297. Pi Day and the Ides of March

Some housekeeping first. I sent an email to Dr. Jacob Payne of www.PageOneKentucky.com thanking him for linking my essay on the Metro Club Senatorial Debate and their "last night in Okolona" to his blog. Joe Sonka at www.barefootandprogressive.com linked to it as well, and Ben Carter at www.bluegrassroots.org followed suit. I've had my best two days of hits since signing on back on January 4, 2007. Thanks to all of them and to those of you who are reading my little place of thoughts here along the Left Bank of the Ohio River near Milepost 606. I may even have to increase my five faithful number up to six if the barrage of hits continues - barrage being a relative term. My average prior to yesterday was about 34. Yesterday I had 86, today in the high fifties, with some time left. But, enough of that self-gratification stuff.

*****

Today, March 14, is Pi Day, that is today is 3/14, the mathematical pi term representing the 3.14 more or less [3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510 is actually a closer approximation, but an approximation nonetheless] which equates out to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. I first learned that in some 8th grade Algebra classes, which along with some 9th and 10th grade (especially 10th grade) science classes, specifically chemistry and biology, were the cause of my less-than-perfect high school GPA at "Dear Old Durrett High School." Those reasons, along with simply having gone to high school in the late 70s, when nothing was really fashionable and every one was more-or-less laid back, usually due to some stimulant or intoxication or both, and some more than others, prefaced what has for me been a rather laid-back attitude toward a number of things in life. Or it may have been those lines, copied here before from James Whitcomb Riley's poem My Philosophy, counselling readers to "just do your best for praise or blame." While I haven't always done my best, I have at least tried to. The late monk Thomas Merton, for whom Louisville's Metro Council want to christen a downtown intersection at 4th and Ali as a means of diverting attention from their failure to adequately provide for a library system -- wait, I digressed way far from base there.

A Kentucky Historical Marker already commemorates Merton's revelation at S. Fourth Street and W. Muhammad Ali Boulevard in downtown Louisville.

There is a prayer attributed to the late monk Thomas Merton which hangs on one of my kitchen cabinet doors. Part of it reads (and I read it every day) that while I may not know if what I am doing in this life is actually pleasing to God, the fact that I believe that I am trying to do so, does in fact do so. That is what I ask of myself and tell others is acceptable. In one's life, trying to do your best, even if you do not always achieve success, is, in and of itself, a personal success. Of course, I am not the Maker they will Meet upon their earthly demise granting them eternal bliss or damnation, so they may or may not want to follow my recommendations.

Nonetheless, if anyone ever says to me that it is important to "Beware the Ides of March," which is tomorrow (3/15), as was written by The Bard to be said by a soothsayer to Julius Caesar in Act I, Scene II of the play named for the 1st Century BCE Roman military leader, I would more or less dismiss them. Well, at least I think I would. While I know there are outside forces at work intermingling the lives of all of us [think Six Degrees of Separation, or of the film noir Magnolia], I am content that each of us determine our own fates to the point that some Supreme Being grants us the personal free will to do so, rough-hewing them as we do.

Ain't life grand.