What I'm Wondering

1. Why can't or won't men wear hats like this one pictured here on long-gone Lorenzo de Medici? Doubtless that flappy business would be maddening on a windy day. As I recall, I liked what I read of him in Irving Stone's wonderful book The Agony & the Ecstasy. One of my favorite writers, no foolin.'

2. How'd I get to be such a cranky old weirdo?

3. Can a person NOT be a cranky, anti-social, tech-phobe weirdwad by willpower alone?

4. Why does Bashar al-Assad of Syria have to be such a murderous, delusional piece of work?

5. Why did blogging seem such a good idea when hardly anybody reads blogs?

6. Or do lots of people read blogs and I just don't even know it?

7. Why can't everybody just MAKE there not be such a long, abysmal, divisive, pissy, way-too-damn talkative, time-and-money-consuming way of electing a President in this country?

8. I mean, I'd almost rather have a king and/or a queen than listen to all this nonsense, wouldn't you, dear whatever goober's reading this? But then, originally a 'blog' was short for web log which is like a journal and people aren't expected to be reading other people's journals, right?

9. Would anybody read it if I started posting/serializing my novel here, starting tomorrow? We'll find out, I guess. Just for you to know, I called it Just For You to Know, and if this world were not so rotten, millions of people would have read it by now. Honestly, it's so good and tragic and funny I can't believe that I wrote it, but then I'm not the person I was then. Like the Missouri River is not the river it was yesterday or will be tomorrow, right? I suppose.

10. Aren't you glad that Kim Jong-il is dead, as long as he was totally unwilling to do anything for the people of North Korea except to allow them to go hungry and wave at him? But then is usefulness and compassion the only criteria for someone being allowed to live? I think not.

11. How are a Shih Tsu and a Great Dane like me and Ryan Seacrest? They're both dogs and we're both people. Go figure.

12. Why have I confined myself on this blog to writing about dead people and their birthdays? Well, because it's a way of remembering these people, calling a precious few live people to their attention, because someday we'll be dead and now that we're alive, we won't want to be forgotten, but if there's anything to the hereafter worthwhile, we probably won't care if anyone remembers us because we'll be A. otherwise busy or B. oblivious to the whole affair. Not like I'll get to choose, but if I did, I generally choose the latter, not wishing to get in the sort of eternal trouble I used to hear about in Sunday School/not wanting to let myself hope for paradisiacal enlightenment & happy celestial reunions.

13. In any case, besides Betsy Ross, Lorenzo de Medici, and J.Edgar Hoover, the writer E. M. Forster, (Edward Morgan Forster, whose books I intend to read this year [at least one of them because get a load of what he wrote once upon a time: "If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words."] share today as a birthday.

14. What was Michelle Bachman thinking?

15. And I'm wondering if the project/proposal I've been working on the past few days will pass muster at the Nat'l Geographic. I'm sending it off tomorrow or the next day and my fingers, they are crossed. Then I'll get back to the coloring book I've been illustrating for the village of Arrow Rock, MO. A nifty little place, if you've a mind for history. George Caleb Bingham, the painter, used to live there. Did you know that under his wig he was as bald as an egg? Well, he was, poor fella.