Reading the Sunday paper

Reading the Sunday New York Times is a stream of my subconsciousness. It directs me where it desires, it answers questions only slightly posed, it has definite likes and dislikes and it avoids those parts of my brain that are deeply and perpetually undernourished.

It has now started to advise me, after a long period of obstinate denial, that my heart and my head belong first and foremost on the sports pages of your paper. No longer does it allow me the fantasy of contemplating my ascension to a universe of vital considerations of the rise and fall of humanity. It is painfully obvious that I am not at that advanced state of being. Thus, this morning I began by investigating the plight of my favorite team temporarily deprived of its most astounding star, the sudden disappearance of superiority of its most transcendent arm, and the compelling tale of the nonagenarian spending her waning moments sitting endlessly in her appointed place in the stands (like Horton hatching an egg) pencil and scorecard in hand, a reminder of an era in dire threat of extinction.

Only reluctantly do I gravitate to the section that is denominated a review of the week but is truly more of an insight into our preferences and prejudices. Here I learn why baking sourdough bread is a mystical experience, wonder whether it is better to die all at once or little by little and cogitate about the possibility that the fate of the world may one day rest on the talent, or lack thereof, of a single translator.

Ultimately though, even as my conscious being is pleading with me to go read that book about Obama and Biden as a detective duo,  I am drawn to the topic that causes my brain to swell as near to explosion as a brain can come. I stare at the image of the Vice President inside the face of the President and read how for every bad there is a worse. I am told that young people don't like lousy governing policies and I wonder how my generation, once made up of young people, grew old and politically crotchety. I reach inside the head of Mr. Trump to learn that our leader is really a bad Mafia Don. Although in this universe, bad may be the ultimate compliment.

And here I rest, and take his opportunity to write to you, before I move on. Wondering where this exercise has taken me, what have I learned of myself and my world. Am I different than I was but an hour before, has my being become more advanced, does my heart beat grow stronger? Or am I as I was when first I awoke, just a little older, a little more cluttered with information crammed into a brain already many years into the overload cycle, a little closer to the end than the beginning?

So concludes, at least for now, my treatise on the exercise that is, for most of those meandering through existence at a forever advancing stage, our most consistent form of workout. Pushing our brain left and right, back and forth, up and down, and somehow landing in the same spot we started. Winded a little, fatigued in the molecules that bounce off the insides or our brains, in need of a moment's mental rest.

For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. The Sunday paper, til death do us part. Or at least until Mafia Don shuts down the failing New York Times.