It Hurts When I Do This

She lives down the street from us. She used to live across the street. She used to be ten. She's older than that now. She was the one who took delight in teaching our little boy how to walk. She has lately been busy teaching her own son how to get around. When we saw her getting out of her car, my wife noticed her pained expression. "Are you okay?"
She winced a little, "Oh, it's bursitis."
My wife moved forward and took her hand, "May I try something?"
There was a look of fear, then acceptance, "Alright." She wasn't really sure.
My wife told our young friend about how she had seen a woman in the grocery store make the pain in a checker's shoulder go away with a gentle twist and a brief massage. Standing on the sidewalk in the middle of this new day, my wife wasn't able to perform the same magic. "Have you tried," and off we went on a brief discussion of possible treatments and potential care facilities. It seemed like maybe a trip to the emergency room wasn't quite what the elusive doctor might have ordered.
Bursitis? How could this young thing be suffering from this old person's malady? Okay. Maybe you didn't have to be old to have bursitis. You just needed to have some repetitive motion, enough that it could wear out the bursa sac in your shoulder. I looked at her face again. There were some miles on that face. Highway miles. We had done our wringing hands dance way back when we learned that she was going to be a teen mom. It wasn't going to be as flashy or interesting as those on MTV, nor as confounding as the children of the children I am now teaching at my elementary school. This was a reality check. My wife and I had our own sore knees and shoulders to kvetch about, and now we had to consider the creeping decrepitude (my wife's term) of the kids in our neighborhood.
Former kids. Now adults. Somebody's mom. We were, by logical juxtaposition, the grandparents in this equation. What could we hope to gain except an understanding of our own mortality? Helping a neighbor. Visiting an old friend.

Fogbound

"Evolution" is what they are calling it. They are not me. I wouldn't call it that. I had been pleased and happy with my little toe, and my appendix, even as I have been told that these are vestiges of a previous being. That wasn't the kind of evolution to which they were referring. They weren't talking about body parts that were no longer explicitly necessary. They were talking about my radio station. The one I have listened to since I moved to the Bay Area. The one that had the news guy from Boulder. The one that sounded like where I came from. The one that sounded like home: KFOG.
The news came to me on the first of April, so I was initially skeptical. I was ready to chalk it up to a somewhat clever prank on behalf of the fools on the radio. The folks back in Boulder, many years ago, had perpetrated a ruse of this sort back in 1987, called "Intervention Day." I happened to tune into that radio event not only while it was underway, but also as I was coming back down from a particularly confounding bout with mind-altering substances. The radio told me it was 2027, and the celebration of Intervention Day had already begun. It took me an hour or more to figure out that I was listening to a very amusing production created by the music director and that news guy. I was relieved and entertained to have been taken in by such a funny manipulation of time and space. And sound.
Here, just eleven years away from the pranked date of that broadcast so long ago, it turns out that KFOG was serious about their "Evolution." They had fired their on-air staff and were gong into DJ-free hibernation of sorts, playing a rough facsimile of the format that had been in place before the April First purge. Only it was free of all that annoying between-song-human interaction that had once made the whole experience feel so much more - human. New Sound Meister Bryan Shock, whose name I would not make up on a dare, has cleaned house, because it seems that radio is a business. Keeping me pleased as a listener turns out to be one of the least of corporate America's concerns. Selling advertising is the reason for all those songs to be played, and those mildly human interactions between them. This wasn't FM, or WKRP. This was business, and KFOG DJs weren't going to stage any sort of insurrection or intervention. They were going to pack their bags and looking for work at other stations where humans and their connection to the music they play is still valued. Wherever or whenever that might be.

Walk Don't Run

In my job, I spend a lot of time discouraging kids from running. This is interesting, since there are also periods when I encourage them to pick up the pace. That's the part where I am often found actively herding groups of children as I run alongside them. Then, about the time I get them all moving around a prescribed course described by a series of colorful cones, I ask them to stop and hold still. Then, after a more prescribed movements, I have them all get into that most impossible of formations: a straight line. After that transition has been managed to the mild expectations of elementary school, I ask them to walk back to their class. Walk, run, stand still, walk again. All that coiled energy being told to start, stop, speed up slow down. It can be a little crazy-making. I like to remind my young charges that they have no reason to run, especially since we have all these assigned desks and alternative seats for when those places get full. Sitting still really isn't in the cards, unless we had asked them to run around like crazy people, in which case stillness is a likely reaction to all that authority.
Truth is, I don't get the whole walking thing myself. When someone suggests that we take a walk, it feels like I'm in trouble. This is probably exacerbated by all the times since I was a youngster that these walks brought news, and not the happy kind that ended up with ice cream or trips to the zoo. The walk allows a slow reveal, a calm place with a calm pace. This is how we learn about pets that aren't coming back or girlfriends who would like to take this opportunity to say we should just be good friends. These little walks usually have the effect of making me want to run away.
Which is probably why I continue, decades later, to run for my health. I don't stop to chat. I just keep running. Forrest Gump would be proud. And yet, there are still times when polite society and its conventions encourage me to take it down  a notch. My wife likes to go for walks. With me. And I try not to imagine what sort of bad news might come my way as we take these leisurely strolls in the park, or down by the ocean, or through our neighborhood. Mostly it's just the day to day business and pleasantries of a relationship that has been going on since about the time I started running. For my health. So I go along, taking my cues from those around me. Walk. Don't walk. Run.

I See Dumb People

I stopped lining up for M. Knight Shyamalan movies after "Signs." Once it became pretty clear that his thing was to have a twist at the end of each of his tales, it made the twist less entertaining. It became, to me, annoying. You mean that village is really next to a highway where all these modern-day Luddites have raised themselves up a generation of kiddies living in fear of that world outside the woods? I never would have seen that coming, except that it has that "M. Knight" at the front of it and I wouldn't expect anything else as a result. This may be the best way I can explain my reaction to Donald Trump(sic).
Why would I be surprised by anything that comes out of that roiling sewer of a mouth? How could I not anticipate that each new verbal salvo will be more offensive than the last? When he was just a reality TV host and guest on Howard Stern's radio show he was a buffoon. He gets big points with his orange Kool-Aid swilling followers for "telling it like it is." Maybe that's the hair dye talking, but "telling it like it is" should not be confused with "saying whatever comes into that atrophied stem of a brain. "There has to be some form of punishment" for women who have abortions is only the most recent example of how vile and idiotic things just dribble off this guy's tongue. 
Outrage was heard on all fronts, including those on the "Pro Life" front: Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that opposes abortion, joined the chorus of people condemning Trump. “Let us be clear,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. “Punishment is solely for the abortionist who profits off of the destruction of one life and the grave wounding of another.”
Why would anyone, at this point, have any questions about how incredibly out of touch Mister Trumpway is with women and women's issues? Why would anyone expect that he would do anything but support his campaign manager after he was accused of battery on a female reporter? This is the guy who offered to pay the legal fees of any of his angry rabble who might end up punching, pepper spraying or otherwise harming those who might speak against their Oompa Loompa God. 
What sort of outrage was stirred by Donald Trumpty when he reversed his idiotic position just hours after he was ready to punish women who had abortions? Well, let's just say that I wasn't surprised to find out that Bruce Willis was dead all along. That's what all those clues were about. Trumpadump's handlers explained it away as "a simple error in speaking." Simple? As simple as the suggestion that he should simply stop speaking. 

Live From Leeds

Keep calm and carry on. That's what the Ministry of Information will tell you, if you lived in England during World War Two. While Hitler's Luftwaffe bombed London night after night, and German V2 rockets screamed overhead, the British people kept their resolve and their stiff collective upper lip. This was, after all, what was left of an empire that once spanned the globe. They weren't going to run and hide from a vegetarian painter with visions of world domination. They had negotiated their own non-aggression pact with Germany just a few years before, so they obviously had a sense of humor. Combine that with all that calmness, and you have a pretty wicked sense of the absurd.

Which may explain why twenty-six year-old Ben Innes took the time during Tuesday's standoff on an Egyptian airliner to snap a photo of himself with the hijacker. "I'm not sure why I did it -- I just threw caution to the wind while trying to stay cheerful in the face of adversity. I figured if his bomb was real I'd have nothing to lose anyway, so took a chance to get closer and look at it." The bomb in question was strapped to a belt around fifty-eight year-old Seif al-Din Mohamed Mostafa. The picture was not, as initially reported, a selfie. Instead, it was taken with the aid of a stewardess who was standing nearby in what must surely be one of the most impressive bits of customer service imaginable. 

Ben is a rugby player, which may explain some of the pugnacity. One admirer of Mister Innes appreciated his "indefatigableness," which may be the Queen's English for "nitwit." Some might call it "cheeky." Others might say he was "barmy." Whatever the descriptor, it was apparent from the evidence that he wasn't trying to be a hero as much as he was trying to point out the absurdity of the situation. Fifty-five hostages on board an EgyptianAir A320 could have been blown to bits by such an affront, but since it all ended happily with their release and the hijacker being taken into custody. Rather than being totally snookered. 

And so, do we admire this young Brit and his ability to stay calm amidst the chaos of this modern world? Or should we count this as a lucky bit of social media that could have been a sad relic of something much worse? For now, I will take it as the tiniest of victories in the war against terror. Countless thousands to one. One health and safety adjuster from Leeds. 

Killing Superman

Why bother saying that we killed Superman? I understand that the spoiler alert is happening here, after the spoiler, but it's not really a spoiler if there is no way anyone at Time Warner will let that happen. That's how we have come to know too much about show business. A twenty-four hour news cycle means that we know everything that Hollywood movie executives of yesteryear knew when they were running studios. We know about gross ticket sales and star's paychecks and production difficulties. Why would we care? Why would we want to know that there is a man behind that curtain pulling the strings and pushing the buttons. The great and powerful Oz was James Franco and it was a beautiful mess, as are so many things involving James Franco. At least this is what my informed opinion turns out to be. I got to this point pretty early in my life, having grown up with a mother who read every movie magazine that came into her parents' drugstore back in the 1930's. What was happening behind the camera was every bit as dramatic and exciting as what occurred on the other side, you just had to read.
Now you don't even have to read, you just turn on TMZ or click on the link that shows up at the bottom of the last post you read. I didn't read the reviews for "Dawn of Justice" before I went to see Batman try to beat up Superman. I had read and heard about how difficult the process of bringing the big guns of DC comics together on the screen. I had formed my opinions long before I took my seat, but I wanted to see it unfold. I had hoped to be surprised. The surprise was how low the expectations I had set needed to be. A friend's son had told me "It's not that bad." How bad would that have to be? This dark and muddy world of angry revenge brought forth without any of the motivations that previous iterations of the Dark Knight had provided. Ben Affleck and George Clooney are both actors for whom I have a great deal of admiration, but I will be happy if they don't don a cowl and cape anytime soon again. It's not really their fault, after all, since the fun part of super heroes comes in that first part: super.
I have written before about my pre-existing prejudice against DC comics, and my predilection for those made by Marvel. Flawed characters are interesting, even heroes. Watching them rise above those flaws is the trick. Seeing Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent struggle with their collective id doesn't have the same snappy taste as Peter Parker or Tony Stark. This is probably because there is better writing going on, and since the stakes are often very similar, how is it that there can't be a better movie made with all that money being thrown around?
I blame Superman. Invulnerable means "not vulnerable." Those other guys, Bruce Wayne/Batman included, are vulnerable. They are making a conscious choice to be super. Supes wakes up that way. He has to make a conscious choice to be vulnerable. That was Superman II. That's been done. What's left? Killing him. That's as vulnerable as you can get. But you can't have a sequel. There's already a release date for the next one. They aren't going to pay Henry Cavill all that money to lay around in a pine box. He'll be zipping around in that red cape and matching briefs before you can say "Justice League." Will we care? I will still probably stand in line to watch it happen, in that whole train wreck, Rotten Tomatoes kind of way. And that's how really bad movies still make money. Go figure.