Random Thoughts

April 24, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     First, let me get this out and off my chest.  I'm sick and tired of Elon Musk and his car company and his silly space ideas and his big proposed bullshit solutions to big problems, solutions that never materialize.  Most of all, I'm tired of seeing his weird face plastered all over the news.  He looks like he's from another planet, so maybe he should just go back home, already.  Those of you who don't live in California probably don't see as much of him as I do, because he's based out here and he and his Tesla company are the darlings of local industry.  But I'm reasonably sure you see more of him than is warranted by anything he actually does.  I mean, come on!  Electric cars?  They were around before the internal combustion engine caught on.  Nothing new by way of technology there, folks.    Well, I'm glad we had this little talk.  Now on to some other more important things.

     Like many of you, I've been cautiously venturing out to the grocery store on occasion, to lay in provisions, like they used to say in the cowboy TV shows.  "Where's your paw, Mark?"  "He went into town to get provisions."  This would be a once-a-month kind of thing, with the Rifleman, or Hoss Cartwright, or whoever, going to the mercantile store and buying a wagon load of flour, some sorghum (whatever the hell that is), hard tack biscuits, bacon, and lard.  You know, the stuff you need for everyday eating.  Well, like the pioneers of old, I foray every two weeks or so into my local mercantile, namely Walmart, to get a shitload of stuff.  On each successive trip I notice new virus-prevention safety measures in place, making me wonder why many of them weren't in place a month or more ago.  Yesterday I went, and for the first time I didn't see a single person without a mask.  Great.  Some people wore them sulkily, as if they were children who were only following the rules because they HAD to, but most wore them dutifully and with some hope that they'd do some good.  There are also now, in theory at least, one-way aisles, to reduce the amount of passing too closely with carts.  The signage in this regard is rather subtle, even wimpy, with little one-foot squares on the floor at the beginning of each aisle indicating whether you should not enter, in red, or "walk this way" green signs with arrows.  (These latter got me to singing "Walk This Way" by Aerosmith over and over in my head as I strolled the aisles.)  The thing is, people who grocery shop are not looking at the floor all that much, because, let's face it, the groceries are not on the floor.  The more observant and better-informed-in-advance among us did notice the directional signs, but many--perhaps a third or more--did not, and simply wandered up and down the aisles irrespective of whether they were going the right way or not.  Once a woman in front of me chewed somebody out for this, but for the most part the failure to observe the directional signs went unnoticed, or at least only silently noticed, as we all concentrated on our tasks at hand, and some of us on keeping the hell away from other people.  Even the staff didn't try to enforce the directional signs.  In fact, our friendly Walmart customer service crew seemed to be the least observant of any of the rules; though they all wore masks, they continued to gather together closely in little tete-a-tetes as if the mere fact of wearing masks made them invulnerable and immune.  Or maybe they're just being fatalistic, considering the inherent danger of their low-paid, no future jobs.  Like coal miners of old.  But talk about setting bad examples for the shopping public, particularly because where I shop is under what you might call a triple edict:  a local Palm Springs municipal order to wear masks and keep at least 6 feet away from anyone else; a Riverside County fiat to do the same; and a social distancing order of a similar nature from the California state governor, suggesting masks but not ordering them. 

     These trips to the store have been, as I say, an adventure on a par with Chuck Connors taking the wagon into town through Indian territory.  (This latter comment is not completely a joke, since a good portion of the land in the City of Palm Springs, perhaps half of it, is in fact owned by the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, and rented to the local white man, including possibly the land on which Walmart is situated.)  As an observer of the human condition, I have been noticing, for several shopping trips during the virus crisis, that grocery shoppers are a singularly preoccupied lot.  I've only noticed this because I'm on alert, otherwise I'd be just as preoccupied.  Shoppers are on a mission, hunting and gathering, and tend to get lost in thought or mystified while looking for something high on a shelf.  For many, if not most, shoppers, this general approach to shopping has not abated much at all.  It's as if most people are incapable of the potentially life-saving multi-tasking required of them in these times.  One of course wants to buy groceries, as always.  But one also ought to want to be mindful of others, and to steer clear of them.  Not so, at least for the majority of folks.  They just get lost in their little worlds, as they always have done when grocery shopping.  Think about it: when was the last time anybody at a grocery store gave a shit about anybody else except in the most perfunctory way?  Sure, you try not to run into anybody or kick any children, but otherwise, it's every shopper for him- or herself. and the devil take the hindmost.  Today we're in a unique situation where we are being asked to take not only our own health and safety into consideration, but simultaneously the health and safety of others.  It's as if someone asked us to make sure the people driving next to us had their seat belts fastened.  Absurd, right?  Who gives a shit about the person next to you on the road, as long as they don't hit you.

     Now we're being asked to stay away from each other not just to make sure we don't get sick, but to make sure they don't get sick from us, unbeknownst to us.  This latter half of the equation has proved to be too much for many--Republicans in particular, who by definition are not good at empathizing with or caring about anyone else, otherwise they wouldn't be Republicans.  In fact, this characteristic of Republicans (by which of course I mean Trump supporters) has been their hallmark lately, as they hide behind a perverted interpretation of the First Amendment to protest stay-at-home orders and get out and go back to doing what they feel like doing.   Well shit, we'd all like to get back to doing what we feel like doing--going to restaurants, walking closely beside others, not wearing masks.  But some of us, who appreciate the concept of the common good, have decided to subordinate our immediate desires to that good.  Right wingers, led by the example set by their leader, are not only heedless and ignorant of the concept of the public good, but also apparently incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves.  Government of the selfish, by the selfish, and for the selfish is their credo as they careen down the highway of destiny.  Can you imagine anyone during the middle ages parading down the streets proclaiming their RIGHT to get the bubonic plague, or to give it to someone else?  People would have thought they were crazy.  They barely understood the disease, or the germ theory of disease, in anything like the way we understand it today, but one thing everyone knew was that they sure as fuck didn't want to get it, and if they could help it, they didn't want to give it to anyone else.

     Well, that's Republicans for you.  As someone once said, you can't argue with stupid. 

       

Finding It

April 15, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     The other day my daughter Katie said, "During this time, instead of losing it ... I think I'll find it."

     She may have meant this as a joke, or perhaps as a bit of self-reassurance.  Or maybe both.  But the statement carries with it the seeds of inspiration.  It would be pretty easy to lose it, as they say, during this period of forced self-isolation.  The initial chaos of sudden confinement settles into routine, and routines give way to monotony, and monotony begins to fray nerves and to magnify the tiny bumps of daily life, so that like the Princess and the Pea we become conscious of ordinarily imperceptible irritants.  In this regard I feel fortunate.  I've put my pickiness on hold out of necessity.  And I am particularly lucky that I get along with my wife quite well, and that she's put her pickiness on hold too.

     I am not by nature either a Princess or a Polyanna.  I think I'm what you might call very cautiously optimistic.  It seems to be the best overall approach to the world, for me at least.  For some it might not be enough positivity.  For others it might be silly, given the grim realities of life, especially now, but really, any time.  After all, life ends in death for all of us, but we spend those lives either ignoring that fact or postponing thinking about it, or making up fairy tales about an afterlife.

     With regard to the current virus crisis, I try to keep a balance between full awareness of the knowledge of the harsh likelihoods of the immediate future and the rather intriguing and encouraging pieces of information that daily make themselves known--things like medical device manufacturing, drug testing, statistical analysis of trends including the prediction of the rising and flattening of the curves of the disease.  There are also the uncountable instances of human kindness and bravery--indispensable public servants staying on the job, health care workers overextending themselves for the sake of others, grocery store employees continuing to work what in the very best of times must be pretty shitty jobs.  And then there are those who exemplify human stupidity and shortsightedness--people congregating outside shoulder to shoulder, certain types of stores staying open for no good reason, preachers holding live church services, people thinking that because they feel pretty good they should be able to act as if nothing's going on.  And that's not even counting the almost supernatural ignorance, selfishness, and mendacity of the man who is supposed to be leading the country.

     Finding it, so to speak, has become a pastime with me during my isolation.  I'd already been using the usual streaming services for movies and other television entertainment, as well as online versions of magazines and local and national newspapers.  But I've found some really interesting statistical websites for use in tracking the virus throughout the world, thanks mostly to my wife.  For some, these detailed statistics might be too much information about an unpleasant situation.  For others, who are not accustomed to using the internet for research or verification purposes, but only for exchanging vapid social pleasantries and believing everything they're told, such real statistical information might be inaccessible, given their limited outlooks and imaginations.  For me, it's a sort of tonic that, if taken in moderation, helps me to understand things as they change.  Italy's curve is beginning to flatten, slowly, for example.  They had the lowest daily death count today since a month ago.  China is doing pretty damned well, too.  The U.S. now accounts for almost 40% of all active cases of the virus worldwide.  Bulgaria, for some reason, is doing pretty well, probably because nobody gives a shit about it and they don't go there.  Closer to home, the Coachella Valley death count has been pretty stable, and pretty low, for a couple of weeks.  Maybe that will change, and maybe not.  Tune in tomorrow.  All of these things provide me with grist for the mill in my mind that tries to make rational sense of the situation without getting too optimistic or too pessimistic.

     The people for whom I condescend to feel most sorry these days are not those who get their "news" from Facebook (God help them), but those who rely on, and keep their television sets tuned to, 24-hour TV news services for their information, even the more "liberal" ones like CNN and MSNBC, because as watchers they must live with the constant "breaking news" harangues from the talking heads who really have very little to talk about on the busiest days, and must stretch it out into endless hours of palaver.  The same thing happens when you read the newspapers, with their meaningless "human interest" stories about "one town's struggle," and all that horseshit, but at least you can just turn the page of a newspaper.  But that's not the worst part:  all of these TV news services put the ugly face of the president in front of us on a daily basis, often for long stretches at a time.  Sure, it's often to criticize him afterwards, but the truth is that he gets so much free publicity from the news that after a while people get used to seeing him.  That's the worst part--getting used to seeing him.  It's like turning on the History Channel and seeing Hitler and Nazis all the time.  That simply isn't healthy for the human mind, even if the shows end with their demise and that of the Third Reich.  It regularizes evil, and dulls us to images of evil.  The same goes with pictures of Trump.  If you hate the guy, seeing him too often will make you get used to him, and you shouldn't get used to someone or something you hate--it's just not healthy, because eventually you'll lose your perspective and start relying on the regular consumption of the images of the person or thing you hate.  That's why churches don't put pictures of Satan up everywhere, for crying out loud.  It doesn't make sense.  Sure, everyone knows about Satan, but they don't have to see pictures of him all the time to understand that he's evil.  If they put images or stained glass windows of him everywhere, pretty soon people would start worshiping him, because, let's face it, he's a lot more interesting-looking than Jesus is, even in his nude homoerotic agony on the cross.  The same thing has happened in reverse to viewers of Fox News with respect to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the socialist congresswoman from New York City.  They hate her so much that they publish stories about her almost every day, whereas the Democrats and their followers have adopted a ho-hum attitude toward her.  Yeah, they say, let her be the voice of the left wing of the party, but after all, she's a freshman with practically no power, and not even old enough to run for president, so just let her talk.  Meanwhile, I guarantee you, if you want to know anything about AOC, as she's known, you have to go to Fox News, where they love to hate her so much that she's developed almost a cult revulsion following.  It doesn't hurt that she's easy on the eyes (just imagine if Trump were that attractive what a mess we'd be in), because one thing Fox News knows better than any other network is that cute women attract viewers, which is why the average Fox News person on air is an attractive blonde.  I will bet you dollars to donuts that the die-hard Fox News male watchers are sitting in their recliners jacking off to AOC just as much as they are to any of the rest of them.

     But aside from the news, with the help of friends I've found such things as a website containing tens of thousands of books whose copyrights are expired, just ready for easy streaming onto my laptop.  And of course if one wishes to pay money, there are endless more recent books as well.  Since I am a devotee of 19th century British and American fiction I am in hog heaven, reading Conan Doyle, Balzac, Dreiser, and others.  Once you scrunch the pages down to the width of a book page, they're pretty easy to read. 

     Another thing I've found is an increased need to communicate with my friends and an excuse to do so.  Also, I have found an interest in my extended family that is more than abstract.  For some this might have been the way of things before this crisis, but for me, as a person naturally prone to isolate, it was not.  Somehow enforced isolation brings with it more of a tendency to reach out than the regular shutting out of the world did before. 

     And to put a final point on all this, I have found small pleasures in small things, like birdsong and flowering bushes and small animals and various types of weather, that somehow never made much difference to me before.  "Glory be to God for dappled things" as Gerard Manley Hopkins said.

     All of this might emanate from a kind of semi-mad stir craziness that will fade away when the virus does.  That remains to be seen.  I hope not, because I've found some pretty good things.   

Home, For Now

March 29, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     The RV park where we're staying is pretty nice, as these things go.  Last year we stayed at a place that was much more redolent of trailer park than RV park, if you know what I mean.  There were permanent residents, as there are here, but many of them had converted their small pull-behind trailers into tiny houses, complete with little plastic picket fences, lawn trolls, and Japanese lanterns.  These were, for the most part, people who couldn't afford to live anywhere else and who would have decorated their lawns like that even if they lived in regular houses, replete with year-round Christmas lights.  From the open screen doors of their dwellings came the jagged coughs of elderly smokers and the rough baritones of whiskey-voiced women.  Life had ridden most of those folks hard and put them away wet, and what they had to show for it was a trailer and a few square yards of crappy living space.  To be sure, there were a number of spaces there for transient vacationers such as ourselves, but the atmosphere was, shall we say, mixed.

     This year's dwelling place is a cut or two above that.  As I said, there are a few year-rounders, but all of them, and the majority of the rest of the occupants, have large nearly-new class A motor homes or spacious fifth wheels of the sleek variety, often exceeding 40 feet in length, with three or four sliders.  Having attended several annual RV shows at the Pomona Fairplex in LA County, I know that the class A's of that size often cost over $250,000 new, and the fifth wheels about half that.  Our modest 2006 32-foot class A looks perfectly respectable, but somewhat small and doughty, by comparison.  And we bought it when it was 11 years old, so it cost less than one of the overpowered four-door pickup trucks that seem to be the vehicle of choice for pulling a fifth wheel.

     Perhaps half the denizens of this park hail from Canada, and mostly from British Columbia.  A fair number of the park dwellers, and the Canadians, are male gay couples.  However, in light of the acceleration of the coronavirus epidemic, most of the Canadians cleared out at least a week ago, heading for an uncertain border crossing and what they assume will be a 14-day quarantine once they get home.  The mass migration of the Canadians, like that of the painted lady butterflies hereabouts or the monarchs over in the California central coast, was to be expected anyway, but not for another month or so.  Entomologists might say, "Well, the Canadians are a little early this year."  These Canadians are restricted to no more than 182 days (I think) per year in the U.S., and if they overstay their welcome here in the land of the free, they risk being prohibited from re-entering for up to five years.  And worse yet, from their point of view, if they stay for a half year or more they will be subject to U.S. and, I presume, California income taxes.  Despite their unfettered leisure time and apparent affluence, which permits them, despite the comparative weakness of the Canadian dollar, to spend their time in quarter-million-dollar RVs, and travel back and forth to California (not to mention for some of them the Mexican Pacific resort areas), they seem to regard the whole subject of the virus and forced social distancing (which they don't observe very well, considering that most of them are in a vulnerable demographic group), as something of a joke, and really, more of an annoyance than anything else.  Perhaps it's in their national character to act mildly annoyed and bemused by just about everything, as a sort of antidote to what they may justly regard as the U.S. tendency toward shrill hysteria.  I don't know. 

     Fortunately for most of them, the weather in the Vancouver area, where they are principally from, is comparatively mild in April.  There is a couple from Ontario still here, and they're not going anywhere just yet, for obvious reasons.  That leaves a smattering of U.S. folks, mostly from places like Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and South Dakota, from whence, like us, they've come to miss out on winter.  And the year-rounders I mentioned.  It's rare to see a motor home from east of the Mississippi, or from south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Folks out there go to Florida or just stay where they are. 

     And speaking of staying where you are, we are doing just that.  The virus situation is unfolding and unforgiving and changing so rapidly that it's not even worth going into detail about it here.  You can read the newspapers or the online stuff, and anything I say now will be at least partly obsolete tomorrow.  We're staying in and taking walks around the sparsely populated park and doing lots of reading and some TV streaming, which in truth is what we were doing anyway, except that now there's no going out for sushi and Thai and Mexican and to the movies.  I go out every ten days or so to the grocery store and take all the precautions I can short of wearing a hazmat suit.  This is life for most of us around the world, so I'm not telling you anything.  And if it's not life for you, then you're a fucking fool, and a dangerous one at that, unless you have the misfortune of being a healthcare worker, grocery store employee, or cop or firefighter, in which case I wish you the best and urge you, in the case of the cops, not to shoot anybody.

The City of Dank

March 7, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     It seems that Cathedral City, our home away from home this winter, has been freely zoned for marijuana dispensaries, and contains more of them than the other towns here in the Coachella Valley.  The Coachella Valley, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is the Southern California desert lowland in which Palm Springs is located at the northwestern end, followed, heading southeastward, by Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, and Indio, then more southward through Coachella, Thermal, and Mecca, to the Salton Sea.  The area is about 45 miles long altogether and an average of fifteen miles from north to south, bounded more or less by Interstate 10 on the north and California 111 on the south.  It ranges from just under 500 feet above sea level at Palm Springs to 272 feet below sea level on the surface of the Salton Sea.  But altitude is not really important to the issue of marijuana sales, except perhaps in terms of how high one must get in order to be as high as the folks in, say, Denver.

     The legal recreational marijuana industry, here in California as in the other states where it exists, has given rise to a unique set of commercial nuances.  Business names and logos are important, just as they are in fast food or tax preparation, for instance.  Places must be easily recognized for what they are, and labeled in such a way that they will attract the intended clientele.  That clientele can vary.  Of course there are the everyday stoners who just want to get high, who I'm sure make up the bulk of the customer base of any marijuana dispensary, just as everyday or regular drinkers, as differentiated from those who take a drink only on special occasions, keep the alcoholic beverage sales industry going.  But there are also the folks who consider marijuana something more (or perhaps less) than a THC delivery system--those who believe in the curative, sedative, and restorative qualities of the noble weed.  Of course, now that recreational marijuana use is legal across the board in a number of jurisdictions and trending more that way, much of the bullshit, quasi-bullshit, and sincere beliefs that fostered the prescription-only medical marijuana industry, such as its anti-nausea qualities, its ability to relieve pain, its calming effects, and the various real or imagined magical qualities of hemp in all its forms, may be dispensed with as pretexts for its legality.  No longer do ardent users have to try to persuade legislatures of the inherent goodness of weed, like children trying to convince their parents that joining the circus would be a good thing because it will enable them to broaden their horizons.  Here again the analogy to alcohol is strong.  Even during Prohibition, pharmacies were permitted to dispense alcohol for medicinal purposes, many of which were believed to be similar to those of marijuana--it can calm you down, it can relieve pain, it makes other medicine go down better, etc.  In the 19th century and before, alcohol was just about the only reliable medicine, along with opiates, available to the general public, and furthermore was one of the only safe things to drink, besides boiling-hot tea and coffee, from the standpoint of being free of waterborne pathogens, such as cholera.  For that reason, the consumption of beer and wine were considered downright healthful, and laudanum, which was opium dissolved in alcohol, was a sure-fire winner, and generally thought to be good for what ailed you, from tuberculosis to migraines to menstrual pain.  Addictive as hell as it turned out, but as long as it was cheap and legally available, not so terrible in the minds of the public.

     All of which brings us back to Cathedral City and its many marijuana dispensaries, often including on-premises consumption lounges.  Although I have not partaken of this earthly delight for many years, since back when it was illegal everywhere in this country and far less potent that it is today, I remain fascinated by the existence of the thriving legal dope-selling industry as it begins its life--something I never thought I'd see.  Within a few blocks, or at most a mile, of where we're situated, there are several dozen such emporiums, and their names are often fanciful, and probably more varied than the products they sell.  One place advertises on a billboard, "Smoke it, Eat it, Drink it, Enjoy it."  Green crosses frequently signal dope shops, just as in Europe the green cross is the universal sign of a pharmacy.  Here are some of the names of the places I pass nearly every day:  Mother Earth's Farmacy, Cathedral Green, Atomic Budz, House of Lucidity, and The Vault.  A little further out, but still in Cathedral City, one can find Dank DePot, Green Cross Pharma, West Coast Cannabis Club, Iguana Collective Dispensary, The OG Collective, and more.  But by far my favorite, by name, is The City of Dank, a place situated nearby in a tiny strip mall, together with a Philly cheese steak restaurant and the Show Girls Gentleman's Club.

     During the many years I have been out of the marijuana consuming game, so to speak, the terminology has changed.  We used to call it grass, or weed, or dope, or reefer, or (not very often) pot.  And if it was strong, we'd simply say it was "good" or "righteous" or maybe "killer."  A marijuana cigarette was a joint, and a pipe was a bong.  Types might include Acapulco Gold, something with the word "red" in it, I think, and most often just weed of unknown origin.  Much of it was filled with seeds and stems, and flower buds were a rare treat.  My memory is, understandably, foggy about any more details than that.  But suffice it to day, things were a bit simpler.  And as with anything else, one falls out of the loop, jargonwise, quite quickly if one does not keep up.

     Today, as with the marketing of alcoholic beverages, there is, if anything, an excess of choices, nuances, and sales pitches for marijuana.  Does it give you a body high, a head high, a creative high, or a combination thereof?  Is it relaxing or is it downright shit kicking and hallucinogenic?  In the world of alcohol, the simple drinking of a beer, a beverage with very little alcohol, something that should take about a minute and a half followed in a few more minutes by the need to urinate and another beer, has become a Big Fucking Deal, far beyond the rather lowly status of such a pedestrian potable.  There are craft beers and specialty beers and fruity beers of all kinds, and the bulletin boards of bars and restaurants will list them all, including their relatively puny alcohol contents, for the serious and "discerning" consumer.  To be sure, there have always been different types of beer--lager, Pilsener, porter, and stout, to name a few--but the act of selecting one or the other, and the absurd snobbery associated therewith, has never before been elevated to such complicated heights.  Even the act of putting a slice of citrus fruit in the neck of a beer bottle would once have been considered an irksome hindrance to ready access to the contents of the container.  Wine and wine loving was always a more complicated thing, since it was inherently something to complement food, or to come before or after a meal, so taste and flavor and quality meant more.  The only kinds of food beer pairs well with, really, are, besides salty snacks, pizza and maybe burgers and dogs and fried chicken.  Beyond that, the purpose of beer is or should be to give you something to drink a lot of over a fairly long time, at a comparatively low price.  There are exceptions, but most folks don't usually buy 24 bottles of wine or a dozen liters of whiskey to consume during the course of an evening with a few friends watching the Super Bowl.  And you don't order a glass of whiskey to wash down a beer.  It's the other way around.

     Anyway, the name City of Dank intrigued me, and thanks to the miracle of the internet I was able to ascertain that the word "dank," as an adjective and sometimes a noun, denotes particularly strong and high quality marijuana.  When I looked up City of Dank on Google, I of course saw the name of the place I'm referring to here in Cathedral City, along with (you gotta love it) Yelp reviews.  But I also discovered that there's a song called "The City of Dank," by a Houston-based hiphop group called SPM, or South Park Mexican.  The chorus of this ditty goes, in part,

          Well I come from the City of Dank,
          Where n*****s shoot hop, snort, and smoke crank.
          Where anything's possible and nothin' fa sho'
          High off Khadafi mixed with blow.

The exact meaning of "Khadafi" in this context was more difficult to discover than was the meaning of "dank," which seems to be pretty well known.  As with the etymology of any term that has no obvious linguistic origins, whether it's reported in the Oxford English Dictionary or an online urban or slang dictionary, the meaning is usually teased out by citations to its first known use, or to a few different such occurrences.  As far as I can tell, after some research, "Khadafi" denotes a drug (probably heroin) whose effect may also be to make you as crazy as the late Libyan Colonel Muamar Khadafi, who was indeed known for his craziness.  Mix it with cocaine (blow), and well, I suppose anything's possible, as the song says.

     I'm a hopeless old fogey by South Park Mexican standards, I admit, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the words from "The City of Dank" cited above point with a certain measure of pride to the profligate consumption of a variety of very strong drugs within its eponymous earthly paradise, and not of the kind sold over the counter at your average Cathedral City legal dope house.  As such, it's difficult for me to understand why that name would be a good ambassadorial invitation into the place, especially considering that one of the glowing online reviews of the City of Dank had its proprietor gushing about how wonderful it was to see an old woman come in and obtain what she needed in order to be able to play, pain free, with her grandchildren.  Again analogizing to alcohol, imagine calling a bar The Stagger On Inn, or a liquor store A Drunkard's Dream.  Now, there are bars and there are bars, as we all know, from elegant cocktail lounges to buckets of blood, but as a marijuana dispensary, the City of Dank doesn't strike me as your mother's, or grandmother's, kind of place.  More likely, its patrons go in to get as fucked up as possible, then wander out to consume a Philly cheese steak sandwich or two, and then maybe repair to Show Girls to gaze at naked pole dancers and sip on overpriced craft beers.

     Early in the evenings, at the corner of Perez Road and Cathedral Canyon Drive, just a block or two from where we stay, we began to notice a rank smell rising up from the dry desert floor.  At first it reminded me of skunk cabbage, or perhaps of a skunk itself.  But I realized that skunk cabbage favors wet areas, not the arid arroyos here in the northwestern Sonoran Desert, and also that skunks aren't very common hereabouts, and certainly not at the same time every evening.  So it dawned on me that the smell was the powerful Stank of the Dank, emanating from the collective exhaust systems of the consumption lounges of Mother Earth's Farmacy, Cathedral Green, the House of Lucidity, Atomic Budz, and yes, the City of Dank.

It's What It's

February 19, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     Do you ever wonder about contractions?  I find myself thinking about them a great deal of the time, which might tell you something about me and my priorities.  I don’t know.

     I recently re-watched a movie from a few years back, True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges among others.  It was a remake of the 1960s John Wayne movie, probably no more True than the first one, but with a little more Grit added by the Coen Brothers.  One of the things I noticed about the dialogue was the almost complete absence of the contractions we take for granted in regular speech.  First I thought that perhaps this was a mistaken idea by the Coens of how people talked during the last quarter or so of the 19th Century, or just a stylistic flourish to make the speech patterns of these rough-shod frontier folks more quaint and rhetorically appealing, as if all of them, from the proper church lady to the uneducated outlaw, had attended to their manner of speaking under the tutelage of some stern pedagogue wielding a hickory switch.  But just today I learned that the Coen Brothers had been true to the dialog from the novel on which the movies were based, by a writer named Charles Portis, who just died.  So it was the invention of the writer, and not of the Coen Brothers.  Jeff Bridges, as Rooster Cogburn, drunk by the campfire, says, speaking of the malefactor Tom Chaney, "If he is not in a shallow grave, somewhere between here and Fort Smith, he is gone.... The trail is cold, if ever there was one!  I am a foolish old man who has been drawn into a wild goose chase by a harpy in trousers--and a nincompoop!"  It's a fine piece of monologue, both funny and stilted, and devoid of contractions, which is as good a way to keep the attention of the audience as any, I suppose.  But what such dialogue accomplishes in terms of arresting and charming cadences it surrenders in verisimilitude.

     When one reads an old novel--say, one written in the middle of the 19^th Century--one does notice that contractions were not as prevalent in narrative and expository prose as they’re likely to be today.  Still, there is evidence that they were in as common usage then as they are now, based on the dialogue in those same novels.  Perhaps the particular contractions are different—shan’t, for instance, for shall not, or mustn’t, for must not, or daren’t for dare not, or be-n't for is not—but they were being used all the time in ordinary conversation among people both high-born and lowly.  Even Shakespeare, four hundred years ago, used contractions constantly, favoring words like 'tis for it is, and that's for that is.  Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy alone, uses no fewer than eight contractions.  True, some of those were for the sake of making his speech fit into the framework of iambic pentameter, but still, they were used, and I'm sure quite common among everyday speakers of the language. 

     Curiously, "ain’t" was perfectly acceptable until fairly recently, and was used by duchesses and blacksmiths alike.  I don’t know precisely when it became declasse, but anyone my age or younger knows that it’s considered substandard usage now, marking and indeed stigmatizing the uneducated as certainly as anything they might wear, eat, dwell in, or vote for.  That’s a pity too, since ain’t is one of the most versatile contractions around, standing for is not, are not, am not, and probably a few other word combinations I can’t think of now.

     Notwithstanding the True Grit take on the olden days, the history and course of any language illustrates the tendency of the people who speak it to make it flow more quickly, rather than less so, and to convey more meaning with fewer words, rather than with more.  Call it efficiency, or if you're a snob call it laziness.  If you're a linguist, call it elision.  There's an almost gravitational movement in the direction of scrunching words together rather than drawing them out.  Instead of saying "God be with you" every time we part from one another, we say "goodbye."  That one's so old that no one remembers when it was otherwise, but it certainly was at one time.      

     We now convey more with short words like "like" in combination with the verb to be than ever before.  "He was like, oh my god, and I was like, duh!" could be more eloquently written, but not with so few words:  "He expressed surprise at what I told him, and I responded that he should not be surprised at all."  Of course the president wouldn't use such argot in a speech (okay, maybe this president would, but real presidents wouldn't).  My point is that all this word compression, as well as the tendency to use the smallest and simplest words, and to give them more meaning, in place of more complex or multi-syllabic ones, is a natural linguistic tendency in everyday speech.

     Still, there is something more arresting or hortatory in speech that does not use contractions.  It somehow begs to be understood more and taken more seriously.  Great orations, from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the inaugural addresses of presidents, seldom contain contractions.  At some level, in spite of the more relaxed forms our everyday speech takes, we value contractions less than we do their more drawn out counterparts.  When God gave Moses the stone tablets, the commandments started with Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not, rather than the simpler Don't, even though the first written use of the word "don't" is thought to have occurred around the time of the King James translation of the Bible.  It just seemed more official serious, like your mother standing with her hands on her hips and saying, "You WILL clean your room before you go out to play."  Even now, if you were to day "Don't move," it wouldn't carry quite the same force as "Do not move," would it?

     So besides compressing the language, contractions seem to round off its sharper and more commanding edges.  Even so, the frequency with which we use them in more or less official writing is gradually increasing.  How do I know this? you might ask.  Well, how's this:  on older typewriters, such as the manual one on which I learned to type back in eighth grade, the apostrophe, that indispensable component of the contraction, was located on the upper case of the "8" up on the number row, keeping company with the open and closed parentheses, the ampersand, the dollar sign, and other lesser figures.  Today, it has graduated to the middle row, just to the right of the colon and semicolon key, within easy reach of your right little finger, and in the lower case, to boot.  That shows you that somebody saw the need to put that sucker somewhere more convenient, if you ask me.

     Well, I don't quite know where I'm going with this, or quite how to end it.  It's just something I had on my mind.  Like everything in language, contractions follow their own path of progress, with or without our approval.  Ultimately, it's what it's. 

Tattoo You

January 29, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     Like many people over a certain age I have been watching the proliferation of tattoos among the general public with a mixture of perplexity and grim amusement.  Here's where my age really shows.  When I was growing up the only people I knew who had tattoos were veterans of World War II or Korea, and they were all men.  Usually the tattoos were fairly small and confined to the forearm or upper arm, and focused, subject-wise, on emblems of the military, like eagles or anchors or occasionally mottoes of some kind--Semper Fi, etc.  They would sometimes be a bit more fanciful than that, but not often.  An in-law of mine had acquired a skull with a dagger being driven through it on his upper arm, which he had gotten in the Philippines in 1946.  Our neighbor across the street, who had been in the Navy, had a tattoo of Betty Boop wearing a bra top and a grass skirt.  He claimed that his Betty had originally been naked, but his post-war wife had made him add the clothing.  That was about as risque and imaginative as things got where I came from.  Women most definitely did not have tattoos, at least not any of the women I ever knew, since I did not frequent New Orleans brothels as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Oakland County, Michigan, nor did I ever travel with the circus or know any Maori warriors.  I'm sure jailhouse tattoos existed back then, and that military veterans weren't the only people who got tattoos--there were bikers and other free spirits and degenerates who no doubt had them too.  But as a rule, people didn't have tattoos unless they had had some sort of rather intense experience to go with them.  Tattoos were, if you will, souvenirs of various of life's vicissitudes--warfare, confinement, degradation, solidarity, or utter depravity.  People who had been through nothing of the sort, meaning almost everyone, didn't see the point in having indelible ink on their skin for the rest of their lives, to commemorate things like, say, graduation cum laude from college, or employment at General Motors, or for losing a loved one, or for being a parent for crying out loud.

     It need hardly be said that things are different now.  Today it seems difficult for most folks to find a reason not to get a tattoo.  I chalk this current tendency up to several things.  (You'll notice that the none of the reasons I shall enumerate for the rise in tattoos are positive ones, betraying the fact that I do not view this phenomenon in a very favorable light.)  The first is simple conformism.  People see other people getting tattoos, and they want them too, just as they want to wear certain clothing or hair styles.  This is a characteristic of human behavior that is far older than tattooing, of course.  And it has analogues in the behavior of other animal species, such as lemmings.  The difference between wearing one's hair a certain fashionable way, or having a particular pair of shoes, on the one hand, and getting a tattoo, on the other hand, is or should be obvious to all concerned.  The hair grows out, the shoes can be replaced, but the tattoo will be there until the day you die unless you undergo painful surgery to remove it.  Very few people at the age of forty would wear their hair as they did when they were twenty, nor would they wear the same clothes.  People my children's age look back on photos of themselves from the 1980s and laugh at the big, overstyled and overcurled way they wore their hair, or how they tucked their leggings into their socks and affected the "preppy" look that was best embodied in the character of Ferris Bueller's sister.  My adult children wish to continue to follow fashion, to some degree, and these things just aren't fashionable any more, at their age or any other.  They understand that decisions made in adolescence are almost invariably, well, adolescent, and inherently transitory.  Life has a way of doing that to us.  We start smoking as teenagers, to be cool, and then we get addicted to nicotine, and spend the rest of our lives, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not, trying to kick the habit.  But at least it's possible to do so.  Yet somehow, in a sort of  movement of mass hysteria, teenagers and young adults are getting tattooed, thereby committing the most indelible nonlethal act of youthful indiscretion possible.  And that includes three of my four children, sadly.  True, when they are old and tattooed, they will have plenty of company.  But whatever profound or whimsical or deep meanings the tattoos once had will have gone, and only the blue will remain on their wrinkled skin, looking like irregularly-shaped bruises.  Most of our youthful indiscretions, if they are kept to ourselves, can accompany us to the grave without being noticed by others; but tattoos begotten in the prime of our lives will stay until the last, bearing mute testimony to whatever foolishness led us to get them in the first place.  Meanwhile in a generation or two tattoos will have fallen out of fashion, and will come to represent the hopelessly outdated practices of an older, misguided generation.  The main problem, besides the obvious disfiguring and embarrassing one, is that unless the tattooed people die the day after they get the tattoos, they will almost invariably live to regret them.

     The second reason people get tattoos, slightly more nuanced than the first, is that in general, people lack specific ideas and ideals around which to focus their existences, so they think that by putting some designs on their skin they have sort of joined a club, which I suppose they have done in a way.  The Club of Nincompoops.  They are thereby one with those other folks who have tattoos.  Never mind what the tattoos are, and how varied and unfocused are their messages.  The important thing is that they have ink, like everybody else (or at least everybody else within their narrow frames of reference).  I have occasion to go to a day spa hot spring from time to time, and thus have a chance to see many partially-clothed people of all ages and sizes.  Lacking any common focus for their tattoos, they tend to choose fancy dragon-like designs or collections of Chinese characters--things they saw on others that they sort of liked--or swirly cursive renditions of their children's names and dates of birth, or the dates of death of their close relatives, friends, or who knows who.  Some folks go for large lettering of the names of their wives or girlfriends, or photo-like renditions of their nearest and dearest, without regard to whether they will be so near and so dear in a few years, or will, with the inevitability of gravity, even vaguely resemble those individuals by the time their skin has loosened and sagged.  (I knew a guy about two decades ago who loved Jimi Hendrix, so he got his face tattooed on his arm.  The problem was that it didn't look all that much like Jimi Hendrix, and more like some unnamed Native American.  So he constantly had to explain what the tattoo was.  Well, at least he saw the error of his ways more or less immediately.)  Most tattoos tend to be intensely personal in nature, doubtless reflecting the person's mood and frame of mind at the time they got the tattoos, but without regard for what their mood will be in a few years.  If the people are fat, the tattoos tend to draw attention to the vast expanses of flesh they possess, like the over-sized canvasses of the neoclassical painters of the French Napoleonic period, on which the tattoo artist has to work.  If the people are good-looking--muscular men or women possessed of smooth curvaceous and otherwise unblemished skin, the tattoos mar the fine natural landscapes of their bodies, like random stains on a beautiful piece of fabric or gashes of graffiti on architecturally attractive buildings.  Tattoos enhance natural ugliness and besmirch natural beauty.  And there is essentially no area of the body that is immune from tattoos, from head to foot.

     The third reason for tattoos flows from the second one.  Because most people are socially and morally unfocused, and tend to spend a great deal of their time watching violent cartoon-like and comic book-inspired movies and reading garbage on their smart phones, they have become inured to depictions of extreme absurdity and vulgarity.  Thus they are unable to differentiate the comic book realm from the realm of reality, and are unable to recognize the foolishness of what they see.  Besides that, they're high or stoned much of the time.  They have so much sensory input from all sides, that it's almost as if they are in anti-sensory deprivation chambers, filled not with silence and lack of sensation, but instead with too much meaningless white noise and chaos.  Thus almost devoid of anything that could possibly shock them or wake them up, they come to crave the pain of getting the tattoo itself, and care less what the ink says than what the process of getting it does to them in terms of sharply focused sensory input.  Tattoos in this context are the equivalent of beating your head against the wall, because it feels so good when you stop.  This pain consideration often divides the tattooed people from the untattooed people.  Those who do not particularly like pain, and have found enough in life to stimulate them in more focused ways, tend not to get tattoos.  These latter folks are, not coincidentally, on the whole more intelligent and better educated, too.

      Another reason for tattoos, perhaps wrapped in the tendrils of the previous ones, is narcissism.  The social media and recent technologies have instilled in practically everyone who uses them a sense of preoccupation with themselves in a way that was never before possible except among the insane or insufferable.  Facebook says to the world, "Here's what I think, where I am, what I'm eating or enjoying, and what amuses me or pisses me off," whether anyone is interested or not.  Twitter says, "This is what I'm thinking RIGHT NOW, in 280 characters or less," whether anyone is interested or not.  Instagram says, "Here's what I look like RIGHT NOW, as I'm in the act of saying or doing whatever I feel like saying or doing," whether anyone is interested or not.  (This very blog, I'll admit, is an instance of the social media, except that it's much less accessible, which is why I have about eight followers, instead of 11,000, which in turn is why the things I say won't have much of an effect on others.)  All this wasn't possible a generation ago, and so people didn't assume that anyone necessarily gave a rat's ass about their innermost thoughts and opinions, or what they look like while acting foolish at any given moment, which, in point of fact, most people don't.  This was a good thing, because it tended to keep people's egos in check, not to mention allowing people time to think about what they might say and do, and often wisely to decide not to say and do those things.  Ah, the lost art of impulse control.  Tattoos precisely reflect the narcissism and lack of impulse control created and fostered by the social media, only in a much more indelible way.  They say, in a way nothing else can do, LOOK AT ME (and see what a fool I am).

     The next reason for tattoos is akin to body dysmorphia.  That's the condition in which people completely lose sight of the objective realities of their bodies.  They become obsessed with self-perceived flaws, often leading them to diet excessively and unhealthily, or to get plastic surgeries that end up going right past mildly corrective and into freakishly disfiguring.  Yet they do not realize how ugly they look, with their fish lips and taut skin and outlandishly high cheeks.  As it occurs in tattooing, it is what causes people to get more and more tattoos, thinking that if one tattoo looks good (to them or a few other similarly tattooed people) then additional ones will look even better.  Eventually they're covered with tattoos in a way that would make a freak in the employ of P. T. Barnum positively green with envy.  It is akin to the phenomenon in a certain society of stretching the lips and putting plates in them until they stick out half a foot or so, and calling that beauty.  Almost everyone from outside that society can see how absurd that is, and regards it as ugly and disfiguring.  Except, that is, for that small group.  In a few years, millions and millions of people are going to be looking at the tattooed people of today and shaking their heads, wondering what they were (or more likely weren't) thinking.   

   The last reason for the great proliferation of tattoos, and surely the most important one, is a sort of corollary to all the rest of them, or more accurately the overarching reason for them, and that is stupidity.  The abundance of pure unadulterated idiocy among humans is staggering, and nowhere is it more evident or inexcusable than in tattoos.  People look back to the Middle Ages and say that folks were really ignorant.  And in terms of technological knowledge we certainly have come a long way since then.  But at the core of our beings we are still as ingenuous and superstitious and just plain toe-stubbingly doltish as we were when we dragged our knuckles on the ground.  There are many more of us on the planet, and we're healthier on the whole and better able to get around.  But we're just as benighted as ever.  And nowhere is our inherent stupidity more in evidence than in the phenomenon of tattooing.  Where once (and sometimes now as well) tattoos were the symbols of a comparatively narrow shared experience, like being in war, or prison, or a gang, today they are evidence of nothing much at all, except the silliness of wanting to be like others, without regard to the consequences.

     What's to be done?  Well, nobody asked me for my opinion, but I think that this thing, as I've suggested, will just have to play itself out, going the way of the powdered wig, the wing collar, and the tie-dyed t-shirt.  All things must come to an end, eventually.  In the meantime, it seems to me that with what we know about the human body, not to mention chemistry, someone could come up with a tattooing process, or an ink, that naturally fades and goes away completely after, say, five to seven years.  How goddamned difficult could that be?   We already know that some tattoo ink colors naturally fade more quickly than others.  If all tattoos had a comparatively short life, tattoo artists could stay in business, and people could, after coming to their senses, go back to having the skin they were born with.  Hell, under those circumstances, I might even get a tattoo.  Maybe one that says, "Stupid for a day." 

Weathered

Cathedral City, California

January 11, 2020

     It has been almost 40 years since the Weather Channel began on cable TV.   That means that more than a generation, and close to half the people alive today, don’t remember when the weather only occupied five minutes or less of the local evening news, and that was it.  Then, as now, the goofiest and otherwise least upwardly mobile of the news crew members would stand in front of a map of the United States or their state and gesture at high pressure centers and temperature readings, and push the weather in from the west.  Regular watchers would find out what the forecast was where they lived for the next day or perhaps the next few days, and prepare accordingly.  And then the sports guy would come on and talk about more important things.

     Today, the basic format for local weather reports remains about the same as always.  The big difference is that now we have, in addition, an entire channel devoted to nothing but the weather, in all its glorious and varied forms, not just in and around where we live but throughout the whole damned world.  This in turn has produced a generation of home weather aficionados, many of whom have gone a step or two further and become utterly obsessed with the weather, and often quite phobic about it.

     Let me say near the outset of this post that I do believe we're in the midst of climate change and global warming, much of which owes itself to human intervention due to the release into the atmosphere of lots and lots of good old carbon dioxide.  Having said that, I must also state with confidence that not every single fluctuation in the weather is due to global warming.  There are trends and cycles.  And global warming and cooling have happened in the past, without the assistance of billions of energy-hungry consumers.  But still, we are seeing some rather rapid melting at the poles, with a concomitant rise in sea levels and changes in weather streams and patterns, causing who knows what, weatherwise.  But not everything.

     As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.  Of course, when he said that, the implied joke was that nobody could do anything about it.  Today we're pretty sure that not only have we done something about the weather, but that we ought to undo it, or slow it down a bit.  But Twain is still basically right, I think, in that it's probably too late to do much to change the trends of the next century or so.  Alea iacta est, the die is cast, in the words of Julius Caesar, another fun guy to quote.  So I say we shouldn't do a whole lot of hand-wringing; rather, we should just try, within the limits of our poor powers, to slow down the profligate use of CO2-producing stuff.  We’ll figure it out, slowly, and nothing apocalyptic is likely to happen, but in the meantime it wouldn’t hurt to build higher dikes.

     Now back to the Weather Channel, which would exist even if global warming weren't a thing.  Somebody down in Atlanta, probably Ted Turner, got this idea that certainly tapped into the general populace's preoccupation with weather, identified so long ago by our favorite national pundit.  The thinking probably went, why should people wait until the evening news to find out about the weather?  And what with people's families spread out all over the country, wouldn't it be nice for them if they could know what kind of weather their children or parents are having, so they can have something else to talk about and worry about?  And therein lies the kernel of the continuous irritant that is the existence of the Weather Channel, which has by now figured out ways to fill in its airtime with shows about tornado chasing, and all that silly stuff.

      At present I reside in the desert in southern California.  Many people don't know quite where Cathedral City is, and California is a very big state.  But what they do know, thanks to the 24-hour weather reports engendered by, or inspired by the existence of, the Weather Channel, is that certain big weather-related things happen in California--earthquakes of course, and also wild fires, mud slides, excessive rain, not enough rain, flash floods, and so on.  I can tell readily which of my nearest and dearest are watching the Weather Channel (meaning that they don't have a lot else to do), and also which of them are becoming with advancing age more generally worried and fretful about a world over which they have no control (as if they ever did).  I can tell this by their inquiries via text about whether I am in the path of some fire or other meteorological event.  I appreciate it, but hell, if I was in any danger I'd let you know, unless I was buried under a mountain of lava or something.  More often than not these well-meaning worriers are off by at least a hundred miles from where I'm living, because, as I said, California is a big state, about which it is really hard to generalize, though people try to do so all the time.

     Preoccupation with the weather, I think, stands in for a lot of other fears we have, such as fear of geopolitical calamities, and of sudden unforeseen injuries, illnesses and deaths.  In other words, fears of things we can't do a thing about.   And if we're doing okay where we live, we wonder and worry about the people on the other side of the country.  Practically speaking, as we move ever more toward urbanization and away from the era of the individual farmer, most of us don't really need to worry about the weather.  Yeah, it'll be hotter or colder than we like, and snow and rain will come at inopportune times, but the majority of us have decent housing, no crops to worry about, plenty of good roads and safe vehicles to navigate them, and anyway, we lead lives that increasingly keep us indoors, rather than out in the open.  If anything, weather should be becoming less important to us rather than more so.  But that isn't the case.  If it's going to be slippery we wonder whether school should be closed and whether we should venture outside.  If it's going to be hot we worry about whether we should take extra water.  None of these considerations were not there half a century ago, and yes, people died of heat stroke and slipped on the ice and broke their necks, but generally these were treated as isolated unfortunate events, not as part of an almost conspiratorial assault on us by the weather gods.  The prevailing feeling then seems to have been that shit happens, so be careful.

     The media feeds this weather obsession relentlessly, as you might expect.  Hurricanes and earthquakes aside, the weather and the news used to be separate concepts for the most part, but no more.  Today, as often as not, the weather is the news.  There are several reasons for this in addition to the ones I've already noted here.  One is the need to fill up more and more air time.  In reality there never was, nor is there now, more than about fifteen to thirty minutes of news worth knowing about on any given day.  Huntley and Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite, used to do a half hour a night, and that was more than enough.  But with cable TV we have multiple all-news channels (not to mention that all-weather channel) that run 24 hours a day.  Almost at the same time as the Weather Channel came CNN.  But there are only so many ways you can slice fifteen to thirty minutes of daily news to make it spread out over a full day.  Jesus was said to have taken five loaves of bread and two fish and broken them into enough pieces to feed thousands of people.  I think the TV people aspire to do the same with the meager quotidian information at their disposal.  But they're not miracle-workers, and their efforts end up looking silly and repetitious.  One very sure filler on any news day is a look at the uglier side of the weather.  A heat wave overtakes the east, and every person who dies during the heat wave from any cause that is even remotely connected to the heat becomes a casualty of that heat wave.  A regular heat wave becomes The Killer Heat Wave, The Heat Wave That Has Claimed 17 Lives So Far, The Heat Wave That Ate Cleveland.  Thus are our appetites for apocalyptic entertainment and true-life schadenfreude appeased simultaneously.

     I certainly don't gainsay the need to, say, warn people in Florida or Louisiana of an approaching hurricane.  That should be a matter of course.  But to devote 24 or 48 or 72 hours of continuous coverage to flying debris and palm trees bent under the wind is just too much--rather like looking at a dead body from every conceivable angle, then watching the autopsy and subsequent cremation of the remains.

     But as I stated at the beginning, we have a generation or two of people who have never known any other media-produced reality than that of nonstop concern about the weather.  Fifty years ago, and even a hundred and fifty years ago, the weather was just as good and bad as it is now, with people far less well equipped to handle it.  We see temperature and precipitation records being broken all the time, but they usually contain telling statistical points, such as "this is the hottest it's been in Chicago on this day since 1923" (before air conditioning), or "the worst blizzard in New York since 1888" (before snow plows and central heating).  In other words, much more really bad shit is behind us than we imagine to be lurking just around the corner.  In the 1930s a drought in the middle of the country, combined with poor crop management techniques, caused a disaster we call the Dust Bowl--as devastating as anything we've seen since.  And somehow, against all odds, people knew all they needed to know about it, even without the Weather Channel.  Imagine that.

It's A Miracle

January 8, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     The other day I was changing in the locker room at the gym, when a hunched-over older man came to the bench where I stood and began to do the same.  As he went toward a locker to hang up his clothes he said, pretty much apropos of nothing, “Every day is a miracle.”  By that I assume he meant that he felt fortunate to be alive, and that he was glad to be able to work out at the gym.
 

     Well good for him, I thought, but why is that a miracle?  When I was growing up and going to Sunday school, we were given to believe that miracles supernatural things.  In fact, when I looked up the word "miracle" in the dictionary just now, it defined it that way, to wit:  a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.  Getting thrown into a fiery furnace and not being burned, for example, is a miracle; feeding thousands of people with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish is a miracle; a virgin getting pregnant (however dubiously welcome that experience might be in real life) is miraculous.  Maybe my idea of miracles is heavily influenced by bible stories, but still, I thought, unless this old guy I encountered dies every night and is brought back to life in the morning, or arrives at the gym by means of a magic carpet, I just don’t see how every day is a miracle, to him or anyone else.

     Of course we all know that today the word “miracle” has gone down the road of absurd hyperbole (hand in hand with adjectives like “awesome”), such that it is used almost universally to mean exceptionally good, or against the odds, or sometimes just out of the ordinary.  “It’s a miracle we made it here on time, what with traffic,” we’ll say, or “It was a miracle she survived that accident,” when what we really mean is such cases is, “We sure as hell didn’t expect that!”  This all bespeaks more a sincere but mistaken subjective evaluation of a likely outcome than any objective supernatural event.  Apparently, by the way, the definition of “miracle” is completely missing a negative component.  Miracles are always good things.  When things go unexpectedly wrong we don’t call that a miracle; we’re more likely to call it a "tragedy"--another unfortunate misuse of a perfectly good word.  In bygone days (and even today in many religions) both the good and the bad were ascribed to the Almighty and to the adherence of the faithful, or lack thereof, to the necessary prescribed forms of worship.  Thus when the sun came up in the east each morning, or when it rained after a drought, it was considered a miracle brought about by ardent prayers for divine intercession, and when a hurricane or an earthquake came it was because we somehow failed to kiss God’s ass with enough alacrity.  I suppose that giving the deity credit for everything, good and bad, is in some ways more consistent and honest than considering only the cool stuff to be miraculous.  But to think that human intervention helps miracles to happen is just plain ridiculous.    

     One of my favorite meaningless betes noires in this vein is the expression, sometimes slung about by religion hucksters on television, “Expect a miracle; make miracles happen.”  Which is silly, since miracles are by their very nature unexpected events, and most certainly not anything any mortal being can accomplish.  Another one I hear from time to time is “I am a miracle.”  To that let me simply reply, “No.  You are not.”

     The easiest thing to do when confronted with such illogical behavior is to label it stupid and leave it at that.  Most of us know there is more than enough stupidity to go around, and stopping the analysis at "stupid" saves us the trouble of having to figure out why we repeatedly do the dumb things we do.  But a more responsible approach might be to speculate about why people are so prone to calling things miracles when they are manifestly not miracles.  The most obvious answer is that we are prone to seeking linguistic shortcuts, often misusing words until, after many instances of such misuse, they succeed in changing the meaning of a word.  But another possible answer is that we persist in calling things miraculous because there are, in fact, no miracles in real life, and--poor us--we wish that there were.  That also explains why we are so preoccupied with the idea of aliens having visited earth.  Miracles only happen in the realm of myth and legend, and religions stay in business by commemorating those legendary miracles and making folks think that more miracles may be just around the corner.

     The slightly more intelligent religions, like Judaism, take a more nuanced view of the miraculous.  Modern Jews celebrate the traditional scriptural miracles of the past, like the passing over of the Angel of Death and the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, as part of their cultural heritage.  But their core belief is that however chosen by God they might be, they are condemned to an existence that is always a hair’s breadth away from horror and annihilation, chiefly because God is easily pissed off by disloyalty or just by being ignored or taken for granted, and owes them exactly nothing.  They're chosen all right, but they have been chosen by a peevish, jealous, and often indifferent God.  Follow the rules, live righteously, and be just and merciful to your fellow man and you might just be okay.  Or not.  You never know.  The million-pound shit hammer might come crashing down on even the righteous.  Look at the story of Job.  The guy did nothing wrong; he just got in the middle of a celestial pissing contest between God and Satan.  Job was your average  prosperous and righteous dude, always doing what was expected of him.  God was so sure that Job wouldn't renounce him that he gave Satan permission to kill his family, his livestock, his crops, and damn near destroy his body.  He had sores covering him from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.  After all this only Job and his wife remained, but sure enough, Job didn't renounce God, so he got a new family (fuck the kids who died when the roof fell in on them, I guess--collateral damage), and he prospered again.  And this is how the God of the Jews treats the good guys, the loyal guys, the troopers.  Holy shit.  One is tempted to think, after reading this story, that it doesn't much matter whether you're one of God's chosen people or not, or even if there is a God.  And many have thought just this.   

     Christians also celebrate the mythical miracles that brought their religion into existence—the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus, to name a couple of the big ones.  The difference between them and Jews in this regard is that the Christians, like little children, believe not only that those miracles actually happened, but that more miracles are just around the corner.  Maybe the more pessimistic Jewish view is what an extra few thousand years of maturity brings to a religion.  I don’t know.  But with respect to the Christians, it explains why everyone is so determined to see miracles hiding behind every burning bush.  What would life be like, the thinking goes, without at least a few little miracles here and there, and perhaps a big one now and then?  It would be predictable and repetitive.  And predictable and repetitive are things an immature person, or immature religion, just can't stand.  So people all over the world wait for miracles, and when they don't get them, they fudge the definition of miraculous to include the more pedestrian events of everyday life, like active old age, close calls, and recoveries from grave illnesses.

     I do believe that it would take a miracle to convince the average person that there are no miracles.  And who am I to cause such a thing to happen?   

If There Were Any Money In It...

December 23, 2019

Duarte, California

     I am something of an amateur student and critic of American panhandling.  Throughout my life, particularly as a former briefcase-carrying barrister walking the sidewalks of Hartford and Los Angeles, I've encountered all types of beggars, and I do sometimes give them money.  I don't begrudge a person who has to ask for handouts from the passing public, but sometimes I think they're going about it the wrong way.

     It is important for purposes of this discussion to differentiate between begging, on the one hand, and conning and bullshitting, on the other.  Those who con and bullshit--for instance, the woman carrying a baby on the streets of Pasadena, looking like a gypsy out of central casting and holding a sign saying she needs food for her infant; or the guy in the gas station who tells you he needs money for fuel to get to some remote hospital in order to visit his cancer-stricken mother (there's always cancer involved)--are not worthy to be called beggars, and are beneath contempt.  They're simply criminals trying to obtain money under false pretenses, and are no better than telephone and internet scammers and TV preachers.  They're the ones who try to strike up a conversation with you, as if they were interested in you as a person.  If they don't get to the point right away, that's a dead giveaway.  These people with long involved tales of woe, designed to tug at the heartstrings of the feeble-minded and unwary, are the ones who give street beggars a bad name.  Honest panhandling is a simple proposition: if you have any spare money, may I have some?  It needn't even involve words--just a hangdog expression and an empty paper coffee cup will do the job.  It's the simplest of social interactions.  If you feel like giving you give, and if you don't, you don't. 

     As simple as it might be in principle, panhandling is hard work.  You're outside in all kinds of weather, being looked down upon with contempt and fear and condemnation, run off by police, and often abused by your competing fellow-beggars.  It can be a dog-eat-dog world, especially in urban areas where there are too many mendicants chasing after too few dollars.  No one who begs in the street is on a winning streak of any kind, and no one who does it is getting rich from doing it, as much as we might like to fantasize that they are.  There are no Artful Dodgers and Fagins behind most of the poor schmucks who ask for handouts--they are about as much on their own as a person can be in this country.  The con artists and the bullshitters might do pretty well, but not the beggars, which is not to say that they make nothing at all.  But just put it into context:  they may have to get food, clothing, booze, or drugs, and even in some parts of the city to pay rent or protection money to some self-appointed "sheriff" of the homeless, who controls the block on which they strike their tiny tent.  Those things cost money.  When you and I say we "need money," we generally mean we're looking for an ATM.  When the panhandler says he needs money, he means he needs any amount of chump change you might deign to give him.  Given these sad facts, who am I to criticize any poor hobo's modus operandi?  Well, let me assure you that I only have the beggars' best interests at heart.  I'm thinking of what would appeal most to me, an affluent passer by; that is, what would make me wish to contribute to the exchequer of a bum. 

    My first rule would be to keep it simple, but keep it simple in a positive way.  There was a guy who used to stand at the corner of Hill and Temple Streets in downtown LA, who would sort of lunge out at you from a doorway and snarl "Gimme a dollar!"  Perhaps that was taking it a bit too far in the direction of simple, and it didn't work well, because he scared a lot of people when he approached them.  But I admired his no-nonsense approach, and would occasionally give him his dollar.  Of course, he was completely crazy, and would grab the money and scamper back into the shadows like a wounded dog without even acknowledging the gift.  There was another man who panhandled in the same area who would simply lie in the middle of the sidewalk, looking pathetic, forcing people to walk out of their way to avoid stepping on him.  Come to think of it, I don't know if he ever asked for money, but occasionally I'd drop a dollar onto his filthy, shoeless, recumbent body, and he'd take it.  So I don't recommend either of those two approaches as a way of doing business, as straightforward and stripped-down as they were.

     However, it's equally possible to err on the side of repleteness.  Recently I was coming down off the freeway ramp, and at the bottom a guy sat in a folding chair holding a cardboard sign that was just chock full of unnecessary information.  It started out with something like, "71 years old.  No alcohol or drugs.  Homeless..." and it went on from there for several more sentences.  The light changed before I could come to a complete stop and finish reading it, but I wouldn't have given him anything anyway, because his pitch was just too long-winded.  "Homeless.  Need money" would have sufficed, in my opinion, or better yet, just "Need money."  I don't care where a beggar lives or what he does with his money, any more than I would expect the folks who pay me my pension to ask me what I intend to do with the money they send me each month.  My dollar, when I give it, has no strings attached.  I know that some people don't give to panhandlers as a rule because they'll "probably just spend it on alcohol or drugs."   But you, my gentle readers, probably buy booze, and maybe drugs too, with your money, and nobody would gainsay your right to do so.  If you wish not to give, that's your choice, and indeed, it's the choice of the great majority of people who encounter beggars.  The decision to give or not to give should not be questioned any more than the decision to ask for money should be.  Nevertheless, those who don't give on nominally moral grounds are probably right about where the money is most likely to go.  Of course bums buy booze and drugs.  If you took all the alcoholics and drug addicts, sane or insane, out of the homelessness picture, there wouldn't be very many homeless people left.

     So my advice to the bums out there is to keep it short and sweet.  Another fact that I needn't be told by a panhandler is that he's a veteran.  It's one of those tug-at-your-heartstrings things that repels me.  Also, because it appeals to a general kind of knee-jerk patriotism in some people, I view it askance, and tend to think, "Oh, this guy just wants money from Republicans.  Well, fuck him, then."

     Finally, do not give me any of that God Bless You crap.  Maybe in some cultures the beggar is considered closer to God, and hence more able to rain both the blessing and the curse of the Almighty on the passing citizen, but not in this country, mister.  Here, God Bless You is the most meaningless piece of inflated verbal currency we have, a close relative of Have A Nice Day, and not a whit more meaningful.  If you want my money, leave God out of it.  And if you really think you have the moral authority to call down God's blessing on another person, have a talk with the man upstairs about getting you a more reliable source of income.  It's bad enough that people are forever telling me "No Problem" and "Have a Blessed Day."  Don't add to my irritation by putting a pointless benison on your grubby piece of corrugated cardboard.

     My favorite panhandler--and I've had a few I've liked over the years--is a guy named David who sits at the northeast corner of the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration in downtown LA.  David has been there for several years, and I assume he's still there now, unless he's met with some misfortune.  He likes the warmth of a heat vent near the sidewalk.  Often he has a cardboard sign bearing a few nonsectarian words of wisdom or ironic commiseration, designed to catch the eye of the harried office workers and civil servants who frequent the area.  Sometimes he doodles a caricature of a famous person (Marilyn Monroe is his favorite).  Without asking for anything he manages to do pretty well, for one important reason.  He is completely nonthreatening--diminutive, reasonably clean, a little effeminate.  You know he's homeless and wants money, but you also know he's not going to ask you for it.  As a result, he's the only beggar I've observed to have regular female patrons ("matrons" sounds odd there; perhaps I should say "benefactors").  Women go out of their way to say hi to him and give him their leftovers from lunch, and sometimes a dollar or two.  Now, I know every homeless person on the street does not have his felicitous personality traits, gentle demeanor, and comparative lack of stench and overt insanity.  But if you're looking for an edge out there, you might consider taking a page or two from David's playbook.  He's got it pretty well down.  And he's one of the more fortunate of les miserables, in that he only tends to go off his medication occasionally.  I've seen him at such times, and he can be a bit of a handful.  But the rest of the time he's a peach.  Which isn't to say that he doesn't have extensive health problems, not to mention an inability to adjust to anything like what we'd call regular indoor living.  He's just been homeless too long, and the streets and parks and freeway embankments are his home, to which, despite the best efforts of the social workers and other authorities, he always returns.

     I'm so full of helpful advice about how to beg, that I feel as if I should hold seminars on the techniques of applied panhandling, to try to implement some of the suggestions I've set forth here.  And I'd do it too, by God, if there were any money in it.
   

Who Was Vice President?

February 7, 2019

Corona, California

     There's a game I like to play, mostly in my mind, but also among groups of people, especially those of different ages, if they'll put up with it.  It's called "Who was Vice President on the day you were born?"  Many people know who the President was when they were born, but fewer know the identity of the Vice President at that moment.  That's because, as John Nance Garner (himself the Vice President for eight years under FDR) is supposed to have said, the Vice Presidency "is not worth a bucket of warm piss."  Unless they get lucky and the President croaks or resigns from office, most Vice Presidents go into utter obscurity after their terms have ended.  A few, like Bush Sr. and Nixon, get elected to the Presidency in their own right without having first succeeded to the office through the misfortune of their predecessor, but the great majority do not.

     Knowing who was Vice President on the day you were born requires a bit of knowledge of U.S. history, as well as an understanding of when Presidential and Vice Presidential terms of office begin and end, and also maybe a thing or two about when a President may have left office prematurely.  The answer to the question for some people might be that no one was Vice President on the day they were born.  That can never be said about Presidents.  For someone born on November 22, 1963, for instance, there were two Presidents, or if you want to get really technical, one in the morning and another in the afternoon.  There's always a President, automatically, even if he takes his time getting sworn in.  It's like being the monarch of England--the king is dead, long live the king, and all that.  But the answer to who was Vice President on November 22, 1963 could be Lyndon Johnson, or it could as easily be no one, since after about noon central time on that day there wasn't a Vice President, and wouldn't be another one until Hubert Humphrey took the office in 1965.  For a person who was born on January 20 of certain years, the answer might that there were two Vice Presidents on that day as well as two Presidents.  For instance, if you were born on January 20, 1993, the Vice President was Dan Quayle until noon eastern time, and after that it was Al Gore.  But just to complicate things, if you were born before inauguration day was changed to its present earlier date--to  January 20, starting in 1937--the old inauguration day was March 4.  Then, too, some guys had more than one Vice President.  Franklin Roosevelt had three, and the last of them, Harry Truman, took office on the day FDR died, April 12, 1945, and served without a Vice President all the way until he was elected to a full term that started on January 20, 1949.  Nixon had two Vice Presidents as well.

     The 25th amendment to the constitution, which was adopted in 1967, established that when the office of Vice President becomes vacant due to the death, resignation, or removal from office of the President or Vice President, the new President may himself nominate a Vice President to fill that office.  But that nomination process takes a bit of time, since both the House of Representatives and the Senate must approve the nomination.  Thus after Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice President on October 10, 1963, Nixon selected Gerald Ford to be his new Vice President, but the Congress didn't approve his nomination, and he didn't start serving, until December 6, 1973.  Similarly, after Ford became President on August 9, 1974, he nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be his Vice President, but Rockefeller wasn't given the green light until December 19, 1974.  Remember that, if you were born in 1973 or 1974.

   With all that in mind, do you know who, if anyone, was Vice President on the day you were born?  I confess that for many years I had no clue who was v.p. on the day I was born, and like some of you, I didn't really care.  When I was growing up, the grandfatherly bald head of Dwight D. Eisenhower adorned the walls of post offices and other public buildings, and as a young child I came to think of him as the only President I had ever had.  Not so.  In fact, on August 3, 1949, the day I was born, Harry Truman was barely into his second term as President (the only one to which he was so elected), and the Vice President was none other than Alben Barkley, a person who has since slid into that obscurity to which I alluded at the beginning of this post, joining such luminaries as the aforementioned John Nance Garner and Dan Quayle, as well as Henry Wallace, Charles Curtis, Charles Dawes, and the slightly more notorious Dick Cheney.  And those are only the ones who might have been around if you play the game with someone who is less than about a hundred years old.  Should you ask a centenarian who was Vice President on the day he or she was born, the correct answer would be Woodrow Wilson's running mate Thomas R. Marshall, pictured above, a man whose main claim to fame was his opinion that "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar."  Thomas Marshall was a fairly witty guy.  He was governor of Indiana, and is supposed to have said, upon hearing of his nomination for the Vice Presidency, "Indiana is the mother of Vice Presidents; home of more second-class men than any other state."  Up to that point there had been three previous Vice Presidents from Indiana, and in the ensuing years we have added two more Hoosiers to the office--Dan Quayle and our beloved current veep, Mike Pence.

     The very existence of the sitting Vice President is often only brought to our attention when he does something exceptional, like tripping on the steps of an airplane.  He is, by virtue of his constitutionally-granted powers, also the president of the Senate, but only in the most technical sense.  He might choose to preside over the Senate from time to time, if he's not busy looking for a five-cent cigar, but he can't cast a vote unless the Senate is tied.  Almost all the time the person who presides over the Senate is a senior elected member of the majority party, known as the president pro tempore.  These days it's Charles Grassley of Iowa.  But just as often the president pro tem delegates the job of presiding over the Senate to a lesser hack.  It's just a matter of banging the gavel.  In all cases the person currently presiding over the Senate is addressed, ex cathedra, as "Mr. President" or "Madam President."  This might confuse the casual watcher of CSPAN into thinking that this country has more than one President.  Unfortunately, we don't.

     One final thought about the Vice President:  because he has been popularly elected to the office, he cannot be removed from office except by death, disability, resignation, or impeachment for "high crimes and misdemeanors."  (Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first Vice President, came close to getting the boot.  He was federally indicted for bribes and kickbacks he had taken before and during the time when he was governor of Maryland, and, looking up and seeing the sword of Damocles, copped a plea and resigned from office.)  This means, significantly, that the Vice President can't be fired by the President no matter what he does, and he really doesn't have to do anything at all.  He doesn't even have to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate if he is disinclined to do so.  In theory, the Vice President could refuse to have anything to do with the President at all, or tell him to go fuck himself, and there's nothing the President could do about it except maybe to refuse to let him attend any boring meetings of the cabinet, of which he's not a member anyway.  To my way of thinking this would be like throwing Br'er Rabbit into the brier patch.  This knowledge gives me an even lower opinion of our current Vice President, Mike Pence, than I am already inclined to have.  Because in spite of the fact that he's constitutionally completely independent of the President, he chooses to stand behind him almost all the time, with a half smile on his face, as if he's expecting to get brownie points for being there.  Another second-class man, without at doubt.