Note to politicians, one in particular: Stop making promises you shouldn’t keep.

I used to get up at 5am only on Sundays, when it’s always been a matter of arriving at church with enough time to get settled in, prepare, go over the sermon and whatever else might be happening that morning.

Now I arise at 5am every day. I look forward to it like little else. I’m alone with my thoughts, I’m as fresh and alert as I’m going to be all day, and no one’s bothering me. I cherish this time, though I wish I could make better use of it, from a writing standpoint. More often than not, what gets recorded in here is a rather pedestrian recounting of one thing or another. Or it’s another political rant disparaging Trump and (still) trying to get my head around the fact that he’s actually the POTUS.

In any event, I love early mornings. But it’s not because it’s my way of getting ready for “another day in the trenches.” It’s more that it feels like my childhood Hide and Seek place, under all the clothes in a closet where no one could find me. Blissful, self-imposed isolation. Peace and quiet.

My vocational life since seminary has been a portrait of playing against type, practically every day a stretch beyond my comfort zone. And all I’ve wanted of late is to flee to that quiet place and stay there.

Move beyond my comfort zone? So cliche. Comfort zone, shmomfort zone.  Enough already.  Been there and done that for way. too. long.

I hear that film cameras are making a comeback, sort of in the same vein as LP records. Ahh, vinyl… What’s old is new again!

In the other direction, I was going to try and watch a 16K video shot at the International Space Station or somewhere, but decided not to because my laptop’s screen couldn’t do it justice, couldn’t handle the clarity. Remember high definition- HD- television? Dinosaur. A 16K video has 64x the pixel density of your “average” 1080p screen, which was the standard of excellence, oh, maybe three years ago. One might start wondering if a tv screen will look more like real life than real life.

For some, this no doubt lands in the category of “little known facts of lesser known value.” But it has me thinking about how we view our lives. Do we feel as though we need to be following suit somehow? Always taking things to the “next level,” always evaluating our time on earth in terms of how much effort we’re expending in that quest for some ideal version of ourselves? Heaven forbid we should stand still for very long.

It’s tempting to say, “Good luck with all that.” It isn’t that it’s not possible, I suppose. It’s just that it sounds so self-serving, so typically earthbound. I guess there are ways of arriving in a new place without being so intentional about it, as if it’s all about keeping up because somebody is keeping score.

There’s nothing wrong at all with having a sense of curiosity and a desire to keep on learning and growing, but that seems different than today’s emphasis on self-absorption.

Someone should just start a website called Everything Self. It would be a huge hit.

The House is blue now, or will be, so at least Democrats can be a fly in Trump’s ointment. But the Senate is even redder. Did gerrymandering make a difference? What are we going to learn about hackers and Russian interference and people conveniently left off the voting rolls this time around?

The House news seems like a hollow victory. A step in the right direction, but not enough. And of course Trump is ready to move his campaign for 2020 into overdrive. God help us. A moratorium should be declared on all paid political advertising, including Trump’s rallies- if only to give the general populace a break from the noise, and a chance to cleanse pallates.

If we have to continue to endure all Trump all the time and his ugly persona and the firehose of sewage that passes for his mouth, I’m gonna unplug the TV and live in the basement until Jesus comes back.

Nah, I won’t do that. But it’s tempting. And besides, Jesus returning doesn’t exactly seem like a thing. 

Interesting evening around here last night. Tornado warnings, wind and heavy rain, water in the basement again.

And one very close lightning strike, kind of out of nowhere. It was a doozy, amazingly loud. Impressive, actually. And we didn’t lose power. I was expecting to have to break out the flashlights and candles and go without an internet connection for awhile. But the local infrastructure is robust enough to handle some pretty wild weather.

Good thing, because it was nice to be able to monitor the storm’s progress on my phone and check out recipes on Pinterest- things to do while manning the shop vac and sucking up water from places where it doesn’t belong.

There should be a rule, a statute of limitations, on paid political advertising. Money talks and all that, and TV stations across the nation are just fulfilling their obligation to air what the PACs and candidates have paid for. But come on. Not only have we seen these commercials enough times to recite them ourselves, most of them are so full of blatant fear-mongering and hyperbolic, manipulative drivel that there’s no reason to take them seriously. Fact checkers must be pulling their hair out. And voters should be offended. These ads are an insult to human intelligence. Though they apparently must still have their appeal.       

The low road still works.    Sad. 

I don’t live in Massachusetts anymore, but I spent the first 37 years of my life there. My allegiance to the local pro sports teams was forged early on and is ironclad, unchangeable.

I feel like celebrating the latest Red Sox triumph, but also don’t want to overdo. Best to keep it low key. We have enjoyed an embarrassment of riches since 2002, and it’s perfectly understandable why the rest of the country has had quite enough of us. I would feel the same way. Still, it’s a nice run and I’m going to enjoy and appreciate it.

And besides- in the bigger picture, it’s just a game. It’s an achievement athletically, when a professional team distinguishes and separates itself from the rest of the field. And it makes a city and a fan base feel good about themselves for awhile. But in the annals of human achievement, I’m not sure it rises to the level of a cure for polio or the invention of the printing press or air travel.

I just hope they can stay relatively humble. It seems sometimes these guys forget there’s a next season, and karma, and what goes around often has a way of coming around. Some players, and especially fans, have long memories. So don’t offer up any ammunition. Stay humble. Enjoy the moment, but remember you can feel good about yourself and your achievements without rubbing it in. Dispense with the “Yankees suck!” chants and playing “New York, New York” as a burn. And what’s with all this talk about “Title Town?”  Come on.

It’s easy to get stupid.

Post script 1/22/20… maybe this superb season now has to come with an asterisk, since Mr. Cora and company have been caught in a technology-aided sign stealing ploy. Any way you cut this, it’s wrong, it’s cheating, and they deserve the punishment. But if this paves the way for Pete Rose or Barry Bonds and company to be given further HOF consideration, then I am going to swear off professional sports forever. Apples and oranges, somehow.

I’m sure there are others, but Donald Trump is the worst person I know of. I’m sure if he knew how I felt he would reconsider the course of his life. 

He’s winning, amazingly, but I wish he’d lose a little bit. OK, a lot. Like to the point of giving up and taking a damned UP escalator back to wherever he came from.

He’s in perpetual campaign mode. He seems to thrive on hate and disgust. He loves pissing people off. He needs constant affirmation from his followers. The smile he wears best is a smirk. I’m not sure he’s capable of having an original thought. He says whatever he feels like saying, regardless of its basis in truth or fiction. Every indication is that his moral compass is stuck on self-adulation. He seems to grow more brazen and reckless with each passing day.

But he is the POTUS. It’s a waking nightmare.

The thing that sticks in my craw is the image of Trump standing at the podium at one of his pep rallies, smirking away, working his adoring minions into a lather over some hyperbolic, fabricated pile of bullshit. Smiles all around, and Orange Hair probably sporting a chubby over how magnificent and powerful he is.

Every day offers a glimpse of a new low, a plummeting to previously uncharted depths of depravity and deceit. And it’s all calculated. Chum in the waters. No measured, thoughtful appeal to reason or compassion, just ruthlessness and  “anything goes.”

Sometimes it seems like we’re moving toward an America that not even the MAGA crowd is going to like.

The latest climate news is that we have about 10 or 12 years left in which to get our act together. This means nothing to Trump and his cast of misfit toys who ignore these warnings and dismiss them as just the latest left-wing fever dream.

Maybe this is our fate. We go down without a fight. We consume until we fall into an irreversible coma. We default to survival mode and deteriorate to the point of societal collapse at the hands of powerful people with their fingers in their ears humming “la, la, la…”  

At this point, it looks like our only hope is a serious grassroots belt-tightening. Because the people in positions of influence, who have the power to do something cooperatively with the rest of the world, can’t be bothered.