My little fellow found this video on YouTube for our Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys. He calls YouTube “On Demand.” Funnay.
If you don’t know what the Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys is all about, the explanation is here: The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys. Enjoy.
I was reading Essays In Idleness by Kenko. He was dead in 1350. I am many strains of people, but it’s all European. Europe was nothing in 1350. If you were a betting man back then, you’d have bet on Asia. You’d have bet wrong.
So the Black Death is raging around Europe and the Japanese are writing in a style called zuihitsu — just follow the brush. The brush being the stylus of choice there and then. Kenko read Sei Shonagon, the cranky broad from my masthead, same as me. And the personal essay is tie that binds us.
I hate the term: blog. It’s ugly, and it’s come to mean something even uglier than the sound of it. It’s become the minor leagues of hate. I write personal essays here. Zuihitsu. It might not be noble, but a person has little to offer to others but knowledge of which they are sure. “I am an expert in the affairs of all men” is the banner of the professional politician and their toads. Not hardly.
Why am I wandering in the few moments between exhaustion and sleep in the dusty stacks of an alien culture dead and buried for seven hundred years? To find a kindred spirit. They’re in short supply on the DIY network, after all.
A house, I know, is a temporary abode, but how delightful it is to find one that has harmonious proportions and a pleasant atmosphere. One feels somehow that even moonlight, when it shines into the quiet domicile of a person of taste, is more affecting than elsewhere. A house though it may not be in the current fashion or elaborately decorated, will appeal to us by its unassuming beauty– a grove of trees with an indefinably ancient look; a garden where plants, growing of their own accord, have a special charm; a verandah and an open-work wooden fence of interesting construction’ and a few personal effects left carelessly lying about, giving the place an air of having been lived in. A house which multitudes of workmen have polished with every care, where strange and rare Chinese and Japanese furnishings are displayed, and even the grasses and trees of the garden have been trained unnaturally, is ugly to look at and most depressing. How could anyone live for long in such a place?
You can’t. I have never been in a hotel room as comfortable and pleasant as my own bedroom, and I have been in Presidential Suites before. Money can’t fix the problem, and the availability of money without the governor of a framework of rules to expend it almost always makes things worse.
Our post-modern zeitgeist evangelizes that rules of any sort that govern personal behaviors or the appearance of our surroundings or entertainment are stultifying and worthy only of mindless opposition. The unthinking rejection of all tradition leads to a counterintuitive outcome: a set of rules, much more stringent than what they replaced, will replace the old ones, and they will consist of the worst possible alternative to what was there before.
How else can I explain nailing your house onto the ass end of your garage? How else can I explain a Japanese man writing about my house, and the house you should be living in, in the fourteenth century?
I avoid them assiduously here. Hell, I have no idea what this blog is about, what with the furniture, and the boats, and the children, and the music, and the wandering around hereabouts with a camera. But it ain’t about politics. Politics is poison when it enters the home. It’s a civic duty. It belongs in public life. It’s fouling your own nest to drag it into your house.
I was at a small fete last week. The weather was perfect, the company was pleasant, the assorted children frolicked together all afternoon in the gentle sun and the cool shade without ever a tear being shed. The food was good, and simple, and made right before us and served by the same hand that prepared it. We adults chatted of many things and we coalesced in numerous cliques of various sizes and compositions to do that chatting. Since we are not all in each other’s company often, there is a lot to talk about, and much that seems fresh to report as well as to hear.
No one got the urge, not even once, to talk politics.
Why would we? Nothing is settled by political prattle. Points scored in debate are always subtracted from the bonhomie column kept elsewhere. Politics to normal people is treated like what it is: an intrusion into our lives, something that keeps us from what is more important, and what is amusing. Politics is a lawn to be mowed, not a game to be played on it. And the people that involve themselves in it, generally, are either dry as dust, or nasty, or sometimes loony.
I’ll bet you every adult at that party votes in every election. I know they are intelligent and thoughtful people. I bet, if pushed, they could give you a sober rundown, factually coherent throughout, of the condition of the local, state, and national polity. And I doubt very much that all the levers pulled in those booths are the same ones for every participant. But I also bet you there’s one aspect of the proceedings where we all share the exact same outlook, and simply gauge the likely effectiveness of one political party or candidate over another: we’re all looking for the politics that will intrude into these personal scenes the least, or who will allow the smallest intrusions by others — whether simply to annoy us, or to kill us.
I am deeply suspicious, and perhaps you should be too, of anyone that wishes politics to have enough prominence to be mentioned at a garden party. We do not, after all, throw these parties at the Registry of Motor Vehicles.
Got the notion in 1835, to be specific. That’s the year Barney Hiller sold four acres at Ned’s Point in Mattapoisett to the gummint for $240. You can’t buy one acre in Mattapoisett for $240 nowadays, highlighting just how debased our currency has become. If you’re a loon. The United States Lighthouse Service built a 35 foot tower with a — get this– whale oil lantern on top. Well, it was better than fireflies, I guess.
Mattapoistett is right down the street, er, I mean coast, from New Bedford, so the whale oil lamp no doubt kept many whaling ships from running aground here so they could continue to supply the whale oil lighthouse with oil to keep the light burning to keep the whaling ships from running aground when getting the whale oil to supply the lantern that kept the whale…
I see a pattern developing. See: ethanol.
In 1923 the lighthouse was automated, as the local politicians no doubt ran out of brothers-in-law to live in the keeper’s house. The keeper’s house was floated on a barge across Buzzards Bay to Wing”s Neck in Pocasset that year to house some other jackleg, no doubt.
I thought I had fallen into a kind of Connecticut Yankee reverie and woken up in the Auld Sod when I saw this outbuilding. I half expected Maureen O’Hara to come out and talk of the roses by the door and belt me if she liked me.
The kids just come to Ned’s Point at night to drink their fathers’ beers, maybe cop a feel from a willing girlfriend, and perhaps write their name on the side of the lighthouse from time to time while the local constabulary slumber. Those without enough gumption or sense to have that much fun windsurf here. It’s like sailing but you don’t get as wet as you do when you sail.
My horsefly abattoir primitif elicited lots of interest. By popular request, a picture of the results. The customers turn to a sort of mulch in the very hot jug pretty quick.
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