Home Alone; or, How a Dull Man Performed Necessary Tasks to Find Tranquility, Blissfulness, and Nirvana

I wrote this post for the Facebook page of the Dull Men's Club, but the post's meaning and purpose are universal enough to be more widely published.

I had the time of my life a couple days ago, and I want to make sure that my fellow dull men know about it.

My wife was gone much of the day, playing bridge.  I roamed around the house, pausing at the necessary room.  Where I live the usual term is “bathroom,” but I understand that some dull men live where they have “loos.”  By any term, it’s the necessary room.

That day, in our necessary room, there was no necessary paper.  Cradled by chrome arms, the spindle rested there, empty, thin, equally round all the way, reminding me of a girl I dated in high school. 

I replaced it, snapping a new roll into place the way I was taught shortly after the wedding.  I had other plans for those moments, plans that would lead to an activity more beneficial and vastly more fulfilling, but my bride insisted, first things first.  There is only one way to install the roll, she decreed, so I did it now the same way I learned all those years ago, and the way I have been doing it ever since.  When I was finished, the ready-to-use paper hung down in front and not back by the wall.

But then I realized, here I was, home alone, totally unsupervised.  I could do anything!

Driven by some unnamed urge, I removed the roll, and—reversed it!  Now it stood proudly mounted, with the ready-to-use paper hanging down the back.

I hyperventilated for a time.  I was excited, no doubt about it.  I stood there gazing at my handiwork, toying with the idea of bringing in a chair and spending the rest of the afternoon just sitting and worshipping what I had done.  Maybe sipping a relaxing beverage while thus reflecting on the joys of humanity.

And then, I realized I was not finished.  In a flash, I leapt to my feet, reached over and raised the toilet seat until it was vertical, not flat against the bowl.

Now the necessary room was organized and displayed in a manner that was comforting and inviting.  Buddha would have wanted it this way, not that I’m a Buddhist, but I feel it necessary to appeal to a deity of some sort or other, and his name was close to mind.

Alas, the bridge game had to end sometime, and my wife would be home shortly thereafter.  I would have to restore order, which I did, dawdling as much as possible, while softly weeping.

Maybe it was only a fantasy.  Could it have been real?  I don’t know, but my Walter Mitty moment was ended.

***

Great Outings of 2017

Male celebrities are going down the tubes.  Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor—I think I missed others—have all gotten axed, charged with letting hormones override good judgment. 

Who’s next?  Will Santa Claus be ousted (outed?) for hanky-panky with an elf?

***

Three Things

1.  I was out of the house for a time on Saturday.   I understand an apocalypse

occurred.  I guess I missed it.

2.  Various internet sites carried a story, “This Animal Sleeps but Has No Brain.” I guess that was supposed to be news, but I don’t know why.  I’ve known guys like that all my life.

3.  I didn’t miss the apocalypse.  It’s been rescheduled for October 15.  I’ll have to skip it.  That’s the day I go grocery shopping for the month.

4.  If there’s a cooking channel, shouldn’t there be a napping channel?

5.  Blogger does not know how to count. 

***

A Pseudo-algebraic Representation of Why a Do-it-yourself Project Can Be a Pain

About a year ago I bought a new computer.  Its factory settings made the on-screen font too small for easy viewing, so I enlarged the font size.  But I overshot, and the enlargement turned out to be extra-large.  I couldn’t find a happy medium.  The font was either too large or too small.

I left the font size at too-large and pushed the monitor more toward the back of the desk.  That wasn’t good enough, so I scooted my chair back a couple of inches.  Now the viewing distance and apparent font size were as best as I could get them, optimal, as some people would say.

(Devout grammarians would say that optimal is the adjective form; optimum is the noun.  Details, details.  I chose optimal because I don’t get many chances to use it and I liked the way it sounded.)

Except that now my right arm sagged off the desk, unsupported.  A couple of days later, my right wrist began to ache.

I switched the system over so that I could use the mouse with my left hand, thereby giving my right wrist rest. (Say that fast:  Right wrist rest.)  But my left hand, throughout my lifetime, had never done anything more demanding than scratch my nose and operate the turn signal; it just didn’t have any self-control, and its movements with me in charge were herky-jerky.

I found a list of keyboard shortcuts.  My thinking was that I could use the keyboard to take some of the effort away from my wrists.  But keyboard shortcuts didn’t do as much as I wanted, and, besides, using them would be a step backward.  Keyboard commands were all that we had before the mouse and its buttons came along.   No backward technology for me.

I reset the mouse for right-hand use, and with a piece of scrap wood and an old towel fashioned a booster that I taped to the right arm of my chair. Truly an inelegant piece of office furniture, but it worked. 

But the mouse was evil.  Now my right shoulder began to ache, an aggravation of an injury I had done to the rotator cuff therein.  Somehow or other my chair had shifted to the left just enough so that I was not sitting squarely in front of the computing machinery.  My mouse arm was coming in at an angle.  However so slightly the angle was, I was clicking on the bias.

What’s going on here is a series of events that a friend and I talk about from time to time:  That is, it doesn’t seem possible to tackle the simplest of do-it-yourself projects without encountering some form of additional difficulty.  My friend and I have even formulated a sort of algebraic shorthand that we use to identify the problem:

A leads to B+C which leads to D+E+F which leads to G+H+I+J and so on.

That doesn’t really provide any solutions, but I feel better now, and, as Forrest Gump said, “That's all I have to say about that.”

***

It's Time to Move on to the Next Level

Four mornings a week I exercise at a gym—excuse me, fitness center, in today’s lingo—where machines extract sweat and money from the customers.  The place also peddles one program after another for people who want to exercise the way someone else tells them to.  To keep people involved—that is, spending money—little blurbs of encouragement are posted here and there.  Here’s one:

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

If that is supposed to be a motto, it’s a lame one.

Sure, it could push you, when you’ve finished pumping thirty pounds of weight, to go back to the rack and move up to forty pounds.

But those words are nothing more than a truism, a description of the treadmill of life.  When you’ve finished eating breakfast, clear off the table and wash your dishes.  When you’ve finished cutting the grass, leave the lawnmower where you can find it when it’s time to cut the grass again.  If you quit this job, get another one.

And it’s a poorly wrought sentence, too.  It has no subject.  Who is doing the arriving?   To devout grammarians, that opening cluster of words—"Arriving at one goal”—is a dangling modifier.  It “dangles” because it’s not clear who or what is being modified (referred to).

I wondered who wrote it, for the gym did not name the perpetrator.  Ah, but Google knows.

John Dewey did it.  According to Wikipedia, Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.  Wikipedia calls him a well-known public intellectual, and a major voice of progressive education and liberalism.  The quote that I dislike is one of his most famous.

Well, that settles that.  It’s time to move on to the next level.

***

The Grouch Speaks: Overwhelmed by Ennui

This morning, when I left the gym, I felt overwhelmed by ennui.  I don’t know why I was down, but I knew what would fix the problem, a cup of coffee.  As some ad or other says, “Caffeine—makes you do stupid things faster and with more energy.”

I went across the street to La Bou, got my coffee and a staple in my Kamikaze diabetic diet—a chocolate croissant—and sat where I could watch all three big-screen television monitors.  I wanted to see how bad things were in Houston, which was largely underwater because of hurricane Harvey.  A base just outside of Houston was one of my first assignments in the air force.  After more than three years there, I left with fond memories.  Now I'd like to know what was happening.

On one TV a woman wearing an Egyptian fright mask was talking about something or other, what I don’t know.  The sound was off as was the captioning.  Then the captioning came on and gave her name:  Kim.  Ah, yes, one of the famed Kardashians, the twenty-first century’s replacements for the Gabor sisters (Google them) of years gone by.

The station broke, and a more-or-less news program came on.  Three people were talking about a pay-per-view fight, the conduct of which soaked people for millions of dollars to watch late at night.  One of the panelists asked this question: “What late-night activity would keep you up?”

Be serious.  I was talking, silently, to the TV, asking, Do you guys think about the words you use before you throw them out over the air?  I know what late-night activity would keep me up, and it’s none of your business.

I pivoted to look at the monitor in the middle of the room.  A courtroom drama was on, but no, it wasn’t, a commercial came on for a local law firm.

At one time it was illegal for lawyers to advertise; now it’s not.  I don’t have a problem with that, but I think that when the law was changed it should have included a requirement that professional actors be used and lawyers not be allowed to pretend to act.  The lawyers representing themselves on the screen before were as wooden as Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd—dummies used by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.

The TV monitor at the back of the room caught my eye.  People were doing something with a watermelon.  It was a food channel, or a cooking channel, something like that.  A man put a chunk of watermelon in a glass and then poured gin over it. Or vodka.  Or some phony booze.  It’s the concept that counts.  That appealed to me.

It was time for me to go.  I could check out Houston on the Google news feed at home, and what daytime television I'd seen still left me overwhelmed with ennui.

***

What Would (Did) Mencken Say?

"The White House will be adorned by a downright moron”—H. L. Mencken.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English.   He preferred a shortened form of his name, H. L. Mencken, and was nicknamed the "Sage of Baltimore."

Snopes.com checked the authenticity of the quote used at the start of this post and verified that, yes, Mencken did in fact write those words.

Snopes went further and put the remark in the paragraph in which it was originally composed, thereby showing the context, which was not at all flattering to Americans: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Mencken was a skeptic.  He was acerbic. His barbs lived long lives and are scattered around the internet.

He distrusted humanity: “Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.”

He had a low opinion of his fellow Americans: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

He disliked the American form of government: “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

He thought little of the GOP: “In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

***

As a Good Ole Boy Might Say . . .

I enjoyed my air force days stationed with young men from the rural south, people today called Good Ole Boys.  They could do entertaining things with the English language, such as creating a simile like this:

 "His brain is so small that if you wadded it into a ball and shoved it up a gnat’s ass it would rattle like a walnut in a boxcar."

That remark can be applied to whomever you might think of.

***

Power Outage

Our electricity was off because of a scheduled power outage.  I used the time to run errands.  I needed essentials—beer, wine, and insulin syringes.  I like to be mellow when I shoot up.

Necessary stuff taken care of, it was time to do something pointless, time to go to the mall.  The mall in this case is Sacramento’s Arden Fair Mall, two levels containing 165 retail tenants.  The mall’s website says it’s more than 1,100,000 square feet big.  A million square feet! 

But a million square feet is small footage compared to malls in Asia that are three to four times that size.  Somebody has probably written a book about super-sized malls, but I wondered if anyone has compared any of the malls to classic structures such as India's Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid of Giza, or the Roman Colosseum. If anyone has tried to elevate the shopping mall to timeless architectural status, I didn’t find a reference to it.  Moreover, some sort of record should survive so that people of the future will know that we are the era responsible for shopping malls, large dams, small electronics, and nuclear weapons.

Going to a mall is pointless for me because I don’t have the shopping gene.  Maybe I was born without it, or maybe it spun out of my system somewhere along the way.  I suppose a proper shopping gene could have been injected at some point, but it wasn’t, and I remain genetically unmodified, a non-GMO generic old man.

But I had time to kill until the power at home came back on, and my hunger gene pleaded for something to eat.  We, the hunger gene and I, went to the mall and into the food court.  Here is proof that there are no shortages of fat and sugar.  Rationalizing my choice on the knowledge that my blood sugar sags late in the morning and needs a pick-me-up, the kamikaze diabetic in me ordered a hot dog on a stick and a lemonade.  More than just a hot dog and a splinter, the whole creation is dipped in batter and deep-fat-fried so that it looks like what it is, a cocoon filled with carbs.

Then, something miraculous happened:  My phone rang!  In two years of owning a cell phone, this was only the second or third time I’d received a call on it.  That’s the result of deliberate use.  My wife and I got cell phones as backups for our intermittent land line, and we gave our cell numbers to very few people.

Actually, my phone didn’t ring but vibrated, which it was set to do.  I could feel it through the fabric of the pocket.  The vibration was quiet; no bystander would be distracted.  (All things that vibrate are not the same.  Just think of what kind of story you could write if you were in a crowded mall and saw a geezer with a vibrator.)  

Answering it would have to wait.  The food court was packed with noisy people, and I was enjoying a delicious repast of a hot dog on a stick and lemonade.

And, another miracle happened:  My phone vibrated—again!  A different caller this time. 

That was enough.  A trip to the mall and two phone calls was a good morning’s work.  I went home and lay down to experience my own personal power outage.

***

They Say “Senior Citizen”—I Say “Old Man”

A young man was walking out of the library as I was walking in.  He grinned and said, “Hey, old man.  Good morning!”

I liked that.  I liked it then, and I like it now.  He made an honest call.  If it walks like an old man and looks like an old man and acts like an old man, call it what it is.

And he needed more than a little nerve to use the term old man on someone he didn’t know in a society that shuns talk of growing old by hiding behind the euphemism senior citizen. 

Not only is senior citizen a euphemism, it lacks punch.  Ernest Hemingway would have fallen by the wayside if he’d called his masterpiece The Senior Citizen and the Sea.  And my mother’s favorite insult— “the old fool”—becomes worthless as the “senior citizen fool.”

The term came to life in 1938 when a Time magazine writer said a California politician “had an inspiration to do something on behalf of what he calls, for campaign purposes, 'our senior citizens.'”  For campaign purposes there was a lot of pandering for the old folks’ votes in those days since Social Security benefits, implemented in 1935, proved to be so popular.  (For comments on senior citizen and a lot of other topics see Barry Popik’s The Big Apple, at http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/senior_citizen )

It’s possible that euphemisms breed more euphemisms.  A restaurant I eat at doesn’t use the words “senior citizen discount” on its menu but does offer special deals on a page titled, “For Our Honored Guests over 55.”

What garbage.  I’m not a guest of a restaurant but a customer, and I haven’t done anything to warrant being honored.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I like plain, honest language.  Forget about me being a senior citizen.  Just call me old man.

***

I’m from Chicago—Wanna See My Bullet Hole?

Our oldest daughter and a friend recently went to Chicago.  They saw a White Sox Game, took in a Jimmy Buffet concert, ambled in and out of attractions on the lake front, rode a tour boat and a water taxi, and used the El.  They were there for a weekend and came home without any bullet holes in them.

I mention that because Forbes magazine recently ran an article that began, “Chicago has a reputation as one of America's most violent cities. 2016 was the worst year for homicides in nearly two decades in the Windy City with 762 murders, 3,550 shooting incidents and 4,331 shooting victims. On average, 12 people are shot in Chicago every single day and it experienced more murders than New York and Los Angeles combined last year.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/06/21/is-chicago-really-americas-most-dangerous-city-infographic/#7e7831e650da.)

But, according to that same article, in terms of shooting victims per 100,000 residents, more than a dozen U.S. cities are more lethal than Chicago.

So, what about that “reputation as one of America's most violent cities”?

I wondered about that myself, as a kid growing up in Chicago.  From books and movies and radio programs I had learned that Al Capone and bunches of gangsters roamed the city with machine guns, slaughtering at will.  But that ended before I was born, and at its worst it affected very few people.  I never heard any adults tell of the horrible old days that they lived through, but the reputation was there.

It was a reputation that I had fun with when I enlisted in the air force.   The military was going through a big buildup in the early months of the Korean War.  Because of that buildup, I was transferred from base to base three times in my first year, and when I wasn’t being moved around, new guys were coming into whatever outfit I was in at the time.

When you met someone, a ritual took place:  You would introduce yourself and say where you were from.  Very early I began saying, after I gave my name, “I’m from Chicago—wanna see my bullet hole?”  That remark always got a smile, such was Chicago’s reputation.

And it drew a smile from a man I met just last week; such is Chicago’s reputation today.

But—let’s have the disclaimer first:  People are being gunned down in Chicago.  That is truly unfortunate, but no matter where you go or what you do, much of life is a crapshoot.  And this post is not travel advice but merely a little help with sorting out what you get from the media about violence in Chicago.

Chicago is a city of sides, and most shootings occur on the South Side.  The media mention that, usually without making a big deal about it, so the impression that’s given is that Chicago as a whole is a generic term for death by gunshot.

The South Side is the city’s largest side.  In the screwy way that the city grew, the South Side expanded and expanded and expanded, curving east around Lake Michigan, bumping into the Indiana state line, and adding on to the south.  If someone hadn’t put the brakes on, St. Louis and Memphis would have become suburbs.

It’s a shame that the South Side gets such a bad rap.  There are wealthy neighborhoods down there, nice places to live, along with major universities, important hospitals, beautiful parks, and the longest stretch of lake front in the city.  But there are also pockets of people who are trigger happy.

Violence has spilled over these days to the West Side.  I honestly don’t remember there being a West Side when I was growing up.  There had to be, but maybe it was under the radar back then.

I grew up on the Northwest Side, the peaceful Northwest Side.  My parents allowed me a staggering amount of freedom (maybe they were hoping that when I went out one night I might not come back).  I could, and did, go anywhere in the city with only one restriction:  Don’t go to the South Side.

That was in the 1930s and ‘40s, and I suspect that a lot of people follow that stricture these days:  Stay away from the South Side.

That’s not always easy to do.  If you want to go to the University of Chicago, you have to go to the South Side.  If you want to see the White Sox play, that’s on the South Side.  One of the city’s famous St. Patrick’s Day parades is held deep in the South Side.

But when someone is shot in Chicago it happens at one spot, and the pavement isn’t slathered  with blood wherever you look.

I didn’t caution my daughter and her friend about safety.  They’ve traveled a lot and have surely picked up some street smarts.  And I didn’t want to get one of those looks from my daughter that said, Dad, really!

They went, and they had a good time.

And they brought back chocolates!

***

From the Files: Peregrine Falcon

Every now and then I get the urge to delete files.  I don’t differentiate between necessary and unnecessary files; as far as I’m concerned all files are necessary, not to be deleted.  Some I’m using or have planned uses for, while others fall into that mysterious category of well-you-can-never-tell-when-I-might-need-that.

Nevertheless, I did click some bytes into the trash this time, while saving one set of files that I particularly liked.  They’re photos of a peregrine falcon at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. 

The wildlife refuge is in the Sacramento Valley, which sits under the Pacific Flyway.  The flyway is used by some 2 million migrating waterfowl that are fleeing winter’s frozen north for warmer climes.  Many of them glide down from the flyway to spend winter in the valley, on farmland or in wildlife refuges.  The refuges are collections of ponds and waterways designed for waterfowl--ducks, geese, and swans.

So I had this picture of a bird about which I was curious.  I went into the refuge’s headquarters and asked for the help of a uniformed young woman.  I pointed to a bird in a display case as if to say, that’s it.

“No,” she said.  “That bird has got webbed feet.  The bird out there perches in that same spot every day.  It doesn’t have webbed feet.  It’s a peregrine falcon.”

She was nice about it.  She could have said, You dummy!  Didn’t you look at the feet?  This place is for waterfowl.  Birds with webbed feet.  I had photographed an interloper.

She let me go after telling me the one fact about peregrine falcons that seemingly everyone latches onto:  They can dive at speeds of 200 miles per hour.  Actually, they can go quite a bit faster, as I learned later.

My education in this instance began with
http://www.10000birds.com/what-is-a-falcon.  On this site are essays, photos, and videos “for people who love birds, pictures of birds, and people who write about birds, birding, conservation, and much more.”  

About falcons: “For starters, they have the little notch in their bill that delivers the killing blow to spinal cords.  They have small bony protuberances in their nostrils that baffle air flow and allow them to breathe while flying at high speeds.  And there are those remarkable pointed wings, and their reputation for intelligence not shared with the rest of their former family.  These are special birds.”

But we could have lost them, writes Larry Jordan, in one of the site’s essays, “Peregrine Falcon–The Fastest Animal on The Planet”: 

“This beautiful raptor was almost driven to extinction from the use of DDT, a popular pesticide used in the early 20th century….  Beginning in the 1930’s Peregrine Falcon numbers were reduced until in 1970 there were a mere 39 breeding pairs left in the United States….

“The Peregrine Falcon is a success story brought about by the restrictions placed on the use of DDT, the protection afforded by the Endangered Species Act, and the reintroduction of captive-bred chicks.  A cleaner environment and the success of cooperative recovery efforts provide great promise of a bright future for the Peregrine Falcon in North America.”

Jordan’s article also offers a link to High-Velocity Falcon, a National Geographic video.  This short video about a skydiving peregrine named Frightful is enlarged on in a Smithsonian Air & Space magazine article, "Falling with the Falcon." These two pieces describe Frightful's high-speed dives.  In telling about the dives here, I relied on the Air & Space article.

Frightful was airlifted up to 17,000 feet; she had never been that high before.   Not to worry, for she was with her owner and skydiving partner, master falconer and pilot Ken Franklin; also part of the team was Norman Kent, a world-renowned skydiving videographer.

She was released from the plane; Franklin and Kent followed her out.  She dove after a lure, streamlining herself by tucking in wings and feet.  An altimeter-computer combination measured how far she fell over a certain time. On that dive she was clocked at 183 miles per hour.  On another dive a week later, she achieved a velocity of 242 miles per hour.

Now, about that hooked beak.  The top part--it's called a tomial tooth--and the bottom part fit together. The combination enables falcons to bite through cervical vertebrae and sever the spinal cord of their prey.  

Peregrine falcons primarily eat birds.  That dietary preference tends to upset people who don't like to think about one bird feasting on another.  Well, you can't mess with Mother Nature--whatever works, works.

***

Diminished Dad

Recent scientific research of great medical importance shows that during my adult life I have shrunk two inches.

“That’s not too bad,” the doctor’s medical assistant said, perhaps trying to reassure me.

I didn’t need reassuring, for it happens all over the place when spinal discs and vertebrae deteriorate.  It’s common enough so that via Google you can find more about height loss than you really need to know.

A couple of friends told me how much they’ve shrunk.  One’s loss was three inches, which brought him down to my former height, except I’ve shrunk below that height and the guy is still taller than me.

But I wonder where that two inches of microscopic bone decay went.  It could have spread out horizontally around my gut, which looks obvious, or maybe it just went poof into the atmosphere, from where it would become dust motes on the furniture.

There is, however, a larger issue at stake here.  Father’s Day is upon us, and my children will read this and learn that proof now exists that their father is not all he was made out to be.  He has been downsized, as measured clinically, and he is now a diminished dad (which sounds a little like a musical notation).

To that I must say:  Too bad.  I’ve got cold Oly nearby.  You guys will have to fend for yourselves.

***

After Life, Afterlife?

A year ago at this time I was in Yuba City being driven around by a man who was dying.  John was an air force buddy.  We had met 60 years earlier while the air force was training us to be navigators.  We had lost touch, but were back together for a few days last spring.

An infection and cancer had killed off most of John’s lungs.  He was on oxygen and could walk only three or four steps at a time before pausing to rest.  He could drive, however, and in his car we went to lunch and then cruised around chatting and reminiscing.

We both said that we never expected to live as long as we did.  He said he had no regrets and had had a good life.  I said I was satisfied with my life but that I did have one regret.

My only regret, I said, is that I won’t be able to send a letter back telling people what dying was like.  Every time I read about someone who’s had a near-death experience, they say that they saw a blinding white light and then came back to life.  I want to write back and say that’s a bunch of bull, that there is no blinding white light, not even a dim bulb.  Or maybe there really is.  I’d be honest about it.  Anyway, I’d like to report back.

I don’t know why I couldn’t.  I’ve got some Forever stamps from the post office, and Forever is the same as Eternity, the place I’m going.  But there might not be any postal service on the other side.  Then what?

I wouldn’t count on email.  Assuming that a perfect infrastructure of electronics could provide service back to this life, then when an email with a return address of Afterlife hits a live person’s inbox, chances are it’d go straight to the Spam folder.

I suppose I could fake it, write the letter now and have someone toss it in a mailbox after I’ve died.  But there’s so much that’s not known, so much I’d have to make up.

As a Catholic I’d be going through either Door Number One or Door Number Two.  (I’ll leave it to you to decide which door leads to where.)  But I’m not a good Catholic and am more of a skeptic, really.  So is there a special afterlife for skeptics?  A place where a clock chimes twelve times and an announcer says, “Twelve noon, maybe”?

And not all faiths go to the Catholic hereafter.  I’d miss my Jewish friends and relatives.  Valhalla might be fun, sitting around drinking mead with raucous Norsemen.  But Buddhists skip it altogether, being reincarnated as fast as they can so they can come back and try again.  And then there are the atheists and agnostics.  If you are faithless, does that mean you also have no afterlife?

Who all would be there?  Everyone I’ve ever met?  Everyone who ever lived?  Man, it’d be crowded, people standing on top of each other.

Would we have cars?  Facebook?  There’s an awful lot I’d have to make up to make it sound authentic.

I got off on this tangent because of a guy I know, not the air force buddy I mentioned earlier but another guy.  This other guy wrote a blog post in which he challenged readers to review their lives by answering deep, deep questions, such as:

“… did you stand in the face of evil and say no?  With a ferocity that surprised you?”

“… did you help somebody when you could and whisper ‘pay it forward’?  And then think to yourself that maybe you had just created a ripple?”

This other guy is our youngest son, Mark.  Mark offers a different approach to thinking about life than I do.  Mark thinks things through, is sensitive; I tend to live by blunder, a hopeless male, indoctrinated by the First Church of John Wayne.  I recommend reading Mark’s blog; it’s proof that intelligent life can still be found in the universe, and on the internet.

But back to where we started.  I visited my air force buddy several times last spring.  We would get hot dogs at Wienerschnitzel and go back to his house for coffee.  That was John’s special treat for himself—a relish dog and coffee.  He was a wealthy man who for himself lived simply and was generous toward others.

He went into hospice care about the time of my last visit and died peacefully at home.  He was a good man who deserves a good afterlife.

***

The (Lost?) Art of the Klatch

I wanted to write about coffee-klatches, but I have seen the second half of that combo spelled different ways, and I wanted to know which was correct.  In answer, it seems that the English-language klatch sprang from klatsch, a typical German word mucus-filled with seven letters, only one being a vowel.  Either spelling refers to an informal conversation.

Early in my air force years, I participated in a coffee-klatch with a bunch of other impoverished enlisted men.  At the mess hall, coffee was free, but the mess hall was not open all hours of the day and night.  Right across the street, however, was a cafeteria that was open round the clock and charged a nickel a cup.  Refills weren’t free, but at a nickel a cup we could get a lot of caffeine-fueled talk for just a few coins. 

 A nickel a cup!  Thoughts of the good old days come back to me every time I pony up two bucks or so at a place that employs a barista.  Does coffee cost so much because of an Italian word?  

We would gather, a half-dozen of us or so, at the cafeteria after dinner and sit there talking for hours, occasionally till past midnight.  We were in our early twenties, most of us aircraft mechanics.  There were four topics of conversation:  women, cars, airplanes, and how screwed up the air force was.  Early on we made a rule that we would not talk about religion or politics.  Why we decided this I don’t know, but no one complained about it, and we all abided by it.

There was a lot of give-and-take in the talk, a lot of good-natured kidding, and a lot of laughter.  The coffee-klatch was our entertainment. 

I was somewhat misplaced.  I knew nothing about women, and I didn’t own a car.  I knew enough about airplanes to know when to use a wrench and when a screwdriver, and I didn’t know whether the air force was screwed up or not because I had nothing to compare it with.  I am not a talkative person, so I generally sat there quietly having a good time.

One night Pat took me aside.  We knew each other by last names or parts of last names.  Pat was Patrick, a staff sergeant four-striper, and chief clerk in the orderly room.  He was our klatch’s unofficial but acknowledged leader.

“You know something, Pax,” he said.  “You hardly ever say anything, and you’re the smartest one of the bunch.”

That was the nicest compliment I have ever received.  It was totally unexpected.  And it was a surprise:  I had been considering myself to be a bump on a log, but now I realized that I could impress people just by keeping my mouth shut.

A lot of time and gallons of coffee have passed since then, and these days I envision my insides coated a slimy brown and my nerves cauterized by caffeine.  I also envision, and miss, a coffee-klatch like that first one back in the air force.

Something happens to men as we grow older, or at least something seems to have happened to the men I know.  Gone is much of the humor of youth; also gone is the willingness to listen, replaced by the urgent need to say something, anything.  ("Listen to me damn it!  I might die any minute!")

All too often the give and take of conversation is gone; in its place is the competitive serial monologue:  One man talks for a while about something, then another man talks, and so on.  It’s sort of like kindergartners’ show and tell, which among teachers is also known as lie and brag.

I also wonder if any old progressives are around.  The men I hear are all too often merely repeating something they heard from Rush or Sean or some other media mouthpiece who earns a living by preying on the fears of naïve Americans.

I don’t like my approach here because I’m only one voice.  For all I know there could be a jillion good coffee-klatches around, and I just haven’t found one.  That leaves me holding fast to what I learned because of Pat decades ago:  I try more and more to say less and less.

Finally, some of the men I listen to should keep in mind a remark often attributed to Mark Twain: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”

***

Chicago's Summer (?) Starts

I was curious about what was happening in my hometown, Chicago, so I took a look at today's Chicago Tribune.

"Chicago gets ready for beach season...When Chicago's 26 beaches officially open Friday for the summer season, visitors may notice some improvements and some distractions...Changes this year include faster reports of lake water safety and a new dog washing station."

From the Trib's weather pages:  "Time 5:00 a.m., temperature 60 degrees, humidity 86 percent, overcast, light rain showers, and temperatures in the 60s forecast."

For sure, there was a lot more news than that, but that's as far as I got, reassured that the city's weather was still playing its usual guessing games--Sunshine and sweat?  Jackets?  Beach????

***

Book: "We'll Always Have Casablanca"

I just finished reading a good book about a great movie:  We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie, by Noah Isenberg (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017).

All the great lines from the movie are there, along with some fascinating bits like this one:  Of some 150 professional people—cast and crew—15 were American-born.  Many of the rest were refugees from Nazi Germany, and some of those acted in roles of Nazis they hated.

Now I want to go see the movie again.

The Sacramento Public Library has several copies of the book.

***

Patience, Forsooth, Yea Verily

"Impeach Trump" results on Google--about 19,500,000 (May 10, 2017)

In a summer years ago, I and several family members vacationed in the Pacific Northwest.  Early in August, we pulled our trailer into a campground in the wooded mountains east of Tacoma.

The area was remote, and this was a time before the internet.  I don't know if television reception was available there, but faint radio signals could be heard. In the park office that night, an employee and I listened to a scratchy broadcast of President Richard M. Nixon resigning from the highest office in the land.

The date was August 8, 1974.  My trip diary for that date recorded, "Nixon resigned today."

Behind that terse entry were my feelings of frustration and wonderment: Why did it take so long?

More than two years earlier, in June 1972, burglars had broken into the offices of the Democratic National Party at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.  They got caught, and during 1973 and into 1974 it became clear in the media that the Republican Nixon was behind the burglary and other acts of political spying and sabotage.  On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee passed the first of three articles of impeachment, charging obstruction of justice.  Two years had gone by before the nation could get rid of a president who claimed he was not a crook.

That's the way it is.  Many people, and I'm one of them, would like to be done with the current occupant of the White House.  But it'll take time.  The wheels of justice slog along slowly and, we hope, fairly.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to relive those painful moments of yesteryear, the internet is loaded with information about Watergate and Nixon.  I used this site:
http://watergate.info/

***

How I Succumbed to Stage 4 Spring Fever

A serious case of spring fever gripped me this morning, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

I bailed out of the house and went down to the river.

To take a picture of a goose, out there a little way.

And to study a bent tree.
















All is well now.

***

This Blog Is Not That Blog

Once upon a time I wrote a blog called "Notes of a Generic Old Man."  That blog is not this blog, and this blog is not that blog, or something like that.

That blog dealt with a variety of topics.  Over time my posts consisted of a motley miscellany, a potpourri of sorts, a meager profusion of topics.

I grew weary of that approach and wrote a few blogs on specific topics.

I grew weary of that approach and went back to the generic old man blog.

This blog is that blog.

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