Sometimes Life Is Bearable: Lilacs

‘Tis the time of lilacs again, the heavenly treat that comes unbidden and without fail mid-spring, one of my favorite things in life. Their fragrance fills the house and takes me back to my childhood days spent on our działka, a little piece of land on the outskirts of our city, and to my father who was my best companion during those days. The lilac bushes by my house now are from his garden here, in America.

The memories are bittersweet, as always, and now especially as in a few days we’ll commemorate the 5th anniversary of his death. The fragrance, though, is infused with the force and love for life somehow, maybe on its own or maybe because of the associated memories — likely both — making it worth living.

In a couple of weeks there will be another glorious and short-lived gift of spring: lilies of the valley. Life is bearable sometimes.

Springtime for Twitler: Truth a la Trump

The human mind is not able to disprove every single falsity which has been suggested to it.

Andrzej Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology.

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On the 90th day of Trumpism, Our Leader gave to us: lotsa flip-n-floppin’,  60 bombs exploding, one Southern White House, much kleptofascism, a missing armada, botched legislations, conflicts of interest, Russian collusion, a bunch of Nazis gloating, dozens lost attorneys, journalists a-leaping, Steely Smile Spicer, and a sense of unreality.

To name just a few of his many accomplishments.

The sense of unreality, compounded by chaos and associated anxiety, is slowly but surely becoming our default state of existence as it always is when pathocracy — a rule by psychopaths and narcissists — spreads in any more or less normal so far society. Norms and laws are being set aside and/or redefined, while (the healthy part of) the public watches in horror and disbelief, and organizes protests and anti-pathocratic movements trying to stop the progress of this malignant social disease.

Full text.

Wargasm, or How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria

Their cheeks reddened with excitement and their eyes glistened as they gushed over the spectacularness of the event.  Some on that spring evening were moved to wax poetic over the images unfolding before our eyes; while others proclaimed, without a hint of irony or self-reflection, that the illegal and unauthorized act of aggression against another country signified a much needed positive development, both in the President’s popularity and stature, and America’s standing in the world. Also, it made us safer, somehow.

As the bombs hit (or missed, as the case often is) the obscure targets in the faraway land, the media experienced a collective wargasm of the kind that should warrant at least a trigger warning.

Full text.