I usually start these emails to you with a pretty good idea of what I'm going to cover and how I'm going to cover it. I have a cache of notes I organize and re-organize into a letter, embed links, illustrate it, and then it ships. This week, I'm doing something different because the times surrounding us are so different and changing so quickly.
Since my previous email to you, we've had an insurrection and an inauguration. I wasn't sure what to expect of either of these. Now, you may be asking about whether I had expected an insurrection at all: I was. I think I was expecting the insurrection for years, however that didn't make it any less shocking when it actually came to pass. And, honestly, I didn't have much expectation about the inauguration. Given the armed revolt from the previous weeks and Covid casting a long, dark shadow over everything else, Mom and I both thought it would have been perfectly reasonable to have the inauguration in a small, quiet room someplace safe. In the end though, I was pleased with the hoopla especially, the poem so beautifully written and recited by Amanda Gorman. Other events in my life seem pale in comparison to what we've been watching on the stage of national events, but there's been changes happening in our household.
For one thing, Mom is now on a list to get a Covid vaccination. Arkansas, like many other states, have opened up the vaccine to the next tier of people and she's a member of that tier. We don't know when her number will come up at the local pharmacy, but we know she's on the list. I don't know when I'll be on a list, but I feel as if I might be next in line.
Not long after the previous email to you, Mom and I had a deep chat about what's going on in our lives, how each of us have started a new chapter in our lives. We agreed that sometimes starting new chapters are difficult and we both acknowledged that we have both been through some difficult times. We also agreed that new chapters can mean new and better adventures. And we agreed that the current chapter seems to be pleasant. She said she didn’t expect us to be living together but that it is ok. We were able to avoid any discussion about where she's living which is a familiar rabbit hole for both of us. She doesn't believe that she's living in her home and I try to convince her that she is. Mom believes these current chapters of our lives started a couple of weeks ago. It seems that way to me too even though its been a few months since I moved back to Arkansas.
I told Mom that when a new chapter in my life opens and it seems to be getting off to a bad start, I try to put more beautiful things into my life. I listen to good music. I read good books. I try to learn something new (in my case, Hebrew), I might resurrect an old hobby I found satisfying (in my case, chess). I burn scented candles. I might cut down on the time I spend with the news, following the daily horror show that passes as our first draft of history. These are all techniques I learned as an outpatient in a program back in the Bay Area when I was going through a rough time. The therapy is called dialectical behavioral therapy commonly abbreviated to DBT. The point is to change the conversation in your mind, change the mood, put something positive into your immediate environment that counteracts the negative. Watch a cartoon. Take a shower. Eat a fudgsicle.
Mom's cognition has declined recently. We're unable to have long conversations like we used to. Her day-to-day memory is all but gone. She's more "out of it" than usual. Also, I can tell that she's not able to follow along in her books and am not convinced she remembers what she's read anymore. I quiz her on what the story is about and she can't answer me. It's also more difficult to engage her in conversation as she doesn't seem to have anything to say any more. This has been depressing. There's the additional loss of her cognition, but there's also the increased loneliness I'm experiencing. I'm losing something never to be able to retrieve it. And so I end up more isolated. I was surprised how sudden this change happened and how noticeable it was. It seems like it actually happened overnight. Mom also seems to be obsessing more about not being at home. She'll bring this up several times a day now and ask me to take her home and it breaks my heart because I can imagine, all too easily, what it's feels like not to live at home.
The other big news in my life is that my possessions will arrive in Arkansas next week. It's important to me to note here and now that this was a considerable undertaking and could not have been achieved without the love and support of some Very Good Friends. At the beginning of my Arkansas journey, I had just a few hours notice that I was needed here. I threw a change of clothes in my bag, and caught a jet from Madison to DFW and then on to FSM. None of my things in my apartment were packed at all and I had to rely on my Very Good Friends to sort all this out, pack, and then supervise getting the boxes onto the moving truck. It was a humbling experience for me to learn I had the this much support.
I've been making some recommendations about the various technology I use in my life and this week will be no exception.
After playing around with it for about a year, I decided to switch browsers to Brave. Brave is a privacy-based browser that's built on Chrome. This means your browsing is secured and not monetized by Google, Microsoft, et.al. It also means that the user gets the snappy performance of Chrome without your privacy constantly being bought and sold. Of course, if you're using Google, gmail, gcal, Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media apps, it doesn't make that much difference what type of browser you use as you have opted in to a marketplace that's selling your privacy for market capitalization. Brave isn't a privacy panacea but it helps a lot. And if you want to step up your privacy even more, I recommend using the Tor browser and a VPN. I constantly use a VPN and can recommend the one from Nord as it's one of the less cumbersome to use and offers many cool features.
Another app I've been working with off and on for a few years now is called Kodi, formerly XBMC. I came across Kodi when I made my first foray into the world of the Ubuntu operating system. Now, it has evolved into a multi-platform system.
Here's what Kodi does: I have a movie library on a disk, about 3Tb of movies, somewhere north of 200. The movies aren't organized. The only exception is that the title of the file is the name of the movie and the year when it was released. If a movie has subtitles, I create a file folder to hold the movie with the subtitle. That's all the organization there is. This "movie" file folder is cumbersome to open and can only sort by the date when the file was created and the title of the movie or the size of the file. And this sorting takes way too long and is relatively useless. And doing a search on a name of a movie takes waaay too long. Here's what Kodi does: everything time I open Kodi, it updates an index of the files in the movie folder. When it comes across a new file, it looks up a movie in an open source data base, pulls down the relevant tags (genre, stars, director, etc.), movie poster, and then gives me an interface that makes it drop dead easy - and quick - to use. So I recommend Kodi for organizing movies you might happen to have on your disk. (I shall neither report on nor make recommendations about how to acquire these movies and if you ask me, I'll ask you for a warrant.)
One thing I do every morning as I read the NYTimes is search out its column that highlights the opening monologues from the late shows. Watching Colbert or Seth Myers or Trevor Noah make a spin on the news is good therapy for me. I actually laugh out loud. I've curated my Twitter feed to filter out the loudly negative voices and capture the positive Jewish voices. But Twitter is still too much to bear in large doses. There's a reason it's called "doomscrolling." What I need to do next is start cutting off some of the alerts I get on my 'phone. I don't know if I can cut off the alerts from the NYTimes, but I can cut off the email alerts and the Instagram alerts (I actually don't use IG that much at all except to keep track of pretty people doing pretty things.)
My aspiration to learn how to play chess continues. I have a book ghost-written for Bobby Fischer on the fundamentals of chess and Fischer's book, My 60 Memorable Games. That's a book he actually did write. Meanwhile, I finished reading the Paul Morphy biography. What I've come to find out is that the real chess action isn't in a book or a magazine anymore. Everything is on the web, of course. I had been thinking about learning chess the way I first learned it: On the page. Nowadays, everything's online.
So, I bought an vinyl chessboard and an inexpensive set of wooden pieces before I realized the whole dialogue about chess is now happening online. I almost bought an inexpensive analogue chess clock but pulled up short when I realized I wasn't going to be playing anyone face-to-face in the near and possibly distant future. I've completed the first two series of lessons on chess.com. I started at the beginning even though I know the moves. I want to make sure I don't miss anything. I've re-learned castling (learned a few new rules about castling) and en passant. I've also finished reading one of the better (best?) biographies of Bobby Fischer, Endgame.
It is a very depressing book. Fischer was so gifted and yet his mind was completely bent, worse than Morphy. Fischer was a virulent anti-Semite, Protocols of the Elders of Zion level bad - actually - even though both his mother was a Jew and his father (who we can't really identify) was probably a Jew. I'm also studying Beginning Chess by Bruce Pandolfini. Pandolfini is the real life chess teacher that was played by Ben Kingsley in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.
I've just started studying this book but am very enthusiastic about it. The book includes a section of aphorisms such as, "Acclimate to tactical terrain and other harsh realities." Or this note, "Analyze complicated positions. The more complex the better. Assign an analytic hour. Do it in your head, time yourself, and write it in a notebook before checking. Repeat. Now and then, look back and smile." I've set up a board on the floor of the living room and am studying an analysis of Bobby Fischer games from a book newly revised and updated, Bobby Fischer Rediscovered by Andrew Soltis. Mom is unimpressed by the mess I've created in the living room but tolerant as we don't use the living room very much at all.
The other reading / studying I'm doing falls into two different areas: First, I'm beginning to read a text that was suggested in the Kabbalah course I'm taking, Ehyeh: The Kabbalah of Tomorrow. I'm also interested in reading a book called Everything is God: The Radical Path to Nondual Judaism. The second area is the literary fiction I try to read. A Very Dear Friend brought a book to my attention this past week, The Innocents by Francesca Segal. It's a retelling of Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence set in a contemporary, insulated London shtel populated with upper middle class Jews who all know absolutely everything about each other. The Countess Ellen Olenska character is moved onto a cousin / niece who is half American / half British who has just been thrown out of Columbia's MFA fiction program after starring in an "art house" movie that is rather explicit and returns to London to be in the midst of a large family she's been separated from and either try to reform herself or just cause trouble. Where I am in the book makes it hard to tell what path she's on. It might be both paths at once.
I've started watching Bridgerton and Lupin. I'm a little bit further with Bridgerton than Lupin. Bridgerton is, of course, the Marriage Plot, a family densely populated with girls who need to start marrying off and so the story commences. There are some interesting backstories that are starting to get filled in. Bridgerton has been covered at length, so I don't need to go into any great detail here. Race is an important element of the story but I haven't been able to figure out how I feel about it because it seems slapped into the mix without rhyme or reason. It's like one of the revisionist stories where the author adds zombies onto the title. Pride and Prejudice with Zombies. Then, a friend asked me something about Lupin the day before the NYTimes decided to review the French series. I was intrigued, so I decided to give it a try. I've almost finished it and it seems pretty good. As with Bridgerton, there's some interesting backstories that are getting filled in as we go along.
Well, that’s all for now. As you can see, I have a lot of pots on the stove and I must tend to them. G-d bless you for reading this and for everything else you do.
Yrs.,
brian.