Crossing The Line

 They used to keep movies in theaters for weeks. For months even. I can remember when Star Wars, which was the title of the movie before it became a franchise-breakfast cereal-TV series-pop culture phenomenon, played at one theater in our hometown for more than six months. Long enough for me to embrace the quantumness of it and order myself a Darth Vader mask and have it shipped to me in time to wear it to a showing where I was allowed to get in for free because I was such a fan. Such a fan, in fact, that a friend of mine and I were once paid a dollar (each) to stop repeating the lines before they were spoken onscreen. This allowed us (both) to rush up to the concession stand, buy some Junior Mints and come back to different seats where we continued our repertory. 

This was not a singular event. Once upon a time, before the clone wars, theater owners who had a hit on their hands would make an advertising point out of a movie being held over for the "seventh smash week!" Your entertainment dollar was being carefully herded toward what became blockbusters. Theater owners would keep showing whatever was keeping lines going around the block. Or at least filling a matinee. 

Of course, this was a time before home video. Before HBO was making their own movies. Before movies were reduces to a little plastic box containing a spool of half inch tape. Before they became shiny coasters. Before they disappeared completely and started appearing magically on the ridiculously large flat screen in your living room. This was another time. 

We now live in an age where we can decide if we would like to wait the week or two for a film to become available on a streaming service, or pay the nominal fee to have it even sooner. 

Without ever standing in line. 

I remember, before the COVID, going out late in the evening to stand in line to see the first showing of the latest Marvel, or the "last" Star Wars. There was a cultural cachet to those experiences. I continue to hold personal pride in being an opening weekend kind of guy. I want others to ask me what I thought before they go out and don't have to stand in line. They don't because it's not there. The line that is. It will be on Netflix/Hulu/HBO/Apple/Roku/AskJeeves before you know it anyway. At which point, feel free to watch these films as many times as you'd like. Memorize the dialogue. But don't expect to get paid to shut up. 

Enormous Changes

 Greetings from sunny California!

Oppressively sunny California. I have been struggling with trying to remember which comedian wondered if Eskimos ever got tired of their weather forecasts. Here in the Golden State, we are kind of done with all that extra sun. We are on fire out here. And the forecast is for more sun. And fire.

Meanwhile, on the right hand side of the country, things are underwater. Initially, there was some relief in the word that Ida had been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. And then the flooding began. Torrential rains pounded New York and New Jersey. While folks in Louisiana are still waiting for the power to come back on, the D Train is running late because it is under of water. 

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents part of this undersea kingdom , tweeted, “The Green New Deal, which is a blueprint to create millions of good jobs rebuilding infrastructure to stem climate change & protect vulnerable communities, is unrealistic. Instead we will do the adult thing, which is take orders from fossil fuel execs & make you swim to work.” 

And that may seem like a bit of hyperbole, but out in California where wildfires have been raging for months, commutes, school schedules and everyday life has been disrupted by the ever-shifting realities of the climate. The changing climate. The global warming that was referenced with such irony by deniers when winter came in such a crush last year is here now. The sun is boiling the water and turning it into severe weather that is wreaking havoc in all parts of the globe. Drought on one side of a continent and torrential rains on the other. My family in Colorado has felt little of this disparity, since they have experienced fires and flood in recent years. This summer has been one of few extremes, with nothing catastrophic. However, they can remember floods and fires coming in alternating waves in summers past and they can anticipate more of the same moving forward. 

Which is not news, really. It's just science. It's not weather. It's climate. 

And it's changing.

Really. 

Don't Fence Me In

 I grew up with a certain distaste for Texas. There was a feeling among Coloradans at that time that Texans were using Colorado as their personal playground, and when they showed up they weren't the polite guests that would have ingratiated them to their hosts. The picture I have in my mind is that of a brash and loud recreational vehicle full of brash and loud individuals who expressed their brash and loud opinions about how things ought to be. Mostly, they wanted everything brash and loud like it was back in Texas.

I know from a solid bit of hindsight that the cultures of these two states were not radically different. Cattle and oil paved the way for a lot of folks to become rich and spread out across vast expanses of land that was never theirs in the first place. Those patches were described by where you could string a barbed wire fence or drill a well. It is no surprise that the fictional Ewings of Dallas competed for ratings back in the day with the fictional Carringtons of Denver. 

But somewhere along the wagon trail the paths diverged. Those small patches of blue that existed in places like Aspen and my hometown of Boulder began to spread. Soon there was a counterculture that became culture in Colorado. Democrats began to take hold. Liberals controlled much of the politics that went through the Centennial State.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, there was the constant battle to "keep Austin weird." This has been accomplished to some degree, but not enough to impact the general drift of things to the right. Just recently, the powers that be in the Lone Star state have made it harder to vote, all but impossible to get an abortion, and easier to own and carry your trusty shootin' iron. How did this happen? 

Maybe it has something to do with that frontier spirit that made settled the west. Nobody tells me how to live my life. Everything, including the egos, are bigger in Texas. They stood up at the Alamo. They stood up to all those who said that they would never last in such godforsaken waste. 

Yee hah. 

Now that same attitude is fueling a surge in the epidemic, and crushing the rights of those who don't own a ranch or an oil well. Which I can only imagine will create some sort of exodus, with havens like New Mexico and Colorado providing safe haven for those refugees of this death cult. My suggestion? Don't drive up in your brash and loud RV. 

These Go Up To Eleven

 Bill Gates and his ex-wife have spent so much time saving the world that they almost forgot to put out a new version of Windows. 

That's the way I am guessing it went down. Back in the day, it seemed like you couldn't turn around without finding a call to update your operating system. Way back in the late eighties and early nineties, it seemed like the first version would be fine after a few tweaks that came along with 2.0. Windows 3.0 hung on for a few more years after that, but Windows 95 came about giving us the fear that we might suddenly be asked to make a change once a year. That turned out to be three, when Windows 98 showed up, and just a couple more before we had Windows 2000 dropped in our laps. That one only held sway for a year before the very futuristically named XP was rolled out. That was replaced by Vista in 2006 after a nice run, which was in turn remanded to the shelf by Windows 7. Then 8. Then 9. Then came 10. In case you thought that this trend would continue, you're in luck because in October we will be gifted with Windows 11. Just when you thought it was safe to turn on your computer.

Of course, you could be working on one of the Apple machines and have absolutely no idea about the progression of Lion to Ocelot to Yosemite to Pleasant Valley. Or whatever it is that the self-proclaimed geniuses at Mac feel like naming their operation systems. I imagine there is a genius in an office in Cupertino sole purpose at the company is to come up with random nouns to assign to their new products. Just like all you really need to do is slap an "i" in front of anything in order to raise the price by a power of ten. 

Why am I griping about this? I run a computer lab at a school. For kids. Each time one of these "revolutions" occurs, I have to set about scrambling for funds to get the room full of machines in front of which children will eventually sit up to date. This school, as you may imagine from reading many of the other entries which I have written about my job, does not have a parents group or readily available stream of financing the sole purpose of keeping us on the cutting edge of technology. Once upon a time, we were gifted with an extremely generous benefactor who showed up on our doorstep asking if there was anything he could do. "Would you like to have a computer lab with Internet and network printers?" I jumped at that opportunity. Replacing the room full of Apple IIC boxes and tractor feed printers only loosely connected by a hive of wires was a dream. It came true. 

And now, some twenty years later, I am once again tensing for the inevitable crush for funds to make it all work. Again. Better. Faster. Eleven. 

Sheesh. 

The Way Home

 It makes sense, after all. My son is an adult now, even though I have to remind myself of the fact of twenty-four years. My instinct to reach for his hand as we cross the street will come in handy in a few more years when I need help negotiating traffic. And all those reminders I got from my mother for all these years about how I will never stop being her son make more sense now that I have this context. I want to do everything I can to make his path in life easier.

Some things, I find, are beyond my control. 

As much as I would like to be the all-knowing all-caring source of all that is good an kind in his life, my son has discovered that I am a minorly flawed being. I do not know everything. There are things that he would rather not discuss with me. No matter how interested I am. Or pretend to be. And it's not like he keeps secrets. He sometimes sighs and tells me "I'd rather not talk about it." 

And this makes sense. 

I have to remember being in my twenties myself. I have to remember that I was looking for someone who could understand those bits of me that I kept hidden. Or shared my excitement for the things that no one else seemed to appreciate. It's a calculation. It's a wager, a chance taken on the world that is spreading out in front of him. I am grateful for all the ways he has helped expand my world. Formula One racing, for example. Memes for another. These and other cultural threads might never have become part of my quilt, but I have my son to thank for bringing me the flavors I might never have tasted.

And all the permutations of meat and cheese we have always shared together. 

Now he is on a separate voyage, and even when he lives in the basement just below us, it is a separate life. When it came time to figure out who would give him a ride to the airport, it wasn't automatically his mother and father who were on the hook. He figured he could just call a friend, just like he would once he arrived at his destination. A little piece of my heart broke then, but I know I'll be okay since his parents are still the ultimate backup. And his biggest fans. I can't wait for the next postcard or text. Or the name of the Korean Barbecue place he discovered. When did that become part of his palette? 

Granted

 "You know what, kid? You've got spunk!"

"Well - I -"

"I hate spunk!"

It was this exchange, more than anything else, that brought me to the work of Ed Asner. While it is entirely possible that I was aware of his presence before I watched this scene because of the marathon of a career he had on film and especially television, but this was the moment that captured my attention. This gruff, shirtsleeves rolled up guy, was on the verge of giving America's Sweetheart played in this case by Mary Tyler Moore a chance. Instead, he spat his pointed indifference to her presence in his office. As a result, what would eventually become a TV institution was almost over before it began. 

We all know that Lou Grant ended up hiring Mary Richards, where she worked as associate producer for WJM-TV news for seven years. I watched them all the first time they aired, and then again whenever reruns appeared. This was one of the very few shows that proved an exception to my hardline stance that all episodic TV should be limited to three seasons. For example, I could have done without the episode in which Lou attempts to act on the crush he believes he may have grown to nurture for his associate producer. But mostly it was the better part of a decade getting to know the crew at WJM News. 

And now Lou Grant is gone, along with pretty much the rest of the cast. Except Betty White, also known as Sue Ann Nivens, The Happy Homewrecker. Maker. Sue Ann's tireless pursuit of the cantankerous Lou Grant was always a reliable source of laughs, as these seasoned pros showed their stuff. Ed Asner won five of his seven Emmys for his portrayal of Mister Grant, spanning the Mary Tyler Moore Show and its dramatic spinoff that featured Lou Grant as an LA newspaper man. And before you decide that he was just a one-trick pony, don't forget the Emmy he won for playing the morally conflicted slave ship captain in Roots. 

Then there was the way he supported so many liberal causes over the course of his career, including those that may have led to the cancellation of his hit CBS series. Ed Asner probably deserved some sort of special award or recognition for the way he proved to be a burr under Ronald Reagan's saddle back in the day. 

Now, he's gone. Lou Grant probably would have hated Ed Asner. He had spunk. He stomped on the Terra and made television a little more interesting in his wake. He will be missed. Aloha, Ed. 

Spirit In The Sky

 You take your wisdom where you find it.

In my case, at this particular moment in time, I am taking odd solace in the words of fictional character, Tyler Durden. If you are familiar with the wit and insights of this person, I will encourage you to find a copy of the movie or the novel before you complete this next bit. It's not a requirement, and there will not be a quiz, but a little background might help.

You have been warned. 

Mister Durden said, "You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you." 

I repeat this sentiment here not to stir up questions about the existence of a deity or to jab at anyone's specific beliefs. I looked at the news and I saw Haiti being leveled by an earthquake just weeks after the assassination of their president. I saw hurricanes lining up to batter communities already suffering from a global pandemic. I read about the Taliban bringing their own peculiar brand of repressive theocracy to a country that hasn't seen a day of peace for two generations. People are flocking to feed stores to buy horse ivermectin to protect them from the aforementioned global pandemic rather than taking the free FDA approved vaccine being supplied by the government. Jeff Bezos is suggesting that the solution to our tired planet's trash problem is to send it into outer space. 

So, what if Tyler was right? I suggest that we all come together whenever and however we can in what may be the waning moments of our time here on the planet, before the Taliban takes over and sends all those they consider unclean into outer space on Prime Day, and pray.

Or at least apologize. We can do better. We need to do better. Before someone hits the reset button.