Only relatively late in life …..
….. did I come to the conclusion that while I despise extravagances and pretentiousness, I have a passion for the finer things … particularly things that have to do with preparation and ingestion of good food and classy libations; or appreciation of natural and artistic beauty in endless forms and manifestations; or exciting, interesting, and challenging travel to exotic places; or ideas and concepts that intrigue, interest, and gratify me.
To be clear, in the Freudian schematic my hedonistic passions aren’t merely id-driven urges to scratch one or another dopamine itch. Rather, they include wholesome activities and constructive pastimes that fall within the range of well-disciplined superego-related impulses. But whatever. They’re my impulses, my passions, and I claim them, no matter how risky and purely self-indulgent, or noble and charitable they might be.
And I would, in the best of all possible worlds, spend my life chasing hedonistic rainbows. But the pursuit of high hedonism takes high levels of personal energy and material resources and, while I’m committed to being energetic, I sometimes falter. Beyond that, I lack the kind of resources required for full-time pursuit of constructive hedonism. I work fulltime as a modestly-paid consultant to social workers who care for some 1,300 damaged and/or ill children and youths, and I simply don’t have the time, money or energy for unlimited personal indulgence of any sort.
Beyond my day job, meanwhile, I have a significant distraction in the form of a 30-year-plus florid love affair with Guatemala. My relationship with Guatemala – and to a lesser extent with Latin America more generally – is manifested by doing on-site volunteer work and remote project coordination as often as possible. So, inevitably my abiding love for Guatemala and the people there are a distraction from more elegant hedonistic pleasures like food, wine and vacation travel.
And finally, by nature I’m compulsively, unabashedly, and even affectedly intellectual in my approach to life, and rather shy and even introverted in my own way (I should add that those who know me best say I’m neither ‘introverted’ nor ‘shy,’ and laugh at that description. But, I know better). So when it looks like I’m being sedate and reserved, I’m quite often actually flying high on a first-class flight of wild self-pleasuring cerebral fancy that is in itself a kind of hedonism.
In any event, given my personality, proclivities, and modest but not completely limited resources, the quest for me becomes not so much how to find and enjoy the good and exciting things in life, as how to make them meaningful by sharing them. This page is my humble attempt to do exactly that: to validate my quest to make every day, every possible event and experience and journey, a meaningful celebration of life by sharing it with friends and readers.
I hope you will find something here that inspires, intrigues, or touches you in some way!
A $13 Chianti Classico with Pizza (Onion Jam, seasoned tomato paste, artichoke, Spanish chorizo, fresh tomato, and mozzarella-provolone cheese mix)
Photo is Toledo Cathedral … almost empty of tourists. Worth the January chill to have it be this accessible.
Photo: Looking across Guatemala’s Lago Atitlán to Volcan San Pedro
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