After this long on the planet It is very annoying to learn that there is basic information missing from my personal portfolio. But yesterday I was listening to a woman on NPR who was talking about our Black Canyon fire and who used the term “drythunderstorm.” I had never heard that term before.
So I looked it up.
What it means is precisely what happened here last Thursday morning. Ferocious lightning without any significant rainfall. These sorts of storms occur primarily in very dry areas of the country, as found in the Western US. They are a very common cause of wildfires, exemplified by the fact that our recent “dry thunderstorm” produced four fires in this area, which are still burning.
Dry thunderstorm … polar vortex … downbursts … the meteorologists have their own arcane vocabulary which they use to maintain their power and lord it over the rest of us. Someone should fire them all. I’m calling DOGE.
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Main Title Theme (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), by Bob Dylan
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Robin and I are presently exploring the joys of pozole, a Mexican stew made with hominy (dried corn). Yesterday I put together a pozoleverde, made with hominy, tomatillos, jalapeños, chicken, and a few spices. It was delicious. The helpful publisher of the recipe provided instructions for making it in an either a crockpot or a pressure cooker.
I started out with a package of dry hominy, which is the consistency of a bag of rocks and requires some serious soaking and cooking to soften up. Once you get this part done, the rest of the recipe kicks in quickly.
Simple techniques, no special skills required, delicious output. What’s not to like?
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Went with friends Joe and Caroline to a chamber music concert at a local church. Three young musicians played for us, with violin, viola, and a double bass the size of a compact car. The music was excellent.
The bassist was a member of the Navajo nation and he played two of his own compositions. The first of of those was so beautiful and dramatic that I sought him out after the concert and asked if he had recorded it, hoping I might purchase a copy. But no, it was his most recent work and he was still trying it out.
A pity. Would have loved to have had it in my library.
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Not Dark Yet, by Bob Dylan
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I am so totally confused now about the Jeffrey Epstein affair that I don’t know where to start. And the White House isn’t helping by trotting out one scenario after another hoping to find one that will make us all magically forget our names and where we put the car keys and everything else.
The whole business is a good reminder of one of those adages you can hear at any AA meeting. “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember what you said before.” Exactly. And the hapless consortium at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can’t remember in mid-afternoon what they said before lunch.
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“Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?”
The past several days we’ve been traveling and there has been little time for blogging. We’ve moved along by car, which is my favorite way to go, and so passed through Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and southern Minnesota. All along the route and at each bathroom stop on the freeway system, the humidity increased, until I estimate that it is above 100% here in Minneapolis. Or at least that’s what it seems to desert dwellers like ourselves. If you listen carefully you can hear your hair matting on your forehead and the creases falling from your trousers to the floor.
The purpose for the trip was to attend our granddaughter’s wedding. I had been asked to give the bride away, and everyone hoped that I could perform that brief duty without tripping, drooling, exhibiting excessive flatulence, or in any other way embarrassing the family. I think that I did okay, although the reviews are still coming in.
The bride was beautiful, the groom seemed blissfully happy, and the assembly was refreshingly young. When you are a senior citizen you have a lot of social options you can choose from, but most of them are comprised of getting together with groups of other seniors. Moving to a room where the average age is under 30 is a treat. You are reminded of how sleek and supple the bodies of people are when they are in their twenties, and that once upon a time you owned one of those bodies. ‘Twas a pleasant recollection.
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Summertime, by Janis Joplin
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From The New Yorker
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I have let the world turn largely without me during these travel days, but it is a joy each morning to find that we are not yet at war, not in a depression, and have not yet set ourselves completely apart from the rest of humanity.
President Cluck, it seems, has become quite adept at lowering his rank in the opinion polls each time a new one is taken. My take is that the scales are finally dropping from the eyes of those who are willing to see what advanced thinkers like myself have noticed all along. That he is an unprincipled gasbag with no more right to be POTUS than your average intestinal roundworm.
(That may only be my opinion, of course, but you have to remember that once upon a time I was a physician and that makes my opinions so much more valuable than those of your run of the mill poltroon.)
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From The New Yorker
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The journey home has been uneventful so far, except for a 40mph headwind, rampant humidity, and a temperature that held right at 100 degrees all afternoon and early evening. The headwind was so forceful that our Subaru posted the worst mileage day of its life – 24.4 mpg. It was a long day of two-handed driving and subsequent cricks in the neck. At one point I was loading ice into our cooler when I dropped the bag and it flew away too fast for me to ever catch it, although I did run after it for a few yards. So, today I am a litterer. Ugh.
Were there any pluses, you ask? Well, yes, quite a few. Other drivers sharing the road with us on this trip have been remarkably polite and well-mannered. A young man at a gas station came out to the car to offer me a huge bag of ice at the same price as two lesser bags. Another very young man who we asked for restaurant recommendations suggested we try the Crystal Cafe. “I’ve been eating there since I was a kid, and it was always good,” he said. Of course to Robin and I he was still a kid, but the food was very good.
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Summertime Blues, by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
Sunday afternoon Robin and I attended a Zoom training session on grassroots political strategies which was held at the Ute Indian museum out on the southern edge of town. There were probably 20 people in attendance. Besides myself there was only one other man present and he was only slightly younger than I am. Nearly everyone in the room was a senior citizen.
We wondered. Where are the men? Where are the young people?
This conference was broadcast nationwide, and had more than 1700 attendees from just about every state in the country. All of them were deeply interested in what we can do to more effectively oppose the destructive policies coming out of the Cluck administration.
The leader of the workshop was Representative Pramila Jayapal, a congresswoman from the state of Washington. She was an excellent moderator, was very well organized, and kept the session flowing so well that even though it was three hours long it never flagged.
Her enthusiasm was contagious.
What a civics lesson we are receiving! Perhaps it would have been better if the need to attend such lessons hadn’t arisen, and we could just have remained dumb and happy for the rest of our lives. However, it is another one of those situations in life where when bad things happen, the process of dealing with them often reveals something very good. Perhaps a strength you didn’t know you had, for instance.
Robin and I feel that we know much more about what it means to consider ourselves an American citizen. Along with the benefits, there are simply things that need to get done. If we are not doing the work ourselves, there is someone somewhere who is carrying our burden as well as their own.
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Slim Slow Slider, by Van Morrison
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From The New Yorker
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One of Jayapal’s slides contained this diagram, and the explanation that went with it is that when working with people who may not be allies, your true goal is to try to nudge them over one category to the left, not all the way to “active allies.” Even moving them from “passive opposition” to “neutral” is a very positive step. It’s all about shifting balances.
I thought this an interesting approach, and a more useful way of assessing the effectiveness of one’s efforts than “Make any converts today?”
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Finally – a rain arrived on Monday. Actually an all-day drizzle. But we’ll take it and be joyful! It’s been a dry couple of months. While Robin and I are close to ecstatic, the cats feel quite the opposite way. Everything in their expressions says: “What’s this? Wet paws? Wet fur? This is HELL and I’m not having it!”
It is a rare moment indeed that all four of us agree on what is or is not a good day. If we can look at the graphic above, the best Robin and I can hope for at such times is to move the pets from passive opposition to neutral. If they are in the active opposition mode … well … we’re at an impasse and can expect some major scratching of household objects. Like the sofa, or the end tables.
A very long time ago and with another cat (who is now deceased), we experienced what happens when an unhappy animal goes nuclear and declares: “What you see is a carpeted clothes closet. What I see is a litterbox. Deal with it.”
Compared with that, a little grumpiness is okay.
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From The New Yorker
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I tried to follow a recipe for fried chicken breast, the kind with the bones and skin still present, and ran into a problem. The cooking time recommended in the recipe had to be almost doubled because the breasts were so large. Now, in a lifetime I’ve dealt with chickens on various levels, chased them, ran from them, slaughtered more than a hundred, and eaten many times that. I know what an undrugged chicken breast looks like. But these body parts are so huge that I would seriously consider walking across the street to avoid meeting the chicken that was once built of such materials.
The original bird must have been as big as a mastiff, and when you combine this muscularity with a brain the size of a caper, you’ve got a potentially lethal situation. I would hate to have my tombstone read: “Led a decent life until mortally pecked on a public thoroughfare.”
Perhaps there are other things that I should be worrying about, but we all have to deal with what’s on our respective plates, don’t we?
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Cyprus Avenue, by Van Morrison
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Van Morrison was only twenty-two years old when he recorded Astral Weeks, one of the more talked about albums that came out of the sixties. The two pieces I chose today are from that album. Lester Bangs was a prominent music critic of the time, and ten years after the release of the album he was still moved enough to pen these words.
What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
One morning this week I was looking to find something cheerful in the newspapers at around 6 o’clock A.M.. The first thing I learned is that the rice that I love to eat is loaded with cadmium and arsenic at “dangerous“ levels. So, to be an informed rice-eater, I researched and made a short list of what cadmium could do to me:
Pulmonary edema
Chemical pneumonia
Nausea
Vomiting
Diarrhea
Kidney disease
Osteoporosis
COPD
Lung cancer
Dysfunction of my liver, pancreas, and testes
Death
I was going to check on arsenic’s toxicity as well, but by the time I finished with cadmium I was already bummed. Hmmmmm … let’s see … a choice between shrimp fried rice and a trip straight to metabolic hell …
This information comes on the heels of my learning a couple of days ago that eating bagged lettuce is also more dangerous now because the Cluck administration has so reduced the number of food inspectors who protect us as our veggies make the long trip from farm to table that the hazards are increased. So I guess it’s back to good ol’ Soylent Green for me …. wait, what’s that … a little louder, please …
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Grift, graft, corruption, schmorruption … who is surprised by any of Cluck’s vigorous attempts to stuff money into his pockets in these days of dishonor and disrepute? He is a crook, a draft-dodger, a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and one of the champion liars of any generation. He is a caricature of a man. An empty suit.
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From The New Yorker
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Omigosh, our secrets are out! Here is Springsteen opening at a concert in Manchester, England. Damn. Now everyone will know what a bunch of twits are running our show here at home.
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Springsteen is catching four kinds of hell from MAGAland for his speech at the concert. (Because he called American out in a foreign land, he is even called a traitor, as if every word of every celebrity isn’t available instantly worldwide wherever it is uttered.) Over decades, maybe centuries, each time any singer brings up an issue that is in the forefront at the time this sort of reaction happens. And the criticisms are always the same: “He should just sing and leave the politics outside!” They try to ignore one important point, which is that music and politics have a long history together.
Pete Seeger made an entire career out of reminding us of the place that songs had in our own history, especially in labor and antiwar movements. Bob Dylan picked up that torch and carried it for years. Crosby Stills Nash and Young sung beautiful harmonies over sharp words dealing with the Vietnam War and social unrest. Sooo many others.
Music is powerful, and we all know it. It can change minds, sooth or inflame, elevate or depress moods. I don’t pretend to know why, but the far right has much more difficulty coming up with something a guy can hum than the other side does. Seems they are a hort on creativity, as it were. Perhaps that’s one reason they resent it when a Bruce or a Bob or a CSNY belts out yet another moving anthem. They know they have lost another round.
Chimes of Freedom, by The Byrds
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Every year it is the same. In the spring we sort out the camping gear, toss out the broken items, and replace those as well as the ones we just lost somewhere. We arrange the stuff perfectly logically and neatly until it is a joy to behold. By mid-summer chaos has sneaked in and taken over everywhere. As we set up our tent it becomes obvious that neither of us knows where the rubber hammer the we use to pound tent stakes into hard ground has got itself.
We find that if we are to eat anything which requires a tool we must make do, because all we have are spoons. The rest went into the house after the last camping trip and never made it back into the storage boxes. There are now six bottles of insect repellent and no sunscreen at all in the bag of necessaries. A cut finger provokes a search for a Band-Aid and we can only come up with two of them. Where is the First Aid Kit? Abducted by aliens is what we deduce. The first night of any trip when we can’t find the small flashlights that we need to find a bathroom during those early morning hours … it’s not the predators we worry about as much as rocks, cacti, thistles, and tripping over those accursed tree roots.
In short, we go from perfection to woefully unprepared without even noticing, and we do it every blessed year. As of this writing, I have all our stuff laid out in front of me on the garage floor and am preparing to put it back just the way that the universe knows that it should be done … all the while aware that ultimately I will find myself this autumn with only two Band-Aids and no sunscreen once again.
As Sharif Ali says to Major Lawrence in the movie Lawrence of Arabia:
Once upon a time I was a member of a small multispecialty medical group in a small town in South Dakota. One of our perennial problems was recruitment of new physicians, even though the town was pleasant enough, and was in a scenic part of the state. The problem was, we were in South Dakota.
And to the majority of Americans, if the earth had been truly flat, our state would have been off the edge of the world in the place where the maps state: Here Be Dragons. Abandon hope.
So much so that most people made little effort to learn to distinguish between the two states with Dakota in their name, North and South.
So when we finally had a physician come to look us over, we often looked beyond aspects of their personalities that might be thought of as irregular in order to add their expertise to our mix of doctors. But there were limits to which we would go. One example follows.
A middle-aged orthopedic surgeon came a-looking. We already had one physician with that specialty on staff, but being the Lone Ranger was growing tiresome to him, so we wanted desperately to find him a companion. Someone who spoke his language and could share the burden of being on call. This candidate looked good. He was well-trained, with good references, a personable man with only two areas that were worrisome.
The first was that he loved sky-diving as a hobby. From the clinic’s standpoint, if you have a precious resource you hated to think of them jumping out of airplanes where gravity and a recalcitrant parachute could put you right back where you’d been before they came.
He still might have made the cut if it wasn’t for the fact that he liked to sky-dive in the nude. With his girlfriend. And take photographs as he fluttered down.
Somehow this last bit of business was too much for our board of governors, and they told him goodbye. Our clinicians didn’t think of themselves as a prudish bunch, not really, at least not when measured against the average American. Oh, we had our occasional affairs and office intrigues, but as the rest of the world knows, our country has a problem with nakedness at any time outside of infancy. We are a clothed people, and that was that.
On the other hand, another doctor-candidate, a cardiologist, was hired even though one of his qualifications for us was that he had to live in a place where he could feel free enough to step out on his deck of a morning and take a leak (urinate) any time he chose without fear of being arrested.
That seemed easy enough to accommodate, and he was helped to find a home on the edge of town where confrontations would be highly unlikely. We were also sensitive that the deck not be on the west side of the home, where our prevailing westerly winds could be a problem.
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Mean Ol’ Wind Died Down, by the North Missippi All-Stars
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There were two things on Monday that prompted an unscheduled trip to Paonia, a village an hour’s drive from Paradise. The first was that a friend of Robin’s had discovered a restaurant there that she thought was special, and the second was that the weather was a cold (but welcome) drizzle. So off we went. We’d visited this town a couple of times before, but hadn’t really given it a close look, usually we were on our way to somewhere else and stopped for a coffee or something similar.
But this day we located the restaurant, which is called Nido, and at the waitress’ suggestion, ordered the bubblegum plum carnitas tacos on soft corn tortillas. Its ingredients were listed as “crispy pork, local bubblegum plum/jalapeno jam, mixed greens, miso molé mayo, b.p. hot sauce, plum pickle, and cilantro.”
There’s not much to say except that we’d never had a taco like them, and I mean this in the best possible way. They were lovely to look at, actually, and so tasty … excuse me while I salivate at the memory. ‘Twas real food artistry.
Paonia is a town that has a definite cultural vibe. It is artist-friendly, DEI enough to give a Republican acid reflux just thinking about it, with some unobtrusive modern elements nestled among leftovers of the coal mining town it once was. The depressing aroma of gentrification is still absent.
Across the street from Nido is TLC, a shop that dispenses locally made ice creams which were delicious, but take a close look at this part of the menu which was posted on the wall. The attention-grabbing sentence was “To ensure access to everyone, everything on our menu is offered on the gift model so you have the option to cover the cost, pay it forward, or pay what you can.”
Now, I asked myself, when was the last time I dined at a place that offered such options? NEVER! That’s when! What are these people, anyway, socialists? Sheesh! Where were they when I was an impoverished college student barely surviving on the dollar bag lunches dispensed from a campus food truck?
We are thinking about going back when the weather is just a bit warmer and not so bleary and perhaps spending a weekend studying the town more carefully than we have in the past. It is entirely possible that we might gorge ourselves on these delicacies in the photo at right … the bubblegum plum carnitas tacos.
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Corazon Apasionado, by Cuco Sanchez
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It is almost beyond belief that we are still talking about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as an unresolved issue. But the gaps in supervision haven’t been closed, the new perpetrators keep coming, and the old perpetrators die of old age without ever being held to account for their crimes. The Church has been a foot-dragger all along, and this includes Pope Francis, who started out better than his predecessors in this regard, but ultimately failed in his duty to protect the children of the Church. And he had nearly twelve years to do it.
This is a church that has completely lost its way and doesn’t seem to want to find it. Until and only if it does, no child should be left alone with any member of the Catholic clergy. Not for a moment.
It is so tempting for a weak-willed man like myself to say something about the World of Cluck every day, because the insults and outrages come at us just that fast. That is how that particular crapslinger-in-chief works, jabbing and then oozing away, leaving a slime trail and the listener off balance.
What I will say is that the healthiest thing for any one of us to do is step back, let Cluck flail away in a vacuum, and work hard to hollow out the ground under his feet.
We are now witness to the damage possible when two mentally unstable billionaires get together and run a country, so this would be one good place to start. I doubt that there has been any time in history when wealthy men didn’t have more power than the peasantry, but it is greatly magnified right now, and we can clearly see that it is not in America’s interest to let it continue unchecked.
Speaking as a lifelong peasant, getting rid of Citizens United would be my first step. Allowing another farce like this past election, where one man bought himself a president, should not be allowed to happen again.
Right now Congress is too weak to do the job, so my question would be – what do you and I do to change the composition of those two bodies in the upcoming mid-term elections? Where best to put our energies?
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No Bad News, by Patty Griffin
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When a limited cook like myself looks for something new to try, these days the internet is just too tempting as a resource. But what has become obvious to me is that the old and disciplined recipe books of the past provided something that an internet search on “How to make the best omelet in the universe” does not. Reliability and editing are the differences.
Generally any book-published recipe has been tested and retested over time, and the text has been proof-read. All sorts of mischief can come into play when these are lacking. For instance:
You may find that following the recipe faithfully and executing each step perfectly produces a nice plateful of heartburn
You may find that there are ingredients listed that never show up in the Directions section, and then … where to put them?
You may find that tablespoonful measurements are inadvertently substituted for teaspoonfuls – chaos being the result
You may find that although all of the nutrition is there in the final product, it is simply too ugly to eat
And yet, there is at least a 30% chance that later today I will look for yet another version of Mac n’ Cheese out there in the ether. I will type it into Google and trust to the result to feed my wife and I. It’s a mystery to me why I keep doing this. My grandmother would have said that I was soft in the head.
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Come On In My Kitchen, by Crooked Still
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Richard Chamberlain died this past week, after reaching the ripe old age of 90. Actually, when you get to that point you are past ripe, and well into the fruit leather category. I wasn’t a big fan of his, although I thought he did a good job in the original “Shogun”series back in the early 80s.
What I remember very clearly, though, was his effect on middle-aged American womanhood in 1983, when he was the male lead in the television series “The Thorn Birds.” He played a priest in that series, and each week millions of women tuned in, hoping with all their hearts that this would be the week that he broke his vow of chastity.
At work the nurses and female staff would recount the previous night’s episode in detail, and you could tell from their conversation that they were having a bit of trouble with the line that runs between reality and make-believe.
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Go Wherever You Wanna Go, by Patty Griffin
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Our cat Willow is on the road to recovery from … whatever she had. After seven long and heart-wrenching days she is finally up and about and beginning to eat once again. She is far from thriving still, and perhaps I am jinxing things by claiming victory … but it is her victory, we humans being mere cheerleaders.
A sick pet can be emotionally draining, because wherever love goes it goes full tilt and that is not a rational act but a step into a place that is neither wise nor completely sane. At each of the times in my life when my heart had been bruised I resolved to get out of the love business from then on. Too painful when it goes awry, I would say to myself.
A resolution that I never kept.
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Monday our beautiful weather took a turn from unusually nice to far from pleasant. The wind blew hard all that day, and that fast air passed over dry and open fields, carrying dust into our noses and eyes. Even though the temperature was around 60 degrees, wind chills were much lower.
Then on Tuesday we received the double blessing of even colder weather plus a snowstorm. Tonight the temp is headed for 20, and that can do some serious mischief among all those blossoming trees in Paradise.
So we’re socked in for the moment, but with a warm home, food, coffee, two cats, and absolutely nowhere we have to be. Life is good.
Some good things that come from the cold weather are the coping strategies that we use. A steaming bowl of steel cut oats is a warm and chewy way to start a morning. Aromatic soups both mundane and exotic are just the right thing for supper, and their preparation warms and perfumes the rooms.
Sharing a small blanket with a friend while watching television harkens back to the bundling practices of colonial America. And if you and your friend are of like mind, there are delightful liberties that can be taken under that covering.
Those puffy down jackets and coats are amazing armor against arctic weather. Even my 35 year-old Loden parka, heavy wool that it is, is a barrier no icy blast can penetrate.
And when your bathroom feels like the crisper drawer in a refrigerator as you strip down to take a shower, a small portable heater can create a micro-climate just for you.
I think that our cats feel much the same way. Without the need to constantly patrol the back yard against marauders of various species, they can remain indoors and devote themselves full-time to their true love … napping.
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Father’s Son, by Stephen Wilson Jr.
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We still don’t have much snow here in Paradise, and the nearby ski areas are starting to complain that they would like quite a bit more, if you please. Ski resorts here in the mountains so frequently grumble about how much snow they’ve received that in this they are much like the farmers of the prairie states who absolutely never get the amount of sunshine or rainfall that they want.
In general talking to those farmers during the growing season is tiresome. They will rail against the weather of the present, and when they are done with that they will begin bringing up the meteorological misdeeds of the past several decades.
These orations are so similar to one another that farmers could really save themselves time and energy by transcribing one of them and then printing it as a handout to be passed around in place of conversation.
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I can’t recall if I’ve brought this up before, but my approach to cooking is to learn how to do everyday dishes well, and leave the more exotic and the gourmet to others.
So it’s a tasty roast chicken that might come from my stove, but probably not coq au vin. I don’t worry about the intricacies of working with phyllo dough because I skip over any recipe that contains it.
From time to time a new recipe will work out so well that I take one bite and my jaw drops and my pupils dilate. Although this is not a culinary blog, I am going to start sharing with you those times when something turns out that good that I can’t shut up about it. My first such share is for a chicken noodle soup that rocks, and is in a total ‘nother country.
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Cuckoo, by Stephen Wilson Jr.
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Readers of this blog over time have learned that I attend AA meetings pretty regularly. Even though I haven’t used alcohol for a very long time now, there are at least two reasons that I still go to those meetings.
First, one is never “cured” of whatever being an addict is, and so far there has been nothing found that works better than the comradeship and support of people in the same pickle that you are in in maintaining abstinence.
Second, if you have found a small boat to have been a lifesaving tool for you, gratitude leads you to personally want to make sure that such a useful watercraft is tied up to the dock and available for the next person who needs it. An AA meeting can be that boat.
Robin and I are watching the British television series Call the Midwife, and in one of its story threads it has subtly laid out the progression that many people who now suffer from alcohol addiction have followed in their lives. A main character in the show first enjoys the camaraderie and sophistication that she feels when having a dram on special occasions. Then it is on non-special occasions. Then nightly. Daily.
Because the series was so successful and lasted so long, this progression took place slowly over several years, as it often does in real life.
Eventually there come the attempts at self-control and their subsequent failures with accompanying guilt and dishonesty. The lucky ones eventually find their way to a therapeutic community, with AA being one example.
All of this has been laid out quite believably in the series. There are no big dramas, no surgeons passing out and pitching forward into the abdominal cavity (oh, the stories we accumulate), but only a good woman doing what other good women were doing but finding that somehow … inexplicably … she developed a problem while they did not.
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[Sometimes it helps to turn to poets to see through the smoke, at those times when life becomes a dance of perplexity and anguish. A friend of mine long gone used to say “Poets are the last truth-tellers.” Of course, he said a lot of things … some of them were true.]
Exquisite Politics
by Denise Duhamel
The perfect voter has a smile but no eyes,
maybe not even a nose or hair on his or her toes,
maybe not even a single sperm cell, ovum, little paramecium.
Politics is a slug copulating in a Poughkeepsie garden.
Politics is a grain of rice stuck in the mouth
of a king. I voted for a clump of cells,
anything to believe in, true as rain, sure as red wheat.
I carried my ballots around like smokes, pondered big questions,
resources and need, stars and planets, prehistoric
languages. I sat on Alice’s mushroom in Central Park,
smoked longingly in the direction of the mayor’s mansion.
Someday I won’t politic anymore, my big heart will stop
loving America and I’ll leave her as easy as a marriage,
splitting our assets, hoping to get the advantage
before the other side yells: Wow! America,
Vespucci’s first name and home of free and brave, Te amo.
Students … STUDENTS! Take your seats, please. I am about to expostulate right in front of everyone (an act that is a misdemeanor in at least four of the red states , and a felony in two).
My statement for the morning is this. There are rock songs that are as worth studying as some pieces of classical music are, for they are every bit as intricate and complex.
Now I can already see a few haughty noses being raised in the back row there, those of you of privileged breeding who regard such suggestions as being quite preposterous. Must I remind you of the quotation from the philosopher Herbert Spencer:
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
There. I’ve had my say. And now a musical example is provided by Jason Isbell and his band The 400 Unit. To begin with it’s an interesting ballad, but listen carefully to the long break after the second verse. Themes rise and fall, guitars move in and out, percussion waxes and wanes. What is this if not the rock and roll equivalent of chamber music?
Dreamsicle, by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
There will be a quiz on Friday next. Bring your Air-Pods.
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From The New Yorker
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If you accept ovo-lacto-vegetarianism as a thing, I have slowly moved to where I am about 95% vegetarian. Reasons? Health concerns, curiosity, economy … all of these have played their part. But the final straw (or straws) has been the cumulative addition of one horror story after another about how that piece of beef or pork or chicken made its way to my plate. The awfulness of that industry … if you would ask me why it took me so long to get to this point, my answer would probably be twofold, sloth and unwillingness to change.
I have no excuse. I read The Jungle as a teenager. During the ensuing decades since that eye-opener I’ve seen one documentary after another on the meat industry and felt shame each time when I was done viewing.
All of my life I have been picking up bits of knowledge about what it means to be a sentient being, and what our duties and responsibilities toward the rest of the animal kingdom might be. But my eating patterns remained largely unchanged.
So about that remaining 5%? Well, that’s my personal hypocrisy score, I guess. It’s a better number than it was a decade ago, and I confess there are many other areas of my existence where that score would be higher. Slow learner, moi.
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From The New Yorker
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I’ll Fly Away, by Ian Siegal
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Less than two weeks now until we celebrate the national holiday in support of obesity. The only one of the bunch where eating large quantities of food is the whole point. Oh, there are brief mentions here and there about being grateful and giving thanks and all that, but otherwise the articles dealing with Thanksgiving are mostly about recipes.
If I were to decide that each day for the rest of my life I would eat nothing but turkey stuffing, I am almost certain that I would not run out of instructions for preparing variations of these dishes until I was over the age of 125.
And by that time my bloodstream would be 50% creamery butter, I would likely weigh over 600 pounds and when I died I would have to be cremated with a flamethrower. If you Google overeating on turkey day, you will be inundated with suggestions as to how to avoid things like food coma, GI reflux emergencies, and trips to the emergency room for tryptophan overdose.
So you can see how far we’ve come from the first Thanksgiving where the Pilgrims sat down to platefuls of succotash and were grateful for not being dead of starvation, exposure, and disease.
I have my own gratitude list that I compiled some time ago, and keep amending from time to time. It is much like the Pilgrim’s might have been. Grateful for the roof over my head, clothing enough to keep me warm this winter, and food enough for the day. Grateful for the friends that I have now and have had over a considerable lifetime.
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Observations on what has transpired since the recent election. I have my own conspiracy theory which is no more crackpot than many others that are circulating. I think that it is possible that the leaders of North Korea, China, and Russia got together and decided that instead of continuing to amass nuclear arsenals and build up armies against the USA they would do what they could to get Donald Cluck elected to office. It was a far cheaper and more effective approach, knowing that he would appoint one incompetent after another, deliberately sow chaos and disunion in his own government, and undermine agencies, institutions, and programs that had been effective in promoting safety and stability for generations.
It was a genius idea, and we are seeing it play out daily in the media. Half of the country is still gloating in his re-election even as he is busily sawing a leg from the very stool they are standing on.
I would find it hard to feel sorry for them if they ever realize their error and the great national harm of which they have been a part. In fact, I will probably haul out my trusty “I TOLD YOU SO!” and use it as a club to lay about me at will.
I am nothing if not petty.
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Here is where I would like to spend eternity. At the World Cheese Awards. This year there were 4786 entries from 47 countries at the event. It was held in Portugal and the winner was a Portuguese cheese described thusly:
Made with vegetarian rennet created from thistles, the winner is described as a gooey, glossy, buttery cheese with a herby bitterness that’s typically served by slicing off the top and spooning out the center.
CNN Online, November 16
“Slicing off the top and spooning out the center” … have you ever read a more beautiful line in your life?
The photograph below was taken of the judging floor, and ( I am choking up just thinking about it ) those tables are filled with the best cheeses in the entire (bleeping) world. I mean, really, what wouldn’t I have done to get there? To get a chance to wear one of those tan coveralls I might not have killed, but I would certainly have bruised.
The Director of the Guild of Fine Food, which puts on the show, described the atmosphere:
Gathering thousands of cheeses at room temperature under one roof inevitably produces an intense aroma. “It’s very punchy,” is how John Farrand, managing director of The Guild of Fine Food, the contest’s UK-based organizer, described the atmosphere at the event.
CNN Online
So probably not for everyone. I have known people who swooned from the aroma of a single well-aged chunk of Roquefort unveiled at a party.
Little Home In The Valley 