Love Is Still god

I've been doing this blog for less than a year (seems lots longer, doesn't it?), and already I'm repeating and referencing myself.  If any of us needed evidence (I know I didn't) that I'm a man of few ideas, there it is.   On February 12 I wrote a post about Love.  I'm here to talk about it again, with not much new to say.

Like the rest of you, I'm sure, I was sickened by what happened in Connecticut yesterday.  I cried my way home from work, called my son Sam who was 2 cars (or trucks, to be honest: we're carpenters, after all) ahead of me 'cause I needed to tell him I love him.  The shooting was a horrible, heinous, unthinkable-until-it-happened event.  And I'm sure that we're, as a sick society and species, going to endure many more that are just as unthinkable.  Until they happen.

The governor of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy, said Friday that "Evil came to this town today."  With all due respect, that's just a good sound bite.  It's far too simplistic and shortsighted to address the fundamental human need that led to this shooting, though I assume he meant well.  If it was evil that led to Friday's tragedy, then evil is all around us, in every town, every day.  And here's where it gets hard to say, and all fuzzy-headed Liberal: Evil, or something like it, entered Adam Lanza's life long ago.  He was as much victim as killer.

Although I can understand it, I was, somewhat surprisingly even to me, saddened to hear that at gatherings and memorials last night there were 27 candles lit, to commemorate those who were killed.  The fact is, of course, that there were 28 people who died in that massacre; the one not remembered, not mentioned, the one we'll all think of for all time as a monster, was the perpetrator of the horror, who was himself once a little boy looking for love and affirmation, looking to know that he was okay.  That assurance was apparently not forthcoming.

Yes, what he did was sickening, was horrifying, unthinkable, unexplainable.  Or was it?  No one comes here thinking "Someday I'm going to slaughter tens or hundreds or millions of innocent people."  We all come here with certain immutable physical needs: food, shelter, and clothing, and one enormous psychological need that may in fact outweigh the physical.  We Need Love.  We need to know that we are needed, wanted, respected for Who We Are, for what we brought to this strange and foreign place.  We can't go back whence we came, much as we might long to, so we have to know that where we're going, we're going to be okay.  And some of us who don't get that reassurance, who don't get enough love, or the kind of love we need, become sick and twisted and erupt in horrifying ways.  Something happened to Adam Lanza along his journey; could he, at 7 or 8 or 10, when he himself was trying to find his way, have even contemplated being in the torment he had to have been in when he committed his inhuman deed?  I can't imagine it.

Until we all learn how to give each other the kind of love we all need--which is to say "never"--we will go through horrors such as occurred in Newtown, or worse, again, and again, and again.

As I was writing this post Saturday evening, an extraordinary thing happened.  I received a phone call from a man in North Carolina who met Alice B. Fogel last spring when she was in residence at the Carl Sandburg house,  heard her do a reading, and bought her books.  He called, filled with emotion, to tell her that he had sent her poem "Grief" to his daughters, who have school-age children, and to many friends, as a way for them all to cope with the Newtown tragedy.  He wanted her to know how important her words had been to so many people, and how her poem was helping them to carry on.  It was an incredibly kind and thoughtful act for him to call, and further evidence, I think, of our innate need for connection.

I have secured the author's permission (by virtue of walking from my office to the living room--some of us are just lucky, I guess) and herewith reprint the poem, which appeared originally in I Love This Dark World (whose title came from our son Jake, then aged 3; his Facebook page from yesterday is surely worth a read) and subsequently in Strange Terrain:

Grief

I am ashamed as I try to sleep,
counting the wounded and the dead
in this old day's news

the grieving ones they leave behind.  Counting stones and bullets, averted needs,
the pretty breaths of my family beside me,
counting on a world that I don't trust
to keep my children safe.

What was I thinking?  Did I forget those others,
the rubble of their troubled worlds
and mine?  Does it fill their days--

their remembering?  Or do they remember too
to choose their favorite breakfast bowls,
that red dress, the time to step out of doors?
When I lean my body over the fragile forms
of my husband and children, I am afraid

I am not strong enough to bear
the grief of so much loving, the burden
of our survival from day to day,

or of what we can't live without, but will.
How each of us fends off despair--
that is what we are made of
when all else is dust or luck.
Each stranger's grief is not my grief

but it lies under everything, like ice.
Sometimes I fall through it.
Sometimes I walk achingly.

I am not saying their voices rise
above the hum of comfort here and now.
I'm saying I believe that even sweet blue skies
will break away, leaving nothing
between my eyes and the face of a god

who says,  Look down into that dark place,
meet your own shadow there.
Go on, take it, take it on.  Grieve:

Go down into the dirt.
I want to have already known its taste.
I want to have swallowed it alive.
If I fall asleep tonight,
If I do not die before I wake,

what will have lifted me back to perfect
that other thing that we call hope
is more love:  the leaven of all sorrow.


That was written in the early '90s.  It'll be true forever.

It may not be true, as The Fabs had it, that "All You Need Is Love," but it's surely most of it.

We need to love each other, and love each other right.  Now.

"Fiscal Cliff"'s Notes

And a bunch of other stuff.  Hi again, gang, and welcome back.  Or am I not supposed to be the one saying that?  When I realized that Tom had more posts on my blog than I did in recent weeks, I figured I'd better weigh in some, too.Thanks for writing, Tom; your responses have triggered many thoughts in me; I was actually going to write about Rudman, f'rinstance, even before you brought him up.

While it is certainly true, as Tom notes, that this is "their" country, too (see the Nov 4 post, and Tom's response), I think that "they" see it as, literally, their country.  Or want to see it that way, at least; as Don points out in his response, "we, the people" didn't allow that to be true, much to Republican insiders' shock.  But I think very strongly that we delude ourselves if we see the one percent as somehow having the same wishes, hopes, and views of the country as the "great unwashed" do.  And here I must go off on one of those digressions to which I am prone, and which will probably blow the whole point and tone of this piece, but what the hell, I'm'a do it anyway.

The phrase "the great unwashed," used to describe the lower classes, whatever that may mean to anyone in particular, was coined by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, a British (obviously, what-ho?) novelist of the mid-nineteenth century.  He is also the coiner of "pursuit of the almighty dollar," "the pen is mightier than the sword" and, perhaps most famously, "It was a dark and stormy night," which last has led to much derision (Snoopy always used it to start his novels in the "Peanuts" strip) and has given rise to an annual contest to write the best opening line for the worst (prospective) novel ever written ( This year's winner: "As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.") .  So the poor guy gets made fun of for the one thing, but doesn't get recognition for the other great lines that become standard parts of the lexicon.  Jeez, wonder if that's true for everyone--they've got shit we can deride, but they've also got lots of wonderful things to offer ...?  Nah, can't be.  Never mind.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, "their country."  I believe that their country and mine are geographically the same, or at least similar, but emotionally or attitudinally worlds apart.  I believe that my country is open, welcoming, ready to accept and aid people of every race, gender, creed, persuasion and stripe, while theirs is reactionary, exclusionary, all about consolidating and amplifying what they have, repressing, oppressing and suppressing The Other, because, of course, The Other can eventually threaten them.  In spite of Romney's "47%" comments, I, sap that I am, thought that he was basically a decent guy who, unfortunately, would say or do anything, or the opposite of anything if necessary, to get elected.  Then, in his post-election comments he revealed himself for the self-aggrandizing and -accreting greedhead (thank you, Hunter S. Thompson) he is and longed to represent.  Obama won by giving "gifts" of aid and food and support to those in need?  That's called being a leader, a President, Mitt; those aren't gifts or bribes, as your type might see them; they are the way that a responsible and compassionate leader carries out his or her (and there are women leaders, Mitt:  who the hell knew that New Hampshire was so progressive that we'd have 5 of them?) responsibilities and obligations.  Maybe a conversation with that traitor Chris Christie is in order.  Jesus, what would Jesus do?

Mention of Christie brings me to Warren Rudman, who Tom referred to in another post (and yeah, I know I'm the one who mentioned Christie, but if I had to wait for you guys...).  Christie was entirely partisan, it seemed, one of Romney's biggest (in many senses of the word) and most-noticed cheerleaders.  Then Sandy hit, and Christie put leadership and compassion above partisanship; to his great credit, he recognized and praised what Obama and the Federal government, that conservative boogeyman, were actually all about and could do.  Warren Rudman, former senator from NH who died last week, was like that, too.  He was a Republican insider who became an outsider when he became more open-minded,  fair and bi-partisan, working for the best interests of the people, rather than hewing to the party line.  He was most instrumental, for instance, in slipping David Souter past the GOP Guardians Of Morality and onto the Supreme Court.  As NH attorney general he was pretty reactionary and oppressive (see Mayflowers, when Abbie and Jerry, et al came to UNH--right, Carolyn B.?), but he grew and  became a mensch (a Jew from NH in power? Oy vey.). 

Unlike, for instance, a still-living relic of that era, John Sununu.  He was governor of NH in the '70s, went on to be chief of staff for Bush 1, and delivered the official nomination speech for Romney at this year's Convention.  He was always an arrogant, combative, mean-spirited little prick, and has not changed an iota.  I heard him being interviewed by Brooke Gladstone on NPR's On the Media in August, on the subject of fact checkers and truthfulness in political advertising.  In the course of the interview he went from testy to full-out angry as Ms. Gladstone pursued her line of questioning.  Just before he hung up on her on air he said something about the elite liberal media, especially NPR, always covering the President's butt, and "you're going to lose in November."  You should listen to it.  Good to see that he's every bit as good a political prognosticator as he is a human being.  There's a reason the GOP presidential nominee has won the popular vote once--yes, that's "once"--since 1988.  Dinosaurs like Sununu could ensure that it stays that way.  While part of me-- not my higher self, but the immature, self-serving, venal part which, admittedly, is about 90%--wishes that would be the case, most of me knows it shouldn't--we face an overriding issue which needs all of us working together to fix.

And I don't mean the stupid "Fiscal Cliff" although, like the real problem, it too is manmade.  Obama and the Dems actually stand to benefit from this so-called cliff: let the Bush tax cuts expire, then enact new legislation which raises taxes on the rich while lowering those of the middle class.  Let there be huge cuts in defense spending-- and it's about fucking time-- and then fund according to priorities, although Obama would want far more killer drones than I'm comfortable with, which is about zero.  Let the GOP vote against these measures and then see how they do in 2014 or against Hillary in 2016.  However:  We can discuss all of these financial minutiae, but Rome is burning--and melting.

Sorry, gang, to keep on about this, but we're killing the climate, and that's going to kill us.  We want to see events like Irene and Sandy, droughts in Africa and Kansas, as anomalies.  They were, once; now they're commonplace, exacting huge human (hear that, Dems?) and financial (hear that, Reps?) tolls, which are only going to grow.  But when was the last time you heard any of our  "leaders" raise the issue of climate change in public discourse, other than to to downplay or outright dismiss and disparage it?  Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert, among many other smart, brave and informed people, are there, but elected officials?  Nope--the Force-10 winds aren't blowing in that direction yet, and when they finally do it'll probly be too late.

Turns out you didn't really miss this shit, did ya?

Forward...Into The Past?

Earl Weaver,  longtime manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Hall-of-Famer, inarguably one of the greatest managers in baseball history, was shrewd, smart, and eminently quotable.  His Orioles teams were invariably in the thick of the pennant race every September, and Earl used every tactic he could to psych out his opponents.  In September, 1975, as the O's were in Boston trying to catch the Sox, and all of Red Sox Nation held its breath anticipating another collapse, Weaver said "We've climbed out of more coffins than Bela Lugosi." 

In 1966, the US Supreme Court struck down, once and for all, we thought, the poll tax, perhaps the last of the Jim Crow laws, clearly intended to suppress the ability of poor and minority, especially black, voters to exercise their right to vote.  In 1973, the Court's decision in Roe v. Wade finally, once and for all, we thought, gave women the right to control their bodies and to make their own decisions regarding fundamental human rights.  In 2008, we elected a black man (well, half-black; why is it that we characterize such mixed-race people as "black?"  They're equally white.  But I guess it's better than two alternatives that come to mind: ""blite" or "whack," and oh shit I've just given those "non-racists" fodder) to be President of the US, an act that was unthinkable when I was a kid and, we told ourselves, was clear evidence that the country had finally, once and for all, overcome its heinous past and was no longer virulently and institutionally racist.

Comes now Election 2012,  and so many of the issues we thought were buried and behind us are being pulled back out of their coffins by the Grand Old Party.  Jim Crow, meet Voter ID, a straw man used by Repugnicants countrywide in an attempt to disenfranchise generally Democratic demographics, in the name of preventing voter fraud.  That there is no evidence anywhere of significant voter fraud (except for, in one of life's grand ironies, a voter-registration firm hired by Repugs in FLA to increase their voter registration, and which was found to be fabricating names on their rolls) matters no more to the Right-Wing Elites than the overwhelming evidence that there is climate change happening.  Women's right to choose, meet "Life begins whenever one man thinks lustful thoughts about one woman, and rape is just God's way of saying 'Um, are you sure?'"  Barack Obama, meet the New America, same, in way too many respects, as the Old America.  I heard recently from a resident of Houston that the local PD there refers to African Americans as "Mondays" because "everyone hates..."--yup.

It seems unfortunately appropriate that the election comes so soon after we've turned back the clock;  Romney/Ryan, Inc. and their assorted partners, puppetmasters, sycophants and toadies are trying to turn the calendar back to, say, 1957, when white men ruled, as god intended, and if you didn't like the way they did things it was too bad, because they couldn't really see or hear you anyway.  And it almost wouldn't be quite so bad if that's all it was; after all, we survived Nixon, Reagan, and W.cheney, Inc.   But the GOP now is venal, virulent, and vehement in its outlooks and proposed policies.  They're turning their backs on infrastructure, healthcare, education, science, for chrissakes, the poor, the downtrodden, the elderly, their very own citizens and constituents.  If the French had any balls (sorry--stooping to a stereotype for a cheap laugh) they'd ask for the Statue of Liberty back, or at least to have its motto sandblasted off: it will no longer pertain even to natives, let alone immigrants.  "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" need not apply.

We are told that every election is (imagine the stentorian tones of John Facenda, the voice of NFL Films, the new Voice of God)  "The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime," but damn, this one might be.  I dimly remember a Paul Simon quote about rap from the ('80s?)--and this surely says something about his and my biases-- to the effect that " Rap is like dropping an atomic bomb on the history and evolution of popular music--I mean, how long will it take us to get back to Charlie Parker?"    If RomRyan, Inc. gets elected, how long will it take us to get back to basic humanity, to the fundamental responsibilities and trust intrinsic to government and civilized society, to pull ourselves, if not out of the coffin, at least back out of the subprimordial slime?

What The Fuck is happening to my country?  Please make it stop.

BTW:  the titular (I obviously love that word) quote comes from Catherwood, the duplicitous butler in Firesign Theater's "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger (Third Eye)."

Da Eiron-Ron-Ron, Da Eiron-Ron

In Classical Greek comedy, particularly in the plays of Aristophanes, there was a stock character called the eiron.  He was a dissembler, often outwitting his foes by appearing to be less able or less smart than he actually was, and that they fancied themselves to be, thus lulling them into a false sense of security or superiority until it was revealed that they'd been toyed with and were themselves the fools.  Yeah, okay, so I took Leo Rockas's "Satire" class at UHa in 1980, and some things stuck.

From "eiron" we get "irony," a term,  a style, a genre, a pose which has perhaps become the predominant manner of expression in modern cultural discourse-- in novels, music, poetry, movies, TV, even "journalism," and especially in interpersonal relationships, to the dismay of many.  Irony has become nearly synonymous with "sarcasm" in our daily speech and affect.  Greg Brown calls it "One cool remove away."  It allows the speaker/writer/performer to distance herself (a gender-neutral pronoun would be helpful there) from his (see what I mean?) words, thoughts, emotions.  It can be infuriating or at least disheartening to the listener/recipient.  It's hard to have a serious interaction when at least one of the principals can claim ironic distance.  Or so I've been told frequently; I am an inveterate and habitual practitioner.

That's irony in discourse.  There's also, of course, situational  irony, when concurrent or at least linked events are at odds with each other: the young husband sells his watch to buy combs for his wife's gorgeous hair, which, it turns out, she has shorn in order to buy him a chain for the pocketwatch he no longer owns.  I just made that scenario up, but someone should write a story based around that premise.  What?

Due to circumstances at my real work, as most of you know, I haven't been able to do my radio show for three weeks.  This week, though, there seems to be an opportunity for me to change that.  Hurricane Sandy is gonna keep us from working until at least Wednesday, it seems, due to rain and very high winds, not particularly good conditions for framing and sheathing a roof system.  So Tuesday noon-till-two seems available.   In very windy conditions there is an enormously high likelihood that WOOL's antenna, perched shakily atop Fall Mountain, will be knocked out of commission, eliminating our already-limited capacity for over-the-airwaves reception.  It's also quite likely that there will be power outages, perhaps extended ones; that will wipe out our internet connection and eliminate the possibility of anyone listening to the show on their computer.

Any chance I can fob some combs off on any of you?

Beingness and Nothing

On Saturday past, a lovely autumn day, the sort of day that had to have prompted more than one person to inanely utter to some innocent bystander "this is why we live here," I spent the afternoon and evening with two longstanding (to say "old" seems to connote wrongly) and very dear friends.  We talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some, er, wine, gin, and vodka, variously--whatever Simon Says, there were no beers this time.  And then I had an hour-and-a-half-drive home, contemplating, following a gorgeous half moon hanging low in the sky, the ipod set to Van Morrison; I barely scratched the surface of the 735 songs by him on that machine.   With all of that, the glow of close connection to people important in my life for decades, the beauty of the cosmos, my favorite singer pouring out his--and touching my--soul, what I was struck by was the void at the center of it all for me.

I have been a most fortunate man.  My life has been, and continues to be, blessed by more love, kindness and support than any 5 people have a right to expect.  I have been exposed to and immersed myself in music and literature of unsurpassed beauty and depth, the blood, sweat, toil and inspiration of some amazing minds.  I have been given a wonderful family, both of origin and that which I had some small part in creating.  I look out any window in my home and see nothing but the beauty of the natural world,  colors, shapes, movement and flow of trees, flowers, leaves, mountains and sky, flora and fauna of great variety and breathtaking inspiration.  At night, as when I arrived home and stepped out of the truck Saturday night, there's the immensity and wonder of the firmament hanging above me, a beauty and clarity that, alas, fewer and fewer people get to experience due to light pollution, maybe pollution in general, maybe general inability to see and wonder at.  Stars uncountable, depths unseeable, size unimaginable, and   all    of   it   right...There.  And yet it's not enough, it's never enough.

I think now, in ways I never realized before, that that night's moon is the perfectly apt metaphor for my Being: Half full, yet half empty; half there, half absent; wholly half, half hole.  Two halves and half not.  It's yet another context for seeing, as Wallace Stevens had it, "nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is;" that definite article makes all the difference.  Though the moon is sometimes only partly lit, the outline of the missing piece is miraculously still clearly visible, another "(thing) invisible to see."  What lies beneath is for me illusion, pure and simple--though, of course, neither pure nor simple.

Some people seem to have managed to fill the void for themselves, or perhaps for them it never existed; they've been whole, contented and fulfilled from the start.  Others find many paths to get them there: drugs, meditation, religion, yoga, hiking, painting, creation in many forms.  I've tried many of those, and yet "the nothing that is" remains, and feels like it always will.  I envy those who feel complete and filled full, even those who only think they do; the inability to feel thus feels like ingratitude, especially for one such as I who, as I say, has been blessed beyond all even unreasonable expectation.  It also, though, may have given me more insight into those people, like Van, who seem to have it all, who seem to be enlightened, or at least on the path there, who seem to be living comfortably in the material world, and who yet present a curmudgeonly side: "leave me alone and just let me do my art in peace," even though, without us, their fame and fortune would be impossible.  But if, after achieving those things most of us profess a great longing for, one is still hollow at the core, only half there, then what?  It's not an easy place to stand, but a place I can understand, beneath the overarching foreverness, trying to feel whole.

"...it's only castles burning...."
__________________________________________________________________

On an unrelated subject, except that everything connects:  a former student of mine at UNH/Manchester (I think), Lisa Carver, had a wonderful piece in the Times magazine on Sunday, an appreciation, of sorts, of Yoko Ono.  You should check it out; it raises lots of cool issues worth thinking about.

Can't You See I'm Busy?

For which, I guess, I should be grateful.  But I've just embarked on a house project that looks like it promises to be the most stressful of my career.  Alice says that I say that about every job, but this time I mean it.  Really.  Thus, for the foreseeable future, which for me is usually about 15 minutes, I shan't be doing a radio programme, and only a sketchy blog post.  I miss you guys, man, and hope to get back to the real stuff soon.

Meanwhile this, lifted in its entirety from The Week, Oct 19 edition:  "A congressman who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology has dismissed 'evolution, embryology (!--mine), and big bang theory' as 'lies from the pit of Hell.'  Speaking to a church group, Rep. Paul Broun (R [there's a shock]-Ga. [and another] said that the earth is only 9,000 years old, and that science keeps people 'from understanding that they need a savior.'"

A-freakin'-men.

"I Can't Help Myself...,"

...apparently.  I know, I've said that I try to be provocative, if not controversial, in these posts.  Occasionally, though, as in last week's, I try to avoid any hint of conflict or "attitude," and just muse about something that I can tie to a particular group of songs I've chosen to play on the radio that week.  Even then, though, it's hard to avoid giving the impression to at least some readers that there's some subtext there, one that even I am unaware of.  Perhaps if I were a better writer (not ending sentences with prepositions as I did the last one, for instance) I could convey just what I want and nothing else, but it turns out that this writing stuff is pretty hard.

This week, for instance, I want to continue my sporadic series of songs with women's names in the title.  I found the last one--which was also, weirdly, the first one (see what I mean about how words sneak around and trap you into unmeant meanings?)--to be a lot of fun, and there are certainly lots of those songs around, and if you have any to suggest I'd love to hear from you.  But trying to write something to explain why I might be playing those songs, other than for the above reasons, which don't lend themselves to becoming an interesting post, turns out to be fraught.

I was gonna talk about how I've always preferred the company of women to men, how, given the choice to talk to a man or a woman, I'd choose the woman 99% of the time (commitment issues prevent me from making that 100%).  But right there I've offended all of my male friends, of which I had many, I think, and raised the question of why I prefer women's company.  Is it sexual, am I just an inveterate (or maybe, being spineless, that should be "invertebrate") flirt at best, predator at worst?  Do I feel superior somehow to women?  Inferior to other men?  Is it because I couldn't talk easily to my father?  Jesus, leave me alone, willya?  I just want to play some songs, for Chrissakes.  Oh, um, I guess those voices were technically just in my head.  Nevermind.

Besides, men are on our way out:  Hanna Rosin, an editor at The Atlantic, has a new book out entitled The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (I don't really get what that colon's doing there) which makes the case that the era, which to me means most of history, of male economic supremacy is gone for good.  Among other things, women in their 20s now out-earn men in their 20s, and more and more young women are choosing "hookups" rather than relationships so that they can have the sex without commitment getting in the way of their freedom.  Guys, why didn't we ever think of that one??   What? 

So, dammit, I'm just gonna be uncontroversial and play songs with women's names in the title.  Last time I got through "X," so this time I'll start with Ottmar Liebert's "Yasmeen," John Gorka's "Zuly," and then back to the top.  I'm also, I think, going to try to resurrect The Nails' "classic" "88 Lines About 44 Women," 'cause it seems apropos somehow.  Join me, won't you?
100.1 FM, www.wool.fm on Tuesday from noon till two.

We're all still pals, right, guys?

"I Never Meta-Post...

I didn't like," Will Rogers might've said (except maybe Wiley Post, who was flying the plane whose crash killed Rogers in 1935, so he became ex Post: facto; or the New York Post, whose front page headline today used the word "loon" to describe the guy who posted the video that has set the Middle East back on fire).  But he didn't, 'cause he didn't know from blog posts, of course.

I, on the other hand, am about to meta-post.  I've been doing this blog thing since mid-January, to a total of 40 posts.  While it can hardly be said that readership is growing exponentially, it does seem to be growing.  I send post notices out to about 60 people; assuming that half of them either ignore me or send me to spam, there's 30 or so peops who I figure read somewhat regularly.  The blog has been averaging around 130 visits a week, so somebody's going there.  For the uninitiated, then, a mission-statement.

I began writing primarily to publicize my radio show.  It runs on a low-power FM station in Bellows Falls, VT, and, on a good day, all weather conditions and planetary alignments being favorable, can be pulled out of the air from as much as a half-mile away.  WOOL also streams live on the interwebs, so it's available there, but, as the show is from noon till two pm on Tuesdays, very few on my mailing list are able to listen at that time.  It's almost like I didn't want to be heard, isn't it, all of you armchair psychologists?  But I do.  So, I thought, if I linked the subject matter of the blog to the show's theme, even people who couldn't get the show would have some idea what I was up to, at least regarding that facet of my life, and if they cared.  And there are at least two jokes that I know to illustrate that sort of, not really synesthesia, but of one sense compensating for the lack of another, that I'm refraining from telling.  One's racist and the other's just too lowbrow.  Look how mature I can be!

I also wanted the posts and shows to be topical and timely as much as possible.  Thus, I'm often writing about somewhat controversial things and, as a committed Lefty, from that perspective.  Although the elite Right-Wing media keep trying to portray it as otherwise, I think the Limbaughs and O'reillys drive public discourse today and work diligently, through spin, selective context, and outright lies to affect the mood and direction of the country.  I try, although surprisingly my audience is smaller than theirs, to be a voice counteracting what I see as their self-serving and dangerous ideas (See what I mean about the Lefty thing?).  As a result of "speak(ing) today in hard words" as Emerson had it, I've gotten some surprising (to me) reactions.  In fact this post is a reaction to that issue: a newbie reader who expressed some concern my regarding tone, directness, and their effect on audience reaction.  Thus this attempted clarification.

Some find my "rants," as they are commonly called by readers, too angry, some too politically different from their views.  That I can understand--I don't listen to Rush or watch BillO for the same reason.  But I'm not as angry as it may sound; that's partly persona and pseudo-extremism. Mostly I'm amazed and bemused by what's going on, and feeling like others ought to be aware.  In an earlier post I characterized what I'm doing as Secular Prayer, and I guess I'll leave it at that.  The country's under attack and I'm trying to man my barricades.  As an agnostic, civil-apostate fan of appositives, I'm just sayin'.

This week's show, as yang to last week's yin, will be "listen" songs.  Haven't even thought of any (any suggestions?) but I know they're out there.  There's lots of talk out there, but still a lot of important things to listen to, and too often we miss them.

Self-aggrandizement department:  one of these past posts, I'm not even sure which, will be printed in a forthcoming book by world renowned writer and professor Dr. Brock Dethier.  I also don't know title or publication date of the book, as Brock was noticibly reticent with details, or if the post will be cited as a positive or negative example of the form.  Not knowing stuff never keeps me from pronouncing on it, though.  And I'm a published, professional (to the tune of $50 smackers) writer now.  So.

"You're Talkin' A Lot...

So, the political conventions are over, and the silly season is upon us in earnest.  Everybody's talkin' at us, but it's hard to hear a word they're sayin', mostly 'cause they're not really saying much.  Empty platitudes, hollow, base (in at least two senses)-pleasing rhetoric, and the implication, from all of that, that we're just too partisan or dumb to know the difference.  Real issues, to which necessary attention must be paid, Mrs. Loman, will have to wait until the wet fingers dry and candidates can safely see which way they think the wind is blowing. 

Obama's convention speech was inspiring, Kennedyesque in the best sense, trying to remind us all that it takes all of us pulling together to make this whole grandiose experiment work.  I hope, if he manages to get re-elected, that he acts to back up the rhetoric. "Let's see action," I say.  I've been sorry to see the ad Scott Brown, one of the few Repugs who seems genuinely willing to work in a bi-partisan fashion, as the Republic was designed,  has been running, pandering to Massachusetts fishermen, complaining about government over-regulating the industry:  there aren't enough goddam fish!!  We have to have limits, except in the silly season, which, unfortunately, seems to be every season these days.  Why can't we learn from the Brits, whose campaigns last about 4 weeks, and who can call for new elections when it becomes clear that the current administration is ineffective.  Then again, that'd probably just lead to virtually perpetual elections here.

"Talk" songs this week, then, in honor of the hot air and impotent and condescending promises we'll be inundated by in the next two months.  Tuesday, noon till two at the usual spot.  And again, I hope to see lots of you on Saturday night at 33 Bridge St. in BF: 3 bands for five bucks, all you can drink (till your money runs out or I shut you off) and loads of fun, all in support of WOOL FM.  Support Community Radio!

...but you're not sayin' anything."

Better run run run run run run run away.

"Someone's Been Telling You Stories..."

In the course of my job as a general contractor, I work for and with (and probably other prepositions as well--healthcare practitioners get to say they work on people, which, as far as anyone knows is not true for me) a variety of  people and types of people.  As in all relationships there are minefields and pitfalls one must negotiate, things one can and can't safely discuss in the course of friendly and casual conversation on the jobsite.

I just finished finishing-up a project for a late-ish middle-aged couple, a few years older than me.  They're very nice folks in general, and they are rabid Republicans.  During campaign season you can count on their yard being plastered with campaign signs, stumping for every Republican candidate from dog-catcher to President.  Some of the people who worked on that job (see, we can work on jobs, if not people) also shared their political views to one degree or another.  In fact, one of them used to be a "Follower" of this site but left, I guess because it was too left.  They believe what they believe at least as fervently as I believe my beliefs.  It got me to wondering how that sort of thing happens.

We all love stories, have throughout the course of human history, from griots and bards through novelists and screenwriters.  It could be argued that, beyond food, shelter, and clothing, stories--and probably art in general, as witness cave paintings, petroglyphs, The Rolling Stones and other ancient examples-- is the fourth basic essential human need.   In this political season--and when isn't it political season in the US, to our collective exhaustion?--there's certainly no shortage of stories being told.

There is, of course, no inherent connection between stories and truth; some of our stories are true, some--often the most enjoyable--are outright fiction.  It's when the fictions blur into, or are presented as, facts that things can get pretty sketchy.  Today we have several media-watchdog organizations who vet political ads and claims for their relation to the facts, bestowing ratings like "three Pinnochios" or "Pants on Fire," depending upon the veracity of the propaganda.

From my precarious perch on the Left, it sure looks to me that the stories primarily come from the folks on the other side.  I mentioned several of them in passing in last week's post: Obama's Kenyan birth, Muslim faith, plans to confiscate all guns and to take private property into government control via armies of UN soldiers or Martians or something, are just a few a few of the stories being promulgated in the elite Right Wing Media: in print, on Fox Noise, and, especially, I think, on Hate Radio (66.6 on your AM and FM dial--and the fillings in your teeth, and the receivers they implant in your brains, and other silly stuff I'm making up).  But why are so many otherwise smart and decent people so eager to believe such rot?

Turns out it's biological.  Recent studies discussed in a number of places (the two I consulted were Psychology Today and the blog Live Science), cited experiments that show that, when shown photos of positive things (cute little bunnies, beautiful sunsets, marijuana [I made that one up]), or negative and gross things (car crashes, maggot-infested wounds, Ted Nugent [I made that one, up, too, but...] ), conservatives spent more time looking at, and were more affected by, the negative images, while liberals were drawn to the positive stuff.  The upshot, I guess, is that we may really not have a choice in how we think, politically:  we're just wired (or, for conservatives, weird--wouldn't resist that) in that way.  Verrrry eenterresting....

Story songs, then, this week.  This post title, f'rinstance, comes from a Dan Fogelberg song, as will the coda, which is coming up soon, honest.  Tuesday, noon till two, 100.1 FM, wwww.wool.fm on the webs.  And don't forget on Sept. 15, the final in the DothWool series at 33 Bridge St. in Bellows Falls, three bands for 5 bucks and a really cool bartender, unless I show up instead.

...and they just ain't true."

From Out of the Sun...

I keep coming back to Yeats, and The Second Coming:  "The best lack all conviction/While the worst are filled with a passionate intensity...".  Of course "best " and "worst" depend on where you stand--my "best" may be your "worst," and vice versa.  I see what I'm doing in these posts as an attempt to keep my best passionately intense; others just see my posts as angry, ranting polemics.  What to do, what to do?--it's the liberal dilemma.

Now that Isaac has safely blown past Fla., Mitt Romney tonight will realize his long-held dream and officially receive the Republican nomination to become The POTUS (that always sounds somehow vaguely dirty to me).  While--shocking revelation coming up--I've lately found myself becoming more receptive to spirituality in some form, organized religion still makes me squirm, as I think that far more bad than good has come from it over the centuries.  And while pretty much all religions have weird origination stories, it sure seems that Mormonism is front and center in the weirdness department.  Angels in America (Tony Kushner took his title at least partly from the Mormon story); golden tablets buried in upstate New York which an angel named Moroni (a feeble-minded Italian, evidently) led Joseph Smith to; angelic writing on said tablets which only Smith was able to decipher; and the disappearance of those tablets before anyone else saw them.  Oh yeah--and the revelation that the ancestors of Native Americans were the Lost Tribes of Israel (of which Isaac was one of the three patriarchs; cue spooky sound effects) who Somehow found their way to these shores in pre-history; and, finally for this rendering, a visit to America by Jesus, sometime between the Resurrection and the Ascension, which apparently no one else knew about.  Or maybe the media were just kinder back then and didn't want to get all up in his grill about what he was doing and where he was going.  Why couldn't they have done the same for Mark Sanford and John Edwards and on and on?

So we're gonna entrust our country to a guy, all of his other strengths and faults aside, who can give credence to that story. There's probably something to be said for unquestioning belief, but sheesh!  Then again, I guess when the only alternative is a Kenyan-born Muslim intellectual who's going to use UN troops to take our guns and land, even that choice looks reasonable.  Anyway, in honor of Moroni and all of the other angels in America, merrily dancing on pinheads, I'm playing a show of "Angel" songs, of which there are an enormous number in my collection.  Hope you can join me today, noon till two on 100.1 FM or www.wool.fm on the webs.

Wonder what Pat Robertson and his ilk would have said if a hurricane had forced postponement of the Democrats' convention?

...come Angels with guns."

"America, Where Are You Now...?

So yeah, it's another week, and thus nominally the self-appointed time for a nearly 60 year old pretty privileged and insular white guy in the wilds of New Hampshire to fulminate against the evils and fucked-upednesses he sees in the world, and, apparently this week, to do so in the third person.  But really, it's all just "blah, blah, blah" or "obla-di, obla-da," isn't it?  To wit:

115 degree rain fell in the Mojave Desert this week.  Hot tubs are kept at around 104 F.  It was   the hottest July in recorded human history.  Even The Wall Street Journal is suggesting that it might be time to start taking this shit seriously.  Repug Govs. Chris Christie of NJ and John Kasich of Ohio are also saying the climate is getting "hotter and wilder."  Guess they're dead to the Right now, huh?

An African-American couple was prevented from marrying in a mostly-white Baptist church in Crystal Springs, Miss. because they were told by their pastor that the congregation had decided that "no blacks should marry in this church." In 2012. That's one man, one woman; that's a "normal couple"  attempting to start a "normal" family, the sacrosanct unit to the Religious Right (which, again, proves that they are neither).  Yeah, I think that Jesus said "One man, one woman--except for niggers," right?

Todd Akin, Republican Senatorial candidate from Missouri (the "Show Me" state) and currently a member of the House SCIENCE COMMITTEE  said that cases of "legitimate rape"  (think about that one for about a nanosecond before your head explodes) don't usually result in pregnancy "because the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down."  Yeah, and they can spin their heads 720 degrees on their necks and projectile-spew green bile at will, too.  If we didn't need 'em to breed with us--white women, that is--we'd be better off just bein' with other guys, ya know?   As the Reverend Haggard said,--oh, never mind.  So Akin's in the House, now, and on the science committee (Earth's only 6,000 years old, y'know);  at the whim of ignorant voters maybe soon a US Senator.

Paul Ryan, the current golden boy of the Right, Willard's choice for VP, wants to cut taxes on the rich and fruitlessly attempt to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.  Again, just the way Jesus spelled it out on those golden tablets he left behind when he visited America.  "Mitt gliberty, und justice for some."

Some guy in Nevada, wearing a legal concealed weapon at a movie theater (what's up with guns and theaters anyway, Mrs. Lincoln?) shot himself in the ass as he attempted to adjust his seat.

Why isn't everyone walking around either laughing maniacally or wailing bitterly?

So this week, on my radio show, for no reason whatsoever, songs with women's names in the title.  I'm serious. Why the hell not?  I'm going alphabetically through the alphabet (not really a redundancy).  It can be fun, although, admittedly, "U" and "X" are one-shot deals, and sketchy at best even then. Tuesday, noon till two on 100.1 FM, www.wool.fm on the webs.

"Why did you leave, America?"

"...The Disappear(ed) Railroad Blues."

I-86 in New York state, the so-called "Southern Tier Expressway" is our favorite route to Chautauqua, much nicer and more scenic than  I-88, which cuts across the middle of the state making a beeline to Buffalo(!).  And while it's a nicer drive, it's still a helluva long time to be steering a car and basically staring at the macadam in front of you while the fortunate few passengers get to find other things to look at and ways to amuse themselves.

About an hour east of Jamestown sits the Seneca reservation, replete with the now de rigueur  (for our displaced indigenous peoples) casino.  In addition to the casino, three things about the Rez stand out for me.  One is the fact that many of the highway signs are in both English and, one assumes, Senecan, or some tribal language, at any rate.  That's pretty cool to see.  The second thing is that the 20 or so miles you spend on the interstate driving through the Rez are probably the worst-maintained miles I've ever driven on our interstate system, and have been unchanged and unimproved in the dozen or so years we've been driving that way.  Sure seems like we're still stickin' it to those savages.

The third thing, the most amazing thing to me, is a sign at one of the exits proclaiming the points of interest to be found there.  The top of the sign promotes a railroad museum, the bottom advertises the Seneca/Iroquois museum.  Don't know if they're at the same location, but, top billing aside, wouldn't it seem that the only two possible exhibits that could be more offensive to Native Americans than a railroad museum are, perhaps, a tall-ships celebration or a smallpox-blanket diorama?  It's pretty hard for me to think of anything that contributed more to the demise of the native population here than the Iron Horse.  Really?  Both museums together?  Yikes!

Genocide aside (and we've done a damn good job of keeping it at least aside, if not totally hidden, haven't we?), the railroad system is arguably humans' greatest transportation achievement.  For moving the most  goods and people most efficiently, it can't be beat. And, if we'd advanced the technology involved rather than dismantling the whole system, it would almost certainly be the greenest form of transport, too.

Conversely, the interstate highway system, President Eisenhower's baby, of course,  is arguably--or maybe it's not even arguable--the most inefficient, wasteful and environmentally-destructive system ever devised.  It's possible that it's the single biggest contributor to the horrible change humans have wrought to our very planet.  Yep, Ike had one brilliant and fabulous idea, a warning, actually, to beware the Military-Industrial Complex and the havoc it could wreak morally, financially and psychologically to our country and the world, an idea we have emphatically ignored and rejected.  And he had one horrible and horribly destructive idea, the interstate highway system, which we have embraced wholeheartedly.  Yay, us.

The long drives I've taken in the last few weeks have made me long to be on a train, staring out at the scenery whizzing by, lulled by the "clack, clack, clack" of steel-on-steel, partaking of a much more enjoyable journey.  That, coupled with the fact that Bellows Falls and North Walpole, where I spent my formative years (dasn't say "grew up," as there are too many who would dispute that) were railroad towns has made me nostalgic.  Amtrak still runs right under the square in BF; if you're sitting on the deck at Popolo at the right time, you can watch it run right beneath the restaurant, whose beer and soda lines were laboriously fished over the top of the tunnel.  And, as some of you who have listened to my show have heard, the Montrealer blows its horn as it heads into that tunnel at around noon every day.

 So I'm honoring all of that this week with "train" and "railroad" songs; I'm sure that with only a few minutes' rather cursory thought you too can come up with a very long list of songs on topic.  I hope you can tune in tomorrow from noon till 2 (ish)--I have a lot of 'em--to hear my list.  100.1 FM, www.wool.fm on the webs.

And, although none of you were in attendance, I'm sure you'll be excited to know that our Block Party on Saturday night (held in part of the old train yard, as a matter of fact) raised enough to pay our bills for the next 3 months.  You should still become members, though, if you haven't yet.  We wicked deserve it.

"He Maketh Me to Lie in Green Pastures...."

Dateline:Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, New York

Good morning Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.  This is your intrepid reporter, Germ Hammerin' Sleazy on the front lines for this week's theme here at Chautauqua, The Ethics of Cheating.  Flash: Turns out we are all liars to varying degrees, and we all can rationalize that lying so that we still think we're good and moral people.  Who knew?

Yesterday's main speaker was Dan Ariely, eminent professor, author, and researcher into this whole cheating/lying thing.  Among many fascinating facts and research statistics, he also told a great joke:  Man goes to his Rabbi (hey, Ariely's from Israel, don't blame me) and says "Rabbi, something terrible has happened.  Last week at Synagogue, someone stole my bicycle."  Rabbi says, "At Synagogue?  That's awful.  Here's what we'll do:  This week you sit in the front row; we'll talk about the Ten Commandments.  You turn toward the congregation and look them in the eyes.  When we get to 'Thou Shalt Not Steal,' whoever took your bike will avoid your gaze and you'll know who did it."

After the next week's service, the Rabbi approached the man and asked how it went.  "It worked great!," enthused the guy.  "When you got to 'Adultery'"--and here the entire audience of 3,000-plus bursts into knowing laughter, having figured that NO ONE in the congregation could meet his eye--"when you got to 'Adultery,' I remembered where I had left my bike."  Oy vey.

Today's speaker:  Julia Heiman (not making that up), Director of the Kinsey Institute.  At this beautiful place that started as a Methodist retreat!  Woo hoo!

Next week's post and show theme: trains and railroads (really).  Hope to see lots of you at the WOOL Block Party this Saturday, 7-11 PM at the Waypoint Center in BF:  Music, food, me tending bar, everyone helping out WOOL.  It's a winner all-around.
 

...Drone Know What It Is*

Two stories that caught my eye in recent weeks, one about drones, one about mosquitoes.  See what I did there?  Aaanyway....

There was an article in the first week of July in The Paper Of Record about training military drone pilots, which seems like quite a misnomer: "operators" or "controllers"  seem more to the point.  Please correct me if I misunderstood, Col. K ( a recently-added fanatical reader and my advisor on all things military), but the droners who are killing insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and Sudan and wherever else our peace-prize-winning Pres. is selectively having people killed are not actually in those countries.  They're in Mitt Ronmey's Amercia, the good ol' SUA, as Stephen Colbert had it.  Essentially they're commuters playing lethal video games.  They might have a mission in Iraq in the morning, break for lunch, then "go" to Afghanistan or (shhh) Pakistan in the afternoon, then commute home to spend the evening in front of the TV or at a Little League baseball or soccer game.  Landing the things sounds fairly difficult: the signal from the on-board computer camera (Skypeing with drones!) has to bounce off a satellite on its way to Cali or wherever the operator is, so there's a several second delay.  Things don't happen in inhuman human real-time.  That also makes it difficult to hit moving targets, as you might expect; one rebel leader said that, as soon as they hear a drone, they start moving around as quickly and erratically as possible.  At least, like those bad guys in Westerns, we're makin' 'em dance.

"Researchers estimate that mosquitoes have been responsible for half the deaths in human history," according to an article in The New Yorker for July 9&16 of this year.  That statement stunned me, but seems not implausible (how's that for straight-shootin' syntax?) when you think about it.  The prime culprit is Aedes aegypti, which transmits malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile virus, and several types of encephalitis, among other things.  That species is not native to the Americas; it most likely arrived on slave ships in the 17th century, which I find cosmically hilarious and maybe the best modern example of Dante's contrapasso.

So scientists, particularly from the British firm Oxitec, have been experimenting with genetically-altered mosquitoes, and have already released millions into the wild.  They are implanting two genes into laboratory mosquitoes; one of them is just a marker to identify altered bugs.  The other, though, is an instruction to manufacture a certain protein at a level far  too high to maintain healthy new cells.  Sounds sorta like cancer, no?  They implant these things into creatures, breed them, kill all the females, since only females bite ("Only women bleed us"), and release the males into the world.  The males die after mating (life span is 10 days) as do any eggs that may result from this mixed breeding.  Pretty ingenious, huh?  Except that, since the only way to differentiate between genders is by size--females are significantly larger, and how would you get their little legs apart, anyway--scientists estimate that, for every 3,000 males released into the wild, one female looking for blood goes out, too.

Now on the face of it, both of these things sound pretty good, right?  I mean, if our military can kill whatever group we currently deem the enemy while being on a whole 'nother continent, that's great.  They'll be out of harm's way, the bad guys get offed, we win.  And mosquitoes undeniably cause untold human suffering (Google "dengue fever," for instance) and death, so why not get rid of them?  It's pretty well-accepted by biologists that they're not at all an important part of the food chain, especially since, evolutionarily speaking, they just moved into our neighborhood yesterday.

Morally, though...?   Is it really okay to kill another human from half a world away while risking nothing more than thumb sprains ourselves, regardless of how "evil" that person is?  Who's gonna decide who's evil, anyway?  We might generally agree here in the US of A that those Al Quaeda leaders oughta go, but how long before we target neighborhood drug dealers, or people with opposing political points of view?  Bill O'reilly or Roger Ailes with drones to fly drones...!?  And no human has been bitten yet by a Frankensquito; we have NO IDEA what the ramifications of such an occurrence would be.  What if one of them bit a drone?  Holy shit!

Ah, the perils of Mordant Science and Technology.  But 'twas ever thus: at Los Alamos, for instance, there was some question among that group of genius physicists that splitting the atom would set off an uncontrollable chain reaction that would destroy the planet. A small chance, but a chance, nonetheless.  Thank Shiva the weenies were overridden, 'cause that whole nuclear thing has worked out pretty damn well, doncha think?

No shows this week or next, I'm afraid; work this week, vaca at Chautauqua next week.  But on Saturday, Aug. 11, from 7-11 in the PM the WOOL Block Party will be happening at the Waypoint Center in beautiful downtown Bellows Falls, VT.  There'll be several bands, lots of food, and a cash bar tended by yours truly.  I'd love to have you stop by, and it's for a very worthy cause:  helping to keep WOOL FM on the air.  Hope you can make it.

* It's from a Van song, sort of.   Called "Enlightenment."

Myopiate For The Masses

On March 25 I wrote a post ("Pander...") lamenting the fact that our grownups aren't grown and our leaders don't lead.  Well, from the THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD department: miraculously, that's all changed.  They heard this one lonely voice and all is well in the world.  Hallefreakinlujah!

Naw, I'm just goofin' around.  Not a fuckin' thing has changed, except maybe to get worse.  Imagine that.

The climate has undeniably changed.  In this country the first six months of this year were 4.5 degrees F. hotter than the 20th century average--the hottest ever recorded.  Nearly 60% of the country is suffering drought conditions;  some foods will likely become scarce and prices on many, many items will increase.  The Week, in the July 20 issue, whence those facts came, had a great cartoon, from the Chattanooga Times Free Press of an ostrich, head buried firmly in the sand, "global warming denial" written on its neck, and its body looking like a cooked turkey just out of the oven, heat waves radiating from it.

The gun murder rate in the US is almost 20 times higher than the next 22 richest and most populous nations combined.

The unemployment rate creeps back toward 9%, homes still aren't selling, Europe teeters still on the edge of bankruptcy and financial chaos, student-loan debt is going to come crashing down on all of our heads like the housing bubble did.  And what do we talk about in this election year?  Birth certificates, tax returns, treatment of family pets.

Quick study that I am, it's finally dawning even on me:  We don't want grownups or leaders.  We don't want to focus on or even really look at the life-and death issues facing us, issues which are HERE NOW.  We want HEROES:  we want Superman to swoop in, or Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford to step up and do something dramatic and wonderful and instantaneous and just fix things, goddammit, so we can keep on with our normal, upwardly-mobile, progress-and-profit American lives, the way it's supposed to be, the way God planned it when he led white people to these shores.  If the Hadron Collider is here, can Deus ex machina really be far behind? 

Well, can it?  Can it really be fair that we--us, you and me--have to pay some sort of price for the way we've lived?  Us?  C'mon.

So this week, on my radio show (I have a radio show, remember? Tuesday, noon till two on 100.1 FM, wool.fm on the webs) I'm gonna celebrate Superman, and heroes in general.  Maybe they'll hear it and show up and do what they're meant to do.  I'm'a go play golf.

"Are you out there, can you hear me...?"

Big Tent, Little Tent, Intent: Portent?

Well, you might have to bear with me even more than usual on this one, kids.  See, I've been reading an article in The New Yorker about this radioevangelist in Tupelo, Miss. by way of Wyoming by way of Stanford(!) by way of Oklahoma City, named Bryan Fischer.  As you'd probably expect, he's to the right of Attila politically, and his primary crusade is against homosexuals.  He has said, among a deluge of crazy things, that homosexuality was at the heart of Nazism.  To wit(less): "Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Storm Troopers...(he) discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough" and that "homosexuality gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine, and six million dead Jews."  I tried Google to find a list of well-known evangelical homophobes who are later outed themselves, a la Ted Haggard, but what's out there for vicious, violent, sick, twisted videos and rhetoric from these men and their acolytes is too disturbing for me to explore, much less recount.  It is truly shocking and sickening.

Sorry--I really am shaken by what I just saw and read.  But anyway, I intended to talk about how much Saint Ronald of Reagan's "Big Tent" in the Republican Party has shrunk, if in fact it ever really was larger than it is now.  That tent is all-inclusive so long as you're not gay, non-white, a member of a labor union, a proponent of contraception (in 2012, for chrissakes) or a woman's right to have some say in her reproductive (at the very least) destiny, a believer in climate change, a Judicial activist (Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy excepted, of course), a believer in evolution, one who believes we need to raise revenue as well as cut spending, low-income, etc., etc. ad nauseum.  A very large segment of the Republican Party is attempting to turn the calendar back to 1958, to a world which didn't even really exist then. 

Maybe they have "Big Tent" confused with "Red Tent," the place which, in many cultures back in the day when women were fully-recognized, actual people, was used to segregate women when they were thought to be at their most powerful, during menstruation or childbirth.  "Because of the power a woman has during this time, it is best that, out of respect for her men and their medicinal trinkets and beliefs, she stay away from them."  Now, again and still,  it's because of her lack of power that she needs to stay away.  At any rate, tents are places, it seems, of apartness, not inclusion.  Is that really how we want to live?  Perhaps the upcoming election will give us an answer, for better or for worse.

As usual, this is the long way 'round to the theme for this week's show (hey, it's not easy, connecting the disparate parts for those who only read and those who only listen; you're probably best off in the majority, those who do neither).  Turns out I have zero songs about "tents," but lots, in this season, about circuses, which seems apropos to our current governance, and carnivals.  So that's what'll happen tomorrow, noon till two on 100.1 FM, www.wool.fm on the webs.  Hope you can join me (and join the station, for a nominal tax-deductible charge, if you like this stuff).

"They're selling postcards of the hanging/
They're painting the passports brown/
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors/
The circus is in town...."

Secular Prayer, Or Just Old-Fashioned Hypocrisy?

As you know, faithful readers that you are,  I'm currently involved in this cabinet-installation project in a nascent palace on Lake Sunapee.   Turns out that the house is being built for an Executive Vice-President of, of all things in this campaign season, the bane of many people's existence: BainCapital.  Go figure.  One response I got to that info in the last post came from an old college friend and frequently infrequent email correspondent.  The gist of it was (and this is a total paraphrase) How do you reconcile your bleeding-heart viewpoint, so evident in your blog posts, with dropping everything to go build a house for someone whose values you apparently find so repulsive?

That's an excellent question and one that I wrestle with frequently in my work.  I'm using lots of raw materials and energy, destroying trees and wild places, to create, frequently, unnecessary, ostentatious, and ostentatiously unnecessary dwellings, monuments to someone's unthinking greed.  This place is such a classic example of what I was initially tempted to call American conspicuous consumption ( a term coined by Thorstein Veblen in 1899!), but it's hardly limited to Americans, as evidenced by the lavish palaces we're discovering that were built by various dictators we've recently killed.  It seems a general human impulse--if we can, we do, for the most part.

The person who raised this issue is a devout Catholic; in fact she has written several books on the value and efficacy of prayer.  One way I thought of to respond was to ask how one reconciles faith in and devotion to an institution so rife with scandal and its own excesses;  clearly it's possible to get past some ugly stuff if one can perceive some value on the other side.  In this instance, in my case, the short answer is ugly and prosaic:  I do it to pay the bills and to provide for my family.  I think that we all make choices and compromises every day, to varying degrees of personal psycho/moral comfort.  Do I feel guilty?  Am I guilty?  You bet.  "And I'll be guilty for the rest of my life...."

But what of the posts and liberalness-on-my-sleeve posture?  There's a better response to the question, I think:  I'm gonna call it "Secular Prayer."  See, I've never really understood the concept of prayer, at least in the narrow way I approached it.  If there were a god, and an all-powerful one, who chose to give some people terrible things to contend with, and then was swayed by their supplication or petition (which brings to mind Jim Morrison's shrieked "You cannot petition the Lord with prayer" in the spoken-word intro to "The Soft Parade") to change his mind and make those things better--WTF (as the kids say.)?  That just strikes me as perverse and vain; why in the universe would we want to honor and pay obeisance to an entity who toyed with lives like that?

Recently, though, it has been explained to me, primarily by my son the religious scholar, that prayer frequently--and maybe most appropriately (my words, not his)-- serves as an end unto itself.  The simple act and fact of praying is itself healing, even with no real expectation of Occult Result, and there have apparently been studies showing just that.  Now, that certainly raises the possibility that those positive results were proof of Divine Intervention but, as Jake said, "Potato, potahto."

I think, upon some reflection and my friend's challenge, that my missives/diatribes function in just that way:  I have no illusion that I'm going to change the world, that I, of all people in the history of the world, will find just the way to express a point of view that I believe in, such that suddenly all of the peoples of the world will rise as one and say "Oh, yeah, that's it.  Why didn't anyone tell us this before?"  Nope, plain and simple, it makes me feel better just to put it out there. It's Secular Prayer, an attempt to self-heal and to cope with all of the negative stuff I see going on all around me, while at the same time finding some sort of community. And if I don't live, or live up to, my espoused ideals?  Guess I'm just another human, rolling around in the mud and the blood and the beer of my shortcomings, vowing to do better next time.  As Walt Whitman was the inspiration for the title of my radio show and this blog, so let him speak again:  "Do I contradict myself?  Well then, I contradict myself.  I am large.  I contain multitudes."

So, of practical necessity, no show this week either.  I hope like hell to be back next week, though.

And remember:  "Guilt is magical...."

"...See What's Become of Me"

Or,  "...World Enough and Time...."  There seems to be a dearth of both, lately.  Due to a sudden, self-professed (by the owner of Vermont Custom Cabinetry) "cabinet emergency,"  I've been thrust into the middle of a nearing-completion frenzy at a rather spacious and possibly specious "cottage" on Lake Sunapee.  Hence, I won't be doing a show this week or next, or writing a proper post.  I may weigh in on excess and the 1% and just-what-six-mil-gets-you-these-days (still working off last week's hyphen surplus, as you can see) and suchlike later, but not right yet.

I would like to alert you to/remind you of the Grand Opening celebration at Popolo (it's a restaurant, pronounced "pope-uh-low," no "s") in Bellows Falls, VT. this coming Saturday,  the 30th.  It's a pretty fab place, and there'll be much good music, food and merriment there.  Among the highlights will be Travis Adams playing under the nom de keyboard "Suicide Rhodes" from 5-6 in the lounge.  Popolo is very fortunate to get him at the conclusion of his most recent world tour which commences on June 29 in Saxtons River, VT.  I'm sure he'll be pretty beat from the road ("Mr. Booking Agent, please have mercy/ Don't book the jobs so far apart"), but, trouper that he is, I'm sure he'll rally and provide his usual stellar show. 

I hope to see you there sometime during the course of the evening; I'll be there till bedtime, which, really, can come at any time these days. 

Until the next time there's time, then....

Meet the new post, same as the old post

See, here's the problem with linking blog posts with radio show themes:  If I don't get to do the show, as happened last week (I've still gotta make a living, you know), then, if I still want to use the show theme and playlist, there's likely nothing more I want to--or can--say about it.  That's the case this week;  same theme and songs as last week, no new stuff to say.

Except that Alice B. Fogel set off yesterday on the latest leg of her solo Appalachian Trail quest, this one from Etna, NH to Gorham, NH, a distance of 150 or so miles and 16-18 days, across the Presidential Range, including Mt. Washington, which bills itself as having the worst weather on Earth.  Oy!  Momma never told me there'd be days--or weeks-- like this.  Needless to say, then, Fran, we weren't at Clearwater this year.

See you tomorrow on the radio, noon till 2; the freshness date still hasn't expired.

Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you....

Weather or not we're ready, it's here

I've been thinking, again, about the weather.  This time, though, I mean the external meteorology, climate change, not the solipsistic this-is-how-it-looks-inside-so-that's-how-I-see-the-outside stuff.  I know I've written about things climatic before, at least tangentially, but it's getting harder to deny that we're entering a strange new world  unless you're a multi-billionaire already, someone who's made your fortune on environmentally-degrading endeavors and wants still way more money and so you spend barrels of cash on having "experts" plant the seeds in the minds of average people that this whole climate-change thing is a hoax and no, this isn't a run-on sentence, just a lengthy and barely-controlled one.

But really, is there any plausible deniability left?  David Letterman started his TV career as a weatherman in Indianapolis and once said that there were hailstones the size of canned hams falling in his broadcast area.  I don't guess that's accurate even now, but as Jackson Browne said, "Don't think it won't happen just because it hasn't happened yet." We've had at least 3 hailstorms in the last couple weeks in this area, some quite damaging;  I certainly can't remember belonging to the hailstorm-of-the-week-club ever in the past.  And in case you're wondering, I got a great deal on hyphens on E-bay recently, so I've got plenty to use willy-nilly (see?).

I know, too, that I mentioned Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle a while ago, so I'm sure I've given you all a chance to reread it.  As you'll recall, then, the book's basic premise is that, the US military, grown tired of being mired in swamp after swamp in their various wars, have (that may be a more British verb form there, the "have" rather than "has," "military" for them being a collective noun rather than a single entity, thus "they have" rather than "it has," leading to the awkward-sounding, to our ears, use of the singular v--oh, never mind) commissioned their scientists to come up with something that dries up any mud they might encounter.  The result is something called "Ice Nine" (Jerry Garcia named his music publishing company "Ice Nine," for what it's worth).  It works great, essentially freeze-drying the water in the mud and allowing their vehicles to ride atop the suddenly hard ground.

The problem, of course, one which no one considered, is that Earth is a closed system and all water on the planet is ultimately connected to all other water.  Hence, the entire planet becomes a rime-covered waterless uninhabitable desert.  Oops!  As Vonnegut describes it: There was the sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of  heaven being closed softly.  It was a grand AH-WHOOM.
I opened my eyes--and all the sea was ice-nine.
The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl.
The sky darkened...the sun...became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel.
The sky was filled with worms.  The worms were tornadoes. 

When my kids were babies and I'd stop in their rooms to kiss them one more time on my way to bed, I often took the opportunity to apologize to them (they were asleep--I wasn't trying to give them nightmares.  What kind of person do you think I am, for chrissakes?) for having brought them into this world.  The only reasons, it seems to me, to have kids intentionally are the biologically-encoded drive all organisms have, to propagate to ensure the continuation of the species (hardly necessary in our case, what with seven billion others around to handle that) and ego: the need to ensure a specific genetic line's continuation, or to attempt to ensure one's own immortality, or whatever other socio-psychological theory is currently in vogue about that issue.  But I don't think it's 'cause we think we're giving these new beings a slice o' paradise.

Maybe the sky's not falling, maybe it won't soon be filled with worms of tornadoes, though I bet there are people in this country who'd say it already has been.  But it sure seems to  me that we're at least dipping our toes into waters we know nothing about.  We're changing the sky above us with greenhouse gases and the very ground beneath us with our hydrofracking experiments to feed our fossil fuel dependency which will then put more gases into the atmosphere which will then you get where I'm going.  I guess what baffles me most is this: where do the Koch Bros. and all of the other billionaire anti-climate-change propagandists and fanatical, dissembling environmental deregulators think they're gonna go if cataclysmic events caused by our behaviors do happen?  Are they so insulated by money and privilege that they think they're somehow immune?  Must be, but wow. And what of their children and children's children?

All of this sparked by a few hailstones--what a whackjob I must be.  But the music'll be good: lots of weather-related stuff--"Stormy Weather," "Bless the Weather," "Earthquake Weather," "Hail, hail, Rock 'n' Roll," and many "nowhere" songs, 'cause we don't really know where we are anymore and there's nowhere else to go, and Bruce Cockburn's "The Trouble With Normal."  Join me Tuesday, noon-till-two, won'tcha?  And "Hi," Rybie!

"Pay attention to the open sky/You never know what will be comin' down...."

Hello, I Must Be Going

This week, in a crass attempt to increase readership, there'll be no post.  None.  I'm not writing anything.  There's just no time for either it or a show, what with the trip to take Mariah to Montreal and an investors' dinner at Popolo Monday eve when we return. 

So enjoy the week off, re-read and memorize old posts and, as the Ronmey campaing says, "Dog Blses Amercia!"

Summer in Paris. Some're not. Somme isn't.

Well, gardening apparently didn't float anyone's boat, at least enough to write a response.  If it's angst and controversy you're wantin', you'll be left wantin' this week, too.  I am apparently riding a wave of contentment and Wellbutrin--er, wellbeing-- right now.

Two events in the coming week have my attention and a share of my show: Bob Dylan's 71st(!) birthday on May 28, and Mariah Edson's trip to France on June 3.  I'll start with Mariah.

Mariah has always had an interest in other cultures and languages, perhaps since she is multicultural herself.  She taught herself Japanese at a ridiculously young age, took 3 languages in high school and 2 others in college, and did the Middlebury/Monterrey intensive 4 week course in French at 15, before she'd ever set foot in a French classroom.  She's been looking for another intensive immersion experience, and we were lucky enough to find one.  Through a former colleague at UNH (Sandell Morse if you're wondering, Brock and Becky R.), we found a couple whose son has just gotten married and moved out.  They live in Vincennes, a 15-minute Metro ride from Paris.  Valerie, the nascent host-mom, does some sort of translation work, but wants to improve her English; so, with method, means and motive in place, Mariah will spend June, July and August in France, room-and-board-free, improving her French and Valerie's English.  C'est tres bon ("It's wicked good!")!

And before this goes further into holiday newsletter territory, on to Zimmy.  I don't know about you, but I still tend to think of people as being in the same age range as they were when I first came to know or know of them.  Since I haven't aged, why would they?  So it's a little staggering to realize that Dylan's that old.  As I've always had the body of a sixty-year old and have finally aged into it, Dylan's chronological age has caught up to his voice.  I've always actually liked Dylan's "singing,"  but I know that probably most of you reading this don't share that view.  Since I just got a Dylan covers album by Bryan Ferry (of Roxy Music) and since Maria Muldaur and Dave's True Story (at least) have done entire albums of  Dylan covers, I thought I'd do a show of 'em, and not just from those three artists.

So this week, one hour of songs about French, France, et Paris, and one hour of folks doing covers of Dylan songs.  Hope you can join me, noon till two, eastern, or wool.fm intergalactically.  See you then.

"You're gonna make me lonesome when you go...."

Call Any Vegetable...

 I first saw Dave Mallett perform in 1978 in a club below street level on Fore St. in The Old Port area of Portland, ME., below my favorite record store (whuzzat?)  How good could someone from Dover-Foxcroft be, anyway?  The answer was "Pretty damn."  Since then I've seen him a number of times, though not for a while--when I lived in CT, at the Folkway in Peterborough, and one time I even ran into him in Cap'n Bullfrog's, a fabulous record store (a what, now?) in Brattleboro; the first bin I saw him check out was his own, which I found amusing.  He was pretty interested in the John Prine album I was getting, though, when we chatted.

Once when we saw him at the Folkway, we got even closer than chatting.  That was a great club, the Folkway--good food, great music, intimate atmosphere, which of course guaranteed that it couldn't last.  The prime table was right in front of the center of the stage; Alice and I had gotten there early to have dinner before the show, and we snagged that table.  When Mallett started his set, Alice had her feet up on the chair opposite her, which apparently happened to be touching the mike stand (I refuse to use the current vogue spelling "mic," which to me is pronounced "mick.").  Each time she moved her foot in time to the song, it moved the stand, which was disconcerting to Mr. Mallett.  More disconcerting was when the mike bonked him in the nose, at which point each realized what was happening, to her great embarrassment and his great relief when we moved the chair away.

But I didn't come here, as Arlo would say, to talk about Dave Mallett, specifically, or mikes, or any of that: I came to talk about gardens.  I'm taking suggestions (sort of) from Fran and Antonia's replies to my last post.  At first I thought "animals," from Antonia, which I like and will use in the future.  But with Memorial Day weekend upcoming, and that being the traditional date in these parts to safely put the bulk of the garden in, I'm going with that.

As I've said and you've noticed, I like to be topical and provocative, and I wondered how I'd do that about something as seemingly innocuous and uncontroversial as gardening, but of course everything is political.  Where we get our food, how it is grown, whether it is genetically modified, how far it has traveled, whether we should eat foods out of season--all of these are complicated and potentially controversial issues.  Even the question of when to plant ought to make us think:  we really don't need to wait till Memorial Day anymore.  We've warmed the planet so much by our activities (an arguable assumption for some) that we can plant earlier with less chance of a killing frost than ever before, and we can grow some things that didn't used to be grown around here 'cause the season was too short.  Plants too are moving north and up (in elevation) at a shocking rate.  Turns out that Ents aren't the only movable flora.

It's heartening that the above issues are being considered and discussed and are leading to action.  More people are eating organic and local, so more people are growing organic;  groceries and restaurants (like Popolo) are buying and serving locally produced foods as much as possible.  Young people, like Jake's friends Connor and Brenna are starting organic facilities, though the effort required is much greater than on enormous Califlorida tractory farms.  Even cities are getting into the act; Detroit, of all places, is in the forefront of the Urban Gardening movement.  Abandoned buildings are being replaced by community and even commercial gardens.  Sometimes good things come from hardship and human folly.  Can it be that I'm writing a post about something positive?  'Twould seem so.

So this week, "garden" songs, like ( we've just been waiting for it to come around on the blog again...here it comes)  David Mallett's "Garden Song," "In the Garden" (various versions), "Johnny's Garden," "Royal Garden Blues," (Duke and The Count), "Thorn Tree In the Garden," and the like.  But NOT, definitely not, oh no, NEVER "Octopus's Garden," even though I'm wearing my Abbey Road tee shirt as I write this.  Oh yeah--and the Beach Boys' "My Favorite Vegetable" and "Call Any Vegetable."  C'mon along: Tuesday, noon till two eastern on 100.1 FM or www.wool.fm on the webs.

...Call it by name.

Markness Risible

No, that doesn't mean what you think, especially at this age.  Just Google the definition.

It appears that many of you faithful postees are the sort who bring gifts to events that specify "No gifts, please" on the invitations.

My dear, dear friends and loved ones--and, really, what is the difference between those terms?  If you are my friend, you are my loved one; if you are my loved one, you are my friend.  I am an extremely fortunate man--thank you all so much for the posts, emails, phone calls.  Although, as I said in Sunday's missive, I was not seeking same, humans are generally quite empathic, especially to those they care about, and you have proved this.

My intent was  threefold: to explain ways I'd been being that some of you might have noticed and wondered about;  in my usual overblown sense of self-importance, maybe, (to use some therapspeak,) to "model a behavior."  This is tough stuff, this coping, this dealing with the psyche and  all of the slings and arrows; perhaps, I thought, if I relate my experiences, others may feel okay-er about theirs.  Finally, I was pretty sure the topic would provide me with enough songs for a show, which it did.

Whatever the intent, I just want to make sure that you all know that, in the larger sense, I am fine.  I'm just going through some stuff, stuff lots of you have gone through or are going through, and that this, too, shall pass.  I'm just waiting for the drugs to kick in.  Life throws us all shit to deal with, and we deal as best we can, sometimes more easily than others.  And while I really appreciate being called brave, it's really just irrepressible self-exposure.  "...I can't help myself...."

I'll try to find something topical, upbeat or fun for next week, just to shake things up. Any suggestions?

Markness Visible Redux

While I don’t wish to make a prophet of Alice's friend who asked not to be bothered by “self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness musings” in her in-box, this week’s post may meet those criteria. And it’s long. Nevertheless, I hope you’ll read it; it’s even a little amusing at the end, I think.

My mother was a small woman, barely over 5 feet tall.  The top of her head came about to the middle of my chest.  During the summer of 1979, her last summer, when I was 26, every time I saw her, she would lean her head into me and say “Oh, Mark, I wish I was dead.”  These feelings were the culmination of years of depression, unhappiness, and inability to change her situation.  For a variety of reasons I won’t go into, she was unable to act on any of the suggestions I made to  try to change that feeling.  On September 6 of that year, she had a stroke.  It wasn’t a terribly bad one initially, and at the hospital, my father, sister and brother-in-law, aunt and I, along with her doctor, Dave Stewart, had already begun to discuss physical therapy regimens and what we would all do to help her recover, as we waited for the last family member to arrive at the hospital.  Mom couldn’t talk, but it was evident that she was embarrassed at her incapacitation—she was paralyzed on the left side, couldn’t talk or control her bodily functions—but she knew we were all there, and we kept encouraging her and telling her we were going to help her get back.

Within an hour or so of my sister Dorine’s arrival from Connecticut, Mom suddenly got very much worse.  Either an aftershock of the first stroke or a second, worse one unto itself, but she was basically brain dead, and at about 10 o’clock that night, when it became apparent that she could be kept alive but wasn’t going to improve, we made the decision to remove artificial supports, and she at last got her wish.  She was about a month shy of her 65th birthday.

It wasn’t until the next year that I read Katherine Ann Porter’s amazing story, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.”   In it, Granny lies in her hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness,  apparently unresponsive to those around her, going over the details of her life, including the time she was left standing at the altar by her expected groom, which lent the piece its title.  Throughout the story there is a dim blue flame, her—what, soul? Life force?—flickering above her head.  At the end of her ruminations, with no sign of hope to continue holding on, "She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light."  I’m as sure as I can be that that’s what my mother did.  She waited till we were gathered, had a chance to say goodbye to us all and then took the only way out of her depression that she could; she blew out the light.

My father, while only slightly larger-than-average in size, projected bigger. He had powerful muscles, a powerful drive to succeed, and powerful insecurities, although  he showed confidence in all situations (some might say overly so).  He taught Dale Carnegie ("I never had a hobby that didn't make me money," he was fond of saying.  I'm not sure I ever saw him cash any checks from all of those paint-by-number pictures he labored over on Sunday mornings, though.) classes on public speaking and preached that gospel at every opportunity.  Harold Lavalley, owner of the largest chain of independent lumberyards in the Northeast for 50 years now, was one of his earliest students.  Two of Dad’s most-repeated sayings were Dale Carnegie’s “Act enthusiastic and you’ll BE enthusiastic,"  which I can now grudgingly admit has some merit,  and  “On, on, our hero cried; I’ll find a way, or make one,” which is evidently based on a statement Hannibal made as he found his passage through the Alps blocked.  Dad started up and made quite successful a machine shop business, a construction business, became Chairman of the Board at Bellows Falls Trust Co. after his retirement.  He was the very model of up-from-the-bootstraps, can-do Americanism—confident and capable with no outward sign of self-doubt or self–questioning.

He also ate Tums by the handful and, not often but not rarely, either, spent large portions of a day in bed with, literally, a sheet pulled over his head, the world evidently “too much with him” at those times.  Attempts to engage him in conversation in his obvious times of distress would be met with a classic Yankee response:  “My troubles are my own, thank you.”  At the end of his life, in his dementia, he was the textbook embodiment of the “Sundowner,,” pleasant and cooperative during the day, violent and nearly unmanageable at night, but it seems obvious in retrospect that the shadows were never far from him during his life, even in his outwardly-sunniest moments.

And now that dark helical strand of my DNA has its hand on my shoulder, its cloak over my eyes.  It’s nothing new, as those who know me well will readily attest, although it is bigger and deeper and more consuming than anything I have ever experienced.  The world is "too much with me" (I have no desire to do anything, even read, which is unique in my life) and so are my genetic markers.  But somewhat  surprisingly I also feel, after nearly 60 years, ready to deal with it (Well, well: Wellbutrin.); as an aged mason I once fired for using a racist term to describe a type of stone he was using said, “You learn something every year.”  Maybe.

My last 3 posts, this one included, have alluded to what’s going on, by title (the play on William Styron’s account of his descent into the depths of depression and despair,  Darkness Visible: A Memoir Of Madness, the quote from Lindsey Buckingham’s “B’wana” (“We all have our demons…”) or by brevity and tone, but it feels time to address this thing head on. In the past, I didn’t want to acknowledge what I saw as a personal failing, an inability to get past an affliction that feels self-created, to overcome the blues, to "Act enthusiastic...."  But it’s no more self-created than breast cancer or MS or hundreds of other biological conditions. It is internal, not external, although that is certainly how it manifests, and it is inextricably intertwined, woven together, with all of the other strands which make me me.  I know that many people who receive these posts (and may even read them) are contending with the same issues and somehow manaage.  It's a wonder we can get out of bed in the morning.  Is this a condition of modern life?  Has it always been with us but hidden or ignored?  Dunno; it just seems that some people get some shit, other people get other shit, and some few lucky ones may be shitless—but I doubt it.

Please understand that I write this not as a solicitation for an outpouring of sympathy or concern.  I don’t want or need that, maybe can't even handle it now, but people will respond as they need to for themselves and we'll all deal.  It’s just that, again as those who know me will attest, I tend to err on the side of  too much info, too much self-revelation, and here we are.  But that too is me.

In acknowledgment of  all of this, then, appropriate music this week. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s all gonna be lugubrious minor-key stuff although, truth in advertising, it's not gonna be real up.  “I’m Down,” for instance, contains one of Paulie’s most rock-us vocals;  “Yer Blues” and “Manic Depression” are hardly the stuff of easy-listening, either.  Now, I’ll concede “Am I Blue” and “Most of Us Are Sad,” but  Tom Waits's "Emotional Weather Report" is just finger-poppin' hipster (the good kind) jive.  Hope you can join me, Tuesday, noon til two eastern, 100.1 FM,  or wool.fm.  Sorry I wasn’t there last week.  Work got in the way.  Gotta get Popolo up and running!

Well we all need someone we can lean on….

 --------------------------------------------------

Saw a fella down to the dump on Saturday (And it’ll always be “the dump,” won’t it, Becky Rule (mooseofhumor.com?  “Recyclin’ centah” is for folks from away) who had a sticker in the back window of his pickup that said “Liberal: the French word for Coward.”  I said to him “Actually, you know, “Liberal” means “open minded.”  He sort of shrugged behind his mirrored aviator sunglasses and said “Either way.”  And he pronounced it as “eyether,” which surprised me; I wondered if we were going to do the whole Satchmo and Ella thing.  Instead we called the whole thing off.  But I wondered: did he mean that both “liberal” and “open-minded” are synonyms for “coward,” or did he, for one brief and shining second, become a liberal?  I didn’t ask him.