Yeah, I am Ok

 I moved out of the old place on October 1. Five days later and I have almost recovered from the experience. Walking up and down two flights of stairs wrecked me - not that the lungs were not stretched to the extreme. I think I will start using them this week to improve my breathing and - hopefully - get rid of some of this weight.

Friday was the group therapy. I think I will post separately about that. CC had been helping me with the move, and by Friday we were both getting too tired to entirely civil. Thursday, our nerves were stretched a bit too far, and I was determined that she was going to do nothing if she came over, other than read. Instead, she slept Friday away. I went to the sheriff's to give them the new address. Two things happened there - rudeness and being told there was a fee for the address update. The uniformed deputy informed me several times I should have made an appointment, needed to make appointments in the future, and disputed my statement that I had never been told that. Like, I have not been doing this reporting thing for 4 years now. The fee was also news. I came back to the apartment, napped, and cataloged my books.

Saturday, I needed carrots to roast with a beef tongue, and a mouse for the computer. Off to Staples for the mouse (and a new keyboard, and a plastic storage bin). Then I went to the Farmer's Market (no carrots, but I got honey and maple syrup), Payless (carrots and a few other things). Then I found the phone was missing. Up and down to all the places I had been looking for the phone. It was at Payless. Time and energy lost. I napped, then emptied boxes. I went out later for Coke Zero, going to Payless. There I bought a piece of cake for CC. That I dropped off and came home.

Sunday was church and sleeping most of the day. I tidied up a little, warmed up the tongue later, and then started running through my prison journal. That will appear on this blog next week. I am thinking of it as paper reduction. 

The email is piled up. Submissions need made to magazines.

There are things I know I packed and cannot find. Top of the list are laundry pods. 

I could not reach CC yesterday. Maybe she will know.

Today, I am going to Indianapolis.

Wesley Bush called me this morning from the prison in Illinois. He seems to be ok.

The soundtrack of the past few days has been mostly from YouTube:

Hoosiers gather outside Indiana Statehouse for pro-democracy event (wthr.com)

How the Union Lost the Remembrance War (JSTOR Daily)

At first, though, there was little doubt in the North that there was no moral equivalency of cause with the South. There was no forgetting the notorious Confederate prison camps like Andersonville and Salisbury, the Confederate pogrom at Fort Pillow, and the fact that the South had seceded in the first place to perpetuate and expand an elite-serving economy based on human chattel. General and then President Ulysses S. Grant’s posthumously published memoirs (1885–1886) called the Slave Power’s cause “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and for which there was the least excuse.” Memorial Day started as the specifically Unionist Decoration Day.

Feeling No Shame (Sheila Kennedy)

I recently looked into the concept of shame and its social utility. It turns out that the ability to feel shame is an essential element of what psychologists and psychiatrists call “pro-social behavior.” It prevents people from damaging their social relationships and reputations, and it warns one of social ostracism or disapproval. Feelings of shame motivate individuals to conform to group norms and expectations, and that helps members of a society function cooperatively.

Although shame can also be toxic, in its healthy form it serves as a natural mechanism for self-control and social regulation, and promotes a shared sense of values and expectations for behavior.  

As we learn daily, Donald Trump and his cast of incompetent clowns and sycophants are incapable of feeling shame or even of experiencing its dimmer cousin, embarrassment. In the wake of one of the most recent exhibitions of Trump’s detachment from reality, Lincoln Square ran an article bemoaning the fact that Trump isn’t simply embarrassing himself, he’s embarrassing America

 

Such is, was, my life.

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