Gramp

Today is a gramp day, gray and damp. It is kind of like an old man's underpants. The day is cool outside. It is my favorite type of day, grampy. I sit with a welcome cup of coffee, luxuriating in its warmth and stimulation. I used to drink black coffee but now I take that dark, bitter, drink and add cream to lighten it and sugar to sweeten it and have the nerve to say it tates like real coffee. No it doesn't, it is a man-made concoction. Why can't coffee taste as good coming out of the pot as it smells before it goes into the pot?
I am up very early. Last night I didn't go to bed until one o'clock in the morning. I stayed up watching television. Yes, I succumbed to my age-old addiction. I can't remember what was on too well ( 7 of 9 was on two and a half men) and when I went to bed I didn't read, I just turned out the light and now have to face the shame of being a tvier. What a waste of consciousness. There are eighteen channels and I just flip from one to the other. I have Will and Ariel Durant's volume on the Age of Napoleon, the last that they wrote, and when I finish that I will have read the entire series. I started reading that series thirty years ago and feel that the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, should be required reading for anyone that wants to know where the human race has been and how similar the backgrounds of all of the cultures and clans and moieties of mankind are and how much they owe to each other. That book should be handed out free in the lobby of the U.N.. Maybe that would add some relevance to a faded organization that was born amid so much hope.
I think back now on the hope that the first volume gave me when I first read it. I was raised with the concept of predestination and the seemingly unfair road that it offered. How could I be held accountable for actions over which I had absolutely no control? To find that other cultures had much different ideas was the beginning of my distaste for Religion and my concept of faith. To discover the minds of the Indus valley and that sub-continent was a ray of hope. To then discover the brilliance and purity of the minds and tolerance of the Arabs was an awakening. The minds of the Greeks would be lost to us if the Arabs had not preserved it from the cauterizing of literature and wisdom that the Western world seems to revel in at periods of time. From that volume came my appreciation of the Jains. I admire them very much but I don't think that I could live without meat. I definitely wouldn't want to go without onions and garlic. I would have to burn all of my cookbooks, the occidental answer to any dissenting opinion or dissenter.
Too much reflection. Today I will turn on the heat and make bread and spend most of the day exploring the new website I have found. It translates any English phrase submitted into heiroglyphics. When I first learned of the fictional character of Daniel Jackson I thought "the luckiest man alive.". To have a knowledge of heiroglyphics and cuniform and Sumerian and Luwian and Hittite and Phoenician, the luckiest man alive. Now the thought comes about the roots of the word phonetics. "It's going to be a good day Tater.". So many places that start with el and so little time to find out the connections.