Luban

Have to decide if going to the furry parade in extreme heat is worth being late to a party happening in my own backyard

I asked someone out on a 2nd date earlier this afternoon and have been waiting on a reply. I went out walking to enjoy the late summer solstice day, listening to animal collective and Jonathan Richman, I was thinking I’d never felt more in sympathy with the summer elements on a solstice before now. I had just rewatched Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale, a movie where a guy goes out on summer vacation and has trouble deciding between three women he could possibly go on a beach trip with (and in part such a difficult movie to watch, because it’s very obvious he should put all his effort into dating Margot). While out walking and thinking about the movie, I saw three rabbits chasing each other in a circle, with a lightning bug hovering above them all. By the end of my walk, as the twilight fully set in, the lightning bugs were in every lawn; some would come and hover next to me, keeping up with my slow steps and turning left and right. The fact I haven’t gotten a reply yet makes me pessimistic about the 2nd date happening (though, realistically, I’m never sure if this timing stuff means anything). Part of me might be glad because it allows me to continue fantasizing about dating another woman I’m planning to ask out when she returns to the states later this summer. There’s still just a bit of light out now at 9:30, honestly a disappointing amount given it’s the solstice, but it’s a cloudy day: earlier while walking I could see the moon in the sky only hazily behind some clouds.

Wrestling with alligators and playing poker with chipmunks

The kantian ideal of a form of justice capable of being assented to by all rational agents in a social whole in abstraction from their own interests and positions could be overly idealist: that is, it requires too strong an ideal of consensus when a rational democratic society must likely expect to operate by means of compromise to achieve measurable outcomes that members of the society agree are desirable. On the other hand, there is something about it as an orienting paradigm I can’t entirely dismiss still. Similarly, I am not sure if I can agree with the kantian criterion of beauty as something that although presented to one as an entirely singular instance not capable of being subsumed under an intersubjectively communicable concept, is nevertheless judged as beautiful, and thus felt as pleasing, by virtue of our thinking that all other subjects given this presentation would judge the same. Still, I think there is something to it that can’t be flatly dismissed. If beauty is not a result of conceptually determinate properties, what does it mean to communicate to others that something is beautiful—and thus to share it with others? Perhaps it is only the agreement of a wide enough quantity of agents in identifying something as agreeable or desirable, but it seems to be more than that in requiring a specific social context transcending ordinary desire.

There’s a lot that could be said on how the immediate world can be beautiful and pleasant and yet the anticipated world terrifying. One interesting aspect of this is that sometimes those anticipations are rational and other times they are not. We live out our days in large part entertaining propositions about the anticipated world, our hopes and fears or even quite simply our curious attempts at prediction. When we are not doing so, we may be entertaining propositions about objects that transcend our personal lives (be these concerning God, scientific theories, literature, or what have you). On the other hand the immediate vicinity, when inspected, is infinite: it is everything that actually exists. The problem is that what actually exists has in its essence its necessity to give way to future events, and its possibility to be succeeded by events of varying forms that thus vary in desirability. We are forced to journey along the fine line of enjoying the full actual present and preparing ourselves for future enjoyments.

Had a dream featuring my mother where I suddenly realized she was losing her hair (presumably due to old age). Later this morning, reading Platonov's Chevengur, I got to a part where a character (Kopionkin) also dreamed of his old mother, who in turn began to become identified with an aged and sickly Rosa Luxembourg.

Attempting to describe the sight and smell of the secret fire that lies beneath the hidden mountain

Has the US suffered a more humiliating military defeat than what it appears we are suffering in the Iran War? Was Vietnam worse than this or on a par? The causes for the US’s involvement in Vietnam were at least a bit more manifold and not coming down to the stupidity of such a select few individuals in such a short span of time. Surely this is world historically embarrassing for the Trump regime. But if there really is billions of dollars from private businesses about to get funneled into Iran, maybe that will have a net positive effect for the Middle East. Especially since Israel is now looking increasingly ruined.