Do Your Job

Okay, he said as he rolled up his metaphorical sleeves, let's get down to it. 
On Monday, the "president" made the following pronouncement: "There has been so much unnecessary death in this country. It could have been stopped and it could have been stopped short, but somebody a long time ago, it seems, decided not to do it that way. And the whole world is suffering because of it." I suppose I should start with the notion of "unnecessary death." This seems to raise the obvious specter of "necessary death." In this matter I would only assume that we look to our institutional means such as the death penalty. It also makes me think of the recent spate of parades and demonstrations in which people, predominately Americans, have rushed out into the streets insisting that the matter of losing a few lives is worth getting our freedoms back. If you're in Georgia, some of those freedoms include getting a haircut or tattoo. If you are not a Constitutional scholar, you may not be familiar with the portions of that document that describe in detail every U.S. citizen's tonsorial and skin decorating rights.
The sad fact of the matter is that these folks are so intent on "sticking it to the man" that they don't recognize what a good deal "the man" has given them. All of these governors who have made tough conscientious decisions on how best to keep people from dying are getting varied amounts of support from the federal government. Many of those "unnecessary deaths" came as a result of a woefully unprepared nation operating in a vacuum. The estimates tossed around early in the game were terrifying, and anyone who looks at the current death toll might be tempted to say, "Where are the millions that everyone promised?"
Disappointed?
It reminds me of the George Carlin bit where he played a radio announcer relating the holiday death toll on the highways, "that's down a little from last year - you're not trying!" But that's just it: We are trying. We are doing something that's never been done before. We have stopped rushing forward, regardless of the consequences. And people are staying alive as a result. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, but we are fast approaching a moment where there will be a million patients who have survived. Thanks to the efforts of our doctors, nurses, orderlies, custodians and anyone holding a swab, what could have been is just that: Could have been.
And what did we have to do? Stay home. Stay apart. If only all problems were this easy. Yes, I hear that thunder in the back, the garbled voices screeching about the importance of the economy and how we can't leave a mess for our grandchildren to clean up. As long as those same voices have been raised about climate change and income equity, then I'm willing to let them roar. Someday, a long time from now, we will talk about how somebody stepped up and did the right thing. We won't need to focus on the "somebody" who made all this suffering and death even worse.
But for now, shut up. Stay home. Do your job.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Piers Morgan apologized to Lady Gaga last week. The talk show host apologized to the pop singer for initially diminishing her role in in the World Health Organization's attempts to raise awareness and money to help fight COVID-19. At first, Morgan was very uncivil. “Has she found a cure?” he tweeted. “Otherwise, we don’t need a bloody singer there.” One great big concert and one hundred twenty-seven million dollars later, the big fat apology came: “This was a great initiative that raised a fortune, entertained people, and will help save lives. It was also a perfect illustration of a major star using their profile properly in this crisis. Congrats and sorry for originally questioning it.”
Over the weekend, another pop star decided to follow suit. This was Post Malone's turn to use his talents to help out. He and his band played an eighty minute set of Nirvana covers and raised almost three million dollars. Did he find a cure or help create a vaccine? Nope. He used his talents to pitch into a fund that continues to grow, and perhaps more importantly take some people's minds off of what is going on outside. 
Back in 1985, an Irish musician had an idea about helping alleviate the famine in Africa. He put together a little show called Live Aid with some of his mates. which eventually raised more than one hundred twenty-seven million dollars to ease the humanitarian crisis across the globe. One hundred twenty-seven dollars. Nice coincidence. Nice job. 
They might have been inspired by the hippies who put together three days of peace, love and music in 1969. Four hundred thousand kids came together to celebrate all those previously mentioned concepts and take part in a concert that spawned a cultural meme. "It'll be the Woodstock of plumbing fixture trade shows!" 
Maybe it's that healing power of music that we've heard so much about. There's a lot of healing that needs to take place out there. 
And all that money won't hurt either. 
Keep on rockin'. 

Creature Features

Most of your most famous monsters don't really think of themselves as monsters. Your King Kong, your Wolf Man, your Frankenstein's Monster. That last one is, admittedly, a bit of a giveaway, but it brings me back around to my point. There comes that tragic moment when the beast confronts the fact that he, invariably "he," is the scary one. Tragic, really.
And so it was with Fang Monster.
Oh. You aren't familiar with the story of Fang Monster? Perhaps the most frightening creature ever to haunt the halls of my parents' house. On any given Friday night when my parents were out for the evening. Fang Monster would chase my friend and I around the house, up the stairs, down the stairs. We were terrified. The most visceral memory I have of those nights was sitting with both of our backs against the wall with our legs bracing against my bedroom door as Fang Monster shoved and snarled and pounded on the other side. My friend and I had no idea what might happen if somehow Fang Monster would break through. What did he want? Why was he so enraged?
Fang Monster did not want to be a monster. Fang Monster was my younger brother. He had no idea that he was a monster. He just wanted to be able to play with his older brother and his friend. The terms were pretty simple: If you want to play with us, you're going to have to be the bad guy. The rules were simple. Fang Monster chase.
You know the part in the movies where the monster is antagonized by the villagers carrying torches and pitchforks? My friend and I were doing that with peer pressure. Which is worse than torches and pitchforks. My friend and I created a monster. Fang Monster.
Today is Fang Monster's birthday. And the greatest gift I can imagine is this: I'm sorry. You didn't sign up to be a monster. You're not a monster.
We were.

LP

So maybe you've noticed that the subtitle of this blog is "Short Attention Span Theater." Or maybe you've been too rushed to take the time to read down that far. Which is understandable. This is the age in which we live. It's a "don't bother to read the subtitles kind of world" in which we live. It's hard to keep up.
Until now.
All of a sudden we have been gifted with all this extra time. Time to learn how to play guitar, as a friend of mine from work has done. He's got the beginning part of Bob Marley's "Jammin'" almost down. And he continues to work on it.
Because he's got the time. My wife and I have completed watching three seasons of The Good Place. It's a show about being trapped somewhere between heaven and hell and it's entirely relatable currently, but of course back in the days before Quarantine we didn't have time to watch. At least that's what we told ourselves. And best of all, Netflix takes the commercials out. Saving us all that time to learn how to play guitar.
And set up Zoom meetings.
It has occurred to me that back in the day there was no producers or disc jockeys telling Beethoven that that Ninth Symphony is really boss but does it have to be that long? Like the scene in Bohemian Rhapsody where resorts to going to a radio station to personally invite them to play his band's six minute song. Take this to the current status of pop music where songs are released and albums are rarely created to be taken as a whole. We simply don't have the time to listen to anything for more than two minutes and forty-five seconds. During this isolation period, I have been listening to Pink Floyd records start to finish. Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a long title for an album that should be listened to at a sitting. Just your luck! We happen to be sitting for forty to fifty minutes at a stretch these days. Why not enjoy a little extended play?
My sainted mother and I were talking movies the other night, as we have done straight along, but I confess I reach out to her a little more often these days. I wanted to know how she enjoyed the last Avengers movie because I needed validation for my nerdiness from my mother. And we agreed that it was quite epic, which had the subtext of meaning "long." Not that we didn't enjoy it. When I watched it the first time, I was ready to do laps. Yet I am still willing to participate in our culture's obsession with keeping it short. I make my share of jokes about Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. "Oh, it's so long! Why can't it be shorter?" Okay. Maybe they were more whines than jokes, but seemed important to diminish it because of the time it took to watch it. Shameful, when I consider how I reacted to a friend of mine complaining about Peter Jackson's King Kong going on for more than three hours. I was agog. King Kong? Peter Jackson? Why couldn't it have been six hours?
These are unique times. Time to reflect. Savor. Enjoy. Between the mounting fear and depression. And I could go on and on about this, but you've got things to do.

You're Not The Boss Of Me

Let's see, the world is hunkering down as any good world would in the midst of a plague. But, as I have pointed out here recently, that does not mean that we have to recognize a universal cessation of hostilities.
Quite the opposite. Tensions are high, and not just across America's living rooms as families try to negotiate terms of use for their Netflix account. A lot of folks would rather not be told what to do, especially when it comes to wearing a mask or standing six feet away from one another. Now I suspect some might have missed the message, or maybe their good mask was in the wash, or perhaps their sense of distance is impaired by years of being taunted by the conversion to the metric system. Whatever the case, it's causing some people to get more than a little jumpy.
You can add to this list the flood of overly concerned corporations who have taken it upon themselves to produce commercials to remind us just how overly concerned they are with our welfare. Dunkin' Donuts cares. Burger King wants to help. Everyone wants us to know that they offer "contactless delivery." Even Hyundai would like to make things easier for you to buy a car. Even if you don't have anywhere to drive right now.
What can be done with all this pent-up aggression? Some have taken to a nightly ritual of howling at the moon, or at least howling at the twilight. This could be a change from the original version which had Italians singing from their balconies. Which is great if you can get everybody to agree on a song. And everybody knows the words. And sing. Or you could just get up right now and go to your window and yell, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
Or, you could take it to the lowest possible level and start taking it out on those around you. You could start caterwauling at people who are just doing their jobs. Call them names. Demean them just for making the mistake of being in the same room as you. That's what our "president" does. Don't do that. As the lady said, "It's chaos, be kind."
Just a suggestion. I'm not the boss of you.

Why Waste Your Time?

A while back I wrote here about using a hair dryer to stave off being contaminated by COVID-19. If you still have a blow dryer up your nose, put it down. Unless of course this has been a part of your grooming regimen for some time. Unruly nose hair can be a trial even when we aren't in the midst of a global pandemic.
What I would like to suggest is this: One hundred monkeys and one hundred typewriters. Not actually, but in the following hypothesis: We have millions of people, some of them quite clever - educated even, and it seems that if we were to unleash this vast potential problem solving mechanism on finding a cure for the disease that is currently having its way with the planet. Two housecats were recently diagnosed with coronavirus. And Idris Elba. That was in case you weren't already stirred by the hundreds of thousands who are suffering and dying. Idris Elba.
Instead of spending all your time trying to figure out how to get wifi in the guest bathroom, or choosing what to binge on Netflix next, put on your thinking cap and set yourself a goal to come up with a cure or at least a treatment for COVID-19.
Since you asked, I have considered a few. Like the thought of giving coronavirus the coronavirus. See how they like it. Or what about the M Knight Shamalamadingdong movie where it turns out that water is what kills the aliens? In War of the Worlds it was the common cold that brought the Martians down, so maybe if we can't infect the virus with itself, maybe we could give it some of Keith Richards' old blood from back when he used to have really scary blood. Before he had it all replaced. Or we could lure it to a Taco Bell and force it to eat the entire Dollar Menu. Someone recently suggested that we could scare it away by telling it that we really have feelings for it. And we think it might be time for a commitment.
Instead of singing Happy Birthday or It's A Small World or any other tune that goes on between twenty seconds and four hours, why not spend some time ruminating on how we might combat this beast of a germ? Consider its motivations. Ponder its potential as a world leader, compared to some already elected to high office. Imagine how we might ruin its day instead of staying hidden in our caves, only stepping out in our masks when we want a breath of fresh air filtered through a bandanna.
Or maybe this is all a bad dream, and we will all wake up soon with a sigh of relief. Because that's another thing that I have learned from watching Invaders From Mars. Except when we think we can wipe the sweat from our collective brow and move on with our lives, it turns out that was no dream. There's a worldwide pandemic going on right outside and there is no cure.
Not yet.
So let's get busy.

Should I Shave Or Should I Grow Now?

So, that little project is done.
Not the one where I painted the rocking chair. Although after some sanding and a couple coats of spray blue, it's looking just fine out on the porch again.
It's not the lawn mowing, either. There have been moments when I have looked out on the grass, especially in the back yard, where I have considered pulling the mower out of the garage and hitting it again, just to have something accomplished.
And on the work front, there are daily requests and questions that need answering for technical assistance. How do I log into this? Where is that report? Can first graders do the second grade version? That won't end anytime soon.
The one I am referencing is the space just below my nose and above my chin. About three weeks ago, I started letting my facial hair grow. I am not by any stretch of the imagination alone in this enterprise. Men across the globe have been follically experimenting with their cheeks, chins and upper lips over the past six weeks. Some of the results have been nothing short of transformative. Some of them not so much. A colleague of mine cancelled his beard when another teacher pronounced him "Yasser Arafat."
I was more fortunate. I chose to go for the goatee, mostly because it is the style that universally causes individuals to stroke their chin as they attempt to describe it. It also had the effect of combining with my skin-dome and glasses to give me a Walter White vibe. The guy from Breaking Bad. The guy who gave up his job as a chemistry teacher to get into the drug trade. It allowed me to let folks know, when they asked during Zoom meetings what I had been doing during quarantine, that I was building a meth lab in my basement.
But sooner or later, all good beards must come to an end. I had a beard and mustache when my son was born. That one was raised out of the relative calm before his birth. I wore that one for the first eight or nine months of his life, but I shaved it off as a direct result of seeing him flinch when I leaned down to kiss him goodbye. I don't need whiskers that bad.
And so came the end of this version. My wife was initially enthralled, claiming that she felt like she was "dating a new guy." Somewhere in there, however, I began to remind her of her uncle. That was enough for me. That and the fact that what came sprouting out of my face was not the old standby gerbil colored hair that I had cultivated in my youth. This was a lot of salt with a little bit of pepper. I hit the rewind button hard when I shaved it off. No more meth lab. No more stranger in my wife's boudoir. No more stray food hanging around after meals.
And no audition for ZZ Top.