Blackness

         I’m confused by all the genetic labels currently being used in this country and why we still use them. Is anyone with even a trace of Negroid blood considered to be black? I know it once was so, but is it still? Is Meghan Markle black? Does Prince Harry care if she is or isn't? I don’t think so. Is NBC newscaster Lester Holt black? More like a nicely tanned fellow with a very receding hairline. Black is a color and is often used as a synonym for Negroid, but not all blacks are black. Most are those with varying degrees of skin pigmentation, all the way from obsidian black to opal pale. Skin color shouldn’t be what we use as labels for the world’s ethnic groups. Why even have such labels? And if we really do need a label for Blacks, then “coloreds” is much more accurate. But we also try to distinguish other races by skin colors, like red, yellow, and brown. Native Americans are redskins, Asians are yellow skins, and Hispanics, Indians, and a host of others are brown skins. What nonsense. America in the early 20th century was thought of as a melting pot or salad bowl because we were made up of so many different “colors” or ingredients. The melting pot metaphor suggests that we think of all these people who either emigrated here or were already here as different colored metals that are put in a pot, melted down, and stirred together, resulting in a new metal, stronger and more cohesive, a new breed of mankind that exemplifies freedom and unity, an American. Why do we insist on all these labels, especially the ones based on country of origin, as in German American, Irish American, Italian American, Mexican American, or Korean American? What nonsense. We’re all American Americans. And if we stick with nations of origin, would we have to label those from Panama Panamanian Americans, or from Argentina Argentinian Americans. Or should we just call everyone from south of our border South American Americans. What nonsense. “African American” as a label for blacks doesn’t make much sense since there are all kinds of different colors in Africa. Are Egyptian Arabs black or are they a hue of a different color? Or maybe we should use various religions for our labels, like Catholic Americans, Jewish Americans, and Muslim Americans. But how would we then be able to label agnostics and atheists? It’s all so confusing. And nonsensical.

Countdown:

          A number of my friends are unhappy with what I’m calling my countdown. I never intended it to be anything but an unemotional examination of what happens in the concluding chapter of one’s life. Ever since my encounter with pneumonia a year ago, with all the physical complications with heart and lungs, the boundaries of my world have shrunk and continue to shrink. The oxygen line that follows me everywhere has become a shorter and shorter tether. I’m finding it ever more difficult to go out for dinner, or to a theater for a movie, or even go the Arizona Broadway Theatre for a dinner/show. I run out of air so easily. I walk from car o restaurant and I’m panting like a dehydrated dog when I finally get seated. The answer, I guess, is to buy a wheelchair for Rosalie to get me to and from places outside our home. Granted, Stephen Hawking spent most of his life in more difficult circumstances than mine, but Stephen Hawking was far more intelligent and resolute than I am. It’s all about quality of life. Right now, I seem to be approaching what I consider an unacceptable quality of life. Thus, the countdown. This past week the clock has been stationary, no nearer midnight, still about 11:53.

Golf Observations

1. Has anyone else noticed the hump in Tommy Fleetwood’s back? He seems to be too young for osteoporosis, but it certainly looks like an early onset.

2. On the LPGA I find it curious that none of the commentators has said anything about Inbee Park’s amazing weight loss. In less than a year she’s gone from balloonish to svelte. Well, not entirely svelte, but she seems to be getting there. I guess marriage has been good for her.

3. This last weekend’s WGC match play tournament in Austin showed us the deadliness of having only two matches on the final day. What does the network do in between shots? You got it—commercials. Match play can be compelling, as it often is on Sundays during the Ryder Cup, Presidents Cup, and Solheim Cup, when there are twelve matches going on. That gives the network plenty of time to go from one compelling moment to another without so much commercial time. But in this WGC, the two semifinal matches in the morning and the final and consolation matches in the afternoon weren’t enough to sustain interest, especially when that final match between Bubba Watson and Kevin Kisner ended so early and without any kind of suspense. Bubba was five up after the first five holes, and everyone knew how that would end. It was deadly.

4. During almost every PGA event, I notice more and more golfers (the younger, the more likely) spitting. A while ago I wrote a blog about sports spitting with baseball players being the most frequent offenders. I went on to say that professional golfers were too gentlemanly to ever demean their game with spitting. That may have been true a decade ago, but no longer. Two of the younger golfers, Daniel Berger and Kevin Kisner, seem to have suspicious bulges in their cheeks which might suggest a wad of snuff, and when they all too often spit, it’s not a little squirt but a big drizzly gob. Don’t they realize they’re in the ubiquitous eye of the all-seeing camera? Don’t they realize how disgusting their spit is to most viewers? I guess not. There are others whom I’ve seen spitting occasional little baseballish squirts, like Tiger and Dustin Johnson, but you’d never catch Speith or Kutcher or Mickelson doing it. I’m going to keep a close eye on everyone at the Masters in two weeks. None of them should even think of dissing the hallowed halls of Augustan ivy. The powers that be might disqualify them for such disrespectful expectoration.

5. The game has changed so much I can hardly recognize it. Bubba Watson in his match on Saturday hit a drive that went 489 yards. What! And for many tour players, averaging over 300 yards off the tee is no big deal. I know that many young players are now in remarkable physical shape and swing with blinding speed, but most of this distancing and straightening is because of the clubs and balls they use. A 350-yard hole is now considered just a long par-3. How much farther can it go until all our courses become as extinct as pterodactyls?

Countdown

 Countdown:   The last two days were the two worst days I can ever remember. I felt like I couldn’t breathe because of clogged sinuses, my back hurt from another polymyalgia attack, my upper dental plate was so loose that eating was difficult, my oxygen level would drop to alarming numbers after even the simplest activity, and I was so tired that all I wanted to do was close my eyes and sleep. I felt bad enough that I thought I might soon die. And I didn’t really care. See, not good days.

A few nights ago I got up to pee and when I got back in bed, my oxygen level was 59%. That’s a dangerous low, only a few percentage points away from hypoxia, loss of consciousness, and death.  I went out to the living room to check my concentrator and found that the oxy line had come loose. Put it back on, went back to bed, and in ten minutes I was up to where I should be. But it was a scary moment, another reminder of how important my oxygen line is, a life line as well as a tether. Just not good days.

Three days ago I went to see Dr. Michael Benson, a urologist to whom my primary doctor had referred me because my last blood test showed an elevated PSA, up to 7.2. Dr. Benson assured me that the PSA count was only one of the ways to detect enlarged or cancerous prostates. He then gave me the friendly social finger and told me that my prostate seemed to be normal, without any enlargement or hard spots that would indicate cancer. Good. I felt better.

But then these two awful days showed up. Two nights ago on the Stephen Colbert show, Drew Barrymore read a poem that hit me right between the eyes: “So Now?” by Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is an old iconoclastic hippie, but this poem isn’t any sort of protest. It’s the statement of an old man who mourns the loss of youth and fears the approach of death.

the words have come and gone,
I sit ill.
the phone rings, the cats sleep.
Linda vacuums.
I am waiting to live,
waiting to die. 
I wish I could ring in some bravery.
it's a lousy fix
but the tree outside doesn't know:
I watch it moving with the wind
in the late afternoon sun. 
there's nothing to declare here,
just a waiting.
each faces it alone. 
Oh, I was once young,
Oh, I was once unbelievably
young!

That’s me right now, exactly me. The only change I could make would be to switch “Linda” to “Rosalie.” Bukowski has painted a picture that fits me like a very old pair of shoes.

March Catchup

Time to catch up on a few things.

First, television and what’s good for viewing and what’s not so much. I say again, there’s just too much to watch. All networks, big and small, are now making their own movies and series, and then there’s the streaming of original movies and series on Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix. We would need about a hundred hours a day to see all that’s worth seeing. My assessments will be directed mainly to the major networks with a little peak at TNT and FX. I watched the pilot of The Alienist on TNT and decided it was just too grimy and with dialogue too hard to understand. FX’s The Americans will soon return, but without me. I loved the show when it first came out, but then there was such a long time between its brief seasons that I forgot what was going on. I still have too much to watch without worrying about what Elizabeth, Phillip, and daughter Paige are doing. I no longer watch American Idol or The Voice because both seem to be more interested in the judges’ shenanigans than on the talent they’re supposed to be judging. Who needs it? ABC’s For the People, the latest law and lawyer show, has too many main characters with too many plot lines racing from one to another. Don’t need it. Deception on ABC has an FBI magician working his illusions to help solve various crimes. Don’t need this one either. Taken (NBC) is just too stupid to watch. All right, what are the good ones? The two new medicals, The Good Doctor (ABC) and The Resident (Fox), are excellent. On Fox, 9-1-1 keeps getting better and better with more and more complicated and interesting plot lines. The Seal Team (CBS) is good but still not as good as The Brave (NBC), which may not be renewed for a second season. Rise (NBC), the second coming of Glee (FOX), looks and sounds very good, but where Glee was in many ways a parody (think Jane Lynch as the too hateful Sue Sylvester) with an unrealistic cast of great singers, Rise is trying to show us a high school with vocal and dramatic talent that no high school could possibly have. I hope it has as much success as Glee had. We’ll see.

          Quick Trump comment. I read one of the letters to the editor in the Arizona Republic a few days ago that railed against the students at Stoneman Douglas High School, saying they were too young to realize what they were doing to the Second Amendment and his right to “bare arms.” Yupp, that sounds exactly like a Trump supporter who wants to keep his arms bare. Trump and his supporters apparently aren’t very good spellers. Trump recently tweeted that he’d like to create a space “core.” Donald and his tweets. Doesn’t he realize that what he writes shows the world how stupid he is? Apparently not.

          And finally, what’s up with Tiger. It now looks like he really can come back and win more PGA events as well as one or two or more majors. I and all other golfers hope so. He’s very good for the game. I can’t wait to see what he does at Augusta in April.

Tiger & Charlie

I haven’t mentioned Charlie and Tiger for a long time. Time, then, to catch up. Ever since I’ve been confined more and more to the house, the boys have assumed that all humans must be around their pets most of the time. They act much more like humans than do cats whose parents aren’t home as much as we are. They’re both much more involved with us. Tiger has to show off by playing his one-cat soccer up and down the kitchen and laundry room, or by being bad, as only he can be bad. He’ll jump up on the tv stand, turn around to see if we’re watching, then start scratching the screen as hard as he can. He knows he’s not supposed to do that, but that’s what makes it so much fun for him. And he’s such a good little helper. Whenever either of us has gone grocery shopping, he greets us at the door with tail wagging like a dog, sheer cat-happy. Then he leaps onto the counter to see what’s in the bags. “Whatta ya got, Mom, whatta ya got, whatta ya got? Huh? Huh? Huh?” He’s interested in what’s in the bags, but he’s even more interested in the bags themselves. He loves to lick plastic bags. Normal cats sleep about sixteen hours a day, but Tiger isn’t normal. He sleeps twelve and is awake to do his bad boy things for twelve. Charlie is the good boy. He’s willing occasionally to play with one of Tiger’s plastic soccer balls, but usually he’s too sedate for such nonsense. He has a regal air about him. If he’s the king of the house, then Tiger is the court jester. I’m happy to report that our two boys are now becoming best of friends. They still don’t sleep together, but they’ll spend three or four minutes grooming each other. Charlie is even now accepting me. It took us only about five years for that acceptance. He lets me pet him, he will even sit on my lap. But only for a minute. Anything longer than that would be an intrusion into his monarchy. Now, although I’ve been feeling like my home has been shrinking, the boys must feel like it’s expanding with Mom and Dad right there all the time.

And speaking of Tiger, hot damn, the other Tiger is back and looking much like the one from five or six years ago. After Saturday, he's one back of the leader at the Valspar in Florida and can maybe stage a Sunday Tiger attack and win one for the first time in five years. Oh, how I and most of the rest of the golf aficionados around the world want that to happen. 

Countdown: I seem to be holding my own this last week. By holding, I mean I’m not feeling more fatigued with the same activities, just about the same. It amazes me how much just getting ready for bed can make me pant for breath. I try to take every move slow, but by the time I crawl into bed my oxygen level is back down to 65%. Ten minutes later, it’s back up to upper 80’s, which still isn’t where I want it to be, but at least I’m no longer gasping for air. When I next see my pulmonologist I must ask him how I can counteract this lack of red blood cells. I hope he has an answer or two.

9-1-1 Calls

          I read that after every school shooting, there’s an uptick of fake calls to 9-1-1 about guns and plans for another shooting. The reasons they gave for such behavior? A need on the part of the caller for attention, a ploy to get school cancelled for a day or two, or just for the fun of it. Just for the fun of it?!! Kids, get real. School shootings aren’t fun. We’re living in such strange times. In this country we have an idiot for president and gun violence is at a ridiculous high. I guess I should add that technology is advancing at such a rate that no one can really keep up with it. Certainly no one as old as I am. That’s all I have for today. I’ll find something else for tomorrow.

Countdown: Today I had a wellness checkup with my primary physician, Dr. Greta Brown. Such a nice lady. I guess “wellness” would be a misnomer for me. My blood sample showed a low red cell count and my PSA was alarmingly high at just over 7. Do I have enough –ologists in my life? Apparently not. She referred me to a urologist to check my prostate. Just about the very last thing I want is surgery to remove my prostate. But if it’s cancerous, surgery would be the only answer. She asked me about my urine flow and I said it was more like a dribble than a flow. She explained that an enlarged prostate might account for the dribble. Moving on from there, despite my claims that I was still all there mentally, I was tested with three words to remember—chair, sunset, and banana. There. I still remember them nearly four hours later. Cassandra (Dr. Brown’s nurse) then had me fill in all the numbers on a clock face, then put in hands for 2:10. I passed with flying numbers. Dr. Brown also wanted me to do a stool sample to see if there was any blood. God, how I hate the collection of these samples, you know, two times take a tiny dab of stool to put on the card, then date and send in the results. I also confessed to bouts of depression and my episodes of falling down. She said, when I explained how my world is shrinking, that my depression was situational and not chemical. Well, duh, yeah it’s situational. The walls are closing in! She asked if I wanted a prescription to help with my depression and I told her the thought of taking any more medication really depresses me. She found that funny. I should do standup.

90th Oscars

          Ninety years of Oscars. Whew! So much has happened during so many of these Awards presentations, so many memories. I’m afraid nothing from this year’s show will remain in my memory for more than a week. Despite Jimmy Kimmel’s attempts to keep the acceptance speeches brief, the show itself was one tired trudge through a molasses swamp. I hope all those in attendance had butts as sore as mine. I mean, just short of four hours? Most of the winners were predictable. However, we may see another “Too White Oscars” protest next year because of the near absence of any black winners, the only two being Kobe Bryant for “Dear Basketball” (and many would say that wasn’t deserved) and Jordan Peele for original screenplay with Get Out. Now I have two movies that I must see just to put last year into perspective—I, Tonya and The Shape of Water. The best song was “Remember Me” from Coco, but here again, none of the nominees were at all hummable and, therefore, probably not very memorable despite the song’s plea for us to remember it. I keep wondering what ever happened to the simplicity and clarity of a song like “Moon River.” Enough! I have to wait another year to see what 2018 brings to Oscar.

       

          Countdown: My congestion and coughing/blowing are a thing of the past, but I still feel like I have less energy than I did only a month ago. Less energy means I’m finding it harder and harder to leave the house for almost any reason—dinners out, movies, grocery shopping, even the many medical appointments I have. Less time out and more time in means the walls of my world are closing in like in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Not a pleasant sensation. And with increasing claustrophobia, there’s a decline in quality of life. At what point does quality of life drop enough to kiss it all goodbye? I don’t mean I’d consider suicide, but is there a point where I might just will myself to a permanent sleep? I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Oscars 2018

          Oscar night with Jimmy Kimmel and I’m more excited about this year’s celebration than I have been for a long time, not just for the winners but also for whatever Kimmel and the winners might say about the #MeToo movement and our leader Donald Trump. I’m guessing that Kimmel may take it easy of the Donald but there will be plenty of others who take a shot or two. I haven’t been able to see all the films up for consideration so my choices are a bit skewed.

          First, the movies. I have to dismiss some because they just didn’t fit my eye. Dunkirk may have been interesting and cinematically awesome but I didn’t see anything that made it memorable. Get Out got much praise for its take on the horror genre and Daniel Kaluuya’s acting as the black victim of a white plot to steal his manhood and a portion of his brain. I enjoyed the tension but I couldn’t accept the false premises on which it was based, the hypnosis bit and the brain surgery. Same thing with Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. I loved Soirse Ronan’s portrayal of teenage angst (Why doesn’t she just give in and spell it Sirshu?) but the film portrayed high school and teenagers in a way I just don’t understand. Too old, I guess. That leaves me with no opinion of five of the nominees, of which I most regret not seeing The Shape of Water. I would have to pick Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and one that didn’t even make it to the best nine, The Big Sick, as the two best movies of 2017. Both had great stories, interesting characters, and great acting. The Big Sick had additional humor and drama and should have been one of the nine nominated. It also had Ray Romano and Holly Hunter who should have been nominated for best supporting roles.

          What about the acting categories? First, I still don’t know what distinguishes a lead role from a supporting role. Is it based on the importance of the role to the overall story? Or is it based on the number of minutes on camera? I shrug my shoulders. In either category, what kinds of roles are more likely to win? It seems like eccentricity or physical transformation proves the difference, especially for best lead roles. Just look at some of the winners in the last 15 years. Actors: Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Colin Firth as King George VI, Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln, and especially Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote. Actresses: Julianne Moore with Alzheimer’s in Still Alice, Meryl Streep as Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher, Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, Hillary Swank as a boxer in Million Dollar Baby, and beautiful Charlize Theron as the truly unbeautiful Monster in 2004. So, the greater the division of actor or actress to the character portrayed, the better the chances of winning. Where does that leave this year’s actresses? The best shots must be for Sally Hawkins as the mute lover of her Black Lagoonish monster and Margot Robbie as the semi-monterish Tonya Harding. But who will win? That’s a shoe-in for Frances McDormand as the Three Billboards mother and Gary Oldman’s Churchill. Best supporting actors and actresses? Allison Janney as the monstrous mother in I, Tonya and either Woody Harrelson or Sam Rockwell for their great portrayals in Billboards.  Okay, let the contest begin.