Aargh!

Charlie Brown was the master of a certain expression of agony that is today largely replaced in pop-culture by reference to various forms of poop.

"Aargh!"

It always rose in shaky black font letters above his unhappy head.

Today is an aargh day for me. Today I know how he feels.

In spite of writing the event down on not one but two calendars ...

In spite of a personal phone call that I received yesterday reminding me ...

Still I went about my work this morning somehow believing that Thursday (i.e., tomorrow), not Wednesday (i.e., today), was the day of the big event.

It was no less than a very important community meeting in which I would not only represent the school district, not only make the announcement that our school district would host the next meeting, but also would receive a nice, hot lunch.

Someone called me from the meeting an hour into it. My absence had been noticed.

Not that it did any good but I drove on out there post-haste, too late to do much of anything, certainly too late for the lunch.

I missed kicking the proverbial football and I can't even blame Lucy for this one.

I sat through what was left of the meeting with my tummy rumbling. I drove back to the office in the rain and ate a cold tuna sandwich alone in the break room.

Why is there some stubborn, stupid, part of me that resists looking at my calendars, that fights so hard against the attempt of the rest of me to actually be an organized, productive human being? Why cannot I extricate that part of me, pluck it out like some kind of tapeworm, kick its sorry %$^, then throw it beaten and bloody into the cargo hold of a plane bound for Mogadishu?

Mastery of metaphor

“I led him up the dark stairs, to prevent his knocking his head against anything, and really his damp, cold hand felt so like a frog in mine that I was tempted to drop it and run away.” – David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.

To be my friend ...

... To be my friend, requires a special kind of person.

You must be willing to endure what most people call being ignored, for indefinite periods of time, then take up where we left off. You must not take this personally. I have scatterings of friends all over the world and I attempt to tend to them all in turn. I stay busy with this frenetic, fascinating thing called life.

Plus, I am a military brat and shaped by ADHD, too. I'm not really sure I know all the rules or have the ability to form the deep, empathetic, sympathetic bonds that most people do. (How my Beloved endures me, is an unfathomable mystery.) I get uncomfortable hanging out and making small talk. I need to be doing. I'd rather help you tear up your deck than sit in your living room.

You must understand that I crave knowledge, but that to crave and to have are two different things. You must understand the difference between a know-it-all and a wants-to-know-it-all and not presume, when I bring up Augustus Caesar or Augustine of Hippo, or the Paleozoic Era, that I am challenging your personal intellect.

You must understand that when I make a promise to you, I WILL keep it, eventually,if it can wait. But if you need something immediately, like your furniture moved, I'm there.

In Chicago, of all places

I have heard it said, and I believe it:

The tropical rainforest is important and we should teach its conservation. But it is equally important for an American child to love and value the forest just beyond his own backyard, that he or She may mature into a grown-up who cares.

Only today I have learned of a tiny, unique little flower, believed extinct. In a purely material sense, who knows what pharmaceuticals might have been extracted from it for the benefit of humankind? Thismia apparently had a relationship with local soil fungi. Perhaps it produced botanical chemicals to ward off other fungi or bacteria.

Who knows what a study of its DNA and habitat might have added to the discussion of continental drift, and how it came to be so far from its only living relatives in Australia.

You see, this little flower, thismia, wasn't found on some pristine Montana prairie, not even in a deep Smoky Mountains forest. It was found, in 1916, in a wetland in ...

... Chicago.

And since the initial report by a sharp-eyed scientist, it has never been seen again. And in the years following, someone smothered the site in fill dirt. And no one really cared, because it was Chicago after all, a city, not some wild wilderness. And so we may never know its story.

http://chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/summer2004/thismia.html

The man from Tagaste

This week, I finished my reading of Confessions, by St. Augustine, described as the world's first autobiography.

I will not attempt to write a book review. The book was published 1,600 years ago and I am sure that whole libraries could be filled with the commentaries already printed about it. Plus, the latter half of the book was incomprehensible to me, reminding me forcefully, in paragraph after paragraph, of the severe limitations of my personal I.Q. number.

The logical next step is to read City of God, by the same. Logical, that is, for someone of my ilk who is either completely insane, a sado-masochist or an incorrigible optimist.

Some thoughts came to my mind that I will share:

Tagaste, birthplace of St. Augustine, is in modern-day Algeria. Scarely four centuries after Augustine, that whole region of the world was conquered by Islam and has remained in its orbit ever since. If Augustine had been born there in the seventh century A.D., rather than the third, would his astounding intellect have made history in the service of Islam, rather than Christianity? Would Christianity have gone down a different pathway without an Augustine to guide it from the Roman Empire into the Medieval Era? How different might Islam have been with him as its champion and a shaper of doctrine?

In City of God, Augustine will attack the premise of the day that the oh-so-recent sack of Rome (410 A.D., by Alaric, an event of huge pyschological impact, even though Rome's glory days were long gone and the heart of the Empire was now far east) was the fault of the Christian faith that the Empire had adopted.

It is not so well-known that the "barbarian Germans" who trashed the Eternal City, were in fact Christians. They were Arian Christians, believing that the Son was not equal to the Father. Arian (NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH ARYAN) and so-called orthodox Christianity waged war for centuries against each other for the title of true Christianity. The reach of Arianism extended all the way into China before it finally began to lose the battle.

I don't know everything about Augustine, obviously. I wonder how much time he spent in the contest between Catholicism and Arianism. I know he spilled quite a bit of ink attacking the Gnostic sect, Manicheism, that had once held his allegiance. If he had trained his cerebral guns on Arianism instead of Manicheism, would Christianity have been different?

Some historians consider Islam to be a sort of hybrid Christianity. After all, the faith accepts the New Testament and accepts Jesus as a prophet. However, anyone who has read the Quran, realizes early on that Islam fervently rejects the notion that God could ever have a son, let alone that such a son could be His equal.

Did Arianism help pave the way for Islam?


These are just a few of the questions now banging around in my mostly empty head.

Honey, about that hike to France we planned ...

In August of this year, archaeologists reported the discovery of the oldest-known house in Britain -- 6,000 years older than Stonehenge.

It was built, they said, when Britain still was connected to continental Europe.

That gets me thinking. That means there had to be some particular day when humans in Britain woke up and discovered that they were suddenly upon an island. What was their reaction? Was it cataclysmic -- suddenly a churning channel where children had picked flowers the day before? Or was it an oh-so-gradual rise, with a few inches of water between France and England building to its current depth over the course of centuries?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-10929343