Memorial Day

Sunday morning. It's about 9:30 AM. The air temperature is just right. I have a Weight Watchers meeting at 10:30. I've decided to walk to get there. Because so many of the people I weigh in with run 5k races, I've set my fit bit to kilometers for the day. I want to see how many kilometers I walk in my average morning walk. Running just isn't about to happen.

Everywhere as I progress toward the meeting people are seen shoveling mulch. A couple of folks are in their yards with snipping shears. One gentleman is digging in his perfectly manicured front lawn. Why I inquire? He tells me he is fixing the sprinkler system.

Many houses have empty driveways. As I said the wealth of car top carrier's I saw the other day indicated up north was the weekend destination for many people.

Walking at 9:30 AM a lot different than walking at 7 AM. You feel the warmth of the sun. This is not a bad thing. Still a ton of dog walkers though. 

Two things caught my eye this morning. One was a flag hanging in almost a perfect Americana fashion. I love Memorial Day memories. The other was a purple bush. One shows appropriate respect for those who sacrificed. The other shows the glory of nature. Ah the fragrance as I walked under that bush. It was just wonderful and sense filling.

Have a good day my friends. Cook some burgers on the grill. Feel the sunshine on your body. Smell the flowers.

Security Blanket

Here is the prompt for the day from that WordPress 365 Days of Prompts article.
Memories for sale
On a weekend road trip, far away from home, you stumble upon a garage sale in a neighborhood you’re passing through. Astonished, you find an object among the belongings for sale that you recognize. Tell us about it.

I approach this writing prompt a little bit sideways.  The trip was not a weekend trip.  The town was not somewhere I was passing through. But once a long time ago I did find an object that I knew was far out of place had almost no meaning to anyone where I, anyone except for me.

I came to Michigan in 1974.  I hated the place.  My plan was to leave as soon as possible.  I was lonely.  As the academic year dragged on I was cold, very cold. I was homesick.

In 1974, you could not listen to your hometown radio stations over the internet.  Now when I need a dose of the Delaware Valley and its accent I pull up WXPN on Aha.  In that year, you could not email someone to tell them about what had happened in class that had frightened you, or challenged you, or left you puzzled.  If your wanted to talk about it in some detail with somebody who knew you, and not somebody you just met and let us face it everyone was someone I had just met, you had two choices. First there was the long-distance phone call and even after 10 the rates hurt.  Second was a letter.  Find an envelope and paper.  Write out legibly, always a challenge for me, your thoughts.  Borrow a stamp.  Go to the post box and drop it in.  Wait five days or six and see if the recipient wrote you back and if they even deigned to respond to what was on your mind.

Once I was six hundred miles away from home I was on you own in a culture and climate that was foreign and new.  Words didn’t have the same meanings.  Customs were not the same.  There were times when I just longed for some kind of connection with the life I used to know.

My main hobbies in the Godforsaken place I had come to were reading and shopping for LPs.  The key here was shopping not necessarily buying. Money was always tight.  Going to the used record stores to peruse the bins to see if some odd artist I had just gotten interested in could be found there on the cheap, was an afternoon’s outing. Ah the smell of vinyl in the afternoon of a Saturday.

Occasionally I would wander into other stores.  There were hippie places with bedspreads of many colors and incense of many smells.  There were real honest to God local bookstores with the newest volumes.  There were clothing stores with fashion but I did not tarry long there. Jeans and a flannel shirt, that was all I needed.  It was all anyone male or female needed in the mid-1970s.

One October afternoon I wandered into a used book store.  It had books crammed in floor to ceiling and had the smell of mold and must.  That afternoon I found myself looking in the history section. There I came upon a book that could only have come from my hometown, well at least my county.

In 1960-something New Jersey had celebrated it tercentenary.  In North American terms that was damn old. Tons of celebratory stuff marked with this weird logo were hawked.  I think we had purchased a number of anniversary bottles of brown glass blown in observance of the fete. 

My county wanted in on the 300^th birthday party so they published a book called Fenwick’s Colony. It contained photos of ancient houses and people doing business in the contemporary environment.  There were pictures of all the towns in the county.

I knew the book well.  I knew that my house was in picture in the center of the volume.  Having pulled the book from the shelves I open it and looked at my home as it looked a decade before.  I flipped through the pages and there were pictures of people I knew and knew well.  Babe Huber was there as was Mr. Sparks and others. 

Flipping to the inside front cover I found a note gifting the book from one person I knew to another I knew of.  How this book had come 600 miles to a used book store was a mystery to me.  In reality it was probably bought at an estate sale and then shuffled around between book dealers until it came to rest in the middle of the Midwest.

However, the book found its way here didn’t matter.  Every page printed in faux sepia tones was something that was a connection with home.  I don’t know what the price was but I bought the damn thing at once.  I still have the volume although it appears my wife has put it in a box somewhere during a recent cleaning of the bookshelves. 

The book was something that was “of home.”  It reminded me of the place that had defined me.  Those pages were a connection to everything environmentally that had formed me.  It was a printed security blanket and I was damn glad to have it.

Hope Required

Today was a fairly quiet one at work.  Most of what I have done is simply sorting out minor problems for the mechanically challenged. One person seemed to have truly either lied to me. She had failed to abide by the number one rule that applies after seeing me, NO DRINKING.  Her loss.  Either she accepts my decision or she appeals it.  Either way she will be suffering economic consequences. The rules are simple, don’t drink and if it looks like you have been drinking, prove to me that you weren’t.  A simple urine test will resolve the question.

I have not really been checking Facebook or the news stream very often.  Two night ago, there was a terrible act of violence in England.  There has been precious little that is really meaningful in the electronic static stream.  The bomber has a surname that is Arabic sounding.  He died in the blast, I gather that makes him a suicide bomber.  Another person has been arrested but what his connection is to the dead little girls at the pop concert is uncertain.  Who plants a bomb to kill fifteen-year-old girls?

About the only horror that has not be inflicted on the world in my lifetime is the use of a nuclear bomb on a populated area.  Genocide of millions of people has been waged on several parts of the globe in my 61 years.  Hot wars and cold wars have been waged.  Acts of terror, mass and small, have been carried out.  To what end?

These deaths are not deaths that have furthered the chances of our species surviving the changing global climate.  These deaths have been carried out either in the furtherance of advancing one groups economic advantage over the other or to impose a certain ethical or moral code on “infidels”.  Death because group A eats pork and calls their God by a different name than the non-pork eating group B seems really stupid to me.

I can understand the economic battles.  Food, water, shelter and Wi-Fi these are things to blow up buildings and kill people for.  However, murder over what your call a God, a God that says to both groups you shall not murder makes no sense. 

The battles leave me weary.  The deaths are senseless.  The need to be on top in the battle of creeds and oaths seems frivolous.  Maybe it is my humanist roots showing that I believe in tolerance and coexistence.

…

Saying these things does not move me anywhere closer to a being a citizen of a world committed to survival.  I am a product of privilege.  My water has always been clean and my food supply steady. Not so much for so many in this overcrowded place.  How do I realistically do something that makes a difference?

I guess that is my starting point.  Starting from small acts what can I do to aid others as I pass through the remaining years of my life.  I guess that I can act with kindness and not turn away from the homeless people who are at the corners of every scene I pass through in this life. Maybe I can give some of the money I spend on coffee each day to something better.

In Honor Of

Manchester England is about 200 miles northwest of London.  The city lies about 35 miles east from Liverpool, that industrial port town that gave us modern popular music.  From Manchester have come John Thaw (the original Inspector Morse), Morrissey and the Gallagher brothers. Despite this for the next half a century the name Manchester will be stained with the memory of innocents whose blood was shed without purpose. For a city to face being long associated with something it had no control over is a shame, really.

 

Phrases from the New Testament and from drunken Irish poets fill my head as I contemplate what occurred in Manchester.  I want to say to the parent of every child lost or maimed that they should not grieve as those without hope.  They need to know that every heart of every parent that has raised a child with love stands with them and aches for them. Each of us as we are thinking of them believes that their child, and every child lost in that arena, is in a better reality.  We pray for every single person touched by this tragedy.

 

To those who have carried out this act of murder and mayhem we say this vile form of death shall have no dominion over us.  We say your acts of cowardly horror will have no power over us, not now, not ever. We will live as wounded people but as enlightened people. The world will grieve with every soul in Manchester touched by this tragedy.  We will not however surrender to acts such as this designed for naught but evil.  In spite of you we will lives of freedom.

 

 

 

 

Vampire Lust

My children refer to me as the show killer.  If I am drawn to a show that has any kind of supernatural theme it dies. My kill ratio is almost without exception, there have only been one or two survivors.  Invariably if the theme is people with special abilities or if the show is set in an alien or space landscape the program will get its initial 13 episodes and then be gone.

Vampires, witches, aliens, people who do not age and unnaturally gifted people, these are the shows that strike my fancy.  Apparently theses shows strike quite a few people’s fancies because every television season a new crop of shows about the undead or people who can see through the boundaries of this mortal coil arise.  The question becomes why do we like these shows?

Over time I have returned to that question and pondered it.  My thoughts on the topic are three fold when it comes to television serials involving these groups of people.  First, we are drawn to worlds where the rules of our world don’t apply.  Second, there is this death-eroticism nexus that intrigues us.  Finally there is the pretty people factor.

On the first point I offer this.  Most people, not all, but most people that plop down in front a video device to watch a program about vampires or young people on an abandoned world or people who hop between time periods are folks whose lives are really rather regimented.  We go to work.  We drop off the kids.  We do the grocery shopping.  We mow the yard.  We have sex on Friday night or Sunday morning.  Regimentation rules our lives.  Rules rule our lives.

We face deadlines and dress codes.  We are overbooked and our lives have no margins.  Thus when we see people who don’t give a flaming fuck about the rules and live in an alternate world to our own, maybe interacting with us, or maybe not it offers us an escape.  We are able to live out mentally a little fantasy about draining the blood from those who constrain us and further of making them slaves to our will. We want the freedom of those living in the alternate universe together with the excitement and the danger.

iZombie is a favorite of mine.  Liv tries to live to a human moral code while driven by an internal Zombie lust for brains that is raging and uncontrollable.  We can empathize with that.  We love the complexity these characters have to navigate.  Why, because we have to navigate complexity but ours is so boring and so mundane. We want to break the rules and when we are watching fantasy we applaud those characters who without hesitation break centuries old codes. For a great example of these check out the Dusk ‘til Dawn television series.

The death eroticism thing cannot be underestimated.  We are all scarred out of our minds by our own mortality.  If we think on it too long at a stretch we get palpitations and our guts churn and we hyperventilate.  Each and every single one of us is going to die and we don’t, we really don’t, want to go.  So what is the antithesis of death?  Why the antithesis of death is wild sex, abandoned and filled erotic passion. 

If we make the characters vampires you can even blend these two elements. Pale but pretty undead creatures go at it like Montana Wildhack in some blue tinted porno about naughty nurses gone berserk on a sex stimulant.  We want an explosive release from our mortality. Watching the beautiful undead having passions, having sex, having elegance (don’t forget they are always drinking blood or fine wines at tables with the best silver and exquisite porcelain on white line with lots of candles) we for a few moments get that.  We can overlay our passions, the ones we thought would be eternal, on these story lines.

Don’t ever forget the third element, the pretty factor.  No single being in a fantasy show that is going to last more than an episode is other than young and beautiful.  The men are hard bodies who spend lots of time shirtless showing off their six packs. The women are buxom and always busting out of leather garments that barely constrain their bosoms.  When like pretty people.  We react to pretty people.  If no one is around we masturbate to beautiful people doing hot dirty things.  Yeah combine these three factors and we are drawn to these shows like moths to a flame.

Me, I just happen to pick the ones that have themes that are just not romantic enough.  Time travel is always the sugar that lures me into the amber.  But vampires and their passions, their blood and eternal struggle, these are the folks that hit all the major points above for most people.