Thursday, July 23, 2009
A Chip Off the Ol' Turd, and Farewell
The beat goes on, I guess...It just isn't a rhythm I want to tap out any more.
First The Dick, then The Dotter.
It's all too crazy. Time to hang it up.
Spousie can barely stand to read the news anymore, and I'm starting to see why. Who wants to think about Sarah Palin's Next Step, or even know who the so-called Birthers are?
I'm thinking about when I used to backpack in the high country out of Yosemite. It was fine, trudging mile after mile, but not glamorous or anything. At night we'd take off our hats and see whose hairdo was the worst. We'd identify wildflowers and construct elaborate lines for hanging food away from the bears. Then it'd be one foot before the other, day after day.
That's all incidental to the way we'd feel when we'd come out of the wilderness some days later. Back to Yosemite, we'd be among all the tourist noise again. Cars would whiz around. Vending machines dropped candy bars. Gas flowed from pumps, sending vapors into the air. It was jarring.
As is this particular news cycle. It's more than significant that Walter Cronkite is no longer among us. The news isn't the news anymore. I'm fine with Jon Stewart being our most trusted news source in this mad-tumbling time. His is the only show with anything like institutional memory. The rest are, as Stephen Colbert told the DC Press Club, stenographers, duty-bound to Represent The Ideas of the latest wing-nuts. Then the rest of us can hop in and talk about the tin-foil hats. It's old.
Fact is, though, I'm in no position to do anything better. I can only riff on what other people occasionally uncover, and that seems pretty third-hand to me. Other people do it better.
I want to find what it is that I can do. I have no idea what I mean by that. I do know that the act of discovery has to be the new assignment.
So thanks for stopping by. Perhaps we'll meet in some other context. In the meantime, as Walter used to say, That's the way it is.
Adios.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Tuesday Rant
...But can she be impartial? So Sonia Sotomayor is, according to the ABA, supremely qualified to be a Supreme. Now the assholes on the Other Side of the Aisle wonder if she, as a non-white, non-male can "understand America," can be "impartial." I guess the role model is supposed to be Clarence "Clarabelle" Thomas. Yikes. This after the appointment of Dubya's two ideologues who make no effort to be impartial at all.So she changed her clothes on the plane. So shut up, already. Why, oh why does the press get so excited when Michelle gets on Air Force One in one ensemble, only to be in another when she deplanes? Are they fantasizing her in her undies or something? The woman just wants to get off fresh, you idiots. She doesn't want to greet foreign dignitaries with deep creases, dummies. I have lost all respect for the HuffPo (if I had any left) for even linking to this.
Rest in peace, Michael. Your antics with children made me crazy, but long ago you were a fresh lesson in overinvolving my ordinary self with the lives of celebrities. F. Scott said it best: the rich are very different from you and me. I don't know whether you were innocent or guilty of the charges against you, and I disagree with my pal Zippie's emotional assessment, but you were a hell of an entertainer, and it's time to let you be. I sure don't envy your children, even if you were a peachy dad. You have left them.
I do wish the following people would disappear permanently (after making better arrangements for their offspring than Michael did): Jon and Kate and Sarah Palin.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Our Own Beer Garden!
Oh, how gay the summer months are here!Ask a Real Vermonter about summer, and s/he replies, "In Vermont summer comes every year. If it comes on a Sunday, we take a picnic." A-har!
It's been raining for the last week, with more to come, even on the 4th of July. Our beloved gardens are awash in slugs. Spousie has to soak all our lettuce (and we have had bushels of it) in buckets of salt water to dislodge all the slugs before we have the big ol' salads that dominated the dinner menu in the month of June. Everywhere I look, I see slugs.
We aren't poison-happy gardeners. I did use over a bag of Escar-go to slow down the parade. But our yard is so big and in parts so overgrown that we've had to consecrate the beer garden.A Beer Garden! The very term summons to mind lasses in dirndls and lads in Tyrolean hats, moving merrily to the sounds of an oompah band. Here in Vermont it means no more than moving serenely to the Great Beyond in a can of beer.
We bury cans with the cheapest beer we can find near various plant-heavy parts of the garden. In the wee hours slugs emerge, head for the brewskis, and fall into one last grand frat party. What a way to go, I tell myself. Should I run into a slug during my usual garden chores, I invite him out for a tall cool one. How about a beer? I ask jovially.
Some sages tell us that we can use alcohol-free beer, but I think that is unnecessary, even cruel. No, slugs, if you are going to meet your maker in our humble yard, rest assured that you will go out in style.
Skol!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Out of Our Lives
What a shock to learn of Michael Jackson's passing.
I hadn't had much good to say about Michael in recent years; his isolation and self destruction were hard to see. But what a talented performer he was, and having watched him grow from a dynamo of a child to a beautiful young man was amazing to me.
Then came the endless messing with himself: the plastic surgery, the whitening of his skin. I wondered how he could have missed how much more beautiful he was, just as he was made. How could he reject and abuse that man in the mirror?
So here's an old clip of the original Michael. Most of the videos have been disabled for embedding, which is sad, because I'd like to share his beautiful dance work, in something like "Rock You" or "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough." In these he's carefree, thoroughly enjoying the moves and the music, not yet affecting all the royal epaulets and shit. Just beautiful and young, the whole world before him.
What a loss. But it's been so long in the making.
Michael, I've been missing you for years. Rest in peace.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Betty Bowers Explains Bible-Based Marriage
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Time Passes Slowly, Except When It Doesn't
Yesterday Spousie and I went down to the pond that's around the corner from our house and took our binoculars to do a little turtle-watching. It's something that we would find it hard to fit in if I weren't sitting around waiting for my shattered radial tip to regrow, embrace the cobalt tack that's holding things together since my surgery. I can work about two and a half hours a day, and then I'm spent. I take a lot of naps, the better to let the old body shop open up for repairs when I'm Out.There are lots of things can't do, both at home and at work while the mending takes place. I can type, but I can't write. Sewing is out; reading is in. I can transplant little seedlings in the greenhouse, and I can water, but I can't bend over, so no digging, weeding, putting plants into the ground. Spousie's list grows as mine shrinks. She picks up what I can't do, and ours is a yard that takes two people, lost in the garden love-slave business of spring. I can't drive, but where is there to go? Spousie shleps my to my appointments, to my short shifts at work. Otherwise I gaze out at the lilacs and forget-me-nots, as if I could see them growing, chloroplast by chloroplast.
Ain't no reason to go in a wagon to town,
Ain't no reason to go to the fair.
Ain't no reason to go up, ain't no reason to go down,
Ain't no reason to go anywhere.
What else? I can still Photoshop, though my drug-addled brain is less than inventive. I surf the net, noting all the usual stupidity. Angelina has new tattoo! gushes the Huffington Post,
probably via People Magazine. What is the Meaning of Michelle Obama? a newsweekly wants to know. Rush wants Sonia Sotomayor (big surprise) to fail. Conservative pundits wonder whether our new court nominee "can really understand" what America Is About, as if understanding our Constitution was the sole province of conservative and stuffy white men.I watch the fuss about Carrie Prejean come and go, note the latest in boob job fashion as the left tries to attach some phoniness to a beauty queen's natural assets, as if it were a challenge.
Some tabloid, or is it the Huffington Post again? dares me to match the celebrity with her reshaped titties. I image search and crop the empty eyes of Republican women and wonder if Meghan McCain 
has credibility with anybody as she tries to sell her peers on her family's Awesome Party. I learn that I can be annoyed from whatever distance, beneath whatever opioid cumulo-nimbus.
The object of the moment, as the doctors say, is to stay ahead of the pain, and I dutifully swallow the pills that keep the throb at a bearable distance. I think of all the pill abusers that used to pass
through Doc's practice, back when I managed it, trying to get him to write 'scrips for backs that didn't really ache, blood that had been dropped into urine in a fake kidney attack. I am grateful that my painkillers hold no mystique for me, that I finally have come to prefer my own tacky version of consciousness.Time passes slowly out here in the daylight,
We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right-- that old Dylan song wanders through the echo chamber of my head. In three weeks I'll be in physical therapy, stretching my way back to whatever rotations the new bolt will allow. In the meantime I'll keep company with some good writers, sleep through the podcasts that pour through the earbuds, twisting and turning my dreams into writhing combinations of old baggage and new players hefting it.
Today was difficult. Mostly, though, my life seems to be a series of lessons on gratitude, and through all the pain and annoyance of these days, I don't forget it, an occasional teary outburst aside.
Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day,
Time passes slowly, and fades away.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Tripping the Light Fantastic
I loved the the film tribute to childhood and play, "Big," those many years ago. Today I read that Toys R Us just bought up FAO Schwartz, the toy store providing one of the film's most delightful moments: when Tom Hanks jumped on the floor piano for a little Chopsticks jig.
But these girls take play to new heights with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. School of Performing Arts? Julliard brats, maybe? I'm glad TRU are keeping a store with such an ultimate toy right side up.
Ever'body dance!
