Ramblin' with Roger

I’ve been experiencing what they used to call manic depression. My highs can be really high and often unexpected. But my lows might be rage-fueled tantrums.

In music, which I’ve listened to dozens of times before, I’m often struck by how emotional I will get. Familiar pieces can bring me extraordinary joy – or great contemplation. An example of the former: The Concerto in F by George Gershwin is a recently heard example. 

This tale of a memorial service brought me familiar recognition.

Here’s a wonderful bio piece about first niece Rebecca Jade for a concert she performed last week. 

I loved the clue on a recent JEOPARDY so much that I stopped the recording – I watch almost nothing in real time – to point it out to my wife. 3 CONSONANTS IN A ROW, $800. “The comical coinage aibohphobia describes the fear of this type of word.” What is palindromes? I should have gotten it because it was used before, in 1999. PALINDROMES, $1000. “The whimsical coinage ‘aibohphobia’ means this.”  What is fear of palindromes? It was a triple stumper both times.

I am bemused and more than slightly amused by how much the Jeffrey Epstein issue is the hill that MAGA people are willing to die on. Besides knowing that Epstein was dreadful, I’ve thought of nothing about him. Given all the other things happening in the country, he took no space in my brain. 

Won’t get fooled again

I got an e-mail from what purported to be the company that hosts my blog saying that the payment didn’t go through. Given my technological difficulties a few weeks ago, this was a reasonably possible situation. So I went to the login page, but it wasn’t my provider’s URL, though it looked like their page. I contacted my provider, and they asked me to resend them visuals, as I must not have properly understood.  So it was with GREAT JOY when they indicated they’d gotten enough complaints on this topic from others that I didn’t need to send them anything else—something off my plate.

Our backyard has a shed that holds our bicycles, lawn chairs, grill, etc. We could no longer lock it because some gophers or other rodents had undermined the shed’s base. This was a great concern because there’s a neighbor boy about 12 who would wander into our backyard; our next-door neighbor came to our house to express concern about the kid. We started putting cinder blocks in front of our yard gate, but that’s suboptimal.  So I was pleased when one day we came home and suddenly the shed door locked; it must have been our contractor, whom we had contacted several days earlier. It gave me a sense of real joy.

Conversely

The news in the country made me not just disappointed but furious, enraged. No recent story ticked me off  more than ICE being able to access information from CMS about 79 million Medicaid users, including home addresses and ethnicities, information being passed along so that they could “root out fraud.” It infuriated me so much that – and my wife can verify  – I was spewing invectives to no one in particular. “Don’t those F***ing SOBs know about HIPAA privacy laws? Their ethnic bigotry knows no end!”

Then I read about the US Secretary of State’s plan to burn 500 metric tons of emergency food aid that had “expired” because the State Department failed to distribute it when it took over USAID. 

The EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm and “begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so.”

And this, on top of the other crappy things, such as Congress codifying the cuts of previously allocated funds to PBS and NPR, and authorizing health cuts that would have prevented people from dying, really broiled me.   Oh, former criminals need more access to guns!

It is a  ‘State of Emergency’ for Civil Rights. 

Me, me, me

You may have seen David Brooks share Alistair McIntyre’s explanation of FOTUS in The Atlantic magazine:  He “doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. [He] speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. [FOTUS] doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and [FOTUS] is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.”

And it makes me think of less than charitable thoughts… So, some joy, some rage. The rage turns into the melancholy of One More Damn Thing.

Song