THE INTRIGUING SIDE OF PURGATORY

I'm in my own private realms of hell, of course, but I often lie and say I'm in purgatory. It sounds less innocuous.

I suppose it's human nature to be so immersed in your own agonizing problems that you don't bother to see the rejuvenating aspects of life that surround you.
They might be subtle or elusive, but they're there.

Today was so lovely and enticingly inviting that I put on my hiking boots, grabbed my walking stick and El Cheapo ancient digital camera, and ventured outside.

My feet hurt, my back is so ravaged that I can hardly hobble, but the intrigue of Mother Nature on a sunny, balmy autumn day is often irresistible.

Fortunately the forest is only a few yards from the house.
Despite the fact that glorious October is gone, some beautiful foliage is still colorfully clinging to the trees - - ignoring the annoying prospect of impending winter.

It's sunny but there's a balmy haze that seems to infiltrate the photos (...or is it just my myopic eyes?)

Some trees are bare, but not too many (yet)

A tree in the front yard (above) illuminated by the morning sunshine.

My wild, overwhelming back "yard".

......and Bosco, intrigued by some blowing leaves (the camera flash went off when I took this, and the picture looks washed out).

Before I depart -
I want to thank the few courageous people who left such thoughtful comments on my previous post.

           Cheers, Jon

DEAD DAYS

November is ushered in with dead days.
All Saints' Day. All Souls' Day.
Dia de Muertos. Day of the Dead.

The dead days reflect the essence of my soul: empty, withered, drained, lifeless. I feel I'm among the living dead.

Is this too depressing for you?
Too bad. It's my reality check.
(sensitive souls, hold your ears)

Life can be an unrelenting bitch. It can ruthlessly drain you of every positive thing you once had - and as you're reeling in disbelief, it will unceremoniously kick you in the ass and make sure you're down permanently for the count.

Paltry prayers will never be a potent enough ploy for you to get up again. Prayers fade and dissolve in shrouds of cold vapidity before they get to Heaven. Only the blessing of your tepid hopefulness will save them.

Don't ponder that for too long - - you'll hurt yourself. I'm merely thinking out loud and saying things that you already know but are afraid to acknowledge.

I have begun November in the putrid realms of impenetrable darkness. No need to panic. 
The darkness will pass. Eventually.

These dark realms are a part of my complex, enigmatic nature.
I was never an optimist, never a saint, never a foolish Pollyanna. The unrelenting tribulations of life have ravaged me so many times that it has extinguished the candles of Faith.

The realms of Hell are what we experience when we are living.

I ventured outside and walked in the forest yesterday. A brief welcomed respite.
My original intention was to post forest photos today (I'm sure you're excitement knows no bounds)........but I got sidetracked with my dismal dissertation.

I'll post the photos tomorrow. Or soon.

The following photo was taken yesterday in early afternoon. Eerie mists and a feeble sun turned the forest into a monochromatic dreamscape.

Until soon, Jon

LAMENT ON A NOVEMBER AFTERNOON

 I can't seem to let October go. I'm still lamenting the passing of my favorite month. I'm still in a Halloween mode, immersed in the apex of the autumnal equinox.

November is here. Most people have rudely discarded their withering jack-o-lanterns and are now gearing up for the holiday onslaught. They're dusting off their Christmas ornaments and Nativity mangers (are mangers still legal?). They're deciding what type of enhancing plague mask they'll be wearing to the upcoming Christmas parties (is Christmas still legal?).
They'll be getting their 39th Booster Plague Shot, just to be safe.

Am I being sarcastic?
Nope. I wouldn't even think of it.

I'm too busy savoring what's left of the autumn foliage. The turning of the leaves was initially sporadic and rather reluctant here in the wilds of Tennessee. The past few days have brought a glorious burst of color in the surrounding forest. 

Today I had planned to walk in the woods (again) but didn't feel up to it. By late afternoon, in the golden waning sunlight, my backyard forest looked beautiful. I grabbed my camera and took some fairly decent photos without having to leave the back porch.

Glimpses of my world on a November day:

 

My bedroom window early this morning

Back yard, photos taken from porch

 

Pumpkins left over from October. I should have cleaned that mirror - but, heck, I'm not Martha Stewart.

NOVEMBER DAYS

The weather has been almost as annoyingly unpredictable as the Asian beetles are. It's frigidly cold one day, mild the next.

I was bombarded with thousands of Asian beetles one mild day last week (see previous post). Then a sudden overnight frost killed them. 
Or so I thought.  

On Saturday morning I was horrified to find hundreds of dead beetles piled up around the doors and windows. They presumably perished from the frost.

Dead beetles everywhere -

lower part of photo is inside the house by the front door,

upper part is on the porch

Sunday was a sunny, mild day and - wouldn't you know - live Asian beetles began appearing everywhere again, but not quite as many as last week. 

The allure of a mild, sunny Sunday made me temporarily forget the damn beetles and inspired me and my El Cheapo camera to wander outside.

Despite the fact that the leaves are shedding quickly, the foliage looks much nicer than it did in October. It was a wonderful afternoon.

I almost never take videos with my El Cheapo digital camera because

1. They quickly drain the battery

and

2. The quality is so POOR that it looks worse than an 1895 Kintoscope experiment by Thomas Edison.

The above clip that I took Sunday is only about 20 seconds. A quick glimpse of my back yard.

Here are some photos.
It was a perfect day for taking pictures - and the best part is I only ventured a few feet from the house.

 

A strange shadow taking pictures in the forest. I was wearing a cowboy hat, which is the reason my head looks so big.

Note:
I removed my recent piano video simply because it annoyed me (but I appreciated your comments). I will post more piano videos in the near future..  Jon

NOTHING TO SAY

I've always maintained that there's nothing more annoying than a person who blogs and has nothing to say.
Then I suddenly realized that I've been blogging and saying absolutely nothing for many years.

In the throes of delusional enthusiasm, I write posts that I initially think are great - then when I re-read them, I think they're crap.

Occasionally I write about certain subjects that I've already written about numerous times (like the two previous posts about the California fires and my mother). 
This bores the hell out of my regular long-time readers (I can hear them sighing in disgust), but I mostly do it for people who are new to my blog and don't know much about me. 

Winter has arrived early here in the wilds of Tennessee, with cold days and frigid nights. Last Thursday (the 15th) it snowed lightly in the afternoon - fortunately no accumulation. The ravaged foliage is still stubbornly clinging to the trees.

These are my last photos for awhile. The lithium batteries on my El Cheapo digital camera died. I'll have to get more on my next venture into town.
I'm also almost completely out of all supplies. I haven't (yet) done any grocery shopping at all in November.
I plan to go to town next week - - before Thanksgiving.

I'm STILL waiting for my new contact lenses to arrive from Canada. They're supposedly on their way.......
The Big Delay (capitalized for emphasis) was caused by a Big Mistake that I made on my order form.
Moral of the story? Always read the fine print carefully.

Why Canada?
If you order contact lenses from a company in the United States, they demand that your prescription is current - and they call your optometrist to make sure that it is.

In Canada they don't give a damn and will gladly accept old prescriptions, without a validation conference with your doctor. 
I think that's a marvelous business practice.

Well, I've said a lot of nothing and have nothing else to offer.
Except a few photos of my cat Bosco, which I have no doubt will thrill you.

I took these last week one morning while I was still in bed. Bosco was looking out at the frost.

 

AND NOW NOVEMBER

The days seem to be impatiently rushing towards the end of the year. October is now only a memory.

Halloween was mild and breezy - a balmy 69 degrees (that's Fahrenheit, for those of you in Oslo). My celebratory mood was minimal: I had pizza and a piece of Mississippi mud cake.

What's Mississippi mud cake? 

Heck if I know. It has chocolate and nuts in it. And probably simulated marshmallows. I bought it at the supermarket. My knowledge of exotic southern cuisine is minimal, at best.

What I really love is Mississippi Mud Beer. It's my favorite.
I used to drink it when I lived in Texas. I haven't seen it in Tennessee. I suppose Tennesseans consider it to be an evil concoction consumed by heathens.

The day after Halloween the weather suddenly turned cold, gloomy, and damp. Some of the lovely colored foliage is already withered and turning dire brown.

Yesterday (Friday) I needed to go to the bank and post office in town. It was extremely important and I couldn't avoid it.
It was a chilly 42 degrees - wet, misty, miserable. As I navigated the slick, winding mountain road I continuously cursed myself for living in a rural area. And I yearned for the good ol' days when I used to live three minutes from civilization.

I got back home quite early, since I didn't do any shopping. So I decided to take a quick walk in the wet woods. Mostly to snap a few photos of the remaining foliage.

My boots sank in the mud. And I got caught in a thorn bush. Don't know exactly how it happened, but suddenly two long thorny tentacles wrapped around my legs and I couldn't get lose. The thorns were so sharp that I was afraid to pull them.

As I was standing there, trapped in mud and thorns and wondering how the hell to get loose, I heard gun shots.
It's officially hunting season!

Gun shots always reverberate haphazardly through the forest and hills and it's difficult to tell exactly how close they really are. But these shots sounded uncomfortably nearby.

I finally managed to untangle the grasping thorny things with minimal damage to my hands (some blood, but not a lot). Then I hurried home, while praying that a myopic hunter wouldn't mistake my skinny ass for a whitetail deer.

The joy of living in the wilderness is almost unbearable.

DISJOINTED OBSERVATIONS

I was going to call it Discombobulated Observations, but didn't want you to waste time having to Google it (*smile*).

I'm disjointed.
Come to think of it, I'm also disorganized, disoriented, disconnected, and possibly disqualified - - but that's beside the point.

We're already way into November and the time is going too quickly. I can't keep up. Chronologically speaking. 

Does anyone HATE Daylight Saving Time as much as I do? It's an absolutely useless burden inflicted upon us by sadistic bureaucrats. I only turned one of my clocks back an hour. To hell with the rest of them.

The weather is still  delightfully mild and unseasonably warm. The cats love going outside....and every time I go outside I'm chased by aggressive wasps. I'm irresistible. I thought I had a horrible head cold these past few days, but after careful consideration and observation I've decided that it's an allergy from the weeds - which are now somewhere around 40 feet tall.

I somehow pulled a muscle in my right shoulder and can hardly lift my arm. I don't know how the hell I did it, since my sedentary lifestyle is legendary. Perhaps I was waving too vigorously at the drivers in the passing logging trucks.
I just threw that in to alarm you.

Speaking of "passing", I was outside early this evening (or yesterday evening) taking some photos of the moon (I kid you not) when a firetruck screeched by with blaring sirens. It's very rare for anything to screech by in this isolated area (except logging trucks, of course).

Anyway, the siren scared a huge white owl, that swooped out of a nearby tree. 
I hear owls hooting every night but this was the first time I saw one.

Here's the moon, as it appeared over the forest last night.

 My front porch yesterday afternoon. I painted it last year and it already looks like it needs another coat. I love the long shadows this time of year.

 Bosco basking in the sunshine yesterday afternoon.

The autumn foliage still looks beautiful, thanks to the calm, mild weather. I'm savoring it while it lasts.

 View from the back porch yesterday evening

FROST, FIRE, AND TURKEY

Note:
as you read this post you'll probably notice that my text size and font style inexplicably keep changing. This has been happening to my blog for weeks, and so far everything I've tried to correct it has failed.

Also, the "I" key cap on my laptop keyboard is still broken and I have to go through a slow and painstaking process to insert an "i" into my words. 

Both of these problems have made typing so agonizng and frustrating that I no longer enjoy blogging. It's very diffcult to maintain my chain of thought while constantly struggling to eradicate these annoyances. I'm seriously considering abandoning my blog because of it.
Anyway, here's my latest post:
 

I indulged in one of my greatest passions last night. This is where your wicked imaginations should go into overdrive.

Opera! Not quite as good as sex, but a satisfying facsimile. I watched an entire performance of Die Walkure - a duration exceeding three hours. I was emotionally and spiritually transported to the realms of Valhalla, where I could easily reside forever.

Yea, I know - the subject of opera is a sure way to repel my three readers (bitter sarcasm inserted here), but allow me to vent for a glorious moment.

Wagner's artistic musical imagination and sheer genius for drama is beyond superb. Wotan's Farewell and the Magic Fire Music are so sublimely beautiful that the emotion overwhelms me.
 

Magic Fire Music on a very frosty November night. What could be better?

My personal favorite Brunnhilde?
Gwyneth Jones. I love her.
And Wotan?
Tough choice. James Morris and Donald McIntyre.

There. That wasn't so bad, was it? Now for a change of subject.

My previous blog post  All About Thanksgiving was written two years ago and posted on my old blog Lone Star Concerto. After reading it again, it's not quite as funny as I initially thought (I have a feeling that you agree.....)
but I still think it's good. 
And it's damn true.

 View from one of my bedroom windows

Thanksgiving?
I'll be spending it home alone, with the three pesky cats. I bought a turkey but think I'll save it for December. Why have turkey on Thanksgiving just because tradition dictates it? I might have roast chicken and stuffing. Haven't really decided yet.

Actually, I love turkey - - could eat it once a week, at least. And I always make homemade soup from the leftovers. Smoked turkeys are the very best, but they're expensive. 

I also make homemade pumpkin bread, pudding, and pie. Yea, I can cook.....I'm not just another pretty face.....I love anything with pumpkin in it.
I remember the delicious Mexican pumpkin candy I used to get as a kid on Olvera Street in Los Angeles.

What I like best about the holiday season is the festive atmosphere and the good food. I was never into family gatherings and all the faux unity and kissy kissy crap. Why bother to fake it once a year?

This undoubtedly stems from my parents. They had the most turbulent marriage in history and were complete opposites, but they fully agreed on one thing: they never liked holidays, parties, or inane social gatherings. 
The fact that we lived thousands of miles away from most of our relatives was another factor. We never had to worry about being involved in all the family holiday crap.

So what's happening here on the mountain? Beautiful days, but the temperature is supposed to drop to 15 degrees tomorrow night.(yes, 15 degrees Fahrenheit)I'm sure as hell not looking forward to it. I had to crawl under the house again today to check some things. Didn't scare me half as much as it did the first time. Emerged covered in dirt and cobwebs.

It's presently 3:00 p.m. - getting dark, rainy, windy, and cold. I'm going to make dinner and a cup of tea.