Last week’s post ended with a contemptuous: “You know what? The Chinese can keep their thought police. It’s time to recognize Taiwan.”
Now, speaking of contempt, in these quarantine lockdown times, here is a nurturing paragraph, but with righteous swear words, from the blog of best-selling writer John Scalzi: (Whatever, for April 26, 2020)
- All the above, incidentally, is why you have my official permission to tell all those people who are saying that you should develop a new hobby under quarantine and/or if you’re not doing six different things all very well, then you are wasting this precious gift of time, to fuck right off. Motherfuckers, I released a bestseller in quarantine and promoted the crap out of it and am negotiating some genuinely breathtaking business deals and I’m still mostly feeling like sleeping until 3 fucking pm in the afternoon and then going back under the covers an hour and fifteen minutes later. If you’re getting out of bed these days, you’re ahead of the game.
One of our local National Hockey League coaches would concur. “I’m pretty good,” Matt Brown replies. “And I keep telling people, ‘Pretty good is the new great’”
Wes Gilbertson, in a sports article for page C1 of the Calgary Herald, May 9, writes ‘Sadness. Frustration. Boredom. Fatigue.’
He then quotes coach Matt Brown:
“I think probably the most universal theme is that everyone, almost every day, goes through some sort of low-grade grief, and the reason is just that the emotion of sadness is always in response to loss….
If you look at our Flames players, for instance, the two things that they love most are playing hockey and being together. Both those things are taken away. Every day that you wake up, it’s another day that you’ve lost those things, so it’s a bit of a Groundhog Day of grief right now.
“As a result, what sadness does is it causes a drop-off in energy…. (By design)
So we can process loss, so we can wrap our head around it…. So what people find unnerving is that you get high-functioning, very motivated people that suddenly have no energy. They know what they want to be doing…”
So, dear reader, let’s not have self-contempt. Note: The article covers the whole front page of the sports section, having much practical advice for coping with COVID-19.
Hello Reader,
Got pretty books?
Of course I’m proud to be a member of the human race—not like being a Martian—but still, sometimes I have contempt.
Oh, how I wish humankind could learn two simple things, just two:
First is: ‘Don’t invade other countries,’
Second is: ‘Don’t introduce invasive species.’
So while the pretty peacenik with a guitar sings “Where have the native flowers gone?” hoping her fellow civilians will get a clue, I know the truth:
All we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.
… Here’s a poem from my Tracing the Martians of H.G. Wells poetry manuscript:
Coffee Table Books
Before I was born
there were books made for boys,
boys who wondered, “What’s it like on the inside?”
I saw how in a bomber fuselage
rivets and structural lines stretched along through rings,
with the turret gunner’s seat dangling like a swing.
The bombardier had a mattress to lie belly down on
looking through rings of plexiglas.
In a big cramped submarine
bunks lined the torpedo room,
with a sack of potatoes hanging inches
from a sailor’s nose.
They called their subs pigboats
as diesel fumes clung to their clothing.
A boy wants to see into the corners
of an airplane, submarine, battle-tank:
“What’s it like on the inside?”
An adult only wants to view the whole machine
at a long glance,
posed clean and pretty on a stage,
in a coffee table book.
A grownup has trouble imagining
the wreckage of war,
as I learned when they did a product-recall
of a G.I. Joe battlefield command post:
Toy soldiers with their map table and walkie-talkies
were set in a jagged corner of an open brick building.
Grownups prefer their toys on a clean flat coffee table.
As a boy reading The Martian Chronicles
I learned that when adults saw newsreels of wars in China,
they saw the footage as dim and unreal, too far away.
I felt war as a child
during a nightmare in darkness.
I was with Danny Beck and Bobby Johansen
and we were all crying.
We were soldiers by the black barn,
and across the field was a creek.
And down in that dark creek, we knew, unseen,
were the Germans. And we were in utter despair.
Adults live in their bright world of sunny
coffee table pictures,
with no shadowed corners,
never asking, “What’s it like on the inside?”
Sean Crawford
Calgary
May
2020
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