After lunch today I was watching another CNN report on the Presidential Election, and I decided I had to get out of the house, to get away from the TV, to get away from the election; so I talked Margaret into going with me, and we drove down 8th Avenue in National City to the docks, a place familiar to me because of decades of riding my bicycle along the bike path that circles the San Diego Bay.  From the windows of our apartment I can see the entire bay from San Diego and Coronado to Imperial Beach and finally to Tijuana, Mexico.  Driving in a car is a poor substitute for going around the bay on a bicycle, but the car was our way of doing it today… The Bicycle will serve another day.  When I got back home, I found that perfect Vincent Van Gogh statement in which he says, “In spite of everything, yes.”  It is appropriate today.

“Ah! my dear comrades, let us crazy ones take delight in our eyesight in spite of everything, yes, let’s!  Alas, nature takes it out of the animal, and our bodies are despicable and sometimes a heavy burden.  But it has been like that ever since Giotto, that man with his poor health.  Ah! and what a feast for the eyes all the same, and what a smile is that toothless smile of the old lion Rembrandt, with a piece of white cloth around his head, his palette in his hand!”

— Vincent Van Gogh