Vicarious

There is a genre of television program that I like. These different serialized tales have a number of similar elements. while I will identify a number of the elements the core of the tale each tells really comes down to one factor which I will touch on at the end of this rant.


The elements usually involved a fallen hero or heroes. These people are damaged goods or simply imperfect people like John on Person of Interest, Sherlock on Elementary and Kate on Castle. Frequently the lead characters are involved with either technology or other fantastic elements that lie sometimes just outside of the things mere mortals like myself have or will ever have access to. On the tech side there are/have been programs like Continuum, Fringe and Person of Interest. On the fantasy side there are teleplays like Grimm and Once.


These shows are populated by usually buxom women (lots of them blond or ginger) most of whom have a propensity to show their cleavage. I can’t think of a single one of these where there has not been a contrivance to get the good looking star down to her skivvies at some point in the series run. These shows are also populated by handsome and usually buff men. Again virtually all have come to some plot point that has mandated some main male character to show off a solid buff physique wearing only his boxers. The women are usually subjected to this diminished state of attire as part of an escape in cold weather (and water be it sweat or the East River) but for the men it usually involves a gym stakeout or a meeting at a swimming pool or sauna (mob types like saunas I have been led to believe).


Most of the story lines have some degree of sexual tension. This usually involves someone to who the hero or heroine can best be said to be a frenemy. There is almost always a third wheel who behavior is erratic or unreliable, think Fusco on Person of Interest. And there are other elements like soft retro lighting in scenes where back story is told and harsh cold lighting in situations where the outcome is theoretically dubious.


The core of each of these stories is this. In every situation the lead character is threatened by a malevolence that is vaguely personified. In some series this evil is clearly identified but is an ongoing unseen and perhaps unnamed character. In Castle it is the shady group that killed Kate’s mother. In Grimm it is the royals. I almost forgot the Mentalist’s Red John. In others of thee programs the evil changes from week to week with the hero vanquishing the current foe while still knowing that something else dark and sinister will arise. In every story the hero is burdened by imperfect, inexact knowledge. It is the role of that imperfect knowledge to keep us tuned in for the full hour.


My thought is that I (we, perhaps) are drawn to these programs by a feeling that our lives are lived with imperfect knowledge and that we like to see someone win a battle or two against the malevolence that pervades our world. When we are subjected to arbitrary and capricious dictates about how we are to perform our jobs or how our kids’ education must be planned or how we have to deal with some part of government’s interaction in our lives we feel a dark presence over which we are powerless to respond to. Thus I (we) subconsciously empathize and root for these characters. We have too often lost often due to the missed e-mail, the notice not removed from the backpack or being out of the group that is in the loop. We want to kick somebody’s ass and when those folks on TV do it we feel glee vicariously.


Those bastards at the networks are smart and manipulative.


Oh yeah we might watch this stuff because we wished we had done or could do the kind of acrobatic, anarchic and authority defying stuff they do. Perhaps it is because we wish we could drink as much as they do (and never have a hangover) or have as much rough sex as they do (without any consequences). Maybe it is just because we like to see beautiful people living lives as scantily clad rich people. Right now my favorite is Justified.

400 Addendum

It struck me as important that this milestone with music.  I have opted for one of my all time favorites.  It has all the themes I need, hope, despair, Michigan and the Soo.



Also I have refreshed the Blog format.  Any thoughts?  Is it easy to navigate, attractive?

400

Writing this blog has become a journey for me. This trip a twilight passage through the straits in an old tramp steamer was an unintentional one to say the least. It began with a stray comment in a coffee shop from my dear friend Chris. Over several years she had listened to the manager of the store and I engage in that great American tradition of narrative story telling. Mixed in to the twisted and confabulated bits of oral personal history were personal observations on daily life and rants about political issues then current. It was her impetus, almost insistence that I write something down that motivated me to take a shot at it. This is the 400th piece I have drafted.

Fear almost stopped me from creating the blog. I was unsure of my writing skills and I was unsure of what I might possibly have to say. Funny in looking up something else I came upon a quote from a writer that now serves as my ideal. He didn’t speak of inspiration when he talked about writing. Instead he spoke about just doing the work, for writing is a kind of work. He emphasized the need to be doing it regularly and getting into the routine. Perhaps it was Ray Bradbury that seems like something he would say. He was right.

My skills at some very basic things like using periods and commas are quite deficit. Books have been bought since I started to try and improve my posting. Things like Grammar Sucks and Eats Shoots and Leaves were paid for. Both volumes remain barely touched on my shelf. Truth be told I have good intentions but at self improvement I am not so good on the follow through. If you look back on my attempt to do a complete run of comments regarding Milton Mayeroff’s On Caring tied to beach stories you can see it petered out after what nine posts. I still intend to go back to that. Grammar should not stop a person from writing. Computers these days will help you quite a bit; I know they have done wonders for me.

On those days when I have something to talk about writing this blog is a joy. When one of the kids accomplishes something I know the pride just drips from the letters on the printed page. If I am reflecting on a moment in the past with clarity it feels like I have opened a little puzzle box and found a prize inside. When I talk about music I feel passion for while I do not play and even with my hearing degrading. When I get up on my soapbox about our need to work with people identified as ASD I feel so much about the plight of the different folks that occupy our world in non typical situations. On the days I start down these roads it is just a joy. Not every day is like that and I know some stuff that I have put up has been filler. I hope you will forgive me. What surprises me sometimes is how much something I did as a “one off” still resonates for me.

About half the pictures I put up I steal off the web. The rest of my images I capture on my iphone and then tweak on the iphone using an adobe photo app I purchased some months ago. One picture I took of the canyon created by buildings on the north and south side of Ottawa Street east of Capitol Avenue and the short bit below it strike me as some of the best of what I have tried to accomplish.

I would urge anyone who has any leaning toward writing or is considering a journal to do it. Just go out to www.blogger.com and create an account. It will take about an hour to familiarize yourself with how it works and then off you go. What I have created here may be gone in a second one day when Google fails and shuts down its servers. But the Buddhist part of me is okay with that. In the meantime I will keep writing.



Thank you for stopping by from time to time.

Truth and Consequences? *

Listening to the Grateful Dead I contemplate the tableau on the table before me.  There is a bottle of red wine and a number of plants on this kitchen table’s marble top.  It is winter so the plants are not thriving.  Guess their struggles are no surprise.  What in this God forsaken place thrives in the doldrums of early March? Hockey is over and occasional only slightly warmer days tease us.  In most of the stores the displays for lawn and garden season are already up.  Damn it they are toying with us. I don’t drink but once a month but I might crack open the bottle of Merlot and have a sip before the night is out just to ride out this case of the mid-winter blahs.

Over the past couple of days I have been thinking about self censorship and self- filtering.  Whilst having dinner last night we were listening to Pandora on the stereo and Dion’s Runaround Sue came on.  This tripped a memory switch and I started to tell my sons a story about how I spent my summers in Ocean City, NJ, it was as they say a dry town.  The drinking age was 18 and everyone would cross the scary causeway at 9^th street to get to Sommers Point home of the Anchorage, Tony Marts, Gregory’s and countless other bars.  

In the summers of the early 1970s the music that would be blasting out would be the songs of summer circa 1965.  Under the Boardwalk, the Twist and Runaround Sue were three of the pillars of this endless cycle of oldies.  Before my time at the beach was over the Hustle and various Earth, Wind and Fire compositions would be mixing in, but Runaround Sue always stood out.

I didn’t dare tell my son that the reason that song sticks out for me is that one night after closing up the ice cream stand at midnight we all crammed into a car and rode over to the Anchorage.  The night was very warm and nobody had anything on other than T-Shirts and cut off jeans.  My T said:

One late night as we approached the entrance to the bar there was some girl who was way too drunk involved in a scene.  She was laughing this weird kind of painful laugh.  She was so drunk that even though she had stepped on a broken beer bottle and lacerated her foot, she was laughing and asking her uber drunk boyfriend what she should do.  The bouncers were trying to give her boyfriend directions to Shore Memorial hospital but he seemed to be too drunk to understand.  I had never before seen anything like this.  If you were hurt you went to the hospital, you didn’t dither about giggling.  All the time we were seeing this, the loudspeakers were blaring Runaround Sue and the queue to get in was oblivious because all you could smell was pot.

Nope I didn’t offer up that part of the story.  Somehow it didn’t seem right at the time.

I tried to explain to him some of the things I learned at the beach that were PG rated.  I told him that split shifts suck.  Saturdays for me at the ice cream store were routinely split shifts.  You worked 10-2 left and then came back at either 6 or 8 and worked to close. Closing time could vary but was usually closer to 11:30 than not. Isn’t much you can do on a day with split shift midday except go outside and work on your tan, eh?  

I could have told him about the bad behavior that occurred when the shift ended.  It usually involved being intoxicated until about 4 in the morning (always), playing strip poker (sometimes), talking philosophy and cosmology (always) and skinny dipping (rare).  There was one nude conga line. Ultimately it involved crawling out to the beach at 9 a.m. to sleep (after a short nap at the folks apartment) and when the brain cells really starting working again as God is my witness I would read Shakespeare.  No really I wanted to grow mentally. Pepsi Cola handled the dehydration and beach fries cleaned up the lack of salt.  The salt water would wash away the stench of the shots of Jack Daniels.

(Not a reasonable facsimile of the author)

(Closer to accurate image)

Even here I am self censoring.  It wasn’t just beer, okay?

It is funny this self censorship is based on not providing a template for disaster for my kids.  I look at other kids Primus and Secundus know and the trouble they are already in because of getting wasted.  I look at the people I judge and think there but for the grace….  No I don’t want to glorify this stuff for them. It is one thing to tell a tale when it is long in the rear-view mirror and another to present it as well a statement of this is how it is.  

On Facebook today I told a story about stealing a flatbed trailer that came very close to altering the direction of my life due to the fact it had been seized by the IRS.  Uh, destroying Federal property was a big thing back then, they called it a felony they did.  The cops came to my home and there with them were as Arlo Guthrie described it charts and pictures with paragraphs on the back.  In the end it all came to naught but it was a very anxious time in my life. I didn’t even lay out most of the story in the short Facebook post. The one thing I said was that when I saw the State Troopers going over the trailer that my nads (short for gonads) pulled up into my chest.   

One of my fellow posters called me out for being offensive.  Uh well I guess.  Would it have been better if I had said gonads? On average I try to keep what I put on Facebook relatively clean.  I don’t talk about smoking pot in the church basement while the service was going on.  I didn’t talk about a nuclear sexual peccadillo that I won’t even mention here.  I didn’t mention the night that convinced me to leave Detroit.  It involved a road trip down the Cass corridor at 4 a.m. harassing hookers.  Any story that begins “There I was in the Post Bar you know the place where it was written in magic marker on the wall, “You can only give it away for free so many times”, will never find its way onto my FB stream.

But I am beginning to wonder why the fuck not?  I am 56 years old and the statute of limitations has run on pretty much anything I could talk about.  It isn’t that my life has been all that interesting or special or different cause I was a nervous Nellie through most of it. Quite probably save my bacon more than once.  But I am who I am nothing more and nothing less.  If I let down the filter maybe I can break through to something more essential, more elemental in my nature.  I don’t know.  If a very few years I will be dead and nobody will have these memories I hold.  Like who will tell my boys that I used to be a petty and bitter man?  Surely not the attorney grievance attorney (currently but then a law student) who held me upright because I was so drunk that I couldn’t stand up so that I could pee on my ex-girlfriend’s basement (garden) apartment window?

Nasty right?  Still it is kind of absurdly funny that this is what I was like and what he was like.  Now he defends impaired attorneys and I judge impaired people. FYI I didn’t do that again and within a few more years (read a decade) I had backed off on the drinking.  

In all my thoughts of this I have kept coming back to a bit of Buddhist thought I read recently.  It is this “When we can be secure in our inner source for true happiness, we don’t expose ourselves to the devastation that comes when outside hopes for happiness and security are dashed. We have our shelter, our place of security, inside. And we needn’t be afraid that this is an escapist shelter. When the basis of our well-being is firm within, we can act with true courage and compassion for others, for we’re coming from a solid position of calmness and strength.”- Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “What We’ve Been Practicing For”. 

I am working to accept that internal space. Really. Maybe I don’t need to clutter it up with secrets and half truths about who I am.  So again maybe I can let the filter down a bit more or better yet let it start to dissolve. Maybe I should let the filter and let the chips fall where they may accepting what may come.

A Crack in the Wall

Adrift in the Sea of Humanity

I walked out side the front of the Sec. of States office today. This is the place where you process your driver license fees and obtain license plates. A wide swath of humanity passes in and out these doors in a constant and unending stream

I don't drive. I haven't driven in decades. I had a meeting to attend away from the office so I ordered up a cab. The cab ran a few minutes late in arriving for me. As time went by I had the opportunity to watch a large swath of people go in and out on their errands . As I stood unobserved I noticed a number of odd facts.

There are a set of steps that lead up to the door of the office. Invariably someone going up the steps would be doing so at the same time someone was coming down the steps. At about the midpoint of the steps a person tends to adjust their grip on the handrail or their stance and they look up. As often as not they have to make eye contact with someone traversing the route in the other direction.

It is at this point things grew odd. Watching these interactions revealed the number of different social behaviors. On this day African Americans tended to greet each other whether or not they knew each other. Older people tended to greet each other regardless of race whether they seemed to know each other or not. The younger Chinese that came in and out seemed to have a sense of personal space and behavioral rules that precluded contact and made them seem somewhat rude by our normative behaviors.

The groups of white people coming through seemed too agitated and did only made contact with the person coming the other way if it was someone they knew.

I know it was only one day in one location and for a very short period of time but the differences in contact behaviors intrigued me. Long ago as an undergraduate student I participated in number of studies relating to the initiation of social contact. We did not look at issues of race or age relative to the contact behavior. We only studied position. If you're facing someone directly you are most likely to start some kind of conversation with them. If you were at a 45 degree angle the odds were far lower that conversation would follow.

There are no great insights from this. The differences were just interesting to watch.

Just the Regular Kind

I am waiting for an x-ray. My foot has become a unicorn. In saying that I mean that's spur has begin to grow from the atop my left arch.

The foot doctor doesn't seem particularly concerned. Her attitude makes me feel better about this situation. situation. Whenever you see a doctor what you want to hear is that it's mundane , it's normal, it's the regular kind.

And what is up with all these soft pastel watercolors?