Hi, there, Dear Reader.

It is late morning here in my corner of west-central Florida on Monday, October 18, 2021. It is a nice fall day; the current temperature is 74˚F (23˚C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 38% and the wind blowing from the east-northeast at 11 MPH (18 KM/H), the feels-like temperature is 72˚F (22˚C). Today’s forecast calls for partly sunny skies and a high of 84˚F (29˚C). Tonight, skies will be partly cloudy and the low will be 64˚F (18˚C). The Air Quality Index (AQI) is 32 or Good.

Well, yesterday was my late mother’s 93^rd birthday, the sixth recurrence of the occasion since her death on July 19, 2015. For me, it was a challenging day, to say the least. I experienced a wide array of emotions, including:

• Sadness, mostly because I miss her, but also because her last years were awfully hard on her
• Guilt, mostly because in the six years since her death, I only visited my parents’ resting place once
• Anger, mostly over the rift with my half-sister Victoria. I am in “New Hometown” and not in Miami mainly because of that unhappy situation
• Relief, mostly because  Mom did not live to see a Trump Presidency or the global COVID-19 pandemic. Plus, she’s no longer in pain or suffering from depression
• Gratitude, mostly because my mother was, despite her human foibles and flaws, a decent and loving person, and because she was a great parent

Other than yesterday’s blog post, I didn’t do anything of great import. For that matter, I didn’t do much of anything. I had a difficult time concentrating – yesterday’s post about the impromptu Diane Lane double feature I watched Saturday was the product of several attempts to come up with a blog post that was not about Mom, grief, or family dysfunctions. I actually started one of those, got to the halfway mark, read what I had so far, then disgustedly deleted the whole shebang.

I figured that it might be best if I wrote about the Divine Miss Lane – whose mother, I discovered this morning, was Playboy’s Miss October 1957[1] – instead.  So, that’s what I did, and my Sunday ended up being a bit less gloomy.

The ‘Maybe Later’ Pile

I still have not gotten around to watching any more episodes of the recent version of The Stand. I seem to be doing this a lot with newly purchased books or movies. I will order something affordable on Amazon or the Disney Movie Club – such as The Odyssey of Star Wars: An Epic Poem or The Incredibles 2 (the latter one acquired with Disney Rewards Points) – and then, after starting them, I will put them aside for later reading or viewing.

The things I put on my Maybe Later pile can be pretty darn good; Canadian poet (and Star Wars fan) Jack Mitchell did an excellent job at taking the Star Wars saga’s original trilogy and presenting it as a Homeric epic. But…I don’t know. The constraints placed upon me by my disability, a fixed income, and a living arrangement that is only convenient because I can afford it, combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, have sapped my enthusiasm for reading or watching new things. It’s puzzling because when I buy something, it’s because I’m already predisposed to like it. (The horrible flick Needful Things is a rare case of me blind buying something in hopes that it will be good, then finding out it’s patently awful.)

In any event, I will read The Odyssey of Star Wars and watch both The Stand and The Incredibles 2 soon. I bought them for that purpose and not so they would gather dust on a bookshelf or entertainment center racks.

I, of course, don’t have much else to report, so I’ll close for now. Until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.

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[1] Colleen Leigh Violet Farrington was in her early 20s when she posed nude for photographer Peter Basch. Some of her Playboy photos can be found via Google Images.