Musings & Thoughts for Sunday, August 6, 2023, or: Weekend Update, Part the Second

Late Morning, Sunday, August 6, 2023, Lithia, Florida

“Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.” ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Another Sunday morning, another unbearably hot summer day in the Tampa Bay area.

As I begin writing this, my 1,213^th post in this blog, I’m listening to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and counting myself as being lucky to be in a house with air conditioning in the subtropical hell that is Florida in August. Currently, the temperature (outside) is 90°F/32°C under sunny skies. Now, if it felt like it was 90°F/32°C, I’d venture outside just to get some fresh air and sunshine. Alas, the harsh sunlight, lack of cloud cover, 67% humidity, and a weak sea breeze blowing from the west-southwest at 3 MPH/5 KMH make it feel like it’s 102°F/39°C. We weren’t under a heat advisory yesterday, but we are today: the forecast calls for a high of 93°F/34°C, mostly sunny skies, and a 26% chance of rain or thunderstorms.

Ugh. I’m glad I live in an air-conditioned house, and while I regret not being able to go out for walks (the only time I’ll venture beyond the front door is to take some trash out to the garbage can if it’s outside), I just can’t stand the heat as well as I used to when I was younger.

Weekend Update, Part the Second

My Saturday was, like the Saturday before that, and the Saturday before that, uneventful. It wasn’t boring per se – I always find ways to keep myself entertained here – but it was just one more day spent in the same place, with no place to go or even friends to hang out with. It wasn’t a terrible day; it wasn’t a great day – it was just another meh day in one of the hottest summers on record.

Predictably, I spent much of my Saturday online. I played a football-related game on Facebook; exchanged posts with other members on X (formerly known as Twitter), fretted about the most recent batch of uploaded corrections to Kindle Direct Publishing to fix – once again – issues with Reunion: A Story, and read other writers’ blogs over on WordPress.

I thought about watching a movie, and even put one in my room’s Blu-ray player (A Walk in the Sun, a 1945 war film directed by Lewis Milestone), but I ended up watching a documentary about the Korean War out on the family room TV set instead.

I also read a bit from David Halberstam’s last book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (2007), a non-fiction book that examines “The Forgotten War” from various vantage points, including the experiences of the soldiers who fought in Korea, the dark synergy of American domestic politics and U.S. foreign policy, and the Cold War miscalculations made by leaders in the U.S., the Soviet Union, China, and North and South Korea that made the war possible.

It’s a thick book, and it isn’t a typical military history book that focuses primarily on the Korean War’s purely military aspects, so I am not quite ready to review Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter. I have, though, come away with the conviction that mixing America’s chaotic and often toxic domestic politics with national security and foreign policy is an extremely bad idea. In 1950, just as there are now, there were too many American conservatives – mostly rural, mostly white, and mostly Southern and Midwestern – who wanted the government to not focus so much on other countries and just worry about “America first” or “America only” while at the same time obsessing over the threat of Communism here and abroad. Isolationism and paranoia are never a good mix, and Halberstam’s insightful and informative book explains how what happened in the late 1940s and early ‘50s set the stage for the chaotic political divide we find ourselves in today.

I didn’t play any of my Steam games yesterday; I did think about fighting a Skirmish on Regiments (by far my favorite game of the ones I bought between last year and early 2023), but as I was trying to decide which scenario to play, I changed my mind. Maybe today…I don’t know. Depression sure does a number on my ability to enjoy life.

On Writing & Storytelling

As for Reunion: Coda?

I didn’t – thankfully – work on it at all yesterday. I never felt a sudden urge to “just write one paragraph to get things ready for Monday,” nor did I spend one minute reading the first scene in Chapter 11 to make edits or revisions.

I hope that remains true today. I might regret it, sure. But I don’t feel like working on the weekend…at least, not this weekend. Writing this post on Sunday is “work” enough, I think.