At Sixes and Sevens

For some reason, I am not relaxed this week, most likely because we are heading off to Kansas City this week. I am looking forward to it, for sure, but I am beginning to think that anything that interferes with our routine, with living here at the lake, unsettles me.  It's now almost 10:00 in the morning and Evie's making cookies for our trip to KC.  I have settled on a date for my ablation, Thursday the 20th of January, which allows me to enjoy the holidays and yet get it done.  Not much to prepare for other than taking coumadin for the prior three weeks.

Last night Evie has her Ladies of the Evening gathering, at one of the ladies house in Chautauqua Shores.  She seemed to enjoy it, though playing Xmas trivia was not exactly her cup of tea.  Mostly, they sit around and talk and share stories, many it seems about the wives dissatisfaction with their retired husbands, who tend to sit around and do nothing but watch TV.  It seems like they are not shy about sharing their opinions and attitudes, even in front of others.  Next time they are going to take a personality test, something they have done previously and liked.  I guess they all thought it was very accurate and the person who shared it with them is a Pastor, Wendy Heinz, and she tends to use it quite often and feels it''s really helpful and useful.  It sounds like the dynamics are interesting as well, as Jane is their with Stan's new wife, Anne, and her mother, a very outspoken women.  I guess Anne and her mother are also very frank with each other.

Instead of sitting home last night, with Evie gone, I went to the James Prendergast Library in Jamestown to a lecture by a distinguished professor from Fredonia SUNY on Nietzsche's "God is Dead" passage from his writings.  There were about 50 people there, mostly my age or there abouts, and it was quite good  Instead of lecturing, he elicited our responses to the text, using our thoughts and ideas as a well to unpack the text.  He was very accessible, congenial, listened well, and yet helped explain what Nietzsche meant, where his thinking takes us.  Most of the audience was interested and asked good questions.  I did force myself to respond two or three times, but then felt like I was showing off, so I basically sat back and listened, wondering if people like to her themselves talk or were really trying to understand at the talk.  I agreed with most of what the lecturer had to say, and especially Nietzsche's belief that we ought live in this world of uncertainy, avoiding the trap of routine, complacency, the easy road as it were, of avoiding action/doing and its consequences, often pain.  He believes to be alive we must act, do, search, constantly seek truth, understanding, and never sit still.  It's an ideal, no doubt, one even Nietzsche was unable to accomplish.  Yet the ubermensch is someone we should all try to copy, as he strives toward truth, creation, and understanding.  Clearly, he sees religion as a palliative, something that offers answers to questions that really don't have answers, and it stands in the way of achieving his goal of constant change, of growth, as if once you understand something or an idea, it can stand in the way of further understanding unless you jettison it.  Humankind can never live without religion because for most it solves life's major questions: what to believe, how to act, and what happens when we die...an its real virtue is that if its God's word, there's no argument with it..there's certainty.

It's late afternoon, nasty out, gray rainy, the lake rough, the wind howling and we love it.  It's a great afternoon to sit, reading my 2nd Jack Reacher book, Echo Spring, much better than the first.  We did get an hour walk in this morning, as we drove into Mayville to the Webb Trail, an abandoned railroad track that runs East West and connects with the Overland trail.  It winds between various properties, none looking very prosperous, a half hour out, a half hour back.  Then, we stopped at the Lighthouse, got a chicken for dinner, and have taken it easy the rest of the afternoon, as its too wet to do much outside and we are a bit tired of organizing inside, other than packing for our trip on Thursday  Time for some Turkish tea and back to figuring out how Jack will get out of the latest dilemma.