thoughts

In the midst of a pandemic that’s laid many thousands of lives and entire industries to waste, I am fine. I have a house, a steady income, healthcare, food. I have time to play with my children and pursue my hobbies. I am exercising, reading, and listening to records I haven’t played in years, learning and rediscovering and reminiscing with friends on the phone over drinks. I’m buying things and posting. I am comfortable. Of course it won’t last, major changes are already happening on the personal level, but for now, my narcissism hums along, unchallenged and uninterrupted, and the status quo suits me. A despicable thing to say and feel.

But I’m old now, and I know who I am. I will enjoy this way of life while it lasts, and when things do finally fall apart, when a new reality finds me, I resolve to remember how good I once had it, not with anger or bitterness at its escape, but with humility, gratitude, grace.

 

One guy’s view

Talked to a guy who worked here in Dayton for 34 years. A proud, lifelong union member. He asked me what I was looking at on my phone. I told him twitter. He said “you one of the Trump guys?” I told him no and this is what he said.

“Everybody (trump voters) says they’re fed up. Well what I wanna know is, what are they fed up of? They talk about the opioids. You ask anyone on that stuff whether it was a choice. They’ll tell you it was a choice. A choice they made. They do it because they want to. That’s a choice.

Well, I made the choice to move out of Kentucky because there were jobs here. I come here and was a drier, worked my way up to millwright. You could do that then.

But they’re fed up. Ok, what do you do when you don’t have work? You go find work. You go where there’s work.

….They’re too stuck in their ways. They want to make bad decisions. They’re addicted to it. Then they said they want a businessman to run the country. Shit, what kind of businessman do you trust? I don’t trust a businessman. And they still voted for him. They voted for him. He said he grabs women by the pussy. Imagine that was your daughter. If it was my daughter i would shoot him right between the eyes. He said don’t rent to black people. He said don’t rent to black people. And they still voted for him.

And you young people, you don’t have any of that. You don’t have what I have. I have a pension. You don’t have that. You’re the ones getting fucked. I’m embarrassed and ashamed that he is our president. It disgusts me.”

Diary of a dad 3

Many others will opine, if they haven’t already, about what the fire that immolated the spire and caved in the roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral says, what it means to France, to Europe, to the world, to the Church, to themselves. Many of these pieces will be good, and valuable. Others won’t. Plenty of both have already been published I’m sure.

(You expect them now, the takes. We all watch disasters unfold together, in more or less real time, and the little text boxes are pitiless in their demand. This isn’t new anymore, hasn’t been for years. Nor am I saying anything new. And of course we offer our thoughts freely — it’s nothing to grieve in the face of catastrophe, perfectly natural, and the people in our phones can be a comfort. Lord knows we find comfort where we can.)

The relics and the Blessed Sacrament were saved, thank God. There is a comfort. They’ll rebuild her, eventually. There is another. (According to whose vision? What will it look like? Questions for later, to my mind. Cathedrals aren’t built and don’t operate in regular time.) For now let’s be grateful, or try to be, even as we mourn.

For the faithful who there heard the Mass, for those who continued, even after they or their ancestors had left the Church, to visit her and marvel at her beauty, for the locals and tourists who prayed there, for the lovers who kissed in her shadows, for the millions of all faiths and backgrounds whose hearts felt deflated and broken today…I have no words. I’m one of you. Not much else to do but to pray.

Diary of a dad 2

Diary of a dad 2

Through a dirty airplane window Nevada is grubby and brown, on first glance, but then you look closer. There is an incredible depth and richness of color: burgundy, tan, sepia, chocolate, crimson, rust, oak, rusted oak, midnight black. Line and shadow on sugar-capped ridges, Mandelbrot lakeshores, an enormous dam, the cliffs around it ringed with white at the bottom, like the sole of a sneaker. The valleys look desolate, impassable. The towns-settlements they looked like, really, in their novelty, and in their obvious impermanence, where the roofs of the houses are the same colors as the landscape, and only the grid pattern and the teardrop pools give away that they are, in fact, man-made -are beautiful. Who am I to look down at this and grumble? Who am I to wish I wasn’t here?

—-

There are any number of reasons to come to this place. Many involve sin. It’s right there in the name. I’m here for work, a conference. The hotel, which is also a casino, is gigantic, the size of twenty malls stacked on top of one another, and is connected to a mall, and it’s also a mall itself. The whole strip is a mall. Malls within malls. Work says I can expense what I need while I’m here. Well what if I need a $50 lunch? Sure, no problem. (Is a $50 lunch a sin? It sure feels like one.)

—

I tried on some Cartier sunglasses on my way to the meeting room. The clerk could tell I wasn’t there to buy, I think, but she indulged me anyway. And today I am dressed like a man who could plausibly afford Cartier. Just straight-up larping. But I realized as I left that this type of thing isn’t harmless, that fantasizing isn’t harmless – if I’d had the money, I could picture myself buying them on the spot. I know no person on earth needs $600 sunglasses. I know that.

—

I won’t go back past that place tomorrow. Indulging a fantasy lays a blueprint for action, and honestly, I can’t trust my brain when it so easily turns want into need. It’s real simple to fool yourself when you act the part well.

—

“Change is the only constant.” “We’re going to disrupt disruption.” “Transforming the industry.” “Harnessing technology” and “leading the future.” This is the vision. To me it just sounds like a joke. I’ve been mocking this language for years. (It hasn’t helped, if you can believe that.) And anyway, my jokes dry up fast in the face of my livelihood. I have to buy into this, or my family will suffer. At a certain point, it doesn’t matter if it’s bullshit: the checks are very real.

—

At meetings I keep a rosary in my pocket as kind of a comfort. I clutch the beads and say Aves in my head when I’m low. I forgot it today though so I couldn’t keep count.

—

It’s funny to think that I’m here, surrounded by luxury, bombarded by buzzwords, in a room full of affluent people in the middle of a giant mall in the desert, saying prayers in my mind while clapping at nonsense, making every last effort to care, but still just wanting to leave. Because, really, I’m blessed to be here. I’m blessed to have work, however unfulfilling, and I’m blessed to be able to support my family. I’m eating and drinking for free. How ungrateful can I be? Many of the people in those waffle towns, the ones I saw from the plane, they probably wish they had it so good.

Shirley Goodman

Like so many other greats, Shirley Goodman from New Orleans learned to sing in church. Unlike most, hers was a chirpy soprano, almost childish, tender and aggressive in equal measure, and uniquely suited to the tempo of the two forms she helped to pioneer: rock n roll and disco. She sounds like a bird or a flute. It’s a nasal and rounded voice, easy and strong, rarely showing effort, controlled, rhythmically flawless. It is beautiful.

It’s also rare, now, in its color, if it isn’t completely dead. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another pop soprano lead with her rhythmic instincts, and the almost-sharp sound as she darts in and out of the backbeat is one I associate with the rapid patter you hear in movies and radio programs of the thirties and forties, more than any musician. The “talkie” voice. It recalls a world that is gone.

Her duets with Lee were a blueprint for the several popular male-female duos that followed in the next decade, none of whom, in my estimation, managed to surpass what they accomplished. Her later performance on “Shame” is immortal. Listen here:

The Aladdin Years

Shame, Shame, Shame

Diary of a dad 1

It’s in the basement of a church, my son’s preschool, and about a mile and a half from our house, so this winter I’ve been dropping him off and picking him up. It’s way too cold not to. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. One of my favorite responsibilities.

I like to see the small people in their small coats, pink and blue and red, with their tiny satchels and lunch sacks. There are stone pavers in a diamond pattern leading to the entrance. Some days, my son won’t step on the cracks – “don’t want to break mama’s back!” I like that kids still say that.

Behind us we hear a girl crying. She fell and skinned her palms. My boy grabs my hand, as if by instinct, and then he asks her if she’s all right. She doesn’t answer – her mom has her full attention – and wipes away her tears. We go down into the basement towards the classroom.

There are several classes here. The kids range from two to five, and outside every door the teachers pin the previous day’s work to corkboard for all of the parents to see. I snap a picture of my son’s latest painting – done with a dog bone, the teacher’s assistant informs me, with excitement – as he hangs up his bag and takes off his coat. He turns to head into class and doesn’t even say goodbye, so I catch him and give him a kiss on his forehead. He doesn’t even look at me. His mind is on “crafting.” My son loves school. My folks told me I did too, at his age.

As I walk up the stairs to leave I pass the little girl with the skinned palms being carried down by her mother. She’s not crying anymore. I hear her saying “I don’t want to go” as I step out the door, already thinking about what I have to do today at work. Me neither, kiddo.

I have a blog now

Instead of dumping hundreds of thoughts, comments, yawps, jokes, links, photos, and whatever else I do over there, I’ve decided to go ahead and try to mold what I do daily, hourly, constantly on twitter into something more focused and less annoying to read. Please bear with me because I’ve forgotten how to write. Fair warning: this will probably be pretty bad, and if you feel the need to dunk on my posts, or just ignore them altogether, don’t worry – I get it. Do what you’ve got to do.

Just to kick it off on a personal note, some of my interests include well-told stories, music, attitudes, behaviors, moods, how things look, how things feel, historical scams and frauds, all sorts of deceptions, mysteries, madness, idiocy, absurdity, and making enough money to provide for my family and learn more about these subjects unimpeded. I am Catholic. I live in Ohio, though for how much longer I’m uncertain. I also like pasta. I’d wager that most of what I post here will revolve around the above, though subject- and lengthwise I haven’t set any goals. We’ll see if it works out.

Right now I’m reading a comprehensive history of pudding, which I found after thinking about how weird it is as a food and then googling ‘history of pudding.’ A bewildering dish that the English have claimed as their own. You might say ‘what haven’t the English claimed as theirs, over the years?’, which I can’t answer – the English mind is mysterious, like the sudden onset of fog, or an elephant’s ears, or pudding itself – but it seems to me that their claim here is strong. Here is the link http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpuddings.html