Pretensions!

I used to love reading the New York Times on Sunday.  Miguel and I, when he was still alive and we were at home in New York, would spend most of Sunday reading the Times.  He would read the Travel section, and we would both check to see if there were any trips available that were cheap, to places we knew well, and with Miguel, to places he had never been.  But at some point, and I don't remember when, we both got rather disgusted with the pretensions of the articles, the advertisements, and the people.  In the last few years I stopped Times delivery and started reading it online, the news only.  Just recently I gave into a whim and took the weekend delivery option, at half price.  I will cancel tomorrow.  It was today's magazine section that did it.  The cover story is on an emergency hospital in Kabul, with a cover of gauze bandages spotted with blood floating in the air.  Even the real stuff is made unreal.  I haven't read the article and don't think I will, not because it isn't well written or important, but because it's in the magazine section, which is full of gauzy articles about gauzy people, writing about the ridiculous and the unimportant.  The contrasts are too disturbing. Do any of us really need to know about the "one good egg" that Alice Waters made for Daniel Duane some decades ago? In a world falling apart!

I'm off to slice some mushrooms, cut up a few cherry tomatoes, scramble two eggs, eat my breakfast, and cancel my subscription. The Sunday Times has lost its magic.