Sometimes the best option on a Friday night is home. With the dog. And slow cooking soup and pasta and baking sourdough. And listening to Van Morrison and Mark Knopfler with a martini and wine. And thinking about old friends and times past.
I’ve spoken of Tim before. The regular character in Strong & Co. every night. He never misses a day. Most nights, someone buys his dinner. Last night we were in and sure enough, someone had covered his tab. Tim took all the change out of his little change purse and left it for the bartender. It was a little sweet and a little sad.
Pierre and Inbal’s cat died after 16 years. Chap. I only met him once, but he was a fine cat. Dignified and sweet. That’s a tough day for anyone — losing a member of the family after so long. Chap was older than their oldest child. At least he got to die in Paris, where Pierre and Inbal are spending a year on sabbatical to be around his family.
The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing… Each must learn its lesson anew.” —
Albert Einstein, October 26, 1929
Does this phenomenon explain why so many people are not getting their children vaccinated. The lack of direct experience?
I climbed Kilmanjaro with a man and his son from South Africa. The man had a bad limp and had to be taken off the mountain after a few days because he could not handle the hike. His affliction? He had polio as a child. That’s my direct experience, although very limited.
Many people have no direct experience of slavery, or Jim Crow, or the attempted genocide of Native Americans or when we imprisoned all Japanese Americans, or when pollution and smog was so thick you could not see 5 feet in front of yourself and chemicals killed whole rivers and streams. So, perhaps we are destined to continue to make these mistakes time and again. Especially as our government is taking extreme measures to make sure reality is replaced by fiction in our history books.
We are living in an age where a great many people who are able to vote, are either ignorant of the past, too ignorant to understand the implications of the past, or simply just dumb in the crudest sense of that word. We can add in some greedy voters whose only interest is paying as little tax as possible, while presumably living in a safe country with modern infrastructure and conveniences.
What is missing from Einstein’s quote is the nuance that people who intentionally educate themselves, who have compassion for others, who are thoughtful and respectful of others, are likely to draw different conclusions from those who educate themselves at the local pub with professor pencildick holding court at the podium. With respect to Einstein, I think there is more to the story.
When Bill O’Reilly is saying Kristi Noem needs to de-escalate, you know things are bad. And they are. There are some uncomfortable truths about our society. Our politics.
In 2016, I voted for Hillary Clinton. Obviously. But not because I thought she was my candidate. But because she was not Trump, who was clearly a lunatic. Hillary and Joe Biden do not represent me. We have some common ground, but in most ways they are an extension of a status quo that has slowly undermined our means of living in the US. And our way of life. A way of living that minimizes and patronizes a large, important part of our populace who do not subscribe to the outrageous capitalistic excesses that represents the American brand of capitalism.
The Democratic Party does more for the average person than the Republicans, but that is a pathetically low bar.
Democrats and Republicans are both in bed with big business and billionaire class. It’s just that the republicans are cheap prostitutes, selling their sex upfront and without illusion. True GFE. Democrats are giving handjobs to the wealthy in back alleys while hoping for a marriage proposal and the pretense of dignity.
Republicans make no pretense of caring for anything but power. Democrats make gestures. Gestures of compassion are more like an essence, a token, rather than the truly committed compassionate acts that affect meaningful change.
I see this a lot in Southern Africa. The wealthy whites will support feed schemes and basic education, but they are not willing to change the underlying power structures that enable their great wealth while intentionally keeping the masses in poverty or perhaps a sort of constrained middle class to maintain the wealth inequality.
Democrats are stuck in a regressive mindset. They fight for a return to 1950’s version of America rather than a modern version of Finland or Norway. They want to get a little deeper into the pocket of the extremely wealthy, but just enough to assuage guilt rather than a truly equitable re-distribution of ill gotten gains.
I didn’t originally understand the origin or vigor of my desire for change. I only knew something didn’t make sense. It was more of a gut feeling than an understanding. Bernie made more sense to me — but he was undermined and frozen out by the Democratic Party. As one would imagine when he is speaking truth to power. His truth is a bridge too far for the Democratic old guard. They are also entrenched at the trough.
The concept of design obsolesce is maddening. As in all our modern consumer devices that are affordable, but will fail by design and with unfailingly predictably, within a few years. And which we cannot fix. By design.
I grew up poor enough that we had to fix things. We had no choice. Cars, furnaces, appliances, electrical and plumbing problems. We rebuilt our own homes. We wore second-hand clothes. We ‘shopped‘ at Goodwill.
This is part of the pact business and government made some 50 years ago and which reigns true today. It came as the small print with the transition to globalization. This is why we all are so frustrated, even if we cannot articulate the reasons as clearly as we would like. Bernie gets it. He’s gotten it for a long time. But the rest of congress has their boot on his throat, just as they have us all by the balls.
To be clear, I am not anti-globalization. Globalization has lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty around the world. I am against the unconstrained form of capitalism that underpins business structures that results in paying basement level wages in every economy and pitting poor people against one another to ensure those wages stay low while also forbidding unions to allow collective bargaining, and even for good measure giving corporations a free pass on taxes to make the profits exponential.
People do still shop at Goodwill. And other thrift stores. Including me on occasion. But increasingly, we are not allowed to fix our own things. We buy them, and are forced to replace them in a few years. Or, increasingly, we must subscribe to a service.
Want heated seats in your car, $10/month. Want the driver assist technology — that’s $18/month. Consistent revenue stream is the new drug of choice for corporations. Get people hooked on a cool gadget and rather than get $100 for it, take $10/month for 8 years.
Unconstrained capitalism finding new ways to exploit — because you know, Jamie Dimond only made $770M in 2025. Elon was approved for a $1T pay package.
We are trapped between lunacy and slow tortuous death.
I see that Muhammad Ali now is featured on a USPS postage stamp. This is the guy who was demonized by our government in the 1960’s. Who was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to prison and had his boxing license, his ability to care for his family taken away. He was investigated and harassed by the FBI.
Meanwhile, another guy from that era, a white man from New York, son of a wealthy real estate investor, was allowed to skip the war due to a corrupt doctor.
As history has a way of favoring the just, mostly, Ali is returned to glory while Trump is busy digging the grave where is legacy will lie.
My last night in Akron on this weeks client visit, I went to dinner alone. Intentionally. I needed the down time after three long days of meetings and two nights of dining and drinking with client and other consultants. Good people, but I needed my lonely wolf time.
I sat at the bar of a decent Mexican restaurant. Only one other guy was there. A young’ish black man, about whom I would soon find out more than I cared to know, was the only other person at the bar. I had my iPad and was reading the paper, giving off serious ‘leave me the fuck along vibes’, but his radar was out. He apologized for interrupting me and then proceeded to interrupt me continuously for the next hour. What can you do. I folded away my iPad in resignation and turned to engage.
He was pretty beat up. I had only noticed the ball cap and dark glasses. But now looking directly at him, he had two black eyes, a swollen cheek and a nasty bruise on the side of his neck. He proceeded to tell me he was an MMA fighter who’d had a tough night. I would say. But the more he talked, the more I figured he was just another confused and lost soul. Almost certainly it was not an MMA event. More like a standard bar disagreement event – which is similar in tone but doesn’t pay as well I think.
He was just turning 30 and looking to get out of fighting, and thought he had some legit connections in music promotion. He rattled off some names of rappers who he said ranged from up and coming to almost as big as Drake. They could have been rappers or coal miners for all I knew as none of the names resonated with me. But he was working on a plan to become their agent or promoter or something.
I don’t even know how these things work in the modern world. There are no album or CD sales to speak of really. I don’t know how artists make their money aside from touring. Anyway, this fella was hard pressed to convince me of his grand plans and I did my best to be faithful and supportive. He seemed to need some validation and I suppose a stranger at a Mexican bar was as good as he could get that night.
I found a graceful time to exit and left him there. It was windy and snowing hard when I left. Blizzard like with snow accumulating fast. I felt empty and alone and sad for the fella. As always, there is a story there. Probably unfortunate early circumstances compounded by bad choices or something along those lines. But what do I know. Maybe he was a legit fighter and will soon be flying private with some hip-hop dudes and their massive entourages.
It seems sometimes a little like that. I feel sadness, or a heaviness a lot of the time these days. But it’s not really about me. It’s about what’s happening to everyone else around me. Or at least a large portion of the population of the world living under authoritarian rule without a barrier between them and the henchmen acting out the leaders darkest fantasies. Or just the pervasive poverty that we can’t seem to muster the will to defeat. Or the mental illness unleashed on society — biologically mental abnormality or socially engineered mental illness from trying to survive in a world gone mad. Increasingly void of human connection and institutional forces dividing people and creating hate and social unrest.
Barefoot girls sitting on the hood of a Dodge, drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain.
Bruce Springsteen.
I understood Bruce Springsteen as soon as I heard him. Living in a factory town. Smoke and smog and chasing the hope of a good blue-collar job with a union. This was destined to be my fate if I hadn’t mustered the will to fight my way out. Back then, we had no information. Most families had no culture of education past college. Probably more than half the adults on my street never even finished high school.
It’s been a long road with Bruce and I, but we’ve done all right. The characters in his stories, less so. They are still living in the shadows. In fear.
“When you listen to Bruce’s music, you aren’t a loser. You are a character in an epic poem about losers.”
That was one of the many great lines Jon Stewart delivered when introducing Springsteen at the Kennedy Center Honors. That was also the ‘if James Brown and Bob Dylan had a baby‘ reference.’
I thought Errol would have liked that.
It was a great introduction and worth 4 minutes of your life.
https://speakola.com/arts/jon-stewart-bruce-springsteen-2009
Humbly Submitted
Robert Myres – Portneuf Valley Rugby Football Club, Flanker (ret.)
The Martini Tales 