Gone But Forgotten

 Ron Howard has taken a lot of abuse over the course of his career for what happened to his brother. Not his real brother, Clint, who has received ample support from the roles big brother Ron has been able to send his way over the years. Seventeen of them at last count. Instead of real life, I prefer to turn our focus to life on the little screen: Whatever happened to Richie Cunningham's older brother Chuck on Happy Days? Somewhere along the early episodes of the second season of that very popular series, Chuck just ceased to be. The Chuck Cunningham Syndrome may not get the attention that Richie and the gang brought Jumping The Shark, but it is a very real thing. 

Don't believe me? How about if I were to ask you about Carol Geller? You know, Ross Geller's wife. On Friends. Now for the bonus round: How did the show's writers and producers wind up her story? What about their son, Ben? They eventually disappeared into TV ether somewhere around the eighth season. Rachel and Joey and Monica and Chandler and Phoebe just went on without any real notice or care. Besides, by this time Ross had been married a bunch of times and became a father all over again with Rachel. What's an ex-wife and and her wife going to do to compete with all that? And young Ben? He would be thirty-one years old by now. 

What do you suppose he got into in all those intervening years? I get it that the struggles of a young man growing up in Manhattan being raised by two mothers could never compete with the seemingly endless hijinks and hilarity brought to us by the gang of Friends, but the powers that be did see fit to bring Gunther on for the final episode. 

It's about closure, right?

So I think there's a play or a Netflix series that could be made out of all those discarded characters from various TV shows a la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Chuck, Ben, Carol and Mandy from the West Wing could all hang out somewhere in a hazy ill-determined reality in which their characters are waiting for a call to return to work. Back to the life they had been living until some executive decided they weren't "gelling" with the rest of the cast. 

I blame Fonzie. 

Passing Through

 Many years ago

I considered myself a poet

Because of all the thoughts

That could not be contained

In a sentence or paragraph

I once wrote a poem entitled

You Can Come And Go In My Life

I did this for two main reasons

To express how deep I was

And how much I was willing to grow

As it turns out all those years ago

I was not kidding around

You have come and gone in my life

And the good news here is that

Each time you have gone

You found your way back

So here we are decades later

Having created a center

Around which we can orbit

Navigating our way through

Space and Time and Always

With a sense of place

A place we call home

Gravity Isn't Just A Good Idea, It's The Law

 Forty years give or take a month ago, I experienced what has become over time a defining moment for me as a human being. 

I jumped out of a swing. 

Many of you have heard this story before. It is significant in the annals of "Why Doesn't Dave Drink?" Because I did. 

A lot. 

And on that one particular July night in the year of our lord 1986, I polluted my brain chemistry enough that the relatively simple act of jumping out of a swing, which I had been doing since I was a small child in a variety of settings, caused me to question not just my place in the universe but also my participation in the prevailing culture. 

Whew. 

That was the first week, anyway. It would still be another few years of bacchanalia for yours truly as the laws of physics seemed to need my attention as did the status quo. Jumping out of that swing meant that I would spend another semester in college to complete the fringes of what would become my Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing. It would still be those few more years figuring out that knee surgery was probably the least intrusive way that I could have received the message: Slow down. 

I wasn't listening then. 

I'm listening now. Each time I have to manage my hop down from a set of stairs or the dull ache that comes when the weather changes I think back to that night and wonder why I needed to live so close to the edge for so long. Nothing that I couldn't bounce back from. Not back in the day. The payback, as it turns out, came much later. 

George Bernard Shaw once suggested that youth was wasted on the young. I'm guessing there was a swingset somewhere in George's past. 

Strays

 The bluest skies I've ever seen are in Seattle. 

Just not today. 

Or for the foreseeable future. 

Last Sunday night, while the community gathered around the iconic Space Needle in the Emerald City, shots rang out. The Bite of Seattle festival ended abruptly as two young men fired guns, nominally at each other, while thousands of attendees looked on in horror. 

As quickly as this tragedy began, it was over. Bodies lay on the ground as the crowd fled the scene. Three people ranging in age from nineteen to fifty-six years old were dead. Four more, including a toddler, were injured. Police on the scene took one of the shooters into custody while another fled. Authorities provides some good news: none of the officers on at the site fired their weapons. Who knows how many more injuries and fatalities might have resulted in more shots being fired?

Because this is the bottom line: You have to have a little something wrong in your head to imagine that you might show up at a large community gathering and "settle things" with a gun. Why would anyone choose to carry a loaded gun into a throng of people who came together to enjoy the flavors of their city? It is the kind of thing that harkens back to our wild west heritage, when gunslingers would roll into town in time for the big square dance, looking for the guy who done them wrong. 

To kill them. 

In the stories we tell and make into movies, the gunslingers are generally really good shots, and they tend to shoot up the scenery rather than innocent bystanders when they miss. The fact that both of the assailants in Seattle managed to shoot everyone but each other speaks volumes about just how ridiculous this scenario turns out in real life. Revenge is not exacted out of the death of innocent victims. 

The Bite of Seattle Festival may go on next year. With increased security and measures to keep this kind of tragedy from occurring again. But it's already too late. Like the Garlic Festival in Gilroy. Or the Pride Festival in Berlin. Or any of the hundreds of other senseless killings that take place every day. 

Whether its the guns or the people that are doing the killing, one thing remains true: If there were no guns, three people would still be alive in Seattle. 

As The World Burns

 For some time, Google has been placing a proud bit of brag at the bottom of their search page proclaiming how long they have been carbon neutral. If you look for it now, it's not there. It was removed because of  "the rapid expansion of power-hungry artificial intelligence caused Google's overall carbon emissions to surge, making it unfeasible to claim operational neutrality without making misleading claims."

Want to know how I found that out? I looked it up on Google. 

Meta, also known as The Facebook, recently kicked aside their clean energy pledge as they surged forward in their efforts to build gas-powered data centers. The agreement, known as RE100, is "a global initiative bringing together the world’s most influential businesses committed to using 100% renewable electricity in their operations." This initiative proudly names more than four hundred companies that have signed on to be a part of this program, including Apple, Microsoft, and the aforementioned Google. Facebook used to be part of that list, but not if it means they would have to give up building giant, smelly data mines. 

So, as it turns out, data seems to have overtaken climate as a concern. The ability to turn your family photos into cheap cartoon renderings of themselves is not more important than our ability to live and breathe on the earth. 

This past week I struggled with my own version of this type of schadenfreude as I read of the struggles of our first paper trillionaire. All of a sudden it seems as though he can't sell an electric dumpster fire of a truck to save his empire. Additionally, the flock of greedheads who gathered to snap up stock in his spaceship program have also given up interest. This pains me because there was a time when I would have been actively rooting for anyone who said they were going to get us all to drive electric cars and fly to outer space. Now I am happy to see him his empire disappear. 

Here I sit, waiting for the billionaire who will come along and save us all. 

No Laughing Matter

 Dying is easy. Comedy is hard. 

Depending on where you look, this quote is attributed to either Edmund Kean in 1823 or Edmund Gwenn in 1959. The one hundred thirty-six years that separate them suggests two things: First of all, British actors seem to always have just the right thing to say, and that after more than a century this sentiment rings true. 

Also true is the way that death and pain seem to run throughout our experience with comedy. Knee slapping and gut busting are just two of the ways that funny things might attack us. A comedian who is having a very successful show might describe it later by saying, "I killed tonight." Contrastingly, someone who is having a less-than-triumphant experience might say, "I died up there tonight." Or perhaps you might say they "bombed." 

This last one is intriguing to me given the convicted felon's recent appearance at the rescheduled White House Correspondents Dinner. You may remember back in April when an attempt at an assassination attempt spoiled what was supposed to his first appearance at the annual event. You might expect that with a few extra months of prep time that maybe the former game show host would be able to work up some solid material. Maybe he might take a chance at having a little fun at his own expense?

Not to worry. The man who has been impeached twice as many times as he has attended the White House Correspondents Dinner spent most of an hour blathering on as he tends to do, poking fun at others and detailing all of the perceived injustices that have been cast upon him. He even tossed out some jabs at his own cabinet: ""I hope that everyone finally got to enjoy their entire very delicious beef tenderloin, very special beef, and I want you all to know that Bobby Kennedy is right here, personally ran over the cow in his car." Which would have been funnier if he hadn't really made a habit of scraping dead things off the road for his study and amusement. 

Another feature of the yearly fete is the presentation of awards to reporters who have covered the White House over the previous year. The adjudicated rapist continued his running "gag" about the recipient of  the Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure, Kaitlin Collins. "I said Kaitlan, do you ever smile?" Trump said. "Smile. You have a nice position. You are at CNN Fake News. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan, just smile."

Crickets chirping. 

An hour of this. 

When it was all over, the Orange Worst summed up his experience. "They said, 'Would you do it next year? I said I will be back next year. If you get really, really nasty, maybe not. But we are going to be back next year."

Might I suggest taking the easy way out. 

Sum Zero

War, we have asked here before, what is it good for?

Well, if you happen to be in the business of selling arms and munitions and missile defense systems, then the answer would be "our bottom line." These would be canonically known as "war profiteers." These are the folks whose business is injure, maim and kill other human beings, preferably in large numbers so as to further the spread of an ideal. Currently that ideal comes under the heading of nuclear non-proliferation, but is often short-handed to "Democracy." 

Profits. 

Oops. How did that get in there? 

The War Pigs have recently been selling us this idea that the soldiers who have been killed in and around Iran were making a "sacrifice." Chief among these aggro voices is the Chief War Pig, Pistol Pete Hegseth who used the opportunity to memorialize those who died by saying, "Godspeed, heroes. Their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve." Feel free at this moment to insert your own joke about the phrase, "stiffen our resolve."

Additionally, we were told by the convicted felon who never bothered to serve because of his made-up bone spurs, “They said, and all of them said very strongly, ‘We can’t let, we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. They won’t have a nuclear weapon.’” Yes, Dear Leader, I am certain that is exactly what they all said. In unison. As they consecrated the oath of obedience. 

You may not have heard about the three billion dollar federal and Pentagon investments made to 1789 Capital, a venture company run by the son of the convicted felon. This is separate from the two billion dollars daddy has raked in since he returned to squatting in the ruins of the White House. The families of the fallen soldiers will not see any part of that. They will, most likely, be stuck arguing with the folks at the Veterans Administration about the compensation they are due for their deceased sons and daughters. The two thousand dollars they get for burial "benefits." 

That's what war is good for.

Absolutely nothin'. 

Say it again.