Getting Down. No Shame

 

The frogs are going at it again.  Riding south the other day I heard a whole lot of peeping, oddly from up atop a hill.  Down on the trail was a small rivulet that I traced up the slope  There must be some swampy, vernal mess up there that supports thousands of tadpoles winnowed to a few dozen frogs.  Going the other direction you pass a summer swamp or two that you can look right down on and sure enough, they were alive with the sounds of frogs getting down.  No shame. 

A friend had recommended a book stitching together the rise of Castelo Branco in Brazil, 1964 with the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965, suggesting that these U.S. orchestrated coups were brutally effective and together were pivotal in ensuring American hegemony.  I put it on my list.  I opened an Amazon package out in the mud room today to find that the book, “The Jakarta Method” by Vincent Bevins had arrived.  I pondered if I’d somehow hit send when hadn’t intended to, but the more logical answer was that my pal over in Beijing had just sent it to me.  He did.  I thought it might be a polemic and it may be in the end, but so far the writing is nuanced and the scholarship is defensible.

 

But I’m already out on a tangent.  I boxed my mind into pacing along with my older one’s class assignments which currently have me halfway through “Secrets of the Soul:  A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis” by Eli Zaretsky and I had wanted to be diving deep into this pile of Sinophilia I’d amassed for myself.  The Zaretsky has an orange book jacket.  It looks appealing like a piece of fruit.  It looks a lot more appealing than the todo email that lists out all I’m supposed to be erasing as done.

Seventy degrees today.  I was wearing gloves when I road last week.  We may yet have snow and frost but winter’s in retreat.  I spoke this morning with a friend who’s an avid cyclist and I told him that I need to visit the bike shop because my coccyx was hurting.  He had a lot of advice.  Some of it required investment and other bits could be experimented on for free and I tred that angle today raising my bike seat up just a little bit higher to see if that did move the pressure properly from my tailbone to my two ischium.  I may yet invest in a new seat.  

Thursday, 03/25/21