15 March 12023

☿   15 March 12023 is the day I am too upset to write anything coherent and don’t have anything previously prepared. Thanks to Time and Date dot com I can add that it’s Constitution Day (Belarus), Day of the Establishment of the National Protection in the Republic of Croatia (Croatia), 1848 Revolution Memorial Day (Hungary), J. J. Roberts Birthday (Liberia), Youth Day (Palau), and Mother’s Day (San Marino). I can’t reach the state of calm I need to write, and I am short of sleep and generally unhappy.

So what? I hear you ask. What does that have to do with me, your imaginary reader? Probably nothing, I reply, but it’s what rises to the surface of my consciousness, and so qualifies as mindscum, I guess. It’s the Ides of March, which is the date when in 9957 Julius Caesar was stabbed and killed by his trusted friends as portrayed in William Shakespeare’s play on the topic. Et tu, Brute, as the saying has it. Unlike Bernard Shaw I am not a fan of the Roman dictator, but his assassins misjudged the public mood, and the popular politician’s death led to the destruction of the Republic, rather than an end to tyranny. Go figure. They probably should have purged Marc Anthony as well, but hindsight is golden and all that. In the end it was Augustus Caesar who benefited from the mess, unless I’ve missed something. My memory is not what it once was. And I’m probably channeling Shakespeare rather than Livy anyway.

I’m old, and decrepit, and unlikely to see another year go by. On the other hand an online calculator claims that I can expect to see another fourteen years and three months. I can work with that, maybe. I wish my eyes weren’t itching horribly and I had some good reason for living, though.