i stayed at home today. It was Sunday. i think. Didn’t feel like Sunday.

i’ve been in my version of sequester for a fortnight. No symptoms. Just thought what if everyone in the world had stayed in a safe version of sequester for these two weeks just what the statistics would look like. There are enough illogical resisters out there that this thing could go on for years.

How much does the media impact this? They are trying to inform us, but some of their reporting creates panic. How do we fix that? Haven’t fixed it history, and we keep stumbling over our mistakes, get up, and keep moving on as if we never stumbled. Sad.

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My brother Joe is an incredible person. Incredible. His depth and expanse of knowledge is amazing. And he is deep. Deep. And good. Did i mention good?

In a moment of my disillusionment a while ago, Joe suggested i read  an author that might help me get my mind right (Still one of the best lines from “Cool Hand Luke”). Rainer Maria Rilke. I did. Reread him in during this downtime. Caught a passage that sort of screamed at me deep inside:

Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

And i thought: there is way too much defensiveness and scorn out there. Yet, we seem to thirst for it, enable it, applaud it. We hide it in nationalism, socialism, religion, causes, but it’s there, front and center at every roll call falsely responding “here” as if it belonged. Why?

Joe is so valuable to me and should be to so many people. He has two traits combined that are damn near impossible to find: wisdom and caring. He does not suffer stupid, but he always tries to help. He is religious in the right way.

Thanks, Joe.

As we finished dinner tonight and could not find anything we cared to watch, certainly not the infinite updates ad nauseum about our state of fear and tired of reruns, we caught a streaming of the San Diego Symphony. Ahh…

Don’t know when we spent an evening listening to Tchaikovsky. Nice.

And we, here on our hill in the Southwest corner, near four miles as the crow flies from the Pacific, find all is calm — as the word “pacific” was intended to mean — and being close to only a few can bring understanding and inner peace.

i wish that and good health for all of you.

And quite frankly, i’ve been alone more or less for more than a year several times, mostly at sea, and it ain’t all that bad.