Ironic third verse of Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven

I got the rockin' pneumonia,
I need a shot of rhythm and blues.
I caught the rollin' arthiritis
Sittin' down at a rhythm review.
Roll Over Beethoven they're rockin' in two by two.

The irony of course is that when Berry was finally diagnosed with stage 3 country-and-western cancer it was already too late; the progressive-jazz chemotherapy gave him at most an extra month. Some say it was the shame that really did him in.

Gotta go; starting to feel a severe bossa-nova migraine coming on.

Bad Poetry

This is a bad poem I wrote a while ago when I thought there was not a chance I would outlive ms.

Hereafter

Hush, old woman;

You gave me your body,

Your lashes when curly;

Your cheek when smooth,

Hush, old woman,

It is no longer early.

Hush, Hush, old woman;

You gave me your troth,

When I lied, when I lay

In the depth of my sin;

Hush, old woman,

On wake’s wedding day.

Hush now, woman;

You gave me my babies,

Tendered in pain;

Bawling, squalling, noisome brats;

Hush, but woman,

All anon gone again.

Hush old woman;

You gave me your youth,

Wasted wakefulness,

Breath, time; My wickedness;

Hush, old woman,

It is done, long-tooth.

Hush, old woman;

You gave me your tear,

Fear, and pure ivor’ prayer;

I lay in a ghost of your pain;

Hush! Hush woman,

Not now long, He deign.

Hush, Hush! Hush, old woman;

You give me a black dress,

White face to the sky;

Fain whisper your incense

To Purgatory;

It is over; And may be for ill,

But accomplished: lowly test;

Now hush, old woman,

And go to your rest.

Hi brow humor

Anyone looking for to split a gut need look no further than the first two paragraphs of the wikipedia page for The Three Stooges. An excerpt of the first and the entire second paragraph:

Curly Howard replaced brother Shemp, who later returned when Curly suffered a debilitating stroke in May 1946. After Shemp's death from a heart attack in November 1955, he was replaced by comedian Joe Besser, after the use of film actor Joe Palma to film four Shemp-era shorts. Ultimately, Joe DeRita (nicknamed "Curly Joe") replaced Joe Besser by 1958. The act regained momentum throughout the 1960s as popular kiddie fare until Larry's paralyzing stroke in January 1970 effectively marked the end of the act proper. Moe tried unsuccessfully one final time to revive the Stooges with longtime supporting actor Emil Sitka filling in for Larry. Larry ultimately succumbed to a series of additional strokes in January 1975, followed by Moe, who died of lung cancer in May 1975.

When I got to "lung cancer" I 'spit take'd coffee all over my screen.

Affidata al Cuore Immacolato di Maria

Yesterday they installed I discovered they had installed the stone at her head sometime in the last three days. It's beautiful and I kissed the letters in her name.

I'm not sure it's where they said they'd put it though. I thought it was going to be just half on her spot and half on the spot next to it which I've two thirds paid for. It looks better where it is. Maybe we can wait to move it until I'm underneath.

Day four continues on hwy sixty-one south. I've just entered Perry County

When you live on a river like the Red, it's so little affecting, like a single nondescript tree, you can stare at it every day and walk away unchanged. When you live on the Mississippi, like a terrible mountain, you don't want to look at it. It's too insistent that you come down to the end with it, refusing to grant permission to turn around and contemplate its Source (that must be done sneakily). It's like falling from the sky--or any other activity that comes to an abrupt and unpleasant end with no second chances--I mean, like life.
So people don't look at the river. In the big cities they cater to tourists who wanna see it for the romance, but in the towns and farms they don't look at it--except perhaps those with an already fey disposition, I don't know. You can't see the river from town, there's a railroad between you and it (I asked one fellow if the river was just on the other side of that right-of-way over there; I might have asked him if his victims were just in that freezer over there). And along highway running its length, you're separated by not only the train tracks, but the next set or next two sets of hills or at least a broad muddy cultivated flat (cultivated with what? I'll have to find out). You can't see the river, only the steam above it. But the mist, too, reminds me of death.
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There are quite a lot of roadside Marian shrines about.
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Later...
Stopped to take in the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal at Saint Mary's of the Barrens Church in Perryville, MO for another three decades and to collect on a couple of--uh-- shall we say favors?
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Passing through Cape Girardeau, Mary made me turn off 61 onto William to ensure I saw her Cathedral (a fellow in Ste Gen mentioned it, but didn't say where it was, and I didn't find out till I drove up to it), but I forgot to wear a shirt so equally she ensured the doors were locked. So I walked once around it, and on the fourth corner I looked up to see a little fountain garden just in time to glimpse a cardinal flitting off from a drink before flying up to a tree across William Street. "Wrong diocese!" I yelled after her. Old St. Vincent's was also locked... Odd. I thought old St. Vincent didn't get around much anymore.

Day 3. Cont.

In the valley, leaving Jefferson County and entering Ste Genevieve. The crickets are incessant; their whispers culminate in the roar. "Breathe in the fragrance," they say: wet, sweet, lush and green-- to my untutored senses, used to the frozen and sterile North, almost jungle-like; three parts growth and one part decay it fixes my attentions soul and body down to my bowels insisting, "you are temporary." Don't I know it.

Up on the crest, highest around, I catch sight the great rolling waves of treetops running East, bluer and bluer they recede until finally after one more crest lies unglimpsed the brown ribbon--how far?--the brown ribbon that will join me to the sea.

Epitaph Worries.

As of Monday, yesterday, we are worried. The people commissioned to design, build and engrave the stone, which is to be for both beloved ms and your own cricket, seem to think a single epitaph should apply to both of us. Leaving aside the fact that the participle "Affidata" is singular and feminine, it seems obvious to me that each person buried under a stone should have his own epitaph. Having chosen interment in a casket over cremation for myself, I think I want mine to be: "Still wasting space", but I guess I'll give the kids the final say on that.

The much maligned parasite

We scorn the lowly parasite and we make it a great insult to call our brethren by that name, yet we kill to survive, all of us. That is to say we presume upon the very lives of our benefactors in plant and animal kingdoms. Meanwhile, our friend the cuddly parasite merely presumes upon the hospitality of its host. Or perhaps it is better to kill than to sap. Is it?

Getting serious for a moment: an important PSA.

Make no mistake: the odd ice-cream headache is almost certainly nothing to worry about. But too many people continue to eat ice cream too quickly suffering recurring ice-cream headaches unaware that they could be signs of a more serious ice-cream malady: ice-cream meningitis perhaps or, more seriously, an ice-cream aneurism; even ice-cream cancer.

My great-uncle--never a sick day in his life--dropped dead at 81 from an ice-cream stroke at the TCBY.

.

Another letter to an atheist

Commenting on the outcry from Christians over some recent end-of-life cases in which the question of euthanasia arose, my atheist friend puzzles at:

...this fervor com[ing] from one who professes to believe in life-after-death. If there really is life after death (eternal life, in fact), why is it important to prolong the suffering career of the cancer-ridden body in this fallen world? To put it another way: atheists, who believe that this earthly life is the only life there is, might be forgiven for clinging to it at all costs. Yet, oddly enough, atheists are generally OK with euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, while it's the supposedly religious people who are the clingers.

I think he asks a good question. At its most stark it is for Catholics (and any who believes in sacramental Baptism): why don't you just douse the forehead then slit the throat avoiding for him so fortunate a vale of tears in favor of immediate beatific bliss and everlasting. But this is to take the atheist's barren world view as our own—albeit with a little heaven tacked on the end—discounting, among many other blandishments of a life of grace, the uplifting dynamic of an ongoing community of man whence rises a Communion of Saints—the reason why any man's death diminished, say, Donne (as he seems to have thought).

To shed the light of a mere burning match on the Christian's strange position we look first at the atheist's, his perfectly reasonable attitude based on two conceits on his part. The first is the idea that he can at a moment in time effectively plot the arc of his future existence and determine whether its integral is positive or negative. It is highly questionable a notion at each step, not the least insoluble term being how to calibrate existential nothingness at our worldly zero. The second, implicit in the first, is the tenet that suffering is always of negative value and this second notion is simply—certainly in terms of the person whose God came to earth to suffer, but also empirically, if we are honest—an error.

Of course I'm talking about an idealized atheist, and when we turn back to the Christians in these news stories the problem of explaining their behavior when facing death is made many times more difficult by the fact that they (and we) are none of them (or us) ideal Christians but are by and large as infected as anyone by the spirit of the post-Christian age in which we are immersed; an age in which peculiarly the ontological if not the eschatological assumptions of the atheist hold sway, but animated by a spirit not at all unlike that which in all ages gains its purchase in original sin. In short, our motives are mixed and when any one does cling to life at all costs (especially at the cost of others’ lives), he does evil. But anyone may fear death as your less-than-ideal atheist also does along with the imperfect Christian, and it is only in folly that the pure and shining, the fearless atheist specimen looks down on such a ragged and craven Christian, scoffing that for the Christian death is—or need be—but a play-acting scene (say, I’ll just lie down here and close my eyes till the end of Act II, then we’ll all go to the wrap party and have a real good time).

This is false. Death, we know well, is the radical disintegration of the body and from it its form the soul. It entails real and utter surrender of oneself to a blackness, perhaps to forgetfulness, and no one knows, beyond an obscure and remote promise, what for himself lies beyond it—even more: what strange and fiery form the self itself may take—and that is a fearful thing. Indeed, the Christian must acknowledge that, again for him, it might be much worse than oblivion. But it must be just so else the Christian concede all love and sacrifice and all hope and thanksgiving are but play-acting exercises as well (say, I’ll just {wink} deposit my pocket change here with this beggar assured that later on I can withdraw it in golden flag—with interest).

Further, it must be remembered that for us death is the novelty, the unnatural thing we were not designed for but rather a punishment for our sins, itself symbolizing, even aping the end of our self willed separation from God. In that, but for Christ's sweet promise, death is an enemy forsooth to be hated and feared. But to unite ourselves truly to that promise and extract all its sweetness requires from us the real love that lies in self-sacrifice so profound that it is to our fallen natures like death before death, and so again, poor Christians, we poor Christians are afraid.

But Christian is the word not so much for what we are but for what we aspire to be, so while one may well fairly judge Christians harshly as lacking the courage of their convictions (though he must grant they are not easy convictions to live up to), better judge Christianity on its own terms. The true Christian view of death begins with Christ. The saints recall His seven last words with great reverence and close attention and are moved to face their own death with the equanimity of St Stephen who begged for the lives only of his executioners. In a modern hospital setting our example is St Gianna Molla. She was no clinger. If the difference between them and us is the Hope born of a plenitude of Grace—which Grace engenders also a more perfect Love—then surely these saints both of unconquerable courage and of a Love most potently expressed in mercy will be in favor of assisted suicide?

Of course the answer, finally, is no, for the saint rejects not only the first two assumptions of the suicide enthusiast, but also even more profoundly the third error of the atheist—the presumption that one can own a life (either ones own in the case of suicide or that of another in the case of euthanasia). To frame it thus is to recognize the hollowness of the question, If there really is life after death, why is it important to prolong the suffering career of the cancer-ridden body in this fallen world? for to equate on one hand doing all we can to alleviate the physical and psychological suffering of the dying—short of stealing something literally of inestimable value and disposing of it as literally worth less than nothing—with, on the other, purposely prolonging (what we arrogantly suppose to be: needless) suffering, is to embrace wholesale all three of the atheist’s errors—that he knows what life and death are (and they are reductive), that he understands suffering (and it is uniformly negative) and that it’s his choice to make (with or without good data). The first two are manifestly false to anyone on a moment’s reflection. While the error in the third may only be grasped by a certain type of theist, the ends of its implications in all facets of life will be dire. But that is a whole other discussion.

Death Penalty

Empirical arguments aside, I don't understand the argument that I should theoretically be against the death penalty because the possibility of an innocent man being executed by the state exists. If there is no death penalty, the same innocent man might be imprisoned which is a terrible thing. You can never give him the lost years of his life back, even if you do later discover his innocence. Why is this not an argument that I should be opposed to imprisonment for criminals?

I think the innocent man argument against the death penalty arises from the entirely secular notion that the worst thing is death. It is not. Christ showed us just how an innocent man can die, conquering death in the process--making it sweet and benign. Who doesn't believe that our Lord heaps abundant blessings on the executed innocent, as on the imprisoned innocent?

Far worse, on a cosmic scale, than an innocent man being executed by the state is an unrepentant guilty man being executed by the state. In fact, that might actually be a valid argument against the death penalty.