Dangerous

 I should start by saying that I believe any person who would be willing to put themselves into the spotlight that is leading the free world probably has a kink in their personality. Of some sort. Even Jimmy Carter, who had lust in his heart. Bill Clinton might have taken a cue from him, rather than carrying on with "that woman" as he did. And others. 

So when we examine the forty-fifth man to hold the office, however tenuously, we should probably accept that there were some drawers that needed new contact paper in the dresser of his mind. The appeal, as I understand, of this former game show host is that he is not like all those other politicians. What sort of expectations that sets is frightening, as we all remember from his pronouncement that he could shoot a guy on fifth avenue and not lose any voters. 

Turns out he could commit sexual assault, tax fraud, and flash around confidential documents in the bathroom of his golf club and still not lose any voters. All of this on a course toward insurrection and guided by a willful disregard for the Constitution of the United States. The more outrageous his demeanor, the more fascinating he becomes. 

Witness the fact that I am once again taking up the topic of this demonstrated loser. This bully. This over-inflated blob of ignorant arrogance. 

Why? 

Because I am terrified by the continuing adoration he seems to inspire among a wide swath of our nation's eligible voters. The louder he yells, the harder his flock dig in their heels. Never mind that he continues to admit his transgressions because he is physically incapable of maintaining his right to remain silent. His base believes that he can do no wrong because only he can define what is right and what is so painfully and obviously wrong to those of us without red ball caps on our heads. It is as if everyone hearing Lonesome Rhodes express his contempt for his audience in A Face In The Crowd, but they showed up to the next big broadcast anyway. 

Sadly, like so much of America, I can't find the off switch myself. 

Work Stoppage

 To say that I am nervous might be an understatement. If I were to describe my feeling right now it would fall somewhere in the territory of  "creeping dread."

That's how I would describe my concern over the progress, or lack thereof, on the playground at my school. You may recall a few weeks ago when I got all worked up because after twenty-six years the asphalt upon which generations of school kids have played tag, kickball, soccer and assorted other recess and PE activities while gathering their share of knee, elbow and shin abrasions. Visions of new play surface and improved conditions danced in my head as I imagined all the ways that that time had finally come: The time for playground renewal. 

"Not so fast there, bub," sneered the voice from the great beyond. Since the massive demolition and partial removal of debris at the beginning of June, the playground has sat. And sat. And sat. Days when children would not be encouraged to go out and play were ticking by, and no progress was being made on the reformation of something in the realm of a safe place to cavort. Or frolic. Or stand around and complain about having to play at the behest of some grownups. 

Should I be concerned? With a month left in Summer Break, do I really believe that the school district and its many contractors might just leave this vast expanse untouched until the last minute? 

Or after? 

Well, yes I do. As mentioned here ad nauseum, I have worked for this district for more than a quarter century and I have seen how they can mess up a pretty sure thing. I can envision a future where the first day of school will arrive and the bulldozers and asphalt spreaders remain idle, waiting for clearance or a sign of some sort that will tell them that it's time to build a playground. "We'd love to get started, but you haven't filed your Zed-stroke-nine form which needs to be accompanied with the green forty-seven B. You do have your green forty-seven B, don't you?"

In which case, I figure that I will do that thing that I often do in situations like this: I will learn how to pave a blacktop. I've taught fourth grade. How hard could it be? 

Look At This!

 Everything we see and hear is one big conspiracy. The Matrix movies were documentaries. The crackers I had for lunch were made from people. The Deep State will probably doctor this blog post and turn it into a bunch of inconsequential lies about things that don't matter. There is no escape!

Whew. Those past three lines took a lot of energy. I wonder how folks who live that way all the time cope. Lots of caffeine, no doubt. The one that has been amusing me this past week or so is the insistence by the conspiranoids that every time something happens that we should be paying attention to, something else happens to take our attention away from the thing to which we should have been paying attention. That submarine getting lost was a cover for the Hunter Biden charges. Who cares about a bunch of billionaires drowning when the son of a millionaire, who happens to be a millionaire himself and whose dad is the President, pleads guilty to two federal misdemeanor tax charges. 

It probably didn't have anything to do with the fact that taxes are so inherently boring that cheating and fraud doesn't do much to spice up the topic, especially when compared to the human drama of billionaires lost at the bottom of the sea. Or the "distraction" of an attempted military coup in Russia. The conspiranoids would like us to believe that Joe Biden, who is alternately incapable of tying his own shoes and the evil genius behind the liberal demonization of America, unleashed the mercenary forces who were on their way to Moscow to overthrow Vlad "The Poot" Putin. Then he probably had some ice cream and a nice nap. 

Or maybe things are happening in such a torrid blur these days that concentrating on one dumpster fire at a time is all but impossible. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, or at the very least the news feed. Those on the left and the right seem to have driven right past the three hundred or so Pakistanis who perished off the coast of Greece when the overloaded fishing trawler they were on sank. There were no billionaires on board. 

Maybe that had something to do with it. 

On The Cusp

 Not everybody is going to flinch when they hear that Frederic Forrest died. If you grew up in the seventies and eighties, it's probably a little more likely, but this wasn't a leading man. Mister Forrest was more of what you would call a "character actor." He showed up for me way back in 1972 in a little picture called When The Legends Die. He played a Native American who gets pulled into the rodeo circuit by a drunken Richard Widmark. Not your typical western. But it was a start.

Several years later, I took in all his repressed rage against the war machine in Apocalypse Now. Frederic played Chef, a member of the crew that gets assigned to ferry Captain Willard up the river, into the heart of darkness. He left me with this bit of wisdom: Never get off the boat. It was this same year, 1979 that he appeared opposite Bette Midler in The Rose. Bette was the star and the voice and the glitter and the gaze, but Frederic Forrest as the limo driver who ends up as the unlikely last love of this doomed siren is the heart. 

A few years later, he appeared in the teen comedy, Valley Girl. Forrest made the most out of his dad role, giving us one of the first "Woodstock parent" tropes. He and his wife try and figure out how their little girl could be so fascinated by shopping and slumber parties when there was the important business of running a health food store to keep in mind. Again, you'd probably come for the Nic Cage, but I would recommend staying for the Frederic Forrest. 

 It was around this time that I discovered Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, the story of a surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman who is worried that the couple that he has been watching will be murdered. The couple was played by Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams. This is when I began formulating a corollary to Roger Ebert's Stanton-Walsh rule, which stated "no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad." I'll just go ahead and say that it should be expanded to the Forrest-Stanton-Walsh Rule. 

Frederic Forrest may not have stomped on the Terra, except in the background while making it possible for those big stars to have their moment. He will be missed. 

How Long Can You Hold Your Breath

 I wasn't surprised to find that there are a great many phobias associated with being trapped underwater. The story of the OceanGate submersible seems to have captured a nation's interest because of all these linked fears. Since I was very young, I have harbored a morbid fantasy of diving into a pool, only to find that when I try and break the surface, a sheet of glass has been placed at the waterline, keeping me from getting that lung full of air that I so desperately need. This covered pool scenario probably came from a bad horror movie that I watched when I was young and impressionable, but it hasn't kept me from having it. Or from jumping into the occasional pool. 

Still, that correct wariness of being out of one's element, as an air-breather, is one that most of us maintain because it is a matter of survival. Try as he might, my older brother used to try and condition my younger brother and I out of our panic over enclosed spaces by giving us plenty of exposure to such things. Being sandwiched between two bean bag chairs with my older brother sitting on top, reminding me not to use up my oxygen by yelling did allow me to surrender a bit of my claustrophobia. Kudos to him for that. Don't struggle, it will only make things worse. Then it was my turn to teach this lesson to my younger brother. 

Even so, there's something about submarines that just don't sit right with me. Any enterprise that includes a waiver that mentions death three times doesn't sit right with me. Any enterprise that dangles "catastrophic failure" as a possible outcome doesn't sit right with me. Then there's the very simple matter of revisiting the scene of another famous disaster. More than fifteen hundred people the first time the Titanic stopped being afloat. It seems like an unreasonable amount of hubris involved in taking tourist expeditions to one of the most famous seagoing catastrophes. A little like taking a dirigible across the ocean to recreate the last flight of the Hindenburg. What could go wrong? 

Well, in the case of the undersea voyages of the rich and famous, we have our answer: the aforementioned catastrophic failure. All of which makes me glad for my older brother's careful ministrations, but I will continue to make sure that the pool cover is put away before I jump in. 

Down The Street

 We're gonna need some more Broncos fans.

Our friend and neighbor Nick passed on this week. He was the old guy on the block. His house was on the corner, and he saw his share of good, bad and ugly during his time there. When the neighborhood lit up for Fourth of July celebrations, he had a front row seat. Just like when cars would choose the intersection to spin donuts and leave great heaps of smoking rubber, he got to experience all that noise and stink.

Such was the life of the guy who lived on the corner. Nick was there for an awful long time. He was there long before we moved in twenty-six years ago. His front yard was a haphazard lot of barrels, wood and metal, car parts, and a great many trees, most of which were shorter than the haphazard but sturdy fence he built to go around it. Somewhere in there I'm pretty sure I saw an old streetlight.

His front steps were covered in plastic, as if waiting for a chance to paint, or waiting for a chance for paint to dry. I assumed he made his entrance and egress from the side door beneath the car port. The car port that occasionally played host to vehicles like a cherry red Buick that he had restored once upon a time, but spent most of the time under a cover when it wasn't on its way to a vintage car show, and a twenty-five foot Winnebago for which he had to raise the roof to wedge it in. 

Nick would show up to the yearly Neighborhood Night Out, sticking around long enough to tag off on all of us who live down the street and then back up the driveway he went. I would periodically run into him on my daily runs around the block, and somewhere along the line a long time ago the subject of professional football came up. His distaste for the then local franchise, The Raiders, was quickly in evidence, and I was surprised to hear that his favorite team happened to be The Broncos. 

Just like me. 

And so, for years we kept tabs on "our team." When we won a Super Bowl. When we lost a Super Bowl. When we made the playoffs. When we missed the playoffs. "What happened to our team?" Nick would ask me as I rounded that corner. I would stop and commiserate about how things were going that season, or our hopes for the next. We knew that our political views were not completely in alignment, so we steered clear of most of that, preferring to vent our pleasures and displeasures in a pigskin vein. 

On Thursday morning, we got a text from another one of our neighbors letting us know that Nick had gone to that big carport in the sky. While he was here, Nick held his corner down. He was a fixture, and he stomped on that corner of the Terra. He will be missed. 

Go Broncos. 

TooDoo

 We have a white board in our kitchen upon which my wife and I write accomplishments for the month. Things that get moved or fixed or replaced or put right in some way. We track these events by the month. Some are more full than others, and sometimes we have to squeeze things into the margins to capture all the activity. Mostly, it's there as a surrogate for the "To Do List." This is our "To Done List."

June is usually a pretty hectic month, what with me being out of school and looking for something to keep me busy because being busy is one of the ways I know that I am alive. Another way is to have myself paged at an airport, but since I'm not flying anywhere these days, I'll stick to the list. 

After the misfire that was that ill-fated attempt at turning a broken microwave into a Little Free Library. I was still able to put this up on the board under the guise of "recycling," having reduced our science oven to its component materials. But I didn't let that stop me. Instead, I began foraging wood and screws from the pile of debris that exists in our garage. Eventually I was able to cobble together a rough scale facsimile of our house that we painted and put up on a post outside our front fence. The BoogleSnort Free Little Library arose out of the ash that was once a microwave oven. 

Which left me with ten days left in June to fill. And a white board that was getting full, but needed something else to push it over the edge. 

That's when I noticed that our shower drain was all but stopped after my wife's bath. I fussed with it for a bit, checking to see if there was an obvious clog. The plunger technique did not yield any kind of satisfactory results, so I began ruminating. 

A very long time ago, we had our bathroom plumbed in such a way that the sink and the bathtub would drain out the side of the house so that we could reclaim our gray water. It was a very environmentally conscious decision to make. From time to time, the hose that leads out to the front lawn gets a little kinked, and water sits in the sink or the tub while one of us trots outside to make it flow once again. My cursory inspection of the hoses did not reveal a kink, but upon further consideration, I decided to remove the hose from the fitting on the side of the house. When I opened up the valve again, a glug and then a gasp of brownish gray goo as big as my fist emerged before a stream of water that looked like water once again. Not sludge. 

I tried to recall the last time I had checked that hose and could not remember a white board entry in as many months as I could visualize. It had gone a long time, filling up with soap and filth and all the things that would make a drain slow. 

But not anymore. The relief I felt was enormous and just a little embarrassing. Not enough to keep me from writing it down on the white board, but now I've still got a week to come up with something even better.