(Accidental motif captured as boxes emptied themselves with energy. Seeing blank wall reformation into ‘home’ is welcome for the onset of the Holidays!)

The morning has already had some moments. You know that moving is a disorienting thing with that dichotomy of excitement and loss. It happened here a couple days ago with some progress. The cardboard boxes are gone and there is art on the new walls. The season adds to the sense of old and new colliding in stark contrast. There is influence of the Big Dinner coming in just a day. The real sense of wonder in having a solid comfortable life in what may be the best time to have lived in species history. And to have shared those times with great people united in a common framework that enabled extraordinary freedom.

There are other memories, of course. Today is the anniversary of one so powerful it is still with us. It happened in 1963 in Dealy Plaza in Dallas. The murder of the President seared the national psyche. None of us know what happened beyond the basics. We had a retired Special Agent pal from the Bureau after we both retired from service. It was fun to ramble through all the loose ends and motivations with someone who understood internal procedure. We agreed there remain questions enough about who did what to whom. Abraham Zapruder’s film of the event stands as a marker of a technical development that changed how things work in media and communications. So did that other shooting two days later that cemented a mystery. But the memory of uncertainty felt by twelve-year-olds will never fade.

We want to remember without dwelling on it. We are at a disinformation fatigue now with plenty of them to consider.. We have read enough fevered speculation to wish to stay away from the matter altogether. You know the cast of characters: Deranged Lone Gunman in the Book Depository, the Mob, the Cubans, Vice President Johnson, the CIA, and the people who built the FB-111. Or all of them acting in concert.

The Writer’s Circle had fun analyzing all of them, years ago. The complete saturation of information provided by our personal communications has given us a much broader field of events. And there are several of them. Or narrower, in the information flow, since the torrent of digital data is so pervasive as to permit dedicated information streams exclusive of others. In so doing, other information streams can be drowned out. Adapting to the new relation between technology and social interaction is still a work in progress. It is a sort of secular reformation, you know?

We got to talking about that late yesterday. Religion hadn’t come up in a while since it was lumped into a partisan issue. It used to be a routine social issue, remember. We discussed some of the turmoil that incurred the 16th-Century Reformation. the “Reform” of religious life in the animated discussion between the Catholic Church and Protestant zealots.

In that light, the small crowd around the flatscreen in the front room of the new place smiled when they lit up the tree. The jolt of old messaging about the impending season of joy got us a little revved up.

In keeping with the spirit, we intend to have a comprehensive Turkey Dinner MP3 video on our YouTube feed almost simultaneous with the dinner. We would do a Podcast but we are not savvy enough about the links from the Big Pink infrastructure where we live now. Yet.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
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