Venezia

Good friends of ours celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary with a trip to Italy. Charmed by Venice as any romantic and lover of beauty would be.

I don’t care what anybody says, the casino operators may build antiseptic copies of the canals and bridges and palazzi and gondolas in Las Vegas and Macau and elsewhere, but there ain’t nothing on God’s green earth that can compare to the original.

Stealing Time

Here's a story about old Shanghai.

Stealing Time

Some Darker Thoughts

Subtitles

On the doors of the department store, every ‘PUSH’ label on the left-hand side is subtitled ‘Empuje”, and every ‘PULL’ label on the right-hand side is subtitled ‘Puxe’. And people still get it wrong as they enter or leave. One assumes the doors are sturdy enough that the abuse they suffer daily will not damage them irreparably.

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Things we take on faith

That the pilot is sober and perfectly well qualified to fly the plane so as to land us safely at our destination.

That the plane is airworthy, all systems having been thoroughly checked and double-checked.

That our luggage has been safely stowed on the plane on which we are traveling and not on a plane headed to a different destination.

That there is sufficient fuel in the tanks to get us to our destination, with some extra gallons to spare.

That the safety video’s precautionary advice regarding drops in cabin pressure, oxygen masks, landings on water, and emergency evacuation will never have to be followed in an actual event.

That the undercarriage will descend and deploy as usual when the captain pushes the button.

That the plane will not be struck by lightning.

That the security personnel have been trained sufficiently well and will have done their screening thoroughly so that no individuals who mean us harm can possibly be aboard our flight.

That our flight will arrive in time for us to make our connection.

There can be many more such faith-based assumptions pertaining to air travel, but these are all that come to mind right now.

One last thought, this in reference to being stranded on the freeway during the rush hour. Very great faith is needed to shed that sense of unease you feel should you happen to be stuck longer than a few seconds beneath a freeway overpass. Earthquakes, you see?

The Thought of It

No, really. I don’t want to think about it. There’s so much else to think about. Why think about this? Yet. Yet, you cannot help it. You must from time to time, yes, maybe even on a daily basis, which is a wordy way of saying ‘everyday’, the thought will just come straightaway into your head, and you can’t avoid thinking about it. That’s usually the way it happens. It comes into your head. Even if you don’t want to think about it, you’re thinking about it. It just happens. It can’t be avoided.

Of course I can’t tell you what to think. That would be ungentlemanly of me. After all, who am I to presuppose that I am able to affect your thought processes? But if you were me, if you were grammatically correct I, you would certainly without fail think about it, simply because it’s there to think about, and there’s no getting around it.

It pops into your head. Like the old bad penny it keeps coming back. If you’re lucky you may not think about it when you get up in the morning and get out of bed. At least, not immediately. But soon enough you will. You can’t miss it. It’s there, lurking in the vicinity, and all you have to do is to be caught off guard for a second, and poof! it gets into your skull, and there you are thinking about it even without consciously meaning to.

It’s actually a bit scary, when you get right down to it. How it loiters there, just beyond the edge of your consciousness, waiting to pounce. The moment you relax, and all it takes is a split second, the thought slips in again. And once it gets inside your head, it is nearly impossible to get it out. It will linger, let me tell you. It will linger.

You can’t force it to go away, to clear the hell out of your head. You simply can’t. What you must do is get yourself distracted. Do something, maybe something physical, requiring the use of muscles. Physical exercise, yes, that’s one way. Don’t try working on puzzles or otherwise using your brain. That won’t do it. Don’t try turning on the television. That will only make it worse. Music sometimes helps, though. But you must play it loud. And then the neighbors might not like it.

Thursdays

I must sound like an old-time 78 rpm record that’s stuck in its groove. (You youngsters probably can’t relate to the old 78’s, which came before the 33’s and the 45’s, and were way, way before cassettes and CD’s, online music downloads, and iPods with white earbuds. Back in those days, you played a vinyl 78 rpm record on a turntable, and sound emerged from your loudspeakers. Sometimes the needle that rode in the grooves of the vinyl would not automatically lift itself off the record groove at the end of the music, and so it would continue scratching the surface over and over until you actually did the lifting yourself to stop it.)

I’m talking of course about my harping on the same topic, about time, the swift passage of it, and the profligate squandering of it. But actually it’s quite true, if you listen with an unbiased ear to my rant. Here’s how it’s been happening, week after week, month after month, and always faster and faster.

Thursdays are the worst. There’s the trash pickup, when you have to get the garbage cans out the evening before, because the truck arrives early, long before you wake up. In fact, it is the sound of their banging around in the street outside at 7 in the morning that wakes you up on Thursdays. Also the occasional cuss word in Spanish.

And every other Thursday it gets worse, because that’s when the recyclables are picked up. Those colored plastic recycle bins had some meaning to them in the past – blue for newspapers, dark blue for cans, grey for glass and plastic, green for other paper products such as empty milk cartons. But these days the colors don’t mean anything anymore. You can use any color for the various sorts of recyclable material, just so long as you use one bin for one sort.

What I’m trying to say, and am having considerable trouble doing so, what with all the interruptions and digressions that occupy my waking hours, is that Thursdays are coming at us far more swiftly than they had been in my youth. The weeks just fly by accelerando e con brio.

Talk about global warming and the melting of the icepack in Antarctica and glaciers in Greenland – everything, but everything is gathering speed today. Cars are driven faster. Fast food outlets turn out their products with ever increasing speed. You turn on the faucet, and water gushes out faster than before. Even insects on a summer evening seem to buzz around with greater speed. The momentum of life may be exhilarating for the kids today, but it is incredibly dizzying for those in my age group.

And the only thing I can think of doing is one that I must now do most days. It does nothing to slow down the pace of living by even a tiny fraction. What it does do is block it out for a little while.

The answer is a nap.

Odd Thoughts

It has been nearly a month since my last post, and I plan to do some catching up, as time's a-wastin'.

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In trying to learn a Romance language, I find that the most difficult part is to distinguish between nouns that are masculine versus those that are feminine. Sure, there are other parts of grammar that one must pay attention to, not least of which are verb conjugations, idiomatic phrases, and such. But for me the chief concern is gender.

Why, for example, should certain words in Spanish and Portuguese which end in ‘a’ -- words like ‘dia’ (day), ‘cinema’ (cinema) be considered masculine, while words ending in ‘o’ -- like ‘mano’ or ‘mão’ (hand, in Spanish and Portuguese respectively) be considered feminine. It just does not seem to make any sense.

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The other day at a rather upscale Chinese restaurant, I saw an item on the menu that intrigued me: ‘Prophet fish filled with brown sauce.’

It turns out that ‘pomfret’ had been misspelt, and that it should have been ‘fillet’ instead of ‘filled’. How it was to be filled with brown sauce, and whatever flavor or shade of brown the sauce might have been, must have caused some diners to wonder.