneid, “a poem of loss, defeat and pathos as much as it is of triumphant destiny. … …. Augustus had to emphasize law and order; the finale of Georgics I makes that clear. But Virgil never underestimated the cost in human terms. &c. From L P Wilkinson’s translation of The Georgics, Penguin Books, 1982, which I’ve had on my shelf for ages and still have yet to finish. I’ve known people for whom literature is the ordering principle of their lives. I’ve not seen much happiness there. I watch Laurel and Hardy and feel released from the burden of going to bed all Rilkean and waking up as Ezra Pound, spurs jangling. Still no word on when my café will reopen….’

March 13-17, 2026: Despite disparities between their capacities for considered thought, Milo is Trump and Trump is Milo. Always has been. Will always be. I cite the film “Catch-22” (1970). It has been described as a satiric take on military bureaucracy, as if that is all it is. Saw this film when it first came out. Here it is half a century or so later, and it holds up just fine, perhaps because the lunacy of it, accorded both realist flourishes and whimsical measures, transcends its little patch of time. Chocolate-covered cotton, anyone? War is a de facto invitation to insanity. Wars undertaken for bonkers reasons are all the more insane. And not to get preachy, but to what end? Follow the moola. Pick up the trail among all the clichés scattered across the warscape like crumbs, or body parts, as it were, bomb-shattered dreams, the smithereened remains of vanities, marches to the sea. As for which peoples are civilized and which are less so, bear in mind the following: that the Milanese only kill on Saturdays because, for the rest of the week, “they’re too busy working”. Or that for Sicilians, Sunday is a full dance card: mass, the grandparents, lunch with grandparents, the afternoon TV soccer match, the evening stroll and ice cream, no time for the commission of murders. All this according to Andrea Camilleri, author of the Inspector Montalbano series…

And despite my shaky grasp of the Social Wars (91-87 B.C.) as was fought between Rome and much of Italy, that it was in part about enfranchisement (Roman citizenship the prize), I am still trying to make the case (if only in my head) that, in the US, the campaigns against illegal immigrants has to do, in part, with just that: enfranchisement, citizenship, discount shopping. Talk about chickens coming home to roost… It brings one to a query: whose policies first put in play years and years ago on the continent to the south of here led to this pass – to the waves of “illegals” washing over a nation of sore heads? The clock ticks. A hint for you. It was not the Peace Corps.

And well, what else? Stephen Miller’s corollary in the ancient world, you ask, that is, if you were to ask? I nominate Sejanus, Tiberius C’s Man Friday. Sejanus (vicious sort) played Tiberius C like a fiddle. Used every power at his disposal to achieve his aims while sidelining the elderly, sour-minded Caesar with his sour, burned-out libido. (It is difficult to imagine Miller having sexual conquest in his quiver for the pursuit of his machinations.) Taking into account the creepiness factor of either Sejanus or Miller, the palm goes to the latter hands down who can set flesh to crawl at a hundred paces. Moreover, you can bank on this: that when You-Know-Who goes down for one reason or another and the cheeseburgers pork him, the people who fawned over the man throughout his regime’s dark span of years will say that, all along, they had not much cared for his almighty Self.

So now you get a taste of what Juvenal’s tenth satire is mostly about: the usual hypocrisies as well as reversals of fortune. Indeed, whatever “got you there” may likely unseat you: your lust for power, your wealth, your talent, your wit, your looks, your fashion sense. Whether this grim overview of human existence remains true beyond the confines of the classical world is certainly debatable, given that oligarchical power insulates crime, especially the whitest (collar) crime. Sacks of Saudi cash? Crypto assets with fruit loops? It may be, I suppose, so much wishful thinking that poohbahs and their yacht-loving, golf-mad, cash-harvesting triumvirates will, in time, self-destruct, as an AI epoch seeks to cut nature (including human nature with human responses) off at the knees, poetry a skin rash.

At least he (Priam) died a human being, while his wife, Hecuba,
Survived only to bark fiercely from a bitch’s gaping jaws. ….

Which is to say, apropos of nothing, or apropos, perhaps, of Operation Epic Fury and Operation Plan D Something or Other Just-in-Case, that King Priam’s long life was rewarded with the sight of his world in ruins, with his wife gone mad with the deaths of her sons and daughters in the course of the Greek assault on Troy. From the aforementioned tenth satire known as “the Vanity of Human Wishes”, as if that is all it is. And as if the sentiments apply only to the closing out of the so-called Bronze Age, poetry in trouble because it has gotten too costly to publish, and who cares, anyway? (Ah, once again, I have my ages misconstrued.)

Postscript I: But on this day, 1920, the failed Kapp Putsch, as would bring down the Weimar Republic, revealed the government for the 90-pound weakling it was. Whether there is anything in this to reflect upon for fun and profit, and whether Biden’s administration was somehow a paler shade of Weimar – is perhaps a stretch. Carpenter would know.

Postscript II: Lunar reflecting on “forever”: … …. ‘Me, [ ] having failed to grasp the world’s illogic, I’m trying to wrap my head around the infinite. I reckon that if one were to truly grasp the infinite, one’s head would explode. I mean forever is one heck of a distance, further than the local post office, but then surely the very notion of distance becomes meaningless. Don’t mind me, I’ve got a bit of a hangover. Strange how immediately after the end of WWII the Japanese took on baseball, it being the sport of the victors. Do they play with more verve than the Yankees? [Now] have you ever heard of a French Canadian writer called Sylvain Trudel? I picked up a novella of his called The Harmattan Winds. The title appealed to me. It was going well until suddenly …’ … …. Screeching halt here. Perhaps it is best we leave go of it, Canadian literature just called into question, American literature apparently less susceptible to triteness. In light of which, Lunar may have some explaining to do, may have to ask if he is being unfair. But what of lingering, festering inferiority complexes? Loss of prestige in some Literary Valhalla? Of one’s place in the queue in some Literary Waiting Room? And yet, why give Trump more excuses to caw-caw-caw and throw his weight around? Again, how many states are there in the union? 50 and counting? Shock and awe is always a possibility – to be dealt from the bottom of the deck when the bones feel right. … …. Says Lunar: … …. ‘That’s the Israeli name for it, Dahiya or the Dahiya Doctrine (Dahiyeh?), which is to destroy the civilian infrastructure, and it is the path Hegseth and Trump are now taking, lethality. I wonder if they have been told about the Iranian notions relating to martyrdom. So, yes, a licence to kill. Dahiya takes its name from a suburb in Beirut which the IDF bombed mercilessly. I have fears for Isfahan’s historic centre. Speaking of martyrdom, which is one feature of Shi’a, when I went down any main street in Shiraz or Isfahan there would be an exhibition, usually in an open tent, devoted to martyrs who died in the conflict with Iraq. There is no guided missile that eliminates martyrdom, quite the contrary. But there has been a surfeit of fake poems as might blunt one’s appetite for rhyme, and AI is claiming its cut. [ ] Yesterday I got a date for my follow-up appointment after last week’s procedure. July 2nd!!! And it is by telephone only. The merry-go-round to fucking nowhere. Maybe that’s why I’ve been focussed on the infinite.’ … …. Could be. As if that focus is one’s reason to live, one’s eye on the glittering eight-ball. Because it really feels like, in the Collective Mind of these North American parts, there is a huge disconnect, power outages, wires spitting and sparking, cognitive wheels spinning, going, as was just said, nowhere, guttering, the Maggie Atwood wing of the festivities gone to the Oscars, self-celebritous wankers some of whom may be in possession of principles. If not, can Florsheim shoes float their boats?

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, and honk away some more if you are a fool thinking differently about the Strait of Hormuz: … …. ‘How are fresh Russian troops in Ukraine trained to use their weapons? They're told to read information available in Wikipedia. No kidding.’… …. I think this falls under the rubric of If You Say So, Leave Your Name and Telephone Number and We’ll Get Back to You Department. And Drake thinks that: … …. ‘T will cut and run. The counterargument: he's moving 2,500 Marines from Japan to the Middle East. Not a good sign. But T is fickle. He can move troops around, then do nothing with them. It's anybody's guess, but mine is cut and run. Incidentally, I thought you might like (or not like) this piece from Fukuyama. I greatly enjoyed The End of History even though his conclusions were wrong. Anyway, in this article he essentially gets at humanism, via the Enlightenment, and rejection of religion as the basis of Western Civilization's success - which T and his Christian Nationalist ilk are doing their utmost to undo. And that's an even worse sign for the future. A religiously structured civilization would rip us apart, as it did before. Humanism held us together, and today, its worst enemy is Donald Trump.’ … …. I did not get the idea, unless I am getting Drake’s drift wrong, and as I read the piece on offer, that Fukuyama expressly dismisses religion, and Christian religion in particular, as good for nothing. He seems to be saying that it is the wellspring of “our” civilization. As for humanism turning over the line-up, that is, bringing new energy to the fray and refining things, humankind front and centre, church and state going their separate ways, God’s shadow taking a backseat, for sure, though it has come about that some humankind insist that we speak as much about the salamander as we do some Bieber or Taylor Swift, or Wittgenstein at a barbecue. If, as you have said, atheism is just another religiosity, then I would add secularism to the bonfire of vanities, and I would further note that people “believe” when it is convenient for them to believe, and believe not so much when it is the path of least resistance. So what do people prioritize in their hearts of hearts? And who’s on first? Vale, Drake, for now.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Still having nothing to say and almost enjoying it... I am, however, thinking that Buenos Aires is fabulous in both architecture and culture and night life, having yet to be gentrified. Hablas Espanol? Would you consider living there? A friend of mine went to Valparaiso thirty years ago and never left. How about Halifax? Though maybe, yes, the winters there and the eventual getting priced out anyways don’t mitigate your discomforts… It’s one thing to say the world is unworkable. It’ll be quite another on the day when we speak to its liveability, as in un-liveable. Percival says “maa” or hello. “Catch 22” (because you mention it) was one of the first novels I read. Read it nights in my tent when I was tree-planting on the peninsula and just before I was ravished by a female tree-planter who had nothing better to do in her downtime. I went on to finish up university. Don’t know what became of her. That was in the glory days when sex was a fine mystery and the evils of war were, wait for it, not good. I didn’t mind trudging up and down mountainsides with my fistfuls of trees-to-be in sudden turnabouts of weather – one minute you’re baking, and another and you’re shivering in a deluge – but I did mind the True Believers in our midst. The sprigs they’d plug in the earth, that would need years and years to mature and yet, the world was created the day before yesterday, and God did it for us. The thing is, I didn’t begrudge them the belief. I begrudged them their smugness, the same sort, in essence, as the more hawkish atheists bear us idiots. The moral of the story? Don’t come out west. You’ll still only find a Lotus Land replete with druggies and party raves and spiritual flakes. I did try Montreal in the way-back time, but being delicate, I cowered in the face of steamed hot dogs and the artic temps.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘I hold out my finger as if it were a divining rod and it alights upon, from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and in light of current conflicts and the far-right takeovers of governments: in the general order of Providence, princes and tyrants are considered as the ministers of Heaven, appointed to rule or to chastise the nations of the earth. But sacred history affords many illustrious examples of the more immediate interposition of the Deity in the government of his chosen people. The sceptre and the sword were committed to the hands of Moses, of Joshua, of Gideon, of David, of the Maccabees… and so forth and so on. Does this mean I ought to hold off weeding my garden? Ought I take history and shove it? Board the night train to Prague and besot myself in an Irish bar? Finish my doctorate at the University of Manitoba? Send Drake a postcard? I don’t know, was “Catch 22” all that masterful? That horse-flogging scene and other back-alley scenes involving knives in the wee hours as might’ve stepped out of The Satyricon’s underbelly as per Petronius – that got to me. Yourself? Is everything, barring a nuclear winter, hunky-dory for you?’ … …. Thanks for asking. Will let you know.

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Cupcakes in the oven. And though I’m not worthy of it, picture it, me and the French horn and Ludwig’s Nine Symphony, third movement, horn licks…. And what with the weather – ice storm and snow, I’m watching more movies that I might otherwise absorb through my benumbed organs of sight. A Polish cousin reminds me that much of the art I’ve admired over the years were, in their day, cash cows. And so, talking art, and a nowadays spy thriller with A-list actors and a sexy, but not brain dead actress debuting, and things are going swimmingly until it hits – plot twist, Attack of the Trites which, with a little manipulation of vowel and consonant, might give us one brain-level Attack of the Trots, and I wouldn’t otherwise care, but sometimes it’s the most inanely innocuous claims on our time that most do us in – and hey, in the name of “art forms” and follow the money. I did care when, in the flick “The Mothman Prophecies”, one of the characters tormented by the precognitive in his brain, allows himself to die of exposure in the woods just to get clear of “knowing”. I cared enough to wonder if there is any reality to “precognition”, and really, despite my inner soldier of fortune’s antennae, I’ve no idea. Never saw “Catch 22”. Never read it. Instead, some title just now rises to the surface in my thought-world, something like “The Fall of Public Man”. Very worn dustcover signifying vintage. Must’ve read it once upon a time. Shall have to goggle for author name and vital signs. And you know you’re reading history when you ask yourself how it would’ve been like to have Cicero for a father, who was a loving father but a political bumbler, his vanity blinding him to certain political realities, though he was very intelligent, so they say. Alright then, I’m done here.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘It remains a great mystery – when my go-to café shall reopen. Will it feature interior pilasters when it does? Couches (with ivory inlays) for the banqueters? More fish tanks with more streamlined fish? I’ve been applying thought to the possibility that our language is inadequate for the insanities that engulf us, and I’ve decided that, no, ain’t so. At the risk of repeating myself or someone else on this site, “clown” is perfectly suitable for the stereotyping of our dear leaders. Train wreck is maybe somewhat stale and yet, it gets the idea across of what passes for any number of You-Know-Who’s bone-feels or lack thereof of policy. Shall I press on? Can I think of anything cheerier to say? Sure. “A continuous cycle of striving and boredom, not to mention pain”. Elmer Fudd’s vocalizations coming on like thunder peals. But sugar shack days are with us now, though I must own: I’ve never been in one. Never eaten maple-taffy-ed snow. Never laced snowshoes on my feet and did the beguine in snow-brightened moonlight. Never thrown a snowball in anger. Could mean a diminution of charm in my personality. Missed, irretrievable happenstance. Held hands with a woman once on the moonlit Campidoglio steps, and never was Roman stone so luminous… And still, at this late date, and so far as I know, there is no cure for this, the romance of the ruins, one of the prime indulgences. Has it ever struck you as a bit strange that the sweetest part of a mango tastes a little smoky?’

March 9-11, 2026: Idle remark, or that, for Plato, paraphrasing here, virtue was not just following rules, but the health and perfection of the soul itself. It was the indispensable means to achieving eudaemonia, or the true, flourishing life. And he might well have said that liberals with lifestyle to lose are pretty much on the hook for the collapse of the liberal order, but then he has not been around for eons. And even if he were, there are seriously unattractive aspects to his “social engineering”. Is there such a thing as a moral city slicker, no shortage of wiseacres?

One comparison can be made between You-Know-Who and King Philip of Macedon. (This king was the father of Alexander the Great.) The former hombre has his Truth Socials; the latter had his “communiques”, the use of which he was quite fond. Otherwise, the comparisons end there. Philip, man who had a working brain, and despite his empire building, made some contributions to the lives over which he held sway, not the least of which was how best to work a battlefield. That he brought about innovations in tactics. It is to say he had genuine thoughts on the subject and was not afraid of having the likes of Aristotle around, unlike a Certain Party who is thought-phobic. He was, no doubt, part ways a monster, but was not entirely lacking humanity. In that Oliver Stone flick about Alexander, Val Kilmer portrayed Philip as a one-eyed man with a limp, if with a great deal of energy and generosity. The wine had to flow. Kept his friends close and his enemies closer. Moreover, he was realistic about what kingship is and what it can do to the person who has it to wield. It might just be credible that somewhere in You-Know-Who’s mental make-up, there is a vein of kinetic mentation as has an existential notion or two as to what being Top Dog truly entails (no pun, by the way), but perhaps I speak in jest. Unexpected attack of jest.

And articles as to what it means, on the individual level, to have a sense of morality or not and what this portends for the health of the body-politic are constantly appearing on the various news sites I crawl through daily, and I do not know whether to laugh or cry or do some “too little too late” soliloquy. As for virtue or lack thereof, I would offer myself up as “Exhibit A”, but I am squeamish. What is the worth of virtue and honour when there is none of either around, especially in the world capital? Try Juvenal’s eighth satire for a discussion of the same. (Otherwise, it is a rather pedantic piece, this satire, as if the poet got bored with the sound of his voice…. It happens.) Have a go at the ninth, the opening lines of which are distant echoes of the similes that the comics Colbert and Kimmel, among others, employ in their monologues. The Roman satire points at the eternal conflict between the satirist and the moralist and the city slicker or “sophisticate”. The satirist, roughly speaking, bursts bubbles in which the hypocrisies thrive. The moralist would address the consequent vacuum with notions of “right behaviour” while the city slicker yawns. Who wants to sleep with a prude? &c.

Postscript I: March 9, 1933, and the first concentration camp (Dachau) was up and running, and it would come to consume some 32,000 lives. Through chance, and early on, I happened to have been exposed to archival footage of these camps, and this “exposure” formed my own moral order at least to this extent: never again. Evidently, Eisenhower thought the same. Henceforth I came to see all those quarrels about the worth of “morality” as opposed to the worth of a strong ethical bent – came to see all these discussions as sideshows to the main event, or “never again”. I have now lived long enough to see this “never again” completely turned on its head, not to mention the complete hollowing out of the Republican party. In any case, meaning what? “Never again” was never a way toward a “flourishing life”? You will tell me that Hitler was “moral” even as he was evil. Or that some born-again is moral when all he or she wants is an all-white world, no one else need apply, and now you can now safely discredit any notion of what is or is not moral at your pleasure. Carpenter now and then weighs in on this topic. There is a twilight world that surrounds the “spirituality is easy, religion is hard” observation, no question, but few people abide by anything remotely resembling a principle. Moralistic? My apologies. Then again, there is a point, as one philosophizes, when the act of thinking betrays thought and one has accomplished nothing more than to bite one’s own arse. What do we have when an ethical or moral sense interferes with one’s “pragmatism”? That I have questions for “the life unexamined”, for “better Red than dead”, for “a penny saved is a penny earned” – does that make me a closet absolutist? Stuff your smart phone in your mouth; it will tell you when you are going to die and from what. And so, you have it, the relativist curse all hopped up. Which some say bespeaks a healthier mind than the mind of a zealot. We do not care for zealots. We do not care for the cheesy reasoning behind the notion that some evil is permissible so long as one is morally ascendant in a game of whose underwear is the least disgusting. It is a game all politics play, some more than others. An anarchist yelp? No, we like it when governments work and we have some peace of mind with respect to the food we eat and the streets we walk – peaceably, one hopes. It is often said: government should be boring. No doubt, at those Roman supper parties where the stoic virtues prevailed, the Augustan “peace” (Pax Romana) was discussed in a similar vein, Augustus Caesar Rome’s first emperor, and no democrat.

Postscript II: Lunar coins another word: passementerie. Has to do with tassels and the making of them. And perhaps a furry with a syringe on top. I did not get to the bottom of his “sinistroverse” (previous post). However, Lunar on a related-unrelated subject: … …. ‘It is a real contest determining who are the most repulsive figures in the Trump admin - I’d say the women (or avatars of women) are the all-round winners - but I think with respect to the males it is a toss-up between Miller and Hegseth. There is something peculiarly disgusting in the latter's bloodlust. If shit could talk, it’s him. Yesterday I spoke to our upstairs neighbour S who is Kurdish Iranian and I was struck by how pale and drawn she was - she usually sparkles - worried sick about her family. She hates the ayatollah, but she hates more the fact her country is being utterly destroyed. Why is everybody talking about reconstruction when Israel actually wants Iran to be a ruin? There is something almost fetishistic in the way they destroy people’s houses and olive groves. The link I tried to send [you] was of Trump’s “spiritual advisor” Paula White doing some insane incantation, “Strike, strike, strike …” before going into tongues. Just google it. It beggars belief.’ … …. No thanks. I can only goggle so much. Huzzah.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, and honk away if you are a fool thinking differently: … …. ‘Read your post. (Previous.) Superbly depressing (depressingly superb?). It reinforces modern civilization's judgment that it's not much better than the ancient ones. [And] because the idiots are burning through the US's munitions supply on behalf on Bibi, this would be a dandy time for Mr Xi to invade Taiwan (which has been waiting on delivery of $11 billion worth of US military goods — good luck with that). Not that Trump would have defended democratic Taiwan any more than he's defending democratic Ukraine.’ … …. Drum roll, please. Score one for the Drake. He just might break even.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘I’ve nothing to say. I feel uneasy saying it, but there it is. What’s robbed me of my urge to say something? (My novel is, how describe it, moribund. Fancy word for dead in the water.) Maybe my moral vision of the universe is a crock, seeing as I’m an unbeliever and am vaguely pagan. I’ve only Percival to thank for keeping me on the straight and narrow, and he’s a damn goat. Maa. The Recycling Depot is probably as close to a moral operation as I’ll ever get on this island. Daffodils, eh? Spring, you know. Seals. Birds. Frogs. As you like it. “As You Like It”. But I forget who loves whom in the play and to what end, just that at some point, someone hangs poems from the trees in the forest. Was Shakespeare aware that he was “exploring queer undertones” in this bit of theatre or was he just letting rip and the chips fall where they may?’ … …. Beats me, kemo sabe. It has been an age since I read the thing. Meanwhile, I wager that one can see Tehran burning from Mars. Never mind that Mars was the old Roman war god who also oversaw crops. The last time I was on your island, what concerned me most was how to get a tugboat into a spot of verse. Hey, I heard that: your “piss off”.

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Where were we last? Right. China. By the time the latest ruckus runs its course, China will have been gifted. Do we care? How shall it go for the price of tea in Slovakia much less the price of jujubes in a Manhattan deli? Alright then. You’ll not likely find jujubes in such a venue, but then we are flying blind, in any case. Did Plato have a sense of the absurd? Absolutely. But not in the sense of a world without meaning but in the sense of human stupidity, whatever that has come to mean. As when the president poked a hornet’s nest and didn’t bargain on getting stung. Fine weather on tap here for the next few days. Perhaps that’s all one can ask for. Surely, Polybius has something to say about what Trumpy is, but I’m too lazy just now to check it out. True, I’m a Brit, Romanized, but sometimes I like to lark about, flat-footed glides, or go continental and tango.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Thought I’d take a break from music (French horn) and cupcakes (oven) and read that book you lent me. It strikes me that one can say one is reading history when certain word assortments occur, like: “Romans like the Scipios or the Fabii were hardened (horse) riders.” From The Classical World, Robin Lane Fox. This allows me to say that all Trump ever rides, so far as I can determine, is a golf cart. Further on in the book, one comes across this: “Meanwhile the Macedonians’ cavalry-charges down the wings failed, partly because of the Romans’ elephants, partly because their own elephants were truncated (pun?) by a Roman anti-elephant corps.” What this has to do with the Strait of Hormuz, I couldn’t tell you, but I suppose one or another of my Polish cousins could.’ … …. Truncated. If a pun, it is a wicked one, girl.

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘Don’t press me too hard, I might shatter. I can’t get over how insane everything has gotten. Then I went and watched The Wicker Man (1973). Another one of those flicks that the world watched in its day save for me. Could be the strangest and silliest and most horror-inducing flick I’ve ever sat through. Except that I couldn’t watch the ending. Would’ve been stomach-turning. Even so, I cared more for the geese and pigs about to be sacrificed in the flames than I did the puritan copper. So, what to do with “virtue”. With “moral”? “Ethical”? Should city slickers run the world? God no. But the honourable opposition could use a few of them in its ranks. Who’s calling out those who call out the hypocrites and the demented? Lately, I’ve been thinking that the world is a theorem that has no solution. There’s only damage control. Is that moral relativism? I’d happily participate in some maypole dance and play volleyball immediately thereafter if I thought it’d attach the better angels of our natures to the better deities out there, but everything is smart phone friendly. That is to say, life is getting to be so structured in such a way as to preclude our natures for good or ill in any event. Some silence is golden, no question, but a lot of it is that which allows people to be pulverized off-camera. Even Columbo, were he in the game, would fail to get these perps off their game. I digress. Though some digressions are sacred as when one agrees that one shalt not kill, then tucks into an ice cream bar.’

March 3-5, 2026: Someone said: “Go write a poem.” And there it was: dismissal with disdain. I cite The Wild Party, a Merchant-Ivory film, not one of their best though it looked good on paper. In which Raquel Welch sort of acts. Noble effort on her part, in fact. Based on a rhyming narrative, and viewed (until I bailed) against the backdrop of the latest debacle, of what was flitting out of the latest shiny edition of Pandora’s Box, the president’s cocked but disembodied head among the wingéd demons, and does the box have a bottom this time around? We shall see. For now, let us rag on poets some more: … But the outstanding poet,/Whose inspiration is rare and unique, who makes/Nothing from common stock, strikes no debased/Poetic currency, minted with platitudes – though/I can’t think of one just now… and so forth and so on. From Juvenal’s seventh satire, beware of looting the canon. You may proceed, but with respect to risk, it will be a close-run thing.

Gaza, eh? Ukraine, say what? History is no stranger to abominations and yet, these aforementioned instances of sadistic aplomb need cede no pride of place to the cynicism that drives them, war powers coming to your neighbourhood. Future analysts will look at it all systemically: such and such a political force, such and such a move on a Ouija board, such and such an economic reality is or was in play; realpolitik delusions. But discount the ugly personages, and which side of the bed they got out of some fine morning of an inflection point. Spiritual collapse? What are you smoking? Ain’t no such thing. Give your conscience a holiday. Though when a Trumpian millennial goes on about spiritual collapse, you can be sure the pot has been Prozac’d and the kettle votes Democrat. Which brings me to remarks from a friend at a car rally in Shillong: “If You-Know-Who wanted to liberate Iranian women, what the f--k was that, that strike on a girls’ school, over a hundred dead?”

And for a different though somewhat related topic: supper party at Mar-a-Lago? Have a go at Juvenal’s fifth satire. Gaucherie in all its glory, and some choice exotica on the menu might appeal to what remains of your sensory apparatuses….

And then Juvenal’s sixth satire … It allows one, even across the centuries, to glimpses of Ice Barbies and other Trumpian harpies in aviator glasses. Otherwise, Juvenal overall: rank misogyny, some of it hyperbolic, some of it signed off on with genuine conviction, a lot of upper crust ladies calling their own shots – for good or ill, which most likely galled the poet. Then again, the rictus smiles that come of facelifts, many of those smiles privy to private jets… And is it anyone’s business, what kind of in-flight sex they tool around with, cruising altitude set at beyond oversight, the next destination the next Ponzi scheme?

Change of pace: we at Ephemeris make no claims to be objective. Neither do we use subjectivity as a crutch. A pox on both their houses. Those ships, having sailed, are on the open seas, though some seas are more open than others, and you can expect a hazing, your oil bounty commandeered. We respect the power of cliches, those put to the test with elan and a sense of urgency. We do not trust pilgrims who are easily bored. You-Know-Who is that (though he says he is not, war endlessly fascinating), his brat-pout the chief aspect of his countenance. I have seen a friend’s attempt at a portrait of that look. Got the meanness of the mouth more right than not. The rest? An imago (in the zoological drift of the word) of a Futurist big wheel circa the 1920s. Roundabout which time Mussolini had it in mind to revive a dead empire. As per some spiritual quest. Is there any other kind? I just read that Operation Epic Fury would do better to coin itself Operation Epstein. A cheap, if accurate dig. There are many shades of farce. The one currently on display might savor of Aristophanes. At some point Petronius, his back up against it, will kick things up a notch (with dirty limericks aimed at Dear Leader even as he bleeds out). Then the Juvenalian touch will howl – with concomitant levels of disgust. (For once, Monty Python does not really cut it, even if we are, by now, post-post-post-post-so-hugely post-modern that we are classical again.) There is Thucydides to this effect: the strong will do what they do, the weak must suffer what they must. (This quote or near quote showed up on Al-Jazeera the other day in a discussion of the new hostilities with Iran.) Be still my beating heart. But no, the Hegsethian is neither a school of magic out of Harry Potter nor a school of Neo-Platonist mindcraft nor a men’s cologne. It does have something to do with logicking on one’s toes.

But if Cioran regarded life as flat-out meaningless, all pity misplaced, and do not cry for me, I did get the impression from his letters that he would not have gone into that good night willingly and happily. An optimist, as I have heard it said, is one who has not yet heard the news, but it does not follow necessarily that one should go out of one’s way to live life joylessly…. Right you are. I forgot, for a moment, how naïve of me, what has been airing on the news sites, including “legacy media” on each their life supports: missiles and drones, drones and bunker busters, and custard-thick rhetoric as would fit nicely in Orwell’s “1984”. The clowns of Oceania mic’d up (or whichever A-team it is having at their forever war, terrorist blowback in the offing). The most tired of all clichés are, indeed, the clowns. But the cliché still nails the new crop of conquistadors, those funny, funny entities, regime change their war cry and payload, their brains wired to pure logic and the return of Jesus, their hisses and sally-forth noises tailored for sound-bytes, and for the lizard eyes of their Übermensch.

Postscript I: Well, March 3rd. “March 3rd individuals have an upbeat disposition that keeps them physically, emotionally, and spiritually energized. They may not be especially careful about their diet, which can lead to unwanted pounds later in life.” And that lets the cat out of the bag with respect to this time capsule. This day in 1933 saw the inauguration of Franklin Delano Rooselvelt. A year later, and John Dillinger escapes from prison, having carved a pistol from wood and blackened it with shoe polish. Carpenter might wish he had thought of this….

Postscript II: Lunar coins a word: sinistroverse. Unknown what he means by it. A favouring (in the brain) of the left hemisphere over the right? The universe’s sinister face? A new poetry genre? Israel taking over [ ] Lebanon?... …. ‘There will be hell to pay but only by the innocent. Still no word of regret from the IDF about bombing a school of young girls. Find Daddy indeed. And still no word about their meddling with the Druze in the south of Syria. The last thing they want is a ‘free’ Syria. Well there it is and God knows what will issue from it, all manner of evil. Netanyahu will be the only winner in this. [ ] Americans can no longer take human losses and so the tide will surely turn but not before another decade’s worth of damage has been done. Trump has no concept of the Persian notion of self-sacrifice which is built into their culture… …. We watched another, very grim Iranian film The Circle about women in Iran, prostitutes mainly. When I was in Isfahan a ghastly pimp tried to interest me in a prostitute while at the same time explaining why there were so many prostitutes. Mind you, I probably played along just so as to squeeze information out of him. They were almost all widows whose husbands died fighting the Iraqis and for whom there was virtually no war widow’s pension or welfare, all of them forced to go on the game. I have often wondered whether the pimp was not in fact a policeman luring tourists into a honeytrap. Anyway, it was all so unspeakably sad.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, and should you come across, in your travels, those presidential rationales for bombing Iran flashing like chameleon fish, feel free to honk. As for this evening’s blood moon, read all the poetry and prophesy into it as you wish. Stand on the corner and bay like a hound. Get biblical. Alright, brush up on your quantum mechanics. Drake then: … …. ‘The NYT editorial board was as stumped as anyone. No good reason has been offered for this war. Not a good but true reason is that Trump is a sociopathic madman; the war also is yet another distraction from the Epstein files. The war was inevitable, exactly what we'd expect from Trump's inept real estate developer and Sunni-money-soaked son-in-law as negotiators. Damn I hate these sons of bitches.’ … …. Here, Drake, no doubt, wipes the spittle from his mouth before powering on: … …. ‘What the kerplooie? "Prime Minister Mark Carney and his foreign minister, Anita Anand, backed the American action" in Iran. So much for the new, thoughtful leader of the free world. Didn't last long. I want out. Beam me the hell off this godforsaken [rock. Where’s a god when you need one?]. Maybe George Carlin was right. The best thing for Earth is a nuclear war that… fill-in-the-blank. [And] damn, I had “Die Walküre” cranked to the audible level of a jet engine a couple days ago while painting, and I just about shot my "essence," to borrow from Gen. Jack D. Ripper. Logic and reason keep the Masters of Conventional Wisdom and mainstream foreign policy analysis snugly in the DC club, this while we’re “bewaring” stuff – like overreach and broken china shops.’ … …. We are grateful for Drake’s advice and what seems to be his newfound ability to distract himself. Impressionist brushstrokes. High decibels. Scorched earth.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Shoulders, back and knees still screaming. From the move. Next time, we (Percival and I) hire movers. I'm turning 70 in two weeks, and the body just can't deal with lugging, lifting, toting, shoving and other such once easy peasy activities. Percival, in goat years, is ageless. But the new place has advantages. Betterly insulated and so we're not relying on firewood as much, plus there are no stairs. Win win. On the other hand, there are other houses nearby. We can see them through the trees, and what’s worse is that most everyone has a dog they take for walks twice a day, so that, cranky loner that I am, I find myself lurking in bushes when I spot other walkers so that I don't have to suffer the agonies of having conversational nuisance inflicted upon me. Just finished Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. Long, very long, 650 pages, but I soon changed gears, slowed down, and basked. Everyone says the mini-series is good so I will give it a go. Fit of nostalgia, I’ve ordered Thomas Pynchon's new novel. I know, I know, but I once worshipped his stuff and a review in the LRB extolled its virtues. For me, Pynchon is somewhat like Frank Zappa, or rather my relationship to FZ. In my teens and early twenties, I loved their irreverence and eccentricity. Decades later, dipping into each of them now and again, they don’t seem to have held up at all well. Still, perhaps Tom has knocked one out of the park in this his last time at bat.’ … …. It is funny, what ages one. For some people, reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. For others Creedance or Cream or backpacking. Vietnam. Selma. Still others, and it is Your Everyday Armageddon with a cherry on top.

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Yes, the new economic strategy comes into play - destroy a regional economy and infrastructure and make money by jerry-rebuilding it. The Chinese have suffered from American infrastructure projects - white elephants with no maintenance agreements, unless a client pays as much again. Trump's rage against China is the rage of the abuser capitalist. China will emerge as boss of everything and it’s [its] sins forgiven. America will be a nasty confused place with intervals of liberal slickness a la Newsome which will change nothing. I will write poems about flowers and aging waitresses. At any rate, I leave you with this: “In matters of literary and historical appraisement, one cannot operate with the methods of a laboratory or furnish the proof to be demanded in a court of law. The best is only the probable. Any who raise complaint have an easy remedy: to offer something better, something coherent and constructive.” Ronald Syme. Seems to be what’s going on. Seems to be what’s lacking. Otherwise, I don’t know what he was on about either, and I’ve read his books.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Feeling a little squirrelly these days. I need a sense of continuance, or that there is such an animal. To that end, cupcakes are in the oven whether or not I’ll eat them. French horn has his ear to some Pergolesi. One can have buffa as well as the sacred in a single breath. Otherwise, we’re so anal with our categories. You know, purity politics. Anyway, I was working on my long tone and then I laid the horn down, wondering of what was I the butterfly effect… Some Polish cousins of mine are saying that Iran blundered, but that there’ll be a Persian renaissance courtesy of that other I-country who’ll claim mastery of the known world. The Melian Dialogue, anyone? Mi casa is su casa so long as you do what I say and don’t tick me off? You say you don’t trust pilgrims who bore easily. But that’s what’s happening to me: I dial up a movie, and ten minutes later, I’m out of there. Life as a journey. Life as a trip. Life as some adorable adventure. Jesus wept.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘More scrambled dreams. But that’s nothing strange in a Hall of Mirrors world that makes perfect sense if, perhaps, you view it while standing upside down. Blood moon? I guess I missed the sight, the prophesies, the Book of Revelations as a series of cartoons, Elmer Fudd epiphanies. All this analysis, instead, of who’s got the power and the mostest moves on a 5-D chessboard, analysts as happy as pigs in bubble wrap, not one mention of Gaza, just who’ll prevail and who has the luck of the Irish though he quite possibly breathes through gills. I’ve become unnaturally sensitive to the more insufferable pretentions such as I encounter on some (not all) CNN segments, and venues that serve specialty coffees. When the last greasy spoon goes under can it be said that a light will have died out in the west? I am failing to adjust. I am on Evolution’s Most Wanted list, and it’s not because I’m handsome. Maybe me and Dostoyevsky will wind up playing handball in Elysium after all. Maybe I’ll break biscuits with Edith Wharton served up by Henry James, liteau on his forearm. Well, see the footnote.’

Footnote: Liteau: French word for a waiter’s cloth.