Excuses.

I don't have an excuse, folks. It's just lethargy. Pure sloth. I have two things on the griddle and I may get back to them eventually. Or not, as the case may be.

Anthony Bourdain

I had a dream on Saturday night, yes I did, but first, a little background.  When I am not writing for this blog, which, let’s face it, is most of the time, I am either working diligently in a sideways sort of fashion at the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread or I am going to bars and photographing the musicians playing at those bars.  Saturday was an exceptionally productive night; people were out and about, some of them were drinking heavily, and in the presence of a 1980’s cover band, a good many of them started dancing like there was no tomorrow. I am very partial to this sort of photograph. The trouble with photographing musicians in bars is that there is nothing inherently dramatic about what musicians do up on the stage. It is very much like trying to capture effect without also capturing the cause of the effect. After all, the person looking at the photograph of the musician after the fact cannot hear the music.  So what I do to compensate for this is that I try to capture the looks on the musicians’ faces as they play in order to convey the emotional intensity of people doing something they love. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t—some musicians are extravagant with their expressions, while others just look down at their instruments trying to make sure that they don’t drop notes or play in the wrong key; it is pretty hit or miss, as is almost anything so dependent on a person’s personality— but what does work on a pretty consistent basis are photographs of people dancing. Dancing means the music is hot and people are having a good time, and who doesn’t like seeing people have a good time? I know I do and I suspect you do as well. Anhedonia, like Marxism, cheese and squirrel sandwiches, and the designated hitter rule have no place in any civilized society. 

As I said, it was a productive night photographically and I got home much at a much later hour than a man my age should be getting home at. I was still wound up; watching other people have fun takes a lot out of a person, you know; and so I watched the news for an hour, which, at that time, was all about Anthony Bourdain dying in France. I finally got to bed at about five and promptly skipped all the preliminary stages of sleep and went directly to deep sleep and stayed there for a while, enjoying the ambiance of the place and the free pistachios with an equally free wine cooler, compliments of the house. Several hours later, I was sitting in my spot at the end of the bar in my favorite watering hole, drinking a Diet Coke and doing what everyone does in such a social setting: I was looking at something on my cellphone. Consequently, I paid no attention to who was coming and going; it’s a bar, after all—someone is always coming and going. A customer came in and sat at the corner and asked Corinne, the pride of Melbin, South Australia, an actual place or so Corinne tells me, for a Corona and a lemon. I looked up to ask Corinne for the bill and stopped. Anthony Bourdain was sitting at the corner of the bar looking at Corinne as she pulled the Corona out of the fridge. As I am never at a loss for words in any social situation I said, “You’re dead! What are you doing here?”  Bourdain twisted the top off of the Corona and looked at me. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Bad decision there. What’s your excuse?”

And then I woke up.  That was three days ago and I am still wondering what my excuse is. I must have one, right?

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.  

Aft times gang agley

So the thing of it was, I had plans, big plans, to get another screed done in no time at all and post it, but things have gone awry, as they are wont to do, and I figured I should explain what happened.  This planned screed, which is actually half way done, was not one of the usual pieces that I put up here, a bit of lightweight fluff about nothing very important, but a deep, really deep, think piece about the NFL players in London a few weeks ago kneeling for The Star-Spangled Banner and standing for God Save The Queen.  I had all manner of facts and figures and I was marshalling all sorts of arguments to prove my point—I can do that, you know, it’s a free country—in order to show that the NFL players were historical idiots, but I had other things to do at work and at home that had to get done; I'm sure you know how that is; and so I had to put a hold on proving my point and go do them. It’s all very boring when not actually being tedious, but most of life is boring when not actually being tedious; what can you do?  Having to put the piece off annoyed me no end because they—the NFL guys, I mean—were being historically ignorant, you know. Think of it like this: There were over six hundred thousand slaves in the United States at the time of the 1790 Census, which is only fourteen years after the United States declared its independence, only seven years since the 1783 Treaty of Paris that formalized American independence, and just three years since the United States adopted the current Constitution.  So it makes sense that except for the youngest of the slaves, most of those six hundred thousand people were born here or they or their ancestors were brought here by the people who ran the United States before the United States became the United States.  The people I speak of were, oddly enough, the British, whose flag is apparently not a sign of racism and oppression nowadays despite their being the people who caused America’s problems with racism and oppression in the first place. This is a bit of a conundrum for me, but I guess that I am the only one who feels this way.  The NFL was playing in London that day and criticizing the British role in the American slave trade was not on, if only for reasons of political tact. Personally, I do not see the reason for this sudden reluctance to point out the obvious, unless the NFL players did not know that they were in the presence of America’s original racist oppressors.  This is very possible, given that K-12 education in the places where most NFL players come from tends to be execrable in the extreme and that their college educations consist largely of remedial classes and in-depth studies of underwater African-American lesbian basket weaving.  It may be too much to hope for historical literacy under those circumstances; it is enough that they are literate enough to sign their names at the bottom of their lucrative contracts without using an X.  That can be very embarrassing, or so people tell me.

But I haven’t had a chance to get all of this good stuff down on paper, so I guess I should apologize for that and let everyone know that I am working hard on the piece and that I will put it up here just as soon as I can. And I trust you are all in good health and enjoying the weekend. Good night.

Apologies

I realize that I spend an inordinate amount of time here apologizing for not writing more and I would not want to bother you with more excuses about why I haven't written for here in quite a long time (if, on the other hand, you want excuses, I have them in abundance and I will be more than happy to share them if you want me to do so.)  Having said that, the long, and by long I do mean very long, summer hiatus is coming to a close and I will be putting something up here shortly. I also realize that I make that promise a lot without ever following through with it, but this time I really mean it. Yes I do.

And so it goes

The thing of it is, of course, that I keep intending to get back to the writing desk and do something new. Yes, I do. Now I understand that some of you are snickering right now, that you have heard me sing this song before and that you are thinking to yourselves that he’ll never get back to it unless someone with a gun makes him sit down and write, but you would be wrong—I have every intention to sit down and write some more for the blog, just as I have every intention of losing thirty of forty pounds; I just haven’t decided when I am going to do this. But I am writing for the blog, I am, I really am,

and I don't care how much you say otherwise. I have my pencils out and the paper (I use yellow legal paper, just in case such things interest you. I can’t imagine why this would interest you, but there are people in this world who collect sports memorabilia even though they know that most sports collectibles are fakes and there are others who think that having the world’s greatest collection of fifteenth century Moldovan bathroom fixtures is an actual accomplishment as opposed to being a sign that these people have way too much time on their hands).  And there is actual writing on that legal pad! Yes, there is. I am writing something right now despite what the cynics and the backbiters and the faultfinders say behind my back and to my face.  So take that, smart guys! 

In other news, my mother has the flu. I realize that my mother having the flu is not really a big deal; lots of people have the flu at this time of the year—it is flu season, after all—but she was one of the first people to get her flu shot this past year and finding out that the twenty-five dollars she shelled out for the shot was for naught did not make her happy, as if the coughing, sneezing, fever, and all the other foulness that accompany the flu were not enough to make her unhappy. What is really rankling her, however, is that she could not go to church today.  If you live in a place where there are a decent number of Roman Catholics, you will have noticed today that many of them are wandering the highways and byways with dirt on their foreheads.  The Papists are doing this on purpose (they’re like Commies that way, you know). Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the penitential season of Lent, and on this day Roman Catholics have their foreheads marked by a priest who intones, remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return—like so many things, this sounds much more impressive in Latin: Meménto, homo, quia pulvis es, et in púlverem revertéris.  This is to remind us all of our shared mortality. Well, my mother has had a priest slather dirt on her forehead every year since 1934 and is deeply annoyed that she could not go to church today to keep the streak going. What makes the end of the streak even worse is that she is blaming me for this. 

I am not sure how this is my fault: I did not give her the flu, I did not plan for her to get the flu, I did not enter into a grand conspiracy with the forces of secularism and British imperialism to give her the flu, and I did not deliberately expose her to people with the flu. I did not do any of these things, but her having the flu is my fault, just as it is my fault that the deer chow down on her azaleas and hedges. In short, logic and rational argument are not going to work in this case. Like original sin, the fault is mine whether I want it or not, and despite the fact that I haven’t done anything to deserve the opprobrium. And so it goes, as a wise man once said.

Notice of intent

Just popping here to let you guys know that there is, in fact, stuff on the way, and no, I am not making that up. Not right now, of course, but certainly by Sunday, I think. Until then, enjoy the comforts of hearth and home, kith and kin, this and that, you get my drift. Meanwhile, here in the Vampire State, the leaders of both the State Senate (a Republican) and the State Assembly (a Democrat) are both under indictment for being more crooked than a pig's penis. Bipartisanship, it's a wonderful thing.

UPDATE: I am sitting here at my desk in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread.  This is not unusual; I often sit at my desk here, except when I go for lunch, whereupon I will leave my desk and this building behind in a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to break free of the suffocating bounds of a rotting Christian morality and establish myself as an avatar of the Nietzschean Ubermensch with a Subway's meatball marinara sandwich and two chocolate chip cookies,  instead of the increasingly decadent roast beef  sandwich with mayonnaise and black pepper; but what is striking me as very strange is that I am the only one who seems to be doing so. Sitting at my desk, I mean, just in case you lost the thread of the previous sentence as thoroughly as I did. The place is empty. Did someone declare a national holiday today, and if so, how come I am the only person who didn't get the memo? Curiouser and curiouser, Akaky said to himself, and then wondered when the rabbit with the watch will going to show up, preferably with some not stale lemon danish. Cherry danish is acceptable as well, but raspberry danish is not. Standards must be upheld, lest the fabric of civilization disintegrate completely and leave us all in a Hobbesian state of nature without any clean underwear.