I shall
Gather up
All the lost souls
That wander this earth
All the ones that are alone
All the ones that are broken
All the ones that never really fitted in
I shall gather them all up
And together we shall find our home
Athey Thompson – A Little Boo
Whoever said patience is a virtue was misguided or maybe just fucking boring. We were in line at Starbucks one morning and a lady and her husband and their kid were ahead of us. The lady felt compelled to lay out her life history to the cashier and the cashier somehow felt like she should play along. I’ve re-financed homes quicker than this lady got her order in and paid. We caught snippets of their conversation and know her kid is named after her favorite word, she is a life coach which makes absolutely no fucking sense, and she heads up a woman’s weekend on the mountain every year and a few other completely forgettable tidbits. But really, back to patience, why be patient in this instance? I don’t want to spend my life waiting in line, I want to get my coffee and get out into the world. We are at a great resort on top of a mountain and I am stuck in line listening to this lunatic trying to impress a 20-year.
We should quit suffering fools under the guise that we must be patient. I prefer impatience. A hard stare and heavy sigh goes a long way towards changing socially unacceptable behaviors. A headbutt—also effective.
I’m at that point in my life where people are going to start dying. Each year, more and more once vibrant souls deteriorate to walking dead. Aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and friends are wandering closer to the edge. Even dad. So I know this is out there. For a person who has an unhealthy depth of sensitivity and emotion, any single event can lead to a spiral. But we shall see. Perhaps maturity and my own balance on the teeter totter tempers the response. I’ll let you know in due course.
Black Dog Ridge continues to please. I am sitting outside, with a 10-year old bottle of Talisker, a 1-year old dog, a cigar, and a good book about the permanence a place can put upon a people. A unique distinction crafted by and suitable to landscape and weather and tradition. It’s a good book but I must set it aside every few moments to gaze on my own landscape and settle my own thoughts. A draw. A sip. A glance down to check the rivers movement. And back to the book.
For some reason I was thinking about our family vacations as a child. For one week each year we drove to upper Michigan, to the Canadian border, to fish for a week. We caught walleye, perch, and northern pike. It was actually a protein foraging trip disguised as a vacation. The protein came in handy for our family of 7. We carpooled up with family friends for the 12-hour drive. My cousin Steve and I got assigned to ride in the back of dad’s pickup truck while the other kids piled into our friends truck camper. They got to lay there and look out the big front-facing window from high above the road while Steve and I huddled together in a blanket to stay warm. There was an old, decrepit cap on the bed of the truck, held on by 3 C-clamps and duct tape, but it was only marginally effective at staving off cold and rain. Dad’s pickup had a wooden bed that was missing several slats and also had a leaky muffler. So the bed perpetually had a dense fog of exhaust swirling around. Steve and I would take turns putting our faces up to the crack between the cab and the truck bed to try to get some fresh air. This was before unleaded gas, so it’s amazing either one of still has enough functioning brain cells to feed ourself. The caravan would stop every 3 or 4 hours for bathroom breaks and to get gas. Steve and I would emerge dazed and disoriented with dark circles around our eyes and wander aimlessly around the rest area for 10 or 15 minutes before someone herded us back in to the mobile gas chamber. The other kids bounded out of the camper crisp and fresh and bragging about who was winning the license plate game.
We stayed in barracks at the fishing camp that must have been built by stoned kids from the alternate school. It was a super basic wood frame building with a gas stove, a sink, a table and 6 or 8 bunkbeds with dirty grey and white striped mattresses. There was an outside toilet house on either side of the camp. The construction could not have been more crude. The beds were made from 2 x 4’s, but the joints were not square and there was sharp edges at eye level and a tripping board just about shin high that caught everyone as they came into the sleeping area from the kitchen. Grandma always took a bunk strategically in the middle of the bunk room so her snoring, which sounded like a crop duster flying low overhead, was sure to keep everyone awake the entire night.
There were a few other families on the same annual cycle as us, including a group of men that came to fish but they also played poker every night. Occasionally dad would join in. I remember the two main guys–Don and Randy. They must have seen Dad coming a mile away and had no issues skinning a guy with 9 kids and a wife out of a days pay.
Poor people’s vacations. But we loved it.
There is a super cute little bakery very near one of the UMass Memorial offices where I sometimes need to be for meetings. It’s called Bean Counter Bakery and I nearly always stop there for a coffee and a bite. It’s amazing the variety and quality of baked goods these little hometown bakeries crank out. Stopping there for a few minutes to enjoy a coffee and a croissant is one of life’s little treats. A precious few moments to myself in otherwise committed time.
Signs everywhere in Columbus and Cleveland now for Pelotonia. Soon my friends who exercise once a year will start asking me to sponsor their bike rides. Which I frankly find sort of annoying. If I wanted to donate to cancer research, I would just write a check. What does one thing have to to with the other? And what do I care if you go for a bike ride or not? Am I bad sport? Maybe. But we live in the richest country in the world by far, and we charge double for health care what other developed countries charge for the same services — and yet we must go out and beg people to donate even more to support our bloated health care system. We also give massive tax breaks to medical device manufacturers and pharma companies for their R&D, which they then turn around and make fat profits on by over-charging us for health care and which enriches their shareholders.
We also charge significantly more than other countries for advanced education. And guess what, we are constantly being hit up to support our local university through campaigns and alumni appeals etc. I remember in Pocatello getting 10 or 20 calls during the ISU fundraising weeks and being asked to subsidize a state and federally funded university. There was never a pledge to help people who needed child care, or better nutrition, or job training. But god forbid the football team not get new helmets every year or the student union run short of tacos.
Every couple of weeks some kids in the neighborhood come by to sell shitty candy so they can afford sports equipment. We can afford to spend $800B+ on defense every year but our kids must go begging for a few bucks to allow them a healthy and productive reason to quit gaming for a few minutes.
And, of course, every small town has coffee cans all over town asking for money to pay for surgery or treatment for some poor bastard who has fallen on hard times. This because we are, yet again, the richest country in the world. But we have no will to provide everyone with the basic healthcare that every other country in the world considers a fundamental right.
Rants are my thing I guess. Maybe whining is the better word. What am I doing about it? Sitting in a bar having a drink. Spreading awareness one blog post at a time. Which of course changes nothing. We are all entrenched in our views – polls show that a very small minority of voters change from whatever their preferred party is. Even independents like myself must align with one party or the other because there are no other options. So I write and I vote and occasionally assault some ears with my annoying view that humans should be able to do better.
In my defense, I am not lobbying on my own behalf, but for others who are less fortunate than I have been in my time. I’m fine.
I’ve been thinking a bit about what constitutes genius. I find the word massively over-used. Normally every week of so, someone will describe to me a person who they think is a genius, but who I, on investigation, find average or even less.
I’ve known people who are extremely good at one thing or another. Exceptionally so. I’ve read about people who can recite the decimals of Pi to some ridiculous number of digits. Einstein was clearly remarkable at physics and understanding cosmic activity and atomic principles and all kinds of groovy shit. Although he was (relatively) weak at math. Or so he claimed. Genius should be measured in extremely top percentiles of specific disciplines.
So I will return to Kenny here.
Perhaps 1 in 100 people are reasonably competent at very basic carpentry. Enough say, to fix a few things, but not design and build any items of quality or significance. These are the folks that can build a garage workbench or a bird house or squirrel feeder from a YouTube post.
Maybe 1 in a 1,000 are competent enough to put a porch on a house or add a downstairs bathroom in the basement. Perhaps 1 in 5,000 are also good at carpentry, electrical wiring, and plumbing. Perhaps then 1 in 25,000 are good at rough and finish carpentry, plumbing, electrical wiring, structural engineering, and project management. These are real builders.
But imagine if we push this thought experiment to a further extreme. Instead of reading and translating designs or prints of others, imagine that some very small percentage are good in all the aforementioned things, but also have a very keen eye for space and design; and the ability to imagine things clearly that are not yet there, but could be; And then know how to tie all these elements together. And for good measure, let’s say they have a healthy respect for the natural environment and to make sure what you envision fits well within that environment. They would know what kind of wood must be used on the structures and which trees in the area might become a burden and which will enhance. They would take the time to clearly mark which trees and plants and shrubs should be encouraged to thrive and which are invasive and mostly a nuisance. They would cut difficult angles cleanly and join joints tightly. They would take the time to insulate completely. They would crawl on hands and knees to tidy up electrical and mechanical systems under the house so the 3 or 4 people who may ever witness know that someone of integrity and truth did the hard work personally. They would look far down the road and predict what must be done—to align long-term realities of building an unnatural structure in a completely natural setting with purpose and vision. Well, this certainly must be genius. If it’s not, then what is. And this is Kenny.
I sometimes imagine what course of events might have played out if the Supreme Court had not intervened and handed the presidency to George Bush. If Al Gore had been elected president.
A few things are certain. One, we would have taken climate change very seriously and almost certainly have influenced the rest of the world to do the same. Imagine taking significant action on climate change 20+ years ago and what that might mean to us now. Gore would have curtailed oil drilling, offshore and on, and ushered in sustainable energy policy much earlier. He would have been more protective of social services and tried to help the poor rather than demonize them.
We also would not have invaded Iraq, which cost a trillion dollars or so and and achieved nothing save a few hundred thousand dead and tens of thousands maimed or otherwise traumatized. We almost certainly would have avoided the financial meltdown that Bush enabled through reckless deregulation and the tried and true Republican strategy of cutting taxes and increasing military spending.
Wonder what good ole Georgie Boy is doing these days. Probably clearing brush in Crawford and painting bad art. Wonder if he ever looks back at those media clips of him saying climate change is not real and if so, it’s not caused by humans. I wonder if he ever considers he missed the mark on that one. Probably not. He doesn’t strike me as a reflective guy, even if Crawford is considerably hotter today than in years past.
I guess if we’re in the business of speculating about what might have happened, I wonder how things would have gone down if Charles Manson had received a record deal. Rumor is he was sorta close to getting a contract to write and record some songs. Maybe a little success might have saved a few lives.
Guess that’s just how the world turns.
I came across a great Carl Sagan quote — written in 1994. Seems pretty prescient.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
Carl Sagan
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
In 2002 I cancelled my cable and never looked back. I had no television in my life until Netflix streaming came along in 2014 or thereabouts. Slowly I started watching more. But now I am back to where I was in 2002. Most of the programming is complete shit. Today’s Netflix and Amazon series are simply a reflection of Americans’ inability to sit still for more than 3 minutes at a time. Every episode of every show has to contain some major drama like a murder or affair or someone’s dog getting kidnapped. I tried to watch Yellowstone and there was a bear attack, a woman thrown from a horse and impaled on a fence post, a young kid attacked by a rattlesnake, several murders, and a near drowning in the river—all in two episodes. And these are ranches. Ranching is mostly riding around on ATV’s counting cows and throwing around some hay once in a while. So I’m off that drivel for a while. I’ll go for more reading and maybe the occasional documentary or good quality movie.
Just wrapping this post up and as the sun is setting, a flock of geese flew low along the water–they followed the river up nearly as far as I could see and then turned and came back along the same path. What could be more beautiful than that.
No more news of note.
Humbly submitted.
The Martini Tales 