Friday

The only good news for the day is that my new CPAP mask is on its way. I hope it will not get here too late. Mostly, my sleep apnea leaves me more and more weary. In time, I may want to do nothing.

I did not go to work today. Part of it was the weariness, and part of it was standing up in the morning and getting too dizzy to stay vertical.

Since not going to work, I need to turn the day to a profit.

 I submitted "Problem Solving" to Random Sample. Having no idea who really wants to read my grimy Muncie stories, I go on missions statements and what I can read of their published stories. I like what this journal says about itself:

Our primary aim as an online literary journal is accessibility and experimentalism: we want work that yields truth, in its many forms, and speaks on behalf of the experience of the body politic. We want the random, the real, the raw, the honest. Overall, we want work that is decidedly and unabashedly human.

I sampled some of the poetry and I liked that, too.

"Problem Solving" is not an explicitly Indiana story, but in my mind its setting is Indiana - albeit not Indiana with its new abortion law.

Having mentioned Indiana's abortion law, I should also note that a Republican judge has enjoined its enforcement in a few Indiana counties. The ACLU is behind the case and is basing its arguments on the Indiana Constitution. The State of Indiana argued that since privacy does not appear in our state constitution, there is no right to privacy. Well, Article I, Section 1 guarantees our inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." What is liberty except unnecessary interventions into an individual's privacy. Yes, there are limitations and excuses for invading one's liberty. Our privacy does not allow us to murder one another. Government exists for balancing the liberty interests of individuals. Where my liberty impacts the liberty of another, the government must mediate the conflict. 

I found Doug Masson still blogs at Masson's Blog, I used to follow him in the old days. Follow this link to a very sensible discussion of the abortion rights case. 

It is 10:52, and I am treading water. I need to do some running, I have the time regardless of how I feel, and I need to do the typing I did not get to yesterday, and I need to set up the Gabb phone. The cleaning crew did not come when I expected it and I started on my email and all that I have so far written here just so I was not in the middle of the things I want to do uninterrupted. I will do my running when the cleaning crew shows up. Same for eating. 

I looked at the places where I might submit "Masque of the Red Death." Nothing looked viable - I do not live in the New York area, my cast is too large.

I have scheduled for this evening three journals for submitting "Problem Solving." The plan was to do this after work. Since I called in sick and the cleaning crew has not yet arrived and, I will do these submissions now.

Having spent $7.50, I have now submitted to The Sun, Indiana Review, and Southern Indiana Review. All three rejected "Colonel Tom." 

I think I will get something to eat and catch the 11:45 bus.

The cleaning crew came by around 11:21. I went by the office to pay my rent and no one was there, and I decided to walk over to Target.

At Target, I got some items to eat and a full-sized keyboard and a legal pad and a pack of Pilot pens.

I fixed and ate my lunch. Then I sat down here to type. That was 1:13. Then, feeling out of energy, I napped. I set the alarm for 2:30, and it was 3:30 before I woke up.

I worked on my email and listened to KDHX's Greaser's Lunchbox until 6:30. Then it was dinner.

I still have not gotten to my story. Instead, I read Democracy or apocalypse? by David Dyzenhaus and drafted a post on that for the future. I also read Dietrich showed how adopting a persona can reveal one’s true self, having had a long=standing fascination with Marlene Dietrich, considered a post on it because the idea of masks and personas interest personally and with my writing, and decided instead to put this quote here

Dietrich spent her last decade shut away in her Parisian apartment, refusing to go out in public, so that her wrinkles and blackened teeth would not destroy the memory of her iconic beauty. Perhaps, as Jung warned, her obsession with persona became pathological.

She was the ultimate unreliable narrator, hiding her true sexuality and fictionalising parts of her life if it enhanced the legend. ‘Her whole life has been built on a grand illusion,’ Fritz Lang feared. Bowie lived his final days with more flair. His producer Tony Visconti remarked that even his death was ‘a work of art’, after Bowie’s swansong album, Blackstar (2016), was released just two days before he died.

As Wilde had observed in the essay ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1881): ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.’ Both Dietrich and Bowie were elusive legends but perhaps, as Wilde suggests, the shimmering personas they adopted give us glimpses of their truest selves.

 I also read Transgressing Our Planetary Boundaries by Chris Durante and published by Public Orthodoxy. Everyone thinking about the climate crisis needs to read this short essay; particularly any reader identifying as Christian:

In the first portion of this essay, I had argued that theologians may garner ethical insight from the data garnered by environmental scientists and concluded with a call for theologians to enlist natural scientists as allies in their quest to better understand the natural law and for Christians, more generally, to become attentive to the lessons that may be learned from studies of the natural world as they respond to the ecological crises that we currently face. In this portion of the essay, I have argued that to knowingly transgress what scientists refer to as our “planetary boundaries,^[4]” is to directly disregard the wisdom to be found within natural creation itself, and as such may be said to be a form of disrespecting its divine author. Humanity must not allow itself to continue to act as a harbinger of death for natural creation as well as itself but rather we as humans must find ways in which our species, along with others in our common planetary home, can manage to flourish sustainably for now and unto the ages to come.

All while listening to the last hour and a bit more of Recherché on WPRB. Hers was one of the radio shows that got me through prison. It is also comforting in Muncie.

At 8:05, I started on my pretrial detention journal. I will give myself two hours on that. Tomorrw, my short story.

I finished the pretrial detention posts a little time ago. I did some research, and I wrote a couple of emails and took a couple of breaks. I had company from T. Rex and The Kinks. Of the blog, I will do one tomorrow morning, that will get me through to Thursday. Tomorrow night, the story. I looked at the movies playing here and there are two I want to see. Maybe Sunday night.

Listening to the early Kinks made me decide to leave on a rowdy note:

I wish I felt even a bit peppy. I never really got out of first gear today.  Then, too, except for my nap, this post represents more than 12 hours of activity,

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