Tag: Events of the Day

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Thankfulness in 2020

 This has been a truly ghastly year, and even the weather today as I write this is metaphorically on point: it’s drizzly and rainy and the screen on my library window is filled with raindrops so I can’t really even see outside very well.

I won’t write my usual long list of things I’m thankful for, but suffice it to say that even in a year like this, it’s still quite a long list, when I really put some thought into it.

Stay safe, folks. Please don’t take unnecessary trips and please oh please oh please, keep your masks on. It looks like we might very well get through this all right, but if this pandemic is a baseball game, we’re only in the bottom of the fifth. Let’s play the whole nine innings, folks.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Oh, and here’s a sleeping dog.

Having gone outside twice, eaten her breakfast, extorted from me a bite of my donut (a PAULA'S donut, no less), and chased her kitty, Carla settles in for a nap. #Carla #dogsofinstagram #pitbullsofinstagram #pitbullmix #pittie #staffordshirebullterrier #s

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“Stuck at home”

 A quite lovely article appears in The Buffalo News by Jeff Miers, describing his struggle with the degree to which the COVID pandemic has disrupted his lifestyle. It’s not just his leisure that’s affected; it is literally his entire life. Miers writes about music and the arts for the News, and with a beat like that, he’s required to be out in the city almost all the time, interacting with music and art and musicians and artists. This has been his life for decades, and now, all of a sudden, he’s been forced to…stay at home.

The Wife and I often comment that it’s strange how this particular pandemic has basically forced so many other people into our lifestyles: we don’t go out a lot at all, and when we do it’s mainly to eat someplace, so getting takeout is just fine with us. My trips out by myself tend to be solo trips to the library, or jaunts to a local park to walk The Dee-oh-gee in solitude. We simply don’t find ourselves often in situations that involve lots of people are in social situations. But our lifestyle isn’t the only lifestyle, and Mr. Miers (who is, by the way, quite a fine writer whose work I usually enjoy) had felt the pinch very keenly:

After months of telling myself that I was far too fortunate to demand such a luxury, I finally admitted that I needed some help, that the ways in which I warded off depression and anxiety in the past – all of them involving music – were no longer enough. I began seeing a mental health therapist, virtually. She immediately pointed out that, in addition to the difficult situation with my parents, I was also quite likely in a state of shock resulting from a core feature of my existence – the live music experience, which has occupied my time an average of five nights a week for 30 years – being ripped away. Allowing myself to admit this, and to mourn it, in a sense, has helped me greatly.

In the course of his article he notes how he discovered that his son’s girlfriend is actually the granddaughter of a noted jazz musician named Roosevelt Wardell. I found an album of Wardell’s on YouTube, and though I am no expert on jazz by any means, I greatly enjoyed it! This record is quite a compelling listen. You never know which direction art will take in reaching us. Some guy asks a girl out, introduces her to his parents; Dad turns out to be a local writer who mentions her grandfather in a newspaper article, and now I’m listening to a jazz record.

The wheel turns, man.

Here’s that album, by the way.

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22 November

 Fifty-seven years since President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I’m surprised to note that I’ve never written a long piece about Oliver Stone’s film JFK, and it’s been so long since I last saw it that I don’t want to try to write one now; maybe next year, after a rewatch. For now, here’s my review of Stephen King’s amazing novel 11/22/63, and here is John Williams conducting a suite of his music for Stone’s film.

I wonder what kind of America would have emerged from the 1960s had Kennedy not been murdered.

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Any time things wanna get BETTER would be great by me.

 So, about that lack of updates in this space for something like nine days…this month has been rough, folks.

First, there was the final run-up to the election, which was nerve-wracking in itself. Then Election Night was its own category of annoying, as a hoped-for Democratic landslide resulting in the defeat of some of the more odious Republican voices in Congress failed to materialize. And then the results of the Presidential race just dragged on and on and on. Granted, we all knew that was going to be the case, given the giant emphasis on mailed-in ballots, but it would have been a lot less of a nailbiter if I wasn’t also disgusted that the likes of Lindsay Graham, Joni Ernst, and Susan Collins weren’t all going back for another six years of being singularly terrible people in the Senate.

Of course, the Presidential result looked more and more favorable as the week went on until finally all the news organizations concluded that yes, Joe Biden had won, and that yes, America had rejected another four years of Donald Trump. Good news, absolutely! That Trump won’t be the one setting the nation’s agenda is an unabashed good thing. But it definitely gives me pause to note that America seems to have said with this election not “We’re rejecting that guy and his agenda,” but rather “OK, we don’t like this guy, but we do like a lot of what he stands for.” Disappointing.

Through all this, The Wife had been suffering some increasingly obnoxious health issues, which finally led to her hospitalization this past Monday when her vitals got seriously out-of-whack. She’s home now, having only stayed two days, and doctors are homing in on treatment options moving forward, and none of it is life-threatening…but still, that was very difficult. And now, as I write this, COVID numbers are relentlessly climbing as millions of my fellow citizens seem to have basically thrown in the towel and embraced life whether they get sick or not, and my government has likewise thrown in the towel in favor of election-related court cases that are not likely to do anything other than get tossed out.

I’m ready for 2020 to be over, folks. This entire year has been ghastly, even as the current crisis seems tailor-made to someone with my particular lifestyle: we’re not particularly outgoing, and when we do go someplace it’s always by ourselves. But still, this level of world-induced anxiety is not something I’m remotely used to. I was reminded just the other day, on the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, that the final transmission from the doomed ship was the Captain saying, “We’re holding our own.”

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What day is it?

 So, on Monday I made a post here, invoking the Les Miserables song “One Day More”, as did many of my left-leaning friends on the Internet. And why not! It’s a song that so ably lends itself to a Monday before a major election. In the show, all of Act One is building and building and building to a group of events, and then Act One concludes as the entire company gears up for the big day to come:

Tomorrow we’ll be far away,
Tomorrow is the judgement day;
Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store,
One more dawn,
One more day,
One day more!

Of course, it wasn’t just “one day more”, was it? As I write this it’s looking promising, though everyone on my side of the fence was hoping for more out of this election. There will be time enough to figure out the way forward, but there’s a reason that the first rule of treating injury is “stop the bleeding”. We’ve probably done that. I hope.

What I can say definitively, right now, is that “Three days more!” wasn’t nearly as catchy.

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One Day More

This is the photo I took on the morning of Election Day, 2016. It seemed like a bright and optimistic day. I captioned it on Instagram: “Looks like a nice morning to make some history happen!”

Looks like a nice morning to make some history happen! #sunrise #sky #clouds #imwithher
The next morning, in the midst of reeling with the eventual result of that election, the hulking husk of Bethlehem Steel, the old steel plant on the shore of Lake Erie south of Buffalo, caught fire. The blaze was enormous, and I was able to take this photo of the smoke cloud from the roof of The Store.
/PHOTO_20161109_082611
It was hard even then to not see these two photos, twenty-four hours and some change apart, as some kind of metaphor for what my country had just done…or, maybe if I’m feeling charitable, what my country had allowed to happen through various questionable voting decisions by her citizens and the fact of her simply nonsensical approach to the matter of electing presidents.
I’ve had various essay-ish thoughts in my mind about the nature of the 2020 election, but obviously I haven’t written any of them. Every time I’ve sat down to do so, I’ve checked out. While I don’t feel a great sense of impending doom just now, I know what America is capable of doing and I know that we still have a chance to snatch epochal defeat from the jaws of hopeful victory.
Suffice it to say that I hope every American who can will vote, and that I hope that when the dust settles, not only has America decided to scuttle the ongoing disaster that is the Donald Trump administration, but that it has also decided to harshly rebuke the party that gave him to us, the party that has been stampeding in this authoritarian and irrational direction for more than fifty years. I know that American voters love to balance things out: “I voted for a Democrat for President, so I’ll vote for a Republican for Senate,” for example. This is not the time for that. The Republican Party needs to be ruthlessly quashed at every single level for which it can run for things. Every ounce of what is wrong with America can be traced back to either their ill-advised action or their apathetic inaction, and as a party American conservatism needs to be banished to the wilds for years.
I hope that when the dust is settling, America can start to do things like address climate change, the horrible inequities in our economy, the pandemic that holds our country in its tightening grip, our centuries-long struggle with racial hatreds, and more. I hope that the 2016 election will eventually prove to have been a very strange historical accident, not truly indicative of anything other than the last gasp of a political paradigm that has been far too long in passing.
I hope we elect Joe Biden.
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Democracy: I Did It

Annnnd, democracy achievement unlocked! #vote2020 #voting #DemocracyWhiskeySexy

 Specifically, I did the democracy thing the other day, on Saturday, when early voting started in New York State. I got to the polling place (a local community center) about ten minutes before it opened, and at that point there was already a line, which extended into the parking lot. This was strange; the building is big and is surrounded by very ample sidewalks, and yet the people queued up in the parking lot. It took a cop to come along and tell everyone to queue on the sidewalk instead of the parking lot. People are weird.

I waited in line for probably about half an hour before I finally got inside. The attendants looked up my name and printed my ballot on the spot (hooray to New York for not passing some dumb-assed Voter ID law!), and then I voted. It definitely felt a little bit strange to vote early. With the exception of my very first election, when I was in college and thus had to vote via absentee ballot, I have always voted on Election Day at my designated polling place. It does seem odd, having joined with millions of my fellow citizens in having already voted, and yet we won’t have any idea how this all turns out for at least another five days. Here’s hoping it’s only five days, and here’s hoping that we Americans are sweeping the forty-sixth President of the United States into office on the strength of numbers too big to challenge.

We’ll see.

Oh, and this was the first time I ever got an “I voted” sticker, so huzzah for that! That sticker is a nice accessory for my overalls, isn’t it?

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“I’ve learned so much”

In Larry McMurtry’s great Western novel Lonesome Dove, for much of the novel the point of view changes between the main story (a group of Texas cattlemen leading their herds north for selling) and a secondary plot in which we follow the nasty adventures of Dan Suggs and his brothers, who are a murderous trio of guys, killing and robbing their way across the prairie. About two-thirds of the way through the book, our lawful cattlemen meet Suggs and his brothers, and they manage to subdue them quickly and make ready to hang them from the nearest tree. But to their surprise, they find that a friend of theirs, a guy named Jake, has fallen in with the Suggs crew.

Jake is not a bad guy, but he’s something of a ne’er-do-well who makes his living lurching from town to town, gambling and drinking and whoring and doing it all some more. It’s been a while since I read the book, so I don’t remember how it is that he falls in with Suggs and his brothers, but he does, and McMurtry captures his disquiet well as he witnesses murder and crime after murder and crime.

But when our heroes, William Call and Augustus McCray, defeat Suggs and company and get them all tied up in order to mete out cowboy justice, this brief conversation transpires:

Call went over to Jake. Deets [one of their companions] seemed hesitant to tie him, but Call nodded and covered Jake with his rifle while Deets tied his hands. As he was doing it Pea Eye and Newt [two more of their companions] came over the hill with the horses.

“Call, he don’t need to tie me,” Jake said. “I ain’t done nothing. I just fell in with these boys to get through the Territory. I was aiming to leave them the first chance I got.”

Call saw that Jake was so drunk he could barely sit up.

“You should have made your chance a little sooner, Jake,” Augustus said. “A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.”

I’ve been thinking about that passage ever since our President made a video, aimed at his fans, regarding his experience with COVID-19 and his intention to leave the hospital later today. After having spent the last bunch of months spreading all manner of misinformation about the pandemic that is gripping the world, decided to record a video for his fans last night, in which he said, among other things, that he’s “learned so much” about the disease.

He’s “learned so much”.

Imagine that. This many months after the pandemic began, this many months after lock-downs and scenes of horror in New York City, this many months after case spikes and the death rate never going down to zero, this many months of America just existing with this damned thing, arguing over masks and “mah rights”…now our President has “learned so much”.

The time to learn so much would have been the beginning, sir. The time to learn so much would have been in the very beginning, when you would have learned so much from the pandemic team the previous administration left in place, had you not dismissed it.

You should have made your chance a little sooner, Mr. President. A man that will go along with two hundred thousand deaths is “learning so much” a little slow.

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The Moment

 Obviously there is zero chance that I will vote for anybody other than Joe Biden this November (or October, really–early voting, here I come!), but I do want to highlight this segment of his acceptance speech last night. How strange a time it is, that we have to celebrate the very notion of electing a President of the United States who can feel genuine human emotions.

Let’s go, Joe. I’m ready.

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