We are staying at the Louisville Ky downtown Marriott Courtyard.  On the seventh floor, across from our window is the Yum KFC center, the home of the Louisville Cardinals.  The Ohio River can be seen behind the Yum Center. The sky is obscured by dome of gray haze.  Sunlight waxes and wanes through the hazy atmosphere illuminating Whiskey Row with a smoky light.

We are here for Pride weekend.  The festivities take place tomorrow.  Louisville is a city on the border between the South and the Northern areas of the country.  It is a city that displays the opposing poles of the current American experience, egregious wealth and visible poverty.  We are staying at a Hilton inn which does not lack various amenities, much attention to detail.  The street below us is busy, bustling with those who come to experience the food and legendary bourbon at a number of the city’s restaurants within an easy walk. While passing the entry of one of the premium hotels near by where we are lodging I took note of a Porsche Carrera GT, about to depart the hotel parking garage to enter traffic.  The vehicle sells for north of 100K.

By contrast about midday I noticed someone appearing to be in his 30s soliciting for money at curbside close to where we were having coffee   Making up my mind that to speak with him, and offer some financial help was my duty, I went over and said hello.  I introduced myself and he shook my hand.  I handed him enough cash for several meals.  He told me his name and pointed out his fiancee who was seated close by.  I told him that better days were in store for both of them.  And that there is no shame in communicating what one needs to others.  I have received assistance from others my entire life.  We are here to lend one another a helping hand.  I have forgotten his name.  But I felt that we were both a bit more human for the words that passed between us.

Some interesting scenes from today…

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This passage seems apropos. Does not the philosopher’s prose paint a picture?

Living in the midst of this jumble
of little lanes, needs, and voices
gives me a melancholy happiness;
how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire,
how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life
comes to light every moment!

And yet silence will soon descend
on all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people.

How his shadow stands
even now behind everyone, as his dark fellow traveler!
It is always like
the last moment before the departure
of an emigrants’ ship:
people have more to say to each other than ever,
the hour is late,
and the ocean and its desolate silence are waiting
impatiently behind all of this noise
–so covetous and certain of their prey.

And all and everyone of them
suppose that the heretofore was little or nothing
while the near future is everything;
and that is the reason for all of this haste,
this clamor, this outshouting and overreaching each other.

Everyone wants to be the first in this future
–and yet death and deathly silence alone
are certain and common to all in this future.

How strange it is that this sole
certainty and common element
makes almost no impression on people,
and that nothing is further from their minds
than the feeling that they form
a brotherhood of death.

It makes me happy
that men do not want at all
to think the thought of death.

I should like very much to do something
that would make the thought of life
even a hundred times more appealing
to them.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 278 by Friedrich Nietzsche