Not Churchill, Not Ghandi

Would you live the life of an ascetic, giving up all indulgences, exhibiting your discipline against the pleasures of the world?  You'd have to believe, of course, that pleasure is evil at the very least, or that you were somehow elevated by your control over your desire.  

In the end, certainly, it is all the same.  There is no escaping it.  The end does surely come.  

Yesterday was a dour day of reckoning, I guess.  A pain in my lower gut kept me from sleeping.  It persisted.  All of life's pleasures were gone.  There was only that.  I wasn't ready, I thought.  It was surely cancer.  

That is how I have always been.  Even as a kid.  I don't do sickness very well.  I am in love with my routine pleasures.  I love the morning sunlight falling through the windows.  I look forward with the greatest of pleasure to the morning coffee.  With something like banana bread, even better.  I love the ending of the day with a cocktail.  These are two of the great and consistent pleasures I have.  There are others, of course, but none so dependable. 

And laughing out loud until you can't breathe.  That is another of life's great gifts, and much rarer.  

Meals with lovers.  And, of course, the afterglow.

The rest of it. . . meh.  

Oh. . . I got better.  But it was a dour day.  

Q sent me a song.  I don't know which of us it was meant for.  

Late in the afternoon, I got a call from Tennessee.  While I was with the factory workers, he was out with the gymroids.  He was afraid the gymroid with the Malaysian wife was going to get pumped and say things that were sworn to secrecy.  I sat in my car in a parking lot for a long time while he told me the tale.  It made me laugh.  "But," I said, "I have no one to answer to, so it is all just a shadow play to me."  

Dark pleasures are not pretty like the rising and setting sun.  

"You know it is best to be home when the sun goes down.  Otherwise, thar be goblins."  

Or with a loved one at a favorite restaurant.  That's O.K. 

Q just got back from his NYC weekend.  He has not reported on it at all.  Q has never believed that nothing good happens after midnight.  Although, I think, he has become something of an ascetic.  He has almost reached his weight loss goal which is fantastic and has taken many months.  You can't do that on banana bread and whiskey.  

As I said yesterday, though, life is more complicated than a Rubik's cube.  I read that some kid in China set the World's Record for solving one.  I wonder what else he has figured out. 

I don't like puzzles.  Never have.  I don't even try.  I did enjoy the t.v. show "The Mentalist" though.  I thought that would be a pretty good thing to be.  

Ghandi said a man should do two things every day that he does not want to do.  Churchill, in response, said he did: he got up every morning and he went to bed every night.  

Me?  I enjoy each of those things.  I've seen the sunrise now, and I have drunk the coffee.  I even had a slice of banana bread.  Half the pleasure of the day is behind me.  I think I'll go back to bed for awhile.  As long as I am up for sunset. . . .