Wednesday, November 16, 2016

The world always is upside down for someone

 
It appears many think the world, once again and for the umpteenth time since the British band of General Charles Cornwallis played the tune after the American victory at Yorktown in 1781, has been turned upside down. This time the event was the election of Donald "potty mouth" Trump to become the forty-fifth president of the United States. My dog, Buddy, sort of goes along with that assessment and has adjusted his position for viewing the world accordingly. My own view is that the world has been turned upside down throughout the last eight years under the mostly absentee leadership of Barack Obama, especially notably on the international front in which hundreds of thousands have been murdered in places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan while the United Nations, the United States and Western Europe have done what ?? Absolutely nothing of consequence to prevent it.

Anyway, now we shall see what the next four years bring -- hopefully, in the least, the death of political correctness and the end of appeasement to terrorists and their sponsor nations.

In the meanwhile, Buddy and I will calmly watch the world go by while drinking our Benedictine; reading our Fyodor Dostoyevsky, our Norman Mailer, our Carl Jung, our Jean-Paul Sartre, our Will Durant and a few "supplemental bums" -- dharma and otherwise; collecting ourselves a gun here and there (by the way, add still another Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum to the number as of last Saturday); and, maybe, smoking our Cuban cigars –- I am thinking about taking them up again .... a guy has to have a vice or two and, god, I miss the taste of a cigar (along with a few other tastes) and you only live once .... unless you take literally Ian Fleming novels.

Ah, yes .... the music. It is here for two reasons: Obviously, because it is exquisitely beautiful. Perhaps obvious also to a few who have been coming here since the beginning, because when I look at the young lady in the quartet whose hair is worn up it is like I am seeing another young lady from the not-too-distant past. Sometimes the past keeps finding its way back, at least in your mind if not into your actuality. Whatever .... since I have written less, there is room this evening for more photographs and more music.






1 comment:

Fram Actual said...

Sometimes I like my twenty-four-hour rule, sometimes I do not. Tonight, I like it and will use it to close comments on this post. For anyone new wandering by, the rule is this: If there have been no comments within twenty-four hours after posting, I (often) shut them off so I do not have to trouble myself with looking back from time to time.

But, I have a difficult time not talking / writing myself, so I will do so here and now, and leave you with this quote from novelist and short story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald:

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

Fitzgerald, who was born in the Cathedral Hill District of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and who lived "here" from time-to-time, wrote a number of short stories and revised his first-published novel, "This Side of Paradise," just a few miles from where I currently have my camp set up. The quote above is from a short story entitled, "The Rich Boy," written in 1925 and later published in a collection of early stories entitled, "All the Sad Young Men."

I began thinking about this sort of stuff while listening to the song, "Young and Beautiful," over and over again this evening. It is from the most recent film rendition of Fitzgerald's novel, "The Great Gatsby."

So, what thoughts about novels-novelists / films / music have been going through your mind this evening ?? Never mind probing your mind .... I can guess ... as Bobby Dylan wrote: "The times they are a-changin'" ....

And, such is the way commentary here ends .... with a whisper and a whimper ....

Something special ....