On Being Lighter

 

 

Don't misinterpret this post. What is going on in the Ukraine is horrible and criminal.  We should not turn away from this new war in Europe.  But not every day is one filled with imperialistic Russian actions.  On those days we need to be mindful for our own mental health.  This post was occasioned by someone telling me that I seemed "lighter" when I was in Portugal.  As I thought of whether I was lighter this is what rolled across my brain.  Right now it is justifiably impossible to be lighter.

14 August to 8 November 2021, was a grand adventure for me.  Four of those 88 days were spent travelling or recovering from travelling.  Let me say transatlantic travel is grinding.  Such travel is not fun and it does not lighten the soul. Four days spent on airplanes, or at labs for Covid testing, or crammed into Ubers rushing from here to there with mere moments to spare provide no joy. Trust me I was total nerves, angst and anxiety for those four days overseeing the travel of the four members of my family.  Oh, and I hate air travel. (One important note learned on this trip, don’t eat the unnaturally green relish at the hot dog stands in O’Hare airport.  Just saying.)

 

For the rest of that time, 84 days to be exact, I was happier and more joyous than I had been in decades. 84 days were spent without any overarching angst weighing my spirit down. 78 of those days were spent in warm sunshine in Portugal. Portugal is not heaven but it have a different vibe to it, a more let us live this life vibe. 

 

My soul was akin to a feather blown upward on warm winds. Was this lessening of the weight of the world due to the warm Iberian climate?  Did the daily alcohol use, something not in my life patterns for over three decades, fill a spiritual hot air balloon and lift me up?  Was it the newness of everything that gave me gossamer wings to catch the breezes off the Atlantic? How do I put my finger on it? I can’t.

 

Don’t get me wrong.  There were moments of challenge that left me tense.  Like the time the Airbnb guy showed up an hour late to let us in.  Or the time the train conductor said we had to ignore our tickets and get off at the next stop and run to catch the next train back to Lisbon or we would be waiting alone on the platform for hours.  Or when following the comments in the travel book we took a train out to a nothing town in the middle of nowhere.  There was supposed to be a historic house there.  Nope.  It was within the boundaries of the town but it was 45 minutes away.  Without a car we weren’t going there.  However, the bull ring made for nice photos.

 

But mostly those 84 were nice.  Each day unfolded as if I had thrown a dark at a wall covered with travel brochures and decided where to go based on what location the dart hit.  We walked down cobblestone streets.  Our hours were spent inside ancient walled cities.  Roman temples, villas coupled with ancient monasteries serving up ancient worlds to my imagination. Meals were often soups and tostas (toasted sandwiches made of brie and prosciutto spiced with a dash of oregano) washed down with flat cold water and/or Superbock beer. There were cathedrals filled with art and gilt just waiting to take my breath away. 

 

The overwhelming newness of the place wasn’t really the whole reason I felt the weights drop off my body and my mind. As much as anything it was disconnecting from the interwebs instantaneous news cycle. I did not check any of my news feeds for weeks on end. Being in a land where I did not speak the language meant that the headlines on the papers at newsstands meant nothing to me, couldn’t make heads or tails of them.  Further, about the only news items I paid attention to were about when the next transit strike in Lisbon would be.  I used my phone to check train times and call Ubers. Well, I also checked my bank account and my credit card from time to time. Oh yeah, I posted to Facebook, it is important to breed jealousy among one’s friends and family.

 

When you unhook from the stream of pundits talking smack, and from the tales of what politician did what, you can live closer to the moment.  I am one of those people who believe that by the time you observe the moment, it has already passed.  You can’t be myopic; rumors of war and violence must be paid attention to with some degree of diligence but beyond that so much of the rest is all unnecessary to living one’s daily life. What Trump or Maddow or McConnell or AOC have spouted recently doesn’t matter to the average person living their average day. So, other than just keeping a light eye on things there is no point roiling your mind and your gut with their nonsense.

 

But when you live in a place where every single time you turn on your computer or look at you cell phone headlines burst out at you saying, “GOP humoring of Trump’s praise of Putin sinks to absurd new lows,” and “Arizona Governor Says He'd Rather Have a White Nationalist in State Legislature than a Democrat,” it is damn hard to stay unhooked.  Thus, staying light is damned difficult. No, we can’t be on vacation all the time in a place where language barriers and the cost of daily cellphone service keep us from clicking and viewing this crap. What we can do is learn, something we humans used to be somewhat good at, how to use our access to technology in a wiser manner.  A few hours less with the endless stream of fearmongering and vitriol will make us all just a few mental pounds lighter.

 

 

Walking Toward an Expansive Ocean in Lieu of Watching Democracy Decline

A teenager in the 1970s I watched the Watergate morass daily.  Reading several papers each morning, the NY Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and some other I also viewed the hearings live on TV.  In August of 1974 I watched Nixon resign.  Before the day was over, I was dancing in a thunderstorm as a live CSN&Y played Ohio for me and 50,000 of my peeps. Within a year I had taken courses in American Constitutional history at university.  My university studies would not be an end of my Constitutional studies, I took three more courses in law school and wrote my critical analysis paper, sort of my thesis for my JD degree, on the bullshit doctrine of original intent.  

Having experienced the turmoil of those years and having read on early challenges to our freedoms that were successfully resolved (sort of) I came away with the belief that American democracy could always heal itself.  Sometimes it would take a Senate panel, or a House committee, or a person with vision and determination about what democracy meant sitting in the Oval Office. Occasionally there was a landslide election called for. But we always found a path and a way to right the ship of state. We were always able to steer past demagogues and our baser interests.

 

But then came Reagan and his cult of selfish capitalism.  Morning for the angry American had come. Greed is good was a thing. Next up were the endless and pointless wars built on lies. Weapons of mass destruction my ass.  Lastly came the megalomaniacal rule of the last President and his cult of greed, racism, and narcissism. Trump exposed the ugliness that is barely hidden in America today.  Fears of the other (racism and xenophobia), selfishness and shortsightedness seem to be about all the US population can muster today when they think of their relationship to their fellow citizens and the government.

 

Nobody but nobody seems to be taking seriously the equality of both the obligations and the rights citizenship imposes on us and grants to us. Every conversation is about individual rights, none on communal duties.  I have the right to be free from wearing a mask.  I don’t have an obligation to avoid passing on a deadly disease to my fellow country people. I have a right to be free from vaccine mandates.  But I have no obligation to ensure the health care system does not collapse. I have a right to be free of government oversight.  But don’t stop the benefits that flow to me from social welfare programs.

 

On the surface the mindset kind of, sort of resembles Libertarianism. But the current zeitgeist of America is not Libertarianism.  The folks taking these stances want government to give to them and their enclaves, people with the same skin tone and generalized faith and social status, but not to different others.  They may in a knee jerk way say they would be okay with Social Security being eliminated and Medicare being gutted, but when you do the deeper dive, they still want those benefits for themselves-they have earned them. What they want is the disenfranchisement of some nebulous group of freeloading others.

 

As the Roman leaders knew in the later empire, panem et circenses would entrench power and limit the potential of revolt.  Between football, baseball, hockey, cable TV and streaming services, we have enough circuses. What the Romans did not have was an almost instantaneous media cycle (I refuse to say news because Fox, OAN and a number of the liberal streams are not news-they are manipulation for political power) that could keep the people divided by playing on racial, religious and economic differences. The divisions entrenched by these media sources and by nefarious algorithms on Facebook render any chance of unified action for the common good almost nil.

 

In this situation I am of the mind that our democracy is at its most fragile state since the civil war.  Well maybe the plotting of the American Liberty League in the early 1930s was close. I am not sure what I can do at this point to help sustain our democracy.  In years past I have knocked on doors for political candidates.  I have run for office and won.  I have been a delegate to political conventions.  But those things are meaningless now.  When Citizen United came down individual Americans pretty much lost all voice in choosing our governance, but it was a voice that had been waning for years.

 

I am moving from my mid-sixties to my late sixties and the expiry date on my milk carton is potentially fast approaching.  Over the years my wife and I have saved enough money to have a decent cash stream over the term of our retirement. Emotionally I can’t handle watching a nation, which for all its foibles, seemed focused on providing a better shot at the pursuit of happiness for all its people turn toward a civil war tied to greed, race and grievance. I don’t have the fight left in me for what is coming.

 

Me, I have always loved the North Atlantic.  Portugal is fronted by that great ocean on two sides.  There are still places along that ocean that I can afford.  The Portuguese government seems to be in a constant state of kerfuffle but it is still a democracy.  And the Portuguese are a warm people with civilized customs (think espresso and a pastry in a park), open to strangers (and their money).  I can’t stay here and watch the democratic traditions of over two hundred years crumble under a sea of misinformation moving an uneducated and uncaring population toward authoritarianism.  Give me a good beer, an ocean view, Apple music and a VPN to watch trashy Netflix movies and I will watch the coming crisis from afar. Life is too short.

Under Glass and Over the Years

 

A three by five-foot sheet of glass covers my desk.  Little plastic footers hold it up and off the wooden desk top. In the millimeter or two of vacant space between the clear melted sand and the polished dead tree reside some visual reminders of the decades I have lived. 

From 1980s Detroit there is a shot of me in a velour robe with a knife in my teeth.  From the two thousand aughts there is a photo of my eldest son and I sitting in a jail cell as part of a Cub Scout police station exploration.  On the left side there is a photo from 1967 of an Asher Family picnic.  My Uncle Tommy is smiling. I stand nearby fat and awkward.

 

My children’s accomplishments are documented with hockey pictures and music programs.  Concert and event tickets stretch laid out include a 1976 Grateful Dead stub to a 1989 ticket for the Northumberland ferry to Prince Edward Island. Scattered in are homemade cards made by the kids and also those little cards you pick up at the funerals of people who left this orb way too early. And finally, there is a picture of a stout Teaneck man in a Playboy bunny costume with black fishnet stockings from 1977.

 

There is a photo of my father coupled with a snippet of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Noble Prize acceptance speech.  ‘Tis a great quote:

 

“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song – but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.”

 

What is missing are the photos of my father’s family and world. There are no photos of the live oak tree in Longs SC that anchors my many memories of my grandmother, Miss Effie and her son Bill. Bill lived with Miss Effie under that tree for all but a few months of his life. The photo adjacent to this is dad, Uncle AV and me (looking like a serial killer in waiting).

 

There are no pictures of Dad’s half-brothers or step siblings on my desktop.  Our family’s annual treks down to Horry County were ritual, but related memorabilia is notably absent from my life’s collage. Until two days ago I hadn’t actually had a conversation with anyone from that side of my family in thirty years. I had no addresses snail mail or e-mail for any of my cousins.  Given the time that had passed I assumed the aunts and uncles had passed but I had no trail to follow.

 

Back in May 2021 I got a message on LinkedIn from my cousin Kay, my dad’s brother’s AV’s daughter.  In the day we had celebrated Easter in Longs a number of times together. So very cool she sought me out.  So random she found me on that platform.  Years ago, I set up a profile there but I have barely looked at LinkedIn in the past decade.  But she found me there and reached out.  Texts and e-mails followed and I sent off a note trying to set up a phone call but it didn’t happen.  My to do list had “Call Kay” as the third item right after lose weight and read more for the last 9 months. 

 

And then just a few days ago she found an e-mail I had sent back last year which due to the vagaries of e-mail’s magic, she had not read. Once she found it, she got back to me again.  We went back and forth a few times over e-mail and texts and set up a phone call.  So, Tuesday night we connected and we talked.  

 

And talked and talked. We ran through the memories of people we knew in common and the experiences we had shared down ‘neath my grandmother’s live oak tree. Being a southern family, we talked about people with names like Belva and Hancie.  I told her the tale of my afternoon with my Uncle Vance, his friend Johnnie (Walker) and his bright red Monte Carlo. We talked about places like Loris, Sunset Beach, Conway and Red Bluff. We caught up on people’s successes and fates. We talked for two hours plus.

 

Our lives have been different but we are kin.  I have often thought about Kay over the years because she seemed like she would travel a similar educational path as I did. I wondered what had become of her and what her life was like.  On Tuesday a window into our respective lives opened for each other. Two hours barely scratched the surface but it was a start. She may not be on a photo under the glass atop my desk but she and her folks will be in my memories as long as my brain cells keep working.  It was good to talk.

 

We didn’t talk music so I didn’t get to tell her about the song that always triggers memories of my grandmother and her home.  So here it is.

 

In Praise of the Third or Fourth Billed

Don’t know about you but during this pandemic, I have watched a wide range of video.  From series shot on a shoestring in Alberta to epic movies that I missed in theatres in the before times, I have consumed a ton of stories.  Some are great tales, Mare of Easttown and The Leftovers stand out. Some are total fantasy trash like A Discovery of Witches and The Ministry of Time.  Some are cop shows like Cardinal and Bordertown. Some have great writing and some have great scenery, some occasionally have both but usually you get one or the other.  

 

As anyone who has been to the cinema knows, a star’s name is often the first thing to draw your attention. Orlando Bloom, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchette, these are the people whose names rest above the title beckoning you to give the unknown tale a watch.  Rare is the star who alone can carry the story, who can keep you from turning the television off when you go to the fridge for a snack. A story needs something more, it needs fleshing out, it needs meat on its bones. A story can’t be a soliloquy, it needs a population for the lead to act off of. This is where the lesser stars and character actors come in.

I offer two examples for your consideration, one of each gender, Lesley Duncan and Bruce McGill.  Who?  

 

Well, let us start with Bruce McGill. McGill is a near ultimate in character actors.  He seems paycheck driven because he will be the good guy, the bad guy or the sociopathic guy-it just does not seem to matter to him. Note well there are bigger stars who fit this category, Donald Sutherland and Gene Hackman come to mind as actors more than happy to accept a large paycheck in a vehicle devoid of artistic merit. 

 

McGill is always working. The first time I remember him was in the 1970s back when you could still smoke in movie theatres.  I went with a bunch of dorm rats to see National Lampoon’s Animal House. McGill came roaring onto a weed smoke obscured screen on his cycle in the iconic role of D-Day. McGill as D-Day embodied everybody’s dangerous friend from their college years. He was the long-haired wild man wandering the halls at 3 AM returning from activities best left unknown.

 

Jump a head a few years to when Miami Vice was the hottest thing on TV.  Vice created stars.  Vice broke new music like Glenn Frey’s Smuggler’s Blues. In the middle of the show’s meteoric run there was McGill playing a psycho ex-cop gone mad.  Under strains of Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms McGill acted with insane passion the role of cop who had walled up the biggest villain he could not convict Cask of the Amontillado style. His frenzy, his intensity kept more eyes locked on the screen for that episode than Crockett’s white suit and fast car.

 

McGill has been in series after series on the networks, from Rizzoli and Isles to the current Reacher series on Amazon. His movie roles include but are not limited to Animal House, The Sum of All Fears, Elizabethtownand My Cousin Vinny.  There are so many others that my digit grew tired scrolling the iPad as I looked over all the titles in his career.  But there he was in each roll usually as some minor official his chest puffed out and acting like he knew more than he actually did. Invariably he can be seen speaking loud and fast.  As soon as he appears on screen you know the all the salient details of the character’s story just by McGill inhabiting the role. Like M. Emmet Walsh and Jack Elam before him, you know what his character represents once he makes his first entry onto the screen.

 

And then there are the actors who for the most part elevate whatever movie or series that are in.  For this kind of actor, I offer as an exemplar Lindsay Duncan.  Ms. Duncan is an elegant chameleon. She can play common or aristocratic.  She can play English or Australian.  She can play comedy or drama and do each well. She can do art-house cinema and trashy series.  In her most recent role on A Discovery of Witches she plays a thousand-year-old aristocratic vampire.  Does it get trashier than that?

 

She has been in films like Birdman, Mansfield Park and Under the Tuscan Sun. She has been in series including A Year in Provence, His Dark Materials, Traffik, Wallender, The Leftovers and A Discovery of Witches.  I think my favorite role for Ms. Duncan was as John Thaw’s wife in the light comedy of Provence.  She had a certain stoic grace as the wife of an English couple who had relocated to the French countryside. She was the couple’s sane and sensible rock as her husband ran afoul of the local hidden rules, norms and customs of the Provence countryside.  I have to say though her role as Grace Playford, outback rancher, in The Leftovers was a particularly strong dramatic punch. 

 

Big stars may draw us to buy the ticket or queue up something into our watch lists on streaming services, but the others actors are what make the story come alive.  Sure, Ed Harris and Bonnie Bedelia were the leads in Needful Things but it was J.T. Walsh’s breakdown in the phone conversation with Max Von Sydow after he had killed his wife that you remember when the movie is over. “These things happen”. 

 

Character actors can elevate entire franchises.  Where would Justified have gone if it didn’t have Walton Goggins playing Boyd Crowder? You may not know their names.  In fact, you may only be able to describe a character actor you like as “that fella who was in that movie, you know who I mean.” Still, without the B- and C listers film and television would not be the same.