Ecclesiastes tells us everything we need to know about life, except how to cure the common cold

First, I want to make clear that this is not the piece that I promised to post in the previous post; the material is still fighting me and yes, it is getting more than a little annoying at this point, but things are what they are and when the thing finally gels I will put it up here PDQ, as my grandmother used to say, may she rest in peace. No, this thing is just a screed about adult coloring books. Now, you may not believe this—I know I didn’t when I first heard about them—but adult coloring books are a thing nowadays. I have seen them. They exist. They do; I am not kidding. The adult coloring book is not terribly different from the coloring book we all knew and loved when we were all about five years old and going to kindergarten.  The outlines in the book are a bit more complex than the ones we filled in when we were kids; there are no happy little bunnies or cute little kitty kats in the adult coloring books; and instead of using crayons to fill in the blanks one uses colored pencils (isn’t that racist? Shouldn’t it be pencils of color?), which allow, I would imagine, a much finer degree of control over where the color goes than a crayon or a magic marker can. The principle, however, is the same: it is a coloring book.

In related news, and I will tell you how this news is related in just a moment, the Census Bureau announced recently that the Millennials have finally passed in absolute numbers the great bulge in the American demographic python that is the Baby Boom Generation.  In addition, the number of Generation Xers will pass the Boomers sometime in 2028, proving yet again, as if the fact needed proving, what a bunch of slackers the Gen Xers are.  The Boomers will not go quietly—there will be plenty of kicking and screaming; the one thing that the Boomers could always do well is throw a magnificent tantrum—but The Preacher tells us in Ecclesiastes that one generation passeth and another generation cometh, and there will be no exception for the Boomers, no matter how much the spoiled senile delinquents insist on staying.

In short, the Boomers are entering their second childhoods, assuming, of course, that they ever left their first childhoods. With Boomers, this can be hard to tell. One would think that it would be impossible to generalize specific characteristics across an entire generation; some members of the Greatest Generation were not so great, some members of the Silent Generation were not so silent, and not every Millennial is an ill-informed doofus…well, maybe that’s a bad example; but most Boomers (specifically the Boomer I cohort of 1946 to 1955) are self-absorbed, egocentric dolts that never grew up (I blame drugs for this, especially weed). If you are one of these Boomers and you feel that this description does not describe you, that you are a functioning adult that long ago left the 1960’s behind and have moved on into the broad sunlit uplands of adulthood, then I apologize to you for the insulting description and I congratulate you for your acceptance that being a mature human being is not a fate worse than death, but let’s face reality: you’re a freak. 

So, we have adult coloring books and cable channels catering to the Leave it to Beaver nook in every Boomer’s soul and now dating sites on the Internet where the Boomers can go and find other Boomers with whom they can relive the happy years of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out without all the teenaged angst. We must endure commercials for CD collections of the Boomers’ favorite music, followed by equally endless commercials for prescription drugs that promise to keep the Boomers reasonably healthy in their second childhoods. Frankly, it all gets to be a bit much after a while.  Is it too much to ask some people to just grow up already and act their ages?  

Apparently, it is, and I am sure that because it is, somewhere in the deepest recesses of the Census Bureau there is joy abounding and happiness without limit, as the numbers finally show, after more than seventy years, that the most egocentric and annoying of American generations is finally beginning to go away.  I would imagine that the Census Bureau already has several cases of champagne on ice in the basement of its Maryland headquarters, stored there to help their long-overworked staff celebrate the happy day when the last Boomer hops into the celestial VW Bus and heads off towards the empyrean Woodstock with his doobie in hand and Saint Wolfman Jack blasting the Rolling Stones’ Can’t get no satisfaction on the radio.  Then the Census Bureau will party like it’s 2099, or, better yet, like it’s 2199, the latter date guaranteeing that there will be no Boomers left holding out on tropic atolls like stranded Japanese soldiers awaiting the return of the Imperial fleet.  And the girl that Mick is trying to make in Can’t get no satisfaction: she’s probably a grandmother now.  

Death, be not proud...

Carla died ten years ago. The words don't really make any sense, as if the reality they describe was simply too odd to be true, but it is reality, nonetheless. The mind rebels against that reality, the mind rebels at the idea that someone as intensely alive as Carla could be dead at all, much less gone for all this time. Some people are like that. When the war photographer Robert Capa died in Indochina in 1954, his friend Ernest Hemingway wrote that Capa was so much alive that it was a long hard day to think of him as dead. Carla was like that. And now it has been ten years.

I hadn’t realized it was the tenth anniversary until a few days afterwards. Time passes and the slow accumulation of days the one after the other goes by so slowly that we pay no real attention to it.  There is always some new thing we must attend to: we must pay the telephone bill or get the car inspected or buy a gallon of milk because the last gallon is almost gone and there won’t be anything to put on our breakfast cereal tomorrow morning.  We worry about getting to work on time or how to get the kids to football practice or whether we can afford a new roof for the house. We wonder where we’ll go on vacation this year or whether to buy one of those big plasma televisions or how much candy to get for the trick or treaters on Halloween or how long to cook the Thanksgiving turkey or what to get the kids for Christmas, and then, before we know it, the New Year is here. And so it goes, one thing after another, one year after another, until it has been ten years since Carla died.

Time heals all wounds.  This is the comforting nostrum we tell ourselves in the wake of any great loss.  If we wait long enough, we tell ourselves, the pain will go away, and perhaps for people like me, the friends of the family, that is true. Time numbs the loss for us, so that we can go on with our lives, so much so that the tenth anniversary can come and go without our realizing the significance of the date.  Carla’s family does not have that. The suddenness of her death, the tragic loss so someone so young, vibrant, and talented as she was leaves a ragged scar on the souls of those who loved her most, the sharp edges of grief keeping the wound from ever completely healing over. 

I have not been to her grave since the funeral. I suppose it just never occurred to me to go. I am sure that everything is now as it was then: the white Dutch Reformed Church and the old graveyard behind the church, with its old and pitted gravestones marking the passing of the generations, the small flags marking the graves of local boys who died in faraway places like Gettysburg, Omaha Beach, and Khe Sanh, the long valley with its neat white farmhouses stretching away towards the sharp rise of the Shawangunk Mountains, all these things will not have changed.  There will be flowers on her grave, in the plot where her paternal grandparents also rest, and maybe a few stones as well, to show that someone came and stopped for a moment before moving on to the next thing, came and stopped and thought of the beautiful girl in the earth below and paid their respects to her. I think that will be my next thing to do, to cross the river and go and put a stone on her grave, and remember the little girl who used to rescue salamanders from the stream that ran by her house and the young artist with so much promise and the lovely young woman who was almost as tall as I am, almost, and who only grew that tall to make me feel old.

The Rhinoceros, a meditation on theft and the modern world

I do not wish to complain here, a statement which, if you have been following these screeds for any appreciable length of time, you know to be an untruth somewhat larger than the dog ate my homework and a bit smaller than a campaign promise, but I do believe that petty thievery is a nuisance as well as a misdemeanor and that someone should do something about it forthwith. I am referring to my missing copy of the National Geographic, specifically the October 2012 issue, which a certain someone who shall remain nameless [yes, if you’re reading this, I mean you, smartass] lifted from my bathroom not too long ago. For those of you unfamiliar with the issue, the cover story reported on the plight of the rhinoceros in our modern world. The rhinoceros is a homely beast, as Ogden Nash quite rightly pointed out many years ago, and for human eyes he is not a feast, but as long as our prepoceros rhinoceros retains his horn, poachers will overlook the beast’s homely visage in the same way a down on his luck gigolo will overlook the girth of a three hundred pound heiress with a falsetto voice and a diamond-studded wart on her nose. 

The rhinoceros has fallen afoul of Adam Smith, yes it has, and now the poachers’ inexorable need for specie is threatening the species’ existence.  There is a huge demand for rhino horn in Asia, where people believe that ground up rhino horn will cure just about any disease you care to use the stuff to cure, and in the Arabian Peninsula, where guys think that rhino horn knife scabbards are chick magnets.  That a rhino’s horn is nothing more than a really stiff bit of hair does not affect anyone’s belief in the medicinal value of the thing, although I suspect when the poachers run out of rhinos to send along, the buyers in Asia will start buying up the sweepings off the floors of Chinese barbershops and selling that as rhino horn.  Hair is hair, after all, and if a rhino’s horn can cure your colon cancer faster than a speeding surgeon then why can’t your own hair do the same thing at half the price?  I also suspect that until the fashion changes, the guys in Yemen and other wild places will not give up their scabbards, and waiting for men’s fashions to change is like watching Bill Clinton give a speech; you know it must come to an end eventually, but you also know that the continents are slowly drifting towards one another and that North America will smack into Asia before Bill finally says the words, in conclusion, with any degree of veracity.  Fashion rules the world, people, and don’t you ever forget it; the Yemenis will give up their rhino horn scabbards when fashionable American women give up their Manolo Blahniks and not before. 

But I know that our Artful Dodger [and yes, I know who you are, smartass, don’t play innocent with me] did not purloin the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic so that he learn of the plight of the endangered rhinoceros, or if he did, he is a much more sensitive young man than his behavior; he thinks passing gas should be an Olympic event and routinely practices for the event at every opportunity; would otherwise suggest. I think, however, that we can skip this possibility; it does strain my credulity more than you can imagine; and go straight to the heart of the matter: Rio de Janeiro.  Along with the other articles in that now-vanished issue, there was a long essay on modern Rio, and as with any long essay on modern Rio, there were any number of photos of very attractive young women at the beach wearing bikinis.  For many another city, the prevalence of photographs of very attractive young women wearing bikinis might seem a shameless attempt to use sex as a municipal marketing tool—one can hardly imagine such a strategy working for Boise, for example, or for Des Moines, although it might work for any ski town in the Grand Tetons, especially if you’re French—but Rio is a tropical beach city and so the presence of photos of very attractive young women in bikinis is not only in keeping with the subject matter, but a necessity if the National Geographic is to portray life in the Brazilian metropolis accurately.  An accurate portrayal of life in modern Rio de Janeiro is not, however, why this junior league Jesse James, this flatulent little Billy the Kid wannabe from down the street swiped my copy of the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic, no, it isn’t.  He wants to look at the pictures. 

I don’t want to sound unduly harsh here, which is another whopper like the one I started this jeremiad with, but the boy’s parents are devout Roman Catholics, very devout Roman Catholics, which is why they get on so well with my mother.  They tolerate me because I’ve been helping the kids with their history homework for free and it makes no difference what deity you worship or what language you speak, getting something for nothing sounds good in all of them, a fact that explains the ongoing popularity of socialism despite that philosophy’s never-ending record of failure in every country that has tried to implement it.  Now, the parents are devoted to their kids, even the gassy goniff, for reasons that I am not sure I fathom, and they want them to do well in school.  But while the boy does well in math and science, getting him to remember what happened on 7 December 1941 is a bit of a struggle; he knows that someone attacked someone on that date, but he isn’t sure whether that was the day our German allies attacked China or if that was the day the South won the Civil War at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  It was something like that, you know, and it was all so long ago, you know, what difference does it make [actual sentence, folks, straight from the kid’s mouth. Sort of makes you wonder what the hell his history teacher is doing to earn his/her/its salary, doesn’t it]?  So the kid was in my house just after Thanksgiving trying to get my help explaining the effect of the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso on Napoleon’s decision to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States for chump change [the answer, in case you’re interested, is none; Napoleon couldn’t have cared less about any promises he gave the Spanish in that treaty. He needed the money].  I’m not sure how or when the kid made his move; it may have been when I was in the bathroom, or when I was on the phone to my alma mater, explaining why I was not going to send them a donation this year; but whenever it was, at some point when I wasn’t looking, he made his move. 

I’m pretty sure I know why he took it; when I was his age, and I know that nothing causes the eyes of the young to glaze over more quickly than someone prefacing their remarks with the phrase, when I was his age, I’d steal copies of Playboy from mailboxes in the apartment complex over the hill from us. The sap was starting to rise and I wanted to ponder the reason why the sap was doing anything at all; I was very interested in science at the time. And then there are his parents, who would probably chastise him heavily if they caught him with a copy of Playboy in his room. The parents are very nice people, don’t get me wrong here, but I’ve been to their house and it is a bit like going back to the Catholicism of my youth. The place looks like a Catholic tchotchke shop, what with rosaries and candles and portraits of the Blessed Mother draped all over everything.  There’s no Internet in that house, and no magazines that show too much skin, nor blasphemous books nor books with four letter words beginning with f in them; there’s just righteousness, godliness, and Roman Catholicism in copious amounts from the cellar to the attic and everywhere in between.  And while righteousness and godliness are good things, no two ways about it, there’s only so much of the Good Book you can read before you want to read a Bad Book, which leads directly to the theft of my copy of the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic. If you can’t find a Bad Book, you have to make do until you can find one. 

I suppose I should be amused by the 1951 of it all; in an age where thousands of young women routinely negate any chance they may have had of achieving high elective office here in this our Great Republic by appearing in Internet porn, there is something curiously retro about someone stealing a National Geographic just to look at pretty girls wearing bikinis. And yes, I suppose I should be amused by the curious workings of postal karma, in which I, a magazine thief in my youth, am now victimized in the same way that I victimized others forty years ago, completing the cycle of yin and yang, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, so on and so forth ad infinitum.  I suppose I should be, but I’m not, so here’s the deal, you pimply faced farting machine: bring the damn magazine back or I will tell your mother that you’ve got it, at which point I will enjoy watching your mother kicking your flatulent adolescent rump into low space orbit. I am not kidding, buddy boy; cough it up or else!

It is the day after St. Patrick's Day, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, shaking, or otherwise mixing drinks of any kind, for all the little drunks are now too hung over for words to describe. This is a good thing, I think, primarily because young persons do not learn anything unless the anything involved hits them very hard on their incredibly obtuse skulls. This is a lesson that most educators do not grasp fully. Your average teacher still believes that he or she is preparing young minds for the future, whereas your average American high school is simply a very large warehouse where civil servants can collect large paychecks and where the hormonally engorged can conduct their social lives away from their parents' supervision; if someone actually does learn something every once in a while, this is nice, to be sure, but not terribly germane. For this crowd, this is why St. Patrick's Day, or St. Paddy's Day, as they prefer to call it, exists. The day exists so that they may leave their suburban warrens and descend upon the great metropolis, eager to suck up any alcohol they can get their hands on, sit on the big rocks in Central Park, and smoke pot, if alcohol is not immediately available. They won't spend any time, if they can help it, actually watching the parade, although in their defense, I must say that watching oddly dressed pedestrians strolling down the street amidst a self-generated megadecibel cacophony loses interest after a while; said cacophony also damages your eardrums. But they don't forget the patron of the day, the reason that they are wandering around the streets of the metropolis in a drunken stupor. No indeed, scarce five minutes went by yesterday without at least one of these bright young cretins shouting, "St. Paddy's Day! St. Paddy's Day!" This announcement of what everyone already knows was almost inevitably followed by the pronouncement, "I am so totally fucking wasted!", which was also something everyone else could figure out for themselves. It has been a while since I attended Catholic school, and no, I am not going to give a specific figure for just how long a while it has been, but as I remember it, the importance of Patrick came from his conversion of the Irish from paganism to Christianity. I am sure if the central tenet of Irish Christianity was "Let's get hammered" one of the nuns would have told me so. Or maybe I was just sick that day and missed the class. That's always a possibility, I suppose.

THOU SHALT HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER...REALLY: It is a dogma of adolescent existence, one that no normal teenager would think to question anymore than a believing Christian would seriously question the existence of the Trinity, a Buddhist would doubt the workings of karma, or a Yankee fan dispute the diabolical origins of the Red Sox, that the purpose of parents is to humiliate, embarrass, and to otherwise discomfit them in front of their friends. The parents involved may not mean to do so; they may even believe, poor fools that they are, that they are in some way actually helping their adolescent spawn with their social lives; but the view from those enduring the hormonal years will always be that the parents are trying to ruin them in the one arena of life that has any real meaning to these pimply cretins. Parents, in the adolescent worldview, exist primarily to provide economic and logistical support to the teenager and to remain in the background as much as humanly possible. When parents and their demands do come to the fore, the teenager resents the intrusion deeply, as it makes mock of their pretensions of independence, which teenagers prize deeply—most teens, however, would prefer to skip the reality of independence, as this would entail doing their own laundry—and provides fodder for that other great adolescent activity, complaining about their parents. This activity is general throughout the adolescent sphere and serves as a bonding agent between disparate groups of teens. If there is one thing on which nerds, cheerleaders, jocks, and stoners all agree, it’s that parents suck.

Why do parents spend so much of their waking hours attempting to destroy the social lives of their adolescent offspring? Strangely enough, no one knows for certain. In my investigations of the matter, I can find no sociological examination of the subject at all. There are detailed studies of almost every odd subculture one can think of, from the recruitment procedures of New York’s five Mafia families to the sexual and dietary habits of followers of YumYum, the great Melamicropolyindomalaymilkofmagnesian rutabaga goddess, but no great university, it seems, has thought the matter of parental uncoolness worthy of serious scientific study. I am not sure why this should be the case. There are several million teenagers in the United States at the moment, some of whom attend those very same universities that refuse to invest some small portion of their bloated endowments to look into the subject, all of whom would be very interested in knowing why their parents have it in for them and why it is that their parents, despite the teens’ best efforts to educate them as to the folly of their ways, insist on being complete and utter dorks.

I suppose I should not shatter their fantasies of independence like this; teenagers pine for the day when they will finally be free of parental control almost as intensely as their parents pine for the day when the kids will finally be out of the house once and for all; but their parents will go on embarrassing them for as long as their parents live. We do not tell our young people this sort of thing—one cannot tell these bright young faces, these young faces so full of hope and aspiration, and after the yearbook photographer is done retouching the senior class pictures, largely free of acne as well, that there is no escape from their parents, ever—and so we let them move forward into the great world, knowing that they will find out the truth the same way we found it out: the hard way.

Yes, the hard way. I am in no way an adolescent; I graduated from our happy little burg’s high school back when Jimmy Carter was still running for a chance to become the worst president since James Buchanan and I will have you know that I managed to go up and get my diploma and even be civil to the president of the local board of education despite my being the only senior on that football field besides the valedictorian and whatever the second place kid is called who was not completely stoned out of their gourd. Such is the power of clean living. I also have steady employment and a home of my very own, which I own outright and in no way share with the bank. This does little, however, to protect me from my mother’s ongoing attempts to make me look like a first class bastard.

If you’ve been following the weather reports at all these past few months, you will know that we here in the northeastern part of this our Great Republic have endured an eternity of one type of precipitation after another. Since the beginning of the year we’ve had to endure rain, snow, sleet, hail, snow mixed with sleet, rain mixed with snow, snow mixed with rain and sleet, sleet mixed with snow and freezing rain, which always confuses me, as I always under the impression that sleet was freezing rain, but it seems I am mistaken in this view, as there is apparently some small difference between these two vile annoyances detectable only to the most cunning of our nation’s meteorological elite and their very expensive instruments.

We’ve been getting rain, straight up and without the snow and sleet chaser, for most of the past month or so, rain coming down in buckets, in cats and dogs, in Bills and Hillarys, in toads and wombats, use the biological combination of your choice. Whatever pair of beasts you choose to describe the cloudburst, rest assured that the rain was steady, copious, and managed to fill my basement to the height of four feet (no, I’m not kidding; I checked the depth). As you may well imagine, I did not want to test the seaworthiness of my home while all my stuff was still inside and so I immediately called my local volunteer fire department for assistance. Flooding being a general problem that day, I had to wait several hours for our happy little burg’s Bravest to show up, during which time I sat up on my roof in the driving rain keeping a sharp eye out for stray icebergs.

The firemen showed up at length and immediately sprang into action after some coffee and a lemon Danish. They set up the pump and spewed the contents of my basement down my brother’s driveway, washing most of it down onto the street and leaving a canyon in the middle of his road large enough for the Federal government declare the gap a national park if they felt the urge to do so. When the firemen finished their task, I felt a peace and contentment I had not felt for a good many months. This warm and fuzzy feeling did not last, however; it was still raining.

Rain, after a while, will make some people crazy and my mother seems to be one of these unfortunate wretches. Now, you will, no doubt, be saying that a man should not be casting such vile aspersions about his own mother. But I do not cast vile aspersions, calumnies, slanders, libels, statistics, or any other form of untruth; I merely report the facts, and the fact of the matter is that at 3:30 in the morning and in the midst of a heavy downpour of freezing rain, my mother, who will be eighty come her next birthday, decided that it would be a good idea to get dressed and come down to my house to dig a ditch so that the rising water would not come flowing into my boiler room. Apparently, it never once occurred to her to wake me up and tell me of the impending disaster or to hand me a shovel, nor did the deleterious effects of pneumonia on the overall health and well being of an elderly woman in her late seventies ever cross her mind. The following morning she called and told me that the water was about to come into the house, a statement that, in my just arisen stupor, I believed meant that the inundation was imminent. I dropped the phone on my big toe and scooted up to the back door as fast as I could and threw open the back door, there to find a large ditch stretching from a few feet away from said back door to my brother’s driveway, or what’s left of his driveway. Aghast did not even begin to describe my mental state at that time. Absolute horror would be good, but the phrase lacks the oomph needed to really tell it like it was.

I cannot describe how bad this was. Visions of my mother dropping dead in the cold winter rain with shovel in hand while I lay inside snoozing the night away in a warm comfortable bed zoomed through my tortuous Roman Catholic psychospace like so many bootleggers trying to stay one step ahead of the revenuers, provoking a tsunami of guilt and paranoia, to thoroughly mix my metaphors. How would I ever explain this? No one would believe me if I told them that digging trenches in the middle of the night was exactly the sort of thing my mother would do, if she thought any of her sons needed a trench in their back yard. The pile of social opprobrium on my front porch would grow so large I’d need a bulldozer to get rid of it all, and then people would still point at me years later and whisper, look there, that’s the heartless bastard who worked his poor mother to death, he should have gotten ten years in the pen, if you ask me, Mildred. You know, I think teenagers should shut the hell up when it comes to whining about their parents; putting up with parents when all they’re asking you for is an A in pre-calc is easy. Putting up with them when they’re trying to drive you out of your mind in another thing altogether.