Birdwatching

It's Tuesday. Last night, I was watching the Capitals vs. Winnipeg with my sons, and I left the room just in time to miss the world's greatest hockey player's 600th lifetime goal. Disappointing, but I got to watch the replay, and it was almost as good as seeing it live.

As I watched the game, I was imagining, for some reason, a character who becomes a hockey fan late in life. After choosing his favorite team, he realizes that he also needs a least-favorite team, a hockey nemesis, as it were. This character is not based on me, of course, because I have the moral clarity to know that the only hockey nemesis that anyone ever needs is present in the form of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the most evil franchise in the worldwide history of professional sports. My character, lacking such moral clarity, chooses the Winnipeg Jets as his nemesis.

"Why Winnipeg?" his family and friends ask him. "What did Manitoba ever do to you?" He doesn't deign to justify his choice or explain his reasoning. He just glares at the TV as his team plays Winnipeg. "Fucking Winnipeg," he snarls, every time the Jets score. That eventually becomes his catchphrase: "Fucking Winnipeg."

*****
Who knows where that came from. Anyway, it's still Tuesday. Speaking of fans, I'm not a particular fan of Rex Tillerson, but he did call Donald Trump a fucking moron on a hot mic, and for that, he'll always have a place in my heart. Godspeed, Rex Tillerson.

*****
After I finished Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I read Havana, which is so far my least-favorite Joan Didion non-fiction. In some ways, it reads like a period piece, with its very Reagan-era preoccupation with Latin American revolutionary politics. Like lots of other literary intellectuals of the 20th century, Didion seems to have had a blind spot about Communism. I mean, I'm sure she's right about totalitarian ideological rigidity among the Cuban exile population in Miami in the 80s, but she doesn't say much about the conditions in Cuba that gave rise to their extremism. Like many other writers who wrote about Latin America in the 80s, she (rightly) condemns Somoza, but gives Castro a pass.

I couldn't decide what to read after Havana. I have a pretty large backlog on my Kindle, but nothing was calling out to me, so I decided to re-read The Thinking Reed, one of Rebecca West's best, and that's already a pretty high bar.  It's just as good as I remembered.  The book takes place in France in the years between the two world wars. One of the principal characters is an immensely wealthy French industrialist who, despite enormous success and power, completely lacks the inclination to abuse or take advantage of the poor or powerless. "Though his ties were with the strong and not with the weak, he would not have had a sparrow fall, anywhere in the world." I have noticed that not every rich and powerful person is like that.

The best part is that it's been so long since I've read it that I really don't remember how it ends. So I'm torn between wanting to rush through it to find out (again) what happens, and wanting to slow down a bit, so that it won't be over too soon.

*****
Thursday: Have you ever cleaned behind your refrigerator? If not, then I don't recommend it. Leave it alone. Nothing to see. The less said, the better.

It had been a long time since our kitchen had been painted, and so I talked my husband into doing it. The paint looks beautiful, but the kitchen is now in a horrifying state of disarray that makes me wonder, just for a minute, if the dingy walls maybe weren't so bad. I don't like disorder. And I have to pretty much leave it as it is for now, because he has to finish the job tomorrow. Horrifying. I'm hyperventilating just thinking about it.

*****
It's Saturday morning now. The kitchen is back in order, and you could eat off the floor behind the refrigerator. Well, you could, but I don't recommend it. I mean it's clean, but it's not perfect. It's still a floor. So don't eat off it. I'll give you a plate.

*****
And now it's Sunday, and I have just a few pages left of The Thinking Reed.  When it's over, the weekend will be over. More importantly, I'll need to find something else to read.  Too bad that Comey's book won't be out until next month. I continue to be torn between actually feeling sorry for Trump's unfortunate staff, enduing threats, insults, and firings via Twitter; and wondering what they expected when they chose to serve a bullying, vindictive, mean-spirited, draft-dodging, pants-on-fire lying coward.  By the time the Comey book is released, there will probably be at least two or three more firings. My money is on McMaster and Sessions, but it could be anyone, I suppose.

Putin just won re-election by a landslide; and somewhere, a sparrow is probably falling. If it's a Russian sparrow, the richest and most powerful man in that country is claiming innocence and feigning outrage that anyone could accuse him of shooting down a sparrow, even as he continues to hold the gun. If it's an American sparrow, it has been subjected to weeks of poking with sticks, as its eventual killer decides if it would be more fun to shoot it out of a tree, or to just set a cat loose on it. I'm losing the thread on this metaphor, so I'll end this episode of sparrows here. Until next week...