Yesterday was supposed to be a stay at home day but the post office delivered my coffee to the wrong apartment so I had to go out to get some. I’m spoiled when it comes to coffee, dealing with anything other than Ahrre’s is a hardship. I’m not running to the local store to get a can of coffee. I went to my alternative, Trader Joe’s. I can get to the one in Chelsea in 48 minutes so that’s where I headed. Of course there I bought more than coffee. I enjoy my trips to TJ’s.
Even though it’s been more than two weeks since surgery I still tire easily. That’s why I wanted the day off. Perhaps today. Maybe I’ll take a walk, that would be good for me, as long as I take it easy. My back is paying the cost of the fast walk to catch the train on Friday. That’s the reason I’ve been taking acetaminophen. On the bright side my abdominal muscle pain is lessoning. I’m not normal, I still always feel something in my gut, but I feel less than I did yesterday. I can’t wait to be fully recovered.
I find that I’ve become reluctant to share many of my thoughts here. I don’t know quite what’s going on. Long ago decided to not worry about sounding pretentious when I blog. I’d write my thoughts and not worry about how others would take it. That served me well, but now I’m having difficulty with it. I think the problem is that I’m having difficulty with follow through. I want to be able to defend my reasoning, not just say what I believe, and I’m getting stuck in the process. I hope it’s because of my physical condition. Then I know it will pass. I hate keeping ideas bottled up in my head. They want to be free.
It’s Memorial Day let’s see if I can write about that. One theme I see on Facebook this year that I hadn’t seen in previous years is that people don’t know the difference between Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. I thought that was silly but by looking at other people’s posts I see it isn’t. People are honoring veterans, people that survived war, not those that died.
Memorial Day started as Decoration Day, and was a response to America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War. More Americans died in it than in any war and the population was far smaller than in the great wars of the 20th Century. Everyone knew somebody that died in the Civil War. The war that was fought at home, hit home. Decoration Day was the day to decorate the graves of the fallen. Memorial Day is the day to acknowledge the horror and cost of war. In that way it is day to promote peace. I’m not a pacifist; pacifism like all absolutist philosophies is overly simplistic. There are valid reasons to go to war, chief amongst them is protect the weak from the strong. But it can never be forgotten that there is a cost to war, and all too often is the weak that pay a disproportionate share. There are no easy answers and it’s easier to find the costs of the actions taken or not taken after the fact than those that would have been incurred if we had acted differently. We need to take the attitude towards war that I took to blogging, it can’t be based on what we fear others will think. It requires deep thought, and careful balancing. You can’t decide matters of war and peace on slogans that can fit on a bumper sticker. “Remember the Maine” is not a reason to go to war.
Now it’s time to eat. That reminds me of something personal and trivial that should have put in the first part of this entry. Last night I did what I thought impossible; I put too much garlic in my mashed potatoes. I didn’t think there was such a thing as too much garlic. Will wonders never cease?
Wise Madness 