Parting Shot

It’s disgusting, but fitting, that in the last days of the Bush Administration, another Middle East country should be pre-emptively invaded.
It is surprising that Sarah Palin didn’t know how to accurately describe the so-called Bush Doctrine, because it can be summed up with the kind of bumper sticker wisdom that she loved: Sh-- Happens.
Don’t tell me that the U.S. had nothing to do with this latest misadventure. Don’t be so naïve as to believe that Israel didn’t act now, because otherwise they would have had to deal with a new administration, and a new President who may not have been so willing to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to another dose of ‘shock and awe’.
Neither am I so naïve as to believe that the soon-to-be Obama Administration isn’t relieved that they won’t have to take the blame for allowing this to happen on their watch. And I am not happy that President-elect Obama has not condemned this escalation of the Palestinian conflict: instead he has played the cynical political game of ‘deniability’.
But as ‘W’ goes out the door – looking much the worse for wear, let’s be clear: this invasion was another – hopefully the last, in a series of so-called policy decisions (never mind that it was yet another decision to do nothing) of the Decider, and an administration that almost always placed ideology above the welfare of the individual.
The people of Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the entire Muslim world – in the eyes of the Bush Administration, don’t deserve basic human rights.
The people of New Orleans – in the minds of the kinds of conservatives that ‘W’ placed in key roles in FEMA and in many other government agencies critical to the welfare of less fortunate Americans, got what they deserved.
The people of California lost billions of dollars to piratical entities like Enron, because the Bush Administration believed in letting the chips fall where they may (never mind that the game was played with your money).
Tens of millions of retirees saw their pensions destroyed in a matter of weeks, because the Bush administration believed that everyone should have an equal chance to be screwed by the corporation of their own choosing.
Exxon-Mobil and their cronies claimed they could do nothing to slow rising gas prices – asserting that it takes months for changes in production to affect costs. But did you notice that when the American people began to drive less, the price came down immediately?
The Bush Administration could have stopped the invasion of Gaza, but why would they? The invasion of Gaza is Iraq in miniature. Our intervention in Gaza is why Hamas took power there in the first place. It was the Bush administrations’ hypocritical embrace of ‘democracy’ that helped bring about the elections there. And then, when Hamas was the surprise winner of that election, Bush’ alleged love of democracy was unmasked as political cynicism, pure and simple, and the Bush Administration tried to starve Hamas into submission. When that didn’t work, ‘W’ turned to his second favorite foreign policy tactic: he put his head in the sand and hoped that when he next looked up the world would have changed. Instead, of course, without an ongoing, constructive effort on the part of America in the area, the situation deteriorated.
As the dust begins to clear in Iraq, we are looking at nearly a decade of conflict, hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi dead, over a trillion dollars spent, a more powerful Iran, and a Middle East as fragile as we found it.
When the bombs stop falling on Gaza there will be probably about a thousand more Palestinians (and a few dozen Israeli) dead, several thousand wounded and – much worse, a city of over a million already desperate people without electricity, water, homes, schools, medicine, food, and with even less hope for the future than they had one month ago.
In such an environment only radicalism can flourish. After such an episode, the prospects for peace will have been pushed back, once again.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Are the Israelis so stupid as to repeat both theirs, and our, recent history: believing they can conduct war on a timetable, believing their bombs are so smart they can pick and choose who they kill?
The Intifadah. The Insurgency. The Taliban. Ramallah, Fallujah, and soon, Kabul?
The only thing missing is George W. in a leather aviator jacket, standing on an aircraft carrier, with a giant banner proclaiming, “Oops, I did it again.”
Goodbye George, and good riddance

A Perfect Tree

I should have just kept last year’s tree.

What do you think?

If you took a ruler to this one, measured its height, its width, its weight, I’m sure I’m off by no more than an inch or two, an ounce or so.

Douglas Fir, Fraser, Blue Spruce?

I don’t know.

I’m not a Christmas tree snob.

I know what I like. I cut right to the chase. It’s a scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: I go right up to the first one that catches my eye, put my arms around it, give it a hug, lift it off the ground, (measuring, approximating, inhaling the aroma), and if it feels right I take it home with me.

And after all the lights and 30 years worth of ornaments have been applied, damn if it doesn’t look just like last year’s tree!

I’m not complaining, but it’s eerie. It’s like there is some kind of relationship, some kind of connection, some inner design I am working to. Has there been building in the cave of my brain all year – ever since we took the last one down, another perfect, platonic Christmas tree?

I don’t give it any thought, but I know it when I put my arms around it.

Of course, the tree has got to fit into a particular space, in a room with a specific ceiling height, allow just enough room for, at most, eight people who’ll sit around it on Christmas morning.

How does that tree feel, among all the other trees? Like the ugly girl, the awkward boy, sitting on folding chairs at the edge of the dance floor hoping for an invitation?

Or is it like Vertigo, to cite another favorite film of mine, when Jimmy Stewart dresses up Kim Novak to look like the woman he loved and lost, only it turns out he’s dressing Kim to look like Kim. The joke’s on him.

Is last year’s tree playing a joke on me?

Clearly, the intent is to make this year’s tree look like last year’s tree, and the one before, and the one before that. We have an idea, and everything we do is calculated to achieve that effect.

I guess I should feel a bit more empathy for the tree. We make a big show of the selection but, ironically, we don’t respect its individuality. Then again, is it really another, different tree? Is it the ghost of Christmas trees past? And what of the rejects cast to the side, too large or too small, too thick or too dry?

This, at least, is a better fate than theirs. This one, at least, was not cut from the soil and strapped to a truck and driven 500 miles for naught.

At least this tree was chosen.

Look at it now, standing there in the corner, all dressed up in tiny lights and handmade ornaments. It knows the truth, but it is content to allow us our illusion.

Our illusion?

What year is this?

1980?

1990?

If you’re not careful you can lose control, be sucked back a dozen years or more, forever trapped in a Christmas or Christmases past.

Christmas trees are time machines!

If I look carefully, I can tell the year, or come darn close. But usually you don’t look too closely at a Christmas tree. Usually, when the tree is done, you allow your eyes to go out of focus, allow your mind to drift.

But there, that ornament of a hockey player made from dough, I could swear we got that in1992, when Bobby was on his first traveling team. That February the parents and players went to Canada by bus. That was the first of several successive school vacations spent, for the most part, in a hockey rink.

And there, those faded blue and green balls, with the gold tracery, those were Mary’s parents’ ornaments, on their tree, and the year is 1949.

The shuttle craft? Press the top and Spock says “Live long and prosper”. That’s only, what, 20 years old or so? It’s amazing that it has lasted, and prospered, for so long.

Now I remember: We haven’t always had our tree in the same spot in the house. It used to be in front of the slider, before the desk went in there. Once it was in the other corner of this room, and there’s the hole from the screw we put in the wall – where we ran a wire to the trunk of the tree, to keep it from falling over again.

I guess there have been a few mistakes made, a few trees that were too tall, or too wide, or whose trunks were too thick to fit into the stand. But even if we choose poorly, we can always add an extra layer of ornaments, or turn the tree so that its bad side is facing the wall, or squint our eyes a little more tightly, fracture the light, bend the shadow, give ourselves up to the overwhelming urge to forget.

Right now, staring at this tree, I’m having a hard time remembering any bad sides, any bad decisions, any bad Christmases.

It seems that somehow, whatever is going on in the world or in our lives, we manage to make it to that place where by unanimous consent, everything’s just fine the way it is.

Maybe it is an illusion. Maybe underneath the lights and the bulbs is an ugly, twisted, corpse of a tree.

But maybe just this once, at this time of year, we just have to blink our eyes a few times and let it be.

So, how’d I do this year?

Isn’t it a perfect tree?

$19.95

I’ve got this gift-giving thing down.
I’m getting my older brother, the Baconwave.
Just $19.95.
It makes perfect bacon, in the microwave.
It’s a joke, of sorts. Bob lives down in Florida, and has been on this health kick lately. He says he’s given up the Guinness, and the fried Ring Dings. He runs now, in the mornings – and pumps iron when he gets home from work. He looks ten years younger, says he feels great.
I guess I’m being mean.
For Dad, it’s the Forearm Forklift Strap Set, just $19.95.
Dad’s 85, in great shape – and with absolutely no interest, or need, for moving or mowing or doing much of anything, except traveling. I tell him not to, but he sends me his itineraries. I don’t care to know the exact time and location of the good times he is having. I think he does it to irk me.
Not that he ever will, but with the Forearm Forklift Strap Set now - if he wanted, he could move a dresser or a refrigerator all by himself.
Hell, he never likes what I get him anyway. He doesn’t really need anything. I guess it’s a kind of sarcastic gift – if gifts can be sarcastic.
I guess I just have the holiday spirit. Well, maybe not the holiday spirit, but one of the holiday spirits. Grumpy? Sneezy? Doc?
I’m getting Dave, down the street, the Weed Thrasher: mainly because I like the name. It sounds like something you beat the weeds up with: give those nasty dandelions a thrashing.
Just $19.95, too.
Dave has no lawn, or yard, to speak of. He’s got concrete, and mulch, and that faux granite tile that’s suppose to last a thousand years, around his in-ground pool. If a stray leaf wanders onto his property, he pays someone to immediately Hoover it off.
Do you sense a pattern here?
I like to give people useless gifts, especially if the price is right.
Maybe I’m angry because – as a child, I never really got what I wanted. My parents could never get it just right: it was always the wrong brand, or wrong color, or the wrong size. And when that happens you have to smile and, with a super-human effort, stop yourself from turning immediately back to your pile and frantically ripping into what’s left.
All these gifts that I’m considering giving, are items that I’ve seen on TV too: odd items from late night television that I considered buying for myself. Eventually though, I fought off the urge and, instead, bought them for friends and family.
I am also intrigued that everything is $19.95.
I think it’s a conspiracy of some kind.
I get the feeling that they (the same ‘they‘as always) have figured out that $19.95 is the perfect price. It sounds nice to say. It tricks your mouth into mimicking a smile. You can’t say ‘nineteen ninety-five’ without grinning: try it. It’s also a price just high enough to allow you believe that you have a chance of getting something that actually does what it is advertised to do, and just low enough not to care too much if it does not.
It’s the magic number. Repeat after me: just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Someone told me it’s the As Seen on TV Index.
When the economy is strong, the ASOT Index goes up. Just last Christmas it was at $24.95. Since then though, it’s dropped like a stone.
Whatever it is, it’s working.
If it’s $19.95 I go right for my credit card.
I’m seriously considering getting the Ding King for myself. It’s this little contraption with thumb screws and suction cups that you place over the little dings you get on your car, and just by tightening the thumb screws – the ding pops out.
Just $19.95.
Not that I have a car worth taking the time to make cosmetic repairs to: I mean, the old Camry could benefit from an extended Ding King session, if I could get the sap off it first. But why bother: we don’t have a garage, so if I clean the sap off the car it would soon be covered again. And in a year or two it will be completely encased in sap, like a bug in amber.
I’m thinking about getting Mary a Snuggie.
You guessed it: just $19.95.
It’s just a big blanket, with sleeves.
She’s worried about work, about the economy, about me – so when she gets home she usually just curls up into a ball, on the couch, and passes out until it’s time to go to sleep. With the Snuggie she can be transferred directly from the couch to the bed.
I might get Riddex Plus, too: just $19.95.
I think we have mice in the attic, or the eaves or somewhere in the walls. They sound like they’re skating: pushing a puck in front of them. You just plug in the little Riddex box in any outlet, and the ultrasonic sound waves – they promise, drive the mice away (or distract them long enough to keep them from scoring).
There’s so much more, so many odd, unusual inventions: so many labor saving devices for just $19.95. The Girl Crush Jewelry Maker. The Ultrasonic Jewelry Cleaner. The Blendy Pen. Ambervision. Mighty Putty. Save-A-Blade. The Big City Slider Station? The Auto Vent SPV. Doggy Steps for aged pets. The list just goes on and on.
I think they should offer a mystery gift, filled with a random assortment of five or six of these odd devices, for just $19.95.
Is that possible?
Sure, why not. They don’t really cost $19.95. That’s just the magic number. They could sell them for a buck, or twenty dollars, or $3.99. But they’ve figured out they’ll sell the most if they price them at the magic number.
I might just go down the list and buy everything they have for $19.95. Then, when everything arrives, cover everything up in the cheapest wrapping paper I can find, load it all into the Camry’s sap-encased trunk, and go around town passing out gifts, pretending I’m the As Seen on TV Santa.
It’s not the holiday spirit. But what do you want, for $19.95?

I'm Not Counting

“Will the days fly by?” my youngest son asked me, early this morning.
Christmas, of course, was what was on his mind.
‘That depends’, I mumbled, trudging down the stairs. ‘That depends,’ I said, but it felt like a lie.
We certainly help create the illusion that the days are hurtling toward us, like snowflakes sucked into our high beams on the highway. But if we were to slow, then stop – get out of the car, turn our heads to the stars, we might find the flakes falling like, well, like snowflakes fall, so slowly to the ground.
I’m sure the single flake once it lands, looks back at the sky, and sighs.
‘I wish’, it probably says in a whisper, in that ever so low snowflake hushed tone, ‘I wish that I could feel what it’s like to fall through the sky, to float through the air, to have that feeling just one more time’.
It does no good to console the flake with references to the water cycle (but of course I make a pathetic try).
“It’s like the rain,” I say to my son over a hurried breakfast, “it falls to earth and then, fills the rivers, and then, well you know – ends up back in the sky.”
He gets what I am saying, smiles, and then to my magic ointment adds his fly.
“But what if I can’t wait, to evaporate?”
“You have no choice,” I say, impatiently, watching the minutes go by: “we are either too early, or too late”.
Even as I say that, though I won’t publicly admit it - I reject that fate.
I too hope for a moment eternal: in Christmas everyday, in Leap Year, and Un-Birthdays.
Everything I write I want to be poetry.
Every bite I take, I am hoping will taste of ecstasy.
Every breath I take.
Will the days fly by?
I suppose what I want to say – to live, is a life of days indistinguishable from one another. Not indistinguishable because they are so drab and gray and uneventful that they all blur into one groaning mass. But indistinguishable because each has a subtle, unique beauty, a beauty hiding, like a drop of rain in a swollen river.
I think what I mean to say, is that we do not need to speed up or slow down these days. We simply need to take the time – there is time, to consider, to touch, to remark on each one.
Today the sun was in my eyes as I drove my son to the Middle School.
The bearded traffic warden was his usual impatient self, frenetically conducting the cacophonous traffic: the yellow bus bassoons, the reedy SUVs, the breathless flutes of four-cylinder youth.
I merged into the traffic, split off from the high school stream, leaped over the confluence of high and middle schools, looped around the future movie studio lot, dropped off my snowflake and didn’t look back.
I know he will make it back home, this afternoon.
I know the day will fly by and he will once again drop down out of the sky, sigh, and say to me, “how many days before Christmas, Dad?”
And I will lie, and say “I’m not counting.”

Pilgrim Labor Crisis

The Plimoth Plantation, the nation’s leading producer of 17th Century Impersonators, announced this month that – in the face of dramatic drops in attendance and revenue at its ‘theme park’, and following on the announced layoffs of experienced staff members, that it is considering several dramatic new business strategies, up to and including changing centuries.
The following is a list – obtained from a former Lieutenant Governor of the Plymouth Colony who wishes to remain anachronistic, of the key strategies being considered by Plantation leadership.

The 20th Century:
Instead of Plymouth in its infancy (circa 1627), the Plantation is considering shifting its focus to the Plantation in its infancy – namely, the Plantation in the mid 20th Century (circa 1968), when it served the community as a kind of de-facto commune, getting the region’s long-hairs off the streets. (Ironically, ‘coole’ and ‘far oute’ were expressions used in both of these historic periods.)

1610
Ten years before the Pilgrim’s landed, the Wampanoag village of Pawtuxet flourished. A focus on that year would allow for the layoff of the entire impersonator staff, the refinancing of every unoccupied home on Leyden Street, the installation of basic utilities (specifically, flush toilets), and the addition to the town’s low income housing, of 11 desirable units.

Pilgrim FX
For this approach, the impersonators remain faithful to the historical record BUT, sophisticated digital technologies and effects are utilized to create horrifically realistic portrayals of the more bloody (and therefore crowd-pleasing) moments in the Pilgrim story, including:
§ The beheading of King Phillip.
§ The drowning of Dorothy Bradford.
§ The big splinter that John Billington had removed from his butt.
§ And the last big layoff (2001) of 17th Century Impersonators.

The Mayflower III Paddlewheel Plymouth Harbor Booze Cruise
Three times a day, five times on weekends, the Mayflower – equipped with it’s own working Paddlewheel, would offer mini-historic-booze-cruises of the harbor during which costumed impersonators - confined to cages on deck, could be taunted and teased by the paying customers.

The Haunting of Burial Hill House
Requiring no Pilgrim impersonators at all, the 17th Century Pilgrim Settlement would instead, be transformed into a first-rate haunted house

The Pilgrim Improv Troupe?
You buy a ticket and we make it up as we go.

Timeshare Anyone?
Imagine spending a week in your own 17th century home, eating gruel, fending off pesky savages, and – helping to keep the towns’ rapidly rising number of wild turkeys in check. For just $10,000 you could spend one week every year in one of the world’s most famous single family homes (the first to order will have their choice of the Bradford, Winslow, or Standish units) – or, exchange your unit for a fortnight in a 9thth Century British hovel (eating gruel, fending off pesky Vikings) or a long weekend in 3rd Century Rome (eating gruel, fending off pesky barbarians).

Seven Flags, Plymouth
You want rides? We got rides! Well, one at least. The Mayflower Experience: a sort of roller coaster with only one large car – in which up to a hundred ticket holders are forced together, doused with saltwater, subjected to nasty smells, tumbled like clothes in the dryer, blasted with pre-recorded religious aphorisms, then left to fend for themselves somewhere else.
Want to go again?

Alternative History?
What if?
What if little Johnny Billington had actually discovered the Pacific Ocean (and not the pond that now bears his name) settled in California, planted a vineyard, developed the famous ‘Pilgrim Pub & Grub’ chain, eventually moving their massive World headquarters (designed to look like a big glass hamburger) to Plymouth’s non-historic, honky-tonk waterfront?
What if?
What if the term ‘Pilgrim’ were synonymous with ‘party animal.’
What if?
What if Squanto’s plan was to wait until he had earned the confidence of the Pilgrims then, when they were all asleep...

Let The Inmates Run the Asylum!
What if, instead of cutting middle management and asking the indentured servants (impersonators) to do more with less, we get rid of ourselves (the high-priced upper management, museum types, Mayflower descendants, retailers) and instead, really, honestly, obsessively, focus on creating an actual working, 17th Century settlement.
Hire dozens of additional impersonators and have them actually on site, all the time.
Instead of giving into today’s economic realities, fully embrace the 17th Century’s realities. Live off the corn we grow, the livestock we raise, and the beer we brew. Have perhaps, two or three sets of impersonators for each historic personage.
Script an entire year – and give visitors a chance to travel back in time – to a specific day, happening in real time.
Now that would be exciting.
That would be a reality worth paying for.
Let the Pilgrims actually run Pilgrim Town!
What a concept!

Ye Olde Story

There are quite a few places in Plymouth that proudly wear the “Ye’.
There are also a great many businesses and tourist attractions that claim to be olde, with the extra ‘e’, which is either an outright affectation, or an implication that the business in question is in part – or whole, really, really old. (An olde, but goode?)
There are also businesses that come right out and slap the word ‘Pilgrim’ onto their store front, the sides of delivery vans, brochures, business cards, web sites and the like – regardless of whether their buildings are olde, their ancestors came off the Mayflower, or they specialize in Pilgrim kitsch.
But there are only a handful of businesses in this historic community that can claim all three.
I call it, The Plyfecta!
And then there is my favorite Laundromat.
I probably shouldn’t say it’s my favorite, because that implies I’ve tried many and prefer one: actually I only recently visited this particular Laundromat, when our dryer kicked ye olde bucket.
But when I realized I had to find a Laundromat, I knew just where I would go.
Not only is the place where I chose to dry my delicates a certified Ye, and an olde but goode, and features ‘Pilgrim’ in its business name, but the wash and fold folks on Sandwich Street take it one big affectated step further - featuring a wishing well – one of America’s most endearing faux lawn decorations, in their name.
Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat!
If you’re looking for a Laundromat, how can you top that?
Well, how about with the words of Mary Elizabeth Dibley, the Plymouth colony’s first washerwoman, from her historic diary, entitled “Of Plimoth Laundree”.

“Being thus arrived in a good harbore and brought safe to lande, we felle upon our knees &, what do thee knowe, but founde we were knee deepe in a small brooke of pleasante waters and, the thoughte came to me – well, actuallethly, the smell came to me, and I remarked to Goodman Bradford that he was ripe in age and stench and that I would, for less than he might imagineth, undertake to wash his doublet right then and there. Blessed be ye God of heaven, who had brought us over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered us from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set our feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente and, despite all that, left both man and woman with an all too earthly odor and a chance to make a bucke”

Unbelievable!
Yeah, you’re right, it is unbelievable. Not the Laundromat – no, that exists, but Mary Dibley – ye olde Pilgrim Washer-woman: I made her up. I got carried away by the Ye, and the Olde, and the whole Pilgrim shtick. But can you blame me? Whether its trinkets or toiletries or auto parts, history is good for the bottom line. Heck, even the movie folks got into the act (rumor has it, that their first idea was to call their venture, Ye Olde Pilgrim Celluloid Companie).
On one hand, it’s silly. On the other hand, it associates your business with people who were adventurous, brave, hard working and – most importantly, successful.
At its worse, Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat is just that – a Laundromat.
At its best, washing your clothes in the waters of Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat might somehow imbue them with the spirit and vitality of our stalwart Pilgrim forbears.
Plymouth was the first town in America where someone casually remarked to someone else – (and someone else wrote it down) ‘there’s something in the water’. And if its ‘in the water’, the implication is clear, it could get ‘in the clothes’!
Its possible!
I should make it clear though that, the owners of Ye Olde Wash and Fold, are not making that kind of claim: not specifically, not outright. The only claim they make – as far I can tell, is that they are not responsible for lost or stolen items.
The attendants, I should inform you, do not wear traditional Pilgrim garb.
And the workers don’t look puzzled when you ask them where you might get an espresso while your doublet is drying.
Though directly across the street is the Jabez Howland home – an actual 1667 saltbox style, cedar shingled structure with leaded windows and tours available – the building that the Laundromat occupies seems to have had almost all vestiges of its past put through the rinse cycle.
Instead of the wide plank floors that tourists might envision, there are only the remnants of artificial floor coverings and, beneath that, what appears to be plywood.
Instead of traditional clapboard there is aluminum siding, and a giant flap on the southern side of the building that – when opened, allows the servicing of the washing machines from the outside of the building.
Inside pop music plays from a few small speakers, and two large ceiling fans turn counter-clockwise while several dozen washers and dryers roll monotonously forward.
It is definitely cleaner than your typical Pilgrim household.
It’s definitely warmer than your typical Pilgrim home.
But hey, whadda ya want: this is America!
We like to associate ourselves with the best of our past, but if the history actually shows through - if the old beams haven’t been plastered over and the wide plank floors haven’t been hidden under at least two coats of linoleum, something must be wrong.
Which is not to say that Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well can’t do the job.
If your clothes need washing but history bores you, rest assured – you won’t have to use a washboard: there is an abundance of late model Maytag machines.
Don’t be confused: the pilgrims did not come over on the Maytag – though if they had they would have arrived with brighter whites, and more vibrant colors.
Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well is, in the end, just a Laundromat.
If you’re planning a visit, bring something good to read.
Bring quarters too: the machines don’t take shillings, or pence, or Canadian coins.
Bring a basket or two of Ye and Olde, and maybe a pint of Olde Grand Dad. After an hour or so taking it all in, who knows how bright your whites might be?

Uncle Bob's

I must be getting old.
In fact, I know I’m getting old.
We’re all getting old – or at least older, and there’s nothing we can do about it – except give in.
I’m giving in, and the evidence of that is in the stuff I am willing to give out – or give away.
I’m letting the stuff go.
A sure sign of advanced years, I think, is the ability to let go of stuff – all kinds of stuff.
When you’re young, you like stuff, but you’re too busy testing out your own stuff (strutting your stuff) to worry about acquiring other stuff. Consequently, though you’re pretty fussy about the stuff you have – or want, relatively speaking you don’t have much stuff at all.
I used to drag around a trunk full of LPs (large pizza-size black platters on which music had been recorded – for those of you under 40), along with a suitcase with two pairs of jeans and 40 tee shirts, and I thought I was weighed down by my possessions. I had no clue how much stuff I would eventually be able to carry around on my back - like the giant tortoise primitive people believed carried the world on its shell.
The truth is, or was – that, 30 years ago I hardly had any stuff at all.
So where did it all come from?
When you reach a certain age, you don’t suddenly have a lot of stuff: stuff doesn’t start erupting from the floor like zits on your forehead.
It’s not that you have more zits as you get older, it’s that you have more forehead: more space for the stuff.
You get your first car and, you soon discover, a car is just space to put stuff.
You get your first apartment and – though you were hoping it would prove a ‘babe’ magnet, it turns out that it’s a stuff magnet.
Your first house? Oh my gosh, a house is like some Criss Angel ‘Mind-Freak’ magic trick in which – one moment you have all these empty rooms, shiny wooden floors, clean carpets and unblemished walls, and then Criss throws a blanket over it – tosses his carefully jelled unkempt hair back and – voila, the place is full of stuff: crammed with stuff; stuffed with stuff; choking on stuff.
Of course you could just get rid of the stuff, couldn’t you?
Hah, that’s a laugh. I still have that trunk full of LPs.
Have you ever seen Criss Angel’s basement? It’s crammed with old guillotines, elephants he teleported, lots and lots of mirrors, and case after case of hair gel.
Scientists will tell you that human beings are genetically linked to squirrels: no matter how many nuts we have, we’re going to keep cramming them down the trunk of our tree until it splits in half. Heck, I carry around a year’s worth of acorns in my mouth.
So what do you do?
Well, when you’re young, you think it’s simple: just get more space, for the stuff.
Maybe you start off storing stuff in the basement. Then you buy some of those closet organizers. Closet organizers are like accountants on a battlefield: useless, except to keep count of the carnage.
Did you ever go to a house and – seeing how neat and uncluttered it was, wonder where they were hiding all their stuff?
My friend Dan super-glued some of his stuff to the ceiling.
I have another friend who put those torpedo-shaped containers that you usually see on the roofs of SUVs – on the roof of his house: he keeps his LPs in them.
I myself have 3 ½ tool sheds, spread about the back yard – and my tools are still somewhere in the basement.
So I was somewhat taken aback, when my wife announced last week that there was going to be a new addition to our family. She wasn’t pregnant – she was just trying to tell me in the nicest way possible that she had agreed to take a few pieces of furniture from her father’s old apartment. It was her way of saying, you can either help me move his stuff in, or you can move yourself out.
I took it surprisingly well, I think. I do take up a lot of space that could otherwise be taken up by three boxes of old photographs, or an old KayPro computer, or one of those budget size 48-roll bundles of paper towels that you can get at Sam’s Club.
That’s another thing about all this stuff: we have so much of it that we spend half our lives moving it from one room to another, one house to another. Forget weddings and funerals: the only time the family ever gets together is when somebody is moving in or moving out. I found out my son had become a Zoroastrian during a conversation we had from opposite ends of a couch we were carrying up two flights of stairs to his new apartment…
So, anyway, I gave in, and paid a visit to Uncle Bob.
Did I tell you about Uncle Bob? He’s not really my Uncle, but I was attracted to the name, and there was a local franchise right down the street from our stuff, I mean, from our house.
Uncle Bob’s is what they call, a self-storage center.
Uncle Bob’s was a revelation, to me at least.
I’ve heard of doggie heaven, and cat heaven, and the like – the places that our pets go after they die. But I never knew there was a stuff heaven. That’s what Uncle Bob’s is: acres and acres of cute little metal houses where the stuff you never thought you could live without, spends its golden years.
Oh, so you’re not impressed. That’s because you’re still young. You still think that there will always be space for your stuff, right at home. You swear you will never give your stuff away or – heaven forbid, store it someplace.
Maybe you’re right. Or maybe you’re just young.
As you get older you don’t love your stuff any less, you just start to realize that not too far down the road, somebody’s going to have to figure out what to do with your stuff.
I’m not waiting. I’m taking a sofa bed and my old trunk of LPs, and moving into a 5x10 at Uncle Bob’s.
Forget the stuff. I need a place of my own.

Time Travel, Rotaries, Convenience Stores..

The trouble with time travel – I have always argued, is that if we could actually travel through time, time wouldn’t be time, anymore.
I mean, time is predictable, inexorable (look it up), unyielding, and monotonous (not to mention, redundant): if it were not all those things, it would not be time.
Understand?
The same might be said for traffic (in fact, I just said it) – and historically, efforts to manage traffic have been as pathetic as the efforts to manage time. That is to say, the idea that we can manage traffic is, largely, science fiction – that is, except for the exploits our own Billington Brothers.
The Billington Brothers, in case you’re new to town – were Plymouth’s own time travelers. No, I’m sorry – I meant to say, Plymouth’s own traffic engineers. In fact, you might say that the Billington Brothers were America’s first traffic engineers.
Way back before there was traffic in America (a long, long time ago), the Billington Brothers were managing it.
Before there was a need to find a quick way to Middleboro – before Old 44 and way before the New 44, and actually before Middleboro itself, Francis Billington went looking for a short cut.
He actually found it – the short cut that is, but as there was no where to cut shortly to – save for the 3000 or so miles between here and the Pacific Ocean, Francis might still be headed west if he did not run smack dab into a Native American all-natural rotary. Some historians have cynically concluded that Francis was actually lost, but I think we have all seen our share of out-of-state drivers who knew right where they were, but could not extricate themselves from a rotary.
I could go on – making a kind of literary rotary out of this, but unlike those aforementioned drivers, I know that to get out of this. I simply need to use, what my first English teacher told me, was a transitional device.
300 years after Francis Billington got caught in that magic circle of bent birch trees, his descendant, Tiki Manoogian, is one of the regulars at the very popular collection of shops and automobile service operations on South Street, known as the Mayflower Convenience Store.
Actually, until I told him, Tiki didn’t even realize that his favorite store sits on the site of that prehistoric rotary.
Until I convinced him, Tiki didn’t even know that he was a descendant of Francis Billington.
But after experiencing the mystery and magic of the maze of roads and parking spaces that have been woven from the 100 square miles of pungent tar that encircles the Mayflower complex, Tiki was ready to let me put words in his mouth.
“I used to believe that there was no more confounding web of roadway in the world than the paths that bind the acres of our own Myles Standish State Forest together,” Tiki repeated for me, adding “To enter the Myles Standish without an experienced guide or a detailed map is to experience a true Hansel & Gretel moment.”
But the mystical power of the Mayflower Convenience stores much smaller footprint, may be derived from its very compactness. And it is far more frightening to become lost in the Mayflower’s parking lots, than it is to be lost in Myles Standish – because it just does not seem possible. One moment you are at the self-service gas pump, watching and waving to friends driving by, and the next you are banging on the window of their own Dunkin Donut franchise – desperately asking for directions.
Tiki swears he’s not benefiting from the confusion – though he understands the financial rewards of stranding motorists at that location. All credit Tiki says, is owed the Planning Board – which designed the traffic flow. And judging from some of their other work around town – the Planning Board’s involvement does seem likely.
No matter who gets credit, the Mayflower Convenience Store parking lot is a marvel of traffic flow dis-engineering.
When you leave the pumps, you can’t go left – though South Street is just a few feet away. The arrows – like bread crumbs left by a lost child, turn you to the right. If you thought then, to pick up a cruller and regular Joe to go, again you can’t go left and park in the spaces in front of DoubleD, but instead you’re directed right - along the front of the store.
Careful, the old dead-end that led to the cute little gingerbread ATM is still there, but different. The road now passes the ATM, and descends down a floodlit hill that you never knew existed, complete with speed bumps, traffic lights, past a grove of ancient, gnarled birch trees (the original Billington Rotary I’m told by local psychic historian Dee Jonson) before circling around the back of the compound.
By that point though, panic has set in, and you just want out. Brilliantly, you can’t ask directions at the take-out window of the Dunkin Donuts, unless you have previously ordered at the remote ordering pylon, which you have probably already passed. If you really want a donut, you’re going to have to go around again, and if you just want to get directions, you’re going to have to order first, after you go around again. If you give up, and want to go downtown - toward the waterfront, you are in luck – because you are now in line for a right turn only ramp. But if you give up and want to go west – toward Home Depot, you can’t take the obvious route to South Street - because that’s a right turn only. Instead, again, you’ll have to pass by the front of the convenience/deli/liquor store.
After doing this a few times, the subliminal low-frequency radio broadcasts emanating from the store take effect, and before you leave you will have purchased – at the very least, a lottery ticket, two donuts, coffee, a new oil filter, and a GPS unit. Or, you may become like Tiki, a permanent resident.
Yes, there are many other magical traffic experiences in Plymouth: the blind intersection of Long Pond and Ship Pond Roads; the mayhem that will ensue when the drive thru at the new Mary Lou's backs up onto Hedges Pond Road; the late afternoon sun that blinds you on Route 80; and the dead-ends, bridge-outs, frost-heaves and nameless ponds of Myles Standish, to name just a few. But I feel safe in predicting that – a thousand years from now, visitors from outer space will be bending time in order to experience the mind-altering, suspension-twisting, one-way, no way, wrong way weirdness of the Billington’s own Mayflower Convenience Store.

Ballast

Ode to a cheese curl.
Oh lovely, crunchy, neon orange waste of a dozen calories. When the day is done you are the only thing that remains with me: glowing from the tips of each finger like radioactive waste; gummed up along the crevices of my molars; stuck to my shirt like late spring snowflakes.
Whenever I become excessively pompous, whenever I go on too long about the symbolism of the Thunderbird in “Thelma & Louise”, nothing brings me down to earth faster than a handful of your hollow fingers.
Is there anything more normal, more everyday, more matter of fact than your obscenely inflated carbohydrates?
Is there anything more accessible, more available, more capable of inking over the aggravating details of existence, than your sold by volume not by weight insubstantiality?
Yeah, I guess there is.
A good hot dog, for one. The first juicy clamp down on a sugar-fed Double Bubble.
Hell, there are probably a hundred economical antidotes to my middle-age onset addiction to the pompous and/or unnecessarily complex.
Pardon me, but I’ve just come to the realization that along with my Silver Patron Tequila, and the anniversary edition of Mile’s Kind of Blue, the poetry of Russell Hoban, the blogs and the journals and the saxophone and a thousand other subtly intoxicating substances and services that I have become philosophically and/or physically addicted to, that I crave the everyday too: I need the average as well, as much, to be happy.
Those guys in the clown outfits that ride the tall unicycles while playing Yankee Doodle Dandy on the fife in the July 4th Parade – they aren’t still out there, are they?
No, I didn’t think so.
You can only balance on one wheel and play the fife and wear the clown makeup for so long – before you go arse over teakettle. Sooner, not later, you have to put the training wheels back on.
Even blimp pilots go on vacations.
And let me tell you, when a blimp pilot takes her vacation she sticks close to the ground: seventy-two percent of blimp pilots are avid spelunkers (I made that up.)
But seriously, what I am babbling about is balance. Not Yin and Yang – those are two sides of the same coin. No, the kind of balance that a ship needs to keep from floundering at sea – balance from ballast: from forty-thousand pounds of cobblestones in its belly (40,000 pounds of cheese curls would do too).
I remember an afternoon playing so-called touch football with some overgrown, underage hard-asses some twenty years ago, and getting carried away with the contact – with rushing the quarterback, with smacking into the oversized yoot left behind to block for the opposition and, though afterwards I could hardly walk, feeling almost high from the contact, the physicality, the total abandonment of intellect.
(I also remember the sound of my bones collapsing like cheese curls under the existential jaw of age).
Touch football is the cheese curl of athletic endeavors.
I love the relative mindless-ness of hiking in the White Mountains too, where, for most of the time, there are no sights at all to see, just branches to avoid, boulders to scale, slopes to scramble up and where – before you know it, your worries are far behind. I think it must be far more tiring to hike out west, where you are often moving across open glades with too much to see, too much time to think.
But then, of late, I haven’t had the time to hike at all.
This year my hikes have consisted of going from the phone, to the computer, to the phone, to the TV, to bed.
Lately life has been like a ride up old Route 1, from Peabody to Medford, with never a break between one oversized array of blinking lights to the next; no exits except those that just turn you around and send you back down the other side like a gerbil on the wheel.
Simply put, I am in need of simplicity.
I could use a bowl of Gram Tobin’s rice pudding.
I’d like to get my hands around one or two of those grenade-sized Rolling Rocks.
I could use a fast drive through the North Woods, with the windows down and the lights out.
I’m searching the dial for a static-free AM station.
This blimp pilot needs a vacation.
Another bowl of cheese curls, please.


(Photo courtesy of Cinemaben)

A War of Our Own

We deserve it and, finally, we’re going to get it.
In a little more than a year they’re going to start delivering the remains to us.
Credit where credit is due.
We went along with it, when it was first announced.
We re-elected Bush, even after it was clear that he didn’t know what he was doing.
And we’ve done everything we can to ignore what is going on, over there, for almost five years.
So now we can relax and enjoy the fruits of our inaction, while the war drags on and our poor excuse for a President limps into history.
Oh sure, there are those who want to give all the credit to Congress. In the beginning the Republicans gave us a new reason getting into the war every week, proclaimed victory ever few months, and devised a new winning strategy before every election. And when the Democrats took power they showed just as much imagination devising excuses as to why we can’t get out.
But it’s not up to them: never was.
They’re our representatives.
It’s our fault.
It’s amazing what you can accomplish, without trying.
We’re probably going to have a casino in Middleboro before we have all of our soldiers back from Iraq.
Over a billion ribbon decals have been sold.
We’ve probably spent more on cheap American flags than we have donated to the effort to end the war.
We support the troops in every way possible, except of course, by getting them out of harm’s way
What’s Iraq to us? Most of us don’t have anyone close, serving over there. And unless you’re in the National Guard, you don’t have to worry about being ‘called up’.
It’s an easy war to ignore.
Sure, there have been hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. So what.
We just don’t care. And we have plenty of company.
I remember the old poster – from the sixties, which was captioned, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”
Today we could say that about protests.
Most protests today, look like excursions from a senior citizen center. The average age of a war protester is about 60.
And even when there is a well-attended protest – the media doesn’t cover it. Why? Because they know we don’t care. Or rather, they know we’d rather watch celebrity mud wrestling.
They know they can get away with it.
Here’s a poster caption for this generation: “What if they spent a trillion dollars and nobody cared?”
Or, “What if they maimed twenty thousand soldiers and nobody noticed?”
Or, “Are we going to let this President get away with passing on this bloody stupid war to us? Or are we going to hold him accountable, end it now, and as a final act, kick his sorry ass out of Washington D.C.?”
Are we?
No we aren’t!
We’re going to let him take the Marine helicopter from the White House lawn, with what’s left of the NeoCons waiving goodbye.
Did you ever play that game with the toy bomb that you wind up and toss from person to person, to see who is left holding it when it goes off – bang! It’s just a toy, but it makes an aggravatingly loud noise. It’s just a game, but you still don’t want to be the last one holding it when the ticking stops.
Iraq is no toy. But don’t look now, George has that silly grin on his face and he’s about to drop the whole damn war right in our laps.
It’s just what we have been asking for.
It’s just what we deserve.

Spider Surge

Like Fifth Columnists, tiny spiders are coming through the living room window, under cover of ladybugs.
There’s an untidy garden of flowers, a pear tree sapling, and a weed pretending to be a bush on the other side of that window, so we are used to seeing small dark, wing-ed specks come through the tattered mesh screen.
The baby spiders are just about the same size as the ladybugs so, in the corner of your eye they don’t arouse suspicion. Until that is, the mother ships arrive.
I’ve heard that this is Spider Season, whatever that means. I suppose that’s at least a hopeful designation, suggesting that most of these spiders are vacationing, or taking short-term leases – and should be headed back ‘home’ once the cooler weather gets a firm hold.
Still, some of these spiders are not as well-mannered as you might expect, of tourists.
There are the 101st Airborne Spiders (my designation for them, not an official scientific term), who drop down in front of the TV while you are watching, unconcerned that they are interrupting your show.
Then there are those Arachis who spin webs, overnight, in public places. On door knobs, or across hallways, or from bedpost to bedpost. Maybe I’m wrong, but I always thought that there were certain, semi-officially designated, acceptable places for house spiders to engineer their webs – and the spicket in the bathroom was never one of them.
It may be me, but I have the sense that spiders – as a species, are becoming more and more aggressive.
Even cockroaches show more sensitivity – coming out only under cover of darkness, and then scurrying for cover if the lights come on unexpectedly.
But the modern day house spider often insolently parades over the living room rug in the middle of the day, in the middle of Oprah for god’s sake – and only scurries for cover when you have a rolled magazine poised above them.
In the past I attributed the fat, swollen, itchy lumps that appeared on my arms and legs, between my toes, on the back of my neck and elsewhere at this time of year, to a wide variety of ointments, water treatments, ants, fleas, tics and such, which have in common a certain occult nature. But today I’m fairly certain that spiders are the cause.
I’ve counted seven varieties on our first floor alone.
Did you ever notice how everyone exaggerates the size of a spider? When you hear a description of a spider it is never less than an inch long, always hairy, and usually said to have strange stripes and spots and, I’ve also heard people say, speech impediments.
I saw one of those the other day – a big, hairy, spotted and striped spider with a pronounced lisp, in the family room, and before I could squash it with my foot, it leaped into the air, yelled out ‘thufferin thuccoatash”, and traveled about a yard before landing – purposefully I believe, smack dab in the middle of an oriental rug. (Did you ever notice how I use the phrase, ‘smack dab’ at least once in every column?)
Once on the Oriental it was effectively camouflaged – so I had to throw the whole rug away.
According to my research, it was actually either a Wolf Spider, or a Traveling Salesman Spider. It all happened very quickly, but I did think I got a glimpse of a small leather valise held by one of its eight hairy legs.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, that’s right: in the last three weeks I’ve recorded definitive sightings of eleven separate species of spider, on our first floor alone.
A Jumping Spider was easily identified, when it jumped into a cup of coffee that I had just put down on the little display table in the middle of the room. Jumping Spiders look like little fuzzy legged spiders carrying school rings but, as I discovered when I poured the coffee out onto a ball of wadded paper towels, that school ring is actually their colorful abdomen.
I also easily identified a Nursery Web Spider – which is also called a Fishing Spider, when I chased it out the house and into the neighbor’s yard where – faced with a choice of either a boot wielding madman or a dip in the neighbors pool, it jumped in and submerged itself.
I’m afraid of pool water, so I thought nothing of it until a week later when my neighbor had a pool party and I suddenly heard the scream of an arachnophobic woman who decided to take a late night dip.
By the way, isn’t the notion of arachnophobia silly? I mean, who isn’t afraid of spiders? Just like you can’t tell me that when you swim in the ocean – somewhere in the back of your mind you aren’t thinking, shark! People with phobias are supposedly mentally unstable, and unreasonably obsessive: but isn’t it stranger not to be afraid of spiders, or sharks, or clowns?
Anyway, after a brief conversation with my neighbor, I realized that I had correctly identified that speedy, three-inch, hairy-legged creature as a Pool Party Spider.
And speaking of clowns, I also identified another spider that had been lurking in the basement – based on the red nose, the large feet, and the tiny little car that it drove around in (and an abdomen shaped like a seltzer bottle), as a Clown Spider.
Anyway, you get my point – I think, that there is something odd going on, in terms of spiders, at least in my house.
I know it’s Spider Season, but I’m kind of worried that Labor Day has come and gone and these guys are still hanging around.
I’m thinking this is a Spider Surge and, if so, I’m going to have to get used to the idea of spiders in the house for years to come.

The Wave

I hate The Wave.
Life is short, and tickets are hard to get.
But when you go to the game, instead of focusing on the field, you get caught up in The Wave.
You hardly have a choice. You hear the squeals around you – a sound like seagulls over the dump, and then you see it undulating toward you. You could ignore it – turn your nose up into the air, but you’ll still be drenched by the spray as it passes over you.
I try to be philosophical – or at least, to hide my disdain for those who ‘join in’. I tell myself that it’s hard not to be distracted by the noisemakers – hard to keep from joining in, despite our better judgment, even when something special is going on.
But life is what we miss while we are busy waving our arms and making silly noises.
Our children are growing up. Our friends are getting older. The ground is cracking open, belching smoke. The end of the world is close at hand, but we are too busy to notice, playing in The Wave.
At least, at the ballpark, it’s a clear choice.
At the ballpark, there are those who know what is going on – and those who don’t care. Not that it makes much difference. Even the purists can get caught up in the spray and foam – belatedly discovering that they have missed an ‘at bat’ or two.
Fenway Park - and the fans that you find there, are no different.
The new, improved Fenway, for all of its amenities, has little to do with baseball. The new Fenway openly acknowledges that, even in a bastion of alleged baseball purity, the so-called fans care little for the game itself.
Every minute before the actual game begins, is scheduled – with wave after wave of deliberate distractions: promotional events, special appearances, autograph sessions, oompah band oomphing.
There is a tacit understanding that baseball is boring. But isn’t baseball, as the purists used to proclaim on their tee-shirts, “life”?
Is life boring?
Boredom’s simply a loss of attention: there is always something wonderful going on, right in front of us – but rather than focus in on what is right there, we search the horizon for the obvious.
I am reminded of the opening sequence of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”: an ordinary, almost clichéd middle American street – firefighters driving by waving from the truck, children jumping rope, stunningly bright white picket fences, sprinklers hypnotically sprinkling and then, almost unnoticed at first, the camera literally begins to dig into the grass and dive down into the dirt, uncovering an unseemly world teeming with frenetic insects.
When we are young, we seem distracted – but in fact we are focused on the world around us, on the moment. We seem distracted because we are overwhelmed by the splendid, complex, unfathomable creation that we have literally just discovered.
As we get older we become selective – perhaps too selective: many of us simply block the world out and interpret everything through the clouded prism of our petty personal concerns and hungers.
You’d think that, when somehow you manage to score those hard-to-get tickets, you’d actually watch the game.
You’d hope that, when the country goes to war, people would pay attention.
You believe that, as the ice caps melt, we’d stop buying disposable plastic water bottles.
But it doesn’t work that way.
My older son and I happened to be at the no-hitter at Fenway, September 1st.
It was a beautiful day, full of natural and man-made distractions. A cloudless sky. 70 degrees. Oompah bands. Sausage and onions. Yawkey Way.
So of course, The Wave started early.
It didn’t matter that the Hose were on the skids – had lost four in a row.
Our seats were great: reached by a special elevator, at the end of a row, in a section with its own concession stands, looking right down onto the third base line and across toward Back Bay where – at game time, the setting sun had already begun to glaze the glass and burnish the golden rooftops of the city’s historic skyline.
There was, in the air, the expectation of pleasure – a feeling as palpable as the smell of sausages venting over the ballpark’s flat green rooftop.
All that could get in the way of a perfect evening, was baseball.
Though Orioles rookie pitcher – Garrett Olson, had previously lost to the Sox, and had an ERA of over 7, Boston’s lineup was stymied early on. Meanwhile, Boston rookie pitcher Clay Buchholz seemed only marginally better.
By the bottom of the second The Wave was disorganized, but gaining strength.
In the fourth Big Papi stroked a wall-scraping double and the drinking light was lit.
When the Orioles couldn’t muster any offense in the top of the fifth, less committed fans began looking at their watches, pondering an early exit. I was admittedly, thinking of another visit to the concession stand but before I could stir myself out of my seat, I was confronted by a strange look on my son’s face. He was hinting – while trying hard not to risk offending the gremlins of baseball, that there was something else going on. He gestured toward the scoreboard above the bleachers. We were halfway through the game and the Orioles had yet to… I don’t want to say it, even now.
But at that moment I laughed him off. The chances were against it. The likelihood slim. There were still twelve outs to go and, anything could happen.
Just then I heard the squeals and saw, on the other side of the park, the un-mistakable signs of an entire bleacher section’s worth of humans about to breach.
A full scale Wave was just a few batters away.
It was touch and go.
We were either headed toward history, or to another day at the beach.
With every pitch that Buchholz threw a thousand more disinterested fans joined The Wave. But with every inning that the Orioles remained hitless, three thousand joined the game.
From that first full-fledged roar of undulating fans just after the fourth inning ended, each successive attempt to start a Wave grew a little smaller, quieter. By the top of the seventh, the sea of fans was amazingly calm: hardly a ripple on the surface.
It‘s normal to lose a few thousand fans by the seventh – whatever the score, but on this cool evening the crowd stayed in their seats, even seemed to grow larger. In some cases, well-to-do fans that had spent the first few innings dining inside one of the private clubs, were lured back out into the open air.
Instead of the squeal of gulls, a sound not unlike the song of whales was heard – and not just from one section of the park, but emanating from deep within the whole. You could feel the excitement growing. As the last batter took a called strike three, it was the actual game that had our full attention.
When it was over – when that perfect moment had passed, the crowed refused to leave.
36,000 people living entirely in the moment.
And then the squealing started up again.

Hamburger with Unions

How’d the strike go?
The slow-down?
The walk-out?
How is that old union of yours? I forget, what’s it called: the United Barbeque Grillers? Or is it the Amalgamated Association of Vacation Home-Owners?
It’s wonderful, isn’t it, to have a holiday all our own: a day dedicated to the former workers of America.
Most people don’t know – and would never suspect, that this cocktail party we call Labor Day was born in bloodshed and turmoil.
When the 12,000 troops called out to break the Pullman strike in the late 1890’s, shot several protesters, President Grover Cleveland felt his chances of re-election were in jeopardy, so he threw a bone to the labor movement which had been lobbying for their own holiday for years.
From the moment the first newspaper account of the tragedy hit the streets, it took only six days for the Congress to push the legislation establishing Labor Day through both houses.
President Cleveland eagerly signed it into law, and a few months later lost the election.
Labor Day was originally envisioned by socialist leaders as both a day of rest, and a chance for workers to unite, and march through small-town America, shoulder to shoulder. On this Labor Day just past most American workers were shoulder to shoulder all right, soaking up the sun on beaches coast to coast.
Today Labor Day is considered the last best chance for a family barbeque, the last gasp of the summer vacation, and the last time this year that you will be able to breeze through the city before the traffic returns to its regular weekday slog and we go about our business – without any sense of renewed camaraderie with the guy in the cubicle next to us.
At its peak though, over 50% of American workers belonged to a Union.
Today it’s one in ten.
So I suppose we can excuse what we have done to what was supposed to be a celebration of the dignity of work. Compared to Christmas, Labor Day is not so bad: that is, the celebration of the birth of Christ – as practiced in these United States, often has more in common with carnival time in Rio, than it does with the origins of the day. Americans have a particular talent for turning every holiday – regardless of its origins, into The Feast of the Miraculous Consumption. From that perspective Labor Day is almost a sacred celebration – reverently observed with closed eyes and a cold beer.
You can also argue that we live in a changed world where, perhaps, it is not as important that we have the kinds of protections that Unions once provided: especially considering that many of those same protections are now embodied in the law.
We should also acknowledge that the work force has changed dramatically – in the last 100 years, both as to the kinds of labor we perform, and the nature of our employers. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of people who work for themselves – part and full time. In large part the physical labor that many Americans were required to do – 50 years ago, has been relegated to workers in other countries (or from other countries) where, ironically, most do not have the protection of a Union. If they had more unions in China, you wouldn’t be able to buy that molded plastic dish tray for $1.99. But then again, if China had more unions, maybe America would be able to compete in areas that we have largely given up on – like steel production, computers, television and soon, cars.
Would you pay $200 more for your new flat screen television, if it meant that America had 100,000 more high paying jobs in that industry?
Would you pay $5 more for a wise-cracking President Elmo doll, to make sure that assembly line workers at the Chinese toy plant can’t be fired to make room for the plant owner’s cousins?
Then again, maybe we just can’t be bothered. Maybe we are content with our lives, with our cars, our boats, and our weekends at Foxwoods. Maybe the past successes of unions have made our lives too easy.
But are you confident that it will all be there, tomorrow?
How much of your confidence, is based on the bloated value of your home?
How much of your confidence is based on the fact that both you and your wife work? When the unions were strong, it took only one wage earner to support a family.
And for all of your things, how much time do you have to enjoy life?
Perhaps white collar workers in their glass towers need unions too?
Maybe the independent, entrepreneur working in his basement, is entitled to certain protections as well.
“Know your rights”, the Clash sang a few years back.
You have the right, they implied to metallic guitar chords, to affordable health care.
You have the right – they seemed to suggest, to reasonably priced gasoline.
You have the right, they sang, to clean air.
And privacy.
Most of us don’t worry about receiving a beating from our supervisor, or being forced to work 12 hours a day, or being locked into an unventilated room and chained to a sewing machine – and in large part unions are responsible for ending those kinds of indignities in the United States.
But many of us worry that if our parents become ill, everything they worked for will be sacrificed to pay for their care. And many of us pay half of our income for heat and gas for our cars. And every day corporations and/or the government intrude farther and farther into our private lives.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating Labor Day by lounging by the poolside, or flipping burgers, or getting that toll booth tan on the way home from the mountains. But perhaps the time has come again to remember the other part of the celebration, to remember the power that we have when we come together to protect one another.
Maybe next year Labor Day will be a day on which we actually work to ensure our rights – as worker, citizen, and inhabitant of the planet.

Memories of Saigon

Did you hear what the President said last week?
I heard him say that we didn’t kill enough of the enemy in Vietnam.
We didn’t burn enough of their jungles. We didn’t bomb enough of their cities. We didn’t turn enough of their women into whores, their children into orphans, our children into orphans, our soldiers into junkies.
We should have stayed, and killed more.
We should have leveled that country.
We had the opportunity.
We had the weapons.
We were just too timid.
If we had done what we had promised to do, President Bush implied, Vietnam would still be the oppressed colonial possession that it had been for decades before us.
It would only have taken a few more political assassinations.
It would only have taken a few tactical nuclear weapons.
We had the draft, so it would have been easy to add a few hundred thousand troops more, to the half million we had ‘in country’ at one time.
We could have easily added another ‘wing’ to the Vietnam memorial.
But we lost the will to win – at least according to the President, and he should know, because he was one of the first to feel that ‘will’ slipping away. He was a trained fighter pilot in 1970, but instead of fighting in Vietnam.. well, really no one knows what he did in those critical years: his records have been ‘misplaced.
But we do know that President Bush came of age, during that time, so he can speak somewhat authoritatively about how close we were to accomplishing our mission there. And the President knows that with victory come the spoils. With the defeat of the North Vietnamese Army would have come an extended guerilla war – with our troops remaining in Vietnam for years, even decades. And with America’s victory, and the necessity of fighting an insurgency in Vietnam for decades, the Vietnamese would have not been able to make the economic gains that they have made since we left. And with American troops stationed in Hanoi, China would have retained a sufficient level of paranoia about America’s intentions to justify keeping their Maoist form of government – which would have slowed their economic growth, kept Wal-Mart from having a source of cheap toys, and preserved American jobs.
Thirty years after our defeat in Southeast Asia we have to face the grim reality that Vietnam is now an economic power, a tourist destination, and that the so-called Domino Effect was real, in economic terms. Yes, with the loss in Vietnam one Southeast Asian country after another fell – like dominoes, fell to the scourge of capitalism.
That, I think, is what President Bush is warning us about: once we leave Iraq there’ll be regional turmoil, the Ahmadinejad government will lose the support of the Iranian people, and in a decade or so the oil will flow, the people will prosper, and Halliburton’s stock price will plummet.
And once we leave Iraq we will be free to focus our attention on the idiots who lied to get us into this war, didn’t plan beyond the first thirty days, and fought like hell to keep anyone from figuring out what was really going on.
Just like Vietnam, soon after we get our last troops out of there, we’ll get rid of a weak President and the Berlin Wall will fall. No, I’m sorry, I’m told that the Berlin wall is already gone: so maybe it will be the wall we’re building along the Mexican border.
In any case, you can see why President Bush wants to stay in Iraq, for as long as he can: as long as we stay the course, we can’t really get on his case.
So I have a compromise solution: let him run for office again, in Iraq.
George Bush would make a hell of an Iraqi Prime Minister: tough, resolute, and desperately in need of the American voter to keep him and his band of loonies in office.
And with George in office, in Iraq, he could say that he honored his commitment, that he didn’t ‘cut and run’, and that our boys (he could bring a few friends to ‘administrate’) are still there. And George could stay as long as he likes. They’ve got miles and miles of open space, and plenty of brush to cut. It would be like being back in Texas, and this time he might even find a little oil.
Did you hear what the President said?
People say I’ve become too cynical, but I think I heard words of encouragement, where others only heard more babbling.

A Presidential Intervention

Dubya, we want you to know that you’re among friends, and that we are gathered here today, not out of anger, but out of concern for your well being.
We want to say, up front, that no one here is talking impeachment. Yes – let’s be honest, there have been those who have used that word, but we here today are all agreed that impeachment is neither an appropriate, nor a constructive option.
You’re a good person.
You’re a loving father.
Everything you have done, all the damage that has been done in your name, during your administration, we believe, has been as a result of your addiction to Presidential authority.
This then is an intervention, not an impeachment. We do not want you removed from office – we simply want to provide a place for you to spend the final months of your Presidency, where you will be cared for, and where you will not have easy access to the authority that has caused your family, friends, and the American people, so much harm over the last six years.
We are ready to send you there.
We have a room reserved for you.
We have all chipped in, and this will not cost you a cent. And in terms of the American people, overall, we’ll save billions.
Ultimately though, this has to be your decision – your final decision as Commander in Chief. But before you make up your mind, there are a few people who have expressed a desire to let you know how they feel.
First, we’re going to hear from your former rival, the man who should have been declared President in 2000, Al Gore.

“I’m going to get right to the point, Dubya old friend. Take a good look around you – at this beautiful country of ours. Record temperatures, drought, floods, New Orleans: do I have to say more? I think you mean well, old friend. You talked a good game – back in 2000: Compassionate Conservatism, you called it. Face it, friend, you need help.”

Thanks Al. Now George, we’re going to hear from your old friend and confidant, the Reverend Billy Graham.

“George. I’ve advised world leaders since the days of old Ike Eisenhauer, who by the way was nearly as thick as you – and in all that time I’ve never met a King or a Prime Minister or a President as stubborn as you, son. In six years, despite debacle after debacle, you have never admitted to one mistake. Oh sure, you said you regretted the words you used, on occasion. But it’s not the words son – it’s the deeds. Your deeds give the lie to your words, son.“

Thanks Reverend Graham. Now George we’re going to hear from a surprise guest, your father, #41, George the First.

“What the hell is going on, Georgie? I didn’t go into Baghdad, so you had to? You had to show me that you were smarter, right? Heck son, you were President of the Texas Rangers and look how well they’ve done. You ‘d do as well to put a Major League team in Iraq. Who wants to sit out in the middle of the desert, baking in the Arlington sun, and watch the Rangers lose? I really don’t think you were ever qualified to be President son. I didn’t say it at the time, well, because I thought that boy Karl could turn a turnip into a President. But really son, you were unprepared. Being Governor of Texas is like being Sheriff of Tombstone: you arrest the drunks and let the bad guys fight it out in the streets. Hell son, you’d have made a damn good Mayor of Baghdad with your experience: just smile and pass the hookah hose - but President of the United States? What are you, on crack? You want to stay in Iraq because otherwise it will be like Vietnam? You been to Vietnam lately, son? The best thing we did for them was get the heck out of Dodge. We killed a million Vietnamese. Should we have stayed and killed more, lost more of our own? I don’t get it son. You’re not making any sense. You’re still a Texas Turnip son, you’ve just been boiled and mashed.”

Thank you Mr. President. And now.. Mr. President, your wife wants to say a few words.

“George, look at me, I’m talking to you! George, you know I’m thankful for our life together, our two beautiful girls. When I met you I was a school teacher, and I have to thank God – and you George, that I am not still a school teacher, forced to spend the whole year teaching to the No Child Left Behind test, for a salary that first year college graduates would turn their noses up at. George, I have to say that you are the most anti-intellectual person I have ever known. You reject what your scientific advisers tell you, what your medical advisers tell you, what your foreign policy experts tell you, and instead you rely on what you are told by preachers, pollsters, professional bureaucrats, and angry old ideologues. You don’t have an administration George, you have a gang, and frankly, dear, they’re making a fool of you. They’ll all just fade away and write books in the next year or two – leave you hanging. You need to go away too George, you need to get away from all the bad influences in your life. Please, George, please, go away now.

Thank you Laura. And now George, it’s decision time. Are you ready to get the help you need, and by doing so, help your fellow Americans. Or are you going to stumble your way through another 18 months, pretending to have a plan – trying desperately to pass off your screw-ups on the next administration. What’s it going to be George? There’s still time to do what’s right. There’s still time to see the light. What’s it going to be?

Dolores, in Space

I’m not sure if I’ve told, you, but I’m a big fan of junkers – which I define as a car that costs less than $1000, has at least 125,000 miles that the previous owner admits to, and emits a combination of sounds that – altogether, are like the sound of a moose in heat.
I haven’t owned a new car for over twenty years and, honestly, I don’t know if I could. I don’t think I could bring myself to spending that kind of cash – even if I had bundles of it, after so many cheap rides.
My present transportation is a ’93 aquamarine Ford Escort wagon, with over 150K on the odometer, a permanent puddle of rust-colored water where the spare should be, and air vents that have some kind of lockjaw: the heat and AC actually work, but the air can’t make it through and when I try, it makes a sound not unlike my first saxophone lesson. Overall the sound of this car rolling down the highway is a combination of whistling, groaning, creaking, and muffler-about-to-go kind of croak that my wife can hear – and recognize, from so far away that she has time to cook my favorite meal before I get home. (She has time, I said, but that doesn’t mean she cooks it).
As junkers go, Dolores (I name all my junkers) is a ‘beaut’. I’ve had her for going on three years now and – though I haven’t put any serious new mileage on it – I did take it to the White Mountains a few years back without incident. I have replaced the alternator, purchased a few tires, and changed the oil twice. The grand total that I have spent on the maintenance of Dolores – after almost three years, is under $250, which although it represents a full quarter of her purchase price, is less than some people spend on gas in a month.
When I see a new car pass me by on the road – the word that first comes to mind is – ‘suckers’.
I see no reason at all for ever purchasing a new car.
I see very little reason for ever purchasing what they like to call a ‘previously owned vehicle’.
I would be hard pressed to buy a used car off a dealer’s lot.
I believe that junkers are the answer to my needs – both personal and scientific.
All of which is why I am especially concerned about Dolores’ final days.
I have to face it – she is already, by definition, driving on borrowed time. If a certified mechanic was to take a good, close look under her hood, they would be ethically bound to have me restrained while Dolores was humanely ‘put down’.
I expect the worse – but then again, that’s part of the real pleasure of driving a junker: anything and everything could and should go wrong – so why worry.
When you buy a new car, part of the justification for the ridiculous amount of money you spend, is that you are officially assured that nothing will go wrong – at least for a year or so. But you know, from experience, that something will – and even if it doesn’t happen right away, you have spent so much that even the lack of perfection is annoying.
You paid, on average, $30,000 for that new car, so what the heck is making that annoying noise?
I paid $1000 for mine, so I expect and even take comfort in Dolores’ annoying noises.
You are on the hook for monthly payments for five years, so why couldn’t they give you a real spare tire – instead of a donut?
Dolores actually has donuts on all four wheels, and does just fine with them.
Anyway, the point is that I want to do right by Dolores, in the end, so I am not going to abandon her by the side of the road in Maine, or add her to the automotive sculpture that I am erecting – by default, in my backyard.
Instead I am going to donate her to charity.
And there’s my dilemma: which charity do I choose? Which charity would be a fitting, if figurative tombstone for dear Dolores?
They’re all in the act now, you’ve probably noticed: you can donate your old car to Muscular Dystrophy, Public Radio, the American Cancer Society, and just about every non-profit you can think of.
I’ve tried them all – over the years, and though the guy who comes to pick them up to take them to the big smelter in Taunton, always looks the same, it feels a little different every time.
What I was really hoping is that I could donate Dolores to NASA. Clearly, they need the money but, more importantly, they seem to have the most respect for the concept of the junker. Most government agencies get their executives new vehicles every year – but NASA seems committed to keeping their old vehicles running year after year.
They’ve had their share of breakdowns, malfunctions, and outright disasters too – but that hasn’t stopped them from slapping on a coat of paint, replacing a tire or two, and getting those old shuttles back ‘on the road’, so to speak.
NASA’s not embarrassed by a few dings here and there, a missing tile, or an astronaut or two that don’t make it back. They know that – if they had to go to Congress for the cash for a new vehicle, they’d face some tough questions, so like me they’ve figured it’s easier just to keep the old fleet running.
I think Dolores would be happy there.
I think it would be a fitting end to her ‘time on Earth’.
I’d get a real kick out of lying back on my hammock, looking up at the stars, and imagining that little speck of light moving across the dark heavens is in fact – in some small way, part Dolores. And if I close my eyes and listen, I might even be able to hear the inimitable sound of a junker in orbit.

Ugly, The Sequel

I’m stuck on ugly.
A person can be ugly, a crowd can turn ugly, even a cow – according to the American Heritage Dictionary, can behave ugly.
Plymouth is, in civic terms, ugly.
How can you not love ugly?
Actually, I think you can – love ugly: I’d even venture to say that Americans make ugly love every day.
So in the positive spirit of ugly I am going to spend my words this week on a description of what I think are the ugliest buildings in town.
Come on, you know you have your favorites.
Let’s start off in the eastern part of town – the Far Eastern.
A little bit of old Beijing, in Cedarville: that’s my impression of the new MRI facility in Cedarville.
For weeks I held off making a final judgment, as this behemoth rose in to the air on a hill off Hedges Pond Road.
I tried to guess what it was going to be. The location seemed odd for your typical strip mall. The height seemed all wrong for a restaurant. The Qing Dynasty had ended in 1911.
I would never have guessed that we were getting our very own magnetic marvel. No wonder my fillings ache every time I drive by!
The only thing keeping this building from being certifiably ugly is that it’s out of the way. If you don’t see the ugly, how ugly can it be?
The John Carver Hotel is another story altogether: another two or three stories, actually.
The entrance to the John Carver – with its 30 foot white faux columns, is the pseudo-colonial equivalent of the Hilltop restaurant’s giant cactus on Route 1 in Saugus. But whereas the kitsch of the cactus and the herd of plastic cattle at the Hilltop fit in with the rest of Route 1’s over-the-top Americana, The Carver’s massive columns are preposterously out of proportion to its surroundings, not to mention our historical milieu.
But are they – the columns, really ugly?
Historically, yes. Architecturally, definitely. Taken out of context, probably not.
The same might be said of another hotel – the Governor Bradford on the waterfront.
I studied this building for quite a while, and was not quite able to figure out what the architect was trying to say. I definitely see the influence of the Swiss Chalet style of hotel design, a trace of Tudor, a hint of colonial clapboard and.. then there’s a lattice-work brick wall culminating in a turreted hot dog stand.
Maybe they had big plans, and a small budget. The structure does remind me of the David Lynch film, Dune. Up to a point, Dune had some great effects – but then the money ran out and the penultimate scenes of the Fremen riding the giant spice worms look preposterous.
(Then again, dignified giant worm wrangling might just be an impossible feat for any director, at any price.)
If the Pilgrims had seen the Bradford when they first came in to the harbor, they would have dog-paddled back to Britain.
And what do you think of the latest restaurant to stake a claim in the economically muddy waters of Court Street – T-Bones Roadhouse?
Within a block of Burial Hill, and practically overlooking the Plymouth Rock, T-Bones built a steel metal store front with a giant letter slot facing the street.
On the hot summer night that I first saw T-Bones I felt it looked like a garage for a hovercraft, or something you’d stick on top of the Enron headquarters in Texas. I’d say it doesn’t really fit in with the historic architecture of Court Street, but then again - architecturally speaking, Court Street lost its way long before T-Bones rock and rolled into town. And on a second drive-by on a cold, wet day, I discovered that they could cover that mail slot with a large metal shutter that has the appearance of a traditional paned window – a much more appropriate look for Court Street.
Whatever seasons we are in, I don’t want to single out T-Bones. There have been many pseudo-modern store fronts downtown on Court Street in the last 25 years – CVS and Puritan Clothing to name two that come to mind. And I could come up with many more structures – both modern and faux colonial, that I believe should never have been built in historic Plymouth, like Jordan Hospital’s Pop-Art Concrete Slabs and the Fire Department’s Headquarters on Sandwich Street. I think it’s a shame that when tourists first reach the historic intersection of Old 44 and 3A that they are greeted by your standard, out of the box, pump and run Gulf and Mobil Service Stations. And if you came from Mars and landed in the middle of any one of our new ‘retail prairie towns’ off Long Pond Road and Commerce Way, you wouldn’t know if you were in Indiana, Arizona, or Maine. Massachusetts? Impossible!
In a forest of ugly trees, which ones do you take the axe to first?
I could go on, but I don’t want to seem mean spirited. And I have to hold back a few of my favorites for Ugly, Part 3. So let me be constructive. My sense is that we desperately need an Ugly Planning Board, or at least a subcommittee dedicated to either bringing a consistency to the ugliness around us, or eliminating it altogether.
I thought we had that covered.
I had assumed that there must be an adjunct committee of some board that was supposed to safeguard the town’s image.
Maybe Mayor Buechs will beautify things.
Or maybe we should just accept that – with a few notable exceptions, architecturally at least we are Weymouth-bound.
And anyway, who am I to talk: I’m stuck on ugly.

It's Getting Ugly Out There

I’m trying to figure out the best adjective for Plymouth: trying to come up with one term that sums up the look and the feel of life in this community, today.
Everybody’s talking about what the town used to be like, or what they think the town could be, tomorrow – but I am not sure we have a clear sense of what Plymouth is like, right now.
According to Bucci’s List of Civic Stereotypes – the bible of travel writers, a town can be Scary, One-Horse, Rustic, Sleepy, Picturesque, Out of the Way, Rural, Quaint, Provincial, Ugly, Charming, Tony, Bustling, or Weymouth-like.
I know that there quite a few people in town who aspire to ‘Weymouth-like, but I haven’t made a final decision.
Right now I’m leaning toward Ugly.
Ugly is a great word, a powerful word – a word that has somehow maintained its ragged, rusty, nasty edge in this age of the dull and the pointless.
Ugly is just short of profanity – just shy of offensive, and if properly expressed, contains trace amounts of grudging appreciation: you know, the kind of appreciation you express when someone lands a great belly flop in the backyard pool.
“Oooh,” the onlookers exclaim, as the sound of that belly slapping the water reverberates around them, “that was ugly!”
There is even another definition of ugly –according to the American Heritage Dictionary, a definition peculiar to New England: ugly, as in ‘Unmanageable: applied to animals, especially cows or horses.’
In this case I am not applying it to cows or horses, but to the town as a whole.
Plymouth is a great big, unmanageable, out of control belly-flop of a community.
How’s that sound?
Again, I don’t mean to imply that Plymouth is ugly to look at. Plymouth is in fact, still pretty, in places. Ugly, according to Bucci’s, refers to that state of socio-economic being that falls somewhere between ‘quaint’ and ‘bustling’.
Some towns manage to skip over ugly entirely. Some towns go from ‘one-horse’, to ‘charming’ in one easy step.
Duxbury started off like Plymouth – with a few pilgrims, some boat building, farmers, and tradesman, but seems to have gone straight to charming. Then again, I’ve heard other adjectives applied to Duxbury.
For most communities though, the changes are painful, and there is no skipping over any of the stages.
In terms of these stages, I believe that the progression goes something like this:
Most towns start off as Scary. A Scary town is usually comprised of a few, apparently abandoned homes that rumor suggests were built by unknown individuals who made pacts with the devil, but perished nonetheless. In some cases these abandoned buildings have become video rental stores.
Carver is an example of a Scary town.
The next stage is often called the ‘One-Horse’, or its updated version, the ‘One Traffic Light’ town.
If a town persists too long in the one-horse state, it often moves involuntarily into ‘rustic’. Rustic is a dangerous condition. A town that is said to be rustic, is in a kind of holding pattern. A rustic town can only go in one of two ways – toward decrepit, or toward picturesque.
According to my sources, Plympton is an officially ‘Rustic’ community.
Plymouth itself was once officially rustic, in the late 1700’s, but owing largely to its historical significance, moved into a picturesque phase somewhere around 1805.
Most towns however – Plymouth included, are unable to hold on to the picturesque phase for very long. When a town is known to be picturesque otherwise well-meaning people move into town, build authentic imitation salt boxes and/or California Ranch-style homes, and become town meeting members.
At this point I think we need to differentiate between two civic phases that are often lumped together, but are in fact worlds apart: quaint and charming.
Quaint, is a classic ‘damn with faint praise’ adjective. By calling a town quaint we are suggesting that, though at one time it was picturesque, most of the older homes have been converted to funeral homes, real estate offices, or pizza parlors, mainly through the addition of colorful awnings. The dictionary definition of quaint is, “having an old-fashioned attractiveness or charm; oddly picturesque”. The emphasis here, I would say, should be on the odd. And the oddness is derived, I would further suggest, from the illusion that we are referring to a small town. You wouldn’t call Boston or Providence quaint, but oftentimes a large town or small city insists that it still qualifies for quaint-ness.
A quaint old town is actually a fairly heavily populated town, with most of the growth occurring outside the old town center – creating a built-in conflict between the image and reality of the community, and between the newcomers and the townies. To be quaint, I believe, is to be confused.
Kingston is very quaint.
The charming community is very different indeed.
The charming community is one that has, in large part, evolved as a whole. It need not be picturesque. It need not be well-to-do. It need only have a certain, undeniable charm.
According to recent census data, there are only three officially charming towns in all of Massachusetts: Woods Hole, Cummington, and Sterling.
There are however, 87 towns in Massachusetts that think they are charming.
When a quaint town thinks it is a charming town, and holds fast to that illusion, it is official designated ‘provincial’ – that is, ‘having or showing the manners, viewpoints, etc., considered characteristic of unsophisticated inhabitants of a province.’
Believing that you are charming, when you are not, is like believing that you are ‘good looking’ when you are not: like the middle-aged guy at the bar who, after a few drinks, starts to flirt with the waitresses. Pretty soon, things start to get Ugly.
And it’s only a 30 minute drive from Ugly to Weymouth.
Next week: The Ugliest Buildings in Town!

Hollyweird in the Home Town

9:25 a.m.: arrest, 23-year-old man
arrested on warrant for charges including
assault with a dangerous weapon.

The film folks have left town, and just in time. We wouldn’t want any professionals horning in on our new, home-town reality series.
This is a casting call for Hollyweird in the Home Town.
Here’s the premise: despite the country’s obsession with the hi-jinks of the honeys of the Hollywood Hills, ‘folks round here’ are just as messed up.
We may be pulled over by the police while driving an old Escort Wagon, or a rusted-out Ford F150 though Manomet, instead of a Porsche or a Lotus through Malibu - but we’re just as high, just as arrogant, just as likely to get off with a slap on the wrist as our role models out there in La-La-Land.

12:10 p.m.: arrest, 21-year-old Plymouth man
arrested on warrant for charge of assault and battery
with a dangerous weapon, Manomet Point Road

The premise of our show is that this is La-La-Land too.
So we are looking for act-a-likes. We don’t care if you look like Lindsey or Nicole, and we certainly don’t expect you to have their cash. But if you have that same, perpetual ‘I could have had a V-8’ expression on your face, have “Rip Tides RIP” tattooed just above the crack of your ass, think your poop smells like pop-tarts, and have been chosen to be a spokes model for Breathalyzer, we want you!
We can’t pay much but, if selected, you will receive your own faux-police dossier with full color mug shots.
We can’t guarantee you the cover of Weekly World News, but you are sure to have your face plastered all across the local papers, and be featured prominently in the local police log.

1:15 p.m.: arrest, 19-year-old Plymouth man
charged with simple possession of Class D substance

The structure of our reality program won’t be anything out of the ordinary: just another pointless competition meant to bring out the worst from a dozen or so local yahoos – but with a grand prize of a 30 day stay at one of the country’s leading rehab centers.
Each week contestants chosen from the local police log will be given $10 and left off at a pre-selected bar or local party with no ID, no credit cards, and the goal of becoming legally intoxicated, borrowing a friends car, and driving themselves to the police station to ask for directions to the nearest McDonalds – and all within four hours.
In the end five finalists will be arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, DUI, possession of a Class D Substance, and assigned a local lawyer .
The finalist who receives the lightest sentence will be declared the winner.

8:01 p.m.: arrest, 39-year-old Plymouth woman charged with
simple possession of Class B substance, simple possession of
Class D substance and possession of Class B substance with
intent to distribute

Don’t sneeze at the prize: the winner may not be cured of their behaviors at the rehab center, but their room will have a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean, and the food there is to die for.
More importantly though, this reality series will awaken Americans to the fact that no one area of the country has a monopoly on spoiled, irresponsible young adults, whacked out judges, or absentee parents.
I firmly believe that if we are going to lock up young actresses for reckless behavior, we need to lock up young convenience store employees too.
If we are going to put the mug shots of drunken actors on the nightly news, then we should be putting the mug shots of our own friends and family on public access television.
And I believe there should be financial parity as well. If Nicole Ritchie has to pay $500,000 to some pathetic, overdressed lawyer to get her sentence reduced to three weeks of home confinement, than our kids should pay no less than $5000 to the guy who hangs out at the local court house and claims he has a law degree, or the guy who handled your mortgage settlement, or your friend who says the Internet is all that you need.

12:40 a.m.: arrest, 23-year-old Plymouth man arrested
on warrant for charges of unlicensed bath house,
keeping a disorderly house and sexual conduct for a fee


Even if you have gotten your act together, and don’t qualify for our show, what about your brother: didn’t I see his name in the Police Log last week? Or how about your wife: she may have fooled the local cops, but she didn’t fool you when you found that six pack in her bowling bag.
Isn’t it about time that the local dumb-ass, hot head, or Hezbollah member got the same attention as their counterpart in Southern Kalifornia?
I think so.
And I am sure that America thinks so, too.
The real crime is wasting so much time on those rich kids.
Sign up now for Hollyweird in the Home Town, or just give your real name the next time they pull you over.