This Is Halloween

 This is Halloween. I mention this because there are not as many outward signs as we have had in the past. Like so many activities and experiences, this holiday has been subsumed by restrictions brought on by the global pandemic. Ghosts and goblins and Marvel super heroes of all shapes and sizes are sitting out this year, and the warm glow of Jack-O-Lanterns is missing from the front porches of homes across this great land of ours. 

At this point, I was going to say something about the "die-hards" who insist on putting out all their Halloween decorations, but this year in particular it seems that phrase my be a little too on the nose-y. The reason that all of our Harvest Festival fun has been curtailed is inexorably linked to the ever mounting number of casualties due to the previously mentioned global pandemic. There will be no parade of costumes around the block near our school this year. Parties, if there are any, will be taking place in virtual spaces where those awful jugs of Tampico punch will be consumed within the households that purchased them. Cupcakes will be eaten, most assuredly frosting first, in the homes where they were so lovingly decorated. If your parents were so dedicated to tradition that they took you to Target to buy that new costume for this year, chances are it will be photographed primarily in your native habitat: your living room. 

No one wants to be the voice that announces that Halloween has been cancelled. Cities and counties are "strongly advising against" trick or treating and gatherings outside your limited social bubble. In a country that refuses to issue a mandate for masks, it is not surprising that nobody is willing to stand up and say that we should all just hold on to those Iron Man helmets and Little Red Riding Hoods until next year. There is little doubt that there will be a number of super-spreader events as a result of our national lack of restraint. Flu season is upon us and the idea of a group of strangers pawing the same bowl of fun size Snickers should put us all on edge in the best of years.

This is not that. 2020 is the year of living dangerously, and my mind drifts to those yards where the annual decorations have sprung up. Rows of plastic headstones, some of them with humorous names or citations, mostly saying "Rest In Peace." Which brings us back around to the two hundred twenty thousand Americans who won't be celebrating anything anymore. Their spirits should most righteously haunt us for years to come. 

And tomorrow, with the arrival of Dia De los Muertos, we can pine not for those missed bags full of treats or yet another excuse for binge drinking, but for the souls of the departed. They are the reminder. They are the reason there was no celebration this year. 

Over The Transom

 I used to find it odd that my wife would send me emails from ten feet away. Our desks in the office at our house are adjacent, and from time to time as I am perusing messages from other far-flung colleagues and associates I will open up a electronic note that came with blinding speed from just over my shoulder. Look at this! Check this out! Can you believe? These exclamations were not uttered, but were instead headers that enticed me still further. 

For a while, I would turn around in my chair and stare at my wife. Always a pleasant view, but also an effective means to get her attention. Eventually. When she did look up from her keyboard and screen frenzy, she would meet my gaze with a surprised, "What?"

"You couldn't just tell me this, right?"

"What?"

"This email. The one you labeled 'Wow.'"

"When did I send that?"

"Just now."

"Oh, I know that one. I was just reading that and thought of you."

And so I came to understand that this is a compliment. In a heads-down, stare at Al Gore's Internet world, the parceling of information is asocial interaction. My son sends me messages on Twitter all the time. It is not, as I might have feared, a substitute for conversation. It is instead shorthand for moving chunks of stuff to talk about. It is an entree to interaction. "Did you get that thing I sent you," is a conversational gambit. As we pile on through our day, there are mountains of intrigue and amusement, heaps of news and tons of cat videos that simply cannot be ignored. 

I get that now. I try to return the favor, but often I get the presentation wrong. Instead of forwarding a link, I sometimes get stuck playing it on my screen, interrupting my wife's work flow, forcing her to stare across the room at what I was just watching. Literally. 

"You couldn't just send that to me, right?"

Touche, my dear. I still have so much to learn about Al Gore's Internet. 

Just A Little Prick

 My family and I have not given up. We all piled into my son's car. Mom got shotgun and I squeezed into the cramped back seat. My son drove because, well, because he really likes to drive. We headed downtown to our local Kaiser facility to stand in line for flu shots. Initially, as much as my son was looking forward to an excuse to head out on the highway, he was not enthusiastic. At age twenty-three, he has not yet become accustomed to the idea that someone jabbing a needle into your shoulder, thigh or other fleshy parts might be the lesser of two evils. 

Because for him it brought back very visceral memories of being poked with these pharmaceutical torture devices. This would include a couple of ill-fated trips with mom and dad to donate blood that ended up making him less than functional for the drive home. Which is why we tossed in the offer of a lunch at a nearby taqueria to take away some of the sting. 

Initially, this seemed to get us past the bumpy part. As we stood six feet away from the other pending flu shot victims, we joked about how much easier this would all be if we were in line for Space Mountain and oh by the way here's your shot just before the push the bar down and send you off into that high speed turbulent roller coaster ride in the dark. They took us one at a time, and I could hear my son chatting up his needle tech in the tent in front of me. He sounded very brave. And when he emerged he didn't look like he needed a lollipop. He even commented that the experience wasn't as bad as he had imagined. 

Later that day, however, his shoulder began to ache and the notion of working on his construction project downstairs no longer seemed like such a good idea. He was still encouraged by the experience of having participated in preventative medical care, reasoning that if he was going to insist that those he encountered around him should wear a mask and maintain social distance, this was all part of the game. 

All of this to say that my son, who by his own admission is a big baby, is still far and away more interested in curbing the spread of infectious diseases than the current administration. While five aides to the head of the "president's" COVID-19 task force have tested positive for the virus, the White House Chief of Staff announced that they were "not going to control the pandemic." Instead, they plan to "control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigations." The reasoning, it would seem, is that all the chickens in their particular coop have been eaten, so they're not even going to bother fixing the hole where the fox gets in. Instead, the Trump regime seems to be targeting chicken self defense as a better solution. 

Even my needle-adverse son knows that surrendering now to the virus just means more shots. Shots that have not as yet been approved or proven. Keep wearing your mask. 

That's Show Biz

 Our dog used to roll over on his back when you tried to pick him up. That's something that dachshunds do instinctively as hunters of badgers. Built as close to the ground, Rupert was assuming the posture that would help him in the event that he was caught in a burrow of some below-ground dwelling weasel. Happily for those of us who came upon him in this prone position, Rupert did not start scratching frantically at whatever was above him. At this point, it was easy enough to reach down and scoop him up under his front legs, leaving his back end dangling in a most pendulous fashion. Part of this resignation was no doubt due to the life that he led. He wasn't spoiled so much as he as favored. 

Rupert was an only dog. He came to our family as kind of a replacement for a dachshund puppy named Snoopy who succumbed tragically to kennel cough before we had a chance to really know him. That was not the case with Rupert. We got to know him, love him, and ritually humiliate him over time. That last bit was mostly my fault, because over the course of the latter years of Rupert's life we had an act. Animal impersonations. To be clear, Rupert did the impressions. I manipulated him. And he let me. No nipping. No growling. Just an otherworldly patience as he awaited his ultimate reward.

A biscuit. 

I would hold him in my lap, pull his ears, stretch his legs this way and that, and even pulled on his jaws to make him speak John Lennon's last words, "I'm shot." Then, once we had run through the entire bit, he would hop off my lap and head to the kitchen where he would sit and wait for me to follow him in to deliver that Milk Bone. Which he accepted. With dignity. 

Not bad for a wiener dog named Rupert. 

Viva Terlingua

 For me, it wasn't a surprise that Jerry Jeff Walker died. I had assumed that the country star had collapsed under the weight of his own legend some years ago. Not so. Just this past weekend, the man who wrote "Mister Bojangles" shuffled off to Buffalo. Or someplace nicer. You've probably heard someone sing that song, somewhere, sometime. A partial list: Bob Dylan, John Denver, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Harry Nilsson, Sammy Davis Jr., Rod McKuen, Brenda Lee, Bebe Neuwirth, Harry Belafonte, and Neil Diamond. And more than one hundred other artists have covered this particular tune. Sammy Davis Jr. may have had the biggest hit, but I would expect that Mister Jeff Walker was probably not scrambling for gigs, providing he didn't sell his publishing rights. Each one of those artists had to write a check to take their shot at telling the story of the guy who would dance for drinks and tips. Legend has it that Jerry Jeff met the real Mister Bojangles while he was in a New Orleans jail for public intoxication. 

Which is fine, but it's not the Jerry Jeff Walker song that I remember most. That distinction belongs to "Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother." The first time I heard this tune, I was hanging out in my older brother's college apartment when he offered to make me a mix tape for playing on those bus trips that we members of our high school pep band took with the cheerleaders and pom-pom girls to away football games. It was a pretty certain thing that just being on the same mode of transportation with us was insult enough for these ladies, so my brother reasoned, why not earn it?

It should be pointed out at this moment that the song "Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother" was not written by Jerry Jeff Walker. As introduced so lovingly in his live version of the song, Jerry let everyone know that it was Ray Wylie Hubbard who penned this ode to motherhood. It was this version that my grungy band friends learned all the words to, and sang them loudly from the back of the bus as we drove on into the dark. "M is for the mudflaps you gave me for my pickup truck. O is for the oil I put on my hair. T is for T-Bird. H is for Haggard. E is for eggs, and R is for..." pause for effect, "Redneck!" And like so very many things that nerdy high school boys do, we were good for at least a couple choruses just for effect. 

It was also the first time I had ever heard of Muskogee, Oklahoma, which gets a name check as the song winds up. A few years after I graduated from high school, I found myself on a highway headed to that corner of the planet with a native of that city. Sometime before the engine in my Volkswagen bug threw a rod, and had to be towed from Tulsa, we were singing along with Jerry Jeff Walker in a scene reminiscent from those years of geekiness, and maybe a little like the lyrics to a song that Jerry Jeff Walker never got around to writing. 

This past weekend tributes flooded in for this country/folk legend, who became yet another victim of 2020's voracious suckitude. Jerry Jeff Walker stomped on the Terra, or at least he wrote songs that made us believe that he did. He will be missed. Aloha, Mister Walker. 

Object Permanence III

 Cresting the hill, I noticed something was missing. Or to be more precise, I noticed something different. There was a breeze on my right hindquarters. That shouldn't be. That area is specifically protected by my shorts, my undies, and the wallet in my back pocket.

No. Not again. 

Those were the words that raced through my head as I stopped pedaling my bike and began to turn around. I did the quick frisk of myself to be sure that I hadn't absently stuffed my billfold in the wrong pocket or maybe I had simply lost touch with the nerves on my back end. 

No such luck. My wallet was missing. Again. After being reunited with my errant pochette two weeks ago, my stomach did a Fosbury Flop as I resigned myself to the slow trip back to school, staring at the street, peering under cars, searching for signs of what I had apparently once again taken for granted. After all, what were the chances that I would be in the exact same position less than a month after that most recent trauma.

Did you guess one hundred percent? You'd be right.

All the way back to school, I alternately ridiculed myself and began to reconcile the disappointment that was building inside of me. I cursed this unnecessary waste of time and the pinhead who had caused it. Then I reminded myself that I now had a spare wallet with a duplicate card which had arrived just days before the last time I was surprised by that which was once lost was found. 

It was not the end of the world. It was the end of a day that had otherwise been quite productive and gratifying. But all that gratification came tumbling down in an instant. Woe is me. How could this be happening to me? Why me?

So I called my wife and asked her to poke around the house to see if somehow I had misplaced my wallet before I even left. Anxious moments drifted by as I waited on the line. Nope. Not there. Not in all the places where it could or might be. 

I went back over all the places where I had been at school that day and retraced steps I hadn't taken for a week. Just in case. The wallet was not there. So once again, I got on my bike and started the creep back up the hill, looking once again at every shadow and piece of trash that might be my wallet in disguise. Once I got back up to the top of the hill, I resigned myself to the rest of the ride home, fretting and consoling myself, at times out loud. 

When I arrived at home, I looked carefully in all the spots outside the house where something like my wallet could just slip out of a pocket and go unnoticed for a day. No luck. Inside, I went to all those spots that made sense and many that did not. Then I checked at the back of my closet.

This is where I toss my clothes for the next day, since I tend to get dressed in the dark each morning. And in the shadows of the late afternoon, I put my hand on the cool leather rectangle that suddenly made everything right with the world again. I had spent an hour and a half berating myself and making plans to phone the credit card companies and file for a new driver's license. Now I felt the weight lifting. The light returned. I had just manufactured this enormous catharsis out of a missing object. I made note of the baggy shorts that had allowed the wallet to come sliding out of my back pocket. Embarrassed and relieved, I put the wallet in a safe place. Where I knew where it was. 

Vote

 Did I mention that you should vote? You really should vote. If you haven't voted already, you still can vote. There is early voting going on currently, so you can vote early, or you can wait until Election Day and vote then. Election Day is November 3, if you were going to save that vote, but don't hold onto your vote too long because not voting really isn't a good idea.

A very good friend of mine got me to vote for the first time when I was in college. I had already skipped a presidential race, and she noticed that for all the bellyaching I was doing about how things were. That didn't seem right to her. She correctly pointed out that I had a voice and I should use if for something besides complaining. As a matter of fact, she continued, it would give your bellyaching more credence if I was an active participant in the system for which I had such incredible disdain. 

Fast forward a few decades and I can proudly say that I have participated in every election since: local, midterm, presidential. I voted. And, if you've spent anytime in this corner of Al Gore's Internet, you may have noticed that I haven't stopped bellyaching either. 

It is pretty wonderful to see how many places I see that word being flashed around these days. Vote. Not bellyaching. It's on T-shirts. It's on badges, posters, stickers and public service announcements starring many of our favorite celebrities. Some of them are getting naked to make sure that you vote. I saw hastily scrawled graffiti on a wall. One word. You know what it was.

Vote.

This is the part where I tell you about how many people can vote, which is a lot, and how many actually do, which is not so much. It would be great if they were the same number? I have suggested here before that you should vote as if your life depended on it, because in this election that could turn out to be more than just hyperbole. Health care isn't something that just all of a sudden popped up. Climate change has been around for quite a while. We're going into our fourth century of systematic racial oppression here in the Untied States. There is something for everyone to vote for in this one. And while you're at it, you could go ahead and pick your favorite city council candidate or decide where your local tax dollars will go. Voting can be very empowering. 

And, let's face it, it can also be a bit of a letdown. I voted for Michael Dukakis. I voted for the guy who invented the Internet. But I also voted for bond measures to help fund our school district. Voting can be a real mixed bag, but it's still better than not having a bag at all.

Vote.