Take it to the limit one more time...on getting old

And it's so hard to change
Can't seem to settle down
But the dreams I've seen lately keep on turning out
And burning out and turning out the same.
So put me on a highway and show me a sign
And take it to the limit one more time.  

--"Take it to the limit" The Eagles

Aging baffles me. It's this cruel trick of the mirror that seemingly over night started showing me someone who isn't me. Or at least not the me that my mind's eye sees.

So far for me, aging is a physical thing. I still, for the most part, have a young mind. Oh, I have moments where I can't remember things. But that has pretty much been with me all my life.

I'm not as flexible physically as I used to be. Even though I workout almost every day, I can tell that I'm slowing down. Rising from a sitting position on the floor after playing a board game with my kids isn't accomplished in one fluid moment any more.

Ok, I likely have another 25 or 30 years to live but the reality that I'll be living those years in an old body is pretty daunting. It's not like when I was in my 20s or 30s and didn't really see an end. I could easily rely on "somedays". Now someday seems like a diminishing possibility.

Mad in America

Seems like crazy in the US these days is the new black. Trump tweets new Twitter-babble almost on a a daily basis. And it garners more attention than the natural disasters ravaging the Caribbean.

It doesn't seem to matter to his "base" supporters (and I mean base literally).

Even the whack job North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un seems rational compared to Trump. He probably didn't expect to encounter someone crazier than he is who is willing to drop the bomb to prove America has bigger cojones than any other country.

The hypocrisy of all is also maddening. Trump rails on NFL football players for kneeling while the Star Spangled Banner is played at games. This sparks more protests and entire teams skip the Star Spangled Banner. This incites a segment of the population who think this is an insult to Veterans. Then photos emerge of Trump standing while the Star Spangled Banner is played but he doesn't have his hand over his heart.

El dia de los muertos Cerdo

All of those Day of the Dead skulls I painted on river rocks motivated me to clean off this derelict cement garden pig ornament that we had inherited when we bought our house and give him a new paint job. He had been hidden in some ivy. When we uncovered him, he'd lost most of his snout and his front hoofs.

It was actually my daughter's idea. She also helped with the intricate paint scheme. I think he turned out pretty cool. So cool that I cleaned off a derelict garden gnome and I'm going to turn him into a Day of the Dead gnome next.

So beyond painting rocks and garden statues being relaxing, I realize it's not high art. But for a little while, it helps fulfill my need to be creative. I just need to remind myself to keep it all in perspective. Just because I like it, doesn't mean other people like it or understand it.

Painting rocks

I just returned from two weeks vacation and though we spent 8 days in Los Cabos, my biggest discovery from my time off (other than I don't like working) is that I like to paint rocks.

I learned this by helping my ten-year old daughter gather rocks from the stream that runs through our backyard. The rocks are exceptionally round, smooth and for some reason are all black. I had gathered some before to fill in steps that lead down our hillside towards the stream. But this was the first time I'd gathered rocks for their artistic potential.

Apparently painting rocks isn't a new phenomenon in Western Washington. There are groups popping up on Facebook with people who paint and hide rocks around for other people to find. My daughter had found some and that inspired her to paint her own rocks.

I decided to join her. She had a bin full of acrylic paints including some metallic paints that really popped when applied to the black rocks. I started by painting a heart shaped rock gold with bronze accents. Then I painted gold angel wings that looked cool on the black rock I'd chosen.

That hooked me. I launched a "day of the dead" series that I'm still kind of obsessed with.

Kettle calling the pot black

Ted has left a new comment on your post "Night of the Living Beach Boys!": 
You're an idiot for saying derogatory things about these fantastic artists. Sounds like you're jealous... 

Oddly enough, in my 13 years of blogging I have had very few trolls sending me love letters like the one above. Whoever Ted is (and I know he isn't my brother Ted...he doesn't use the Internet), he took umbrage at a post I made several years ago about the Grammy's. I'm assuming he is calling me an idiot for dissing on what's left of the Beach Boys for lip syncing  and shuffling across the stage while young performers actual play and sing.

Normally, I just delete comments like this and move on. But although Ted has an account on Blogger and left his name, he didn't provide any means of responding. Because if he writes a blog, he doesn't publicize it with his profile. Probably because trolls don't like to be trolled.

My problem with this is that when I comment on some stranger's blog, I at least have the cojones to not be anonymous. People can respond to my comments. But then again, I don't call strangers idiots. If I take issue with their opinions, I at least engage in civilized debate rather than leading with an insult. It tends to put a damper on communication.

That being said, Ted, I'll respond in a way I hope you understand, "I know you are, but what am I."

Game of Thrones on!

My latest binge-watching accomplishment has been watching all the past seasons of Game of Thrones just in time for the new season to start. I know I was late to the game, but once I got through the first season, I was hooked big time.

Not like other Game of Throne fans, I've encountered though. I didn't read the books. I can't remember half the names. But I am blown away by the amazing, intertwined plot lines. The production values and acting are pretty amazing, too.

The beauty of Game of Thrones is that it transcends time. It's a period production, but not of any period that actually existed. And the politics of the people who jockey to sit on the Iron Throne and rule the seven kingdoms is a bit too much like politics in general today.

The thing about Game of Thrones is that even the good people can be exceedingly bad. And the good don't always triumph. But the bad are more or less pretty consistently bad. But even they have their likable or vulnerable moments.

Unlike Twin Peaks, which I binged watched to prepare for the reprisal, Game of Thrones seems to have only gotten better over the years. The new Twin Peaks is just bat shit crazy and incomprehensible (but of course I still watch it).

I hate that this is the last season of Game of Thrones.  I could have been enjoying it for years.

Oh well, I always have the Walking Dead to catch up on.

Toys in the attic

Crazy
Toys in the attic, I am crazy
Truly gone fishing
They must have taken my marbles away
Crazy, toys in the attic he is crazy
--Pink Floyd, The Trial

Unless you totally avoid social media, the news, talking to co-workers and never leave your bed, it is  not hard to imagine that the world has truly gone crazy. It seems as though on a daily basis that violence erupts, some new scandal breaks and the lunatic in the Oval Office is tweeting gibberish.

Police seem to regularly be shooting unarmed people on routine traffic stops. Others are shot by stray bullets as they sit in their cars or walk down the street. Hatred seems to be the norm. Tolerance is low on both sides of the political spectrum.

For the most part, I am used to odd behavior. Seattle's weather has always been a magnet for the unhinged. I walked past Starbucks yesterday and a woman stood with outstretched arms spinning slowly. A supersoaker water gun sat on the table next to her.

No one around her paid any attention.

The homeless seem everywhere. Tent cities crop up under freeway overpasses. There is hardly a exit and entry ramp onto a major roadway that doesn't have someone standing there with a sign pleading for help.

And bipartisan politicians point fingers at each other and slip through legislation that broadens the gap between the haves and the have nots.

Come on baby light my fire

This photo will make more sense when you read the end of this post.

Having the Fourth of July fall on a Tuesday pretty much sucks, because, unless you took off Monday and Wednesday, you essentially had the equivalent of two Mondays. I didn't take off the Monday before the 4th or the Wednesday after the 4th since I was taking off the following  Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to go camping. So my Independence Day was little more than a speed bump at the beginning of the work week.

I've taken to scanning old posts before writing new ones to avoid cleverly repeating myself and retelling the same stories of my faded childhood over and over. I have written several times about my pyromaniac childhood and my love for setting off fireworks on the 4th.  I'll spare you this year.

I will say that my desire to buy any fireworks has faded substantially in my old age. It has gone the same way as any vestige of patriotism I had in my youth. I was quite content with just building a fire in the fire pit in my back yard and watching my kids incinerate marshmallows.

Social is killing blogs

I blogged much more before social media turned many of us into over-sharers and shifted all of the cats on trampoline photos from e-mail to Facebook. While I post to Twitter and Facebook a few times a day, I am lucky if I post a couple of times a month to my blog.

It's just so easy to snap a photo of your lunch and post it to Instagram with five or six random hashtags than it is to think of something profound and expound upon it on Blogger. Now granted, whereas 28 people have voluntarily followed me on my blog, the people who like photos of what I'm eating tend to be random strangers who are trying to lure me to sketchy sites to look at porn.

Now I do have about 1,127 followers on Twitter (Blogger's note: A day after posting this, I was down to 1,125...who said social media marketing wasn't effective). A bulk of them are complete strangers whose primarily reason for following me is so I would follow them. I fell for this Ponzi scam for awhile until I began to figure out Twitter. Now I tend to only follow news and travel outlets. But even those inundate my Twitter feed with 20 different versions of the same headline. At least I was one of the first to know that Carrie Fisher's autopsy showed she had traces of alcohol, heroin, cocaine and ecstasy in her system when she had a heart attack (to which I retweeted that she had something more than the force strong in her).

And not one of the 1,127 people following me and hanging on my every Tweet liked my snarky comment. Now if I'd posted that on Facebook, at least one of my 161 closest Facebook friends would have at least liked it or given it a smiley face.

Twin Peeks

I didn't watch Twin Peaks when it originally aired in 1990. I was 32, just a year older than Kyle MacLachlan who starred as Agent Dale Cooper in the series. I have more in common with MacLachlan than just our ages. Besides both being Pisces, both of us have the state of Washington in common. He was born in Yakima, WA and went to college at the University of Washington and graduated in cum laude in 1982 with a BFA in Drama. I  went to college at Seattle University and graduated in 1982 with a BA in Journalism.

Uncanny isn't it.

The similarities basically end there. He went on to star in several movies and television series and moved to LA.  I went on to do marketing for a transit agency and stayed in the Seattle area. MacLachlan is also a bit taller than me. But I've been to Snoqualmie Falls where some of Twin Peaks was filmed.

Even more uncanny.

So funny everyone forgets to laugh

I'm not sure when I began to think I was funny (funny, ha-ha, not funny odd). I suppose like many shy, sensitive kids, I turned to humor as a defense mechanism. It was probably junior high when it really started to come out. I was always a pretty quiet kid. I would sit in class and kind of mumble comments to the kids sitting next to me. Eventually they would laugh and I felt like they liked me. I was hooked on my own brand of stand up at that point.

Though it did get me in trouble in this accelerated math class that was taught by a emotionally stunted guy who had been a whiz kid in math. He may have done well in college math, but he sucked as a teacher. He was always throwing tantrums in class and being early teenagers, we pushed as many buttons as we could find. Anyway, one day I was doing my usually covert (or so I thought) monologue to the kids around me and the teacher suddenly was in my face telling me to shut my fat mouth.

Apparently he didn't think I was funny.

Never the Mark Twain should meet

Up until a few weeks ago, I had read a few of Mark Twain's books, but I never really knew much about him. Then my son opted to be Mark Twain for a school project and I was suddenly immersed in the man's life.

Of course his real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He used Mark Twain, a nautical term from his steamboat pilot days, as his pen name. I'm not sure why a pen name was necessary. Samuel Clemens seems like a perfectly fine author's name. But name aside, he was a complex person.

I watched a two-part Ken Burns documentary about Samuel/Mark's life. It was fascinating. And it drove home how influential he was in not only literature, but in the way people viewed the world. He was also a tragic character. He rose from a humble background in the small riverside town of Hannibal, Missouri and rose to worldwide fame as an author, humorist and lecturer. He amassed and lost a fortune during his lifetime.

Basically Samuel/Mark was a brilliant thinker, but a lousy business man. Although he accumulated large amounts of cash and married into a wealthy family, he was never satisfied with how much money he had and made poor investments to try and accumulate more but they only led to bankruptcy. That in turn led him to go on the lecture circuit and earn more money. Which led to time away from a family that was tragic in its own right. He buried several of his children and his wife before he died.

Does not compute

You know I can't resist a good "end of the world" story. And since Howard Camping let us down on the rapture and the end of the Mayan calendar didn't really mean end of days, all we have is Trump wagging his nasty rump at the North Koreans to give us doomsday fears.

But I ran across a new one the other day on Twitter. An article about the world running out of data space caught my eye. Apparently the dire predictions have been around for awhile. We are creating so much data posting photos and videos of our pets and kids on social media that even the mysterious cloud can't hold everything. The article said that even if we figured out a way to store data on every single atom, we'd run out of data space in a matter of years.

I don't claim to understand how we can run out of space for something that doesn't physically exist, but it started me thinking. I've been blogging away thinking that after I post my last post before heading off into the great unknown some day, it and the rest of Dizgraceland would hang around forever helping people solve the riddle of  Leon Spinks and determining whether clams are really happy. Now I find that we could run out of storage space and my life's work will likely be erased to make room for more videos of cats on trampolines.

BTW, my last post will likely be something whiny about repeating myself, being invisible and wondering why my blog never went viral.

Pause for a lugubrious howl.

April fools

Can't believe April Fools Day snuck by me without so much as a Whoopee Cushion or joy buzzer. I guess April Fools Day just feels redundant with you know who squatting in the White House muttering and tweeting jibba jabba.

Not that I had any practical jokes in mind. There is quite the write up about practical jokes on Wikipedia if you are interested in why they are called practical jokes. I think the article also is a practical example of people with too much time on their hands.

Sometimes I miss a time before Wikipedia and not being able to immerse myself in the minutia of useless things.

Pause for lugubrious howl.

Spring into inaction

I didn't post on my birthday as is my usual custom. Generally I get a bit down around then because birthdays have usually been a let down for me. But this year I was treated to a farm stay at a working farm in Sedro Woolley, Washington and it made me forget about me pushing 60.

I won't go into too many details since I posted more about it on my daddy blog.  But suffice it to say I had a blast just feeding cows and driving tractors. It was simple. It was good, hard work. And none of it involved a committee or an hour and a half meeting.

One of the cool things about the farm was that the owner bought it about eight years ago when he was the age I am now. He was this vibrant, smart guy who was patient and full of life. And he made me think about the direction of my life.

If a blog falls in the forest and there is no one there to read it, does it make a sound?

Dizgraceland ko·an: a paradoxical blog, used in cyberspace to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment. Or not.

I suppose I could have titled this post, "What is the sound of one blog clapping?" but that wouldn't make any sense. Nor would "Show me the blog you wrote before you were born." I think I'm fine with wondering if a blog falling in the forest with no one to read it makes a sound.

I remember having to write an essay in an 8th-grade creative writing class about whether a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it would make a sound. I blathered on for a page or two about there always being something to hear it (animals, insects, plants) so yes, it made a sound. It wasn't a very creative essay.

Yet here I am, 44 or so years later blathering on about the proverbial koan and its proverbial sounds. I have to admit I was feeling a bit maudlin about blogging today. Every now and then I check my stats and reread some of my posts from the early days of my blogging career that have been getting hits recently and marvel at the number of comments. The comments were from a group of regulars that I grew to think of as my virtual entourage.

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
La la la la, Those were the days, oh yes those were the days

Oh my god, I'm breaking into maudlin songs mid blog post which is worse than my normal digressions or lugubrious howls.

Feral hog apocalypse now

In between doom and gloom tweets about Crooked Donald, I've been seeing a great deal of stories about animals acting out of character. A bull escaped from a slaughterhouse and led police on a chase through New York. He was shot with multiple tranquilizers before he passed out (and eventually died).

I found it very sad.

Then a coyote in South Carolina followed a doctor into his office. The doctor panicked and led the aggressive coyote on a ten-foot chase before it got distracted by a squirrel. There is no information about whether or not he caught the squirrel.

Now Texas is launching a full-scale effort to stave off a "feral hog apocalypse." Apparently as many as 2.5 million feral hogs are roaming Texas helping themselves to what the Texas Agriculture Commission claims is $50 million worth of crops and Aunt Betty's petunias each year.

I had a dream

I think I dream a lot. But, most of the time I forget my dreams soon after I step into the shower. Sometimes though, the dreams are pretty vivid and stay with me.

Like the other morning, I had a dream that the neighbor had cut a door in my fence and built a play structure for his kids on my property. I only noticed it when I saw his kids building a snowman in my back yard.  So naturally I went outside to confront my neighbor. By this time the snow was gone and he seemed to be having a party in his backyard.

I asked him if he'd built the play structure in my yard after cutting a hole in the fence. He got belligerent when I threatened a law suit and said he wasn't the mortgage payer for where he was living. He was a renter. I told him he needed to remove the play structure at once or I'd call the police. Then I said I'd remove it myself with an axe.

At that point he picked up the main structure and wheeled it through the fence along with what seemed to be an endless amount of other crap that he'd dumped in my yard.

Then the dream got weird(er).

The guy starts up this huge construction machine and is lifting stuff out of the front of my yard with it. And he is carting stuff out of my garage that he'd placed there. I was yelling at him about what gave him the right to put his stuff in my garage (I think this portion of the dream was based on fact since our garage is full of all kinds of crap right now and none of it is a car).

Then I woke up.

The funny thing about the dream was that most of it took place at my mom's old house that was torn down several years ago. I don't have a yard with a fence that borders any neighbors. But I do have a garage full of crap as I mentioned.

Not sure what the point of the dream was. Maybe I feel as though my boundaries in life have been violated by Crooked Donald and his team.

Could be those spicy pistachio nuts I ate before going to bed, too.

We'll probably never know.

The north wind doth blow

I do not like snow. Oh, I'm okay with it if it snows Christmas Eve and looks pretty for a few hours. But then I want it to go away.

I will not bore you and rehash anecdotes of how people in Seattle haven't got a clue how to drive in the snow.  Truth be told, people in Seattle are pretty crappy driver's no matter what the weather. They just treat snow as an excuse to slide into each other and blame it on the weather rather than their own inadequate driving skills.

My children like snow because they rarely experience it here. I imagine if it rarely rained here, they would like the rain as well. I, on the other hand, grew up with snow on a fairly regular basis during the winter. There are only so many snowmen you can make before it loses its appeal.

I don't like to be cold. So naturally snow falls with an automatic strike against it in my book. It reminds me of learning to ski when I was 17 and having to get up at the crack of dawn every day for a week during my Christmas break to catch a bus to Bogus Basin Ski resort. There I'd stand in line at the rental place to get my skis and trudge to my beginner's class that lasted all day. I had secondhand boots that didn't fit right and absorbed water. So basically I was miserable the entire time.

Snow for my children inevitably means no school. When I was a kid they never shut the school down for snow. It was just a few blocks from my house anyway. Even then snow stressed me out because our school had a strict policy forbidding you to throw snowballs. The penalty was a spanking by the principal. And he was this sadistic bald guy who had this big wooden paddle on display in his office.

Now I wouldn't have thrown a snowball because I was deathly afraid of authority at that age, but for whatever reason, the snow still stressed me out since who knows whether I might have unintentional tried to wipe snow off my glove and have it perceived as throwing snow. It wouldn't have been the first time I'd been punished unjustly in grade school for crimes I didn't commit. Teachers in that era had a tendency to be judge and jury.

Oh well, since I started drafting this post the snow came and went. It was followed by torrential rain and winds. And now the snow if a mere melted memory.

Now I can go back to complaining about politics.

Darkest before the dawn

Suffice it to say, it is not the best time to be an American. Not that I have ever overly identified myself with my country. I liked it when it kind of went off and did its thing and didn't bother me too much.

But now the inmates of the insane asylum have literally taken over Bedlam and social and pseudo media are abuzz with riveting stories about how Trump is deadly afraid of stairs and ramps and his press secretary chews and swallows two packs of gum before noon every day. And those stories seem normal in comparison to the flurry of Executive Orders the idiot has issued in his first week in office.

Meanwhile the protests go on and on. And I search my soul, wondering if it does any good. It's like a bad science fiction movie where the Nazi's won the war and America is part of the third or fourth Reich.  There's only so many times you can scream, "No fair, not right" before you realize the people in power don't care.

At first I thought all of the protests were a sign that a majority of the people in America realized Trump and his Toadies are pond scum. Then I started seeing the polls start popping up citing that 50 percent of the population supports his outrageous orders to build walls, ban Muslims and block immigration. But why should I be surprised. Almost 50 percent of the population voted for him. Why would I think they would wake up now?

It all comes down to what people choose to believe. Once they have ingrained something into their heads, it is almost impossible to dissuade them of it being the truth. Because they have made it their truth. And most people will go out of their way to constantly adjust their reality to hold onto their truth. No number of facts will change their minds. Because as we are discovering "alternative facts" are quickly becoming the norm.

I'm no different. Nothing anyone can tell me will ever make me think there is anything positive that can come from Trump running the country (into the ground). And even when he is gone, the Republicans will blame it all on the Democrats anyway.

I wish the sun would come out soon.

Hollywood spirits

I've been to Hollywood a few times in my life. Mostly as most people go to Hollywood--as a tourist. This time I was in Hollywood on a business trip. I was in town for a few days to shoot some television spots for work. And since the production company's offices were in Hollywood I stayed at a hotel in the heart of tinsel town, the Hollywood Roosevelt.

The Hollywood Roosevelt was built in 1927. It is seeped in old Hollywood history. One of the first Academy Awards ceremony took place there. It is even supposed to be haunted by Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Cliff. Marilyn had one of her first photo shoots as a model in the hotel pool.

I didn't see any ghosts at the Hollywood Roosevelt. But I could understand why they would be there. The place had atmosphere oozing out of it in spades. I could understand why I didn't see any ghosts though. My room was barely big enough for me let alone a ghost.

You take the high road and I'll take the circuitous road...

I started to write this post about how romanticism begins to wane the older you get and the more experience you've had. That got sidetracked as I meandered down memory lane recalling my own experience. Experience is the operative word here. Because being hopefully optimistic seems to be something that feeds a romanticized view of life. And experience tends to squash both hope and optimism.

Jaded perhaps. But pretty much true.

Pause for lugubrious howl.

Or perhaps experience begins to create self-fulfilling prophecies that squash both hope and optimism. Regardless, I find it difficult to maintain a cheery attitude about things, especially with the current political realities.

Clickbaiters are the new spammers

click·bait 
/ˈklikbāt/
noun informal 
(on the Internet) content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.

I am struggling to stick to my resolution to not succumb to the siren song of clickbait. This is particularly difficult on Twitter since the primary purpose of most tweets is to get you to click on them. Facebook is not much better. Though I have blocked some of the worst offenders from my news stream. For awhile there I was constantly being pulled into tabloid like headlines reading things like "Mother and toddler discover time machine in Walmart." Turned out to be a mother snaps a photo of a geriatric shopper dressed in the same outfit as her three year old.

Clickbait preys on that aspect of human nature that just can't help but open a container of cottage cheese in the fridge that is several months past it's pull date. It uses the same principal of newspapers like the National Enquirer to lure hapless shoppers to throw it in the cart at the checkout stand because they were dying to read an article about a boy trapped in a refrigerator who eats his own arm.

Repeating myself

I feel like I have told all of my stories. Some of them one too many times. I've even written about repeating myself several times and waxed less than poetically about my theories of why we repeat ourselves so much as we age.  And I find repeating myself terribly annoying.

Yet I do it.

It is disturbing when I catch myself repeating myself. It is even more annoying when someone else brings it to my attention. It happens at work. I'll be pontificating to one of my staff and they'll fill in the ending of what I'm ranting about. Because I've said it to them before.

Then I panic. Because it means I've become one of those people. The ones who are pompous bores that repeat themselves because they don't have anything original to say. It also means I've become unaware. And one thing I've always clung to throughout my life is that I take great pains to be aware of everyone of my faults. I like to beat people to the punch when it comes to pointing out my deficiencies.

I'd like to think that I also tried to correct my faults when I become aware of them. I don't really like to be annoying. And nothing is more annoying than little things like repeating ones self.

Well making grunting sounds for no reason is pretty annoying.  Or sucking your teeth. Muttering to yourself is annoying, too.

Pause for lugubrious howl.

Another day, another year

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the end of 2016, a truly sucky year if there ever was one. I am not even going to rehash (or re-hashtag) the setbacks on the political scene

(Pause for lugubrious howl)

I did manage to post more posts than I have posted since 2011. I think that may have had something to do with the fore mentioned political developments. But I am resolved to ignore all of that for the next four years.

Not that I am much on New Year's resolutions. Though I am going to make as much effort as possible to avoid Internet click-bait. I am also resolved that, once I finish binge watching the sixth and final season of Glee, I will not rewatch it again. Because, although I enjoy the music, I found the writing on season five and six to have sunk to the sub-moronic level. Plus they have run out of gender benders to weave in and out of the weak plots.

Howling the lugubrious howl

If we lose our sanity ... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.--D.H. Lawrence

If I do say so myself, one of my best posts was written on August 29, 2006 -- I, Lugubrious. Actually, 2006 was probably my best year for blogging. I had a slew of regular readers who actually commented and interacted with me and each other. But I, Lugubrious, a five paragraph riff on the word lugubrious kind of illustrated why I love words. The muse moved me and amused me into writing it.

Thank you muse. I miss you and the many mini-muses who read and commented back then. But I still have Baggy in Great Britain even though she joined the party after most people left. She points out on occasion that I still have the lampshade on my head and the conga line has long since ended.

But back to the winter of my discontent. It is the day after Christmas (which traditionally is plagued with the post-Christmas blues). We are perched on the the end of 2016, one of the worst years in U.S. history. And with the upcoming inauguration of the person I will never acknowledge as my president, D.H. Lawrence's lugubrious quote leaps to the forefront of my soul. I am howling out my nowhereness in a suitably lugubrious fashion.

I watched a snail...

"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare: crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving." 

--Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), Apocalypse Now

I was never really a big fan of Apocalypse Now.  I accept that on some levels it is great film. But to me it is just bat shit weird.

I know Coppola based it on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (which I actually read). He just moves the setting from the Congo to Vietnam War era and adds a lot of explosions. Oh and Marlon Brando. He is billed as the star of the movie, but basically you don't really see much of him. Even though there was a lot of him.

The movie was filmed after Brando had pretty much hopped aboard the major train wreck of his career and spiraled out of control down the tracks. And whereas in the beginning of his career he became a really big star. In the end he became even bigger...physically. And the rambling lines he had to deliver as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a Green Beret who had gone rogue and nuts, did nothing to dispel the belief that Brando was also as bat shit weird as Apocalypse Now.

One of those lines is quoted above. And it is a line I included in a skit I helped write for our office holiday party. I won't get to far into what the skit is about other than I play myself and I utter my Brandoesque line when one of the other characters asks me to talk about feelings. And I delivered my line doing my best Brando impression. Though it came across more like Robert Deniro doing Christopher Walken doing Brando.

I wanted to be a spaceman

I wanted to be a spaceman, that's what I wanted to be
But now that I am a spaceman
 Nobody cares about me
Hey, Mother Earth, won't'cha bring me back down safely to the sea?
Around and around and around and around is all she ever say to me 

I wanted to make a good run,
I wanted to go to the moon
I knew that it had to be fun
I told 'em to send me real soon 

I wanted to be a spaceman,
I wanted to be it so bad
But now that I am a spaceman
I'd rather be back on the pad
Hey, Mother Earth, won't'cha bring me back down safely to the sea?
Around and around and around and around is just a lot of lunacy (yeah) (Yeah) 

Spaceman by Harry Nilsson

"The time will come when we permit more people in space."
 --John Glenn

One of the original seven NASA astronauts, John Glenn, died yesterday.  It was just a month shy of my fourth birthday when he became the first American to orbit the earth on Feb. 20, 1962. So it wasn't likely I knew much about John Glenn at the time. But by the time I was five, I was fascinated by the space program and wanted to be an astronaut.

It was the romance of being an astronaut more than anything else that captured my young imagination. I didn't really think about most of the astronauts being military pilots and training for years as pilots before they could even get into the space program. All I saw were these heroes wearing shiny space suites and waving to us from small black and white television screens as they prepared to risk their lives and blast off into space and history.

Splitting hairs

I started writing a pithy post about getting my hair cut on Saturday. Then I realized that, not only was this as mundane as writing about what I had for lunch, but I had already blogged about my hair  several times and I'm all out of entertaining anecdotes about past and present hair cuts.

And even I'm sick of me whining about no one noticing that I got a haircut anyway. You can only play the "feeling invisible" card so many times until people just shake their heads and mutter, "get over it."

Though getting a haircut isn't something that happens that much in your life. Say you get your first haircut when you are two years old and you live maybe to 85. So that's 83 years of getting haircuts. And if you get a hair cut every six weeks, you'll have 719 haircuts in your life. But the haircuts don't really start mattering until you're maybe 11-years old so shave 95 haircuts off the list. And no one pays any attention to your haircuts after the age of say, 45.  So that works out to just about 83 haircuts in your lifetime that really matter.

Kind of puts things in perspective.

It don't matter to me

And it don't matter to me
If your searching brings you back together with me
'Cause there'll always be
An empty room waiting for you
An open heart waiting for you
Time is on my side
'Cause it don't matter to me
 It don't matter to me 

It don't matter to me by Bread (the 1969 band, not a loaf of bread...though a loaf of bread could probably write better lyrics)

Grammatically, it should be "It doesn't matter to me or it does not matter to me" but it was almost the 1970s and the music industry was on the brink of spiraling downward into Disco. So who gave a rip about grammar? And as the old Winston cigarette commercials used to tout, "What do you want, good grammar or good taste?"

But if you are a millennial,  none of this makes a whit of sense anyway.  I, however, was starting to come of age when Bread was casting these mindless lyrics on the waters. I only pulled the last stanza out. The proceeding lyrics were even worse:

And it don't matter to me
If you take up with someone
Who's better than me
 'Cause your happiness is all I want
For you to find peace your piece of mind

When I was twelve years old moping about with endless crushes on girls who I didn't have the nerve to talk to, the song was pretty cool. Now I see it for the moronic bit of pop music that it is. Who in their right mind would tell someone that they would be fine if they found someone better than them? You might as well say, "I'm a loser and you could do way better than me, but want to go steady?"

The badger has landed

"Okay I can forgive the fact that the guy's hair looks like someone created a bad toupee out of a dead badger. Obviously his image people solved that by getting him to wear a ball cap in most of his appearances. And so what if he is a billionaire who claims to know what the common people need. But seriously, listen to the guys idiotic ideas to "'make America great again.'"

--Dizgraceland, The Trump Card, August 2015 

I watched the election returns coming in on Tuesday evening with a growing sense of dread. I won't say I had a premonition that Trump would win, but I didn't have much confidence that he would lose. So it didn't really surprise me. But the rate at which state after state fell to the dark hordes sickened me.

I didn't spend much time on social media yesterday. I took the day off to chaperone my son's field trip to a children's theater version of  The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe. It was actually nice not to be in the center of the hand wringing and shell-shocked reaction of most of the people I know.  For some reason their sense of disbelief annoys me. With all of my railing against Trump, I've just come to the conclusion that what happened was inevitable.

If this is Tuesday then there must be an election

"This is considered the greatest movement, nobody has ever seen anything like it"

--Donald Trump (Presumably just returning from a bathroom break)

I'd like to say that I'm going to miss disjointed mutterings of Donald Trump, but I seriously doubt if the nut job will go away after his psychotic ego has got the taste of publicity only a presidential campaign can generate. That aside, no, I won't miss Donald Trump's nasty face and vitriol (a big word most of his followers won't understand) being spewed on a daily basis.

I made the mistake yesterday of venturing out of my nice, liberal Twitter stream and following some of the election hashtags. I was stunned at the number of nasty tweets by the deplorables. I shouldn't be surprised. Trump chooses that channel on a regular basis. I supposed it is because none of them can focus on anything beyond 140 characters.

Still it shocks me that the other side has just as much rhetoric criticizing Hillary as we have rhetoric criticizing Trump. The difference is that our rhetoric is accurate and their's is just made out of crap they've cherry picked from their "movement."

Random thoughts

of thought

Ironic to call a post "Random thoughts" when pretty much all my thoughts are random. This is why I've adopted Twitter as my channel of choices because I can view hundreds of random posts a day and fire off random comments at random strangers who have a random chance at ever randomly reading them.

But, of course, I digress.

I watched the 10th inning of the World Series last night. It was the first time I've ever watched any of a World Series because I'm not much of a baseball fan. Oh, I've attended a few Seattle Mariners games, but I basically just go for the food and the hat trick game on the Jumbotron. But I have to admit it was pretty exciting watching the last inning of the World Series and watch a team that hasn't won a World Series in more than a hundred years finally pull one out.

But in the scheme of things, what does it really matter?

I think I've become a Tweetler

Tweetler is a word I've made up for a person who heckles what other people (mainly news organizations) tweet on Twitter. I suppose it could be Twittler, too. Regardless, it is what I've become.

I never used to really get Twitter. It was because I used to think of it as another Facebook where you could only post status reports in 140 characters or less. But I finally figured out that it isn't like Facebook at all. For one, no one I know follows me on Twitter. And I don't really follow any one I know.And Twitter is more political than Facebook (or than Facebook is supposed to be).

When I figured that out, I when on naive campaign to get followers using this free site that got people to follow other people if they in turn followed that person. I ended up with more than a 1000 followers but I also ended up following more than 1000 people. And the problem was none of the people following me really gave a rip about anything I post (mainly links to my blog posts). And I didn't give a rip about what most of them were posting about.

A jump to the left

(Narrator) It's just a jump to the left.
 (Guests) And then a step to the right.
 (Narrator) With your hand on your hips.
 (Guests) You bring your knees in tight.
 But it's the pelvic thrust.
They really drive you insane.
Let's do the Time Warp again.
Let's do the Time Warp again.

--Time Warp, Rocky Horror Picture Show 

I actually started this blog post before the "You can't fix stupid...II" post. But as I got into it, it morphed into yet another rant about Trump and his Trumpiots. So I changed the title and posted it as as another you can't fix stupid post. But I'd already Photoshopped my head onto the Rocky Horror Picture Show narrator's body and hated to waste it. So I will once again try writing a post and avoid slipping into politics.

 Though one could construe that "a jump to the left" is a political metaphor. But since I am already leaning that direction, it wouldn't be far to jump. If it was going to be a political metaphor for me, it would be "a jump to the right" and if I did that, I might as well jump off a cliff because there is no way I'm following my older brothers down the conservative right path.

But I digress.

You can't fix stupid...II

I have fallen into the trap of reading article after article about the current Presidential election and the scab picking analysis of why people support Donald Trump. And it boils down to the hypothesis that they are acting out against the status quo by supporting a candidate who flips a finger at every established system on the books. They in turn are giving the finger to the mainstream media, the intellectual elite, the established party system and every other thing that they feel makes them feel inferior.

The irony to me is the similarity to Trump supporters and the bullies who used to harass me growing up for getting good grades. They would compensate for being stupid by taking it out on me on the playground. They would feel superior and powerful for awhile, but they would always be stupid. I on the other hand learned to avoid being around stupid people as much as possible. But if I was forced to be around stupid people, I learned to hide that fact that I was smarter than them.

It is one of the reasons I try not to shop at Walmart.

Photographic memory

"Long ago it must be, I have a photograph 

Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you"

--Bookends, "Simon and Garfunkel"

I have always been fascinating by photographs. I would flip through the photo albums my mom kept in her cedar hope chest. Or I'd sort through boxes of photos my grandmother had. At the time all of the photographs were black and white.

My mother had an old Kodak camera that she'd bring out for holidays, birthdays and vacations. It was the type where you'd flip up the top and hold the camera chest level and look down into a viewfinder that displayed a murky mirror image of what the lens was seeing. It was strictly black and white. And the photos always seemed blurry and off center.

Where are you when we need you Harold Camping?

When Harold Camping, serial predictor of the end of the world, died in 1993, I lost a great deal of blog material. The pompous, bible-thumping windbag was the poster child for self-righteousness. And even after wrongly predicting the rapture three times, he still managed to reel in followers to his religious right. He was a champion huckster.

Now who does that remind me of? Why Trump and his basket of deplorables, that's who!  I imagine Harold and his cronies would have been right there in the basket suggesting that Trump was finally going to fulfill the prophecy and bring about the end of the world.

This time he may have been right.

I have never seen the country so polarized before. It's like something out of Stephan King's end of the world novel, The Stand.  Trump is the Dark Man rallying the haters around his dark tower in Las Vegas. And they are all crawling out from under the rocks they've been hiding under, gibbering like idiots at his jibba jabba.

The parting

Parting: the action of leaving or being separated from someone. "they exchanged a few words on parting" synonyms: farewell, leave-taking, goodbye, adieu, departure; valediction "an emotional parting" separation, breakup, split, divorce, rift, estrangement "they kept their parting quiet"

This is the year of my 40th high school reunion.  It took place in Boise in kind of two-parts. One gathering happened in the summer and the other last weekend. I didn't attend either.

One of the reasons was simply logistics. Neither time was really practical for me to take a trip to Boise. The other was a hybrid of philosophical and vindictive protest. Basically I was never invited.

By way of background, I did attend my ten and twenty-year high school reunions. Neither experience was overly pleasant. The ten-year reunion was very organized scheduled over a series of days. The initial gathering was at the Idaho State Prison (a historic building no longer used as a prison, but an ironic choice for a high school reunion). The event was so traumatic, I wrote a short story about it.

Basically, ten-years was not enough time to overcome all of the residual insecurities from the actual high school years. By the end of the reunion everyone had pretty much been relegated to the groups they'd been pigeonholed into back then. I left feeling every bit the ignored band geek that gone unnoticed by all but a few of my friends in the three years I'd gone to high school.

The 20-year reunion was less organized. And 20 years had begun to take its toll on how people looked. In retrospect everyone was about 38 years old. But I recall many had lost hair and ballooned to the extent that you couldn't recognize them unless you saw a photo of their 18-year old selves (including me).

Happy camper?

I think I've mentioned that vacation growing up meant camping. I was 16 before I stayed in a motel. Up until then it was two weeks sleeping in a tent in either McCall, Idaho at campgrounds near Payette Lake, in the Stanley Basin of Idaho near Redfish Lake, or at campgrounds near the Middle Fork of the Boise River. 

That is a photograph of me camping. I am wearing the hat. Based on the date the photo was processed, I was about 2 1/2 years old.  That is my brother Dan standing next to the tent without a shirt. Neither of us look like that these days (and trust me you wouldn't want to see Dan without a shirt now). I believe that photo was taken in McCall, Idaho. I remember the rock.

Camping is a lot less work when you are a kid. The cabin tent you see in the photograph was pitched using a complicated system of poles, stakes, ropes and swearing that my father was responsible. It was a behemoth of a tent constructed of heavy canvas that absorbed the heat. We slept in the tent on air mattresses and old army cots. It was quite roomy.

I think this was from a camping trip when I was four and a half or five 

(that's me in the foreground looking overly happy.  My father on the other hand 

looks as happy as I do when I camp these days. Now I know why.

My mother didn't like to camp. It just made the thing she hated the most -- cooking -- even more of a chore. While my father took my older brothers fishing in whatever body of water was closest, I remained in camp with my mother as she combated dirt, dirty camp dishes, and mosquitoes. Then she would settle back on a camp stool and read Christian Science periodicals while threw pine needles into the perpetual camp fire to entertain myself until my father and brothers returned and we could go swimming in ice cold waters fed by mountain streams.

The campfire was the most consistent and comforting thing about camping. It was the primary source of heat for cooking, light for reading and warmth when the sun went down. We'd sit around it in a circle after dinner roasting marshmallows and listening to my parents tell stories about their youth. Occasionally we'd spot an owl in the trees looking for field mice or chipmunks. Then there was the nightly march to the outhouse before retiring to the tent for the night.

The unfriendly skies

Cliche as it may be, I have to rant about a recent experience trying to fly home from a business trip to Washington D.C. (and boy are my arms tired).

I could reasonably expect delays if I were flying during the winter. But this was the last week in July. I was a direct flight leaving at 3:17 p.m. EDT from Dulles Airport. It was hot in D.C. Temperature was hovering around 95 degrees. I arrived at the airport about an hour and a half early. I was giddy because I got a random TSA PreChk boarding pass and didn't have to strip down before going through security.

At the gate I was waiting patiently in my boarding group 3 line when the gate agent called my name. She asked me if I was ok with changing seats to an exit row. It offered more legroom so I felt like I was on a roll. We boarded.

That's when my apparent good luck started fading. I had the window seat, but a customer of size wedged himself into the center seat next to me. There went the armrest. Still, I had legroom.

The airplane pushed away from the gate and we began taxing toward the runway. We proceeded for awhile and then the airplane pulled over and ominously stopped (never a good sign).  A few minutes later, someone from the flight crew in the cockpit came onto the PA systems and announced that they had received notice from ATC (which I assumed was air traffic control) that they needed to program an alternate flight path to avoid a storm pattern.

The sky is falling

What do you write when the world seems to be tearing itself apart? But I suppose the world always seems to be tearing itself apart. For some reason, it is human nature to hate. And none of the platitudes from politicians, activists, religious leaders or the Twitter rabble really changes anything.

Social media just seems to fan the flames. We all become eyewitnesses to violence and bigotry. And everyone chooses sides and starts throwing stones.

I am amazed at how quickly the outrage at police killing two black men was eclipsed by a black man killing five police officers. And his justification was that he was upset by the killing of the two black men.

It is the same irony I find in spanking a child for hitting a sibling. Violence does not stop violence any more than throwing gas on a fire will put it out.