One Thing Leads To Another

The way we do things around here:
Sometime in the middle of this past winter, I asked my wife to come sit next to me on our picnic bench. We were in the midst of a disagreement, and I offered the seat as a gesture of peace. When we both sat down, there was a creak and a snap. The dry rot beneath us made sitting on the bench an impossibility and spilled us onto the deck. The slapstick nature of our predicament put an end to the grumbling and hurt feelings as we picked ourselves up off the ground and started to consider how to move ahead. This was the moment that we gave the metaphorical mouse a metaphorical cookie.
The metaphorical mouse was able to hold off on his demand for metaphorical milk until the spring thaw, when my wife and I found ourselves once again out on the porch, and a quick assessment of the bench let us know that nothing had happened to make it any more sturdy since we left it there so many months ago. As is my wont, I began dismantling the remnants of the bench with my bare hands and stopped when I came to the part where there was actually solid wood: the slats. In my mind, I determined that there were enough to make a new table or a bench. Once I had all that nice straight wood laid out on the deck, my wife chimed in to say that making two benches would solve a whole host of problems, at least when it comes to hosting. As is our wont.
The metaphorical mouse wasn't done. He needed a metaphorical straw, which was the construction of these two new benches. Which naturally gave rise to the furniture inside our house, specifically the big blue couch that had served us so well for so many years. It had been the back wall of many New Years Eve forts, and its pullout bed had tortured a great many house guests. Once the metaphorical straw had been given to that metaphorical mouse, what was left but for us to go out furniture shopping. This was the mirror demanded by the mouse to check for a milk mustache, and a moment for us to reflect upon "grown up" furniture. After a tour of Ikea and its many styles and umlauts, we came home to rest, when that metaphorical mouse asked for a pair of metaphorical scissors to give his whiskers a trim. That was when we noticed that love seat we had dragged home from the curb up the street so many years back. It was tired, old, but part of the furniture.
Now we were thinking about it. The next day found us at the used furniture store, where the owner insisted she was in the mood to wheel and deal. A matching love seat and couch, and she would even pay our sales tax. Which meant that we needed to decide on delivery, and that metaphorical mouse and the broom he needed to sweep up the trimmings sounded a lot like renting a truck and doing the lifting by ourselves. All of which made us all very thirsty. So we asked for a glass of iced tea. Because we were out of milk.
But full of new furniture.
Get your own milk, rodent.

Fully Optimistic On Liberation

Aggravating beyond words. When this kind of thing happens, I expect the rest of the country, nay the rest of the world would be as up in arms as I am. This kind of frustration stems from the way things build up over time. If something had been done much earlier, who knows how different things might have turned out.
When there was still a chance that we could have averted this tragedy, no one seemed interested. The apathy felt among various groups was, in hindsight, oppressive. Not that there weren't individuals who tried to rise above the public's perception. There were plenty of folks who got it into their heads that they could be the change that we all need. To those people I say a hearty and appreciative "Thank You." The rest of us?
How could we have ignored all these signs? The great big neon ones that pointed directly to the source, but we as a society didn't have the wisdom or the courage to confront it. Not at the time. Not until it was too late.
But is it really too late? Can we turn back the clock and take another run at it now? If there was some way to make something better, if only superficially. Not that superficial would have made things worse. Sometimes appearances, aside from being deceiving, can open the door to more substantial change. Change that will last.
While we are waiting for someone to provide us with a vision to move ahead, must we stay mired in the confusion and lethargy that seems to bind us? Will we be able to respond as a nation when that individual or group finally appears on that ideological horizon? History suggests that it is possible. Maybe even likely. There are many examples of society doing just that.
How will we know when the moment comes that it won't be too little too late? How can we be sure that we will recognize the right thing to do after doing the wrong thing for so long? Could it be that we won't notice when real change comes down the track because we have been sitting still for so very long?
Hope, as the poet reminds us, is the thing with feathers, and if you have anything to add, please let me know before next April Fool's Day.

Sir Yuksalot

Dying is easy. Comedy is hard. Those are the words most often attributed to Edmund Kean. Mister Kean was a Shakespearean actor in the nineteenth century.  My son, who is a studying theater in college, might agree except that he has disdain for most things Shakespearean. Which, as an undergraduate, is pretty much his job. Poking holes in things that are supposed to be good for you is what students should do. However, having grown up in my house, I don't know if he would argue the sentiment too long. He grew up with a heaping bushel of comic influences. In his early teens, he discovered that the word "pants" has a magical quality to it, and he has used it to his advantage over the years, most memorably when it came time to name our family's Guitar Hero Band: Fiendish Pants.
Meanwhile, tragedy occurs around us every day. Plane crashes. Floods. The lingering presence of Donald J. Trumpf. Finding something funny to say or do while the world continues to disintegrate gets harder and harder. If Shakespeare were writing today, I wonder if he could have maintained his ratio of comedy to tragedy. Lumping the history plays into the tragedy camp, the Bard wrote just about one comedy for every tragedy. For each drama where everyone dies at the end, he wrote one where everyone gets married. Nice job, Will!
Which brings us to the twenty-first century for the sake of this discussion, wherein Peter Farrelly won an Oscar for his movie Green Book. While not a tragedy in the traditional sense, its themes of racism and homophobia seem much more serious than the rest of Mister Farrelly's work. Starting with Dumb and Dumber, he and his brother mined the silly side of the road trip until he decided that would never get him an Academy Award. That being said, I wonder if there is a drawer full of terribly sad screenplays that came roiling out of the minds of Peter and his brother Bob as they struggled to create the giggles found in all those Jim Carrey haircuts. And I wonder if Hamlet would have been funnier if he had a broken front tooth.

As The World Turns

“Unlike some of my colleagues, I am not immediately afraid of what carbon emissions, unaddressed, might do to our environment, in the near-term future, or our civilization or our planet in the next few years. Unlike others, I am not immediately afraid of what the Green New Deal would do to our economy and our government. After all, this isn’t going to pass.” These were the words of Senator Mike Lee from Utah. 
Contrasted to those of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “This is not an elitist issue; this is a quality-of-life issue. You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist? Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint whose kids have their blood ascending in lead levels, their brains are damaged for the rest of their lives. Call them elitist.”
Senator Mike went on to reply to "AOC" thus: “The solution to climate change is not this unserious resolution, but the serious business of human flourishing – the solution to so many of our problems, at all times and in all places: fall in love, get married, and have some kids.”
Or, roughly translated, "Don't worry your pretty little head about this. Leave law-making to the big boys in the Senate." 
If you have spent any time reading about the ideas and ideals of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, they invariably mention her age and her gender. As if these were the measure of her competency. Which may have something to do with the fact that not one senator voted for her resolution, the one called the Green New Deal. Meanwhile, the "emergency" on our southern border continues and the Pentagon just signed over one billion dollars of their ample budget to build a wall to keep drugs out. But no one is going to bully the United States Senate into making any rash decisions about our planet.
Like the way Franklin Roosevelt bullied the country into pushing this country out of the Great Depression and putting millions back to work and providing us with a return to prosperity and the capacity to fight a second world war. Or the way John Kennedy got it into his head that we could send a man to the moon before the end of the sixties, after coming in second to the Russians for pretty much all of the Space Race. Those were some of the things that made America great. 
Maybe it's best for the rest of us that Senator Mike wasn't telling FDR and JFK to stay at home and have babies. Some people don't get Armageddon unless it's raining fire from the skies. Keep your eye on that weather report kiddies.  

Pre-Post-Mortem

My wife and I began this project a few weeks ago: compiling all the breakup songs we could recall an putting them on a Spotify playlist. What began as a simple exercise in "hey, do you remember?" became a mild obsession. For me, it became an exploration of the unrequited love I felt, or believed I felt, for decades as a young man. It became clear to me that I was subject to the pains of love lost before I ever found it. Growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, there was no dearth of heartbreak found on the radio. If only Gilbert O'Sullivan's Alone Again, Naturally  hadn't proved to be the gateway drug for my own self-absorbed moping.
In a little while from now
If I'm not feeling any less sour
I promise myself to treat myself
And visit a nearby tower
And climbing to the top
Will throw myself off
In an effort to
Make it clear to whoever
Wants to know what it's like When you're shattered
What could a ten-year old have to relate to in those lyrics? A few years later, I found myself singing along with Eric Carmen: 
All by myself
Don't wanna be, all by myself anymore
All by myself
Don't wanna live, all by myself anymoreAnd don't think that I didn't notice that comma after "be" and "live" was lost on my dark moods as an adolescent with access to headphones and the patience to listen to a song dozens of times in a row. Welcome to my Pit of Despair. Somewhere in there, I began to believe, deeply and with conviction, that that all love ended in despondency and grief. It was about this time that I watched Casablanca for the first time. If that didn't tip me over the edge, the collected works of Pink Floyd certainly did culminating in Comfortably Numb. The dream is gone. 
It does occur to me that if I had been born a decade later, I might have been one of those goth kids, plumbing the depths of my sadness with all my like-minded friends. Instead, I grew up and got married to a girl who was listening to the same songs, and turned this obsession into a craft project. Or, as Carly Simon sang, "That's the way I always heard it should be."

Affirmative Action

One student at my school fancies himself a potential slot at Hogwarts Academy. Over the years I have learned never to diminish the hopes and aspirations of my young charges. There is plenty in their lives to discourage them already, and about the time I feel that "the truth" might set them free it turns out that the "truth" is not known to me alone. Desire and dreams can make all manner of things possible. If Richard truly believes that it is his destiny to study potions and charms, casting spells and learning about his own personal Patronus, why would I want to fiddle with those dreams?
There is an ideological point at which I do jump off this moral high ground: As near as I can reckon it, Hogwarts is a charter school, funded by someone or someones with a large bank account with the intent of separating the haves with the have nots. Having, as in magical abilities. Support from the wizarding community is of course essential. If you happen to be a Muggle, a person with little or no access to the metaphysical side of life, you are pretty much left out. While it is worth noting that the lady in charge of such things, J.K. Rowling, has stated, "There's no tuition fee! The Ministry of Magic covers the cost of all magical education!" Which I'm sure looks great on the front of the catalog, but that magical education is still a stretch if you have never made anything disappear save for the lunch in front of you. 
Of course, once a student is admitted to this august institution, there is the additional cultural stress of being forced through the Sorting Hat Ritual. Will you be Hufflepuff or Slytherin? I know some kids who say they would rather die than not be chosen to be in Gryffindor, and I don't believe I have ever heard any child squeal with delight at being picked to be in Ravenclaw. Kids between the ages of eleven and twelve are a pretty moody lot, and I wonder just how many cases of severe depression are seen in Poppy Pomfrey's office in the days after lives have been altered forever by this process. 
Which makes me wonder just how much money is really involved in the administration of this school for wizards. If parents would throw millions of dollars at the University of Southern California to ensure their little ones had the opportunity to appear as if they were on the crew team, I wonder what kind of bribe would be necessary to get your kid off the bench and into that Seeker spot on the Quidditch pitch. 
Instead I will do what is essential: Guard those dreams and encourage where I can, but keep my eye out for ways to make Richard's path a little easier. It's a pretty tough walk for a Muggle. 

Shell Game

Last Saturday, nineteen year old Sydney Aiello committed suicide. One day later, a classmate of Sydney's followed her down that long dark hall. Both of these teenagers were survivors of the shooting last year at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Authorities connected both deaths to "survivor's guilt" and post-traumatic stress. More than a year later, the death toll continues to rise.
You want a national emergency? Well, it seems we have one.
Since December 2014, when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook, Elementary killing twenty children and six adults, seven thousand more have died by gunfire. The exact number is hard to determine. A much more defined total can be gained from the Department of Defense, which totals the number of soldiers killed overseas in combat since September 11, 2001, puts that figure at six thousand, nine hundred twenty-nine. A similar number, but the army got an twelve year head start. One might suggest that our children would be safer in a war zone.
An American Academy of Pediatrics report, which said about thirteen hundred children are killed by guns every year. In 2015, a Washington Post article gave us another creepy statistic. During that year, more Americans were shot by toddlers with guns than by foreign terrorists. Whether they were shooting on accident or on purpose, with intent or not, that just shouldn't be. The number of lives torn apart by gun violence that don't end in murder or suicide cannot be calculated. 
Or maybe it can. Each year, kids in California participate in a survey reflecting their social and emotional learning skills and the challenges they face. Here in Oakland, when asked if they knew any friends or family who have died by violence, more than forty percent of last year's fifth graders answered in the affirmative. 
Hello. 
Is this real enough yet? How many children do we need to sacrifice to our cherished Second Amendment before we look at it as a survival issue? 
No more. 
Please.