Three Beautiful Things: 02/07-09/08: Cocktail Ice, Denying Denial, Reconciles Discordant Elements

1. I have taken a brief respite from alcohol abstinence. I remembered that the key to a good cocktail, the variable that can help overcome any other flaw that might undermine a drink, is ice. I love taking a pint beer glass and packing it with ice and then generously squirting the ice with lime, and then combining Meyers dark rum with Coke or with orange juice. If a drink's ice is working right, the drink gets so cold that it preserves the ice in the drink and the cocktail doesn't get watered down by melting ice because the ice is keeping itself cold, as well as the drink.

2. I'm listening to X-Country, the alternative country station on XM Radio and I'm trying to come to peace with how my happiness seems to depend on keeping contradictory joys and pleasures in my life all going at the same time: Snug, writing, drinking alcohol, drinking coffee of all kinds, Johnny's Bar weak to Seattle's Best strong (all I need is milk), drinking Diet Pepsi with half and half, acting, chewing tobacco, praying, reading Buddhism, Greek tragedy, stories of mountaineering, books about coal, playing Bejewelled2, gambling, eating gravy, hamburgers, sausage, as well as steamed vegetables, teaching, serving others, driving to nowhere but getting somewhere, listening to Regina Spektor, classic rock and roll, classic country, Bach, Gershwin, Crazy Horse, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant (that's enough). I have to come to peace with the contradictory nature of what makes me happy mainly because there's always someone, doctor, friend, family member, fellow blogger, someone implicitly or explicitly pushing me not to enjoy some of these things, especially drinking, gambling, and chewing. No one seems to care if I pray! I'm not very good at denying myself pleasure. Somehow I've gotten the idea in my head that a good life is a life of denial and I tilt more toward indulgence.

3. I had a great time subbing for Jeff Friday afternoon. His WR 122 students are working to understand, among other things, ideas of beauty and I listened to them and within myself kept resisting the idea that our ideas of beauty are mostly received cultural ideas. I tend toward a more romantic idea that something in the human person is alive to beauty and that this soul yearning for beauty can be moved for no reason that makes sense. I like how Wordsworth puts it in The Prelude:

The mind of man is framed even like the breath
And harmony of music. There is a dark
Invisible workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, and makes them move
In one society.