Star Fall

When was the last time you saw Randy Quaid? We would all like to believe that your last memory of Dennis's brother was in the critically acclaimed "Brokeback Mountain," and not the 2009 opus, "Balls Out: Gary The Tennis Coach." But since Randy is the veteran of one hundred fifteen films, it might be hard to sort out your perception of one of Hollywood's most durable character actors. Maybe you remember his turns as Cousin Eddie in the National Lampoon Vacation series. Or you probably saw him as Russell Casse the itinerant drunk crop duster in "Independence Day." Did you see his Lenny to Robert Blake's George in the TV version of "Of Mice and Men?"
I remember some of his earliest work best. In "The Last Picture Show," he added just the right amount of schlub to Lester Marlow, Jacy's escort to the Christmas party. My favorite Randy Quaid performance was the Navy Seaman Larry Meadows, being escorted to the brig by Jack Nicholson and Otis Young in "The Last Detail." That was more than forty years ago, but I still remember just how much pathos that big, goofy guy packed into that role. If you haven't seen it, and you're a fan of early seventies cinema, you owe it to yourself to check out this slice of life from director Hal Ashby.
Of course, you might also be aware of Randy's off-screen struggles. Some say they mirror those of misunderstood Independence Day hero, Russell Casse. In spite or perhaps because of his celebrity, Randy feels that he and his wife are in danger. He believes the same bad guys who killed Heath Ledger and David Carradine are after him. That's why he fled to Canada, where he was detained by border guards in Vermont. Somebody had issued warrants for the couple's arrest back in California. Part of the conspiracy? Or part of a twisted bit of reality that had them squatting in a home they had previously owned. Perhaps Randy and his wife Evi are running away not from bad guys but from their own mismanaged finances.
How does someone who once sat near the top of his profession, an Academy Award nominated actor, featured in more than one hundred films, end up homeless? It would be so much easier to blame evil forces that have conspired to bring them low, rather than the sad potential of a downward spiral. Who knows, maybe Randy will eventually star in the big screen comeback action adventure, "Star Whackers." Or maybe he'll be signing DVDs out on the prison yard for the next few years. Stay tuned.

I Want You To Want Them

I have purchased a lot of music in the course of my life. So much so that it has taken on ritualistic status. Tuesday night, after work. That's when the new records are sitting there, waiting to be perused. The sea of wooden bins at Rocky Mountain Records and Tapes that had that certain rustic smell that provided me with that sense of hunting and gathering, even when I was merely looking for the latest release from one of my favorite bands. This was, by no means, survival. This was pleasure. This was recreation. This was how I spent my down time.
Those shopping trips were a habit I developed in my college years, and after. Being able to drive allowed me to check multiple locations, making certain that that one copy of Klark Kent's EP didn't somehow slip through the cracks of this store and that and their ordering patterns. I did not want to be the one who missed the next big thing because I failed to go through the entire new releases section and genre specific sections that might have had that DEVO single I had been missing up until that point.
Before that, I used to buy my music at K-Mart. I write this not as a confession, but rather as a hard-wired visceral memory. I bought my first Cheap Trick album at the K-Mart store in Boulder. It was a bike ride away from my house, thus I was able to get there and back in relative safety, with one hand to do the steering and one hand to hold on to my new bag, slung over the handlebars. The first Cheap Trick album I bought wasn't their first release. It was "Heaven Tonight," the band's third studio album, and I rode down to pick it up because of the recommendation I had received from a friend of mine, a junior named Nick Bates, who seemed impossibly clever and mature from my sophomore standing. I was buying into what he called the "cartoon version of rock and roll" that these guys from Rockford, Illinois had to offer.
I found it in the Rock section, which filled most of the twelve foot aisle that contained all the vinyl that K-Mart had to offer, stuck between Housewares and Notions. The record itself seemed impossibly light given the gravity of what I had been told was inside. I was tempted, briefly, to pick up another record just in case this turned out to be some sort of practical joke on an underclassmen. This was 1978, and debut albums by The Police, The Cars, as well as new material from the Rolling Stones and another little California band named for the brothers Van Halen were awaiting my aural attention.
This all came flooding back to me when I read the headline that read: "Janet Jackson, The Cars, Cheap Trick Receive First Nominations For Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame." This, of course, means nothing, since even if the boys from Rockford make it through the nomination process to be inducted next year, the only true validation of art comes from those of us who appreciate it. Little did I know back in the late seventies that I would eventually be sitting in front of my computer in a different century, a different state, and clicking on the "buy" tab to purchase the latest Cheap Trick album. It has been an enduring love affair that has spanned more than thirty-five years, moving from vinyl to CD to mp3. I will be just as pleased and happy as all the Rush fans were when, at last, Canada's power trio landed in Cleveland to take their spot in The Hall. And I will maintain my respectful distance, since I remember my roots: K-Mart.

Call A Doctor

At last check, there were more than seventy-five candidates for the Republican Presidential Nomination. This was after forty-two of them had dropped out of the race because they couldn't raise the billion dollars required to stay in, or they ran out of red ties, or just couldn't get the cameraman to pan far enough to the left or right to catch them on the edge of that overloaded debate stage. Or maybe they were just afraid of being bullied by Donald Trump. 

This is hyperbole, of course, since there are only a dozen or so "serious" candidates, all waiting for that opportunity to get their chance to stand on the same stage and be bullied by Donald Trump. Up until quite recently, one of the safe choices was brain surgeon Doctor Ben Carson. That hissing sound you hear is the air being let out of his presidential aspirations. I blame the Hippocratic Oath. 

In much the same way that Donald Trump can puff up his chest and say that he is a billionaire, Doctor Carson shows up with his ticket to the convention bearing that title: Doctor. What better certification would one need to show up to a political arena than as a healer? Repairing the rifts that have causes so much suffering in the is great land of ours? Mend the wounds we have all experienced over the past twenty years? Somebody get me a doctor.

But probably not one who laughs nervously when asked to defend his assertion that charging a gunman would be the best chance any of us would have in the event of a mass shooting. The same guy who said, when asked to explain his theory that Jews in Europe might have survived the Holocaust if not for laws prohibiting guns,  “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed. I’m telling you that there is a reason that these dictatorial people take the guns first.” Couple this with his assessment of the recent murders in Oregon, “There is no doubt that this senseless violence is breathtaking,but I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away," and you might expect to see one less podium on that stage at the end of this month.

Then again, if the measure of front-runners in the GOP is how outrageous one can be without actually frothing at the mouth, then this may be the move the good doctor needed to make in order to overtake the ugly flurry that is the Trump campaign. 

And never mind the Hippocratic Oath. It was written a long time ago by people who don't understand today's reality. Yeah. I get it. 

How Much?

A lot of us got into the teaching biz because we wanted to affect change. There aren't many of us who got into it for the big paycheck. Maybe that's just the six figure checks that some teachers are banking in New Jersey, but it could also be a little bit of hyperbole on the part of that state's governor. People who want to make big money, at least in New Jersey become talk show hosts or singers. For the record, Governor Christie is making a six figure salary, and his family is pulling in a reported half-million. Nice work, if you can get it.
On this side of the contiguous United States, the salary is still somewhat negotiable. Not by me, but by my union. I tend not to wrap myself up in that process because I have been told by the guy signing people up for a newspaper subscriptions for free T-shirts that teachers don't make enough. I get it. I am doing this job because I want to make a difference.
For the better, in case there was some question.
In my first year, it was a romantic idea: riding into an urban school to bring my own particular and peculiar vision of how things could be to a generation of youth hungry for whatever it was that I had to offer. That creative writing degree, for example. My esoteric sense of humor. My tireless energy. My ability to wait for hours before I go to the bathroom. These were my calling cards. Those, and the fact that I felt I was "good with kids." When I said this to the recruiter for the district intern program, he laughed. At me.
That was nineteen years ago. I've been going back to school. Day after day. Year after year. Trying to affect change. Here's what I have figured out: I am not making the kind of change that I had imagined way back in the previous century. I continue to be surprised by the lack of change I seem to be able to affect on the children with whom I am supposed to be so good. Then I realize that I never went to school without learning something, even if it was that I didn't want to go to school anymore. What I learned was that the change is in me. I am not the fresh-faced idealist I was back in 1997. I am a veteran, but I have seen a generation of children pass through the doors of this school. So much so that I am now teaching a couple of children of students I had way back in those earliest days. Can you put a price tag on that?

Gamboling

So, here's the deal: I can go down to the local card room and sit down to a "friendly" game of Texas Hold 'Em. For money. Real money. Real winners. Real losers. They are quick to point out that they don't participate in the play at any level, except to give folks a place to sit down and play a friendly game of Texas Hold 'Em. For a little fee. And they'll bring you cocktails. Just like they have since 1895, the year my house was built. It's historical.
And it's hysterical. Because, if the Oaks Card Club did participate as "the house," then it would be a casino, and it would not be legal. Unless that casino was on property owned by Native American tribes, then it would be legal, since they are considered sovereign nations and they make their own rules. Like they have to hit a soft seventeen. In a "way too little and way too late" kind of solution, we are letting Native American Tribes use legal gambling as some sort of karma leveling for the atrocities we waged upon their people and lands. Loose slots indeed.
But that isn't really what I'm confounded by. There are rules and laws governing those enterprises that make some sort of sense. Just like there are rules defining how much I can win or lose in my Fantasy Football League. I know that there are people making lots of cash by getting involved in the exploits of their favorite and not-so-favorite professional athletes. Using sports figures as avatars is nothing new. What is new is the way we have become suddenly used to how we play. Friendly little twenty dollar entry fees are no longer in vogue. That used to buy you in for a season. Now you can spend hundreds of dollars each week on the Fantasy Football Sweepstakes. Sure, some will win. That's the nature of things. Some will lose. Big. That is how we get big winners. And some will cheat. Big. DraftKings employees have won millions of dollars playing on their rival's site, Fan Duel. Sounds like insider trading to me. Of course these are all enthusiasts who love the game so very much that they can't keep their gaming impulses to their own jobs, so they feel the need to spread it around, right? Or maybe they are using an unchecked system of barely legalized gambling to profit from those same schlemiels who are buying fifty dollars worth of Lotto tickets each week in hopes of making it rich. Quick.
Why not just send the folks at Fan Duel or DraftKings a check. Sooner or later I'm sure they will send you one with an even bigger number of zeroes. What the heck. Take a chance.

His Sto Ree

The old saw has us believing that "history is written by the victors." The idea that history is subjective needs no further test than the discussion of the word: His Story. I went to college at a time when Womyn's Studies challenged our mndset as well as our spelling skills. So much of what we know is based on an agreement made by a relatively small group of individuals about what would be taught in our school. What is objective reality? Would it be okay to teach two plus two equals five in one state (I'm looking at you, Texas), while others stick with the traditional and safe answer of four, keeping the door open for larger values of three?
We can be pretty sure that Richard Nixon did resign from his second term as President of the United States. There is a lot of evidence to prove this. Exactly how and why this came to pass is subject to some debate. Not unlike the manned moon missions which have only recently become conspiratorial fodder, everything it seems is now up for debate. I don't get Columbus Day off because we now know that Chris was a lousy navigator and an even worse public relations risk. Fourth graders don't tend to take tours of our nearby missions because it turns out that they might not have been the peaceful stops on the Camino Real. Alas, so much of what I was once taught turns out to be whitewashed gobbledygook made up to make us all feel better about genocide.
Which brings me to Roni Dean-Burren. Ms. Dean-Burren is a concerned parent of a Texas high school freshman. She got a text from her son that included an illustration from his class' ninth grade history text book. Below it, he wrote this message: "we was real hard workers, wasn't we" and he closed with a frowny emoticon. Clever enough for her son to make this connection to the absurd suggestion that "the Atlantic Slave Trade brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations." Well how about that for a revisionist view of dispora? Mom took it to social media where it started to get the kind of attention it deserved. McGraw-Hill will be revising the text of their history.
Any bets on exactly how that will turn out? Stay tuned.

Ready, Aim, Misfire

It was Stephen Colbert who suggested most recently that we as a nation are perilously close to redefining insanity: We keep doing the same thing and we expect different results. He was referencing the shootings in Oregon last week, but it was a refrain to which we are all beginning to fall prey. Pun intended.
There have been forty-five school shootings so far in 2015. My quick math suggests that works out to be five a month, which is troubling since we just finished summer vacation and it doesn't seem that we got any sort of break from the carnage. Maybe your prefer your body count in an easier to digest form a la USA Today: The friendly folks at The Guardian have made a nice pictograph showing nine hundred ninety-four mass shootings in one thousand four days. You can trust the Brits to make us Yanks feel just a little obvious with out ninety-nine percent shooting per day ratio. That's the United Kingdom, where owning guns is not a right, it's a crime. They find this whole mess rather distasteful and confounding.
Back here on our shores, the politics are pretty simple: Red is pretty gun crazy and blue is apologetic for being gun crazy. Always that fine line. It took Jeb Bush nearly a week to live down his reaction to the shootings at a community college in Oregon. His wisdom on the matter: "Stuff happens." Very zen, Jeb, but maybe you're just a little north of that sincerity mark that would have put you squarely on message. You know, sympathizing with the victims, but insisting that some "good guns" would have made all the difference.
That's what Donald Trump believes. He even went so far as to assert that these kind of things are an "unfortunate inevitability." If you didn't want to be shot, why did you come to this country in the first place? He's got a concealed weapons permit because "it's a right, not a privilege." This should come as no surprise to anyone who has listened to this man for more than thirty seconds. Each sound bite from the Donald is a meal. His supporters wholeheartedly believe that a crazy person will get a gun and there's nothing you can do about it except get a gun and shoot first.
And ask questions later. Better yet: don't ask. We already know the answer.