Big Day Tomorrow

My picks for the #KentuckDerby tomorrow (if you make any money you owe me 120% of winnings):

PUGNACIOUS FLATULENCE

WHISKEY FOR BREAKFAST

JEFFREY EPSTEIN

CRUSTY FACE MASK

BABY NEEDS CROCS

SPLENDID COVFEFE

RIGHTEOUS KIDNEY STONE

FYRE FESTIVAL II

RICK

— James (@wetcasements) April 30, 2021

"a battleground for bigger powers"

"Wang's analogy of us as human fertilizer revived thoughts I had been thinking for a long time.  True enough, as Chinese, we genuinely felt that our lives were misused here, but as I have observed earlier, no matter how abysmal our situation was there were always others who had it worse.  By now I understood why occasionally some Korean civilians were hostile to us.  To them we had come here only to protect China's interests -- by so doing, we couldn't help but ruin their homes, fields, and livelihoods.  From their standpoint, if the Chinse army hadn't crossed the Yalu, millions of lives, both civilian and military, would have been saved.  Of course, the United States would then have occupied all of Korea, forcing China to build defenses in Manchuria, which would have been much more costly than sending troops to fight in our neighboring country.  As it was, the Koreans had taken the brunt of the destruction of this war, whereas we Chinese were here mainly to keep its flames away from our border.  Or, as most of the POW's believed, perhaps rightly, we had served as cannon fodder for the Russians.  It was true that the Koreans had started the war themselves, but a small country like theirs could only end up being a battleground for bigger powers.  Whoever won this war, Korean would be a loser."

-- Ha Jin, War Trash

"strange, throatless prosperity"

Mitchell Johnson on how his mom adopted the van life, and the larger cultural picture around Nomadland:

"This year, people like my mom are in the national spotlight as the community at the center of Nomadland, the film that won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, won the Golden Globe for best drama, and heads into the Oscars as a favorite for Best Picture. Nomadland takes place a decade ago, on the heels of the recession in 2011. When my mom started living in her RV, the decline had not ended in any meaningful sense, but the doom of the early years had given way to a strange, throatless prosperity. In this atmosphere, rootlessness could be viewed not as a predicament but an opportunity. It was the era of Eat Pray Love, Wild, and Tiny House Hunters. On social media, the young and online catalogued the adventures of houselessness-by-choice under the hashtag #vanlife. The RV (or teardrop trailer, or sprinter van) became a symbol of inspiration, and a source of ad revenue. Women in wide-brimmed hats and linen shirts sold detox water or bluetooth speakers from the back of their Volkswagen buses, but the real product, of course, was the lifestyle. Living in a van represented a new, glamorous ideal, unburdened from homeownership and a steady job — unmoored, even, from the physical world itself. If owning a home was no longer possible, there was endless space on Instagram. 

In lesser-known corners of the internet, a different set of people were discussing van life, too. Traffic to websites like CheapRVLiving.com boomed as mostly older Americans were planning their exits. A popular Yahoo message board titled 'Live In Your Van 2' doubled its membership in the years after the recession, growing to over eight thousand people. Reddit’s r/vandwellers forum started in 2010 and quickly gained tens of thousands of followers. (Today, it has 1.2 million.) After the recession, sales of vans, RVs, and trailers skyrocketed as more people moved into them full-time. These were the nomads."

I haven't seen the movie, but I've been meaning to read the book.

There's just so much to talk about here -- the fact that so many people of many ages can never afford to buy a house, the American dream of constant mobility and freedom, and our love affairs with cars.

I'll admit that I do watch some #vanlife on YouTube (some of it is decent, seriously).  I also enjoy minimalist survival videos, even though my desire to actually go out camping is less than zero.

Lots to stew on.  Having a house is nice but Americans really tend to overestimate how much house (or lawn, or yard) they actually need.

I'll leave it at that for now.

"the pain inflicted by the English pronunciation on their tongues and jaws"

"So I began to teach them English, just some phrases and short sentences, such as 'Hands up!,' 'Drop your weapon, we spare you!,' 'We don't kill prisoners,' 'Don't move!,' 'Surrender, you are safe!,' 'Don't die for American imperialism!'

There was no paper to write on, so I used a stick to inscribe on the ground the written characters representing the English sounds so that the literate ones among them could have some phonetic guidance.  I couldn't possibly make them pronounce the words accurately, since half of them didn't even speak Mandarin well.  But they were eager to learn, even if they did complain about the pain inflicted by the English pronunciation on their tongues and jaws.  A few claimed they had sore throats.  I was amazed that in just a few days they could rap out to one another what they had learned.  Most of them were smart men who would have gone far in their lives had they had the opportunity and the education.  I wondered why they would concentrate so much on learning a few foreign words that they might never use at all.  Heaven knew what would happen to us tomorrow; we might get captured or killed anytime.  The enemy was just two miles to the north.

I suspected that to them the act of learning must represent some kind of hope.  At least this meant there was still a future, on which they could fix their minds.  Their limited awareness of the larger world and their inert response to the menace of death endowed them with the strength needed for survival.  I was moved by the tenacity of life shown in their desire to learn."

-- Ha Jin, War Trash

"the long course of privation and terror to which we have been subjected"

"Having barely escaped this danger, our attention was now directed to the dreadful imminency of another; that of absolute starvation.  Our whole stock of provision had been swept overboard in spite of all our care in securing it; and seeing no longer the remotest possibility of obtaining more, we gave way both of us to despair, weeping aloud like children, and neither of us attempting to offer consolation to the other.  Such weakness can scarcely be conceived, and to those who have never been similarly situated will, no doubt, appear unnatural; but it must be remembered that our intellects were so entirely disordered by the long course of privation and terror to which we have been subjected, that we could not justly be considered, at that period, in the light of rational beings.  In subsequent perils, nearly as great, if not greater, I bore up with fortitude against all the evils of my situation and Peters, it will be seen, evinced a stoical philosophy nearly as incredible as his present childlike supineness and imbecility -- the mental condition made the difference."

-- Edgar Allen Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Godron Pym of Nantucket

"but we didn't care"

Isle of Dogs

On the Isle of Dogs we barked.

We had our say

from day till dark.

A chorus we were

of piebald hounds.

Our howling spiraled out

across the downs.

We howled at the redness of light,

bayed at the rising waters

and approaching night --

we lived on an island of sounds.

None listened, none heard,

the sounds were entirely ours

None listened, none heard

but we didn't care

as long as our howls

shaped the still air --

we lived on the Isle of Sounds.

-- Michael Palmer

"do only what is allowable"

"33. Set up right now a certain character and pattern for yourself which you will preserve when you are by yourself and when you are with people.  Be silent for the most part, or say what you have to in a few words.  Speak rarely, when the occasion requires speaking, but not about just any topic that comes up, not about gladiators, horse-races, athletes, eating or drinking -- the things that always come up; and especially if it is about people, talk without blaming or praising or comparing.  Divert by your own talk, if you can, the talk of those with you to something appropriate.  If you happen to be stranded among strangers, do not talk.  Do not laugh a great deal or at a great many things or unrestrainedly.  Refuse to swear oaths, altogether if possible, or otherwise as circumstances allow.  Avoid banquets given by those outside philosophy.  But if the appropriate occasion arises, take great care not to slide into their ways, since certainly if a person's companion is dirty the person who spends time with him, even if he happens to be clean, is bound to become dirty too.  Take what has to do with the body to the point of bare need, such as food, drink, clothing, house, household slaves, and cut out everything that is for reputation or luxury.  As for sex stay pure as far as possible before marriage, and if you have it do only what is allowable.  But do not be angry or censorious toward those who do engage in it, and do not always be making an exhibition of the fact that you do not."

-- Epictetus, The Handbook

"natural puppets with nothing in their heads"

"Simply put: We are not from here.  If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us.  Nothing in nature needs us.  We are like [Philipp] Mainlander's suicidal God.  Nothing needed Him either, and his uselessness was transferred to us after He burst out of existence.  We have no business being in this world.  We move among living things, all those natural puppets with nothing in their heads.  But our heads are in another place, a world apart where all the puppets exist not in the midst of life but outside it.  We are those puppets, those human puppets.  We are crazed mimics of the natural prowling about for a peace that will never be ours.  And the medium in which we circulate is that of the supernatural, a dusky element of horror that obtains for those who believe in what should be and should not be.  This is our secret quarter.  This is where we rave with insanity on the level of metaphysics, fracturing reality and breaking the laws of life."

-- Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race

Friday Afternoon

My Dad is sick.  He started coughing last night, and today at lunch he had trouble swallowing (admittedly large) pieces of sausage and broccoli.  We got a big up of chicken broth into him, then he went down to rest for the afternoon.

I'm guessing (hoping?) it's just a cold.  His vaccination was last Saturday.  He's convinced he's having a reaction to it, I really doubt it.

We're keeping an eye of things.

Meanwhile, here's an insanely addictive write up (if you're 46 like me) of 50 all-text games (mostly) from the 1980's.

The write-up of 1985's A Mind Forever Voyaging is fantastic.

Hope Me Greta Thunberg

Me: I live a minimalist lifestyle, trying to consume as little as possible and live an earth-friendly existence.

Also me, when Amazon package comes : GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME.

— James (@wetcasements) April 22, 2021

"Just when I thought that my skies were a June-July blue"

XTC, "1000 Umbrellas"

In one week I'll have lived with my Dad, and been home from South Korea, for a total of three months.

It feels much longer of course.

If you had told me that at this point me and him would be getting along pretty well (only one major fight), I'd be doing some writing that I think is worthwhile, and that the Old Man is now allowing me to drive his car as needed, I'd say that that's better than I expected last winter.

Me taking care of Dad was always going to be an experiment, and a difficult one at that.

But somehow we're making it work, with help from my sister who visits often from the DC area.

I've been listening to nothing but XTC lately, who I've always liked, but I'm taking the opportunity to work through every one of their studio albums as I walk five kilometers every morning, or sometimes eight if I go into the "town" of Nugent's Corner.  (It has a grocery store, a bank, and a Subway.)

Skylarking is over-rated.  Black Sea is their best work.  Or maybe Oranges and Lemons.

I'll probably manage to put together a post about it eventually.

I mowed the lawn now that spring is here.  I haven't done that since high school, I think.

I'm also reading a lot, which is hardly something to complain about either.