A Respite From donnie

Having spent the morning listening to the Democrats spoon up a rather thin gruel – beyond the obvious fact that donnie is guilty of international extortion – of why they need to impeach the president, and listening to the delusional scenarios of republican riposte I just got tired.

Most of that listening had occurred as I rode my Rocky Mountain bike on a trainer.

Twenty miles; not too bad.

Maybe that’s why I was tired.

But I doubt it.

Twenty or so miles usually wake me up and drive all the nasty chemical residue that gathers overnight in old people from me and leaves me ready to pick tomatoes or something.

But after all the sham, sturm and drang of the NPR morning stuff  I was just tired and was pretty sure that the content – noted above – was at fault; I was ready for something else.

So I had two bloody marys as I fixed my BBC News Hour – 1300 out here – breakfast.

It was an English muffin with melted butter on its halves and two eggs scrambled with some almost forgotten in the back of this cavernous Liebherr, scorched previously on the barbecue grill, red peppers.

It was good.

I finished the second bloody as I finished the eggs.

Then I had to face the real mission for the day: vacuuming the cat hair off the two massive couches in the living room.

So I touched MUSIC on my iPhone and invoked my five album Garth Brooks playlist.

Things were going swimmingly.

The BeatsPill that Joe gave me can crank out music loud enough to be heard even over the whine of a vacuum cleaner.

I got about halfway through the first couch when I remembered that I had finished a great little book the previous evening, after which I had watched episode seven of Country Music.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett is one of the most unexpectedly delightful things I have ever read.

If it weren’t for the fact that next in the pile is Sarum, Rutherfurd’s prequel to London I would be lapsing into a semi-suicidal state; I do that when I finish a great book.

If Sarum is as good as London, I may be able to live without The Uncommon Reader.

But then I just recently had to go through that same transition when I had finished Churchill’s Marlborough.

I read that because I had previously finished Macaulay’s five volume History of England.

Sir Winston had felt it necessary to write four volumes in defense of his ancestor against the “lies”, as Churchill called them, perpetrated by Lord Macaulay against the Duke of Marlborough; a trans century spat seemed to me to be the basis of some good reading; it was.

In amongst all that I read The Soul of an Octopus: good story; I totally agree with the underlying premise that many, or probably most, of our fellow creatures are pretty much like us in all important ways: memory, fun, fear, love, hunger and the desire to be heard and taken seriously; I live with three cats who epitomize that basic truth.

Garth just sang my favorite Garth song: That Summer; the bass solo in that song – I think it’s his sister playing it - is one of the great guitar solos I have ever heard, up there with the ones in Poles Apart and Comfortably Numb.

I also, just before all of that, read The Lion in the Living Room.

Anybody who cares at all about how all of us creatures might get on together ought to read that book.

Abigale is a brilliant writer,

I guess I’ve killed all the time I can; I need to get back to vacuuming.

But at least I forgot about donnie in lieu of something tangible, true and meaningful – to me at least – for awhile.

I should mention, as I fire up the vacuum again, Nancy Mitford's biography of Louis XIV is so good it ought to be part of every grade school curriculum: learning about really interesting “historical” characters when one is young enough to still believe in magic might make a better country for all of us.

I doubt if it would do any damage.