Judicial Hearing

         

             Yesterday, I and many other Americans were captivated by the Ford/Kavanaugh hearing. The drama was lengthy, compelling, and riveting. I don’t know about the other viewers, but I was both fascinated and disgusted by this judiciary circus. I was fascinated by the way Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh presented themselves. Dr. Ford, with her large, horn-rimmed glasses riding down her nose, looked a little like that bug-eyed deer in the headlights. Her anxiety and fear were palpable. Judge Kavanaugh looked like a victim of Tourette’s with his sniffling and blinking, facial tics, and frequent sips of water. My impressions of them should have had nothing to do with their believability, and they didn’t. I found them both to be believable even though their stories were contradictory. My disgust derived from the partisanship exhibited by both sides of the aisle. This was supposed to be a hearing to determine whether or not Judge Kavanaugh should be confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court, but apparently the senators were all lined up beforehand—forty-seven Republicans saying yes, forty-nine Democrats saying no, and four Republicans saying maybe. My disgust stems from the senators’ nearly total disregard for the truth. They didn’t care which one was telling the truth. They had decided their yea or nay well ahead of the hearing on Judge Kavanaugh, and their decisions were based almost entirely on party affiliation. Why even bother with a hearing if their minds were already made up? Other than the four on the fence, was there no one of either party who waited for the testimony before deciding? And even the four undecideds are probably more influenced by party pressure or fear of Donald Trump than by a search for truth. Where are the independent thinkers regardless of their party affiliation? Is it time for a legitimate third party of independents? Why haven’t we elected any independents to the Senate? Donald Trump has done so much to divide us along party lines that a third party might bring us back together. Our nation and the world witnessed that Trumpian divide in this fascinating yet disgusting hearing. So, how does the public judge these two unhappy people whose lives will never be the same after this debacle? It all depends on which one we found most likable. The fault seems to lie partly in the nearly two months that were allowed to pass after Dr. Ford’s letter was received. The other fault is in ignoring any face-to-face testimony from those who support the stories of Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh. Certainly, actually hearing their testimony would have aided viewers and the senators in their decision to confirm or deny Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Sports & Politics

                                    East Lake golf course near Atlanta, site of the PGA tour championship and the FedEx Cup this past weekend, looked to me like the meanest, nastiest course I’ve ever seen, set up as tough as any U.S. Open course, maybe even tougher—Bermuda rough like wire, narrow fairways, pins tucked precariously close to edges, greens like glass that were stimping around 14 (and more like 18 when descending from some of the steep East Lake slopes), and, of course, the pressure of FedEx money and prestige. And it absolutely embarrassed some of the best golfers in the world: Phil Mickelson at +13, Bubba Watson at +10, Patrick Reed at +9, and our current U.S. Open champion Brooks Koepka at +4. And the winner, the resurgent Tiger Woods, was 11 under par. Welcome back, Tiger. I and most of the rest of the world were watching with bated breath to see if you could pull off this miracle. And you did, as your two closest pursuers succumbed to the pressure of Tiger mania, with Rory McIlroy six behind and Justin Rose five behind. Granted, Rose won the FedEx championship and the ten million that went with it, but he and Rory and the rest of the youngsters saw firsthand what PGA players in the fifteen years of Tiger dominance saw, the immense crowd pressure that accompanies his every shot. When he and Rory walked down the final hole on Sunday with hundreds of fans right behind them, that crowd, like a swarm of excited bees, nearly swallowed them whole. It had been five years since his last victory, but after this one, there will be many more to follow.

            More weekend sports considerations. I seem to be losing my grip on language. Today, after their debacle against the Chicago Bears, I wanted to say that the Arizona Cardinals reeked, but I was no longer sure what the verb “to reek” meant. I thought it suggested a really strong stench, like a long-dead skunk or a pile of rotting fish. If that’s true, then it applies to both the Cardinals and the Diamondbacks. Wow! Do they both reek. The Cardinals look like a new version of the Cleveland Browns, a team that may very easily lose all sixteen games this year, and the Diamondbacks look more like Zirconbacks, or poster boys for complete meltdown late in the season. How sad for Larry Fitzgerald, who will undoubtedly give it up after this season to begin his career as a sports broadcaster. How sad for Paul Goldschmidt, who will once again not be named MVP in the National League. Oh well, I still have the Ryder Cup next weekend, and a Tiger season beginning with the Masters next April.

            Enough about sports. What about politics? We’re only six weeks from the Mid-Terms and the mud is flying everywhere. Here in Arizona, the art of mudslinging is reaching new highs (or should that be new lows?). In the race for Jeff Flake’s vacated seat in the U.S. Senate, supporters of democrat Kyrsten Sinema and republican Martha McSally are spending oodles and oodles of money to see who can win in the negative tv ads and the too frequent negative mailings. Sinema, according to McSally, opposed the War on Terror, believes in “world disarmament,” wants to shut down Luke Air Force Base, opposed creating the Department of Homeland Security, and voted to cut funding for ICE. McSally, according to Sinema, voted for huge tax breaks for the wealthy, proposed a tax plan that would raise health insurance premiums, put Social Security and Medicare at risk, and voted to raise the national debt by $1.9 trillion. All right, ladies. Why don’t you both spend your campaign funds on ads that tell us why we should vote for you? Tell us what you believe, where you stand on national and world issues, what you would do to bring about positive changes. Instead of mud, why not just toss us some marshmallows?

            We’re living in an age of instant information (too often misinformation) with nearly everyone tweeting opinions on every current subject or using one or more of the many social networks. Everyone has an opinion. And too many of us believe nearly everything said. Only a few decades ago, most of us couldn’t have foreseen a time when the president of the United States might spend hours every day sending out inflammatory, misinformed, ungrammatical, untrue, idiotic comments for all the world to see.  But that’s where we now are. And here I am, sending out opinions to my readers. Take this most recent conundrum, the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the charges of sexual assault brought against him by Christine Blasey Ford. Is he, as his accuser says, guilty of sexual assault or is he simply a man who thirty-five years earlier gave in to his boyish libido and got a bit too rough in his amorousness? Appointing or rejecting him for the Supreme Court is an important decision. What he may have done thirty-five years ago is equally important. Did he cover with his hand the fifteen-year-old Christine Ford’s mouth as he tried to rip off her clothes or didn’t he? And how can the truth be determined? Before we rush to confirm him, let’s hear the testimony of those who were around back then. Let’s not confirm or reject him just on political partisanship.

Ozark

             I just finished bingeing on the first two seasons of the Netflix series Ozark, starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney. It was very good, although maybe a bit too complicated in all the plot twists and turns involving their connections with the Chicago drug cartel and the Kansas City Mob. The two of them, Marty and Wendy Byrde, have agreed to launder money for the cartel. Marty is an accounting genius and he assures his wife that it would be perfectly safe for them and oh so lucrative. It requires them and their two children to relocate to Missouri in the Ozarks, where they have the task of proving to the cartel that he can actually create clean money of the dirty five million they give him. And the plot takes off from there.

Bateman was nominated for an Emmy for lead actor in a drama. And he’s excellent, as are all the people who live there on the miles and miles of shoreline on the lake created there—the Snells, who own a huge amount of the land along that shore and who grow poppies to make heroine for sale along the water; and the Langworths, trailer trash who are much smarter than people give them credit for, especially Ruth and her cousin Wyatt. Laura Linney as Wendy Byrde is so good she should also have been nominated for an Emmy. But my favorite of all of them has to be Julia Garner as Ruth Langworth. She is one tough cookie who, at nineteen, can take care of herself and all of those she loves. She has the turned-down mouth grimace down to a science. This series may not be quite as good as Fargo or Breaking Bad, but it’s still very good and I can’t wait to see what they do in the third season. And it, just like Fargo and Breaking Bad, makes blue language the norm, maybe even more so. As a person born in the Thirties, I didn’t think I could ever get used to the frequent use of Anglo-Saxon 4-letter words or of rather explicit nudity and sex scenes, but I did. Now it seems almost normal for everyone to talk that way. As with movies, the other thing I like about episodes done on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon is that they can slow down the dialogue and allow the characters to act instead of what we too often get on regular networking that have only so much time to tell their stories and must have their characters speak in incomprehensible, machine-gun staccato. There are places where we need pauses to let the faces do the talking instead of the mouths. We get a lot of that in Ozark. If you have Netflix, go there and binge on Ozark.

Countdown

Countdown:   I haven’t had much to say about my clock watch (or should that be my watch watch?) for quite a while now. Physically I’m about the same as I was two or three months ago. However, mentally I’m more and more concerned with my disconnection with friends and relatives. My relatives (other than my three children) all have their lives to live and don’t have time to keep up a regular correspondence with me. Nearly all of my friends here in Sun City West were friends from my golf groups or with those I worked with when I was a starter at one of our courses. Now that I’m no longer golfing, I’ve lost nearly all contact with them. Thus, my feelings of isolation and disconnection.

          In a recent Time magazine (Sept. 17, 2018), in an article by Jeffrey Kluger called “The Surprising Joy of Old Age,” he says better than I could what the end of life might contain: “If life wanted to mess with you, it couldn’t have come up with a better way than death. Especially the lead-up. Your strength flags; your world narrows; much of what once gave you pleasure and satisfaction is now gone. But as it turns out, happiness is still very much with you—often even more so than before.” I’m not sure I agree with the part about happiness. But I can agree with acceptance.

          He refers to The Happiness Curve, by Jonathan Rauch: “Life satisfaction appears to follow a U-shaped course, with its twin peaks in childhood, when the world is one great theme park, and in old age, when we’ve been on all the rides a thousand times and are perfectly content just to watch.”  (paraphrasing) In the middle years, 40s and 50s, when we should be feeling our happiest, life satisfaction bottoms out.

I can now see that my middle years were indeed tenser and less contented than when I was a child or in the years after I retired. I knew as a child that life was filled with possibility. I could do anything, become anyone. When I turned sixty, I had a new life in retirement, living in a golf paradise, and the world was good. But when I hit forty, I felt that all those plans for getting writing published or for actually learning how to play the piano or learn French were never going to happen; my life was less about the future and more about the past. These feelings only grew deeper when I hit fifty.

          And now, here I am, at that other peak on the U, into my eighties. Am I happy? No. Am I fearful of death? No. I’m just here marking time.

Kruger goes on to say, “Yes, death is nonnegotiable—something that can only be delayed, never avoided. It’s a mercy, then, that when we do reach the end, so many of us arrive there smarter, calmer and even smiling.” Okay, I’m smarter and calmer, but I’m still not smiling.

Random Thoughts

             Seventeen years ago. September 11, 2001. A date as infamous as December 7, 1941. What happened on that date seventeen years ago woke us up to the level of terrorism that we had previously ignored, or at least didn’t acknowledge as terror on our home soil. And now we see that the consequences of that attack are ongoing, with the incidence of cancer-related death among first-responders. I hope I live long enough to see the end to this nonsense, this killing of infidels because it is somehow the will of God. Why would God want the death of all non-Muslims? I just shake my head. And, yes, I know I won’t live long enough to see the end of it. But I can hope, can’t I?

* * * * * *

Our space probes onto the surface of Mars have revealed what scientists think are large areas of ice.  If true, what a monumental discovery that would be.  Because if there really is ice on Mars, then there’s also the strong likelihood of life in one form or another.  Maybe only microscopic life, but life nonetheless.  And that would substantiate what I’ve always thought, that if life exists on two separate planets in one tiny galaxy such as ours, then it’s a certainty that life of all kinds and at all levels of advancement must exist in the universe.  Wow.  That’s a quiet wow because my mind can’t quite absorb the enormity of it.  We’re really not alone.  We really could see some kind of contact between species far separated by space.  Wow.  I can’t wait to see what else they discover on Mars.

* * * * * *

Somewhere several nights ago, in one of my moments of clarity just before falling asleep, I thought about the terms mister and misses and came up with the more accurate terms mister and mystery, followed by masculine and femi-nun and male and fee-male.  But all these considerations would be totally sexist, so I’d better abandon the idea. Another thought I had was that a painter could paint a landscape, have it affixed to a magnetic sheet that could be cut into jigsaw pieces, have part of the pieces magnetically attached to a framed metal plate with the other pieces on a table beneath the hanging picture.  People at the gallery could try their hands at finding pieces that fit.  The painting could be called “Work in Progress.”

* * * * * *

             Our soccer-playing Tiger has to be the smartest cat I’ve ever known, just a generation or two away from being able to speak English. But he still hasn’t quite figured out our mirrored living room wall. He’s been constantly going to it and sitting there gazing around, not necessarily at himself (though he does quite a bit of that) but just perusing the room on the other side, like a feline Alice wishing he could step through this looking glass.  He never tries to go to this personal Wonderland; he never reaches out a taloned paw to touch it; he just sits there looking at all the familiar furniture. “Hey, there’s a chair just like the one I love to sleep on. Now I’ve got two.” What must be going through his little cat mind?  When he looks at me in the mirror, does he realize it’s me he’s looking at and does he wonder how I can be in two places at once?  How must he explain that mystery?  What sort of metaphysics does a cat have?  Questions without answers.  It will be interesting to see how long he continues his gazing, how soon before his curiosity wanes and he ignores the other side again. 

Dreams

I realize that more and more of my posts are becoming more and more internal and less and less external. I also realize that almost none of my readers (and they are fast becoming fewer and fewer) are at all interested in what I have to say about myself. But, hey, here I am, less and less connected with the external world. So, please forgive me, whoever you are, if I once again tell you about my dreams.

In looking back at some of my journal entries, I keep bumping into things I’ve said about dreams and the dream state, nuggets of dreams that seem to recur over the course of time, motifs that psychologists would just scrub their hands in anticipation of saying what they might mean, like exclaiming what a sicko this guy is. What follows is a summary of those entries, so they may seem a bit disconnected and repetitive.

For the past three weeks, I’ve dreamed strange, lengthy, disturbing dreams about golf and my past youth and teaching and retiring.  I wake up nearly as tired as when I went to bed.  I guess the word disturbing isn’t really accurate since none of the dreams are frightening or nightmarish.  They’re just so damned odd.  In some of them I’m on one of those familiar dream golf courses where I’m usually playing in a tournament with really ugly and unfair course conditions—fairways hemmed in with trees and bushes and water hazards.  Sometimes I can’t find my clubs.  Sometimes we’re teeing off inside buildings and hitting out through doorways or windows. In other dreams I’m back in school teaching either wildly unruly students or honor students.  In some of them I’m unprepared and in others I teach brilliantly designed lessons.  Often I’m on the verge of retirement and I have only one or two days to go.  The dreams aren’t continuous but they seem to go on all night long.  Often, after one episode, I’ll open my eyes and the clock shows I’ve been in bed only an hour.

Some of my recurring motifs: stolen cars, levitation, going home on foot from east to west (always east to west) and having to go through connected apartments one after another, traveling dreams in which I’m visiting a town or city (usually my dream version of New York) and I either get lost in my car or I’m on foot trying to get to a bus or subway to make it west (always west) and back to where I’m staying, houses with secret rooms usually on the top floor or in the attic. I keep parking a car on a side street and when I return, it’s never there. I think I’ve lost at least a dozen cars over the years. I can lift myself by pushing my palms toward the ground and levitating for a while but only a few feet up.

I’m now dreaming in extended stories, some of which I can recall, some no longer with me.  My short story, “The Hand,” came to me in a dream, the entire plot but none of the details, and the next day I got up and wrote it from what I remembered from my dream. Last night I dreamed I was in a bar drinking beer with someone (a male friend from my past?) and then I had to leave to get ready for some kind of family socializing.  One of the waitresses came up to me to say goodbye and she was barefoot, standing on my shoes with her arms around my neck.  We kissed, and then kissed again, and I looked at her and said, “Damn!  You’re about the only one in town tall enough for me,” and her eyes were right there at my eye level, and she smiled at me and kissed me again. There were more pieces of dream but they’ve fled like wisps of smoke in a breeze

I was writing in my sleep again last night.  There was more to it than this, but this was so vivid I thought I should get it down: I created a transient of some kind who kept his toiletries in a glass jar, about a 12-ouncer, and in it he kept a small comb, a foldup toothbrush, a sliver of soap, and a washcloth.  Now why would I dream such a thing and why would it be in writing?  I mean, as I was dreaming I was putting those words down somewhere.  I think lately I haven’t been sleeping very deeply and sometimes I think in a semi-sleep state and the thoughts seem to be dreams but aren’t really.  I think that floating state between sleep and wakefulness is probably very creative, with the thought process even clearer than it is in an awake state.  Or maybe I’m just full of crap.

I had an extended dream about a story idea.  Some man (husband, father, brother?) wanted me to tutor a pregnant girl until she gave birth, about half a year.  And she would live with me through that period.  The story idea is that the two of them (us?) would not get along at all well but as the delivery day grew near they (we?) began to bond through birthing classes and assorted other traumas until an intimate love develops.  Not carnal intimacy, just two people making a connection that allowed no secrets or embarrassments.  I think it would be a good idea for a novel or play or film.  I’ve never tried a play, but this would be easy, a two-person series of confrontations.  Probably just another thing I’ll never get around to actually doing.  I’m really good at that.  I should have been a corporate idea-man, you know, someone who thinks up good ideas but never has to bring them to fruition.

Puns & Word Play

The English language is so peculiar and must be almost impossible for a non-native to learn (and a lot of natives never learn). For example, “About 8:00 it started thundering and lightening.” Now, does that mean that at 8:00 we could hear thunder and see lightning, or that we noticed the sky lightening? And if we meant the two nouns "thunder" and "lightning," and the two verbs they can also be, then the original sentence should be “At 8:00 it started thundering and lightninging.”  Consider the two words, lightning and lightening. I might say, “We noticed some lightning in the east,” or I might say, “We noticed some lightening in the east.” Two very different meanings.

And that brings me back to puns and word play. Do other languages have such a thing as puns? Do they engage in word play? Probably, but also probably not as many or as often as in Engligh. Here are a few new ones I got from several of my internet friends;

1. The meaning of opaque is unclear.

2. I wasn’t going to get a brain transplant but then I changed my mind.

3. Have you ever tried to eat a clock? It’s very time-consuming.

4. A man tried to assault me with milk, cream, and butter. How dairy!

5. I’m reading a book about anti-gravity. I can’t put it down.

6. If there was someone selling marijuana in our neighborhood, weed know about it.

7. It’s a lengthy article about ancient Japanese sword fighters, but I can Sumurais it for you.

8. It’s not that the man couldn’t juggle, he just didn’t have the balls to do it.

9. So what if I don’t know the meaning of the word “apocalypse?” It’s not then end of the world.

10. Police were called to the daycare center. A 3-year-old was resisting a rest.

11. The other day I held the door open for a clown. I thought it was a nice jester.

12. Need an ark to save two of every animal? I Noah guy.

13. Alternative facts are aversion of the truth.

14. I used to have a fear of hurdles, but I got over it.

15. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

16. Did you know they won’t be making yardsticks any longer?

17. I used to be allergic to soap but I’m clean now.

18. The patron saint of poverty is St. Nickless.

19. What did the man say when the bridge fell on him? The suspension is killing me.

20. Do you have weight-loss mantras? Fat chants!

21. My tailor is happy to make a new pair of pants for me. Or sew it seams.

22. What is a thesaurus’s favorite dessert? Synonym buns.

23. A relief map shows where the restrooms are.

24. There was a big paddle sale at the boat store. It was quite an oar deal.

25. How do they figure out the price of hammers? Per pound.

26. Whenever I try to eat healthy, a chocolate bar looks at me and snickers.

27. Ban pre-shredded cheese. Make America grate again.

28. Our mountains aren’t just funny. They’re hill areas.

29. Turning vegan would be a missed steak.

30. Crushing pop cans is soda pressing.

31. Puns about Communism aren’t funny unless everyone gets them.

And, of course, how could I ever get by without a slight jab at our POTUS: The problem with political jokes is that they sometimes get elected.

100 Great Film Romances

In 2002, there was a three-hour AFI tv special devoted to the 100 best love stories in film.  I had fun reliving a lot of old flicks and trying to guess ahead which would be chosen.  I had quite a few in the top ten, and I’d have been enraged if they hadn’t included The Way We Were (5^th) and An Affair to Remember (3^rd).  And, of course, every male’s favorite pretty woman, Julia Roberts, in Pretty Woman (21).  Gone with the Wind (my choice for #1) was second, and Casablanca was first. I guess those who love Casablanca are seeing something I’m not seeing.

I thought some on their list were odd or totally wrong choices: King Kong (24).  I beg your pardon?  Faye Raye and a big old gorilla?  Hardly. From Here to Eternity (20) was more about the military and less about love. On Golden Pond (22) was lovely, but old, curmudgeonly love is less lovely than young, fervent love. To Catch a Thief (46) was more about Cary’s cat burglary than romantic love. Last Tango in Paris (48) was more about sex than love. Bonnie and Clyde (65) was more about Depression Days bank robberies than love. A Streetcar Named Desire (67) was more about Stanley drunkenly screaming for his Stella than about love. Harold and Maude (69) was more the depiction of a February/December affection than love. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe (89) was more about the acid dialogue between two old nasties than about love. And The Hunchback of Notre Dame (98) must have been so much before my time that I don’t remember it or could even envision it as a great love. I was also surprised by the number of musicals included: An American in Paris (39), Singin’ in the Rain (16), My Fair Lady (12), The Sound of Music (27), and West Side Story (3).  All great movies, but hardly what I’d think of as great romances.

What about all the films they seem to have missed? Where were Newman and Woodward in The Long, Hot Summer? Where were Splash, East of Eden, Sayonara, You’ve Got Mail, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Tootsie, As Good as It Gets, Four Weddings and a Funeral? And what about The Crying Game, which put a whole new spin on the nature of love?

If I included some from the last two decades, they would be Punch Drunk Love, Juno, Moonrise Kingdom, Notting Hill, 500 Days of Summer, Silver Linings Playbook, The Big Sick, Lost in Translation (Yes, even the unspoken but obvious love between Bill and Scarlett), and Brokeback Mountain (Yes, even the love between two men).

The Way We Were (6) has to be one of the most painful movies I’ve ever seen.  It was less about love and romance than it was about the way time moves us inexorably along and how true love can only be true and everlasting in fairy tales.  Listen to that set of lyrics: “Memries light the corners of our mind, misty water-color memries of the way we were.  Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind, smiles we gave to one another for the way we were.  Can it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line?  If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we?  Could we?  Memries may be beautiful and yet what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.  So it’s the laughter we will remember, whenever we remember the way we were.”  Man, those are some sad words.  I think seeing that movie again would only depress me.  Give me a happy love story like Sleepless in Seattle or Pretty Woman.

Years ago, when I was in Boulder doing post-graduate work, I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman and swore it would be made into an Academy Award-winning movie.  Meryl Streep starred in it and the movie bombed.  The book was one of the most moving stories of found love and I thought the movie was ready-made for the same.  Wrong. But at least I was right about Streep, maybe not as a French Lieutenant’s woman, but certainly as an Academy Award winner.

After this AFI special, I was filled with a desire to go back and see a bunch of them, like The Apartment (62), When Harry Met Sally (25), Jerry Maguire (100), and The Goodbye Girl (81). I think if I had enough years left, I’d go back and see all one hundred of them as well as the ones that didn’t make the grade.