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Well, I didn’t get anything posted since last month’s journal entries, but that’s okay. If I don’t do much more than these monthly journal roundups, it’s better than nothing.
With that, here’s my version of March Madness …
March 7, 2024. Every delight, every fancy, every dance with the infinite, is marred by the appearance of a swayback unicorn: a starving dream on the horizon of our wish fulfillment.
Art by Johfra Bosschart.
March 12, 2024. What are our memories worth if not eternal, and what is eternity’s value if not ours to enjoy?
March 26, 2024. Point 1: We are too obsessed with material objects as a society.
Point 2: Books don’t count.
March 28, 2024. Sentencing is one of many bizarre aspects of the law. Today Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for stealing $8 billion through a cryptocurrency scheme. The maximum sentence would have been 110 years.
I assume he’s eligible for parole at some point, but it’s still interesting to think that he’ll likely stay behind bars for as long as some violent criminals. I’m not saying he shouldn’t pay a heavy price. I’m just saying it’s interesting. We seem to be willing to let scammers bankrupt little old ladies day in and day out, but once in a while we find someone to pin a symbolic punishment on (not symbolic at all to Bankman-Fried or his victims, of course).
I guess we can’t catch them all.
March 29, 2024. Life on Earth is the greatest science fiction story ever realized, from the perspective of one who hails from a distant solar system. Imagine stumbling upon the mad proliferation of life that we Earth-dwellers boast, even if your home world is similarly plentiful. It would be stunning enough to discover a single plant that was wholly alien to your world, but imagine coming across a planet with smultitudes of novel plant and animal life forms.
March 30, 2024. Long ago I accepted the reality that one day I will have read my last book, but of course the same is true for music. One day, I will have listened to Bach for the last time, enjoyed my last visit with a favorite Van Halen song, heard my last high note from Glenn Hughes. It’s an unbearable thought because music is so repeatable, and yet no two people hear it exactly the same way. You might read a favorite book half a dozen times, but a favorite song can be listened to hundreds of times over. It becomes part of your makeup.
Yet someday, all the music in the world will cease to exist for me, for all of us. Our way of hearing it will be gone, along with our way of loving and succeeding, wondering and believing. No wonder we long for infinity. The finite is inscrutable.
March 30, 2024. I recently had my first theater-going experience since the movie Eighth Grade. That’s a six-year gap, for those keeping score. When I was young, I never would have believed that such a thing would be possible. I was always going to movies back then.
The movie I saw last weekend was Late Night with the Devil. It was good. The script was simple but tight, which is rare these days, and it’s always refreshing to see a small picture made on a modest budget. Oddly enough, these qualities were part of the allure of Eighth Grade as well, though that film was much better overall.