The Chinese have their ‘chi’, the Japanese their ‘Zen’. But we westerners have our own unseen power, controlling our lives, dominating the airwaves.
I’m giving in to the ‘bim’.
One of my favorite sayings – stolen from the sixties comedy group Firesign Theatre, is “well, it’s a little like bees living in your head but, there they are.”
It is a little like having bees living in your head though, isn’t it? But instead of bees, it’s bimbos. There are swarms of bimbos buzzing ‘round our heads, bimbos buzzing on every channel, everywhere you click.
For some reason I think I would feel better if their names all began with B: Brittany, Baris, Banana Nicole.
Anyway, instead of fighting against their power, I’m abandoning my worn out principles and accepting the inevitable. Instead of arguing for a volunteer ban on bimbos in the news, I’m embracing Banana Nicole and her band of brainless, bra-less, beauties. Instead of asking for anti-bimbo legislation, I now believe that we should all do everything we can to bring all these Bambis into the mainstream.
Let’s stop the fruitless arguments as to their importance: clearly, they are the most important cultural phenomenon of this century.
Let’s stop criticizing their B-havior: obviously, our uncontrollable obsession with everything they do and say reveals our deep-seated envy of everything about them.
So, where do we start?
Despite the importance of Bimbos in our society, we still like to pretend that what they do and say is, well, ridiculous. So it is going to be difficult for people to publicly admit the truth: that our devotion to them is at least as silly as they are.
I propose that first, we change our calendar.
I’m not asking that we adopt a certain style of dress (we already conform to their fashion norms), or learn to speak a new language (the official language of the United States is already ‘bimboese’). No, I simply propose changing calendars, and then maybe the clocks, and go from there.
It has always seemed strange to me that we honor dead Romans and their gods – for the most part, by naming the months of the year after them. When was the last time you saw a video of Caesar Augustus getting out of his chariot, obviously intoxicated, on YouTube?
So, instead of Janus, I propose re-naming the first month of the year, Marilyn, for the goddess of Bimbos, Marilyn Monroe.
Yes, yes, I know, Marilyn was more than just a bimbo: but to her devotees she is the origin, the source, the fountainhead of all bimbolisciousness.
February I’d propose re-naming for Helen of Troy.
Okay, so I’m back pedaling a bit. Helen of Troy doesn’t have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, though their standards seemed to have slipped a bit of late. But the ideas on which our society are based, originated - in large part, with the Greeks. And there was no bigger bimbo in all of Greek literature than Helen.
And speaking of the month of Helen, I think we need to address this 28 day except on Leap Year thing. To make it easier on the Bimbawannabees out there, all the months of Bimbo should be 28 days long.
Is there anything more painful than watching the expression on a bimbos face when they try to figure things out: things like how many days in the month, what to tip the bouncer, and where they left their panties?
And with the 29 days left over every year, we can establish an entire invisible month during which Bimbos – and those with the necessary resources, can go into rehab, no questions asked.
The only real problem I foresee is naming the remaining months. You can’t just use any bimbo: these have to be the very cream of the crop, not just the flavor of the month. Baris, I mean Paris, seems a natural – now: but when she gets out of jail – will we still care? Britanny once seemed a classic bimbo: but of late she seems a bit desperate to make the grade. And what about what Seinfeld liked to call “Mimbos” - male bimbos: what about a month, for example, named for Elvis? He was one of the first, and greatest, male bimbos – though he lived at a time when the press didn’t stalk people the way they do today. And what about our old pal Bill, Clinton that is: I don’t think the fact that he’s intelligent, rules him out. But then again, Bill’s gotten too damned serious of late. Then again, he is the only Presidential Bimbo in history - unless you count Kennedy, or Herbert Hoover, or Van Heflin.
Okay, instead of March, the third month will be named for Elvis, and April will now be called Bubba. And what the heck – Banana Nicole just couldn’t help herself, so let’s name May, Banana.
Madonna? No, everything that happened to Madonna was planned – by Madonna. That’s Brittany’s problem of late too, as I see it. Britanny should just let it happen. Angelina was on the right track – for a while, but as soon as she and Brad got together, she started saving the world, adopting children, and getting all serious.
Maybe I’m still missing the point too. Maybe I need to loosen up. Instead of establishing regular bimbo months, perhaps we should just declare the month for a particular bimbo, after the fact: kind of like player of the month. In that case, I guess we’ve got to go with Paris this month – no matter how her last days in jail go.
Yeah, that’s the ticket: the Bimbo of the Month will be chosen at the end of every month – depending on who gets the most press coverage in the previous month.
Can you handle it? Can you keep up with it? You certainly can’t escape it, so why don’t you just give in to the bim?
You can search CNN, and MSNBC, and even CSPAN for the news, but sooner or later you’re going to have to admit, this is the Age of the Bimbo.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
A Four Letter Word
As part of the ongoing celebrations commemorating my 100th No Mand’s Land column, I am going to list – in no particular order, 100 things I actually like about Plymouth and its inhabitants.
1. First, I like that my devoted readers (all three of them) are incredulous that there are 100 things I admit I like about Plymouth.
2. I also like that though I’ve lived here for nearly 25 years, I can still get lost in Myles Standish State Forest.
3. I like the old Court House too. It’s like something out of a Spenser for Hire novel: a grandiose exterior that belies a maze-like interior filled with narrow, dimly lit hallways full of suspicious characters, over-sized cops, and lawyers that look as if they are being asked to verify that the milk has gone sour.
4. Gellar’s aluminum ice cream cone. When they tear Gellars down to make way for the new combination Museum of Manomet Life and Dunkin Donuts, I’ve got dibs on the cone.
5. The nauseating color scheme at Town Hall: it’s guaranteed to ward off evil, keep board members awake, and agitate ‘certain others’.
6. Japanese ‘Professional’ Wrestling on Cable Access: where else can you watch reruns of men in tights, watching reruns of men in tights, watching reruns.
7. That in a one minute stroll down Court Street, I can have a taco, a curry, moo shi, sushi, sax lessons, a slice of cake, and a pint of Meade (and the stomach pumping people of Jordan Hospital are just a three-minute ambulance ride away!)
8. Enisketomp: when they demolish the McDonalds at Exit 5 to make room for a retention pond, I’ve got dibs on Enisketomp.
9. Bloody Pond. An English tourist named this pond, after getting lost in Myles Standish State Forest.
10. The Billington Sea.
11. The Billington Brothers. If I had a band, that’s what I’d call it (dibs!).
12. The New Brewster Gardens.
13. White Horse Beach in winter.
14. The abandoned train station at the abandoned Wal-Mart at The Latest Attempt to Make Something Out of Cordage Park Commerce Center
15. Bug Light.
16. Clark’s Island: actually, I’ve never been to Clark’s Island, but I’ve heard some great stories.
17. Mosquitoes as big as turkeys and not half as bright. (Oh, I am informed that those are actually swarms of turkeys)
18. Plimoth Plantation (Oh, I am informed that it is now called PineHills)
19. Caterpillar Season.
20. The Saturday Peace Vigil
21. The trolley driver who is always ‘gesturing’ at the participants in the Peace Vigil.
22. The Karen Buechs All-Star Review and Moot Court Team: check the court house schedule for their next live appearance.
23. Burial Hill.
24. Town Meeting.
25. Free coffee and home-made baked goods at the Church of the Pilgrimage on Thanksgiving morning.
26. That a blind-folded foreigner, parachuting randomly anywhere within the town limits, would take only 37 seconds to stumble into a drive-thru lane at a Dunkin Donuts (unless they are impaled on the Gellar’s Ice Cream Cone).
27. That there are almost as many golf carts as Hummers, registered in the town.
28. The “No Surfing” signs at the giant retention ponds on the New 44.
29. The contest to name the giant retention ponds along the New 44 (Rusty Pond? Rubber Pond? Wal-Mart Pond?)
30. The folks who want to stock the giant retention ponds on the New 44 with brown trout and wide-mouth bass.
31. Olde 44
32. The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes
33. City Lights, City Streets
34. The BBC on Middle Street
35. The Old Colony Club
36. Emerson Field on White Horse Beach Road
37. The dozen or so local guys who coach Little League, Youth Basketball, Youth Football, umpire, referee, play golf regularly, have fabulous lawns, nice kids, are somehow still married, and haven’t spontaneously burst into flames.
38. People who drive five MPG, ten-ton, tinted window, black SUVs that seat sixteen and have a bumper sticker that reads, “Piping Plover – Tastes Like Chicken”.
39. Anything cooked by Martha Stone.
40. The smoked eel at Asian Essence.
41. The Pad Thai at Star of Siam.
42. The Weber Grill in My Backyard.
Honestly, I have at least 58 more things that I like about Plymouth, but I’ve run out of space. I’ll save the rest for my 200th column, provided of course that the Bulletin offices have not been sold by then to make room for another Dunkin Donuts, or a retention pond, or a turkey meat processing plant.
1. First, I like that my devoted readers (all three of them) are incredulous that there are 100 things I admit I like about Plymouth.
2. I also like that though I’ve lived here for nearly 25 years, I can still get lost in Myles Standish State Forest.
3. I like the old Court House too. It’s like something out of a Spenser for Hire novel: a grandiose exterior that belies a maze-like interior filled with narrow, dimly lit hallways full of suspicious characters, over-sized cops, and lawyers that look as if they are being asked to verify that the milk has gone sour.
4. Gellar’s aluminum ice cream cone. When they tear Gellars down to make way for the new combination Museum of Manomet Life and Dunkin Donuts, I’ve got dibs on the cone.
5. The nauseating color scheme at Town Hall: it’s guaranteed to ward off evil, keep board members awake, and agitate ‘certain others’.
6. Japanese ‘Professional’ Wrestling on Cable Access: where else can you watch reruns of men in tights, watching reruns of men in tights, watching reruns.
7. That in a one minute stroll down Court Street, I can have a taco, a curry, moo shi, sushi, sax lessons, a slice of cake, and a pint of Meade (and the stomach pumping people of Jordan Hospital are just a three-minute ambulance ride away!)
8. Enisketomp: when they demolish the McDonalds at Exit 5 to make room for a retention pond, I’ve got dibs on Enisketomp.
9. Bloody Pond. An English tourist named this pond, after getting lost in Myles Standish State Forest.
10. The Billington Sea.
11. The Billington Brothers. If I had a band, that’s what I’d call it (dibs!).
12. The New Brewster Gardens.
13. White Horse Beach in winter.
14. The abandoned train station at the abandoned Wal-Mart at The Latest Attempt to Make Something Out of Cordage Park Commerce Center
15. Bug Light.
16. Clark’s Island: actually, I’ve never been to Clark’s Island, but I’ve heard some great stories.
17. Mosquitoes as big as turkeys and not half as bright. (Oh, I am informed that those are actually swarms of turkeys)
18. Plimoth Plantation (Oh, I am informed that it is now called PineHills)
19. Caterpillar Season.
20. The Saturday Peace Vigil
21. The trolley driver who is always ‘gesturing’ at the participants in the Peace Vigil.
22. The Karen Buechs All-Star Review and Moot Court Team: check the court house schedule for their next live appearance.
23. Burial Hill.
24. Town Meeting.
25. Free coffee and home-made baked goods at the Church of the Pilgrimage on Thanksgiving morning.
26. That a blind-folded foreigner, parachuting randomly anywhere within the town limits, would take only 37 seconds to stumble into a drive-thru lane at a Dunkin Donuts (unless they are impaled on the Gellar’s Ice Cream Cone).
27. That there are almost as many golf carts as Hummers, registered in the town.
28. The “No Surfing” signs at the giant retention ponds on the New 44.
29. The contest to name the giant retention ponds along the New 44 (Rusty Pond? Rubber Pond? Wal-Mart Pond?)
30. The folks who want to stock the giant retention ponds on the New 44 with brown trout and wide-mouth bass.
31. Olde 44
32. The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes
33. City Lights, City Streets
34. The BBC on Middle Street
35. The Old Colony Club
36. Emerson Field on White Horse Beach Road
37. The dozen or so local guys who coach Little League, Youth Basketball, Youth Football, umpire, referee, play golf regularly, have fabulous lawns, nice kids, are somehow still married, and haven’t spontaneously burst into flames.
38. People who drive five MPG, ten-ton, tinted window, black SUVs that seat sixteen and have a bumper sticker that reads, “Piping Plover – Tastes Like Chicken”.
39. Anything cooked by Martha Stone.
40. The smoked eel at Asian Essence.
41. The Pad Thai at Star of Siam.
42. The Weber Grill in My Backyard.
Honestly, I have at least 58 more things that I like about Plymouth, but I’ve run out of space. I’ll save the rest for my 200th column, provided of course that the Bulletin offices have not been sold by then to make room for another Dunkin Donuts, or a retention pond, or a turkey meat processing plant.
George Figures it Out
Don’t look now but, George W. just dropped a GW bomb!
Make the children leave the room.
We’re talking (right-wing reactionary fundies close your ears)… Global Warming, no less.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Global Warming supposed to be a left-wing, Harvard-type, New York Intellectual, gay lesbian socialist worker fantasy of the first degree?
Didn’t that crew-cut, barking hyena on CNN just have his own special news report revealing that Global Warming was a thinly veiled attempt to make San Francisco the de facto capital of the United Fakes?
Yet there was the big GW this past week – in front of the cameras, openly talking about his own global warming initiative, explaining how he’s going to stop using his brush hog for entertainment during those long weekends at the ranch, switch the Marine helicopters he uses over to biofuels, and the twins over to grain alcohol based intoxicants.
Wubudahwubudhahwubudah what the heck happened here?
Has George been born again, again?
Did he take a turn at the pump during a photo opp, and see how the average Joe’s gas dollars have jumped?
Or maybe his old pal Putin clued him in, after a few Vodka Collins?
And it’s not just GW wising up to GW: there are other signs of the apocalypse too!
George II is also speaking - out loud, about Darfur.
They used to snicker behind his back, call him ‘Darfur Duck’, but not now. Now he’s using that tried and true axis of evil, hunt you down and slap you silly talk that served him so well back in the good old days of his oddministration.
He’s mad as hell, and he ain’t going to take it no more.
We’re going to put the squeeze on the Sudanese.
And no, gosh darn it, it has nothing to do with his so called legacy, or the lack thereof – or so we’re told. It has nothing to do with the trouble there having over there in the Mideast, Mideast Texas that is: where word is, money for the Big Dubya Ranch and Presidential Library has just about dried up.
The truth is that - when it comes to old George, it just takes a bit longer for the news to sink in.
Emphasize the first syllable, in the duh-b-ya.
For a Texas boy, GWB was surprisingly slow on the draw. It took longer for him to figure out that he should drop “My Pet Goat” and get his butt onto Air Force One. It took longer for him to figure out that New Orleans was underwater and make his sympathetic, ‘I see y'all down there’ flyover. And it took longer for him to realize there tweren’t no WMD. In fact, I think somebody better go round to the ranch and remind him that, nope – they haven’t found any Big Bads in Baghdad, yet.
Granted, he did seem to jump the gun a bit, as regards the end of the Iraq War. But, what we’re just now finding out is that he was actually reacting to the end of the first Gulf War, when he had his little shindig on the aircraft carrier. When it comes to the latest Gulf War, his timing is perfect: it won’t be over for a long time, and he’s the only one that knows it, or will, eventually.
George W. Bush is leading the way, in terms of, well, not leading the way.
They should tack on an entire wing at the future Big Dubya Ranch and Presidential Library for accomplishments ‘yet to be determined’: kind of like those signs you see on the highway, for “Future Exits”.
The historians are sure that at some point in the future, George W. Bush is going to become one of our greatest presidents. You can count on it.
Heck, look what they did for that semi-pro actor – Ronnie Reagan. He left office babbling, and now he’s practically a saint. They’re naming mountains after him.
George II is not there yet but, give him time.
Better give him extra time.
Then, when you have about given up hope, give him a bit more time.
They say once you retire, you’ve got all the time that you need.
Count on George to figure it out – in the end.
Make the children leave the room.
We’re talking (right-wing reactionary fundies close your ears)… Global Warming, no less.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Global Warming supposed to be a left-wing, Harvard-type, New York Intellectual, gay lesbian socialist worker fantasy of the first degree?
Didn’t that crew-cut, barking hyena on CNN just have his own special news report revealing that Global Warming was a thinly veiled attempt to make San Francisco the de facto capital of the United Fakes?
Yet there was the big GW this past week – in front of the cameras, openly talking about his own global warming initiative, explaining how he’s going to stop using his brush hog for entertainment during those long weekends at the ranch, switch the Marine helicopters he uses over to biofuels, and the twins over to grain alcohol based intoxicants.
Wubudahwubudhahwubudah what the heck happened here?
Has George been born again, again?
Did he take a turn at the pump during a photo opp, and see how the average Joe’s gas dollars have jumped?
Or maybe his old pal Putin clued him in, after a few Vodka Collins?
And it’s not just GW wising up to GW: there are other signs of the apocalypse too!
George II is also speaking - out loud, about Darfur.
They used to snicker behind his back, call him ‘Darfur Duck’, but not now. Now he’s using that tried and true axis of evil, hunt you down and slap you silly talk that served him so well back in the good old days of his oddministration.
He’s mad as hell, and he ain’t going to take it no more.
We’re going to put the squeeze on the Sudanese.
And no, gosh darn it, it has nothing to do with his so called legacy, or the lack thereof – or so we’re told. It has nothing to do with the trouble there having over there in the Mideast, Mideast Texas that is: where word is, money for the Big Dubya Ranch and Presidential Library has just about dried up.
The truth is that - when it comes to old George, it just takes a bit longer for the news to sink in.
Emphasize the first syllable, in the duh-b-ya.
For a Texas boy, GWB was surprisingly slow on the draw. It took longer for him to figure out that he should drop “My Pet Goat” and get his butt onto Air Force One. It took longer for him to figure out that New Orleans was underwater and make his sympathetic, ‘I see y'all down there’ flyover. And it took longer for him to realize there tweren’t no WMD. In fact, I think somebody better go round to the ranch and remind him that, nope – they haven’t found any Big Bads in Baghdad, yet.
Granted, he did seem to jump the gun a bit, as regards the end of the Iraq War. But, what we’re just now finding out is that he was actually reacting to the end of the first Gulf War, when he had his little shindig on the aircraft carrier. When it comes to the latest Gulf War, his timing is perfect: it won’t be over for a long time, and he’s the only one that knows it, or will, eventually.
George W. Bush is leading the way, in terms of, well, not leading the way.
They should tack on an entire wing at the future Big Dubya Ranch and Presidential Library for accomplishments ‘yet to be determined’: kind of like those signs you see on the highway, for “Future Exits”.
The historians are sure that at some point in the future, George W. Bush is going to become one of our greatest presidents. You can count on it.
Heck, look what they did for that semi-pro actor – Ronnie Reagan. He left office babbling, and now he’s practically a saint. They’re naming mountains after him.
George II is not there yet but, give him time.
Better give him extra time.
Then, when you have about given up hope, give him a bit more time.
They say once you retire, you’ve got all the time that you need.
Count on George to figure it out – in the end.
The Third Degree
I think my oldest son graduated from college this past weekend, but I’m not absolutely sure.
I’m sure he had what it takes, did what it took, and took what they had: but I am still not convinced that the desired transformation took place.
You would think they would have it all worked out by now. You would think that there would be a book – one slim but definitive volume that you could follow, step by step and, at the end, POOF: the transformation would be easily discerned.
You’d think with the cost of college these days, they could give you some kind of guarantee.
It would help if – at the appropriate time, the student changed colors, or grew wings, or spoke in tongues. Instead, underneath the black satin muumuu they all wear for the final act, is much the same kid you sent on their way four years back.
In fact the youth I sent off to college four years ago, wore pants and shoes and a shirt, and the graduate that we un-robed a few days ago wore only shorts and flip-flops and a look of relief.
We sent off a fully dressed kid and got back something, in some ways, less.
That’s a transformation alright, just not the one I was looking for.
Not that I am now looking for someone to blame. No, if mistakes were made, look no further than yours truly.
I can honestly say that when I supposedly graduated over 25 years ago, somebody messed up.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know where I was going.
I received a degree in Elaborate Excuses, with a minor in Extra-curricular Activities, and before the ink had dried on my sheepskin I had my very own undergraduate and was dispensing educational advice to him with the ease of a bartender.
I told him he could pretend to drink without actually drinking.
I told him to take Chinese.
If I was to sum up the advice I gave my son as he headed off to college, it would be, ‘don’t smack your lips while you’re eating’, metaphorically speaking. I thought it was that simple. I thought the only thing he had to worry about was overdoing it.
Overdoing it was the only thing I had done well during my college days.
That was one reason I sent my son to a small, prestigious eastern college, instead of the enormous prestigious college I attended. I thought he would have fewer opportunities to overdo it.
And I felt that if anyone could produce an actual graduate – with an actual degree, they could.
I have to say that I am happy with the effort: theirs, not his.
The recent graduation weekend was one long ‘David Copperfield Makes the Statue of Liberty Disappear’ extravaganza.
Nothing that might have contributed to a successful matriculation – as they call it, was left out.
He had several Benedictions recited over him.
They had a Baccalaureate ceremony during which a traditional Sanskrit Hymn was played by a Master Sarod Player and accompanists.
There were a half-dozen Processions in his – and a few hundred other pupils, honor.
I counted at least two or three solemn Invocations.
There were endless speeches, honorary degrees, dire warnings about nuclear proliferation, and a parade of professors in medieval costumes.
They had a Lobster Bake and beer on tap.
They recited a lot of poetry too.
Poetry is a sure sign that someone is attempting to create graduates somewhere nearby.
If my son had suddenly begun to recite poetry, that would have convinced me.
Didn’t happen.
There were also speeches in Latin.
If my son had suddenly started to sign the new song by Maroon 5 – in Latin, that would have convinced me.
Didn’t happen.
Still, according to a translation of one of the Latin speeches recited by the school’s President, my son was no longer a pupil, “but a colleague”, and “all that your instructors have been able to do has been done.”
But that last phrase sounds suspiciously like the small print on a box of cereal: “Sold by weight, not by volume. Some settling of the contents may have taken place.”
That was what I think happened to me, during my college days: I didn’t get any smarter, I just had what I already knew, rearranged.
It also reminds me of the time I was not born again.
A few years after my ‘failed’ graduation I tried for another transformation: I wanted to be born again.
I attended the proper service, waited for the proper moment, raised my hand and asked to be born again.
But it didn’t take.
I told the people at the evangelical church that I didn’t think it had taken, but at first they didn’t believe me.
Just wait they said.
Wait a little longer, they said.
Just a few more days, they promised.
That was in 1985.
Maybe it’s the tassel.
Maybe the difference between a graduate on paper, and someone who really feels as if they have had an educational transformation, is the tassel. 25 years ago I may have forgotten to flip it from one side of my ‘mortar board’, to the other.
Or maybe I flipped it to the wrong side.
At my son’s small, expensive, fabulously landscaped college though, they had all the bases covered. They actually had someone assigned just to make sure all tassels were correctly flipped at the penultimate moment.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s my faith that’s lacking, not his.
Perhaps parents are physically unable to see what’s plain to everyone else.
After all, it’s in the book. It’s printed on paper. Soon it will be published in a local newspaper.
Maybe the kid actually did it.
All hail the college graduate!
I’m sure he had what it takes, did what it took, and took what they had: but I am still not convinced that the desired transformation took place.
You would think they would have it all worked out by now. You would think that there would be a book – one slim but definitive volume that you could follow, step by step and, at the end, POOF: the transformation would be easily discerned.
You’d think with the cost of college these days, they could give you some kind of guarantee.
It would help if – at the appropriate time, the student changed colors, or grew wings, or spoke in tongues. Instead, underneath the black satin muumuu they all wear for the final act, is much the same kid you sent on their way four years back.
In fact the youth I sent off to college four years ago, wore pants and shoes and a shirt, and the graduate that we un-robed a few days ago wore only shorts and flip-flops and a look of relief.
We sent off a fully dressed kid and got back something, in some ways, less.
That’s a transformation alright, just not the one I was looking for.
Not that I am now looking for someone to blame. No, if mistakes were made, look no further than yours truly.
I can honestly say that when I supposedly graduated over 25 years ago, somebody messed up.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know where I was going.
I received a degree in Elaborate Excuses, with a minor in Extra-curricular Activities, and before the ink had dried on my sheepskin I had my very own undergraduate and was dispensing educational advice to him with the ease of a bartender.
I told him he could pretend to drink without actually drinking.
I told him to take Chinese.
If I was to sum up the advice I gave my son as he headed off to college, it would be, ‘don’t smack your lips while you’re eating’, metaphorically speaking. I thought it was that simple. I thought the only thing he had to worry about was overdoing it.
Overdoing it was the only thing I had done well during my college days.
That was one reason I sent my son to a small, prestigious eastern college, instead of the enormous prestigious college I attended. I thought he would have fewer opportunities to overdo it.
And I felt that if anyone could produce an actual graduate – with an actual degree, they could.
I have to say that I am happy with the effort: theirs, not his.
The recent graduation weekend was one long ‘David Copperfield Makes the Statue of Liberty Disappear’ extravaganza.
Nothing that might have contributed to a successful matriculation – as they call it, was left out.
He had several Benedictions recited over him.
They had a Baccalaureate ceremony during which a traditional Sanskrit Hymn was played by a Master Sarod Player and accompanists.
There were a half-dozen Processions in his – and a few hundred other pupils, honor.
I counted at least two or three solemn Invocations.
There were endless speeches, honorary degrees, dire warnings about nuclear proliferation, and a parade of professors in medieval costumes.
They had a Lobster Bake and beer on tap.
They recited a lot of poetry too.
Poetry is a sure sign that someone is attempting to create graduates somewhere nearby.
If my son had suddenly begun to recite poetry, that would have convinced me.
Didn’t happen.
There were also speeches in Latin.
If my son had suddenly started to sign the new song by Maroon 5 – in Latin, that would have convinced me.
Didn’t happen.
Still, according to a translation of one of the Latin speeches recited by the school’s President, my son was no longer a pupil, “but a colleague”, and “all that your instructors have been able to do has been done.”
But that last phrase sounds suspiciously like the small print on a box of cereal: “Sold by weight, not by volume. Some settling of the contents may have taken place.”
That was what I think happened to me, during my college days: I didn’t get any smarter, I just had what I already knew, rearranged.
It also reminds me of the time I was not born again.
A few years after my ‘failed’ graduation I tried for another transformation: I wanted to be born again.
I attended the proper service, waited for the proper moment, raised my hand and asked to be born again.
But it didn’t take.
I told the people at the evangelical church that I didn’t think it had taken, but at first they didn’t believe me.
Just wait they said.
Wait a little longer, they said.
Just a few more days, they promised.
That was in 1985.
Maybe it’s the tassel.
Maybe the difference between a graduate on paper, and someone who really feels as if they have had an educational transformation, is the tassel. 25 years ago I may have forgotten to flip it from one side of my ‘mortar board’, to the other.
Or maybe I flipped it to the wrong side.
At my son’s small, expensive, fabulously landscaped college though, they had all the bases covered. They actually had someone assigned just to make sure all tassels were correctly flipped at the penultimate moment.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s my faith that’s lacking, not his.
Perhaps parents are physically unable to see what’s plain to everyone else.
After all, it’s in the book. It’s printed on paper. Soon it will be published in a local newspaper.
Maybe the kid actually did it.
All hail the college graduate!
Toe Tingling Tales
The end is near. Or rather, the end is obvious. That is, I now can see where the end begins, and it is a surprise, of sorts: not the end I thought it would be.
Most people expect the end will begin near the top, and work its way down. Those ends get all the publicity these days – and a large portion of our health care dollar. But for me, and countless others I suspect, it all begins –or ends, with the feet: the toes to be specific.
You begin to get careless, with your feet.
Not that any of us was ever were really careful with our feet: but then, we didn’t have to be. When I was a careless yoot - which is to say, by definition, “footloose and fancy free”, I went around barefoot all the time and, as a consequence, my feet took a real hammering - and it showed.
But those frequent stubs, whacks, smashes and crushings did not seem to merit any special attention, then. It didn’t seem to matter that, by the time I was fifteen, each big toe was already headed in opposite directions: it didn’t seem to have any effect on me at all (what does, at that age?).
I suppose if I had been a World Class Sprinter, or a toe model, or a ballet dancer, the effect of years of toe neglect might have been more apparent, a more serious matter. But for me, and most – the feet are simply transportation. No one looks too closely at the train they boarded at the station - until and unless it breaks down.
And even when a bus or a train, or a car breaks down – it doesn’t necessarily change our lives: it is usually a minor inconvenience, a temporary delay.
Ah but when the feet start to go, to really go, well, everything else follows quickly – no pun intended (well maybe a little pun intended).
This is not some abstract observation: it is difficult to observe the feet abstractly. Besides, any objectivity I might have possessed regarding my feet was lost, when I smashed the older brother of the pinkie toe on my right foot the other evening.
It’s a pathetic, but I am sure, familiar story.
I had stayed up late, watching some gruesome remake of a gruesome but technically unsophisticated B-Movie of the 50’s, and had fallen asleep on the couch. When I woke and turned off the television, I was surprised to find the entire first floor in darkness. I was still in that happy state of couch-bound semi-consciousness though, so I didn’t bother to turn on any lights. Instead, I shuffled robotically from the room, heading for the stairs, hoping to quickly regain full unconsciousness as soon as my head hit the pillow.
I never made it that far.
In my diminished state I forgot about the new bookcase around the darkened corner – an impediment which I had purchased some six months before just to have someplace to store excess stuff over Christmas. And though I seemed to be moving at a snail-like pace, I somehow managed to get every ounce of my 200-plus pounds behind that aforementioned toe as it slammed squarely in to the bottom of that faux-wooden furniture – hollow, lightweight furniture made deadly heavy by all of the weighty tomes that secured it to the earth.
It was a perfect shot.
A slam dunk.
If I had been hitting a golf ball off a tee with my toe, it would have gone 300 yards. Instead, that same energy shot out of that tiny appendage and then – having no place to go, rebounded directly into that same toe, crumbling its tiny little bones and producing the sound that a cheese curl makes when an eight year old boy is savoring its flavor.
I won’t bore you with the details.
I won’t describe for you the progression of colors and inflammation: how the toe blackened, the blood curdled at the juncture of toe and foot, the nail withered, and the other toes seemed to cringe in terror at the sight of their crumpled comrade.
The details of this specific toe’s demise in fact, matter very little. It is the resulting chain of events where your attention should be focused. Because, the lack of a toe – for all intents and purposes, created a series of related issues that far outweighed any pain that the actual broken toe produced.
You see, what you can’t do any more in the middle ages – or not nearly as efficiently as before – is compensate. I should say what “I can’t do anymore’.
Youth can be defined, accurately I think, as a kind of ‘compensation’ for what follows.
We are no more coordinated, or intelligent, or attractive than at any other time in our life when we are young – but we are able to compensate for our failings, and fallings. We say something stupid, and feign ignorance. We do something stupid, and feign ignorance.
The older person however, cannot compensate.
The wood has dried out.
The flexibility is gone.
We cannot take the day off, or sleep in.
Ignorance is no longer a valid excuse.
So from this toe bone turned to sawdust an army of ailments soon descended.
First, there was soreness in strange places.
Then twinges in odd places.
Then – like the sounds of far off celebrations on July 4th, small cannons and crackling strings of firecrackers could be heard going off.
My hips clicked.
My ankles popped.
My vertebrae jawed at one another.
It’s as if I was a plastic action figure that some sadistic kid had taken apart – arm by arm, leg by leg, and now someone had the unenviable task of putting me back together again.
It was all supposed to go together, but none of it seemed to fit.
It was all supposed to fit, but none of it seemed to go together.
For the lack of a toe the entire flesh-covered superstructure began to waver and wobble, and just staying upright became a challenge.
You know that song that goes, “the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone”, and so on? It should be rewritten to include the lynch pin of our entire ‘wouldn’t it be cool to walk upright’ facade: the toe bone!
For without the support of that peanut sized “falangeal” appendage there is additional strain on the calves, greater difficulty in balancing, additional twisting of the hips, and a host of otherwise insignificant muscles yanking on your back so that eventually the tension reaches all the way up from the hollow fold of skin that once housed a stout toe and pulls the chain on your skull.
Your head is the clapper in a giant bell.
It feels as if your brain is about to be sling-shot over the rooftops.
The end is near, and from what you can see it’s black and blue and curled up like Alladin’s favorite slippers.
What a way to go!
Most people expect the end will begin near the top, and work its way down. Those ends get all the publicity these days – and a large portion of our health care dollar. But for me, and countless others I suspect, it all begins –or ends, with the feet: the toes to be specific.
You begin to get careless, with your feet.
Not that any of us was ever were really careful with our feet: but then, we didn’t have to be. When I was a careless yoot - which is to say, by definition, “footloose and fancy free”, I went around barefoot all the time and, as a consequence, my feet took a real hammering - and it showed.
But those frequent stubs, whacks, smashes and crushings did not seem to merit any special attention, then. It didn’t seem to matter that, by the time I was fifteen, each big toe was already headed in opposite directions: it didn’t seem to have any effect on me at all (what does, at that age?).
I suppose if I had been a World Class Sprinter, or a toe model, or a ballet dancer, the effect of years of toe neglect might have been more apparent, a more serious matter. But for me, and most – the feet are simply transportation. No one looks too closely at the train they boarded at the station - until and unless it breaks down.
And even when a bus or a train, or a car breaks down – it doesn’t necessarily change our lives: it is usually a minor inconvenience, a temporary delay.
Ah but when the feet start to go, to really go, well, everything else follows quickly – no pun intended (well maybe a little pun intended).
This is not some abstract observation: it is difficult to observe the feet abstractly. Besides, any objectivity I might have possessed regarding my feet was lost, when I smashed the older brother of the pinkie toe on my right foot the other evening.
It’s a pathetic, but I am sure, familiar story.
I had stayed up late, watching some gruesome remake of a gruesome but technically unsophisticated B-Movie of the 50’s, and had fallen asleep on the couch. When I woke and turned off the television, I was surprised to find the entire first floor in darkness. I was still in that happy state of couch-bound semi-consciousness though, so I didn’t bother to turn on any lights. Instead, I shuffled robotically from the room, heading for the stairs, hoping to quickly regain full unconsciousness as soon as my head hit the pillow.
I never made it that far.
In my diminished state I forgot about the new bookcase around the darkened corner – an impediment which I had purchased some six months before just to have someplace to store excess stuff over Christmas. And though I seemed to be moving at a snail-like pace, I somehow managed to get every ounce of my 200-plus pounds behind that aforementioned toe as it slammed squarely in to the bottom of that faux-wooden furniture – hollow, lightweight furniture made deadly heavy by all of the weighty tomes that secured it to the earth.
It was a perfect shot.
A slam dunk.
If I had been hitting a golf ball off a tee with my toe, it would have gone 300 yards. Instead, that same energy shot out of that tiny appendage and then – having no place to go, rebounded directly into that same toe, crumbling its tiny little bones and producing the sound that a cheese curl makes when an eight year old boy is savoring its flavor.
I won’t bore you with the details.
I won’t describe for you the progression of colors and inflammation: how the toe blackened, the blood curdled at the juncture of toe and foot, the nail withered, and the other toes seemed to cringe in terror at the sight of their crumpled comrade.
The details of this specific toe’s demise in fact, matter very little. It is the resulting chain of events where your attention should be focused. Because, the lack of a toe – for all intents and purposes, created a series of related issues that far outweighed any pain that the actual broken toe produced.
You see, what you can’t do any more in the middle ages – or not nearly as efficiently as before – is compensate. I should say what “I can’t do anymore’.
Youth can be defined, accurately I think, as a kind of ‘compensation’ for what follows.
We are no more coordinated, or intelligent, or attractive than at any other time in our life when we are young – but we are able to compensate for our failings, and fallings. We say something stupid, and feign ignorance. We do something stupid, and feign ignorance.
The older person however, cannot compensate.
The wood has dried out.
The flexibility is gone.
We cannot take the day off, or sleep in.
Ignorance is no longer a valid excuse.
So from this toe bone turned to sawdust an army of ailments soon descended.
First, there was soreness in strange places.
Then twinges in odd places.
Then – like the sounds of far off celebrations on July 4th, small cannons and crackling strings of firecrackers could be heard going off.
My hips clicked.
My ankles popped.
My vertebrae jawed at one another.
It’s as if I was a plastic action figure that some sadistic kid had taken apart – arm by arm, leg by leg, and now someone had the unenviable task of putting me back together again.
It was all supposed to go together, but none of it seemed to fit.
It was all supposed to fit, but none of it seemed to go together.
For the lack of a toe the entire flesh-covered superstructure began to waver and wobble, and just staying upright became a challenge.
You know that song that goes, “the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone”, and so on? It should be rewritten to include the lynch pin of our entire ‘wouldn’t it be cool to walk upright’ facade: the toe bone!
For without the support of that peanut sized “falangeal” appendage there is additional strain on the calves, greater difficulty in balancing, additional twisting of the hips, and a host of otherwise insignificant muscles yanking on your back so that eventually the tension reaches all the way up from the hollow fold of skin that once housed a stout toe and pulls the chain on your skull.
Your head is the clapper in a giant bell.
It feels as if your brain is about to be sling-shot over the rooftops.
The end is near, and from what you can see it’s black and blue and curled up like Alladin’s favorite slippers.
What a way to go!
Friday, May 18, 2007
Don't Drink the Water
The old-timers wink at one another and mutter something about the water. There’s something in the water.
But in Plymouth, that doesn’t seem to hold up.
What water are we talking about: saltwater, well water, town water? Clearly – in Plymouth at least, it’s not the water.
Maybe it’s something in the air.
Maybe it’s the nukes?
What can explain it?
What explanation is there – to cite just one example, for Selectperson Jean Loewenberg – a corporate attorney and otherwise intelligent woman, running around in the dark, uprooting political signs and tossing them into the woods?
Never mind that these signs were illegally placed on town property.
Never mind that every year for every local election the majority of political signs seemed to be placed on town, or state property.
Loewenberg must have known, in the corporate side of her brain, that what she was doing was bone-headed at best: but she could not control herself.
But what about the other local politicians – and/or their lackeys, who repeatedly ignore the town law regulating the placement of these signs?
You are only supposed to place signs on private property – with the permission of the property owners. This can be a laborious process – but, if followed, the end result would indicate actual support of a candidate.
As it is, if median strips could vote we’d have record turnouts!
But the abuse of the political sign bylaws is only one of many signs of the madness that affects Plymouth in the spring.
What about Karen Buechs?
What is it that induces Karen to run and run and run?
Honestly, I thought this was Karen’s year. I expected that – with no ballot issues to lure the locals away from their precious weekend barbeques and lawn work, Karen’s dedicated cadre of ‘Don’t Tread on Me” Anti-Tax, Pro-Mayor, semi-pro election workers would win the day.
She had quite a few signs, in more than one color (I think she may even have recycled some of her old signs, from previous campaigns).
Ms. Buechs even had several television shows on the local cable access channel, which she either produced or directed – on which normally self-absorbed hosts repeatedly urged people to vote for her.
But Plymouth has spoken, and once again they spoke a blend of Mandarin, Hip-Hop and Portuguese.
Karen is out, but Kenny is in?
Former Selectman Ken Tavares was ousted last year in the same election in which Ms. Buech’s efforts to move the town toward Mayoral government, were overwhelmingly repudiated at the polls.
And - in that same election, Tavares lost to an inexperienced candidate supported by Buechs.
That was of course, Sean Dodgson, who served only a few months on the board before he was arrested for – what he has said was, his own private investigation of online sexual predators.
Maybe that’s it – the source of this strange behavior: perhaps it’s not the water but, instead, our Internet stream that’s tainted with some kind of virus.
So last year Dodgson took Tavares’ seat on the board, and the ‘Open” slate (who Tavares strongly supported) was elected and – this year, Buechs is out and Tavares is back in?
Tavares actually received more votes than anyone running for a contested office this year, and will now occupy what will forever be known as the SDS (the Sean Dodgson Seat).
I’m confused but, in general, I think I’m happy with the results.
I didn’t really follow the campaigns of any of the candidates, so my votes were based on bias and political signs alone.
I was a big supporter of Mr. Luscz, largely because I couldn’t pronounce his name – at first. Driving through town, reading the signs out loud, I guessed it was ‘loots’ or ‘luge’ or ‘lux’. But then I received some of his campaign literature in the mail. On one of his cards it said, “How Duscz Pronounce His Name?”.
How can you not vote for a guy who says his name rhymes with fuzzy?
So Fuzzy Luscz got my vote – and lost.
I was generally unfamiliar with the candidates for School Committee, and hoped that inspiration would strike. In the booth I saw that Amy Heine’s full name – listed on the ballot, was Amy “Little” Heine.
I voted for Little Heine, and she lost too.
Beyond that I didn’t have much to go on.
Butch Machado seemed to have more signs than anyone else –at least in my neck of the woods, but I’d heard people say his candidacy was “Much Ado” about nothing. I didn’t vote for Butch – and he won.
The big winner, of the losers that is, was Jeffrey Simpson.
I don’t think he had any signs.
I don’t think he had any literature.
I didn’t vote for him and yet, somehow, he still lost, big.
With just 264 votes Mr. Simpson was the lowest vote getter of any candidate for any office.
I expect big things from Jeffrey.
Next year he’ll probably have signs on the highway, at the Pet Cemetery, on the roof of Wal-Mart and beyond.
And after that, who knows?
No one knows.
Isn’t it great!
But in Plymouth, that doesn’t seem to hold up.
What water are we talking about: saltwater, well water, town water? Clearly – in Plymouth at least, it’s not the water.
Maybe it’s something in the air.
Maybe it’s the nukes?
What can explain it?
What explanation is there – to cite just one example, for Selectperson Jean Loewenberg – a corporate attorney and otherwise intelligent woman, running around in the dark, uprooting political signs and tossing them into the woods?
Never mind that these signs were illegally placed on town property.
Never mind that every year for every local election the majority of political signs seemed to be placed on town, or state property.
Loewenberg must have known, in the corporate side of her brain, that what she was doing was bone-headed at best: but she could not control herself.
But what about the other local politicians – and/or their lackeys, who repeatedly ignore the town law regulating the placement of these signs?
You are only supposed to place signs on private property – with the permission of the property owners. This can be a laborious process – but, if followed, the end result would indicate actual support of a candidate.
As it is, if median strips could vote we’d have record turnouts!
But the abuse of the political sign bylaws is only one of many signs of the madness that affects Plymouth in the spring.
What about Karen Buechs?
What is it that induces Karen to run and run and run?
Honestly, I thought this was Karen’s year. I expected that – with no ballot issues to lure the locals away from their precious weekend barbeques and lawn work, Karen’s dedicated cadre of ‘Don’t Tread on Me” Anti-Tax, Pro-Mayor, semi-pro election workers would win the day.
She had quite a few signs, in more than one color (I think she may even have recycled some of her old signs, from previous campaigns).
Ms. Buechs even had several television shows on the local cable access channel, which she either produced or directed – on which normally self-absorbed hosts repeatedly urged people to vote for her.
But Plymouth has spoken, and once again they spoke a blend of Mandarin, Hip-Hop and Portuguese.
Karen is out, but Kenny is in?
Former Selectman Ken Tavares was ousted last year in the same election in which Ms. Buech’s efforts to move the town toward Mayoral government, were overwhelmingly repudiated at the polls.
And - in that same election, Tavares lost to an inexperienced candidate supported by Buechs.
That was of course, Sean Dodgson, who served only a few months on the board before he was arrested for – what he has said was, his own private investigation of online sexual predators.
Maybe that’s it – the source of this strange behavior: perhaps it’s not the water but, instead, our Internet stream that’s tainted with some kind of virus.
So last year Dodgson took Tavares’ seat on the board, and the ‘Open” slate (who Tavares strongly supported) was elected and – this year, Buechs is out and Tavares is back in?
Tavares actually received more votes than anyone running for a contested office this year, and will now occupy what will forever be known as the SDS (the Sean Dodgson Seat).
I’m confused but, in general, I think I’m happy with the results.
I didn’t really follow the campaigns of any of the candidates, so my votes were based on bias and political signs alone.
I was a big supporter of Mr. Luscz, largely because I couldn’t pronounce his name – at first. Driving through town, reading the signs out loud, I guessed it was ‘loots’ or ‘luge’ or ‘lux’. But then I received some of his campaign literature in the mail. On one of his cards it said, “How Duscz Pronounce His Name?”.
How can you not vote for a guy who says his name rhymes with fuzzy?
So Fuzzy Luscz got my vote – and lost.
I was generally unfamiliar with the candidates for School Committee, and hoped that inspiration would strike. In the booth I saw that Amy Heine’s full name – listed on the ballot, was Amy “Little” Heine.
I voted for Little Heine, and she lost too.
Beyond that I didn’t have much to go on.
Butch Machado seemed to have more signs than anyone else –at least in my neck of the woods, but I’d heard people say his candidacy was “Much Ado” about nothing. I didn’t vote for Butch – and he won.
The big winner, of the losers that is, was Jeffrey Simpson.
I don’t think he had any signs.
I don’t think he had any literature.
I didn’t vote for him and yet, somehow, he still lost, big.
With just 264 votes Mr. Simpson was the lowest vote getter of any candidate for any office.
I expect big things from Jeffrey.
Next year he’ll probably have signs on the highway, at the Pet Cemetery, on the roof of Wal-Mart and beyond.
And after that, who knows?
No one knows.
Isn’t it great!
Belated Anniversary Wishes
I forgot. Another anniversary has come and gone without my acknowledgement.
I try to remember – honest I do, but there’s something wrong with me: something missing from my brain, when it comes to birthdays, anniversaries and such.
I should also admit that I have a convenient philosophical objection, to what I think is the endless marketing of anniversaries to sell everything from candy to cars.
Anyway, that’s my excuse.
What’s yours?
From what I can tell, you missed it too.
And I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that this was really more your anniversary than mine.
It was you that made such a big deal of it in the first place.
It was you, wasn’t it, who put up those flags on the overpass?
It was you who overwhelmingly, unabashedly, unreservedly approved of the invasion of Iraq, right?
Surely you couldn’t have forgotten, so soon, this important anniversary?
The end of the war in Iraq!
It’s been four years now, since ‘major combat operations’ ceased.
Don’t give me that sheepish grin.
You can pretend you missed the anniversary, but you can’t have forgotten that first celebration, four years ago, on an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego.
Banners waving, flags flying, the President dressed down in his flight suit.
A dictatorship overthrown, an army defeated, an historic capital city captured, weapons of mass destruction, democracy, shock and awe, salutes and speeches, yadda yadda yadda.
And it only took a few billion dollars and a little more than a hundred American lives.
A bargain!
There hasn’t been an occasion like that – excluding of course Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster production of Pearl Harbor - for more than four years.
So how did you forget it?
Where were you May 1st?
There were no parades, or solemn invocations – at least none that I heard of.
The day passed without fanfare, though later that same evening the President did make an appearance to talk about victory in Iraq, again.
Major combat operations ceased four years ago and, according to the President – any day now, victory will be in sight. In sight like the light at the end of the tunnel, I guess - a railway tunnel. Like a train bearing down on us.
I never thought that you could be nostalgic about war: but I really miss those days, those early days of peace in Iraq.
I miss all the fresh hype, the purple prose, the Country & Western Pop Star Propaganda. I miss the boyish antics of the President. The trips to the United Nations. The charts and graphs. The film footage of troops practicing getting into their biological warfare suits.
It was our own, 21st Century version of ‘duck and cover’.
Remember the ‘Axis of Evil’?
Remember ‘You can run, but you cannot hide’?
No, of course not: you’re quick on the draw, but a bit slow when it comes to the historical facts.
The Axis of Evil was Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, remember?
Today, after four years of what they are defining as ‘minor combat operations’, that Axis has grown.
What we have now, I suppose you might say, are Axes of Evil: a spider web of nations including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Indonesia, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Ethiopia, and a burgeoning terrorist underground.
A week doesn’t go by without a report – usually false, of a major Al Qaeda leader having been captured or killed. We used to have just ‘America’s Most Wanted” to look forward to: now we have “Today’s Top Ten Terrorists”.
A day doesn’t go by without reports of a car bomb, or a suicide bomber.
They have beheadings on YouTube and IED explosions on the Nightly News.
And a minute doesn’t go by without another government official admitting that the case for war was inflated, exaggerated, distorted or invented.
So, again, how could you have forgotten?
Where were you last Tuesday?
You didn’t even send a card, and they have such cute ones these days: cards for every occasion.
Here’s a few from the ‘Humorous Notes for the President’ section:
• “I know I said ‘Give Peace a Chance’”, written on the outside and, inside: “but I didn’t mean just one.”
• Or how about... “I believed you when you said, ‘Major Combat Operations have Ceased!” on the outside, and inside, “April Fools!”
• Or, “You’re not getting older” on the outside, and inside, “you’re just not as good a liar.”
• Or, “Let’s make it official”, on the outside, and inside, “you blew it.”
• Or just a simple “Belated Best Wishes on the Anniversary of the End of Major Combat Operations” on the outside. And inside a date that you can change to match the actual end of major combat operations.
Pick one out. Send it in.
It’s never too late to say you’re sorry.
I try to remember – honest I do, but there’s something wrong with me: something missing from my brain, when it comes to birthdays, anniversaries and such.
I should also admit that I have a convenient philosophical objection, to what I think is the endless marketing of anniversaries to sell everything from candy to cars.
Anyway, that’s my excuse.
What’s yours?
From what I can tell, you missed it too.
And I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that this was really more your anniversary than mine.
It was you that made such a big deal of it in the first place.
It was you, wasn’t it, who put up those flags on the overpass?
It was you who overwhelmingly, unabashedly, unreservedly approved of the invasion of Iraq, right?
Surely you couldn’t have forgotten, so soon, this important anniversary?
The end of the war in Iraq!
It’s been four years now, since ‘major combat operations’ ceased.
Don’t give me that sheepish grin.
You can pretend you missed the anniversary, but you can’t have forgotten that first celebration, four years ago, on an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego.
Banners waving, flags flying, the President dressed down in his flight suit.
A dictatorship overthrown, an army defeated, an historic capital city captured, weapons of mass destruction, democracy, shock and awe, salutes and speeches, yadda yadda yadda.
And it only took a few billion dollars and a little more than a hundred American lives.
A bargain!
There hasn’t been an occasion like that – excluding of course Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster production of Pearl Harbor - for more than four years.
So how did you forget it?
Where were you May 1st?
There were no parades, or solemn invocations – at least none that I heard of.
The day passed without fanfare, though later that same evening the President did make an appearance to talk about victory in Iraq, again.
Major combat operations ceased four years ago and, according to the President – any day now, victory will be in sight. In sight like the light at the end of the tunnel, I guess - a railway tunnel. Like a train bearing down on us.
I never thought that you could be nostalgic about war: but I really miss those days, those early days of peace in Iraq.
I miss all the fresh hype, the purple prose, the Country & Western Pop Star Propaganda. I miss the boyish antics of the President. The trips to the United Nations. The charts and graphs. The film footage of troops practicing getting into their biological warfare suits.
It was our own, 21st Century version of ‘duck and cover’.
Remember the ‘Axis of Evil’?
Remember ‘You can run, but you cannot hide’?
No, of course not: you’re quick on the draw, but a bit slow when it comes to the historical facts.
The Axis of Evil was Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, remember?
Today, after four years of what they are defining as ‘minor combat operations’, that Axis has grown.
What we have now, I suppose you might say, are Axes of Evil: a spider web of nations including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Indonesia, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Ethiopia, and a burgeoning terrorist underground.
A week doesn’t go by without a report – usually false, of a major Al Qaeda leader having been captured or killed. We used to have just ‘America’s Most Wanted” to look forward to: now we have “Today’s Top Ten Terrorists”.
A day doesn’t go by without reports of a car bomb, or a suicide bomber.
They have beheadings on YouTube and IED explosions on the Nightly News.
And a minute doesn’t go by without another government official admitting that the case for war was inflated, exaggerated, distorted or invented.
So, again, how could you have forgotten?
Where were you last Tuesday?
You didn’t even send a card, and they have such cute ones these days: cards for every occasion.
Here’s a few from the ‘Humorous Notes for the President’ section:
• “I know I said ‘Give Peace a Chance’”, written on the outside and, inside: “but I didn’t mean just one.”
• Or how about... “I believed you when you said, ‘Major Combat Operations have Ceased!” on the outside, and inside, “April Fools!”
• Or, “You’re not getting older” on the outside, and inside, “you’re just not as good a liar.”
• Or, “Let’s make it official”, on the outside, and inside, “you blew it.”
• Or just a simple “Belated Best Wishes on the Anniversary of the End of Major Combat Operations” on the outside. And inside a date that you can change to match the actual end of major combat operations.
Pick one out. Send it in.
It’s never too late to say you’re sorry.
A Bucket of Soldiers
I need to have more faith in my children, and their world.
I need to believe that they too, will overcome the crap – there is no other word for it: the effluvia, the waste, the trash, the sugar-dipped, deep-fat fried flotsam and jetsam that is spewed their way by our pay-as-you-go society.
I think – to be fair, that they are entitled to more time, to get down to ‘brass tacks’ as my parents might have said.
We don’t come to responsibility – naturally: it has to be grafted onto our genetic predisposition to flee from danger.
Primitive man formed the original habit – run or be eaten, and then added on other reasons for moving on: drought, fire, pestilence, greener pastures, wanderlust, and the cute girls in the tribe just over the hill. And so on.
Thousands of years later we still instinctively follow the path of least resistance: but thousands of years later it is not necessarily in our best interest to do so.
Travel is nice, but it does not necessarily make you a better person.
What we all need – is real experience. We need challenges. We need situations in which we have to – to use another cliché, ‘put up or shut up’. But nowadays it is far harder to find those kinds of experiences.
So we send our kids to camp, or sign them up for football, or make them mow the lawn – and are surprised when, at 18, or 20, or 25, they still seem clueless as to what it takes to make their own way in life.
And seeing that lack of maturity, we over-react – I think, to the elements of their existence that we find most alien to our generation. We scapegoat television and video games, and the toys that – in the absence of real responsibility, take up so much of their lives.
That’s where this diatribe comes from, by the way – from trying to understand what it is about today’s toys that our children find so appealing.
This column comes out of a few minutes before bedtime spent listening to my son excitedly tell me about Decepticons and Autobots.
Otherwise known as, the Transformers!
I didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
From my adult perspective, they seemed a complete waste of time, and money.
I thought I knew all the relevant information: which is that Transformers are large, often expensive, very complicated toys that ‘transform’ back and forth between machine and humanoid.
To put it briefly: the Autobots are good, the Decepticons (deceivers?) bad.
It began with a few simple Transformers - originally introduced over 30 years ago, and since that time has grown into a literal empire of toys.
What really bothers me about Transformers, and many of the other toys sold to our children today, is the ‘back-story’ that they all come with. To justify each and every new Transformer that comes onto the market, the manufacturers have created an elaborate fictional universe.
Though usually you also have to buy the book, batteries, and take adult education classes in electrical engineering to put them together, the modern toy does not require imagination: it comes complete with its own universe, its own heroes and villains.
Transformers are not just a series of toys, but a toy religion.
When you purchase these toys, in a real sense, you are asked to believe, to buy in to their often stilted, illogical, violent world views.
That’s a far cry – I thought at first, from the simple toys I had as a child. Those toys didn’t usually come with elaborate stories, invented universes, or their own television shows and feature films. They came in buckets, or boxes, with little if any instructions.
You took them out, set them up, and used them until they wore out or you lost interest in them.
But then again, thinking of the buckets of toy soldiers I owned as a child – I wonder if it wasn’t the same challenge?
Though you could buy toy solders by the thousands, and set them up anyway you liked, perhaps the rules of play that we were supposed to abide by were not so different, and were equally as confining, as modern toys.
While the Transformers creators spent a great deal of time and effort – and money, to establish a story line for their toys, the manufacturers of the toys of my childhood simply took their ‘story lines’ for granted.
Boys played war games – tossing clods of dirt at opposing armies, or gunning down ‘Indians’. Girls were given far less exciting toys to play with – and almost all of them focused on the domestic environment that it was assumed lay ahead for them.
In many ways the ‘story lines’ of the toys of my youth were as stifling to the imagination as those of today’s toy companies – or worse.
And didn’t we overcome those assumptions?
It’s a question worth asking.
I’d like to think that, despite all the time I spent digging in the dirt, positioning my tanks and bazooka-men for the big battle, that I was able to imagine a world without constant warfare.
I’d like to think that despite my love for the simple game of marbles, that I am able to handle the complexities of the real world.
There is very little about Transformers, or many of the similar toys and games that occupy so much of our children’s lives, that I find appealing. They are wonderfully engineered, but that’s about it.
I would rather my son do a hundred other things with his time, before he gets out his Cybertrons, or his Pokemon cards, or his Game Boy.
I will do anything, and everything I can, to make sure he knows he has other options, options that won’t just eat up the hours and ruin his eyesight.
But I need to have more faith that, in the end – given time and patience, he will be able to overcome the artificial, be able to see through the superficial, understand that there are better things to do with his time, better ways to live his life.
Maybe that’s how Transformers work.
After all the time spent putting the things together, snapping in the batteries, and reading the instruction you find yourself looking for better ways to help your children play, learn, and mature.
Cool!
I need to believe that they too, will overcome the crap – there is no other word for it: the effluvia, the waste, the trash, the sugar-dipped, deep-fat fried flotsam and jetsam that is spewed their way by our pay-as-you-go society.
I think – to be fair, that they are entitled to more time, to get down to ‘brass tacks’ as my parents might have said.
We don’t come to responsibility – naturally: it has to be grafted onto our genetic predisposition to flee from danger.
Primitive man formed the original habit – run or be eaten, and then added on other reasons for moving on: drought, fire, pestilence, greener pastures, wanderlust, and the cute girls in the tribe just over the hill. And so on.
Thousands of years later we still instinctively follow the path of least resistance: but thousands of years later it is not necessarily in our best interest to do so.
Travel is nice, but it does not necessarily make you a better person.
What we all need – is real experience. We need challenges. We need situations in which we have to – to use another cliché, ‘put up or shut up’. But nowadays it is far harder to find those kinds of experiences.
So we send our kids to camp, or sign them up for football, or make them mow the lawn – and are surprised when, at 18, or 20, or 25, they still seem clueless as to what it takes to make their own way in life.
And seeing that lack of maturity, we over-react – I think, to the elements of their existence that we find most alien to our generation. We scapegoat television and video games, and the toys that – in the absence of real responsibility, take up so much of their lives.
That’s where this diatribe comes from, by the way – from trying to understand what it is about today’s toys that our children find so appealing.
This column comes out of a few minutes before bedtime spent listening to my son excitedly tell me about Decepticons and Autobots.
Otherwise known as, the Transformers!
I didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
From my adult perspective, they seemed a complete waste of time, and money.
I thought I knew all the relevant information: which is that Transformers are large, often expensive, very complicated toys that ‘transform’ back and forth between machine and humanoid.
To put it briefly: the Autobots are good, the Decepticons (deceivers?) bad.
It began with a few simple Transformers - originally introduced over 30 years ago, and since that time has grown into a literal empire of toys.
What really bothers me about Transformers, and many of the other toys sold to our children today, is the ‘back-story’ that they all come with. To justify each and every new Transformer that comes onto the market, the manufacturers have created an elaborate fictional universe.
Though usually you also have to buy the book, batteries, and take adult education classes in electrical engineering to put them together, the modern toy does not require imagination: it comes complete with its own universe, its own heroes and villains.
Transformers are not just a series of toys, but a toy religion.
When you purchase these toys, in a real sense, you are asked to believe, to buy in to their often stilted, illogical, violent world views.
That’s a far cry – I thought at first, from the simple toys I had as a child. Those toys didn’t usually come with elaborate stories, invented universes, or their own television shows and feature films. They came in buckets, or boxes, with little if any instructions.
You took them out, set them up, and used them until they wore out or you lost interest in them.
But then again, thinking of the buckets of toy soldiers I owned as a child – I wonder if it wasn’t the same challenge?
Though you could buy toy solders by the thousands, and set them up anyway you liked, perhaps the rules of play that we were supposed to abide by were not so different, and were equally as confining, as modern toys.
While the Transformers creators spent a great deal of time and effort – and money, to establish a story line for their toys, the manufacturers of the toys of my childhood simply took their ‘story lines’ for granted.
Boys played war games – tossing clods of dirt at opposing armies, or gunning down ‘Indians’. Girls were given far less exciting toys to play with – and almost all of them focused on the domestic environment that it was assumed lay ahead for them.
In many ways the ‘story lines’ of the toys of my youth were as stifling to the imagination as those of today’s toy companies – or worse.
And didn’t we overcome those assumptions?
It’s a question worth asking.
I’d like to think that, despite all the time I spent digging in the dirt, positioning my tanks and bazooka-men for the big battle, that I was able to imagine a world without constant warfare.
I’d like to think that despite my love for the simple game of marbles, that I am able to handle the complexities of the real world.
There is very little about Transformers, or many of the similar toys and games that occupy so much of our children’s lives, that I find appealing. They are wonderfully engineered, but that’s about it.
I would rather my son do a hundred other things with his time, before he gets out his Cybertrons, or his Pokemon cards, or his Game Boy.
I will do anything, and everything I can, to make sure he knows he has other options, options that won’t just eat up the hours and ruin his eyesight.
But I need to have more faith that, in the end – given time and patience, he will be able to overcome the artificial, be able to see through the superficial, understand that there are better things to do with his time, better ways to live his life.
Maybe that’s how Transformers work.
After all the time spent putting the things together, snapping in the batteries, and reading the instruction you find yourself looking for better ways to help your children play, learn, and mature.
Cool!
Don't Mention It
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences, and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.” The Plague, by Albert Camus
The Egyptians may have had it right.
If Pharaoh, or anyone of prominence in ancient Egypt, did something really stupid – all record of their existence was obliterated.
Whether their name had been inscribed on a hundred granite obelisks, or a forty foot likeness had been carved into a cliff of stone, certain deeds were punished by absolute, eternal obscurity.
Their names were rubbed out.
Their statues toppled.
Their tombs filled with sand.
Of course eternal obscurity is not something you cannot guarantee. Historians and archaeologists have managed to piece together the names – and stories, of those the ancients tried to obscure.
But still, I think they had the right idea – and it wasn’t the obscure notion of a ancient culture: it was a basic emotional instinct that, I think, needs to be re-awoken in so-called modern man.
We have got to stop erecting monuments to evil.
Of course we don’t have obelisks, anymore – at least no one in my circle of friends does: but we do have many new ways in which notoriety is achieved.
The digital world is a kind of earth-sized board game, where with a roll of the electronic dice, it seems, anything can happen.
You Tube, Face Book, blogs, and the traditional media serve as a kind of fractured magic mirror in which our bloated vanity is reflected – though often it is only ourselves who care to look.
Still, there is at least the illusion of a digital democracy – and, as a result, the widespread fantasy that what is most often bad poetry, or amateur photography, or misbegotten philosophy, exists on the same level as that of the famous poet, the brilliant photographer, and the renowned philosopher.
And, at most, it is simply that – an illusion, or perhaps, a personal delusion: pathetic perhaps, but usually harmless.
Harmless, that is, until the kid with the cell phone, or the untalented starlet, or the so-called radio personality steps over the line. At which time their questionable beliefs and talent-free creations are metaphorically attached to a cable, pulled aloft, and dragged across the horizon where they cannot be ignored.
Stupidity, brutality, vanity: instead of guaranteeing obscurity, for those that perform an action that contains an over-abundance of any one of those attributes, they can expect fame and even fortune, instead.
The worse the action – the larger the monument we erect.
We have got things bass ackward!
I’m not suggesting we create laws which re-institute the digital equivalents of the stocks, or flogging, or corporal punishment, to try and impede certain behavior. But I am saying that we have to do more than ‘understand’ (as some media giants offer up as an excuse) that notoriety is a real reward, a real motivation.
Anna Nicole was a lousy mother, whose ditzy, drugged out behavior was rewarded time and time again, and who – when she died of an overdose of every pill she could lay her hands on, was turned into a Movie of the Week!
Cross her out!
Imus was a foul-mouthed, ex-drug addict, talk show host whose only excuse was that he was an equal-opportunity offender.
Turn him off!
And now the mentally ill man at Virginia Tech – whose name I refuse to mention, who lived only as long as it took him to plan and execute his media extravaganza.
Erase his name!
Stop giving these pathetic individuals attention.
Stop giving these idiots hours and hours of so-called ‘news coverage’.
Don’t put their faces on magazine covers.
Delete their web sites.
Don’t pay people who knew them, for telling us what they were like before they made the big time.
The only reasonable, human reaction to the murder of nearly three dozen members of the Virginia Tech community, was stunned shock.
The only reason for television cameras on the Virginia Tech campus after this crime, was to witness the grief.
The only commentary that we should have heard from the talking heads that flocked to Blacksburg like vultures to a carcass, was silence.
The first thing we need to do is expunge every public mention of the sad little man who wanted so badly for someone to notice him.
Let the historians have him. Let the psychologists have him.
But for the rest of us, erase him from the papers, the television, and the internet. To do otherwise is to trivialize tragedy, and encourage imitation.
To do otherwise is to build another monument to evil.
The Egyptians may have had it right.
If Pharaoh, or anyone of prominence in ancient Egypt, did something really stupid – all record of their existence was obliterated.
Whether their name had been inscribed on a hundred granite obelisks, or a forty foot likeness had been carved into a cliff of stone, certain deeds were punished by absolute, eternal obscurity.
Their names were rubbed out.
Their statues toppled.
Their tombs filled with sand.
Of course eternal obscurity is not something you cannot guarantee. Historians and archaeologists have managed to piece together the names – and stories, of those the ancients tried to obscure.
But still, I think they had the right idea – and it wasn’t the obscure notion of a ancient culture: it was a basic emotional instinct that, I think, needs to be re-awoken in so-called modern man.
We have got to stop erecting monuments to evil.
Of course we don’t have obelisks, anymore – at least no one in my circle of friends does: but we do have many new ways in which notoriety is achieved.
The digital world is a kind of earth-sized board game, where with a roll of the electronic dice, it seems, anything can happen.
You Tube, Face Book, blogs, and the traditional media serve as a kind of fractured magic mirror in which our bloated vanity is reflected – though often it is only ourselves who care to look.
Still, there is at least the illusion of a digital democracy – and, as a result, the widespread fantasy that what is most often bad poetry, or amateur photography, or misbegotten philosophy, exists on the same level as that of the famous poet, the brilliant photographer, and the renowned philosopher.
And, at most, it is simply that – an illusion, or perhaps, a personal delusion: pathetic perhaps, but usually harmless.
Harmless, that is, until the kid with the cell phone, or the untalented starlet, or the so-called radio personality steps over the line. At which time their questionable beliefs and talent-free creations are metaphorically attached to a cable, pulled aloft, and dragged across the horizon where they cannot be ignored.
Stupidity, brutality, vanity: instead of guaranteeing obscurity, for those that perform an action that contains an over-abundance of any one of those attributes, they can expect fame and even fortune, instead.
The worse the action – the larger the monument we erect.
We have got things bass ackward!
I’m not suggesting we create laws which re-institute the digital equivalents of the stocks, or flogging, or corporal punishment, to try and impede certain behavior. But I am saying that we have to do more than ‘understand’ (as some media giants offer up as an excuse) that notoriety is a real reward, a real motivation.
Anna Nicole was a lousy mother, whose ditzy, drugged out behavior was rewarded time and time again, and who – when she died of an overdose of every pill she could lay her hands on, was turned into a Movie of the Week!
Cross her out!
Imus was a foul-mouthed, ex-drug addict, talk show host whose only excuse was that he was an equal-opportunity offender.
Turn him off!
And now the mentally ill man at Virginia Tech – whose name I refuse to mention, who lived only as long as it took him to plan and execute his media extravaganza.
Erase his name!
Stop giving these pathetic individuals attention.
Stop giving these idiots hours and hours of so-called ‘news coverage’.
Don’t put their faces on magazine covers.
Delete their web sites.
Don’t pay people who knew them, for telling us what they were like before they made the big time.
The only reasonable, human reaction to the murder of nearly three dozen members of the Virginia Tech community, was stunned shock.
The only reason for television cameras on the Virginia Tech campus after this crime, was to witness the grief.
The only commentary that we should have heard from the talking heads that flocked to Blacksburg like vultures to a carcass, was silence.
The first thing we need to do is expunge every public mention of the sad little man who wanted so badly for someone to notice him.
Let the historians have him. Let the psychologists have him.
But for the rest of us, erase him from the papers, the television, and the internet. To do otherwise is to trivialize tragedy, and encourage imitation.
To do otherwise is to build another monument to evil.
Spring Fever, 2007
Forget NASCAR.
Forget the Kentucky Derby.
Forget the Sadie Hawkins Day Race.
Forget the rush to the hardware store for plywood and duct tape when the weatherman says a hurricane is headed your way.
The camera crews may miss it, and it rarely makes the nightly news, but there is no greater mad dash in America than that which takes place in New England when we get a sunny Saturday in April.
April showers bring May flowers is a cute little weather cliché that does little to mask the madness that spreads like a brushfire when we get one good day out of 30 at this time of year.
You would think we would know what’s coming by now, and organize ourselves ahead of time. There are those among us who have their mowers tuned up, their fertilizer bags stacked, and the Tiki lamps fueled and at the ready well before the end of March – but they are still not immune to the fever.
It seems to sneak up on us, every year.
Leading up to this past Saturday, April had been typically murky. The drabness of the weather even seemed bearable, especially in consideration of the way the recently departed winter had wimped out – at least ‘round here.
But make no mistake, the cold, the gray, and the occasional snow had still taken a toll, psychologically, on all of us, and we were more than ready - in fact well beyond eager - we were actually chomping at the bit (or on the remote control if a bit wasn’t readily available) for a chance get off the couch and do something, anything, as long as we were doing it under a shining sun.
And then of course – perfect timing, a massive storm began moving through the country – left to right, with the weathermen gleefully promising that we would soon be swimming in it, literally, for days.
If you had forgotten, you realized then that April showers, in fact, bring flooded basements, turn charming country roads into boulevards of mud, and seem to carry with them more than their fair share of viruses that had – my theory, lay dormant in the cold soil until this time of the year.
And so – along with the normal chorus of sneezes and sniffles, a wave of panic swept from house to house, from Bangor to Hartford, as everyone realized at the same time that “this might be the last sunny Saturday for weeks!”
The race was on!
At Lowes and Home Depot the stainless steel gas barbeques were lined up like storm troopers, for as far as the eye could see – and soon began boarding a thousand oversized SUVS.
At a dozen or so lawn and garden stores, endless trays of flowers were teased into bloom and pushed out the door faster than burgers at a fast food joint.
That vibration you felt underfoot as you tentatively tread your soggy lawn for the first time in several months, wasn’t a minor earthquake, it was Roto-Tillers by the hundreds, turning the earth inside out.
That buzzing sound you heard wasn’t the long awaited Killer Bees, finally moving north from Texas; it was fertilizer companies in their cute little pastel trucks, swarming into your suburban enclave.
Were there games being played at the town’s ballfields? Not really. But the recreations areas were crowded with aspiring Little League coaches who sought to prove their mettle by wheeling load after load of loam onto the ballfields, which the weather, a day or so later, licked off the base paths like frosting off a cake.
According to statistics gathered by my crack team of crank callers:
1673 new mailboxes were installed on this sunny Saturday.
45,555 pounds of weed and feed were spread, in clumps and clods and the occasional fine spray of pellets.
Though there was no precipitation it still rained - buckets of mulch.
1104 moldy plastic pieces of deck furniture were rescued from sheds, carefully evaluated, and then taken to the dump.
1773 new pieces of plastic deck furniture were rapidly purchased and promptly put on the deck where the expected rainfall would soon begin to lay the foundation for new mold and mildew.
Enough charcoal was sold to power the space shuttle, and men braver than me stood out in the cold that evening, in short sleeves, talking to themselves, waving tongs and knives in the air, under the delusion that they were having a summer barbeque.
Liquor stores reported that beer purchases were way, way, up, but – according to my friend Dan, with temperatures in the high 40’s consumption lagged.
Baseball gloves sold like hotcakes, while hotcake sales were slow.
In order to accommodate the madness, the Cape Cod Tunnel was open to all, and the Red Sox played with the dome open.
Rome wasn’t built in a day – the saying goes, but New Englanders took their best shot at it this past Saturday.
Forget the Kentucky Derby.
Forget the Sadie Hawkins Day Race.
Forget the rush to the hardware store for plywood and duct tape when the weatherman says a hurricane is headed your way.
The camera crews may miss it, and it rarely makes the nightly news, but there is no greater mad dash in America than that which takes place in New England when we get a sunny Saturday in April.
April showers bring May flowers is a cute little weather cliché that does little to mask the madness that spreads like a brushfire when we get one good day out of 30 at this time of year.
You would think we would know what’s coming by now, and organize ourselves ahead of time. There are those among us who have their mowers tuned up, their fertilizer bags stacked, and the Tiki lamps fueled and at the ready well before the end of March – but they are still not immune to the fever.
It seems to sneak up on us, every year.
Leading up to this past Saturday, April had been typically murky. The drabness of the weather even seemed bearable, especially in consideration of the way the recently departed winter had wimped out – at least ‘round here.
But make no mistake, the cold, the gray, and the occasional snow had still taken a toll, psychologically, on all of us, and we were more than ready - in fact well beyond eager - we were actually chomping at the bit (or on the remote control if a bit wasn’t readily available) for a chance get off the couch and do something, anything, as long as we were doing it under a shining sun.
And then of course – perfect timing, a massive storm began moving through the country – left to right, with the weathermen gleefully promising that we would soon be swimming in it, literally, for days.
If you had forgotten, you realized then that April showers, in fact, bring flooded basements, turn charming country roads into boulevards of mud, and seem to carry with them more than their fair share of viruses that had – my theory, lay dormant in the cold soil until this time of the year.
And so – along with the normal chorus of sneezes and sniffles, a wave of panic swept from house to house, from Bangor to Hartford, as everyone realized at the same time that “this might be the last sunny Saturday for weeks!”
The race was on!
At Lowes and Home Depot the stainless steel gas barbeques were lined up like storm troopers, for as far as the eye could see – and soon began boarding a thousand oversized SUVS.
At a dozen or so lawn and garden stores, endless trays of flowers were teased into bloom and pushed out the door faster than burgers at a fast food joint.
That vibration you felt underfoot as you tentatively tread your soggy lawn for the first time in several months, wasn’t a minor earthquake, it was Roto-Tillers by the hundreds, turning the earth inside out.
That buzzing sound you heard wasn’t the long awaited Killer Bees, finally moving north from Texas; it was fertilizer companies in their cute little pastel trucks, swarming into your suburban enclave.
Were there games being played at the town’s ballfields? Not really. But the recreations areas were crowded with aspiring Little League coaches who sought to prove their mettle by wheeling load after load of loam onto the ballfields, which the weather, a day or so later, licked off the base paths like frosting off a cake.
According to statistics gathered by my crack team of crank callers:
1673 new mailboxes were installed on this sunny Saturday.
45,555 pounds of weed and feed were spread, in clumps and clods and the occasional fine spray of pellets.
Though there was no precipitation it still rained - buckets of mulch.
1104 moldy plastic pieces of deck furniture were rescued from sheds, carefully evaluated, and then taken to the dump.
1773 new pieces of plastic deck furniture were rapidly purchased and promptly put on the deck where the expected rainfall would soon begin to lay the foundation for new mold and mildew.
Enough charcoal was sold to power the space shuttle, and men braver than me stood out in the cold that evening, in short sleeves, talking to themselves, waving tongs and knives in the air, under the delusion that they were having a summer barbeque.
Liquor stores reported that beer purchases were way, way, up, but – according to my friend Dan, with temperatures in the high 40’s consumption lagged.
Baseball gloves sold like hotcakes, while hotcake sales were slow.
In order to accommodate the madness, the Cape Cod Tunnel was open to all, and the Red Sox played with the dome open.
Rome wasn’t built in a day – the saying goes, but New Englanders took their best shot at it this past Saturday.
Celebrity Cannibal
At bath time, for no particularly reason, we used to tell my youngest son the story of Virgil the Worm, who ate his entire family.
It wasn’t a Jeffery Dahmer tale, full of ghastly, ghoulish monsters.
It was just your usual, harmless child’s fable – with cannibals and frightening metamorphoses.
One day, the story goes, Virgil went to kindergarten and the teacher, somewhat insensitively, remarked on his diminutive stature.
Actually, when you tell this story you’re supposed to say that the teacher said – in a kind of childish, toothless voice, “Virgil, how come you’re so small?”
In the story Virgil just shrugs, indifferent to his stature at first. But on the way home that day he starts to think about the teacher’s comment and, before the bus arrives at his stop, he vows to grow by any means necessary: (there is no dialogue to that effect, but it is implied by the action that follows).
The next day Virgil goes to school again - a changed worm, and the teacher remarks, “Virgil, how’d you get so big?”
While you’re telling this, you use your hands to indicate that Virgil is now, ‘this much bigger’.
And Virgil replies: “I ate my little sister.”
Suffice it to say that each day Virgil gets bigger, as he eats his way through his entire family: little sister, little brother, big sister, big brother, and so on and so on.
You can make the story as long as you like: just add or delete family members on the way.
The punch line, of a sort, is that after eating his mother and father and growing to over a yard in length (‘this big!’), the very next day Virgil shows up at school at his original, puny, inch and three-quarters length.
And when his teacher asks him what happened, he replied… “I burped”.
My God, Bobby loved that story.
I am not sure if it was the notion of eating all available relatives, rapid growth, or the slapstick image of Virgil ‘burping’ up his entire clan, but when the punch line was delivered he would practically go limp with laughter, sliding down into the tub like a trained seal.
I started thinking about that old story this week, when I heard the latest Keith Richard’s fable.
‘Keef’, the story goes, snorted his father’s ashes – mixed in, of course, with a little of the old Kickapoo Joy Juice.
I don’t believe the story and, in fact, Keef now denies it too. It seems he was having a bit of fun with journalists who would like nothing better than for him to admit such things.
People are going to make these things up about him anyway, so why not get in on the action. It is almost an obligation of the famous, to regularly astound us with their normalcy – which is, to say, their stupidity.
‘Keef’, the eager journalist asks, ‘where’d you learn to play guitar’?
“I snorted Chuck Berry”.
‘Keef’, the next in line queries, ‘where’d you learn to play that lick’?
“I snorted Jimi Hendrix”.
It’s nice, isn’t it, to have celebrities around to ridicule, when we’re feeling blue, but the truth, I think, is that WE are the cannibals. We are the ones who, given the opportunity, would snort up starlets and sports stars and anyone who was somehow famous, and do it without any kind of ‘chaser’. We are the ones, who everyday arrive at school, or work, wearing the designated designer clothes of our favorite soap store, the baseball caps of our famous team, the tee shirt with our favorite band’s logo, the tattoos that reveal our desired tribal affiliation.
Whatever happened to, so-called, individuality?
At one time, in the not too distant past – there was at least a token nod given to being an individual – with all of the quirks and eccentricities that come with going your own way. But perhaps it was naive to think that individuality stood a chance in this, or any age.
And perhaps our worship – our devouring of everything allegedly famous, is our last gasp attempt to be unique, by being anything but who we are.
You might argue that individuality today, is the sum of our desires.
And that may work - for now at least.
But as we watch, science is bridging the gap between who we desire to be, and who we appear to be.
In a few years (I Predict!) celebrity body parts are going to be big, huge, humongous, and mostly importantly - affordable!
Apart from the obvious desire for certain starlets’ partlets, I think the cloning industry will concentrate on those parts that they can reproduce in quantity, cost effectively.
A celebrity breast cloning and transfer, for example, would require a complex, relatively slow, and medically dangerous series of procedures.
If you want Brittney’s Best, it could cost you a fortune, so why not just go with the artificial.
But what about buying some famous somebody’s lips, or lobes, or nails?
How about Beyonce’s lashes?
What if you could grow a movie star’s hair in the privacy of your own home?
Scented soap will be made from the cloned bones of the beautiful people.
Jennifer Lopez – so well preserved after all these years, will have a designer line of genetic knock-offs.
And when this happens the only thing that will separate one clone from another, will be their credit card numbers.
I don’t mean to preach, it just comes out that way. I am not immune to this celebrity fever. To be imperfectly honest, I once worked at Mass General’s laboratories in Charlestown, where I had access to the early research in this area. And they were only too happy to let me – and any other cash-starved youth, volunteer for product testing.
You sign a waiver, you let them inject you, you get a check.
In this case though, I also acquired great personal beauty.
For a time I had Robert Plant’s voice.
For a while, I had Mick Jagger’s lips.
For several years, I had Roger Daltrey’s hair.
I became addicted to celebrity parts, which I just kept adding one after the other until no one recognized me, though everyone said I looked ‘very familiar’.
And then one day it all went away.
One day I was cool, young, hip, and handsome.
And the next day I had the puffer fish face I was born with.
You know the story.
You know what happened.
I burped.
It wasn’t a Jeffery Dahmer tale, full of ghastly, ghoulish monsters.
It was just your usual, harmless child’s fable – with cannibals and frightening metamorphoses.
One day, the story goes, Virgil went to kindergarten and the teacher, somewhat insensitively, remarked on his diminutive stature.
Actually, when you tell this story you’re supposed to say that the teacher said – in a kind of childish, toothless voice, “Virgil, how come you’re so small?”
In the story Virgil just shrugs, indifferent to his stature at first. But on the way home that day he starts to think about the teacher’s comment and, before the bus arrives at his stop, he vows to grow by any means necessary: (there is no dialogue to that effect, but it is implied by the action that follows).
The next day Virgil goes to school again - a changed worm, and the teacher remarks, “Virgil, how’d you get so big?”
While you’re telling this, you use your hands to indicate that Virgil is now, ‘this much bigger’.
And Virgil replies: “I ate my little sister.”
Suffice it to say that each day Virgil gets bigger, as he eats his way through his entire family: little sister, little brother, big sister, big brother, and so on and so on.
You can make the story as long as you like: just add or delete family members on the way.
The punch line, of a sort, is that after eating his mother and father and growing to over a yard in length (‘this big!’), the very next day Virgil shows up at school at his original, puny, inch and three-quarters length.
And when his teacher asks him what happened, he replied… “I burped”.
My God, Bobby loved that story.
I am not sure if it was the notion of eating all available relatives, rapid growth, or the slapstick image of Virgil ‘burping’ up his entire clan, but when the punch line was delivered he would practically go limp with laughter, sliding down into the tub like a trained seal.
I started thinking about that old story this week, when I heard the latest Keith Richard’s fable.
‘Keef’, the story goes, snorted his father’s ashes – mixed in, of course, with a little of the old Kickapoo Joy Juice.
I don’t believe the story and, in fact, Keef now denies it too. It seems he was having a bit of fun with journalists who would like nothing better than for him to admit such things.
People are going to make these things up about him anyway, so why not get in on the action. It is almost an obligation of the famous, to regularly astound us with their normalcy – which is, to say, their stupidity.
‘Keef’, the eager journalist asks, ‘where’d you learn to play guitar’?
“I snorted Chuck Berry”.
‘Keef’, the next in line queries, ‘where’d you learn to play that lick’?
“I snorted Jimi Hendrix”.
It’s nice, isn’t it, to have celebrities around to ridicule, when we’re feeling blue, but the truth, I think, is that WE are the cannibals. We are the ones who, given the opportunity, would snort up starlets and sports stars and anyone who was somehow famous, and do it without any kind of ‘chaser’. We are the ones, who everyday arrive at school, or work, wearing the designated designer clothes of our favorite soap store, the baseball caps of our famous team, the tee shirt with our favorite band’s logo, the tattoos that reveal our desired tribal affiliation.
Whatever happened to, so-called, individuality?
At one time, in the not too distant past – there was at least a token nod given to being an individual – with all of the quirks and eccentricities that come with going your own way. But perhaps it was naive to think that individuality stood a chance in this, or any age.
And perhaps our worship – our devouring of everything allegedly famous, is our last gasp attempt to be unique, by being anything but who we are.
You might argue that individuality today, is the sum of our desires.
And that may work - for now at least.
But as we watch, science is bridging the gap between who we desire to be, and who we appear to be.
In a few years (I Predict!) celebrity body parts are going to be big, huge, humongous, and mostly importantly - affordable!
Apart from the obvious desire for certain starlets’ partlets, I think the cloning industry will concentrate on those parts that they can reproduce in quantity, cost effectively.
A celebrity breast cloning and transfer, for example, would require a complex, relatively slow, and medically dangerous series of procedures.
If you want Brittney’s Best, it could cost you a fortune, so why not just go with the artificial.
But what about buying some famous somebody’s lips, or lobes, or nails?
How about Beyonce’s lashes?
What if you could grow a movie star’s hair in the privacy of your own home?
Scented soap will be made from the cloned bones of the beautiful people.
Jennifer Lopez – so well preserved after all these years, will have a designer line of genetic knock-offs.
And when this happens the only thing that will separate one clone from another, will be their credit card numbers.
I don’t mean to preach, it just comes out that way. I am not immune to this celebrity fever. To be imperfectly honest, I once worked at Mass General’s laboratories in Charlestown, where I had access to the early research in this area. And they were only too happy to let me – and any other cash-starved youth, volunteer for product testing.
You sign a waiver, you let them inject you, you get a check.
In this case though, I also acquired great personal beauty.
For a time I had Robert Plant’s voice.
For a while, I had Mick Jagger’s lips.
For several years, I had Roger Daltrey’s hair.
I became addicted to celebrity parts, which I just kept adding one after the other until no one recognized me, though everyone said I looked ‘very familiar’.
And then one day it all went away.
One day I was cool, young, hip, and handsome.
And the next day I had the puffer fish face I was born with.
You know the story.
You know what happened.
I burped.
The Headless Woman, and Other Stories..
I heard that there is a native tribe in Arizona building an elaborate diving board on the edge of the eastern edge of the Grand Canyon.
I’m told they see it as the final solution to the problem of the White Man, and as a convenient, if ironic method for raising funds for the tribe’s own social service programs.
It’s not the horseshoe shape of the viewing platform that their brothers on the far side of the Canyon recently finished – it is, as I said, a diving board: a narrow rectangle that sticks out over the edge of the canyon.
“You get a great last look” one of the tribal elders allegedly said, “from a series of rapidly different perspectives.”
“Go west young man” a member of the tribe supposedly interjected, and the others tittered nervously.
The diving board to eternity won’t be finished for 18 months, but I hear they already have thousands of reservations.
I’m not surprised.
We have been in such a hurry since we came to this continent.
It’s been as if Filene’s Basement held their wedding gown sale every day for 400 years running.
As soon as the doors opened the brides-to-be rushed in, grabbing land, claiming mineral rights, building factories, and taking no prisoners as they marched from sea to shining sea in search of a better quality of life.
What exactly quality of life consists of however, has evolved, over the years.
At first, it was simply surviving.
Then it was owning – the water, the woods, other humans.
Then we got the notion that quality of life had something to do with personal freedom – so, after killing each other by the hundreds of thousands, we decreed that whatever an individual believed quality of life was, that individual had to respect the lives of other humans.
Unless Congress said so.
Eventually in our search for a better quality of life we reached the end of the continent, divvied up the remaining resources, let everyone vote, and realized that the only thing that was left to fight for – was life itself.
And so we demanded more time to figure things out.
…
I went to a side show at a county fair years ago, and saw The Headless Woman.
She’d been decapitated in a freak car accident – a man in a white smock solemnly explained, but an enterprising young man who happened upon her body moments after the accident, was able to preserve her.
So there she sat, a perfect specimen - save for the absence of her head.
Plastic tubes – allegedly providing a gas that supposedly provided nutrients and kept her skin supple and pinkish, came out of her neck.
Volunteers – the smocked pseudo-scientist called for: anyone who wished could ‘step right up’ and pinch the flesh of her calf, thereby assuring themselves of her reality.
I stepped forward then, and in a sense that is what I am doing here now: stepping forward and giving a philosophical pinch to our society’s obsession with extended life for its own sake.
The reality is – as I see it, is that too many of us live beyond our physical abilities.
The sad truth is, more and more of us live well beyond our mental ability to take care of ourselves in old age.
The hard truth is that we are extending life beyond our ability to afford it.
We simply live too long.
There are tubes coming out of the place where our head should be.
…
Then there’s the joke about the Englishman, the Mexican, and the Texan, flying home from a vacation in Hawaii, when the one of their plane’s two engines breaks.
We need two volunteers, the Captain comes over the intercom, saying: unless two passengers are ejected, the whole plane will crash into the sea.
“God Save the Queen,” the Englishman yells, and leaps out of the plane.
“Remember the Alamo”, the Texan yells, and throws out the Mexican.
No, I am not volunteering. I am not interested in seeing the Grand Canyon, up close and personal, not yet at least.
I’m part of the problem, and I know it.
I can see the end coming, but the closer it gets the more reasons I can find for avoiding it.
I am young – relatively speaking, but I am already sure that when I am in my eighties or nineties, I will be the exception to the rule.
One of the fastest growing age groups – at least in this country, are those between 65 and 80, and that age group requires more and more of society’s resources to support them, or should I say – to resuscitate them.
With rare exceptions, if you live beyond your seventies you will need to go back to the factory for repairs, replacements, lube jobs and such.
New knees, new hips, new teeth, new hair – and that is just for starters.
And for the most part they can make you ‘like new’.
But I am not sure I want to be a collector’s item.
Is the car that is kept in a garage all year long, still a car?
There is something to be said for the dignity of the rusted out old Buick, sitting in the weeds on the side of the road, where it finally broke down.
But I don’t have an answer, or a solution.
I just see the problem, see it growing, and see it affecting everyone, of every age.
My father is 85, and obnoxiously healthy. But other family members are near permanent residents of the nearby hospitals and rehabilitation centers.
We have learned to survive, well beyond our natural years.
It may take centuries, for understanding to catch up.
I’m told they see it as the final solution to the problem of the White Man, and as a convenient, if ironic method for raising funds for the tribe’s own social service programs.
It’s not the horseshoe shape of the viewing platform that their brothers on the far side of the Canyon recently finished – it is, as I said, a diving board: a narrow rectangle that sticks out over the edge of the canyon.
“You get a great last look” one of the tribal elders allegedly said, “from a series of rapidly different perspectives.”
“Go west young man” a member of the tribe supposedly interjected, and the others tittered nervously.
The diving board to eternity won’t be finished for 18 months, but I hear they already have thousands of reservations.
I’m not surprised.
We have been in such a hurry since we came to this continent.
It’s been as if Filene’s Basement held their wedding gown sale every day for 400 years running.
As soon as the doors opened the brides-to-be rushed in, grabbing land, claiming mineral rights, building factories, and taking no prisoners as they marched from sea to shining sea in search of a better quality of life.
What exactly quality of life consists of however, has evolved, over the years.
At first, it was simply surviving.
Then it was owning – the water, the woods, other humans.
Then we got the notion that quality of life had something to do with personal freedom – so, after killing each other by the hundreds of thousands, we decreed that whatever an individual believed quality of life was, that individual had to respect the lives of other humans.
Unless Congress said so.
Eventually in our search for a better quality of life we reached the end of the continent, divvied up the remaining resources, let everyone vote, and realized that the only thing that was left to fight for – was life itself.
And so we demanded more time to figure things out.
…
I went to a side show at a county fair years ago, and saw The Headless Woman.
She’d been decapitated in a freak car accident – a man in a white smock solemnly explained, but an enterprising young man who happened upon her body moments after the accident, was able to preserve her.
So there she sat, a perfect specimen - save for the absence of her head.
Plastic tubes – allegedly providing a gas that supposedly provided nutrients and kept her skin supple and pinkish, came out of her neck.
Volunteers – the smocked pseudo-scientist called for: anyone who wished could ‘step right up’ and pinch the flesh of her calf, thereby assuring themselves of her reality.
I stepped forward then, and in a sense that is what I am doing here now: stepping forward and giving a philosophical pinch to our society’s obsession with extended life for its own sake.
The reality is – as I see it, is that too many of us live beyond our physical abilities.
The sad truth is, more and more of us live well beyond our mental ability to take care of ourselves in old age.
The hard truth is that we are extending life beyond our ability to afford it.
We simply live too long.
There are tubes coming out of the place where our head should be.
…
Then there’s the joke about the Englishman, the Mexican, and the Texan, flying home from a vacation in Hawaii, when the one of their plane’s two engines breaks.
We need two volunteers, the Captain comes over the intercom, saying: unless two passengers are ejected, the whole plane will crash into the sea.
“God Save the Queen,” the Englishman yells, and leaps out of the plane.
“Remember the Alamo”, the Texan yells, and throws out the Mexican.
No, I am not volunteering. I am not interested in seeing the Grand Canyon, up close and personal, not yet at least.
I’m part of the problem, and I know it.
I can see the end coming, but the closer it gets the more reasons I can find for avoiding it.
I am young – relatively speaking, but I am already sure that when I am in my eighties or nineties, I will be the exception to the rule.
One of the fastest growing age groups – at least in this country, are those between 65 and 80, and that age group requires more and more of society’s resources to support them, or should I say – to resuscitate them.
With rare exceptions, if you live beyond your seventies you will need to go back to the factory for repairs, replacements, lube jobs and such.
New knees, new hips, new teeth, new hair – and that is just for starters.
And for the most part they can make you ‘like new’.
But I am not sure I want to be a collector’s item.
Is the car that is kept in a garage all year long, still a car?
There is something to be said for the dignity of the rusted out old Buick, sitting in the weeds on the side of the road, where it finally broke down.
But I don’t have an answer, or a solution.
I just see the problem, see it growing, and see it affecting everyone, of every age.
My father is 85, and obnoxiously healthy. But other family members are near permanent residents of the nearby hospitals and rehabilitation centers.
We have learned to survive, well beyond our natural years.
It may take centuries, for understanding to catch up.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Leaving Room for Hunger
If you believe the critics, public schools can’t teach the ABC’s because of the Killer B’s: bullies, bureaucrats, and broken-down buildings.
I worry more about efficiency.
Today’s public school is a marvel of modern organization: a beehive of activity.
But where are they hiding the honey?
In my elementary days, things weren’t nearly as neat and tidy.
I remember, as a child, arriving at school everyday with a delicious sense of dread. I remember hushed accounts of spanking machines, and teachers that were odd, unusual, even spooky – at least to my literally untutored eyes. I will never forget one particularly sweet matron – a third grade teacher who honestly, earnestly believed in elves. So maybe I am romanticizing a time that was not exactly the golden age of education.
Perhaps.
Certainly today’s teachers are better educated than ever before, and deserve to be considered ‘professionals’, and paid accordingly.
But I am worried that we are squandering their skill, and surrendering our children to – heaven forbid, the statisticians!
A week ago Wednesday was my son’s first experience with that sausage-maker known in Massachusetts as the THE MCAS – and, coincidentally, was also the last day of his first journey through The Lord of the Rings.
Mary read the entire Lord of the Rings to him, out loud, every night (for the most part) over more than 100 days.
Nothing, I think, could be more stimulating to his brain, and important to his ‘development’, than to go along on that Journey with Tolkien.
At times he was exhilarated.
At times he was in tears.
There were occasions when he was angry, with the author and the world.
Who was this man called Strider?
Who were those dark riders?
Why did Sam choose to stay in the shire, while Bilbo and Sam and Gandalf, sailed away to the Havens?
But then, you may never have had the pleasure of reading The Lord of the Rings. Certainly though, you have felt the thrill that great writing, or travel, or a chance encounter can produce: that jolt of current down your spine?
It is the intensity of our experiences, I believe, that forge our character – not the accumulation of information.
You want facts, try a phone book.
A phone book is an efficient transmitter of facts.
A phone book however, does not have complexity, and is short on emotion. A phone book offers little in the way of adventure, and requires absolutely no imagination.
Like the MCAS.
I’m concerned that the MCAS getting in the way of our children’s education.
Are we forgetting about the joy of learning because the focus is on developing the skill of testing?
Is the entire educational experience being slowly boiled down to a series of rubbery, tasteless, tests?
Try and imagine your favorite book, reduced to a list of names of characters, incidents of plot, and other abstract facts. That would be like coming home from a cross-country trip, with nothing but snapshots of highway signs to tell the story.
Exit 3, Tom Bombadil.
Exit 7, The Orcs
Exit 17: The Eye of Sauron.
That is what I fear our focus on testing, our obsession with grades, and our panic about college admissions, is attempting to do: reduce the educational experience to its least common denominator.
I don’t fault the teachers.
The teachers I know are valiantly trying to fight the power. If they had their way their classrooms would be colorful, vibrant places full of mystery and magic, and adventure.
But they are up against a society that is content to feed their children, calorie-free canned experiences – and then expects teachers to somehow fill in the blanks.
It’s impossible.
I think we need to choose. Either school should be an enriching experience that awakens young minds to the possibilities of the world – and trusts them to choose their own path in their own time, or it can be a training camp – a rehearsal for the drudgery that awaits them.
I am, of course, using a thick, broad brush to make a point.
Drudgery doesn’t necessarily await all those who attend public schools – far from it.
The MCAS is not the Eye of Sauron, keeping an unblinking watch on the slaves of public education.
But at the very least the eye of the student is being jaundiced by our focus on what we like to call ‘results’.
If we train their minds, but fail to exercise their emotional musculature, we should not be surprised when they perform well on the standardized tests, but collapse at their first encounter with the unpredictable world that awaits them.
When the last words of The Lord of the Rings were left dangling in the air, Patrick was not happy. He couldn’t understand why the ‘Fellowship’ could not stay together. He yearned for a sugary ending but was given - even in this epic fantasy, something bittersweet instead.
Evil was defeated, for now, but the Shire did not escape unscathed.
Lives were lost, and even for those that survived there were scars, aches, and remorse that would not fade with time.
In the end Patrick didn’t have pictures.
In the end, he didn’t have any so-called facts.
When the story was over, he didn’t even receive a fancy certificate.
After 1100 pages all Patrick had was an unrecognized hunger: an emptiness in his gut that could not be satisfied by any standard fare.
I just hope that all of this testing, leaves some room for that.
I worry more about efficiency.
Today’s public school is a marvel of modern organization: a beehive of activity.
But where are they hiding the honey?
In my elementary days, things weren’t nearly as neat and tidy.
I remember, as a child, arriving at school everyday with a delicious sense of dread. I remember hushed accounts of spanking machines, and teachers that were odd, unusual, even spooky – at least to my literally untutored eyes. I will never forget one particularly sweet matron – a third grade teacher who honestly, earnestly believed in elves. So maybe I am romanticizing a time that was not exactly the golden age of education.
Perhaps.
Certainly today’s teachers are better educated than ever before, and deserve to be considered ‘professionals’, and paid accordingly.
But I am worried that we are squandering their skill, and surrendering our children to – heaven forbid, the statisticians!
A week ago Wednesday was my son’s first experience with that sausage-maker known in Massachusetts as the THE MCAS – and, coincidentally, was also the last day of his first journey through The Lord of the Rings.
Mary read the entire Lord of the Rings to him, out loud, every night (for the most part) over more than 100 days.
Nothing, I think, could be more stimulating to his brain, and important to his ‘development’, than to go along on that Journey with Tolkien.
At times he was exhilarated.
At times he was in tears.
There were occasions when he was angry, with the author and the world.
Who was this man called Strider?
Who were those dark riders?
Why did Sam choose to stay in the shire, while Bilbo and Sam and Gandalf, sailed away to the Havens?
But then, you may never have had the pleasure of reading The Lord of the Rings. Certainly though, you have felt the thrill that great writing, or travel, or a chance encounter can produce: that jolt of current down your spine?
It is the intensity of our experiences, I believe, that forge our character – not the accumulation of information.
You want facts, try a phone book.
A phone book is an efficient transmitter of facts.
A phone book however, does not have complexity, and is short on emotion. A phone book offers little in the way of adventure, and requires absolutely no imagination.
Like the MCAS.
I’m concerned that the MCAS getting in the way of our children’s education.
Are we forgetting about the joy of learning because the focus is on developing the skill of testing?
Is the entire educational experience being slowly boiled down to a series of rubbery, tasteless, tests?
Try and imagine your favorite book, reduced to a list of names of characters, incidents of plot, and other abstract facts. That would be like coming home from a cross-country trip, with nothing but snapshots of highway signs to tell the story.
Exit 3, Tom Bombadil.
Exit 7, The Orcs
Exit 17: The Eye of Sauron.
That is what I fear our focus on testing, our obsession with grades, and our panic about college admissions, is attempting to do: reduce the educational experience to its least common denominator.
I don’t fault the teachers.
The teachers I know are valiantly trying to fight the power. If they had their way their classrooms would be colorful, vibrant places full of mystery and magic, and adventure.
But they are up against a society that is content to feed their children, calorie-free canned experiences – and then expects teachers to somehow fill in the blanks.
It’s impossible.
I think we need to choose. Either school should be an enriching experience that awakens young minds to the possibilities of the world – and trusts them to choose their own path in their own time, or it can be a training camp – a rehearsal for the drudgery that awaits them.
I am, of course, using a thick, broad brush to make a point.
Drudgery doesn’t necessarily await all those who attend public schools – far from it.
The MCAS is not the Eye of Sauron, keeping an unblinking watch on the slaves of public education.
But at the very least the eye of the student is being jaundiced by our focus on what we like to call ‘results’.
If we train their minds, but fail to exercise their emotional musculature, we should not be surprised when they perform well on the standardized tests, but collapse at their first encounter with the unpredictable world that awaits them.
When the last words of The Lord of the Rings were left dangling in the air, Patrick was not happy. He couldn’t understand why the ‘Fellowship’ could not stay together. He yearned for a sugary ending but was given - even in this epic fantasy, something bittersweet instead.
Evil was defeated, for now, but the Shire did not escape unscathed.
Lives were lost, and even for those that survived there were scars, aches, and remorse that would not fade with time.
In the end Patrick didn’t have pictures.
In the end, he didn’t have any so-called facts.
When the story was over, he didn’t even receive a fancy certificate.
After 1100 pages all Patrick had was an unrecognized hunger: an emptiness in his gut that could not be satisfied by any standard fare.
I just hope that all of this testing, leaves some room for that.
A Homely Refresher
Paranoia is, of course, our most valuable natural resource.
Without paranoia we would be Switzerland.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Switzerland.
Paranoia fueled our western expansion.
Paranoia sunk the Maine!
And paranoia, for the most part, re-elected a President who wasn’t qualified to manage the local Burger King, much less a country.
Not that there’s anything wrong with managing a Burger King.
Just that I think I should be pre-excused for saying that the end is near, and China is its name.
I’d like a pre-emptive pardon for my paranoid ramblings.
Need more evidence of paranoid delusions before you let me off the patriotic hook?
How about this: I like the idea of America in the Avis spot: you know, we’re number two, so we try harder.
I’m not a hater, I love America. But I think I’d even like it too, if we showed a bit of humility.
Even if you think we’re still sitting pretty, you have to admit that it’s hard being the leader of the free world, the richest nation, and the inventors of both baseball and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.
I think it’s about time someone else stepped up to the plate: and who better than the Chinese?
Walmart had their chance, and they blew it.
India has potential but is – I will come right out and say it, too English.
Australia has the right attitude, but that’s about all.
China’s got it all.
They’ve got more Walmarts than, well, Walmart.
They’ve got more potential mall rats than India.
They’ve got more attitude than Australia too – but they keep it to themselves.
And most importantly, the Chinese want it too – they want it real bad.
They’ve got an ancient porcelain chip on their shoulder.
At one time – a few thousand years ago, China had the title but, ironically, no one outside of China had a clue.
You’ve got to feel for all those old empires, don’t you: the Persians, the Macedonians, the Egyptians - and the Chinese? They all had their turn at ruling the world, but that was long before the World Wide Web – so who knew.
And there was something about that old title too, ‘Ruler of the Known World’: it had a kind of built-in asterisk; kind of like adding, ‘relatively speaking’ to every compliment.
You’re damn good looking – relatively speaking.
Your breath’s not bad – relatively speaking.
You rule – relatively speaking.
Today, America still is the Undisputed World Champion – and we’ve got the Gold Nuclear Warheads to prove it. But our time is running out.
We’re doing the Ali rope-a-dope, but taking shots in all hemispheres.
If this were baseball, we’d be the Yankees: a lot of trophies in the case, but with a bloated payroll full of overblown egos.
The other nations respect us sure, and hate us at the same time.
But they won’t have America to kick around, for too much longer.
The handwriting – or should I say, calligraphy, is on the wall.
Green Tea is the key.
At least Green Tea is the source of my paranoia.
Not the tea itself, but the secret message on the packet the tea comes in.
Remember when we used to laugh at the silly misspellings that the Japanese would make, on the packages their cute little transistor radios came in?
Remember when anything cheap, brightly colored, and plastic had a ‘Made in China’ imprint, somewhere underneath?
Today, Pacific Rim countries, like China and Japan, provide us with most of our cars, most of our electronics, most of our dishes, most of our take-out food, and – for me, nearly all of my daily required dosage of paranoia.
You would think that they could afford to pay someone to learn to speak and write English – so that they could correct the silly misspellings and odd phrases that appear on products made there, and sold here.
Actually, they can afford it.
American businesses now spend millions training their employees on their culture – so that we can sell more to them.
The difference is that we’re concerned that we will be left out of their markets, and they aren’t – concerned that is.
How do I know this?
Paranoia, pure and simple.
I know because the nice people at the new Chinese restaurant told me.
Well, they didn’t exactly sit me down and lecture me on international business, but they might as well have.
On the packet of green tea that was dropped into the bottom of my take-out order were a series of Chinese calligraphic symbols, and underneath, a translation - of sorts.
Green Tea, the label suggested, has a “Fragrant Aroma”.
Green Tea is also, the translation noted, a “Valuable Gift”.
Green Tea has - a third phrase promised, a “Mellow Taste”.
And finally, Green Tea is, the packet concludes, a “Homely Refresher”.
I laughed at that final attribute.
I laughed first because, at least in part, the phrase was silly: an obvious mistake.
I laughed as well at the oddity of the phrase, ‘homely refresher’.
I kidded my wife: “you”, I said to Mary, “are a homely refresher”.
“You’re refreshingly homely”, she countered.
We both laughed, but then it hit me.
“Homely Refresher” was not a mistake.
It was purposefully left as is, as a message to all Chinese that, economically at least, they don’t have to care anymore.
Now they can act like Americans have, for the last fifty years.
We don’t bother to learn other languages – we expect them to learn ours!
We never could bother to learn their customs and traditions – we expected them to know ours!
But the worm has turned.
Now they have the numbers, the cash, and a culture that we are scrambling to understand.
China - FYI, has a history that goes back before the Yankees won their first pennant.
China had immigration problems before we had people on this continent.
The Chinese actually managed to build a giant wall at their border – three thousand years before we started ours, to keep out undocumented Mongolian farm workers.
It didn’t work either, but it’s a big tourist attraction today.
And word is that they’ve been working on that old wall, working on it at night: adding steel reinforcement bars, infra-red surveillance cameras, razor wire, and more.
When asked what they were up to, a Chinese official said that these were just ‘aesthetic improvements’. Pressed further, he said that they were just addressing some ‘safety concerns’. Put on the spot, he acknowledged that it was part of a national plan to modernize China, to be more competitive in the world economy.
The plan was called, he said, “A Homely Refresher”
Hey, even paranoid people are right – some of the time..
Without paranoia we would be Switzerland.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Switzerland.
Paranoia fueled our western expansion.
Paranoia sunk the Maine!
And paranoia, for the most part, re-elected a President who wasn’t qualified to manage the local Burger King, much less a country.
Not that there’s anything wrong with managing a Burger King.
Just that I think I should be pre-excused for saying that the end is near, and China is its name.
I’d like a pre-emptive pardon for my paranoid ramblings.
Need more evidence of paranoid delusions before you let me off the patriotic hook?
How about this: I like the idea of America in the Avis spot: you know, we’re number two, so we try harder.
I’m not a hater, I love America. But I think I’d even like it too, if we showed a bit of humility.
Even if you think we’re still sitting pretty, you have to admit that it’s hard being the leader of the free world, the richest nation, and the inventors of both baseball and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.
I think it’s about time someone else stepped up to the plate: and who better than the Chinese?
Walmart had their chance, and they blew it.
India has potential but is – I will come right out and say it, too English.
Australia has the right attitude, but that’s about all.
China’s got it all.
They’ve got more Walmarts than, well, Walmart.
They’ve got more potential mall rats than India.
They’ve got more attitude than Australia too – but they keep it to themselves.
And most importantly, the Chinese want it too – they want it real bad.
They’ve got an ancient porcelain chip on their shoulder.
At one time – a few thousand years ago, China had the title but, ironically, no one outside of China had a clue.
You’ve got to feel for all those old empires, don’t you: the Persians, the Macedonians, the Egyptians - and the Chinese? They all had their turn at ruling the world, but that was long before the World Wide Web – so who knew.
And there was something about that old title too, ‘Ruler of the Known World’: it had a kind of built-in asterisk; kind of like adding, ‘relatively speaking’ to every compliment.
You’re damn good looking – relatively speaking.
Your breath’s not bad – relatively speaking.
You rule – relatively speaking.
Today, America still is the Undisputed World Champion – and we’ve got the Gold Nuclear Warheads to prove it. But our time is running out.
We’re doing the Ali rope-a-dope, but taking shots in all hemispheres.
If this were baseball, we’d be the Yankees: a lot of trophies in the case, but with a bloated payroll full of overblown egos.
The other nations respect us sure, and hate us at the same time.
But they won’t have America to kick around, for too much longer.
The handwriting – or should I say, calligraphy, is on the wall.
Green Tea is the key.
At least Green Tea is the source of my paranoia.
Not the tea itself, but the secret message on the packet the tea comes in.
Remember when we used to laugh at the silly misspellings that the Japanese would make, on the packages their cute little transistor radios came in?
Remember when anything cheap, brightly colored, and plastic had a ‘Made in China’ imprint, somewhere underneath?
Today, Pacific Rim countries, like China and Japan, provide us with most of our cars, most of our electronics, most of our dishes, most of our take-out food, and – for me, nearly all of my daily required dosage of paranoia.
You would think that they could afford to pay someone to learn to speak and write English – so that they could correct the silly misspellings and odd phrases that appear on products made there, and sold here.
Actually, they can afford it.
American businesses now spend millions training their employees on their culture – so that we can sell more to them.
The difference is that we’re concerned that we will be left out of their markets, and they aren’t – concerned that is.
How do I know this?
Paranoia, pure and simple.
I know because the nice people at the new Chinese restaurant told me.
Well, they didn’t exactly sit me down and lecture me on international business, but they might as well have.
On the packet of green tea that was dropped into the bottom of my take-out order were a series of Chinese calligraphic symbols, and underneath, a translation - of sorts.
Green Tea, the label suggested, has a “Fragrant Aroma”.
Green Tea is also, the translation noted, a “Valuable Gift”.
Green Tea has - a third phrase promised, a “Mellow Taste”.
And finally, Green Tea is, the packet concludes, a “Homely Refresher”.
I laughed at that final attribute.
I laughed first because, at least in part, the phrase was silly: an obvious mistake.
I laughed as well at the oddity of the phrase, ‘homely refresher’.
I kidded my wife: “you”, I said to Mary, “are a homely refresher”.
“You’re refreshingly homely”, she countered.
We both laughed, but then it hit me.
“Homely Refresher” was not a mistake.
It was purposefully left as is, as a message to all Chinese that, economically at least, they don’t have to care anymore.
Now they can act like Americans have, for the last fifty years.
We don’t bother to learn other languages – we expect them to learn ours!
We never could bother to learn their customs and traditions – we expected them to know ours!
But the worm has turned.
Now they have the numbers, the cash, and a culture that we are scrambling to understand.
China - FYI, has a history that goes back before the Yankees won their first pennant.
China had immigration problems before we had people on this continent.
The Chinese actually managed to build a giant wall at their border – three thousand years before we started ours, to keep out undocumented Mongolian farm workers.
It didn’t work either, but it’s a big tourist attraction today.
And word is that they’ve been working on that old wall, working on it at night: adding steel reinforcement bars, infra-red surveillance cameras, razor wire, and more.
When asked what they were up to, a Chinese official said that these were just ‘aesthetic improvements’. Pressed further, he said that they were just addressing some ‘safety concerns’. Put on the spot, he acknowledged that it was part of a national plan to modernize China, to be more competitive in the world economy.
The plan was called, he said, “A Homely Refresher”
Hey, even paranoid people are right – some of the time..
Daylight Spending
I don’t know about you, but I’ve already spent my extra daylight savings.
Tuesday was a bit gloomy, at least around here – and I wanted to go to the Cape to take some pictures: so I spent the whole wad that afternoon.
Easy come, easy go!
Spending that daylight, I was reminded of the big tax breaks we’ve all been receiving over the last four or five years.
It’s nice to get the check - $400 I think it was, last time: but if you blow a tire, or crack a filling, it goes pretty quick.
And you pay a pretty big price – all told, for your little check.
That is, to give back that extra $400 to everybody, the government has to make some serious cuts in their budget.
You get your filling replaced, but a school in Arkansas goes without a new roof, and a road in Maine is left unpaved, and an AIDS Clinic shuts down in Tucson.
Are the two – federal taxes and daylight savings, related?
Consider the source.
I tend to look at all of these governmental ‘gifts’, with a bit more than a dose of skepticism.
At best, I think, the government is guilty of a lack of imagination.
At worse, well, I’ll leave that to you.
Now my idea of daylight savings goes a bit further than the tinkering we are recovering from this week.
This is the computer age: everything –from battleships to stuffed animals, uses computer chips today.
With all that digital technology it seems both possible, and preferable, for time to be measured in relation to the actual amount of sunlight available to – not rationed out in bits and pieces.
First of all, and to avoid confusion, my idea is to have two different kinds of time (at least at first): Schedule Time, and Experiential Time.
Schedule Time would be the same, everywhere, for everyone – though allowing of course, for differences based on time zones: so planes could schedule their trips, and buses could be there to meet them, and people could make reservations at restaurants and then break them.
That’s Schedule Time.
But then there’d be Experiential Time – which would be based on the way that we experience time.
In Experiential Time (ET) high noon would always be in the exact middle of the ‘day’ – when the sun is directly overhead, and the number of minutes of so-called daylight before and after noon would be based on the number of minutes of daylight actually available to you at that longitude, at that time of year.
In the winter the days would actually be shorter.
In the summer the days would actually be longer.
An hour of day in the summer might be 65 minutes long.
An hour of day in the winter might be 55 minutes long.
Experiential time would not be measured at night – that is, after the sun sets and before the sun rises. The overall length of night would be all that matters – and that would change, depending on the usual factors.
My sense is that once adopted – in no time at all, experiential time would be the only time.
And from there we could move on, to better uses of the time available to us.
We could, for example, have an official ratings potential for days, based on the expected weather, the amount of sunlight, and other seasonal and/or cultural details.
If the forecast called for a highly rated day, with perfect temperatures, low pollen counts, a sky with only the occasional wandering cloud - and this happened to be the time of year that wild strawberries were ripening in the fields – both work and school would be cancelled.
If the forecast called for a reasonably good day – by most measurements, and this was the anniversary of the day you got your first tattoo – take the day off!
Instead of notices of cancellations scrolling by at the bottom of your television, there would simply be a short note: take tomorrow off, and enjoy!
If, on the other hand, a day was expected to be particularly bleak - regardless of what day of the week or time of year, or even if it was your 50th anniversary, school would be in session, and everyone would have to go to work.
Of course there would always be the possibility of the odd, unexpectedly good day – which we would miss out on, but that would be unavoidable.
This wouldn’t simply change sleeping habits, it would change lives.
There would be no summer vacation because people would be enjoying themselves throughout the year.
Of course there would be those who try and take advantage of the situation – working on days that everyone has off. But there would be ways of dealing with these anti-social types.
Pay rates – for example, would be pro-rated based on the quality of the day.
Those working on good days would receive far less than those working on gloomy days.
It’s just common sense – and it would be infectious.
Instead of giving people meaningless tax breaks, maybe we’d give them the things they need to enjoy life, and go from there.
Health Care would be free.
Gasoline would be free.
Education would be free.
Electricity would be free.
The things we need simply to survive – the government would provide: isn’t that the way it is supposed to be?
In turn we would work hard – on those less than perfect days, and with no worries, we’d probably be more creative, more productive and - as a nation, a lot easier to get along with.
Have you noticed? Lately we’ve been pretty cranky – nationally speaking.
I don’t think that – as a nation, we’re getting enough sleep.
I don’t think that, nationally speaking again, we have enough time off.
Sorry Ben, Daylight Savings Time – no matter how much you tinker with it, doesn’t really do much of anything for anybody.
If we’re going to save daylight – or cut taxes, let’s make it worthwhile.
Not just a few minutes, here or there.
Not just a few dollars – tossed at us from Air Force One.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
Tuesday was a bit gloomy, at least around here – and I wanted to go to the Cape to take some pictures: so I spent the whole wad that afternoon.
Easy come, easy go!
Spending that daylight, I was reminded of the big tax breaks we’ve all been receiving over the last four or five years.
It’s nice to get the check - $400 I think it was, last time: but if you blow a tire, or crack a filling, it goes pretty quick.
And you pay a pretty big price – all told, for your little check.
That is, to give back that extra $400 to everybody, the government has to make some serious cuts in their budget.
You get your filling replaced, but a school in Arkansas goes without a new roof, and a road in Maine is left unpaved, and an AIDS Clinic shuts down in Tucson.
Are the two – federal taxes and daylight savings, related?
Consider the source.
I tend to look at all of these governmental ‘gifts’, with a bit more than a dose of skepticism.
At best, I think, the government is guilty of a lack of imagination.
At worse, well, I’ll leave that to you.
Now my idea of daylight savings goes a bit further than the tinkering we are recovering from this week.
This is the computer age: everything –from battleships to stuffed animals, uses computer chips today.
With all that digital technology it seems both possible, and preferable, for time to be measured in relation to the actual amount of sunlight available to – not rationed out in bits and pieces.
First of all, and to avoid confusion, my idea is to have two different kinds of time (at least at first): Schedule Time, and Experiential Time.
Schedule Time would be the same, everywhere, for everyone – though allowing of course, for differences based on time zones: so planes could schedule their trips, and buses could be there to meet them, and people could make reservations at restaurants and then break them.
That’s Schedule Time.
But then there’d be Experiential Time – which would be based on the way that we experience time.
In Experiential Time (ET) high noon would always be in the exact middle of the ‘day’ – when the sun is directly overhead, and the number of minutes of so-called daylight before and after noon would be based on the number of minutes of daylight actually available to you at that longitude, at that time of year.
In the winter the days would actually be shorter.
In the summer the days would actually be longer.
An hour of day in the summer might be 65 minutes long.
An hour of day in the winter might be 55 minutes long.
Experiential time would not be measured at night – that is, after the sun sets and before the sun rises. The overall length of night would be all that matters – and that would change, depending on the usual factors.
My sense is that once adopted – in no time at all, experiential time would be the only time.
And from there we could move on, to better uses of the time available to us.
We could, for example, have an official ratings potential for days, based on the expected weather, the amount of sunlight, and other seasonal and/or cultural details.
If the forecast called for a highly rated day, with perfect temperatures, low pollen counts, a sky with only the occasional wandering cloud - and this happened to be the time of year that wild strawberries were ripening in the fields – both work and school would be cancelled.
If the forecast called for a reasonably good day – by most measurements, and this was the anniversary of the day you got your first tattoo – take the day off!
Instead of notices of cancellations scrolling by at the bottom of your television, there would simply be a short note: take tomorrow off, and enjoy!
If, on the other hand, a day was expected to be particularly bleak - regardless of what day of the week or time of year, or even if it was your 50th anniversary, school would be in session, and everyone would have to go to work.
Of course there would always be the possibility of the odd, unexpectedly good day – which we would miss out on, but that would be unavoidable.
This wouldn’t simply change sleeping habits, it would change lives.
There would be no summer vacation because people would be enjoying themselves throughout the year.
Of course there would be those who try and take advantage of the situation – working on days that everyone has off. But there would be ways of dealing with these anti-social types.
Pay rates – for example, would be pro-rated based on the quality of the day.
Those working on good days would receive far less than those working on gloomy days.
It’s just common sense – and it would be infectious.
Instead of giving people meaningless tax breaks, maybe we’d give them the things they need to enjoy life, and go from there.
Health Care would be free.
Gasoline would be free.
Education would be free.
Electricity would be free.
The things we need simply to survive – the government would provide: isn’t that the way it is supposed to be?
In turn we would work hard – on those less than perfect days, and with no worries, we’d probably be more creative, more productive and - as a nation, a lot easier to get along with.
Have you noticed? Lately we’ve been pretty cranky – nationally speaking.
I don’t think that – as a nation, we’re getting enough sleep.
I don’t think that, nationally speaking again, we have enough time off.
Sorry Ben, Daylight Savings Time – no matter how much you tinker with it, doesn’t really do much of anything for anybody.
If we’re going to save daylight – or cut taxes, let’s make it worthwhile.
Not just a few minutes, here or there.
Not just a few dollars – tossed at us from Air Force One.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
Chump Change
You heard the news?
Yes, it’s true.
I appreciate the advice, but I already have a plan.
Sure, $287 million is a lot of money, but it’s just money: I won’t have any trouble spending it.
I’ll do things my way though, and start off slow.
Everybody runs off and buys a half-dozen cars, a new house or two, a boat – stuff like that.
But I’ll start with the things that are really important.
The things that really separate us from the rich.
Like drips.
The first thing I am going to do is have a plumber in to fix the drips.
Where the other half lives – or so I am told, it’s very quiet.
Mostly because they don’t have drips.
A bigger well too.
A sure sign of my middle class status is the well pump coming on, every time someone flushes the toilet.
From now on, whenever anybody ‘goes’, no one will know.
I guess that means more toilets, too.
And showers: I want one of my own – just mine. And I know, from experience, the only way that you have something of your own, is when everyone else has their’s too.
Of course I’ll have to bring the plumbers in when it’s dark, in unmarked vans – which means overtime.
But I can’t risk anyone seeing a plumbing truck in my driveway for a month or so. That’s a sure sign that I won the lottery. And if anyone guesses, I’ll need another bathroom too, for guests.
So okay – what’s that come to? About $50,000?
Peanuts!
Next the house. Not a new house, an improved house.
I’ve still got the 10x12 deck that came with the house. It would be nice to have a new deck, a bit bigger, with some built in-amenities. Nothing too fancy, just a little more room to maneuver. In fact, I hate grass, so I think I’ll just surround the entire house with deck, maybe a few big flower pots, one of those all-season fireplaces, and a lap pool. No, not a lap pool, one of those tide pools, where you can practice surfing or being swept out to sea.
Nothing fancy, just a nice deck. About $75K.
Drop in the bucket!
And you know something – now that I can afford it, I want to invite those poor raccoons back in. Put a few doggie doors in both sides of the attic, and build them a little play area. Maybe some close circuit infra-red cameras so we can watch them at night
I’m sorry. Mary’s giving me a dirty look, and she’s right. I got carried away there. Forget the raccoons, at least for now.
What about a room of my own – or better yet, a little cabin out back, where I can work undisturbed (or not work, undisturbed). Nothing fancy, just a room, with a toilet and shower – nice sound system, satellite dish.
I can buy one of those pre-built garden shacks, and have it dressed up a bit: a little landscaping, a few shrubs for privacy, a nice stone walk. Then again, maybe it would be nice if it could be used by guests too: relatives we don’t like but can’t turn away.
Figure on about $100,000, give or take.
Chump change!
Mary’s signaling me from the couch, and she’s right again.
Before I go putting in a little shack in the backyard, I might want to address some of the other shortcomings of our present abode.
It would be nice to have a doorbell that works. Now we can afford to splurge on chimes that play ‘Satisfaction’.
We’re going to need a new roof, too. Now we can have any color we want.
Shingles. And not just the ones that need replacing – all of them!
A garage, where we can hide the cars that usually end up on blocks in the backyard.
Security system, to keep out the relatives.
A new refrigerator.
That’s another sign of real money – a fancy refrigerator. Rich folk always have oversized refrigerators, filled with fresh produce, a bottle or two of champagne, and space.
You know somebody is doing alright, when you look in their refrigerator and there’s space.
I want one of those oversized, silver ones, too big for the kitchen. I want one that dispenses water, and beer, and whipped cream.
And paint!
No, not a refrigerator that dispenses paint, just paint!
No, not just paint: an actual painter – a pro to go over all the places where I made a mess of things.
And new carpet too.
Not the durable kind that stands up to wear and tear – the fuzzy, thick, colorful kind that folks that really can’t afford it worry about staining.
Better yet, oriental rugs that you really shouldn’t walk on, and hardwood floors made from rare trees that you’re not supposed to cut down: a lot more not to worry about.
And a boat.
Not in the house.
And not to actually put in the water either: just for show. Something to stick alongside the garage, and annoy the neighbors. (Another place to stash the relatives, too!)
Sorry Mary.
But we haven’t even spent a million dollars.
At this rate we’ll never run out of money.
We could spend $2 million a year, for fifty years, and still have more money than most of our neighbors.
Okay, so maybe I will buy a car, or two.
I just want a Karman Ghia: probably can find a rebuilt one for $20,000.
Mary will probably get that BMW SUV.
I’ll get Bobby another one of those 79 Volvos that he used to drive, and just keep getting it fixed when it breaks down. Or maybe we can get him his own mechanic, so he doesn’t have to bug us every time he has a little accident.
Patrick won’t be driving for another 8 years, so he can have a horse.
The relatives?
We’ll get them all AAA Plus.
And we’ll get them other stuff, too. Or better yet, we’ll let them have our old stuff, every year. The old refrigerator. The old BMW. The old TV, and so on.
With our money it is almost an obligation to replace everything every year.
But I don’t want to go crazy.
I just want to smooth things out a bit.
Quiet things down.
Make things smell better.
Sleep a little later.
$287,000,000 should do the trick.
Yes, it’s true.
I appreciate the advice, but I already have a plan.
Sure, $287 million is a lot of money, but it’s just money: I won’t have any trouble spending it.
I’ll do things my way though, and start off slow.
Everybody runs off and buys a half-dozen cars, a new house or two, a boat – stuff like that.
But I’ll start with the things that are really important.
The things that really separate us from the rich.
Like drips.
The first thing I am going to do is have a plumber in to fix the drips.
Where the other half lives – or so I am told, it’s very quiet.
Mostly because they don’t have drips.
A bigger well too.
A sure sign of my middle class status is the well pump coming on, every time someone flushes the toilet.
From now on, whenever anybody ‘goes’, no one will know.
I guess that means more toilets, too.
And showers: I want one of my own – just mine. And I know, from experience, the only way that you have something of your own, is when everyone else has their’s too.
Of course I’ll have to bring the plumbers in when it’s dark, in unmarked vans – which means overtime.
But I can’t risk anyone seeing a plumbing truck in my driveway for a month or so. That’s a sure sign that I won the lottery. And if anyone guesses, I’ll need another bathroom too, for guests.
So okay – what’s that come to? About $50,000?
Peanuts!
Next the house. Not a new house, an improved house.
I’ve still got the 10x12 deck that came with the house. It would be nice to have a new deck, a bit bigger, with some built in-amenities. Nothing too fancy, just a little more room to maneuver. In fact, I hate grass, so I think I’ll just surround the entire house with deck, maybe a few big flower pots, one of those all-season fireplaces, and a lap pool. No, not a lap pool, one of those tide pools, where you can practice surfing or being swept out to sea.
Nothing fancy, just a nice deck. About $75K.
Drop in the bucket!
And you know something – now that I can afford it, I want to invite those poor raccoons back in. Put a few doggie doors in both sides of the attic, and build them a little play area. Maybe some close circuit infra-red cameras so we can watch them at night
I’m sorry. Mary’s giving me a dirty look, and she’s right. I got carried away there. Forget the raccoons, at least for now.
What about a room of my own – or better yet, a little cabin out back, where I can work undisturbed (or not work, undisturbed). Nothing fancy, just a room, with a toilet and shower – nice sound system, satellite dish.
I can buy one of those pre-built garden shacks, and have it dressed up a bit: a little landscaping, a few shrubs for privacy, a nice stone walk. Then again, maybe it would be nice if it could be used by guests too: relatives we don’t like but can’t turn away.
Figure on about $100,000, give or take.
Chump change!
Mary’s signaling me from the couch, and she’s right again.
Before I go putting in a little shack in the backyard, I might want to address some of the other shortcomings of our present abode.
It would be nice to have a doorbell that works. Now we can afford to splurge on chimes that play ‘Satisfaction’.
We’re going to need a new roof, too. Now we can have any color we want.
Shingles. And not just the ones that need replacing – all of them!
A garage, where we can hide the cars that usually end up on blocks in the backyard.
Security system, to keep out the relatives.
A new refrigerator.
That’s another sign of real money – a fancy refrigerator. Rich folk always have oversized refrigerators, filled with fresh produce, a bottle or two of champagne, and space.
You know somebody is doing alright, when you look in their refrigerator and there’s space.
I want one of those oversized, silver ones, too big for the kitchen. I want one that dispenses water, and beer, and whipped cream.
And paint!
No, not a refrigerator that dispenses paint, just paint!
No, not just paint: an actual painter – a pro to go over all the places where I made a mess of things.
And new carpet too.
Not the durable kind that stands up to wear and tear – the fuzzy, thick, colorful kind that folks that really can’t afford it worry about staining.
Better yet, oriental rugs that you really shouldn’t walk on, and hardwood floors made from rare trees that you’re not supposed to cut down: a lot more not to worry about.
And a boat.
Not in the house.
And not to actually put in the water either: just for show. Something to stick alongside the garage, and annoy the neighbors. (Another place to stash the relatives, too!)
Sorry Mary.
But we haven’t even spent a million dollars.
At this rate we’ll never run out of money.
We could spend $2 million a year, for fifty years, and still have more money than most of our neighbors.
Okay, so maybe I will buy a car, or two.
I just want a Karman Ghia: probably can find a rebuilt one for $20,000.
Mary will probably get that BMW SUV.
I’ll get Bobby another one of those 79 Volvos that he used to drive, and just keep getting it fixed when it breaks down. Or maybe we can get him his own mechanic, so he doesn’t have to bug us every time he has a little accident.
Patrick won’t be driving for another 8 years, so he can have a horse.
The relatives?
We’ll get them all AAA Plus.
And we’ll get them other stuff, too. Or better yet, we’ll let them have our old stuff, every year. The old refrigerator. The old BMW. The old TV, and so on.
With our money it is almost an obligation to replace everything every year.
But I don’t want to go crazy.
I just want to smooth things out a bit.
Quiet things down.
Make things smell better.
Sleep a little later.
$287,000,000 should do the trick.
No Snow to Speak Of
I’ve got nothing to say – and I blame it on the weather.
Not just any, or all weather – our weather: this half-assed excuse for a winter, specifically.
Don’t look surprised: I’m just like you. My thoughts are not my own. I am – as the psychics like to say, just the conduit.
Did you ever notice that the psychic channelers always seem to be channeling princes and emperors, great warriors or priests?
Did you ever notice that when, under hypnosis, people remember their past lives – there’s almost always a person of great wealth, rank, or significance in there someplace?
Not me.
When I channel for this column I usually bring forth news of squirrels in the attic – literally, or wells that won’t pump, or what kind of candy the kid brought home Halloween night.
I channel the average, everyday stuff that we all deal with – but hopefully with an interesting slant, a different perspective.
And what inspires me is the average and the everyday.
But not today.
Today, this week, this month, I have been suffering from poor reception, from a stuttering imagination, from a lack of inspiration because for the past thirty days the average and the everyday have been absent from these parts.
Maybe they’ve gone on vacation.
Look around you.
You call this weather?
Is there anything more inspiring to the imagination than a sudden blanket of white?
When the landscapes that we know so well suddenly disappear, and the background sounds that we expect to hear are muffled, and the schedules that we usually maintain are unavoidably altered, it shocks the system and stirs our thoughts.
And at a time of year when we instinctively crave anything that can awake us out of our stupor – weather is oftentimes our best and only friend.
But we haven’t had any – any weather that is.
At least not ‘round here.
Oh sure we’ve had a taste of rain, a snap of cold, a smattering of sleet, and a sheet or two of ice: but no snow to speak of.
The weather people would argue of course: they’d bring out their charts and cite the statistics.
According to the statistics we’ve had a few inches, here and there.
But that’s not snow, it’s the Dandruff of the Gods: and they’re not sure what’s going on either.
They’re up there, on Olympus, scratching their heads.
It’s not just me either – all of the so-called news has been affected.
People aren’t really interested in Anna Nicole Smith – they’ve just got nothing better to think about.
My youngest son is out there now – not in the Bahamas, in the backyard I mean: out back trying to scrape up enough of that dirty, crusty stuff to make a dandruff man.
“Can you come out and play in the snow with m”, he asked?
“If there was snow to play in, I would”, I promised, but I was not going to get down on the ground and grovel around, pretending.
Of course there are plenty who would.
Of course that’s what they’ve been doing down in Florida, and now in California, and soon in the Bahamas: groveling around in the dirt, trying to scrape up enough stuff to make a story.
Sad to say, the Anna Nicole story is like the weather we’ve been having: hardly enough news there to measure.
And now that the story – and the poor woman herself, have been lying around for more than a week, it’s gotten a bit dirty, a bit crusty too.
That’s the genius of Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes: somehow he turns what annoys him, into the subject of his weekly ‘column’. Somehow what annoys him, amuses us.
But Andy’s secret is – I imagine, that he is amused by what annoys him too: he actually revels in his own annoyances.
I just can’t manage the same enthusiasm for what bores me.
I can’t manage to find inspiration, in its lack.
So, we’re moving.
Taking a vacation of sorts.
We’ve rented a house up near Syracuse, New York. The owners were left in the lurch, when the last tenants moved out giving no notice at all.
The house is fully furnished. The refrigerator is full. The previous tenants pre-paid for six months of satellite TV.
And they’ve got enough inspiration piled up, to last at least until June.
I’m bringing my own shovel: stay tuned.
Not just any, or all weather – our weather: this half-assed excuse for a winter, specifically.
Don’t look surprised: I’m just like you. My thoughts are not my own. I am – as the psychics like to say, just the conduit.
Did you ever notice that the psychic channelers always seem to be channeling princes and emperors, great warriors or priests?
Did you ever notice that when, under hypnosis, people remember their past lives – there’s almost always a person of great wealth, rank, or significance in there someplace?
Not me.
When I channel for this column I usually bring forth news of squirrels in the attic – literally, or wells that won’t pump, or what kind of candy the kid brought home Halloween night.
I channel the average, everyday stuff that we all deal with – but hopefully with an interesting slant, a different perspective.
And what inspires me is the average and the everyday.
But not today.
Today, this week, this month, I have been suffering from poor reception, from a stuttering imagination, from a lack of inspiration because for the past thirty days the average and the everyday have been absent from these parts.
Maybe they’ve gone on vacation.
Look around you.
You call this weather?
Is there anything more inspiring to the imagination than a sudden blanket of white?
When the landscapes that we know so well suddenly disappear, and the background sounds that we expect to hear are muffled, and the schedules that we usually maintain are unavoidably altered, it shocks the system and stirs our thoughts.
And at a time of year when we instinctively crave anything that can awake us out of our stupor – weather is oftentimes our best and only friend.
But we haven’t had any – any weather that is.
At least not ‘round here.
Oh sure we’ve had a taste of rain, a snap of cold, a smattering of sleet, and a sheet or two of ice: but no snow to speak of.
The weather people would argue of course: they’d bring out their charts and cite the statistics.
According to the statistics we’ve had a few inches, here and there.
But that’s not snow, it’s the Dandruff of the Gods: and they’re not sure what’s going on either.
They’re up there, on Olympus, scratching their heads.
It’s not just me either – all of the so-called news has been affected.
People aren’t really interested in Anna Nicole Smith – they’ve just got nothing better to think about.
My youngest son is out there now – not in the Bahamas, in the backyard I mean: out back trying to scrape up enough of that dirty, crusty stuff to make a dandruff man.
“Can you come out and play in the snow with m”, he asked?
“If there was snow to play in, I would”, I promised, but I was not going to get down on the ground and grovel around, pretending.
Of course there are plenty who would.
Of course that’s what they’ve been doing down in Florida, and now in California, and soon in the Bahamas: groveling around in the dirt, trying to scrape up enough stuff to make a story.
Sad to say, the Anna Nicole story is like the weather we’ve been having: hardly enough news there to measure.
And now that the story – and the poor woman herself, have been lying around for more than a week, it’s gotten a bit dirty, a bit crusty too.
That’s the genius of Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes: somehow he turns what annoys him, into the subject of his weekly ‘column’. Somehow what annoys him, amuses us.
But Andy’s secret is – I imagine, that he is amused by what annoys him too: he actually revels in his own annoyances.
I just can’t manage the same enthusiasm for what bores me.
I can’t manage to find inspiration, in its lack.
So, we’re moving.
Taking a vacation of sorts.
We’ve rented a house up near Syracuse, New York. The owners were left in the lurch, when the last tenants moved out giving no notice at all.
The house is fully furnished. The refrigerator is full. The previous tenants pre-paid for six months of satellite TV.
And they’ve got enough inspiration piled up, to last at least until June.
I’m bringing my own shovel: stay tuned.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Experienced Applicants Only
It’s not Iraq, or Darfur, not the price of gas, or global warming: as we begin the last two years of the George W. Bush Presidency, the most important issue facing our country is the experience, or lack thereof, of our next President.
As I write this I am watching President Bush conduct a news conference and I am filled with conflicting emotions.
One part of me despairs at our President’s obvious inability – six years after his original election, to communicate clearly on the important issues of our time.
Another part of me cannot help but like the man – and sympathize with his predicament.
Asked to explain inconsistencies in the manner in which his administration is pursuing the war in Iraq, he stammers, fidgets, and seems about to drown in his own tormented rhetoric.
When no one throws him a life-line, like a student surprised by being called on by the teacher, he makes a joke: when that breaks the tension, he makes another. It’s the highlight of the news conference.
There was a movie, recently, about a comedian elected President: look for it soon, on DVD.
Unfortunately, the American people can’t do the same: its experiences like this, which make a Parliamentary system look very appealing.
But my point is not that we should remove him from office but, rather, that he never should have been elected in the first place.
Even President Bush’s most ardent opponents – myself included, would have to admit, by now, that he’s a nice guy. If a group of friends were arguing over what to do on a Saturday night, George would be the ‘decider’.
Even his most ardent supporters would have to admit – by now, that he doesn’t have what it takes to be President, and see that, after 9-11, his lack of experience made him an intellectual captive of his more experienced White House advisors.
It wasn’t just 9-11 either. It wasn’t just Iraq. On almost every serious issue that he has faced, President Bush’ lack of experience has cost us dearly.
Without a world view, he assessed Russian President Vladimir Putin on a personal basis, and concluded they could be ‘buds’. Today Putin rules Russia like a 13th Century Tsar, assassinating opponents, intimidating neighbors, and arming our adversaries.
With a misguided sense of where his personal and public lives could, or should intersect, he allowed religions zealots to suppress American scientific and medical research.
Most importantly, without real executive experience – and I am including his so-called ‘ownership’ of the Texas Rangers, and his several failed oil businesses, he was forced to rely for advice on Vice President Cheney.
Vice President Cheney may be the single strongest argument for making experience the greatest factor in choosing who is elected President.
No one votes for Vice President, the pundits say: but perhaps we all now understand that, when you vote for someone with little or no experience, you are in effect voting to give great power to those around them.
Very few Americans had even heard the names Pearle, Wolfowitz, Libby or Bolton before President Bush was elected. But they know them now, and regret having made their acquaintance.
It’s no excuse. Call him what you will - the ‘decider’, the ‘commander in chief’, W or Shrub, he may not know what he is doing, but he is the President.
He may not accept the buck, but it’s stuck to his desk.
And we elected him.
Senators and Congressmen have begun to call the Iraq War one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in the history of this country, but I think it pales in comparison to the blunder in 2000: President Bush’s election.
American’s are taught from childhood that ‘anyone’ can be President, but we need to realize that not everyone should have that opportunity.
Can we at least have some minimum standards?
Can those who seek the Presidency, at the very least, be able to say that they have dedicated their lives to the service of others: their lives, not the last two years, or a summer internship with one of dad’s contributors.
As young man – the record indicates, President Bush showed no interest in public service of any kind. He was ‘born again’ in religion, and in politics, and so came in to the White House with all the ignorance and fervor of the recently converted.
America cannot be governed by faith alone.
Lord knows they have tried, for six years, and it has been a disaster.
Would it really have been any different, if someone else were President?
Republicans like to ridicule Al Gore – but their attacks are usually based on personality, not capability.
Would an ‘official’ Gore Presidency have kept the planes from crashing in to the towers on September 11th? Probably not.
But there is a high likelihood that a Gore Presidency would have resulted in the defeat of the Taliban, and the capture or death of Osama.
Would a Gore Presidency have prevented the collapse of Enron and the loss of its employees’ retirement funds? Probably not.
But there is a high likelihood that it would have saved the American people the billions wasted on overpriced gasoline - because of a more stable oil market (with no Iraq war), and have put America far ahead in the research in to the causes and cures of Global warming.
Would a Gore Presidency have been able to end the suffering of the people of Darfur? Yes.
With America able to commit more resources, and unafraid to do so because it was not already spending half a trillion dollars, bogged down in Iraq, Darfur’s pleas for help would not have gone unanswered.
I am not announcing my support for Al Gore.
I am simply questioning the rationale that says that ‘anyone’ can be President.
I am questioning as well, assertions like Barack Obamas – whom I admire, that all you need is enough experience to know things must change.
You don’t have to be a Senator to know that.
Anyone can be a critic.
But it takes a mixture of superior intellectual skills, years of hands-on experience, and demonstrated commitment, to lead – at any level.
Shouldn’t our President have an excess of those qualities and experience?
Don’t you want a President who can both speak from the heart, and make himself understood?
Don’t you want a President who takes the job seriously, even before things go wrong?
Don’t you want a President who doesn’t need on the job training?
It’s not Iraq, or Darfur, not the price of gas, or global warming: the big issue facing America today is where to find someone who has what it takes to be President.
As I write this I am watching President Bush conduct a news conference and I am filled with conflicting emotions.
One part of me despairs at our President’s obvious inability – six years after his original election, to communicate clearly on the important issues of our time.
Another part of me cannot help but like the man – and sympathize with his predicament.
Asked to explain inconsistencies in the manner in which his administration is pursuing the war in Iraq, he stammers, fidgets, and seems about to drown in his own tormented rhetoric.
When no one throws him a life-line, like a student surprised by being called on by the teacher, he makes a joke: when that breaks the tension, he makes another. It’s the highlight of the news conference.
There was a movie, recently, about a comedian elected President: look for it soon, on DVD.
Unfortunately, the American people can’t do the same: its experiences like this, which make a Parliamentary system look very appealing.
But my point is not that we should remove him from office but, rather, that he never should have been elected in the first place.
Even President Bush’s most ardent opponents – myself included, would have to admit, by now, that he’s a nice guy. If a group of friends were arguing over what to do on a Saturday night, George would be the ‘decider’.
Even his most ardent supporters would have to admit – by now, that he doesn’t have what it takes to be President, and see that, after 9-11, his lack of experience made him an intellectual captive of his more experienced White House advisors.
It wasn’t just 9-11 either. It wasn’t just Iraq. On almost every serious issue that he has faced, President Bush’ lack of experience has cost us dearly.
Without a world view, he assessed Russian President Vladimir Putin on a personal basis, and concluded they could be ‘buds’. Today Putin rules Russia like a 13th Century Tsar, assassinating opponents, intimidating neighbors, and arming our adversaries.
With a misguided sense of where his personal and public lives could, or should intersect, he allowed religions zealots to suppress American scientific and medical research.
Most importantly, without real executive experience – and I am including his so-called ‘ownership’ of the Texas Rangers, and his several failed oil businesses, he was forced to rely for advice on Vice President Cheney.
Vice President Cheney may be the single strongest argument for making experience the greatest factor in choosing who is elected President.
No one votes for Vice President, the pundits say: but perhaps we all now understand that, when you vote for someone with little or no experience, you are in effect voting to give great power to those around them.
Very few Americans had even heard the names Pearle, Wolfowitz, Libby or Bolton before President Bush was elected. But they know them now, and regret having made their acquaintance.
It’s no excuse. Call him what you will - the ‘decider’, the ‘commander in chief’, W or Shrub, he may not know what he is doing, but he is the President.
He may not accept the buck, but it’s stuck to his desk.
And we elected him.
Senators and Congressmen have begun to call the Iraq War one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in the history of this country, but I think it pales in comparison to the blunder in 2000: President Bush’s election.
American’s are taught from childhood that ‘anyone’ can be President, but we need to realize that not everyone should have that opportunity.
Can we at least have some minimum standards?
Can those who seek the Presidency, at the very least, be able to say that they have dedicated their lives to the service of others: their lives, not the last two years, or a summer internship with one of dad’s contributors.
As young man – the record indicates, President Bush showed no interest in public service of any kind. He was ‘born again’ in religion, and in politics, and so came in to the White House with all the ignorance and fervor of the recently converted.
America cannot be governed by faith alone.
Lord knows they have tried, for six years, and it has been a disaster.
Would it really have been any different, if someone else were President?
Republicans like to ridicule Al Gore – but their attacks are usually based on personality, not capability.
Would an ‘official’ Gore Presidency have kept the planes from crashing in to the towers on September 11th? Probably not.
But there is a high likelihood that a Gore Presidency would have resulted in the defeat of the Taliban, and the capture or death of Osama.
Would a Gore Presidency have prevented the collapse of Enron and the loss of its employees’ retirement funds? Probably not.
But there is a high likelihood that it would have saved the American people the billions wasted on overpriced gasoline - because of a more stable oil market (with no Iraq war), and have put America far ahead in the research in to the causes and cures of Global warming.
Would a Gore Presidency have been able to end the suffering of the people of Darfur? Yes.
With America able to commit more resources, and unafraid to do so because it was not already spending half a trillion dollars, bogged down in Iraq, Darfur’s pleas for help would not have gone unanswered.
I am not announcing my support for Al Gore.
I am simply questioning the rationale that says that ‘anyone’ can be President.
I am questioning as well, assertions like Barack Obamas – whom I admire, that all you need is enough experience to know things must change.
You don’t have to be a Senator to know that.
Anyone can be a critic.
But it takes a mixture of superior intellectual skills, years of hands-on experience, and demonstrated commitment, to lead – at any level.
Shouldn’t our President have an excess of those qualities and experience?
Don’t you want a President who can both speak from the heart, and make himself understood?
Don’t you want a President who takes the job seriously, even before things go wrong?
Don’t you want a President who doesn’t need on the job training?
It’s not Iraq, or Darfur, not the price of gas, or global warming: the big issue facing America today is where to find someone who has what it takes to be President.
Friday, February 16, 2007
The Woman Who Fell to Earth
Who do you love?
In Northern Italy, a short distance from Romeo & Juliet’s Verona, they have unearthed what they believe to be – or very much want to believe, to be, undying love.
In a grave, in the cold earth, they have found two skeletons that appear to be embracing: that they believe to have been locked in each others’ arms for five thousand years.
But they have to run a few tests, to be sure.
When pressed they admit they are not yet completely confident that the bones they have found, are of a man and a woman.
When not pressed their eyes shine as they describe the lovers.
The stories of the discovery give short shrift to the observation – usually buried far down on the page in the accounts that I have read, that ‘he’ has an arrow or two sticking into his back, and ‘she’ an arrowhead, lodged in her hip.
Yet still, somehow, for some irrational reason, the archaeologists believe this to be a couple, embracing – and not evidence of a primitive divorce.
I suppose archaeologists are, at heart, romantics.
They are, to be specific, people who have given their lives to a science – of sorts, that presupposes there is something of value to be found in what the world has chosen to discard, or nature swallowed whole. They believe that they can find, in a sense, meaning – simply by digging in the dirt.
They really believe they can see, in this tangle of bones, evidence of love.
Funny isn’t it, how love is easier to see in the past, or the future, than it is in the present.
Perhaps the distance in time allows us to make of these two piles of bones, what we will.
We cannot easily be envious of bones without flesh.
We cannot be angry at the unknown dead.
So instead we make lovers, fashioning them with the same sweet wistfulness that a child uses to sculpt a snowman, or a sandcastle, or a mud pie: with the same hopefulness with which a son or daughter presents their latest masterpiece for placement on the refrigerator door.
Here and now though, above ground, in our maturity, we are at best pragmatic when it comes to judging others.
Here in the 21st Century, we are not nearly as forgiving to those around us, who find themselves in difficulty.
In this here and now, the discovery of bones is at first, a crime scene, and the cry that goes out is not the sigh of love but, rather, the grating squeal of anger too long suppressed.
Here all missteps seem to fall into the category of crime and punishment – not necessarily in that order.
Here, at almost at the same time that these ancient lovers are being unearthed, we have the pitiful story of The Woman Who Fell to Earth.
Hers is a love story too, though, isn’t it? After all, what is it that could drive someone forward from childhood, despite all of the obstacles, toward the almost impossible goal of becoming a female astronaut, but love?
Maybe not romantic love, but love nonetheless: of the sky, of the stars, of reaching out to the heavens. And of course such a love was doomed to end in tragedy because, despite everything we have learned we will never learn to fly, on our own.
We begin life on the ground, and then instinct urges us forward, onto our feet and then, into the air.
What separates us is how high we can learn to jump.
What we all have in common is, the fall that must eventually come.
I don’t think you would argue that she had a greater distance to fall than most of us.
There are only so many ships to the stars, and only so many seats on those ships, and so many others waiting for their turn.
The heights that she strove for were finally achieved, but then what?
It is the old story of the aging athlete, or the has-been actor, or the strung-out musician, though the story is almost always about a man.
So why is there so little sympathy for her?
Instead the talking heads on television and radio – and their new cohorts on the blogs, sling arrows at this poor woman.
Instead of asking how this could have happened to her, we seem to be asking how this could have happened to us: we are insulted by her failure.
It seems unimaginable that she could have sunk so low, after flying so high.
There must be something wrong with NASA’s screening system, the pundits proclaim.
The only problem I see is that she was human.
I can imagine myself in her place.
Sure laugh, and say, ‘oh, so you wear diapers too when you go out to stalk someone’.
Go on, get it out of your system.
Get it out of your system and then try and imagine too – it’s not difficult, how you would fare if all that you had lived for suddenly evaporated – like early morning fog, and you stumbled and found yourself in a spiritual grave, alone.
Chilled to the bone.
Would you panic?
Would you grasp at any chance of escaping that pit, take any hand offered?
Who do you see in that pit, in that Italian grave?
What do you see in the shape of those bones?
Why can we find love in the dirt, and yet find it so difficult to shed a tear for a real, live woman?
Who do you love?
What will they say about your bones, in 5000 years?
In Northern Italy, a short distance from Romeo & Juliet’s Verona, they have unearthed what they believe to be – or very much want to believe, to be, undying love.
In a grave, in the cold earth, they have found two skeletons that appear to be embracing: that they believe to have been locked in each others’ arms for five thousand years.
But they have to run a few tests, to be sure.
When pressed they admit they are not yet completely confident that the bones they have found, are of a man and a woman.
When not pressed their eyes shine as they describe the lovers.
The stories of the discovery give short shrift to the observation – usually buried far down on the page in the accounts that I have read, that ‘he’ has an arrow or two sticking into his back, and ‘she’ an arrowhead, lodged in her hip.
Yet still, somehow, for some irrational reason, the archaeologists believe this to be a couple, embracing – and not evidence of a primitive divorce.
I suppose archaeologists are, at heart, romantics.
They are, to be specific, people who have given their lives to a science – of sorts, that presupposes there is something of value to be found in what the world has chosen to discard, or nature swallowed whole. They believe that they can find, in a sense, meaning – simply by digging in the dirt.
They really believe they can see, in this tangle of bones, evidence of love.
Funny isn’t it, how love is easier to see in the past, or the future, than it is in the present.
Perhaps the distance in time allows us to make of these two piles of bones, what we will.
We cannot easily be envious of bones without flesh.
We cannot be angry at the unknown dead.
So instead we make lovers, fashioning them with the same sweet wistfulness that a child uses to sculpt a snowman, or a sandcastle, or a mud pie: with the same hopefulness with which a son or daughter presents their latest masterpiece for placement on the refrigerator door.
Here and now though, above ground, in our maturity, we are at best pragmatic when it comes to judging others.
Here in the 21st Century, we are not nearly as forgiving to those around us, who find themselves in difficulty.
In this here and now, the discovery of bones is at first, a crime scene, and the cry that goes out is not the sigh of love but, rather, the grating squeal of anger too long suppressed.
Here all missteps seem to fall into the category of crime and punishment – not necessarily in that order.
Here, at almost at the same time that these ancient lovers are being unearthed, we have the pitiful story of The Woman Who Fell to Earth.
Hers is a love story too, though, isn’t it? After all, what is it that could drive someone forward from childhood, despite all of the obstacles, toward the almost impossible goal of becoming a female astronaut, but love?
Maybe not romantic love, but love nonetheless: of the sky, of the stars, of reaching out to the heavens. And of course such a love was doomed to end in tragedy because, despite everything we have learned we will never learn to fly, on our own.
We begin life on the ground, and then instinct urges us forward, onto our feet and then, into the air.
What separates us is how high we can learn to jump.
What we all have in common is, the fall that must eventually come.
I don’t think you would argue that she had a greater distance to fall than most of us.
There are only so many ships to the stars, and only so many seats on those ships, and so many others waiting for their turn.
The heights that she strove for were finally achieved, but then what?
It is the old story of the aging athlete, or the has-been actor, or the strung-out musician, though the story is almost always about a man.
So why is there so little sympathy for her?
Instead the talking heads on television and radio – and their new cohorts on the blogs, sling arrows at this poor woman.
Instead of asking how this could have happened to her, we seem to be asking how this could have happened to us: we are insulted by her failure.
It seems unimaginable that she could have sunk so low, after flying so high.
There must be something wrong with NASA’s screening system, the pundits proclaim.
The only problem I see is that she was human.
I can imagine myself in her place.
Sure laugh, and say, ‘oh, so you wear diapers too when you go out to stalk someone’.
Go on, get it out of your system.
Get it out of your system and then try and imagine too – it’s not difficult, how you would fare if all that you had lived for suddenly evaporated – like early morning fog, and you stumbled and found yourself in a spiritual grave, alone.
Chilled to the bone.
Would you panic?
Would you grasp at any chance of escaping that pit, take any hand offered?
Who do you see in that pit, in that Italian grave?
What do you see in the shape of those bones?
Why can we find love in the dirt, and yet find it so difficult to shed a tear for a real, live woman?
Who do you love?
What will they say about your bones, in 5000 years?
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