To bed very early, and up rested at four. One reward for it was this.
I wish I’d caught it a little earlier, before the sun had washed out the impact of this moon quite so much. I wish I’d caught it with the new zoom lens, too … this is just a go-pro hip shot.
Maybe if I can push away the temptation of a nap, and the temptation to not stay up into the wee hours even without a nap (it happens), I can try again tomorrow with the big gun.
I spent my extended morning cooking, and my curry is, in the opinion of my very incapable palate (that’s a biological fact and not modest self-deprecation) approaching perfection.
***
Two bits.
If you think back honestly, before 2015 or so, you will realize that you didn’t passionately hate Vladimir Putin–or even spend any kind of serious thought on him–seven or eight years ago. On the other hand, you did hate him venomously long before he sent troops over the theoretical border into the Donbass.
Something happened between 2016 and 2021 to effectuate that change in you, and it didn’t have very much to do with becoming more informed, or spending any time critically evaluating world affairs with regard to Russia and its leaders. Just as a thought experiment, ask yourself Cui Bono? Who benefits, from your state of dudgeon over that particular evil one? In whose interest is it, that you view the Russian nation in much the same way your parents or grandparents did in 1955, during McCarthyism, during Duck and Cover?
And, on a much lighter but still very serious note, I give you the estimable Norman Finkelstein, who has managed to make it to a very advanced age and is better than ever. Much, much better in fact. He was always smart and worth listening to, but used to come across as more brittle and dogmatic most of the time.
Here he is interviewed by Briahna Joy, and he is both deeply appreciative of her, and deeply critical when she starts to lose focus on the big picture. Not just her, either … generations of us, the lost children from his perspective as he faces his own mortality.
It made me pull back from all this bullshit daily minutiae and remember my own better self, and what this is all about in the end.
May it do the same for you.