Out of joint

I don't always feel like a dinosaur. Give me a sunny day, and I can mellow out with the dog on the deck and feel very content indeed. I can feel good about my archive at two universities, my substitute for a legacy of flesh, and not fret about what happens, or doesn't happen, with regard to them, knowing full well, and from my own experience, it only takes one connected reader to instigate the kind of consequences that keep work alive. I'm not in a popularity contest. I'm in a club with necessarily few members. And all that is fine, the sun is warm, and Sketch keeps me smiling.

I also feel good when I'm reading or listening in my Kindle, overwhelmed when reading the likes of Voltaire or Shakespeare or Durrenmatt or Twain or even someone as recent as Coover or Connell by their insights into the human condition, forgetting for a moment that in a zero-sum universe such genius must be paid for by unspeakable horrors. And if I'm reading on the deck in the sun with the dog, I get double satisfaction.

And yet I also can feel like a dinosaur. Perhaps never more than when I'm watching a female sports event, say basketball, and see the sculptured arms and biceps that only get developed with weight lifting. Female weight lifters! Well, I never admired male weight lifters and I grew up on a Beauty Model that did not include sculptured biceps for women. As a matter of fact, I find such bodies, well, repulsive. There's a dinosaur for you.

Of course, it's easy enough to escape exposure to such strange changes in taste; and yes, I realize that I well could have been born into a culture where I'd be lusting after women with bones through their noses, but I was born between two great wars in the good old USA and women were not muscle bound, or at least not the ones I saw. Now muscles and tattoos and piercings define a new standard of feel-good in women. Fortunately there are young men who agree with them and the species can continue, at least until an angry Nature gets us all.

Some of these themes will be in the summer writing project. Already it is changing. Not in the big picture, in the small details. Eager to begin -- Next week!