Given the cold and dismal hue outside, I offer one final image for the year, a blaze of warmth.
Have a safe, joyous, hopeful New Year. Â See you all on the other side.…
DISTAL MUSE – OBSERVATIONS, OPINIONS, EPHEMERA, & VIEWS
Given the cold and dismal hue outside, I offer one final image for the year, a blaze of warmth.
Have a safe, joyous, hopeful New Year. Â See you all on the other side.…
So it’s the 26th. Digesting, relaxing, contemplating.
Saw my parents. Wished good cheer to each other and others.
This morning, I went to the gym, paid taxes, other errands. Lunch. Then looked at some of the images from the last few days. It has been a hell of a year. We have come here, to the verge of 2018, unsure of some things, comforted by the people still with us and close, and at least willing to face what  challenges may come. A mixed bag, as they say.  (Whoever “they” are—I suspect different “they” for each saying.)
Per Mr.…
It’s Christmas Weekend.  That and several other seasonal  celebrations. People want to celebrate. It doesn’t matter what the label says, it’s the same full-to-brim wish for mutual love and respect.  Gift-giving is great, but the sharing of hope, dreams, soul-urge, and the commonality of human decency underlies and overarches it all.
So a kind of card for any who may stop by here. Â Be well, be safe, be loved, be amazed.
Roy Moore lost. In a state so Red it could be on Mars, Doug Jones squeaked into the win by 1.5%.
Moore is refusing to concede. In some quarters, this is seen as principle. In the civilized world, sour grapes. But delusional.
“Immorality is sweeping the land!”
Says a man who allegedly hit on teenagers when in his thirties, and then relies on a biblical defense, something about Mary only being 13 or some such nonsense, and the fact that he asked their parents. Â Forgive me if I find that whole scenario simultaneously dubious AND extra-creepy. Â (But there is in the South, and presumably other places, a whole cult of True Believers who groom their prepubescents for marriage by parading them in adult drag in front of potential husbands, so maybe.…
I have been wrestling with all the recent allegations of sexual harassment and assault boiling up like magma from a caldera. The image is apt—volcanoes can appear sedate, dormant, unthreatening for decades or even centuries, and then, suddenly, boom! Like that volcano, it does not mean there was never a problem before, only that we grew comfortable with its failure to express itself and assumed everything was fine.
Well, some people did.
The problem I’ve had, I will admit, has been incredulity. Knowing there are men in the world who behave this way is not quite the same as learning that those men and so many and for so long are like this, and it is a bit overwhelming.…