a new kind of pain and a new variation of pleasure
Although the surface of my 3 incisions feel better, I started feeling a new kind of pain under the surface of the wound on my hip. It’s a deeper kind of ache, as if someone had kicked my gluteus maximus with a very heavy boot very viciously. Luckily we have painkillers so I took two of the lighter kind (Tylenol).
On the other hand my kids re-introduced the card game “uno” which can be played by all of us, whether only three are available or we manage to infect and persuade our guests to play with us, versus euchre, which strictly requires 4 players.
Playing cards, like every play, creates its own world, with its own rules, space and time. I vaguely remember some 30 years ago having read Johan Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens” proving this very fact we experience now daily.
Harmless plays simply add to own pleasure balance without hurting anybody. Well, most of them. The kids also got a ‘traffic jam game’ called “Rush Hour”. I watched them push the little plastic cars left and right following some kinky strategy reminding me of Rubik’s cube and then I decided that I would not start playing it, thus avoiding the possibility of being disturbed by visible proofs of my incompetence and impatience.
ambition is counterproductive for pleasure production
My wife and my daughter made me a joint Christmas present, David Sedaris’ book ”Me Talk Pretty One Day “and I started reading the shortest short story practically during the breaks of our Mad-Libs game laughing out loudly (LOL) occasionally, i.e. about every 23 seconds.
Between the age of 16 and 26 I was convinced that I would become a brilliant short story writer and stopped to simply and purely enjoy the short stories I was reading. Instead, I started studying the techniques used by the authors.
After having given up this ambition I could just relax and enjoy them again.
About two or three years ago I chanced upon Sedaris’ “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” in an airport bookstore but the book mysteriously disappeared as soon as I got back to Germany and miraculously reappeared again as I unpacked the cardboard box with my most beloved books in America. My wife and daughter must have seen it on my night stand and heard me chuckle while reading it so they decided to add another volume to my pleasures.
While enjoying every single sentence I remembered DeWitts’s words:
Epicureanism presented two fronts to the world, the one as repellent as the other was attractive. Its discouragement of the political career was repellent to the ambitious, its denial of divine providence to pious orthodoxy, and its hedonism to timorous respectability. Its candor, charity, courtesy, and friendliness were attractive to multitudes of the honest and unambitious folk. (Epicurus and His Philosophy)
…and I felt happy to belong to that multitude:-)
the wonder of canned music
Most hours of the day were passed with a lot of work, two very good meals, a walk in the snow with my daughter. After dinner I put the few books I brought over from Europe to America on the new bookshelves my wife bought, painted and fixed on the wall. I lined up my music CDs in front of the books. Then I sipped a glass of burgundy listening to one of my CDs, “An Afro-Portuguese Odyssey” enjoying it immensely and feeling gratitude at the sight of my wife and kids cuddled on the sofa and at the thought that what a wonderful place this world is, being able to hear Paolo Flores and Dulce Neves bring their sad sunny joy into my quiet home.
fresh snow on December 4, 2010
The last time I wrote haiku* and other poems it was back in 1978, mostly while plodding for one hour and a half over two hills and a valley to a little middle school in Transylvania to teach Romanian children French and English they thought they would never use.
My daughter came running to me this morning with the news: the street and yard are covered with snow. Yesterday the radio forecast snow storm for Southern Wisconsin but it turned out to be a tranquil and gentle landing of snowflakes forming a new white skin over the earth. The wind left scars on the thin and sensitive skin but decided to soothe and heal them later.
My daughter asked me why the snow formed little arcs between the railing bars of our back porch. I gave her an explanation she admired me for and I told her how I admired her observation of aesthetic patterns.
She made some pictures of these pattern but soon she discovered an even more exciting sight: snow caught in a spider’s web.
The moments were so inspirational that I felt the urge to try to catch them in the form of something close to the haiku form.
xxx
Wisconsin winter winds
soothing now the scars they had made
on the snow’s skin
xxx
the backporch railing
curving rhythms
into the fresh snow
xxx
the spider’s new and fresh catch:
fluffy snow
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I uploaded the two relevant pictures on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=39801&id=100000249099074&saved
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Footnote:
*hai·ku
–noun, plural -ku for 2.
1.
a major form of Japanese verse, written in 17 syllables divided into 3 lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, and employing highly evocative allusions and comparisons, often on the subject of nature or one of the seasons.
2.
a poem written in this form.
Origin:
1895–1900; < Japn, equiv. to hai ( kai ) haikai + ku stanza;
The Bare Necessities, the Epicurean anthem
The unwitingly Epicurean anthem on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o
The Bare Necessities
Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
Old Mother Nature's recipes
That brings the bare necessities of life
- - - - -
The Bare Necessities From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "The Bare Necessities" is a song, written by Terry Gilkyson, from the animated 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book sung by Phil Harris as Baloo and Bruce Reitherman as Mowgli. It was written for an earlier, rejected, draft of the movie, and was, as the only song of that version, kept, on the request of the Sherman Brothers, who wrote the other songs of the film. A reprise of the song was sung by Sebastian Cabot as Bagheera and Phil Harris as Baloo at the end of the film. The song was also sung by Louis Armstrong. In 1967, "The Bare Necessities" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song.
similarities between religious and philosophical communities?
Although their ideological foundations are widely different and even opposing, philosophical and religious COMMUNITIES may have more similarities than differences.This may sound strange but I will try to support it in a short blog post as soon as I have some time on my hand to elaborate upon it, maybe Labor Day.
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