THE VALUE OF WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD ALL DEPENDS ON WHERE YOU HEARD IT FROM – SO WE ARE TOLD.

What is this?   A masked man coming to rescue us from the Bad Guys? No silver bullets, but a Golden Mask? Oh, wait a minute.  That is not the U.S. of A. in the background…this is just an American Tourist Abroad taking a Selfie while cavorting at Carnival in Italy.   Are there no heroes anymore?

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STRANGE TIMES BEGET STRANGE THOUGHTS  (Sometimes, no matter how much you try, you just cannot get away from the politics of the day.  This is one of those times, for this Writer, or whatever he is.)

• My mind keeps traveling back to the U.S. Speaker of the House, who claimed God spoke to him and told him he is the ‘New Moses’.  (This ‘New Moses’ is two heartbeats away from being President of the U.S. – so that is either good news for the reader, or bad news – depending on the reader’s current persuasion.)  But where my mind has been traveling, mostly, is to the “Ten Commandments” the Old Moses brought down from the mountain – and how much good they did for all of us.  Have the rates of cussing and sleeping with other people’s partners and stealing and killing and putting false gods before the real God, and those sorts of things declined much since the Old Moses handed the Commandments down?  I’d bet not much.  Here is my thought: I’d like the ‘New Moses’ to give us some serious new Commandments…something we can do – even if we can’t refrain from breaking the old ones.  For examples: 1) “Thou shalt not pollute the air, the waters and the land  2) Thou shalt not let schoolchildren go unfed  3) Thou shalt not kill living creatures with guns  4) Thou shalt not use plastics and toss them in the oceans… Things like that. Things we can really refrain from doing, even though it might cost somebody some money or – worse –  profits.  Obviously we can’t stop cussing, stealing, envying, and sleeping where we should not be sleeping.  But we can do my new numeros 1,2,3,4 if only the New Moses and the House would get back to serious work.
• I have been reading a good way to prevent oncoming Dementia – if you are ‘Getting on’ (in age, that is) is to learn a new language.  A new language, they say, will: ‘Rejuvenate your brain”, prevent ‘brain rot’, bring back your young brain…blah, de dee blah.  Well, if that is the only way to keep my brain alert and fresh – you are going to see me walking, lost down the middle of a road wondering where I live.  It took me a week to remember, in English, the words “Person, man, woman, TV”…I forget what the other one was, let alone remembering any of those words in another language,

In the spirit of being brief and not contributing to the noise – I shall end it for the week – after these quotes:

• “You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” ―Cormac McCarthy, “The Road“
• “Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.” ―Neil Gaiman, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane“
• “If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.” ―Edgar Allan Poe

…And a fond “Hello” to Bogie, wherever you are.

C. E. Metzger

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