Grateful

Watching me watching the world around me. This is how I experienced Yosemite. This was after missing out on the grandeur of all that nature for all these years. This national park was my Grateful Dead album. People who look at my music collection have always been able to find the hole, that missing piece. For the longest time, that was the Grateful Dead album. "Wow," they would say, "You've got a lot of music here." Plenty of admiration. "But you don't have any Grateful Dead?" 

I never did. As much as I respected and admired the work of Jerry and Mickey and the rest, I never got around to buying that record. Or tape. Or CD. Or mp3. This is probably as a result of having spent a good deal of time in my youth surrounded by Deadheads who felt that I should share their commitment to the Dead. I appreciated what I heard, on cassettes and vinyl on endless recordings of live versions of all those songs. Dark Star. Truckin'. Ripple. On and on. Sugar Magnolia. Friend of the Devil. The sounds and words that made up all those tunes became part of my world. Vicariously. Somehow, I felt as if I were to buy into that whole scene that I would be surrendering to this thing that I didn't fully understand. I was stubborn. I didn't want to surrender to something so big, so vast. It felt like peer pressure, and so I avoided it. 

Until the day that I went ahead and bought that greatest hits CD. And now I can hear those songs and enjoy them for what they are. It was a silly principle onto which I held for no particular reason other than showing just how stubborn I could be. That would be pretty. Stubborn, that is.

Which is kind of how I felt when I got out of the car and set foot in Yosemite Valley. There I was, surrounded by all that rock and trees and waterfalls, and that's when I felt the eyes of my friends, and my wife, and my son on me. I knew they were waiting for me to light up with the joy that all that natural wonderment could give me. I looked up at those massive slabs of granite and felt awe. And gratitude for the patience extended by all those around me in the time it took for me to find my way here. Among the trees and rocks and waterfalls. In my head, I heard a song. 

You, who choose to lead, must follow
But if you fall you fall alone.
If you should stand then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home.

It was beautiful. And I was happy to be there. 

Performance

The parties are all over. The balloon industry has met its quota for the next four years, and now we get down to the nitty gritty. The presidential election can now take place. Those previous two years in which people from both sides of the aisle were dong exploratory research and test marketing their brand are behind us. We are now faced with the awesome choice of Hillary or Donald, candidates so familiar to us that we are on a first name basis with them.
I'm not sure I want to be that familiar. I am reasonably certain that, if given the opportunity to meet one or both of them face to face, I would refer to them as "Mrs. Clinton" and "Mr. Trump." A  lot of this has to do with the inherent dignity of the office, not necessarily because of the inherent dignity of the candidates themselves. On the contrary: When my son, who will be voting in his first election this  November, looks to me for wisdom I have little to offer. Currently I am stuck on the parental echo of "because I said so." Do you really want Donald Trump to be president? Then you had better cast your vote for Hillary Clinton. But what about all that stuff about -
And I have to cut him off. Not because I don't want him to question the dominant paradigm, or to seek out the answer that will work for him. I am terrified. Each day that passes without Jim Henson popping out from behind that floppy orange mass of hair, explaining that it was all some massive prank and that he wasn't really dead but he has been zipped up inside the most awful Muppet of all, I become a little more afraid. Are all those people who have access to keyboards and typing those racist, misogynist, and otherwise hateful messages, comments  and tweets really going to crawl out of their dark holes and find their way to polling places across this great land of ours to generate the biggest mistake of our lives? I think of those dull British folks who woke up after their pub crawl to realize they had somehow managed to put their beloved country in a blender and sent it into an economic tailspin. Odds bodkins, that was a bit barmy, weren't it?
Scary, how that one little moment of throwing a tantrum in a voting booth can come back to haunt you for the next four to eight years. It still doesn't give me a good answer for my son, who continues to look for "the right person" for whom to cast his vote, but it does give me hope that this will all turn out to be one really bad piece of performance art.
Yeah. I'd vote for that.

Back Again

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was on my cable TV a few mornings back. Thirty-nine years ago, when I saw it the first time, I was caught up in the mystery and the science and the fiction and all those space ships. It capped off a year that had already taken me to a galaxy far, far away, and now I was being shown a spot just up the interstate from me where aliens were going to land. Roy Neary's story gave me hope that in spite of my lack of potential as an astronaut, there was a chance for me to head out into the stars.
That was when I was fifteen. I saw it as a great adventure. It was an amazing ride. Even way back then, I understood that beings from another planet had selected Roy, played by Richard Dreyfuss, was an everyman. He was a bit of a schlub. He was no Han Solo. He wasn't even a Luke Skywalker. But somehow, he was the one that the schwas picked. Not Francois Truffaut or Bob Balaban or any of those science types. Even that sweaty kid who played the keyboards for the mothership, he stayed home. Roy got to go for a ride.
It reminded me of Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five. It was that same swirl of time and space that I found myself reveling in decades later. Only now I was sitting on the edge of my bed, I was married and I have a kid and a house of my own and Devil's Tower isn't just six hours away anymore. It would take me about as long to drive there now as it took Roy Neary way back then. And now I understand why it was so hard for him to make that choice. He wasn't a kid. He wasn't going off on some idealistic crusade. He was being called. Even though everything in his life, his job and his wife and his kids and his house, created a vortex to keep him here on earth. That's why he's crying at the dinner table. He's a mess.His marriage is falling apart. His neighbors think he's crazy. He has lost his job.Roy has come untethered from his spot at home.
Now I understand just how hard it was for Roy, and how much greater the adventure he was on really was. It's lasted for nearly forty years. And thousands of miles. Here to there. And back again.

What We Made

Every day
I am presented
with this blank page
You help me
fill it up
With a wink
or a smile
or a laugh
or a thought
Every year
I write a book
with your name
on the cover
Our name
on the cover
We share that
we agreed to
long ago
In a meadow
among the trees
and the flowers
and our friends
We made a family
of just two
to start
Thank you
for taking that walk
with me

Unbalanced

Roger Ailes, bye-bye. Aloha. Auf Wiedersehen. Sayonara. Adios. Arrivederci. Au Revoir. Bon Voyage. The Chief Executive Officer of Fox News has gone to that fair and balanced retirement in the sky. Okay, not necessarily in the sky, though one could imagine that his severance package would allow him a nice penthouse someplace or other. Up the elevator and to the right. Always to the right.
Which brings me to the subject of right and left, fair and balanced, liberal and conservative. I remember when I was in fifth grade and we studied journalism. This was back in the seventies, and things were probably very different than they are now. We've got smart phones now. And cable TV. I am sure those things make a huge difference, but what I remember being taught by Mister Conklin was that a journalist should be objective. We were to consider ourselves to be the silent, passive observers of what happened around us. We were asked to report on incidents without giving our opinion on those matters. There was a place for opinions: on the editorial page. Otherwise, we were restricted to those five w's: who, what, when, where, and why. For those of us who were more advanced, we were allowed an h: how. Once those questions had been answered, our job was done. Our thoughts and feelings about how and why things went down was not part of our reportage. We were asked to focus on the facts. Just the facts. This was back in the seventies, as I mentioned. The early seventies. Richard Nixon was president. The only president to resign from office. That's a fact. How  I felt about President Nixon was of no consequence, at least not when it came to reporting on the politics of the day.
Which is why I found myself a job on the editorial page as quickly as I could. Which is why I have this blog. How I feel about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is what keeps me prattling on here. I expect that may have been  what got Mister Ailes started, founding his own news channel, where he could decide what the editorial slant might be. If there was such a thing. It should be noted that Roger got his start as a medial consultant for Richard Nixon. People used to call him "Tricky Dicky." That's a fact.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Lies, damn lies, and statistics. These are the things we might be discussing during this presidential election. Donald Trumpence started the ball rolling early on, calling his chief rival "Lyin' Ted." This was not for Senator Cruz's propensity to fall into a prone position on the floor whenever he didn't get his way, but rather because he felt that Ted would obfuscate or mislead those within earshot of his fiery rhetoric. Manipulation of the facts, however, is what makes this season so special. Truth, it seems, will be a rather tough commodity to come by over the next few months. That and a civility.
Nowhere is this reality gulf felt more widely than the question of law and order. One party would like us to cling to the fear that has been laid out, partly by the media, but mostly by the terror-infused speeches of the Grand Old Party. On the other side we have the folks who will insist that, in spite of the high profile death and destruction we tune into nightly and click on each morning, all is well. There are plenty of media types who will point at graphs that show that violent crime has been on the decline for more than twenty five years. This is usually just before a cut to commercial and then a report on the latest mass shooting or suicide bombing.
What is the truth? Hard to say, especially with so many emotions mixed into the math. But here is where I start to get confused: If the country is becoming more violent, doesn't it make sense to put all our guns away? Or if the opposite is true, and we have never been so safe, why make such a fuss about all those assault rifles?
Maybe the real truth, as so often is the case, lies somewhere in the middle. Like so many slippery, stubborn things facts require management or at least heavy gloves when handling them. Like the economy, which has all those numbers and quantifiers, there will be a lot of arguments about if we are better off now or if we need to change course before we fall down the rabbit hole. You remember the rabbit hole. The one Alice fell into so many years ago. The rabbit hole of political satire.

Float On, FLOTUS

I have stayed away from the spectacle of both the Republican and Democratic conventions. The idea that I might find something in either one of these gatherings of the party faithful that would significantly alter my perception of the way the world works or that suddenly the scales would fall from my eyes and I would finally see the Emperor's fancy new suit for what it actually is seems faulty from the get-go. There have been times, in the past, when I have peeked in at the hubbub just to check it out, reaffirming my longstanding beliefs about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. But like those late-night talk shows that have ceased to be important to me, if something really important or amusing happens, it will be on YouTube the next day.
That's how I missed Michelle Obama's address to the Democratic National Convention. The next day, I heard about how inspiring and soaring her words were. I decided to check it out, and by golly, even after the fact it was stirring. An African-American woman was addressing the assemblage of one of our nation's major political parties not as a token or a stunt. She was there as the First Lady of the United States. She was there as a representative of women and, more to her point, mothers across this great land of ours. It would have been easy enough to toss around the invective that has been standard orating procedure over the past two years. It would have been easy enough for her to simply stand there, as the object of all those things that Herr Trumppenstein holds with such little regard. She spoke of what it means to see the change that is possible in our country. She talked about waking up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.
Wait a minute, says Bill O'Reilly. Let's check the facts on that one. Because we don't want to give this already bleeding heart party any more grist for their mill. "Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working as well." Overseers, perhaps? Bill went on: "Slaves that worked there were well-fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring slave labor in 1802. However, the feds did not forbid subcontractors from using slave labor. So, Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working as well. Got it all? There will be a quiz." Hey, Bill? You just used your bully pulpit (a pulpit used by bullies) to acknowledge that Michelle Obama was correct in her assertion. All that other fluff and nonsense about well-fed and decent lodgings in no way deflects the point she was making. Got it? There will be a quiz.
As for me, I'm just glad that after a minor crisis in confidence by yours truly, order has been restored in the cosmos. Bill O'Reilly is a nutjob. And Michelle Obama is pretty awesome.