Memories

Memory and the loss thereof may be the most tragic of all fates. Memories, after all, are the summary of our being. I realize that not all of our memories are accurate or in some cases may even be entirely manufactured unconsciously. They are what gives us shape, individuality. Maybe that shape or individuality is more flattering that true, but that’s how we see ourselves and believe us to be. In The Way We Were, Streisand sang that they were “misty water-colored memories of the way we were,” often made falsely softer or more pleasant when we thought of them. In the very old days, when we had only friends or relatives to help us find something our memories had lost, if those friends and relatives had all died ahead of us, we were stuck with only those facts we could remember. Your mind says, “Oh, who was that guy I used to love in the romantic movies back when I was young? What was his name? Oh, I can see his face but I can’t come up with a name.” We might then rely on a friend or relative to fish it out for us. No friend or relative? Then no fishing it out. “I used to know all the words to the popular songs when I was growing up. Now I can think of only a few of the titles, but almost none of the lyrics.” No friend or relative to sing something for us? Then the song no longer exists. More and more memories get flushed down Time’s commode. But that was then. Now we have search engines to find lost memories for us. Good old Google and its buddies. Just punch in one or two key words and bang, your new AI friend or relative will take you right to it. You’re not sure when a WWII battle took place? Just do a search and bang, there it is. There may even be in some distant future the technology to implant a tiny computer into our brains that will become our own search engine, storing for each of us most of the world’s knowledge, or at least giving us immediate access to it. It may also store in one of those clouds above all our experiences and memories. I’m not sure if such a thing would be good or bad. Lots of frightening and exciting possibilities there.

But back to memory today. I forget if I ever shared this poem with anyone. My good friend Anne Smith sent it to me a few years ago and I just discovered it again, momentarily lost among the million documents I’ve saved on my computer. It’s too good and too relevant to someone my age not to share it with others who may have been touched by a friend’s or relative’s dementia or Alzheimer’s. Billy Collins was appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, and, according to one of many Google searches, is the modern equivalent of Robert Frost. Since I’m an ardent Frost fan, I think I may have to find more of Billy Collins’ poetry. But then, I may forget what it was I was looking for.

“Forgetfulness,” by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Here’s one about a daughter’s experience with her father’s dementia.

          “Falling Lessons: Erasure One” by Beth Copeland

My father steps into a field of lost
sensation, sunflowers, a yellow star.

He lives in the garden without maps.

My father dreams through
what he feels and believes is real.

He loses his memory, his flesh,
his child with seawater eyes.

He forgets the fog.

We forgot to speak and snow was falling
on blue mountains, a vein

of childhood, blood, and sorrow.

I walk into this memory when my thoughts
start falling into a funnel, when I’m failing

to love, falling into a freeze-frame
where time fades like the flurry

of furious wings. I fall.

          Aren’t those two nicely but sadly done? Reader, you may be too young to understand them, but somewhere down the road of your life, you may.

Words & Catch-22

          I stumbled onto another example of the difficulty of some English vocabulary, people mis-hearing or misunderstanding words very close in sound but quite different in meaning, the pair “squash” and “quash,” for example. I heard this latest example on a recent Stephen Colbert show when he and a guest were discussing one of one of Donald Trump’s fits of pique over some Democrat’s insult. Colbert said that Trump was in “high dungeon” over what was said of him. Stephen’s ear had apparently always heard “high dungeon” when it should have been “high dudgeon.” “Dudgeon” refers to the handle of a knife or dagger, suggesting an anger leading to a knife thrust. Granted, in Trump’s case, “high dungeon” may be more appropriate. We should throw him in followed by the key.

# # # # # #

          I’m happy to see that Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is being remade on Hulu, a 6-episode retelling of Yossarian’s fight with the authorities who are trying to kill him. This was always one of my favorite novels, comically dark in its anti-war sentiments, showing how man and man’s institutions can give us conflicting explanations for absurd decisions. In Yossarian’s case, when he tried to get a medical leave to be sent home from flying bombing runs in WWII, claiming that he was insane, the psychologist said that only a sane person would want to be sent home; therefore, he must be sane and couldn’t be sent home. Classic catch-22.

And a week ago I encountered my own catch-22 when I tried to renew my auto registration. Although it may not entirely qualify as a catch-22, it was certainly like a foolish runaround by the folks at the DMV and the Kia dealership.

This year I needed an emissions test done before I could get my annual auto registration. So, off I went to the testing place where I was told that my car couldn’t be tested until the computer system was reset. The instructions about doing this reset involved either simply driving the car in a normal fashion or by having a mechanic reset it. Not knowing exactly what was meant by “normal fashion,” I called my Kia dealer to have them do it. They told me they couldn’t do it, that the car would reset itself by just driving it. I asked them how long I would have to drive it. They said 5 to 10 days; I said that was way too long. So I called the Kia Company help line to see if they could tell me some other way to get it reset. I was told I should contact my dealership. See, a run-run-runaround. The Kia dealer explained again that they couldn’t do it, that I just had to drive it for three or four days, maybe take a trip on a highway. So my wife and I took a scenic hour’s drive, came back to the emissions testing place, and the car passed. It had, indeed, reset itself. Man, talk about AI having us by the short hairs. And the future seems to indicate that computers, large and tiny, will become more and more in control of our lives.

Dystopia Revisited

          Here’s a post I wrote a few years ago, but in the present state of affairs in our country and the rest of the world, it seems even more relevant today. It’s a look at fictional dystopias, the best-known of which was Orwell’s 1984. Man, we’ve come a long way since then, both fictionally as well as realistically. Talk about Big Brother watching. Today, he’s looking right up our noses and any other orifices he can find. Here it is. Hope you find it enlightening as well as somewhat frightening.

The word “dystopia” seems to be popping up all over the place lately. Not that it’s a new word or concept. It’s been around as long as it’s antonym “utopia,” which dates back to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia in the early sixteenth century. But a recent flood of novels and films like to describe themselves as dystopian, that is, set in some future reality or allegorical time and place which is bad, in which the human race and/or the earth have undergone radical changes for the worse. I think part of the word’s popularity has to do with the ubiquitous ads for pills to fix erectile dysfunction. You know, keep a stiff upper lip and hold your head up high? But back to what could be labeled as dystopian. Probably the best known and maybe the best examples are George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. But the list goes on and on as a string of writers warn us of impending dangers to the future: nuclear war, a new ice age, Big Brother governments, overpopulation, viruses that nearly wipe out humanity, a revolution of robots or computers, alien invasion, environmental disasters such as global warming or poisoning of the seas or the atmosphere (a sub-category called ecotopian fiction). The list continues to grow as seen in the popularity of so many young adult series of novels and films like The Hunger Games and Divergent, the success of so many television series like Falling Skies, Person of Interest, The Last Ship, Stephen King’s Under the Dome, and Extant, the new one with Halle Berry. And now another one called The Lottery (sort of leaning a little on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in which once a year the lucky winner gets stoned to death). In the tv Lottery, there’s a biological problem wherein women can no longer reproduce, an idea much like the plot twist in Children of Men a few years ago. Two other works that are sort of like “the Lottery” (the story, not the tv series) in that they’re microcosmic dystopian tales, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (set on a South Pacific island) and the recent film called Snowpiercer, set on a train.

Here’s a short list of novels and films that exemplify the various categories of dystopia: Karel Capek’s play RUR, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, and the recent film Her (robots, computers); H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, tv’s Falling Skies, and the film The Edge of Tomorrow (alien invasion); Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and the films Dr. Strangelove and all in the Mad Max series (nuclear war and post-apocalyptic devastation); Pierre Boulet’s Planet of the Apes, John Christopher’s No Blade of Grass and The Long Winter, the tv series The Last Ship (deadly viruses and ecological errors); John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, Harry Harrison’s Soylent Green, and, in a crossover about cannibalism, McCormack’s The Road (overpopulation and starvation); Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Stephen King’s (written as Richard Bachman) The Long Walk (Totalitarianism).

This list is only one grain of sand on the beach of all the other novels and short stories and films about dystopia. It’s interesting that The Hunger Games has a common thread with King’s The Long Walk: Both have a plot element like the Roman Coliseum in which a contest is held to entertain the masses and to eliminate contestants. Stephen King did his best to exhaust his readers as we walked along with the hundred young men who had to keep walking and walking until only one winner remained with the other ninety-nine killed along the way. But then, Stephen King has always been exhausting with his endless string of huge novels.

Now, what about Utopian novels and films? It’s far easier to warn us of what could go wrong than to paint a positive picture of the future. Of course, there’s More’s Utopia, but what since then? The most positive novel about man’s future is Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, in which mankind evolves from childhood to adulthood when we become united with a universal life force. In fact, Clarke, maybe my favorite sci-fi writer, is usually positive in his examination of technological advances. Both series on tv and film, Star Trek and Star Wars, are essentially positive in their views of the future. The only other positive looks I can think of are Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, Baum’s Oz series, and Barry’s Peter Pan. But in these last two, about eternal youth, there are still witches and dark woods, Hooks and crocodiles. Then there’s that unusual depiction of the near future in Spike Jonze’s Her. Is it a positive or a negative statement? Is it a good relationship we might have with our computers and smart phones or is it a creepy indictment of where we’re going with computer technology? If my computer sounded like Scarlett Johansson, I could easily fall in love with her (it?).

Maybe the next best-seller will be a dystopian examination of a world in which all men, not just the numbers we now see, are afflicted with zero testosterone and erectile dysfunction. All men are slouching around with both heads drooping and all women looking in bemusement (and maybe a little amusement) as the human race ends, not with a bang, but a limp whimper. And, thanks to T. S. Eliot again, it might be called The Hollow Men.

Love & Lust

        Joe Biden seems to be the early front-runner to win the Democratic nomination for 2020, but Joe is burdened by a few handicap pounds under his saddle—his age, the Anita Hill business, and the charge of inappropriate touching and hugging that arose recently. Let me repeat what I’ve already said in one of my earlier blogs about hugging. Hugging is therapeutic. I don’t mean the kind where two people bend at the waist and pat each other on the shoulder. I mean full body hugging. More therapeutic than a kiss, especially the kiss on the cheek or forehead. Most men don’t feel comfortable hugging another man, but I do. The hug is comforting, saying by the act how sorry we are at the bad news the other has just received. Or how much the hugger loves the huggee. The world would be a much better place if we all gave each other a hug occasionally. I’m still trying to figure out what is or isn’t appropriate about touching and when exactly can an attempt at having sex with someone be all right and when is it not. The standard now seems to be when one or the other who’s about to have sex says no. That’s reasonable. But it can also lead to charges of assault or even rape. I was amused when I read what Dr. Ruth Westheimer (the 90-year-old Dr. Ruth of Ask Dr. Ruth fame), in a Time Magazine interview, said what she considered assault or consent and how this standard has changed in recent years: I think some people took it to an extreme. I believe that two consenting people, if they are in bed naked with each other and about to have sex, no way then can say in the middle, “I have changed my mind.” We also now seem to have a problem with expressing love. The very concept of love gets mixed up in emotional connection and sexual activity.

          For example, with the current rage for tweets and instant messages and texts and short notes on Facebook, there seems to be a trend away from the old niceties in letter writing. No one seems to have time to go into any detail in their correspondence, feeling obligated to use a minimum of characters and the annoying text shorthand ("LOL" especially annoying). And the old salutations and closures are now long gone. I was raised in a time when it was automatic to open any letter with a “Dear,” and close it with a “Yours truly” or a “Sincerely” or, when it was to a friend or relative, a “Love.” Now people are too uncomfortable to use that closure, instead opting for nothing but a name. People think I really mean I love them when I close with a “Love.” In many cases I do, but I don’t mean to make anyone uncomfortable when I say it at the end of a letter. It’s just the way I was taught in my youth. The “Dear” in the salutation doesn’t really mean I hold the recipient “dear” in my heart. The “Love” in the closing doesn’t mean I’m hot for the recipient. It’s just a nice way to open and close a letter.

          What then is the new definition of love? It’s our strongest emotion, stronger than fear or hunger, stronger than hate. But it’s a two-pronged beast made up of emotional love and physical lust, and too often people misunderstand one for the other. How many couples engage in sex and then assume that what they feel is love, feel it enough to spend the rest of their lives together, only to discover soon or late that lust wasn’t enough to bind them. Some live with it; some go separate ways. Otherwise, how can we explain that two out of three marriages end in divorce? That number would be even higher if we added in those who wanted to split but couldn’t, either because of religion or moral upbringing. Lust is the physical drive to satisfy our sexual appetites. It feels so good at the time, but what follows may not be love or even affection. The simplest solution is to find a fuck buddy: find a momentary satisfaction followed by a mutual separation. In marriage, after the sex tapers off or even disappears, we find two people who don’t really know each other or care for each other. They split or they stay together, unhappy. For a lifetime. Then there are extra-marital affairs, lust again. Real love doesn’t require sex. Sex may be part of it, but not necessarily. Real love involves affection for the person, with or without the sex. Real love can be between good friends, parents, siblings, or offspring. Real love can exist with many others, not just the one we live with. It’s important not to mistake lust for love.

Ed McBain

Forgive me for going so often to the literary well of Ed McBain, but he’s so good, and in these two cases, so funny that I have to share them with you, maybe entice some of you to find his 87^th Precinct novels and see for yourself just how good a writer he was.

This first example shows how Detective Steve Carella, his main character, first made use of the words “I love you”:

          I’m thirty-eight years old, and when I was growing up in Chicago, I had none of the sexual advantages today’s young people enjoy. I was seventeen when the sixties were just starting. I missed out on the permissiveness that followed. A goodly amount of my adolescent energy was spent feverishly scheming on how to plunder the treasures inside a laden blouse, each button the equivalent of a Vietcong division guarding the road to Hanoi, how to slide a wily and preferably unsuspected hand along the inside of a thigh and onto those cherished nylon panties beneath a fortress skirt, how to hide from the eyes of a shocked citizenry the erections that bulged the front of my trousers whenever any girl of reasonably modest good looks (and, quite frankly, even some very ugly ones) sashayed into view. I loved legs, I loved breasts, I loved thighs, I loved asses, I loved girls with a passion that was all-pervasive and overwhelming. And on that perilous road to hopeful consummation, I discovered that the words, I love you, sometimes worked wonders: “I love you, Harriet, I love you, Jean, I love you, Helene, I love you, Melissa,” my fingers frantically working those maliciously obstinate buttons and those diabolical brassiere clasps invented by a mad woman scientist, “I love you, Joyce, I love you, Louise, I love you, Alice, I love you, Roxanne!” Those were the days of garter belts and nylon stockings, soon to give way to panty hose (invented by that same madwoman in her boiling laboratory), and God, the delirium of actually touching those secret mysterious undergarments, the windows of my father’s Olds fogged with the exhalations of singular male intent and determined female resistance, “I love you, Angela, I love you, Shirley, I love you Ming Toy, I love you, Anybody!”

          I used the words as cheap currency in a market without buyers.

I’m now reading for the third time Widows, published in 1991. Carella has just lost his father, killed in a nighttime robbery in his bakery, and in his grief he thinks back to times when he was a young man in the old neighborhood. He remembers Margie Gannon and his first encounter with Margie’s freckled breasts. He and Margie were at her home, reading comic books together, Margie’s parents away for the afternoon, an August rainstorm outside. This passage expresses adolescent desire better than anything I’ve ever read, and more masterfully written than most writers could do:

          “He could not remember now which comic they were reading. Something to do with cops and archcriminals? He could not remember. He remembered what she was wearing, though, still remembered that. A short, faded blue-denim skirt and a white, short-sleeved blouse buttoned up the front. Freckled pretty Irish face, freckled slender arms, freckled everything, he was soon to discover, but for now there was only the tingling thrill of her silken hair touching his cheek. She reached up with her left hand, brushed the hair back from her face. Their cheeks touched.

          It was as if an intensely sharp light suddenly spilled onto the open comic book. Not daring to look at her, he concentrated his vision on the brilliantly illuminated pages, alive now with pulsating primary colors, red and blue and yellow outlined in the blackest black, focused his white-hot gaze on the action-frozen figures and the shouted oversized words, POW and BAM and BANG and YIIIIKES!

          He turned his face toward hers, she turned her face toward his.

          Their noses banged.

          Their lips collided.

          And oh, dear God, he kissed sweet Margie Gannon, and she moved into his suddenly encircling arms, the comic book POW-ing and BANG-ing and sliding off her knees and falling to the floor with a whispered YIIIIKES as lightning flashed and thunder boomed and rain relentlessly drilled the sidewalk outside the street-level living room. They kissed for he could not remember how long. He would never again in his life kiss anyone this long or this hard, pressing her close, lips fusing, adolescent yearnings merging, steamy young passions crazing the sky with blue-white flashes, rending the sky with blue-black explosions.

          His hand eventually discovered the buttons on her blouse. He fumbled awkwardly with the buttons, this was his goddamn left hand and he was right-handed, fumbling, fearful she would change her mind, terrified she would stop him before he managed to get even the top button open. They were both breathing audibly and hard now, their hearts pounding as he tried desperately to get the blouse open. She helped him with the top button, her own trembling hand guiding his, and then the next button seemed to pop open magically or possibly miraculously, and the one after that and oh my God her bra suddenly appeared in the wide V of the open blouse, a white bra, she was wearing a white bra.

          Lightning flashed, thunder boomed.

          He thought Thank you, God, and touched the bra, the cones of the bra, white, her breasts filling the white bra, his hand still trembling as he touched the bra awkwardly and tentatively, fumbling and unsure because whereas he’d dreamt of doing this with girls in general and Margie Gannon in particular, he never thought he would ever really get to do it.

          But here he was, actually doing it—thank you God, oh Jesus thank you—or at least trying to do it, wondering whether he should slide his hand down inside the bra, or lower the straps off her shoulders, or get the damn thing off somehow, they fastened in the back, didn’t they? Trying to dope all this out in what seemed like an hour and a half but was only less than a minute until Margie moved out of his arms, a faint flushed smile on her face, and reached behind her, arms bent, he could see the freckles on the sloping tops of her pretty breasts straining in the bra as she reached behind her to unclasp it, and all at once her breasts came tumbling free, the rain kept tumbling down in torrents, and oh dear God, her breasts were in his hands, he was touching Margie Gannon’s sweet naked breasts.

          He wondered what had ever become of her.”

          There. I rest my case. Find McBain. Read McBain. Find your own favorite passages.

Old Age

More and more often, my body keeps reminding me that I’m getting old. No, not “getting” old; I AM old. Every morning, Arthur Eyetis wakes me up and then screams at me as I prop my weight on an arm to hoist my aching body out of bed. The shoulder aches, the lower back moans, my feet tingle. I take two ibuprofen every morning, along with a handful of other meds, and they keep me relatively pain-free throughout the day. I feel like I’m relatively healthy compared to a lot of the oldies I see at Safeway or at Hole-in-One, the restaurant where we breakfast quite often. I see them shuffling to the restroom, tiny steps, backs hunched over their walkers, faces contorted with the effort. But lately I notice a sway in my gait, and the gait is a lot slower than it used to be. Now that I’m an octogenarian, I’m thinking more and more about that exit door just down the hall, with the green ripper behind it waiting for me. A little girl in one of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series overheard her parents talking about the Grim Reaper and thought they were describing some green monster who ripped people apart, thus the Green Ripper. I don’t envision any ripper or black-cloaked figure with a scythe. I know death is a kind of farewell, a closing down. But what comes after?

I was a science fiction addict, so religious explanations of the universe never made much sense to me. It was provable scientifically that our planet, Earth, was a tiny insignificant little speck in the immensity of the universe, third planet out from a tiny insignificant little star set way off in a corner of our galaxy, the Milky Way, one of an infinite number of galaxies in the immensity of time and space. That we could be the only intelligent life in that immensity made no sense to me. I always believed that we created God in our own image, not the other way around.
        And as for our souls and what happens to us after we die, I always believed that we would live again in the next closest to us genetically. If I had one son, his mother and I would be combined psychically in that son. If we had more than one child, we would be spread out among them. But there would be a continued consciousness evolving and spreading out into the future. Walt Whitman said something like that in Leaves of Grass, that our individual spirit is one speck in an ocean of spirituality and that when we are born we are removed from that pool and placed here in this physical space for the length of our lives, to be returned to the spiritual pool when we die, to await our next time in life. Reincarnation, yes, but not involving insects and lesser animal species. But I take it one step further and believe the human connection must be more direct, a genetic connection, not a random placement. All life must be part of this creative force and all might be considered to be God or Godhead. I’m a part of it, everything that has life and motion is part of it. The physical substance of our universe isn’t part of it any more than the husks of our bodies are a part of it. When we die, the shell that held our spark of life returns to the substance from which it came. But the spark returns to the body of the life force—Whitman’s pool of spirituality.

What part does religion play in this? Most people would rather let religious leaders do their thinking for them. They accept on faith what the church tells them, the church’s explanations of life and death and good and evil and the nature of the universe. Most of them are afraid of death and need the comfort of a social organization to lessen their fears.

Where do I stand on Christianity and the many churches that derive from it? I don’t go to any church but I do believe in the humanity and teachings of Christ. I believe that there is evil in the universe and that we have to combat it through a universal or personal code of ethics, a morality we need to work at and pass on to our children. Christ was a messiah, a messenger who brought that code of ethics for us to follow. But he wasn’t a messenger from God. He wasn’t the son of God. And he won’t be reappearing tomorrow or any tomorrow thereafter.

Death makes little sense to me. I’ve often thought, if there really is a God, that he must be an unfeeling bastard, allowing the bestiality we read about in the papers every day, allowing the unfair deaths and tragedies that occur all around us. And cruelest of all, the span of our years is like some awful practical joke. Just when we become skillful physically or mentally, just when we’re able to answer most of the questions we asked throughout our lives, it’s time to die. This is the plan of a God who pulls wings from flies. Fifty years ago, Peggy Lee made popular a song called “Is That All There Is?” When I first heard it I thought it was the most cynical, despairing, darkest set of lyrics I’d ever heard. It was, still is, but the words are becoming more and more personal. Is that all there is? Just this ridiculously short span of time without any meaning and then an eternity of nothing? I hope not. But I guess I won’t really find out for sure until it’s too late to report back to the living.

Life, even though painfully short, beats the alternative. Even when we become so weary we’d like to get off the train, we can’t. Somewhere I read that life is like dancing with a gorilla. You don’t stop when you get tired, you stop when the gorilla gets tired. So, like Peggy Lee, I guess I’ll just keep dancing.

Old A

Texting & More Puns

 

          The national news informs me that texting is now so prevalent among our young people that it’s now believed to be as addictive as cigarettes. Whoa! That sounds too much like the end of well-written prose as we once knew it. What can possibly be the attraction to this two-thumbed communication? What will happen to face-to-face conversation? What will happen to writing, not just by professional journalists and novelists but by the general population? Then there’s the problem that schools must have to contend with. What to do about texting during class, during tests? I’m really glad I no longer have to deal with it. I went crazy enough when students chose to ignore my teaching by chatting or staring out a window. But if I were confronted by a classroom of people, heads down, arms and hands in motion, I’d have gone ballistic. My next question is obvious: What in the world do they have to say to each other in their texty shorthand? Are they trying to solve the world’s problems? Discussing the nature of the universe? No. Much more likely, social small talk. Hi, how ya doing? Where are you? What’re you doing? All in the text code they all use. It strikes me as somewhat similar to the time when I was a very young and dumb lad who flashlighted messages at night to my next door neighbor. But I outgrew that at an early age. Let’s hope that texting among our youth will also pass when they discover how truly simplistic it is.

Some puns are punnier than other puns. There was the person who sent twenty different puns to his friends, with the hope that at least ten of the puns would make them laugh . . . no pun in ten did. And Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail, and with this odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him a super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis. Here another: A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel, and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of his office and asked them to disperse. “But why?” one of them asked as they moved off. “Because,” he said, “I can’t stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer.

And now, maybe the funniest cat joke I’ve ever seen. Even Garfield would get a chuckle out of this one. An elderly lady called the vet to advise him she had a sick cat. “His eyes are dull and he’s listless, just mopes and sulks all day and he won’t eat,” she said. “I see,” said the vet. “You’d better give him a cup of castor oil and I’ll be out about three this afternoon to have a look at him. You may have trouble giving him the castor oil. With your left hand force his mouth open and pour the castor oil with your right.” The old lady had quite a struggle with the cat but her efforts were highly successful. At three that afternoon the vet knocked on the door and asked, “How’s that sick calf of yours?” “Calf? Why, I have no calf. I called about my sick cat.” “Cat? Did you give it that cup of castor oil? We’ve got to do something about this mighty quick or you’re going to lose your cat! Where is he now?” “I don’t know,” she responded. “Last time I saw him he was taking out across the cornfield with nine other cats.” “What in the world was he doing with nine other cats?” asked the vet. “I don’t know for sure,” she said, “but I think he’s formed some kind of organization. He had three of them digging holes, three of them covering up, and the other three out looking for new locations.”

Gun Control Again

There doesn’t seem to be a news day anymore that doesn’t include another example of gun violence, nut cases who want to take out as many random people as possible before taking themselves out, or someone with a real or imagined grudge against an employer or an entire company, or a disappointed lover getting even with the disappointer, or a political protester using a gun to do his protesting. Another school shooting, a synagogue, a church, a rock concert, anywhere that people might gather and become easy targets for someone looking to set a new record for numbers killed. Back and forth go the arguments—gun lovers and Second Amendment supporters against those who argue for more stringent laws about who may own guns and what kind of guns they may own. What follows is a compilation of my thoughts over the last decade regarding our ever growing need to address this issue. If the paragraphs seem to be a little disjointed, that’s because I wrote them at different times about different news stories.

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It’s time to talk about guns again. In light of the twenty children and six adults shot and killed in Newtown, Connecticut, it’s way past time to talk about guns again. I’m not opposed to the Second Amendment; I’m opposed to its application in a modern society. The Founding Fathers correctly protected the rights of individuals to own guns—rifles, shotguns, handguns—weapons they needed to hunt game for the family table, needed to fend off varmints both animal and human (sometimes one and the same) that threatened them and their families. This was a time when there was little police presence to protect them. And, the Founding Fathers thought it might again be necessary for a civilian army to rise up to battle invaders from Britain or Mexico or even Canada who threatened our borders. That was then. This is now. Why is it now necessary to protect the rights of individuals who want to own assault weapons with high capacity magazines, or even weapons more lethal than that—grenade launchers and mortars and bazookas, maybe even a tank or two? We now have armed police forces all around us to protect us from most varmints. We have military forces to guard our borders. We have National Guard units to protect us. We have militia groups (heaven help us!) to supposedly guard us from invaders within. Sportsmen and hunters and gun collectors don’t need fully-automatic or semi-automatic weapons that fire as many or more than thirty rounds in fifteen seconds. Jared Loughner fired 31 shots in about fifteen seconds in Tucson from his Glock 19. James Holmes in July of this year had a 100-round drum magazine in that Colorado theater, killing twelve and wounding fifty-eight. Why would Nancy Lanza, ardent gun collector, not have kept her “collection” more safely locked up, knowing she had a son with mental issues? Where is the sport in having such weapons? What hunter needs such weapons to bring down a deer or moose or elk or bear? Or even an elephant, for that matter? Why did we allow the 1994 law against high-capacity magazines to expire in 2004 and not renew it? Let’s keep the right to bear rifles and shotguns and handguns. Let’s renew a ban against high-capacity magazines. Let’s require background security checks for anyone wanting to buy such weapons. Let’s tighten controls over gun sales at gun shows. Good God, let’s stop the mass killings in our country.

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           Gun violence in Chicago. How can NRA people still maintain their position on gun control? Would all those deaths in Chicago, recent as well as in the past, have happened if guns weren’t so easily obtained? Without a gun, murder would have to be up close and personal, strangling or beating on a head with a hammer or sticking someone countless times with a knife, none of which would be accidental. Guns make it too easy from an impersonal distance. Up close and personal, not so easy. Yes, people would still die but it wouldn’t be in such numbers.

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          In Ed McBain’s Mischief, written in 1993, the author, tongue in cheek, had this to say, “Sixty-one percent of all the murders in this city were committed by firearms, but that was no reason to take guns away from people, was it? After all, in eight percent of this city’s murders, feet or fists were the weapons, but did anyone suggest amputation as a means of control? Of course not.” That sounds like the sort of skewed logic Wayne LaPierre, NRA lobbyist, might make. "If it's crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy," he said recently. Well, Wayne, then you’re crazy. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” they constantly say. But people who kill people find it way more difficult to complete that act if they had only fists or feet or a knife or a rope or a baseball bat, or even a vial of strychnine. And that could only be done one at a time, slowly, not twenty or twenty-six at a time, rapidly, as with those damned weapons capable of firing multiple bullets in only a few seconds. Here’s what the Second Amendment says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Where, in that statement, does it suggest that our citizenry needs to bear automatic weapons? Nowhere. It’s now way past time to tighten our controls over what arms we people have the right to bear.

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Why does anyone need a rifle designed to fire 100 rounds per minute? Why do we still allow people to buy such a weapon? What are the NRA gun nuts thinking? Do they really feel the need to go hunting with this thing and what kind of game would require that sort of firepower? Or do they feel the need to have one for self-defense? If the latter, then please don't let me get anywhere near such a self-defensive crackpot. Why don't our laws prevent anyone from buying 6,000 rounds of ammunition? Or at least have such a purchase send out a red flag to law enforcement? Too many questions, too few answers.

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In the wake of the shooting in Aurora, gun sales are spiking, not only in Colorado but all over the country. I guess OK Corral isn’t that far off. Are those now buying guns first-time gun owners or are they just building up their arsenals? If they’re first-timers, what do they plan to do with their new purchases? Carry them all the time, keeping a wary eye over shoulders in case some gun-wielding bad guy is creeping up on them? That’s a scary scenario. Are those who already own guns simply adding more in case they have to flee to some deep-woods hideaway?

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   The gun supporters in Tucson, after the Gabby Giffords shooting, argued that if everyone in that crowd listening to Giffords had been carrying, Jared Loughner would have been toast after his first shot. Of course, there may have been fifteen or twenty dead from collateral damage, but that’s the price we have to pay to put an end to the M-15 crazies.

      Loughner’s guilty plea comes after twenty months of legal maneuvering and courtroom antics. He’ll serve life with no probation. Free room and board, clothing, medical treatment, television, movies, books—all the amenities of lazy living. Granted, he won’t have his freedom, but life for him will be mainly carefree. And the cost to the public for keeping him? Depending on the state, the annual cost varies from around $50,000 (California) to $13,000 (Louisiana) for an average around $30,000. Arizona averages $25,000. Assuming Loughner will live into his eighties, that’s around sixty years at $25,000 a year, a total of about a million and a half bucks for a man described at his early booking as "smirking and creepy, with hollow eyes ablaze." In most cases, I’m not a proponent of the death penalty. I know the threat of execution doesn’t deter people from committing murder. But some murders are more heinous than others. And Jared Loughner in Tucson and James Holmes in Aurora and Wade Michael Page in Wisconsin and Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech and all the others who commit such senseless acts all fit the heinous label. I say, just kill them. I don’t think that would be cruel and unusual punishment. Storing them in tiny, cold, windowless cells would be cruel. Daily waterboarding would be cruel and spiteful. Stretching them daily on a rack would be cruel and barbaric. Bamboo spikes under the nails would be cruel and silly. But a lethal injection would be just and satisfying. One eye for the numerous eyes each took. That would be Biblically just.

Ed McBain Style

          I know some of my readers must get bored whenever I talk about a writer’s style, but the old teacher in me just can’t resist. What follows is a long segment from Ed McBain’s (rest his soul) Widows, a very good episode in the 87th Precinct series. Gloria Sanders is an ER nurse who has just witnessed the death of a stabbing victim and is now being interviewed by two detectives from the 87^th Precinct.

          Gloria Sanders was covered with blood.

This was ten o’clock on the morning of July twenty-fifth in the nurses’ lounge at Farley General Hospital, down on Meriden Street. Her white uniform was covered with blood, and there were also flecks of blood in her blonde hair and on her face. They’d had a severe bleeder in the Emergency Room not ten minutes earlier, and Gloria had been part of the team of nurses who, working with the resident, had tried to stanch the flow of blood. There’d been blood all over the table, bed, blood on the walls, blood everywhere, she had never seen anyone spurting so much blood in her life.

          “A stabbing victim,” she told Carella and Brown. “He came in with a patch over the wound. The minute we peeled it off, he began gushing.”

          She was dying for a cigarette now, she told them, but smoking was against hospital rules, even though the people who made the rule had never worked in an emergency room or seen a gusher like the one they’d had this morning. Or the kid yesterday, who’d fallen under a subway car and had both his legs severed just above the knee. A miracle either of them was still alive. And they would let her smoke a goddamn cigarette.

          Arthur Schumacher’s taste for blue-eyed blondes seemed to go back a long way. His former wife’s eyes were the color of cobalt, her hair an extravagant yellow that blatantly advertised its origins in a bottle. Slender and some five feet six or seven inches tall, Gloria strongly resembled the one daughter they’d already met, but there was a harder edge to her. She’d been around a while, her face said, her body said, her entire stance said. Life had done worse things to her than being bled on by a stabbing victim, her eyes said.

          “So what can I do for you?” she asked, and the words sounded confrontational and openly challenging. I’ve seen it all and done it all, so watch out boys. I’d as soon kick you in the groin as look at you. Blue eyes studying them warily. Blonde hair bright as brass, clipped short and neat around her head, give her a stern forbidding look. This was not the honey-blonde hair her daughter Lois had; if this woman were approaching you at night, you’d see her a block away. She reminded Carella of burned-out prison matrons he had known. So what can I do for you?

          I wish I’d written that.

          Note the effect of the first lone sentence at the beginning of this segment.

         Note the structure and punctuation of “There’d been blood all over the table, bed, blood on the walls, blood everywhere, she had never seen anyone spurting so much blood in her life.”(the movement from table to bed, then repeating “blood” to introduce the next two phrases; the use of a comma to hook the next sentence in instead of a semicolon or a period)

          Note the author movement to interior omniscient in the paragraph beginning “She was dying for a cigarette . . .” (not using quotation marks for what she told them, the way he makes it sound like what she would be saying to herself even though he keeps it in the 3rd person) Note also the two fragments written as sentences (they’re both noun clusters)

          Note the use of “blonde” as an organizing device (blood in her blonde hair, blue-eyed blondes, then a description of it as “blatantly from a bottle, blonde hair bright as brass, not the honey-blonde of her daughter,” then the image of her hair like a beacon in the night)

          Note the cadence of “She'd been around a while, her face said, her body said, her entire stance said. Life had done worse things to her than being bled on by a stabbing victim, her eyes said.” (the position and repeating of “face said,” “body said,” stance said,” and then the clever echo of it in the next sentence, “her eyes said”)

          Note the opening and closing of the final paragraph (the first question actually spoken and in quote marks, the final question only Carella’s mental repeating of it to illustrate the sound of her challenge)

       Note the way he uses suppositional dialogue to get at the character of Gloria—her question in the last paragraph suggests that she might have said to them, “I’ve seen it all and done it all, so watch out, boys. I’d as soon . . .”

          I hope I haven’t bored any readers. But this is a very instructive passage, and oh so very well written. Ed McBain (Evan Hunter of Blackboard Jungle fame) may have started out as a writer of pulp fiction in the early books in the 87^th Precinct series, but about a third of the way through he began writing much more carefully constructed stories. If you tackle the series, you’ll see what I mean.

Joe Biden & Song Lyrics

Joe Biden seems to be the early front-runner to win the Democratic nomination for 2020, but Joe is burdened by quite a few handicap pounds under his saddle—his age, the Anita Hill business when he didn’t treat her fairly in 1991 in the hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and the charge of inappropriate touching and hugging that arose recently. Will the Democrats overlook this baggage and make him their favorite to oust Trump or will he get dropped along the way? Will women voters forgive him for his treatment of Anita Hill and his penchant for touching people inappropriately? I don’t know, but I do think in his case the #Metoo Movement may have moved too far. Let me repeat what I’ve already said in one of my earlier blogs about hugging. Hugging is therapeutic. I don’t mean the kind where two people bend at the waist and pat each other on the shoulder. I mean full body hugging. More therapeutic than a kiss, especially the kiss on the cheek or forehead. Most men don’t feel comfortable hugging another man, but I do. The hug is comforting, saying by the act how sorry we are at the bad news the other has just received. Or how much the hugger loves the huggee. The world would be a much better place if we all gave each other a hug occasionally. So, dear reader, please assume that I just gave you an internet hug. There, don’t you feel better?

What else will be at the center of debates leading up to next November? Well, obviously, the wall and its effectiveness at preventing or at least slowing down the flood of asylum seekers; the necessity of dealing with climate change; gun control, gun control, gun control (it bears repeating at least three times); tax reform; our failing infrastructure; and, of course, the results of the investigations into Trump’s finances. These should be an interesting and revealing twelve months.

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          I just listened to Jackie Allen sing an old Rogers and Hart song, “You’re Nearer,” and couldn’t help but notice how simple, yet how lovely, the lyrics were.

You’re nearer, than my head is to my pillow,
Nearer, than the wind is to the willow.
Dearer, than the rain is to the earth below,
Precious as the sun to the things that grow.
You’re nearer, than the ivy to the wall is,
Nearer, than the winter to the fall is.
Leave me, but when you’re away, you’ll know,
You’re nearer, for I love you so!

          I may be old-fashioned, but I still most admire lyrics I can hear and understand, lyrics carefully constructed and balanced, unlike too many song lyrics being written today. Even Taylor Swift, a singer/writer I admire, writes lyrics that don’t have real balance. “White Horse,” for example, is a great song, but it depends for the most part on her singing it, her delivery, her personality. Then there’s the insanely popular Justin Bieber. I think he could sing the yellow pages and his female fans would go berserk. But the lyrics themselves are certainly not up to any of Larry Hart’s. He begins “One Time” with “Me plus you, I’ma tell you one time, / Me plus you, I’ma tell you one time, / Me plus you, I’ma tell you one time, / One time one time.” Catchy, right? And he goes on with “When I met you girl my heart went knock knock, / Now them butterflies in my stomach won’t stop stop. / And even though it’s a struggle love is all we got / And we gon’ keep keep climbing to the mountain top.”

All right, so I’m picking on the Beebs and his lyrics. He seems to be a fine young man / With a great future in musical art, / But I’ma tell you one time, one time, / He ain’t no Larry Hart.

Electoral College

         2020 is rushing at us like a runaway political freight train, cars loaded with hats in the ring, Tweet wars, enough gray guilt to paint the entire White House, Mueller reports, and so many other investigations I can’t keep track of them all. And once again we’ll revisit the debate about the Electoral College. Not that anything can or will be done about it by next November.

      According to a Gallup poll in 2013, 62% (more Democrats than Republicans) of American voters are in favor of an amendment to do away with the Electoral College and to use the popular vote to decide who should be president. Granted, most winners with the 270 electoral votes have also had a majority of the popular vote. But five times in our history, people were elected who did not have the majority of the popular vote: Andrew Jackson in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016. Bush, with that strange Florida recount, beat Al Gore but lost the popular vote by 543,816. Most lop-sided of all was the amount by which Hillary Clinton beat Trump by almost four million yet lost by way of the Electoral College. Gore had a valid argument then and the voters in 2016 have an equally valid argument against this outdated method instituted by the Founding Fathers as a compromise between those who wanted Congress to select a president and those who wanted it decided by the people.

          Besides the unfairness of the above five examples, there’s another reason why we should use the popular vote: In states that seem to be already decided based on past voting (non-swing states for either nominee), too many voters might be discouraged from voting simply because they’d feel their vote wouldn’t matter. And it wouldn’t. The electoral votes in California, for example, are already decided ten months ahead of time. A vote for anyone other than Barack Obama wouldn’t matter. Might as well tear up your vote and throw it to the wind, maybe even skip voting entirely. A vote in South Dakota for anyone other than a republican wouldn’t matter. Throw that one to the wind as well, maybe even skip voting entirely. But, you say, they’d have other races to decide on a state and national level, so they’d still come out to vote. Yes, the dedicated and politically aware voters would still vote. But what about the millions of not so dedicated or not so politically aware, the semi-apathetic? Hmmm, the argument would be that we don’t want those millions deciding anything so important anyway, an echo of our Founding Fathers’ reason for not wanting a popular vote to decide such an important matter, their fear of giving too much power to the riffraff. Or as Ron Paul said in his 2004 essay The Electoral College vs. Mob Rule: “The Electoral College system represents an attempt, however effective, to limit federal power and preserve states’ rights. It is an essential part of our federalist balance. It also represents a reminder that pure democracy, mob rule, is incompatible with liberty.” So, Ron, who decides who the mob is? So, Ron, we should keep an elitist system for making this decision and not put it at least partially in the hands of the mob, the riffraff, the rabble, the great unwashed . . . the people? I don’t think so.

          In the next few blogs, I’ll visit some of the other concerns that will be discussed, debated, and fought over in the coming flood of political ads and interviews leading to the choosing of nominees and the final voting in November 2020.