Hilton Head Island: Saturday evening

 

I am on the screened porch.  Above is not quite what I was seeing a few minutes ago.  There was more color, but my iPhone has an algorithm that made the images far too light and by the time I figured out how to eliminate that the pink color in the post-sunset sky was gone,  It is quite amazing how our eyes, even my remaining and compromised one, are so good.

Hilton Head is transitioning from Hades to paradise.  The high yesterday after a front moved through was 75 F.  I opened all the doors and windows and have kept them open.  As you know I like living with the minimal membrane between me and the natural world.  Here for four summer months that is not possible.

Today the temperature went up to 79F and the air conditioning came on.  I wanted to keep the condo open, so I raised the thermostat to 77 which turned the air conditioning off.

I watched some college football on TV and then, after a dinner of a bought 'Santa Fe Salad', a known quantity that I have eaten before, I came out here with the last of a bottle of Botanist gin to watch on my MacBook Air Ohio State/Wisconsin.  Ohio State quickly scored twice and I turned YouTubeTV off and found a wonderful silence, broken only by a few bird calls.  At this moment someone is chirping somewhere.  An attempt at communication.  I hope successful.  I have tried to communicate myself.

I am an unsettled animal.  I believe I was designed to push our species's limits and there is some quantifiable evidence, and perhaps some unquantifiable, that I have.  In my unexpected old age I have found moments of peace.  Maybe I have earned them.  And even if I have, I like to believe that given health and time I will push human limits more.  But I would not like to make Fred Blakey's mistake.

As I have noted here before I am almost always writing in my mind, just as I have read some composers are always writing music in their minds.  I fully understand how Beethoven wrote music when deaf.  He heard the notes in his mind.  I hear the words.  So I am sometimes uncertain what I have thought and what I have published.  If I am repeating myself and you remember, I apologize, but I believe it was painful to get in here and I expect it will be painful to get out, particularly if you have an animal will inside you as I do that so wants to live it kept me alive through eight hurricanes and swimming for twenty-six hours.

A bird is chirping.

I am going to break the wise two glass rule and pour myself a third, this of Laphroag.  I don't think it will kill me.  Like all of us I don't know what will.

Here is an enigmatic photo I took last night.  Make of it what you will, as you will make of me.  Another self-portrait in the present sea.

L'Chaim.