I have been writing things on Facebook. Longer things. As a result, the blog is not seeing much activity. I guess I will commit to making sure that what I am posting there if I ramble on gets a version posted here. Today it seems the whole world has forgotten about Covid and the Ukraine for a moment based on Will Smith smacking Chris Rock. Dramatic? Yes. Meaningful in the greater scheme of things. No, not really.
My only thought on the slap heard round the world.
We Americans have become too mean, too insensitive, and too cavalier in our humor and also in our general discourse over the past forty years. I think the joke that sums it up is a person stating to another, “Nice day today.” The response is a snarling, “What do you mean by that?”
Don’t know if we can put the incivility genie back in the bottle but the word play and yuks that come from attacking everything from physical ailments (e.g., a former leader of this republic ridiculing a reporter with noticeable health issues) to attacks on mental health claimed to be jokes, need to be reined in by self-censorship. And those who don’t self-censor should be given the cold shoulder.
Oh boy, we can’t use the n word anymore. So what? Instead, we can use a thousand different body shaming slurs and a raft of other jocular darts on people who we don’t feel fit perceived normative standards. I am a big believer in free speech but I am also a believer in responsible speech.
åDon’t get me wrong I am not innocent in this. When I was young, I made racist, homophobic, and sexist jokes with the best of them. Trust me, I remember those of you who told me those jokes first before I incorporated them into my repertoire. In my day-to-day speech there have been times when I used each of the seven words you in the past couldn’t say on television as mere punctuation to my language. Yes, I for the most part have qualified to have a lifetime sticker of NSFW slapped on my forehead. But as I have matured (read, I have reached the age when I remember when dirt was still rocks) I have seen the harm. Humor should be pain and folly seen from a point distant in time. Humor should not be the intentional, or merely knowing, infliction of pain or ridicule. Refocus. Be kind.
A final thought. We are crowded together far more physically than we have ever been before. So many billions of people. So many cube farms. So much gridlock on the road and on the phone. Constant noise rattling our senses from streaming services, podcasts, and talk radio. And there are few private spaces left, that you Zoom. As a result, we have damn short fuses, the kind where people kill because someone asked for the mashed potatoes in an off tone. Thus, we need to keep the level of agitation down. Again, be kind.
As part of the pig in the python, that is as just another boomer passing through decades of the American experience, I am in a sense riding on a railroad from the cradle to the grave. Bonus points will be awarded to you if you started humming either a 51-year-old James Taylor song or a 50-year-old Leo Kottke tune after reading that previous line. This is a post about boomer music occasioned by my morning rides taking my son to work. I am referring to my 23-year-old son who has yet to obtain his license and who seems kind of adverse to ever getting one.
Each day when we head out, the lad plugs in his iPhone to the car stereo and begins a kind of carpool karaoke. Each day I am serenaded by old music from Pete Seger protest songs to Irish songs about the troubles to classic Appalachian ballads about ghosts, trains and mine disasters (and sometimes all three in one, e.g., the Miners’ Silver Ghost). Sometimes in a moment of wild revelry my son picks a Pandora Channel called 60s Folk Radio.
60s Folk Radio is an odd mishmash of songs. Songs playing there are from artists like, Tom Rush, Cat Stevens, Chad and Jeremy, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Donovan. To me such content breaks down as 50% soft pop and 50% actual folk music. But I am not writing to quibble about the rubric used by the overlords at Sirius XM who now own Pandora but something I have experienced often in recent years, the shift in narrative perspective due to my advancing age.
This morning Child’s Song by Tom Rush came on. This is a song from Rush’s eponymous 1970 album. The first time I heard Child’s Song I would have been fourteen. Fourteen yeah, I was fourteen with a burning desire to be moving out and moving on from my little farm town in southern New Jersey, mosquito filled hell swamp that it was. (Sidenote: Child’s Song was written by Murray McLaughlin, a Canadian singer/songwriter who turned bush pilot when his concert profits ran a tad low). The lyrics and tone of the song are of conflict, sadness and regret. Here are a couple of samples of the lyrics:
Goodbye momma goodbye to you too pa
Little sister you'll have to wait a while to come along
Goodbye to this house and all its memories
We just got too old to say we're wrong
Got to make one last trip to my bedroom
Guess I'll have to leave some stuff behind
It's funny how the same old crooked pictures
Just don't seem the same to me tonight
….
Thanks for all you done it may sound hollow
Thank you for the good times that we've known
But I must find my own road now to follow
You will all be welcome in my home
When I was fourteen, I sang along to each of these words with vigor. I was constrained, I was repressed, I was dismissed, well at least in my mind I was. So much angst and energy was bubbling up in me. Amazing I did not blow out the screen door of that house on Mill Street and disappear. But those songs they fueled my passions and my wanderlust. In a sense these songs were my sacred texts, my Bible as it were. Eventually my aching to go would be fulfilled when I shuffled off to a university a third of the way across the country.
That was then. Now, I am sixty-five for butt a few more weeks. The wood frame house I grew up in has long been sold. John C. and Dorothy Todd are long dead. Twenty-seven years have passed since I made that last trip to that bedroom. My last trip to that room was on a cold weekend in winter. Mom had died and we were cleaning out the house to sell it. Somehow as I walked over the vinyl flooring listening for each of the creaky boards whose locations I knew by heart, the house seemed 100 times smaller than when I was growing up. On that sad weekend the paint seemed more faded than I ever remembered and the house smelled of oil heat. I was forever gone from that place but there was still an aching inside of me. For what I wasn’t sure.
We didn’t know at the time my wife’s sour stomach was not just indigestion. Zantac wasn’t going to alleviate the morning sickness from the pregnancy which would result in our first son’s birth.
Now I pay a mortgage, the insurance and the utilities for a house that I share with my wife and adult children. When I look at my life now, I remember the angsty pimple faced kid emerging from the passions of the turbulent sixties. He was a tall skinny goofy kid who roamed that place with a burning urge to be gone. He made his father’s life hell with his consistently confrontational stances. Yeah, I was an ass to my folks.
But when the lyrics come on that say, “Thanks for all you done it may sound hollow,” and “I don't know how hard it is yet mamma when you realize you're growing old,” I get it. I really get it. Part of me is glad that before he died, I got to say thank you to my dad for all that he did for me and all that he endured for me. I can chuckle a little bit when I remember him bringing home the anonymous posts that were tacked to his office door at the plant after I got thrown out of high school for streaking. They were tasteful pictures of flashers and copies of the front-page news article from the local paper discussing the event.
A long time ago I was on the train where all the stops seemed to be ahead of where I was. My ticket was a nonrefundable half price student fare good for one of the cheap seats. Where the train was going was not at my direction and most of the choices seemed to be in the control of other people, not me. But now that journey is slowing down and the train will at some point in the next few years arrive at the station. I am however riding in a better compartment. I understand the urges I felt then and I appreciate the love, care and compassion my parents had for me. Child’s Song from where I am now is not an anthem demanding departure and separation, but is rather a meditation on how life places us in family roles that invariably must be demanding but also quite necessary.
Child’s Song is not the only tune that shows me how life has changed my perspective. Uh, when the youngest sings at the top of his lungs the youth’s part from Cat Stevens’ Father and Son oh how the knowing melancholy seeps into my soul. Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen is quaint now and no longer anthemic. Listening to Neil Young’s Old Man and Stephen Still’s 4 + 20 both remind me of the shift in perspective that aging has brought.
Who knew the singing poets of the sixties were oft times capturing the seven ages of humanity without even being aware they were doing so?
What I write doesn’t matter a whit. A year after I am dead a few people will mourn the anniversary of my dying with some real sense of pain. Five years after I am gone a couple of people will have a space inside their hearts where a dull ache remains when they think of me. Fifty years after I am gone virtually nobody will even know I existed. This is the way the world has always been and will always be. My words will mean nothing to those strangers that follow me on this orb.
Don’t get me wrong I am not sad or depressed. Put simply this prospective anonymity is a numbers game I accept. Today as I pound away at my keyboard, I am just one of 7 billion people on earth. On the day I did I will be just one citizen in that small city of 150,685 who passed that day. But if anyone cares to know my mind either before or after the day of summation, it is here to see. Chances are they won’t.
So why do I write?
I published my first blog post years ago, March 23, 2008 to be exact. My first blog was entitled A Space True and North. These writings are still out there and can be found at onetruenorthspace with the addition of .blogspot.com. Facebook will not allow me to put the actual link up in any form because A Space does not meet their community guidelines, but more on that below.
Moved to write by several friends telling me that I had to capture some of my amassed stories in written form, I began to type. The orally shared tales in question were tawdry. Quite often the telling included matters obscene, immoral, fattening, profanity filled and replete with descriptions of behaviors oft times on the far side of proper or legal. What can I say, life was fun in the seventies.
My writing at onetruenorthspace has slowed but not by choice. While I liked to share the stories I posted there, I no longer am able to do so. Some Facebook algorithm (or a person who reported me to the FB police) found the things I wrote objectionable. As a result, any FB post with a hyperlink to A Space will be blocked with a message saying the blog violates community standards.
I don’t know what could be so problematic when I was just talking about having sex in the college dorm shower room, taking acid on a church retreat, running wild on the streets of the beach town where I spent my youthful summers or wistful thoughts on the meditative and calming nature of the north Atlantic’s waves. Still before Facebook got all morality cop on my tail, I rattled off a goodly number of stories about my youthful debauchery.
As the years went by my stories began to change. As my kids grew, the boys provided me with new stories, wonderful (sort of) stand-alone anecdotes. The captured narratives range from one of them puking on my head while I waited in line at a store to a meditation on whether Jesus picked his nose occasioned by son’s knuckle deep nasal scratch during the church Christmas play. Our family’s challenges with autism and OCD were set out, sometimes funny and as often as not heartbreaking.
A few work stories found their way onto the blog. While I had my own stories to tell, I could not let be lost the often jaw dropping tales from recovering alcoholics and drug addicts I saw every day for twenty years. I was very careful to change the names if I used names at all, but I tried to capture the essence of what was said in a true a way as I possibly could. Literally I would find myself shaking my head in near disbelief after hearing some of those stories.
As I aged and came to face cancer and the real potential of an early death a different series of stories came out of me. The tandem fears of growing old and dying or of not growing old and dying ugly found expression in what I was writing. A philosophical vein began to pop up. Stoic and eastern thoughts worked their way into many lines I put down. When my brothers died the heartache I felt, found as clear an expression as I could muster, in what I said on the blog.
With Facebook blocking me sharing anything on A Space and with time on my hands coming from retirement, coupled with internment of uncertain duration due to Covid, I created a new blog. The New Plague Journalgave me an outlet for all the emotional upheaval I was experiencing. I am guessing we all felt the gut churning from the great not knowing what to do to survive in a pandemic era. Writing about what we all were experiencing was an anchor to my day when we all were adrift in uncertainty.
When I began my writings some fourteen years ago, I was a bus rider. Each day I would carry a small note book and I would scrawl kernel sentences and directions on what to find next and where to find relevant quotes on narrowly lined paper. Between the waiting time for the bus and the ride itself there were several years when I had a good half hour five days a week to grab the wild hares running about the corners of my brain and capture them on paper.
Now I am retired and I have a desk in my home where I try and force myself on an almost daily basis to work on my writing. In some ways it is not as easy as when I was on the bus. Here there are a thousand tiny things that pull me away on a daily basis. Some are routine. Some have importance. All are distractions from writing but still I try to create something new every single day.
Because I am not a vampire my mortal frame will return to dust soon. Could be this year, could be five years from now or it could be twenty years from now. If the glowing orb of the world wide web now surrounding Gaia survives my children or their children will be able to find my musings. My heirs of course will be using some incredibly sophisticated software engine, the post Google device which will be able to discern my written voice out of the billions of possibilities which will by then will exist.
I have nothing profound to say. I just offer observations of an average human living in a world at odds with itself. Maybe when those following me write a paper on the transition from midcentury American democracy to post millennial autocratic apathy in a climate changed world, they will be able to offer up some quotes from dear old great grandpa. Would be nice to be a disembodied voice in a paper or a multimedia presentation like those read over sepia toned photos in Ken Burns documentaries.
In the end my writing may be all for nothing. To quote Robbie Robertson in a fractured sidewise way, maybe it is just written on the wind. But I feel compelled to talk and this seems to be the best forum for me. Hey the chances are better my descendants, if there are any, will find my thoughts here as opposed to finding an old notebook in a box which just by sheer chance has not been trashed or recycled.
Why haven’t I been posting? Well, I’m hobbled. Yup, I am moving in an awkward way these past few days.
Don’t know if you have ever had vertigo but it is special. This is my third bout of it in my lifetime. All of a sudden due to an errant grain, in your ear somewhere, you cannot stand and the room seems to be spinning. Vertigo can last for hours. It can last for days. Vertigo can come and go. It has been seven years since my last interaction with this vile condition. How do I know this? Well, that is how old my bottle of vertigo medication is. Double ugh.
With that off balance feeling running through my body it is hard to sit at my desk chair and type. Truth be told it is hard to do anything other than be an inert vegetable. Sitting in front of a screen really isn’t much fun either.
I will be back with you soon. Trust me. My rambling musings are not over yet.
The Foz in Porto, Portugal at Twilight September 2021
Purchased a new mattress last week. Mattress heights have grown incredibly in recent years. As a result, I had to buy new sheets. Got some 680 thread exotic cotton sheets from Costco. These are not flannel sheets but they are definitely warmer than my old sheets. Must have been the warmth from those sheets that woke me up at 5:58 AM today.
Once awake I knew there was no returning to dreamland. Let me tell you last night’s dreamscape was a very active. People from my past were judging all the aspects of my life from my job choices all the way down to my food choices. Somebody (in my dream) was yelling at me for ordering an elk steak at the Church Key restaurant in London Ontario. Hey my dreams can be very, very detailed and I assure you the Church Key’s curry fries remained delightful even in my dream. I woke up mumbling, “Bite me,” to that vague phantasm who tried to destroy my foodie joy.
Anyway, I got up. Got dressed. Made the coffee. Ate my cereal. After delivering my wife coffee to her bedside I went out for a twenty-minute walk.
As I set out the light was a soft pink glow quickly turning golden. But given the temperature, a mere 34 degrees, I was utterly but pleasantly surprised by the songbirds. Those little feathered flashes of color were in every yard tweeting and trilling their unique melodies. After a couple of weeks of every other day snowfall having dry roads to walk on and an avian concerto to provide the soundtrack to my exercise circuit lifted my spirits. ‘Twas truly nature’s own meditation workshop.
When my third of an hour outside over I sat down to peruse today’s news. To quote Joni Mitchell’s immortal song “California”, “Sitting in a park in Paris, France. Reading the news and it sure looks bad. They won't give peace a chance. That was just a dream some of us had.” All the joy from nature’s chorus evaporated after just scanning two or three paragraphs of the morning newsfeed. After maybe five minutes I had to push my chair away from my computer. If I didn’t, I was going to start hyperventilating and crying at the same time.
Me, I am not sure where events are leading for our world and for us. My hope is that sanity will prevail. In the words of my erstwhile guru Don Hurff offered to me so many years ago (we were watching the 1AM waves on a clear and starry night in Ocean City), “Governments will come and go and the human spirit can survive under any of them no matter how awful they are. Let us hope we people have the sense to keep that in mind when someone is thinking about pressing the nuclear button”.
Don’t know where this game of geopolitical chicken will end. Pray that it comes without large swaths of the earth laid waste. Know I am praying for peace. We all should be praying, and working, for peace. Know I love you all. Okay I love most of you, the rest of you I like a great deal.
I will leave you with a beautiful and calming piece of music. The Cinema Paradiso love theme.
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.
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.
