The Profundity of Crumbling/Bananas

I watched two-and-a-half episodes of the mini-series Chernobyl this week. Too much dragged on--men in protective gear going into dangerous buildings--but the scenes of empty homes were gripping--maybe re-creations, I bet (without bothering to look it up) of photos by David McMillan.

Excerpts from his book Growth and Decay: Pripyat and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (2019):

I didn't mean to disparage the bland, clean look of Home Goods in my last post--I do see why people would love them, given how rough it is to live with the Law of Entropy:
"Look, with smooth white pottery, we have created an illusion of space outside the law!"

But the look of decay--entropy at work--is more to my taste.
"Antique" or "vintage" are more attractive words than decay, but it's all about the visual effects of time.
Crumbling is beautiful.
[Exception: dead things when they still smell.]
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I had a bit of a meltdown myself yesterday--the predictable post-holiday, January-cold mood plunge.
I left work early and for the first time in a couple months was really, reeeeally tempted to stop on the way home and buy ice cream. "Maybe I could make an exception..."

Ha. I KNOW how that plays out.
No.
I stopped and bought BANANAS instead and had a minor binge with them + peanut butter on olive-oil crackers...
Pretty satisfying too--crunchy and creamy textures. Bananas are sweet, but with about 1/10th of the sugar in ice-cream.
The emotions are the same, but the nutrition is way different.
I used my porcelain Soviet tea saucer that was probably made around the time of Chernobyl.

I wonder how emotional eating works if you're on Ozempic. You don't physically want to eat, but the emotions remain... The author of Magic Pill talked about feeling flat because he couldn't turn to food for comfort. A woman (who looked great) who'd had bariatric surgery talked about how depressed she was without the pleasure of food.

Of course ideally we learn other kinds of comfort and pleasure.
But it's ludicrous to think we'll just switch-on to train for a marathon; call our [nonexistent] trusted family and friends.
Write a short story...

MAYBE IN OUR NEXT LIVES....
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Idea for a story in Time [more of a thought experiment]

Since time is not linear, if you (your soul) re-incarnates, there's no reason that your "next" life will be in the "future". Souls could live and live again anytime.
What if all the people on earth at one time are reincarnations of the same soul---yours?
What if, once in a while anyway, Everyone Is You?

I can't think how to turn it into a story though, since if it were true, it wouldn't make any difference!
(Since we don't remember our other lives.)
I suppose a character could become aware?
Have I rediscovered the Buddha?
What would a buddha do in 2025?
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I don't record a lot of books I read, I guess partly because a lot of books are barely worth recording.
Another disappointment: No One Is Talking About This (2021), by Patricia Lockwood. (In photo above, behind banana.)

Yes, and why did I think I would like this when I had disliked Lockwood's memoir Priestdaddy (2017)? (She's was born to a father who was a Lutheran minister who later became a Catholic priest--a rare instance of a priest who's a married man with children.)

At first No One Is... amused me, but eventually I remembered... I don't particularly like this person. But she's great at catching the voice of social media!

"She was ovulating, and posted a photo of herself in a bikini with the disturbing caption, 'god's little dog treat.' Her mother called exactly fourteen minutes later. 'You're not an atheist, are you?' she asked. 'That's not what I meant,' she assured her, and explained that the post was actually kind of Christian. Her body was trying to knock itself up, the only way it knew how."

That's on page 107 (of 210), which I think is as far as I'm going to get.

There's a kind of writing I think I could do, but don't want to do:
to use a modern voice that talks about the ironic profundity of the emptiness of eating a hot dog at Dairy Queen alone on your birthday.

And another voice, one that writes with a super-sincere profundity of a man who gives you a reusable bag on the bus when your paper bag breaks.

THIS JUST HAPPENED TO ME.
The bag, not the hot dog. My paper bag of bananas broke and I carried it in my arms onto the bus.
Where an old man pulled from his knapsack a big, new reusable bag from Marshalls, pink with butterflies, and gave it to me.
[*oh. just realized the 'old' man must have been around my age.]

This was a little unsettling because a week before Christmas,  I saw a man at the bus stop where I was waiting who appeared to be carrying all his possessions in a reusable Aldi bag, and he was trying to tie up that Aldi bag because its bottom seam had split.

He managed to get on the bus and go to the seats in the back with his stuff spilling over.
I sat down halfway back, emptied my backpack of the (luckily) few things I was carrying, took the bag back and offered it to him.
"It's not big enough, but you could put some of your stuff in it."

"Thank you so much, ma'am," he said.
[* if he told the story later, he probably said, 'an old lady gave me a bag'.]

I'd thought--in a very Patricia-Lockwood way (though I hadn't yet read No One Is... )--that if someone had recorded this on their phone, it would turn up in one of those "Strangers Are Angels" social media channels.
(I love those, actually. Total strangers happen to look up as babies tumble from balconies, and catch them!)

So, I felt unsettled when basically the same thing happened to me, like a ball returned. Who bounced it back? Unsettled, because this kind of Instant Karma has been happening to me recently.

I don't believe some Consciousness bounced the ball back.
I'm sure it's a cognitive bias on my part:
you notice the .1% of things that match other things, and discount the 99.9% of things that don't match at all.
Right?
Like, I watch Chernobyl and it seems amazing--possibly meaningful--that I have a Soviet tea cup from the same era.

BUT... not to dismiss serendipity! It is meaningful--because we see meaning in patterns. If we do nice things, and then we notice that other people do nice things for us...
That's nice!
Of course not-nice things bounce back too, and good deeds are not necessarily rewarded, not at all;
but all things being equal (which they're not), it's a good policy to make the effort to do good things.

It does take some effort, don't you think? to shove back against the law of entropy, or, anyway, to see beauty in the crumbling?

And on that note I shall sign off--I must get to the post office before its Saturday 1 p.m. closing to mail Marz some odds & ends she forgot. Thermal long johns! NEEDED FOR THE JOURNEY!

Home Truths

The best New Year's exhortation I've seen--maybe ever:

"Believe in yourself like visitors who believe they can pet a bison."

Unless you're already one of those people who believes they can pet a bison. Then, doubt yourself a little.

("Bison injure more people in Yellowstone than any other animal. Bison are unpredictable and can run 3x faster than humans."--NPS)
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THIS, below, is what Big Boss would like the thrift store to look like. He went and picked up a load of donated new (floor model) Home Goods. BB believes in the ministering /charitable side of the store, but he doesn't care about cool old stuff (thrift!).

I'm happy to have new stock to put out––and clean!––but could you get more boring?

My father's relatives, including Auntie Vi, liked decorative stuff like this. My father and his nine siblings had grown up in poverty, and they told stories about boiling water to kill cockroaches in an old house they moved into, wearing damp clothes because their one nice set hadn't dried after they washed it the night before.

Useless, generic objects symbolized resources and cleanliness to them as adults, I think. One auntie had white carpet, with plastic runners where people walked, to protect it. She never let a cake of soap get very washed away before she replaced it.

Some went the other way though. My father was a cheapskate, excited to tell you how he'd found the cheapest off-brand ON SALE.
But he'd spend real money on cool old toys (books, records).

My mother grew up middle-class and loved antiques, but my father was the one with quirky taste that I share. He'd think Toys Recreate Paintings was nifty. My mother would appreciate the art history but wish I'd do something more . . . culturally elevated.
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I didn't much enjoy Christmastime this year. Setting up Winter Village was nice. Recreating "Hunters in the Snow" was a highlight. And, weirdly, another was spending four hours at the art museum café with my sister. Surprising because we're not close. Not surprising because we're the only people who've known each other since babyhood. (She's the elder, by less than two years.)

We talked about the books we most enjoyed this year. Hers included Lessons in Chemistry.
My stand-out was Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. But once again, I FAILed to keep track of my reading and couldn't remember many titles. Sister tracks hers on Goodreads. She has less to remember--I was surprised she'd only read a dozen books last year. Mostly of the book-club caliber.
I am indiscriminate--picking up odds and ends from thrift books and Little Free Libraries, nibbling and rejecting most of them. I quit Lessons in Chemistry: it felt like those Home Goods above.

So--THIS YEAR I intend to try, try again to keep better track of What I'm Reading.
Right now I'm on page 38 of No One Is Talking About This.
It's almost entirely references to social media---and I can follow it because I've been watching lots of TikTok and reels on IG etc. They are sometimes excellent--like Nike ads or Dutch still lives, they are sponsored by, arise from the Culture of the Times.
Our Times!
For better or worse.

It's also funny--I've laughed out loud--so I'll post something later, but that's it for now--I'm heading out into the sunny cold (single digits) to go to work. I have options--today, it's a combo of bus & walk. I decided it's better to walk a mile than to stand in the cold, waiting to transfer to the second bus.

Tootle-oo!

Outline

I'm heading back to work this morning---on my bike.
It's 15ºF ( -9 C) outside, my cut off. The next ten days are due to be colder, so I'll take the bus--two, actually, and those are slower and potentially distressing, depending on who's doing what on the bus.

Work has been mostly good, emotionally--and when it's not, I set my intention to ask myself, "So what?"
Sometimes the 'what' matters, and there's something that I can do.
Often, neither.

The Marzipan drives back to Duluth today--like a Lemony Snicket child, she says.
It's an unfortunate event all right:
the next semester doesn't start for 11 days, but she has to be there for her job at the grocery, which is boring and lonely. And Duluth is even colder than here, "and full of hills and trolls," says Marz.

She is not a happy camper. Too long a break can be demoralizing--you lose momentum.
But I trust she is doing a good thing, going to college. Study is a whetstone, and I can see its effects.

My brain could use a little honing too... Last year I was learning about human neurology and psychology, working with autistic high-schoolers (and school administrators, who were harder to understand--and I'm not kidding).
This year I'm back at my old job, which is a good place for me but does not light up the little gray cells.
I must consider, What now?

I shouldn't say this because I (almost) never DO it, but working out story plots would be a good exercise.
I'm always saying, that would make a good story.
Do you do this?

Even if I didn't write the story, I could jot down an outline.
Like, remember when Deepak Chopra said he'd like to be alone with Trump on an island for . . . a week, was it? to help DT heal.
Wouldn't it be funny to work out what would happen?
Would DT find his wounded inner child and weep and weep?
Or would he kill and eat Deepak?
Does DT know how to make a fire?
Would he eat our hero raw?
I would have to think all that out.

Bradbury is wrong: it is possible to write badly week after week; but if I came up with an idea for a story every week, some of them are bound to be good. Maybe I'll try just jotting them down, as brain exercise.

The decks are clear--there's not much I have to do otherwise. Yesterday I cleaned my apartment and cleaned my online clutter a little too. I unfriended 8 of my 69 FB 'friends' (who are you?) and deleted a bunch of FB and IG posts.
So--I've got free space.

Okay, time to bundle up warm and head out...
Ciao, everybody!

2025: "You can do this".

I'm never tired of this video, "The Morning After":
a man goes running on New Year's morning 2000, after Y2K fears have come true. By Spike Jonze for Nike, 1999.

On we go into 2025...
As they say in The Holdovers, "You can do this."