Tangled

 Remember that story I told about the Comcast offer that turned out to be a scam? Well, if I didn't already bore you with the details, the short version goes something like this: I picked up a call that identified as "Scam Likely," but since I tend to tease these moments out into something beyond just annoyance I decided to play along. The offer being made by the gentleman on the other end of the line was to cut my cable bill in half. Or close to it. And as much as I wanted to bring the experience to an abrupt end, I felt drawn in by the bait. The pitch this guy gave about giving back to their loyal customers was appealing enough that I kept playing along. It was all going along so professional and friendly like until the suggestion was made that I pay for three months in advance. In the form of Target gift cards. From my perch in front of my computer, I was quickly able to Google this specific scheme, and then the fun was over. 

The worst part about this was that recently when I was having trouble with my Xfinity/Comcast/NBC/Universal services, and I found myself once again dealing with the spiderweb of automated systems that are in place specifically to keep customers from speaking to human beings, I wanted that guy back. At least, I wanted to talk to the guy who was understanding about how the price of getting cable TV and Internet and landline service. Shouldn't those who pay their bills on time, and have been doing so for thirty years or more be given some sort of volume discount? Or at the very least have easy access to real people who are interested in helping solve problems with the aforementioned services? 

Because that has all but disappeared. Recently I went to a burger joint for some fast food and found that I could almost completely avoid human contact by ordering at a kiosk, paying there, and waiting for my cell phone to buzz when my order was ready to pick up at the counter. Grocery store runs are also streamlined by the self-service checkout. Get all those barcodes lined up right and don't accidentally remove something from the bagging area and you can be in and out without ever making eye contact. 

Which is great, except when there is a glitch. In my latest Comcast imbroglio, there were several glitches. And once they started, they just kept compounding because there wasn't anyone on the receiving end to slow down the chaos to try and straighten things out. When I finally reached the nominal end of the tech issues, I wanted to be able to relate my experience to someone in customer service. This required another twenty minutes of starts and stops with the phone maze, and I was finally able to get a real person from "Customer Care" on the line. As I began to relate, for that seemed like the twentieth time, my situation, the connection began to falter. 

It was only after waiting for a call back and then reengaging with their system that I was at last told that the "Customer Care" department was shut down due to technical difficulties. Which made me wonder: Who do they call for support? 

How Many Years Young?

 Film composer and former lead singer for Oingo Boingo Danny Elfman just turned seventy. I was going to say "seventy years old," but I stopped myself. First of all, I continue to refer to this person whom I have never met by the somewhat diminutive "Danny" rather than "Dan" or "Daniel." My father waited until I was eighteen before he started referring to me as "Davy." That didn't sit well with me as I was beginning to forge my way in the adult world, but he was my father. My senior. My progenitor. It could be argued that he had earned it. 

But why would I continue to refer to someone who is nine years older than me in this same fashion? Probably because there has never been any effort to affect any change in his overall persona. All those scary, manic noises he sang and composed for all those years, it feels like the work of a Danny. And his last name is "Elfman." How grown up could you expect a guy with that surname will ever be? 

Back to that "seventy years old" thing: Now that I can imagine what seventy might look and feel like, I confess that I am looking for ways to ameliorate that rush of time. Lately, Danny has not been content to simply play out his string, conducting the occasional orchestra playing his film scores, or singing along with guests at the odd staging of A Nightmare Before Christmas. A year ago, Mister Elfman not only performed at Coachella, he did a great deal of that rock and roll set without a shirt. And he had GQ magazine asking about how he managed his "look." 

Then I think about this habit that I have, when I am out on a run, and I run past the occasional duffer who I suspect may be older than me. But by how much? And those who rush on past me, are they just flaunting their relative youth, or do I console myself with the notion that this isn't a race, and we'll all get where we need to go eventually? I am certainly not ready for Gentleman's Quarterly to come and interview me about my workout habits. Not that this is in any way a thing I would encourage. 

Meanwhile, Joe Biden and Bruce Springsteen fell down One is the leader of the free world. The other is a politician. Both of them are older than Danny Elfman. Media outlets felt compelled to use these as a mark of the ravages of time. Just a few days ago, my twenty-six year old son got smacked in the head by an errant door at Safeway. Nobody suggested that he was unfit for office. We all just figured that Safeway had mislabeled their doors. 

No word about how Danny Elfman has been handling his trips to the grocery store. 

How The Sausage Gets Made

President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met in the Oval Office on May 22, 2023 to discuss the debt ceiling. Here is a recording made at that meeting. 

McCarthy: Are you kidding? Pass that stupid debt ceiling bill? That's dumb!

Biden: That's 'cause you know it'll stick!

McCarthy: You're full of it!

Biden: Oh yeah?

McCarthy: Yeah!

Biden: Well I double-DOG-dare ya!

MSNBC: NOW it was serious. A double-dog-dare. What else was there but a "triple dare you"? And then, the coup de grace of all dares, the sinister triple-dog-dare.

Biden: I TRIPLE-dog-dare ya!

MSNBC: Biden created a slight breach of etiquette by skipping the triple dare and going right for the throat!

Sounds of egos clashing can be heard, then the soft whimpering of a House Speaker who had just walked into a trap. 

MSNBC: McCarthy's spine stiffened. His lips curled in a defiant sneer. There was no going back now.

 Schwartz: This is nuts. 

Biden: HAHAHA 

McCarthy: (scribbles can be heard) Stuck. Stuck! STUCK!! 

Biden: Geez, it really worked.

MSNBC: So, if you see Speaker McCarthy with his tongue stuck to a flagpole, you'll know why. 

Grounded In Play

 I picked up my phone on the morning of June first and saw that there was a text from one of my fellow teachers. I'm used to getting texts from my colleagues. What I am not used to is getting a text from one of my fellow teachers a week after we have finished the school year about

Wait for it

The resurfacing of our school's playground. 

You read that right. The text my friend sent me was of a front loader scooping up a great mass of broken asphalt. The bane of my professional existence for the past twenty-six years was being carted away. In great big truckfuls. 

This was a big enough deal to me that I laced up my shoes and ran out of the house, all the way to school where I could witness this magic all for myself. For a great many years it has been my good fortune to teach PE on the desolate moonscape that has passed for a playground. Every year or so, the district would send out a crew to make vague attempts at patching the craters and cracks that proliferated across this expanse. Each year it just got worse. And worse. Each year, whenever the opportunity would present itself, I would make loud noises to anyone who would listen about the state of my school's yard. Each year, those pleas would be met with another round of patching. Each PE class included several requests for the students in my charge to please not throw the broken bits of asphalt and rocks at one another. Over the past year, these pleas were expanded to include bits of the melted rubber that had been used the summer before as patching material. 

On the morning of June 1, 2023, all of that mess was broken into tiny bits, or at least more manageable bits and removed, leaving a barren stretch of earth that would soon be turned back into a play surface for children in grades K through Five. All of those hopes and dreams were suddenly made real for me and the kids who attend, or will attend, my school. Our school. The place with the new playground. The playground I thought might never happen. The playground about which I had recently been centering my plans for retirement. 

But I confess there was a tiny black cloud on the magnificent horizon. Upon first witnessing the initial photo, I felt the urge to call my mother with the news. A moment later, I uttered a curse. Loud enough for my wife to ask what was wrong. My mother didn't live long enough for me to tell her. 

I am assured, by those in the know, that she is aware. She may have had something to do with it. 

Pluribus

I guess I'm a little perplexed. I thought that the Far Right folks were against what they were labeling Cancel Culture. Now it seems that you can't go anywhere without stepping in the middle of some boycott or another. 

As of this writing, Kohls, Chick-Fil-A, and Target are now on the Do Not Fly List for uptight MAGAts. Initially, they seemed happy buying cases of Bud Light and shooting at them, but now they seem to be dedicating themselves to bringing down department stores and, in what seems like a bit of a twist, God's favorite chicken restaurant. 

This Chick-Fil-A hoopla started after someone with access to Al Gore's Internet made a point of sharing Chick-Fil-A's most recent hire:  a Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and to make matters even worse, they are now celebrating LGBTQ Pride Month.

That sound you just heard was the audible gasp from the tiny brained fear rodents who have apparently developed a fear of rainbows.

And what exactly are they so terrified about? Acknowledging a percentage of the human race doesn't live like they do might upset the very twisted balance upon which they have built their lives. It makes it extremely difficult for them to move about the country in their accustomed privileged bubble, knocking over people and things that somehow don't fit into their narrow vision of "how things should be."

Well, here's the wakeup for all of them: Things never were like the way they think things should be. People didn't just start being gay in 2016. America was founded on ideals like diversity and equity. Out of many, one. Or if you're more comfortable with the Latin, E Pluribus Unum. Not a uniquely American idea, but one that those who started this Constitutional Democracy of a Republic thought it important enough to stick on a lot of our money.

The money that you can feel to spend at Kohls, or Target, or even Chick-Fil-A. But to tell you the truth, since I am familiar with it, I kind of like that all those conservative types are being made to feel uncomfortable. There a lot of Americans who have spent their lives feeling like that every day. Feeling excluded? Gee. That's too bad.

Endless Loop

 My older brother kicked the door open for me when it came to making mix tapes. He put Bohemian Rhapsody right before Maynard Ferguson screeching Pagliacci. What followed after that was a mix of music, some of which I was familiar with some of it not, that would become the soundtrack for an entire summer. A few years later, he constructed another epic mix that served as my high school pep band's singalong tape: Ballad of the Green Berets, The Fish Cheer, Redneck Mother, and many many more. We wore that bad boy out. 

And in those acts of brotherly love, a seed was planted. When I got my first cassette deck, plugged it into my component system, I didn't use it to listen to pre-recorded tapes. I went out and bought a case of the preferred stock of Maxell UD-XLII ninety minute cassettes to start my own cottage industry. My car stereo would blast out collections of my favorite tunes, without commercials. The hits just kept comin'. 

When I started courting my high school girlfriend, she became the target of these operas I was too lazy to write. At the moment that the new music in my vinyl library became sufficient, I sat down in front of the stereo and pieced together another hour and a half of what was happening in my head. They became documents of the songs of that time, and the silly bits that I could squeeze into ninety minutes. 

Years passed, and eventually the romance dissipated. But the music kept coming. When she moved away I would still pack up a padded envelope now and again to keep the rock rolling. Somewhere in there cassettes gave way to CDs. And my attention turned to making tapes for the purpose of courting the girl who would become my wife. 

Time was kind to us all. We remained friends, and even though cassette tapes stopped being the currency of our relationships, those tapes hung around. Without any means for playback, there was still this mass of plastic full and overflowing with the sounds of adolescence. My wife had occasion to drop by my former girlfriend's home and she loaded up the empty spaces of her carryon with some of those nuggets from the past. She brought them home and here they sit, on my desk. 

I spent what I thought was a pittance for a machine that could turn those cassettes into music that my computer could play. So I could hear them one more time. On repeat. 

A Writer Wrote This

 The workers control the means of production. That sentiment goes pretty far into the quick and easy reasoning for me to back the Writers Guild in their current strike. To say that I am a "union man" would be a bit of a stretch, but since I pay my dues and I have participated in a number of work actions, I suppose I am guilty by association. But setting my traditional union ambivalence aside, I don't know how anyone outside of the corporate offices of the major studios could see things any other way. A handful of people are getting scandalously wealthy on the backs of a group of creative folks who are far too often not seen or heard even when the words they string together are. 

So why aren't they getting the same sort of big money that the far less creative executroids who "make deals" and "take meetings" get? Something about corner offices and capitalism. Once upon a very long time ago, there was a company formed by Charlie Chaplin, DW Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. They called it United Artists, created in 1919 to keep artists in control of their own interests rather than be dependent on commercial studios. Quite the ideal. Their studio has been bought and sold a number of times over the past century, with each iteration moving just a little farther from that ideal. The height of the irony surrounding these deals may be found in the absorption of UA by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, whose motto translated from the Latin is "art for art's sake." MGM has, to its credit, helped fund a lot of art, but art was not the underlying motivation. 

Money. That's what they want. So they lure artists to their bungalows and have them crank out art that they can proceed to turn into more money. 

Lots more money. That's what they want. The so-called Independent Film craze that broke out in the seventies here in the United States was quickly sopped up by studios who could offer big paychecks for those same gritty off-the-wall creations that were apocryphally paid for with credit cards. And then the studio would own them, free to release these works of art based on their business plans. If a director or a screenwriter got rich, it was never as rich as the ones holding the purse strings. 

When VHS turned into DVD and suddenly you could have the movie-going experience in your own living room, the artists who made those evenings possible had to go on strike to get the tiniest slice of the pie their overlords were enjoying. Now they don't even have to pay for the physical media. They just push a button and suddenly someone's vision can come streaming onto your big screen or your telephone at rates designed to keep you attached to that device and the studios who act as the dealer. 

Strike! Don't write another word until you get paid properly for your efforts. 

So, I guess upon reflection I'm a union guy after all.