Tactical Friday

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

-Jimmy Carter

I remember the night he gave that speech, in 1979. I was fifteen. The response to that evening as much as anything, except maybe the hostage crisis the Republicans intentionally strung out as an election talking point, led to poor Jimmy being a one-termer. Americans have never been able to handle the truth about ourselves, and the Rs, then as now, offered a fantasy alternative.

The above showed up when I searched for some pithy quote about malaise, which fills the air this morning. I have work to do, but don't much feel like doing it. I'm exhausted from the last few days, all the flying and mediating into the night, all the bad news in my thread each morning. I'm just worn out with all of it, with this whole season of life it seems.

As the sun rose this morning, the light revealed ice in our gutters for the first time this fall.

The morning began right at the freezing point, rising now to 37 degrees out there. Slane was waiting at the door when I descended the stairs at 5:45 to look for him. He ate his breakfast, then crawled into our bed and fell dead asleep. It remains unmade because I don't have the heart to move him. Peg'll have to understand.

As she left, P ordered that I eat more eggs--apparently we both had the same bright idea of buying eggs a few days ago, and now find ourselves with a glut. I tried frying a couple while I cooked some scrapple in the air fryer, but the scrapple disintegrated and as I was trying to salvage the bits I neglected to turn off the eggs before they turned to rubber. I ate the whole mess anyway. Because of course I did.

This morning's social media thread brought photos from the graduation of the last F-15 b-course out at Klamath Falls, Oregon. The squadron's slated to receive F-35s next year if the government ever reopens, so these guys mark the end of the line for one of the last tendrils of my old life. I graduated from the b-course in September of 1988, and taught dozens of b-coursers at the RTU from 1991-94. All several lifetimes ago.

The first of several books I ordered by Paul Fussell arrived yesterday--Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Written in 1983 it's a little dated now, but most of what he has to say about the markers of the nine strata he describes in the American class system seems on point.

I'm most looking forward to the arrival of The Great War and Modern Memory, perhaps the greatest piece of literary criticism ever written. Or at least I enjoyed it, perhaps because I encountered it not long after I returned from my war and Fussell--himself a combat-wounded infantry officer who went on to get his PhD at Harvard--lays the wood to our romanticizing of war as he unpacks the dramatic changes in English literature, and in particular poetry, as World War I stripped away European illusions about the glory of war. I came home disillusioned, and felt like I'd found a highly literate fellow traveler in Fussell.

I've stalled enough--time to do my bit to pay for this party. P's been standing in an operating room for well over an hour now. My malaise is no excuse for failing to drag my daily dead deer into the family teepee. This is, after all, the last workday of the week, or "tactical Friday". Tomorrow around this time we'll be taking off from KELM (here I go again), flying a two-hopper if winds permit that will end at McKinney National Airport, Texas for Dad's celebration of life. We'll gather on what would have been Dad's 86th birthday to honor him by spending time as a family doing what he did in his free time--sitting in his old kitchen drinking beer while the TV blares. I think I'm expected to speak, an obligation I've dreaded as I watched him fade and then finally expire.

Onward.