I have a party tonight. I have not been to a New Year's Party in twenty-five years. That kinda happens to you, or so I believe, if you have been a rolling stone. During those years I lived in places for maybe two, orsometimes three, years. You do not get to know people well over such a short period of time. But then, I have only been out here in the abandoned back-country for two years and I have a social life of some proportion. Which means I am wrong in my basic hypothesis. Not uncommon. So I have this party. And there is always the 'what in the world shall I wear' thing that occurs. I picked up my best sweater at the dry cleaners yesterday, but then there is the color issue. Since I am color blind I have a hard time putting stuff together, without causing those little side glances or raised eyebrows of fellow party-goers. And I don't look good enough. I know that because I have a big mirror in the bathroom. I know I look better than I do in that mirror, because everything is reversed in the mirror. I don't really look like that at all. Still. The effect is not pleasing. Not to me, anyway. But then, I am not trying to attract anybody so why do I care? Genetics. It is buried deep inside me somewhere. Maybe the Catholic upbringing. Maybe the Marine Corps (I sure looked good back then, although, and this is so typical, I did not think so at the time). I will do my best. The host is this wonderful guy, with a really neat wife, who expects that I will add some life to the party. In fact, Chris' exact words were "I think you will be great. Just be yourself. We don't care if nobody comes back next year." Then he went on to some other subject. I thought for a while about what he said. Am I that much of a character? I don't see myself that way. I think I am quite carefully held together. Even a bit urbane, maybe. But that is not how I am seen by others. Which is okay. I am used to that, a bit. Maybe I should include a muzzle with the rest of my outfit.
Brett Favre. God, is he a trip, or what? The coach of his team, the New York Jets, got shown the door yesterday. This is right after the owners, the day before, swore that they were not going to fire him. Our culture. You know, the one where everyone tells the truth all the time. So Brett does it again. Devastation follows wherever he goes now. He absolutely bombs his last four games with the team and the coach gets the sack. He blows the super bowl bid last year for the Packers and look what happens over there. I'll bet the coaches get the sack there too. In leaving, he made himself into the Favre Titantic. Everyone goes down with the ship. Except for Brett, of course. He gets a small dingy to sail away in, well stocked of course. Each year I wait for this old saw of a horse to be put out to pasture. He is the George Bush of football. Dumb as a post, spoiled rotten, and flapping his mouth all the time. Oh, as usual, the owners of the Jets are just begging Favre to come back next year. And those guys have quite a solid reputation for telling the truth. Maybe the football 'hero' can finally be left to travel by private jet across this land. Another modern idiot who has been given everything in the world that one can imagine, and for doing what?He throws a leather ball well. Maybe the coming financial crisis will change the way we look at such things and at such people. I don't know though. The games of Rome became more popular as Rome went down, not less.
Bob Herbert. Today he was not writing about stupidity, although, on the same page Judith Warner was being stupid again. Bob went on and on about just what a disaster George Bush has been for this country and the world over the past eight years. Gee, no kidding. The only thing the article lacked was retribution and recovery. We need the stuff back George stole, or helped steal. We need the culprits to be put in stocks and paraded around so people will feel better. We need to know what really happened (like who got tortured and what was done to them). We need to feed our puritanical and Calvinistic roots with the moisture of the blood from all those evil people. I fear, without such retribution and recovery, we are doomed. We must set our course based upon ideas. It is our belief system that has been so badly damaged. "He who has no target, hits same," kinda thing. Look at our space program, as an example. You really can plan to go backwards and design yourself out of the very thing you claim to be headed towards. Our design for the future, given to us by NASA recently, is just such a design. We will build some old Saturn Fives and shoot them off in all directions, for awhile. Maybe we will go back to the moon or on to Mars. Maybe not. The George Bush Space Program. Might just as well get first class tickets aboard Brett Favre's ship. And we will be doing the same thing with our whole culture if Obama, and team, just let this whole thing go and attempt to 'get on with business.' This is not about business. This is about our culture. Our tribe. This is about the belief system of an entire culture.
from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com
It is two days after. My hangover is just starting to clear, and I do not even drink. The weather has responded in kind, with a tepid weepy mess of a presentation, splashing ran all over the lovely clean snow mass out there. Well, it was lovely and clean out there before, albeit cold as hell. Fog. Gray. Christmas is gone. I have a wonderful Mont Blanc pen that the professor gave me, two shirts and three new sweaters. They are all green, or so I am told, being color blind as I am. I put one sweater on this morning. I had laid out the best one (in my damaged opinion) but, after finishing morning clean-up and shave, I forgot I had laid it out and instead threw on one of the other folded one's. I guess I can't tell the difference, and that is okay. Einstein used to have five suits, all of the same color and cut. Then he wore only white shirts and black socks. I like Einstein's style. He was probably as color blind as I, but he was too important for anybody to ask him to his face, or make fun of him (but then, maybe they did and that is why he ended up with the collection he came up with). Harvey has gone into the basement to hunt his 'stocked' supply down there. The pump is running non-stop, but keeping up. Harv checked that out, but, after just one sniff, went back to his dogged pursuit of his genetically enhanced prey. He is not quiet down there. Empty boxes fly and stacked stuff tumbles. The only rule is that he cannot bring his catches up here though, so I ignore a muted crash or two, coming from down there. If he has any catches I mean, which I doubt. But, in his world, as in mine, make believe is a lot more important than reality.
C.E. Morgan wrote a Christmas story and got it placed in the editorial section of the New York Times on Christmas Day! How do you get a short story into the New York Times at all? By being family I guess. I don't know who C.E. Morgan is, except I did read that the first novel written by this person was demanded by the publisher. That same publisher produced a mid-six figure advance. It is all a crock. Oh, it happened all right, but you see, nobody, and I mean nobody unheard of, gets a six figure advance on a first novel. And nobody gets a short story published on the editorial page of the New York Times on Christmas Day. And finally, nobody gets a rotten story published like that. 'Over By Christmas,' the name of the story that person wrote, should really be the title of the author's career, if the story is any indication. A story about the killing and/or training of horses...and the 'gift' of the necessary torture applied during the training process. "You can't shoot a dog while patting it's head, she had learned the hard way..." Good Christ, what bunk. Then there was the phony alternate sub-story of 'Dean, over in iraq, talking to her on the phone. In the background was an explosion so loud it made her "cry tearlessly." I have already used the phrase 'Good Christ,' so what can I reach for now? Cry tearlessly, give me a break. And somebody died from that explosion, in her story. Now what are the chances of that? Zip. Only in a bad story does that happen. Why am I going on about this? Because C.E.'s very existence in print displays one of the major problems we have in the withering writing culture of our nation. Good writing is seldom read, much less published. Instead we have a litany of the 'Over by Christmas' crap. And, instead of looking at the origin of the piece for answers, we question ourselves. "What is wrong with me? Why can't I understand this story?" It is not you. It is poor leadership. it is nepotism. It is profit-taking. It is keeping it in the family. It is good for them, in the short run, but bad for us all in the long run. The New York Times is dying and the stench of that slow decay is right there, seeping out from the Christmas Day editorial page.
Today, we have humor, once again, from that same editorial staff. Judith Warner, one of my favorite dumb columnists, has a run down one side of the page, while Bob Herbert ("I can too push a pencil across a table top with my nose") Herbert has the opposing side. His article is titled "Stop Being Stupid," but then, of course, he writes on and becomes illustrative of his own title! Part of his rant is about people being so stupid as to purchase houses that they knew they would not be able to afford. What rubbish. People buy a house on hope. And then there is the assistance from the talking heads they got. Even the head of the Federal Reserve was telling them that everything would be alright. He sure as hell was not telling them that whatever they bought would be worth fifty percent less one year later! But, in Herbert's twisted view, it was those poor people once again, pulling us all down. Those grubby, selfish and unionized auto workers. You know the routine. But back to the humor. Judith Warner starts her column with this sentence: "What if you could just take a pill and all of a sudden remember to pay your bills on time." I looked at that sentence and then back over at Herbert's title and then started to laugh. You guys! Saturday Night Live is not that droll!
As if we have a problem, in this current culture, remembering to pay the bills. We are not paying the bills because we do not have the money!!!! We remember. No kidding. We remember every night we go to bed and try to think about the unpaid bills. We remember because our phone does not stop ringing, and it is not friends calling because they forgot Christmas! Judith Warner and Bob Herbert do not have those problems. If you are writing regular columns for the New York Times you are wealthy. Not to mention the books and other perks that go with those jobs. Judith's article was all about a group of shrinks that think it is great to take some of these new 'brain enhancing' substances produced by our wonderful drug companies. How it is as okay as enhancing our intellect by eating a proper diet or working out. Trash. Go ahead, take the junk. Prosac and Paxil and Zanax, and all of the other's of the same ilk, were created to help people who suffer from depression. They take those drugs and become robots. Robots who tend to kill themselves. And the shrinks even know that but prescribe them anyway. I know two people who might benefit from those intelligence enhancing drugs, however. They are both columnists writing on the same page, this day, in the New York Times.
Those two newspapers were leaning against my front door this morning. I can't find the envelope with my cash tip inside. What am I going to do? I stood, newspapers in hand, and looked down my long driveway. It is a white nightmare down at the end of it. Overlapping plows in unwitnessed combat have crisscrossed the cul-du-sac and left jumbled 'Tiger Teeth' of piles strewn everywhere down there. I cannot imagine making my way into that mess to find my papers. I have got to tip this mysterious elusive newspaper person. Christmas stress. I read Judith Warner, a replacement columnist for David Brooks in the New York Times. Where is David? Oh, he needed a break for Christmas, I guess. These 'princes of press' must have their rest. I mean, after all, it takes intensive labor to sit and write something interesting. Another Christmas crock. Like the garbage Judith wrote this day. Brainless. Let's see, she writes about the fact that reason and logic are triumphing over the forces that make Christmas what it should be...wonder, marvel and faith. I am paraphrasing, as her stuff is not worth memorizing. She calls this the 'Woody Allenization' of Christmas. I do like that line, however misplaced and addled it is. You see, Judith is lost in the combating and overlapping mythologies of Christmas in our culture. She is all caught up in the Santa Claus thing, I guess. I am so very sorry Judith, but even though Norad has been tracking Santa's Christmas Eve flight ever since 1955, he is not real. We made it all up to have fun with our kids...and quite possibly for control and discipline purposes as well.
Christmas is filled with wonder, marvel and faith. You just have to look beyond the mythologies. The wonder that people can take a bit of time and think about the plight and condition of others around them. The marvel that they will go out and spend time and money to get something for somebody else that is just right, just to have that person feel a little bit better about life, and maybe them. The faith that something is at work of goodness, driven by, well, you don't have to know. You just have faith that there are more people like you out there, buying stuff not totally out of obligation but because you really want to get stuff for them. There was an old school joke about faith that always liked, even thought the underlying premise was discomforting. Johnny is sitting in the back of his grade school class when his teacher asks the big question. what is faith? Johnny raises his hand, which the teacher tries to avoid, as Johnny is a notorious trouble-maker (i like that part as I was always in that coat closet in my Catholic School for shameful questions). But the teacher caves in when there are no other hands. "Alright Johnny, go ahead...," the teacher says, with disappointment and a bit of trepidation. "Faith is believing in something that you know is not really true," Johnny responds, in his normal fashion. Johnny went, of course, straight to the coat closet, to inhale the aroma of all the little girl's coats hanging there, if he was like me. But the premise of that story is not true. You can have faith in any number of things that may or may not be true. We just don't have enough data or life experience to know. God is like that too. Is He there? Is He a He? What is the deal? I think He is, but I am not sure. I am beginning to sound like Woody Allen, who I never liked, although he is funny...but with some real bad personal habits.
About teaching. The Times had an article about teaching in it. The writer combined the plight and conduct of my beloved auto workers with that of teachers. They are unappreciated. That part is true. But auto workers do not stay up nights working on their stuff, worrying about their charges and taking extra time and effort to help a small person who really needs it. Teachers are different. I know one well. I mean one right now, sleeping and shopping away because she is off for the holiday (one of the few small benefits of the profession). This teacher is kinda normal I think. She asked me to write a short story for her grade school classes. So I wrote The Treasure Pool, which is found somewhere back there in these blogs. She gave out forty-nine copies and then had all the students write reviews back to me. She copied and stapled, read the story to make sure I had not slipped in any filth (I am, after all, an ex-Marine!) and then spent time and trouble helping these kids to come to terms with the plot, the theme and the elements of English such necessary educational arrows to have in their quivers. The critiques came back, and they were wonderful. Oh, I got dinged pretty good on my grades in certain areas. I wrote back to those kids who had given me bad grades for the most minor of things. I was stung. I was nice, but I had to say something! But the story is not about me. It is about the extra time and effort this teacher, Mrs. Machado, takes to really help and advance her students. She is an example of what it is all about out here, and in this holiday season. She follows Sister Sarah Fogarty (my fourth grade teachere) and Sister Michael Marie (my fifth grade teacher) in being one of those unknown and unsung saints. Maybe here, in this lonely blog, she will get the only public recognition she ever gets. But she is all about Christmas. The embodiment. And she is filled with reason and logic and understanding the universe. But she is also a thing of wonder, marvel and faith. Merry Crhistmas Anise Machado. We love you.
Judith Warner's post at the NY Times says it far better than I can: http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/the-mirrored-ceiling/?em
Follow that up with some humor from Jon Stewart. Simply fantastic!
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=184095&title=sarah-palin-vet-this
Peace, Ms. Sweet
