Post-Christmas Post

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Christmas 2014 came and went without much community notice up here in Nonthaburi, although Christmas carols could be heard in the major malls down in the city. (And carols on my streaming internet radio stations are inescapable.) All of December has had a festive atmosphere on our street since HM the King’s birthday is on 5 December, and yellow light displays are on all the trees. (Yellow is the color associated with the King.) The lights are kept on until after New Year’s Day, and they are really something to see. Stumbling home after a pub crawl, it’s like traveling through a winter wonderland – without the snow and cold.

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The highlight of my Christmas was telephoning my sister and her gathered family in the old homestead in Pennsylvania. It was their Christmas Eve, and we talked until my voice gave out. (I’m not used to talking that much!)

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I never did get to see the Geminid meteor showers as I had hoped when writing my last post here. By the time it got dark enough, haze had made seeing any stars impossible. Now I know why there are no astronomy clubs in the greater Bangkok area.

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I’m feeling better, although I’m still weak from the forced inactivity from the thrombosis. The doctor told me to not do any treadmill work for a while even if I felt up to doing it. I see him again after the New Year. But I have been walking the neighborhood loop down by the river and around by the hospital – a neat little 4 and one-half klick distance. I see my Thai friend who makes key copies near the hospital and stop to talk with him briefly. He speaks a bit of English because he had spent some time in the USA a long time ago. Nice guy. On my walks I see a few other Thai folks I know, most of whom do not speak English but who know me by sight. The friendliness makes it truly my own neighborhood.

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Some mornings during this our Cool Season are fresh like a summer morning on the farm. But the sun is still hot. The two previous days were very humid, with rain falling one evening. Yesterday was more of the typical hot-humid hell day we would find most other times of the year. I wish I could get out to walk earlier in the morning when it’s the most comfortable, but my evening FMS meds make me too groggy to do much of anything before 11:00 AM.

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Sick Skinny Silly Willy sleeps next to me now. Why do animals near death seek me out? He likes to go out and lie in the sun at midday.

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Our new kitten, “Tiny” (or, “Jiuu,” in Thai) is a clown. She is about seven months old and rips a destructive path through her world as only a young cat can do. She terrorizes poor old Pinkie, who is shy. But Silly Willy just stares her down. Jiuu will charge straight at Willy in full fighting mode, only to veer off at the last moment. It’s as if she is reading Willy’s mind, “Come on, you little bitch; I’m too sick to chase you, but if you come close enough you’ll be sorry; come on, make my day.” Jiuu just watches him with mystification from the sidelines as Willy turns his back on her with contempt. Little amateur cat up against the (ailing) big-league feline.

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I just finished reading the lengthy Ayn Rand: the Russian radical (1995; 2013) by Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Wow! Chris has been an internet acquaintance for several years from some neo-Objectivist discussion e-lists. He is quite a gentleman and one hell of a great scholar. I would like to review this book properly someday on Zenwind, but here I will just mention that he looked at Rand through the context of the culture she grew up in, in Russia’s “Silver Age” of literature and philosophy. He focuses on her (very Russian, and also very Aristotelian) “dialectical” methods of explaining history and philosophy – and I must say that he brings up integrative trends in her thinking that I had noticed from the very first and which he analyzes in the wider context of Western philosophy. It is a unique and masterful work of scholarship – and it’s the second volume of a trilogy he has completed on philosophy. (The temptation is gnawing at me – shall I examine the other two volumes?)

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Enough.

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-Zenwind.

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