Watching John Boehner well up, I wonder what father would’ve thought of such displays. While it’s good the Speaker of the House is comfortable enough in himself to let tears roll at the drop of a charged moment, isn’t there something unnerving about the leader’s, uh, expressiveness? Continue reading Cool. Resolute. Polished.
The Paper Madeleine
Sometimes simplicity is the best provocation.
This season means card exchange. Or should mean it. Email and the erosion of cursive script are turning paper Christmas cards into museum pieces.
Old-fashioned and time consuming as more and more of us regard them, Christmas cards are always welcome at this address. Their reception indicates a thought and care an e-card blast will never convey. Continue reading The Paper Madeleine
Vacant Copy Desk
Any opportunity to slag ungrateful former employers should be exploited. What follows is one such instance. Continue reading Vacant Copy Desk
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
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
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
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
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
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
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