All posts by rexmerritt

Observed

Small Beer


    Americans are too enamored of SCANDAL. Few transgressions are worthy of such designation. The misused and abused word itself. Thanks to the giant scarlet S, peccadillos barely deserving shrugs balloon into outrage. 

    We resort to SCANDAL too easily. Same with hero. Who can’t be a hero in America? It’s so easy now one needn’t bother swiping Pauline off train tracks at the last minute or yanking cats from tree limbs. The valor invested in hero, like the disgust which should weigh SCANDAL, has been devalued. Otherwise why call such stalwarts “everyday heroes”?

    Isn’t that an oxymoron?

    We now bestow ever-fleeting glory on mundane acts. It’s lazy tabloid media usage. Continue reading Small Beer →

Agitprop/Propaganda

America Dismisses Mr. Charlie


    The United States is fortunate Barack Obama retained her presidency. His tone deaf, brain encased in amber opponent, Mitt Romney, would’ve been the perfect wooden Indian for Corporate America.
    
    In Romney, the grandees and high-flyers lording throughout boardrooms had their soul mate. That is supposing they possessed souls. This horde gives form and substance to Balzac’s quote stating “behind every great fortune is a great crime.” Continue reading America Dismisses Mr. Charlie →

Quarropas

Elsewhere on Earth


    My new gig drags me by plenty of evocative sites. On one hand, these cameos across former stages dent the job’s drudgery. On the other, being an older and worldlier actor permits clearer vision and better excavation of how certain scenes skewed wrong.
 
    Nothing like going past a boyhood marker and confirming that age’s innocence to have been blessed ignorance. Knowledge, truly a two-edged sword for adults.
 

    In the setting and people behind this post I merely occupied the periphery. Events unfolded outside my modest Quarropas neighborhood. All this occurred before money became an even greater determinant. Was ours the last generation in which affluence remained understated and character a worthier gauge? Continue reading Elsewhere on Earth →

Observed

Our Time on Earth

    Unlike morally smug, ethically deficient conservatives and the Scripture misinterpreting evangelicals who enable them, the rest of us have had no hand in our own conception. Randomly created, we are born. Inevitably we die. If we’re lucky we begin enjoying semblances of control several years into seeing first light until our mortal forms lose vigor, and blindness begins the cascade rendering us past tense.

    I read somewhere sight is the first of our senses that extinguishes; hearing the last. Maybe it’s apocryphal but Lillian Hellman yelled final tender endearments to Dashiell Hammett just as he succumbed on his deathbed. Seems right. The two writers were true to their beliefs as well as one another in a fashion that flouted convention.    
    
    Besides, who among us wouldn’t prefer going out hearing how we were adored? Loving phrases over a corpse comfort mourners but do the dead derive any benefit from them? Doubtful. Continue reading Our Time on Earth →

Observed

Clubby


    Don’t states of desolation descend on country clubs in autumn? Lingering summer’s unformed hours still insist on carefree activity. Remnants of airy remarks hover throughout empty rooms.

    Those ghosts will remain somewhat lonely.

    School has resumed. Vacations and lax diligence are finished. Although weather should permit several more weeks of sailing, serves and tee-offs followed by hacking, the emphasis our society places on nose to grindstone performance denies any extension of these pursuits past Labor Day.

    Strolls through such vacant shore or brae addresses are now mixtures of somberness and relief. The leisure class has abandoned these boating and golf premises to housekeepers, gardeners, and kitchen staff who’ve happily shucked much of their occupational deference. Continue reading Clubby →

Green Venom

Off the Mat


    Consider this a Green Venom addendum.

    After nine months of unemployment I deserted the idled ranks in July. My formless time was not a vacation. Unemployment insurance neither made me lazy nor enriched me beyond my wildest dreams.

    Like the millions with whom I shared the same boat, I owe the American Labor movement a giant deal of gratitude. Without organized labor’s steadfast agitation throughout prior decades, enduring unemployment would’ve been Capital A arduous.

    By the way unemployment benefits, subsistence provisions really, are a safety net segment the GOP eagerly intends to shred. Insurance. It never matters. Until it suddenly does. Continue reading Off the Mat →

Pop Culture

Summer Snippets


    Mine won’t be the usual lament about the end of summer. The season did not zip by. No flings that thanks to the heat’s affect on our emotional states ballooned into unwieldy romances pricked by calming September’s inevitability.

    There’s nothing I wished I’d done. Since the season did not present me with opportunities, none slipped away.

    Maybe as an adolescent I may’ve regretted the passing of yearly unstructured seasonal idylls. Today, though, an adult, I have much greater appreciation of idling.

    However, what Summer 2012 lacked, the last several actually, is the absence of accidental street music. (That, as well as the chatter which accessorized it.) If loud enough, then the insistence of incidental thrum and declaim. Ear buds and the prevalence of automobile air conditioning have mightily limned the noise.

    No more ghetto blasters. Far fewer rolling boom boxes. Continue reading Summer Snippets →

Observed

Staged?

 

    The girl who hands over my New York Times is always astounded at its heft. Even on Saturdays. I laugh at her lack of reference. Stacked against almost every other newspaper in America, yes, the Times is plump. But as subscribers of a certain age remember, today’s editions are miserly compared against the fat decks of a decade ago.

    Especially those Sunday sandbags.

    My newsgirl doesn’t read newspapers. At least not intentionally. She’s of that breezily-informed generation which receives its mostly unedited information through bits and bytes. It shows. Their general lack of awareness, the blithe knowledge deficiency, augurs ill for them.

    Fortunately, this group’s esteeming the ephemeral above all immunizes them against everyday worries as well as prospective maladies. Think of it as bliss without the Schedule 1 drugs.

    Even when my age group lived carefree someone older always cautioned “beware!” If recalled correctly, while we proclaimed disregarding those admonishments they nevertheless seeped in to steer us through responsible adulthood.

    My, how mentoring has changed. Etiquette, too. Continue reading Staged? →

Observed

Social Intercourse


    Unemployment gave me a lot of time to waste. Since being shelved, I’ve been able to sate a few extreme curiosities. Online dating has been one of the most perplexing.

    Private by nature, the exposure such sites demand have asked more from me than I’m accustomed to relinquishing. Thankfully “Rex Merritt” has been honest.

    In real life, that is life where actual humans maintain face-to-face exchanges, it’s easier to tailor questions and gauge responses. Doesn’t web anonymity license deception and puffery? Continue reading Social Intercourse →

Tales Out of School

The Wonder Bar


    July 5th begins summer’s great trench. Nothing but sweltering discomfort punctured by periods of merciful relief.

    There is a New Yorker magazine cover which aptly suits these dog days. On it a grinning rubicund sun wipes sweat off his brow while beneath him broiling on the way to burning beachgoers merry themselves towards heatstroke.

    The best part of this season for me? Beer. Beer is colder these days than during winter. Continue reading The Wonder Bar →