End of another year

It was so fun when I was a little kid and New Year's seemed like this great, big, important thing that required planning and activity. There'd be all these rituals that had to be carried out correctly. The coming new year seemed to have a physical presence that would need to be accommodated, an ocean liner nearing a small harbor. For decades now it's just brought on a shrug and the only plans have to do with what stores and offices will close early New Year's Eve and closed New Year's Day.

Me, alone, in 1960.

2018 has seen the amputation of my right leg, the shattering of my right shoulder, a likely terminal diagnosis related to the cancer that took the leg and prostate cancer bad enough that I'll be getting radiation treatment for it beginning on the third day of 2019.
When you tell young people about the bad things that happened to you in a given year, they say cheery things about the new year being a better one. That makes sense when you're under forty. At that age, your sadness comes from things that will heal—a pet's death, the end of a relationship, the loss of a job. When you get older that rule breaks. You're aging. Your immune system permits access to disease and nothing will make your muscles as firm and your skin as taut as before. The next year is probably going to be worse than the one you just survived, and that's true of the year after that and all the years that follow until none follow. 
I'll spend the night alone, as usual. I am always alone and have been for so long now that I prefer it that way. 

A bright side of being a moron like me

If you're like me and you have just a few hundred brain cells firing, life can be difficult. You can't figure out your health insurance policy, you have to pay others to do your taxes, you fall asleep when reading anything that smart people read. Cutting your fingernails is a task that takes preparation.
The good thing about being dumb is that it doesn't take much to please or amuse you. Squirrels running up trees, people walking outside your window, lit candles, warm bread.
I saw this picture of bats on a newspaper's website, saved it, then rotated it so it looks like the bats are standing around rather than hanging around. If you're one of the many who dislikes and fears bats, it's not the picture for you, but if you like the idea of a furry animal that can fly as much as I do and you're as dumb as I am, this picture might make you smile.

Eczema face

Of zero interest to no one, more a personal note to myself: My eczema has gotten even worse. Most of my face is red and swollen and it itches and burns. I've thought that the best way to describe how I look and feel is that I'm one of those guys you see with bee beards and the bees got angry at something—my political views, perhaps?—and stung. 
This is an exaggeration and my discomfort is minor compared to that of many and maybe even my own in the near future.

To my friend, James

Does anyone beside an original poster read comments? On mass media sites, there are often so many comments that reading all of them would take days, and some individual ones are as long as the article they're responding to. On little-read blogs like this one, comments are usually read only by the original poster and if the poster responds to them at all the response would only be seen by whoever commented. 
In this case, however, I want to respond to a comment because I think the issues it raises go beyond those of a dialogue between two people; they're issues we're all hearing about daily.

Donald J. Trump.

Earlier this month I wrote about Brexit and what it meant to me. In that post, I said, "when Brexit passed, I thought, 'Uh-oh. If that happens there, there's a good chance that this clown Donald Trump could get elected here.' (Trump people who feel insulted by that characterization: Think back to 2015 and you'll recall that you felt the same way. How easily we forget such things and end up supporting an admitted sex offender.)"
I was referring to the 2005 Hollywood Access recording of Trump talking to other men while on a bus taking him to do a cameo appearance on a soap opera. The Washington Post published the recording in 2016. 
A man named James, one of the few who reads this blog, took offense to my characterization: 

To call him "an admitted sex offender" is so ludicrous that it barely rates a response. He bragged about being able to do something (in what he thought was a private conversation with a guy he clearly was trying to impress) that there is absolutely zero evidence that he has ever done. A sad, stupid, sexist remark, nothing more. Which is why it didn't cost him the presidency.
Anytime you start to work yourself up into a righteous huff about how terrible a person DJT is, you should call Bill Clinton to mind. In addition to a lot of other factors, WJC and his lovely wife did more to enable Trump to be elected than anything else. After he used and discarded his poor intern and lied about it to Congress and the American people without paying any meaningful price, where exactly did you think American politics would go ?
You said plenty of other ridiculous things, but I'll let those pass. 

I have never met James in person, but I feel that I know him as well as you can know someone online and from what I know of James, he is an intelligent, good and decent man with strong faith in his god and I value his opinions. But there's a blindness that has inflicted us all, on the left and the right. That blindness and it's been caused by anger, anger that had been brewing for some time. Many would say it was due to erupt. I agree, but I'd say the speed and severity of its eruption has been exacerbated by Donald Trump and that the way it's come out is damaging America. 
The level of unfairness in American society is not much higher than it was fifteen years ago. Indeed, three people near George W. Bush at Trump's inaugural address independently verified that his response to it was, “That was some weird shit."
I think James is guilty of the blindness I'm talking about. He, like many Trump supporters, seem to have read only a part of the Hollywood Access recording, the "grab them by the pussy" part, and this they dismiss as what Trump called "locker room talk." 
Oh please. When have you heard men in their late fifties talk that way to impress people far lower on the social totem pole than they are? That's right, never. In any case, those defenders are ignoring this part of the recording:

Donald J. Trump: You know and ... 
Unknown: She used to be great. She’s still very beautiful. 
Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it. Unknown: Whoa. 
Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married. 
Unknown: That’s huge news. 
Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture. I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.

Trump's supporters have praised him for being someone who would disrupt the usual order of things. He has and is doing so. That's not a good thing. Part of what's kept America's government stable over the centuries is its slowness to change. Americans have always favored stability and liked change to occur over time, after long periods of discussion and compromise. 
James is guilty a couple of logical fallacies. One is that it matters that Trump said what he did during a private conversation. It doesn't. At all.
Another that James and others are guilty of, in a tiresome way, is something popularly called "whataboutism." The phrase has been used since the 1970s and Trump's you'll hear it used on Fox News much the way James uses it here, in reference to Bill Clinton's behavior while in office. (They have to go back twenty years because Obama's presidency was free of any scandals.) 
Whataboutism is an attempt to discredit an opponent by calling them hypocrites. 
Here's a sample of its pattern:

1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B asserts that A's actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim X.
3. Therefore, X is false.

Whataboutism makes little sense here because James has no idea how I feel about either Bill or Hilary Clinton and doesn't know that I was in fact a registered Republican within the last decade. Partisanship has no bearing on this. Also, James doesn't mentioned that Bill Clinton did indeed pay a price for his actions: He was impeached and his legacy was severely diminished.
I shouldn't have gotten political. I'm not smart enough to opine on a lot of this. We're all having a hard time not raising political things these days, though. I look at profiles on dating sites and see that many more women use Trump as a litmus test. Some say if you don't like him, don't bother messaging them. Others say the same if you do like him.
Advice to people on the right and the left: Read reporting by the Associated Press. It's journalism that focuses on being scrupulously fact-based. You will never hear of AP reporters getting awards for being great literary journalists, but they do get awards for good reporting. It's dull, just-the-facts writing, designed to be cut-from-the-bottom, inverted pyramid reporting so the first paragraphs are so heavily loaded they can be a chore to read. But you will never hear Trump call the Associated Press "fake news," his preferred phrase for reporting that riles him.

 

What's next

Arnold Schwarzenegger with a woman.

I'd bet that men are less likely than women to believe that hormones influence their feelings and moods. Part of being human is thinking you have control over your decision making process and that you behave rationally. 
When men age, their testosterone levels drop. Many fight this and get supplements. Others are OK with it. Sophocles is reported to have said, when asked how he felt about the effect of age on his libido, "I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master." That would have been around 410 BCE. 
The reason I'm thinking about this is that starting next week I'll be taking pills that will reduce my testosterone level. I'll continue taking them for six months. This is in combination with five weeks of radiation to my prostate gland and surrounding area to try to kill the cancer there. (Honestly, what I'm looking forward to the least about this is the twenty-six trips to the hospital where this is being done. It's under thirty miles but the drive is a winding, indirect one and will take about an hour on a week day.

Sophocles on June 17, 437 BCE.

Silly to complain about this, as so many have much worse commutes, but that's me.)
Studies have found a link between high testosterone levels and prostate cancer. So what the hell, I might as well try it. 
It'll be interesting to see whether the therapy will change my mood. Chemical castration was used in the 1980s on repeat sex offenders, so I guess some feel that it does, but I never saw a study showing that. 
I'll post things about it here in the future. 

What Brexit means to me

Not a lot, really. With my probably shortened lifespan (two years? three?), location (USA, baby!), occupation (none; savings and Social Security), and need to vacation (last vacation: the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the off season, by car, ten days, eighteen years ago), I can't see how Brexit would have any impact on my way of life.

What it did mean to me comes from when it happened: June, 2016. Brexit was pushed through with lies and half truths by would-be populists. In the weeks after it passed and what it meant became clear, many U.K. citizens who had voted for it wanted to do it over and take back their votes. As I write this, the Prime Minister has barely passed a no-confidence vote, taken because she's done a poor job of selling something that will damage her country.
I'd always thought of the English as being more skeptical to political chicanery than we are. But when Brexit passed I thought, "Uh-oh. If that happens there, there's a good chance that this clown Donald Trump could get elected here."
(Trump people who feel insulted by that characterization: Think back to 2015 and you'll recall that you felt the same way. How easily we forget such things and end up supporting an admitted sex offender.)

Cold Days

The past few winters have been freakishly cold in the Mid-Atlantic area I live in. Because of that, the normal temperatures we've been having lately have felt harsh. 

The cold, dry air has aggravated my eczema which, me being me, is primarily on my face. 
The skin on my face is an exercise in diversity. The skin around my eyes, the corners of my mouth and my laugh lines is crimson and dry; it looks like those pictures you used to see in Time Magazine of riverbeds in places that have had a five-year drought. Meanwhile, the skin on my scalp, forehead and nose is pumping out oil much the way it has since I was a teenager, over four decades ago. My skin, along with the missing right leg, has me feeling more hideous than usual. Fortunately, the cold weather makes me want to stay indoors anyway.

Hanukkah

I think the way Jewish holidays like Hanukkah go by the

Jewish calendar instead of the Gregorian one shows balls in a cool way. No caving to Christians even if they're the majority. (It's hard to get a good estimate of the number of Christians in the world, but the Pew Research Center puts it at 2.3 billion in 2015. The Jewish People Policy Institute put the number of Jews at 14.2 million, which nears the pre-Holocaust number of 16.6 million.) Also, the link to the lunar calendar has a nice Asian feel. The only thing I wouldn't like about it is that you're not in the same place on your path around the sun that you are when celebrating things like New Year's, and that to me would interfere with memories of the holidays of the past. But I guess it's the times you had with the people you're remembering, not the dates they occurred on, that matter.

Anyway, although I never think it's right to say "Happy Hanukkah!" to people because that's not the spirit of it and people probably started saying it just because of the alliteration, I hope you're getting much out of celebrating whatever rituals that come with it that have meaning to you, if it applies.

P.S. My recent quarterly scans were good and I'm not dying right now. The best word people like me, who already have cancer in them, are ever going to see is "stable." You would never think that the word stable would make your heart soar, but for me, it does now.