Tuesday AM

I was awakened by another TV news dream — one which featured a curious cast of characters from one job I had about thirty years ago and another job from about eight years ago, brought together in some dream-imagined town I don't think I've ever seen in waking life. It also featured, oddly enough, an old old computer newsroom program from yet another phase of my career — one which I haven't laid eyes on in many years and which I don't think I've even thought about since the last time I saw it. It wasn't the worst of those dreams, by far, but I hate having those old memories pulled up to the front of my brain.

There's a thunderstorm rumbling overhead. I checked the web, and there are no watches or warnings, so I'll assume it's just a generic summer thunderstorm.

Here's a story from the Telegraph about middle-aged men giving up sex.

"What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the 1950s: 'I can have sex but I do not want to. It’s not rewarding’".

What else?

I've misplaced some socks. They're in the house somewhere, but they've gotten separated from their mates.

I mentioned several days ago reading H.G. Wells' The Outline of History. This was the 1919 first edition, which stopped at about the creation of the League of Nations. I picked up a similar but more recent book, The New Penguin History of the World, to cover events from 1919 to the present.

I'm also reading a book called Doubt, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, which had been sitting on my bookshelf untouched for a few years. She's basically assembled some historical sketches of people and groups who went against the conventional wisdom of their eras. For example, she describes how the biblical books of Job and Ecclesiastes are so out of synch with the rest of biblical teaching that she wonders how they were included in the Bible in the first place. ("Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity," is still my favorite Bible verse, and the only one I've carried with me from my thumping days.)

I've been on 'vacation' for a month or so from Zen and Taoist books. I figured I needed to spend more time being it and less reading about it. But I miss having that reading, and I think I'm going to find Wen-Tzu again for another read.

I'm still fat and I haven't gotten any younger.