I Am the Revolution!

Peeking in. . . .

Hello again.

Didn't really mean to drop in unexpected and/or uninvited, but well, deal with it.

I've been off on a sabbatical, timeout, vacation, or any other amusing reference you might desire to attach to my abrupt but publicized leave-taking of social media shit.

I have read immensely more. I have prayed more. I have knitted more, and laughed more, giggled uncontrollably for extended moments in time captured in my heart and laid aside for those dreary days that pop up here and there.

I have found my husband to be my best friend once again, which he always was, but gave way in quiet knowing to my love affair with my own written word and my insanely silly belief that someone cared what the fuck I had to say.

I cared. Was that not enough?

No.

For I was that proverbial fraud who claims they don't give a fuck when I of course gave the most massive fuck of all.

Validate me I screamed. I will not relent until you admit that I was right all along, and you were and are miserably wrong-headed and probably can't be trusted to get the "no pulp" orange juice except through a  pre-arranged call to the supermarket to alert them that you are coming.

Finally I asked, explain to who? or whom? shit I don't give a fuck about which one surely.

Well, the meds are kicking in, (the spiritual ones I've been watering assiduously for a month or more), and I'm not giving a fuck pretty good these days.

I watch maybe thirty minutes of the circus known as politics and then I say, "I really don't give a fuck," and find a baseball game. I'm up on both Arrieta's ERA and Noah Syndergaard's. That's something to give a fuck about I gotta say.

I'm finally sailing toward a pair of socks that I made with my own two hands.

I'm an ensconced at lane six at the pool as the first morning's swimmer from end to end.

I learned how to cook a few more dishes.

I've enjoyed pizza a number of times,

Parker thinks I'm way funner to be around since I'm not arguing any more with stupid people that I truly don't really give a fuck about anyway. I mean there is a FREAKIN' REASON why neither you or I bothered to look each other up for 45 YEARS ya know. So the, "hey you have 14 grandchildren do you?" has worn it's welcome out through the house and out the back door. See ya on the backside as they say.

Anyway, if you wanna read a really really good post on not giving a fuck and which explains me better than I can explain me, read forth.

THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A FUCK

Spot Ya A Synapse and Raise You one Neuron

Spoiler Alert! Reading further may make your brain hurt!

And it will hurt yours worse than mine, because mine is rather used to the chaos in here.

I'm a collection of anomalies. There I said it. I am as contradictive and dystopian as one can get. And since that sentence probably made little sense to you, well, you see how crazy it is in here?

Okay, there is this.

Life is sorta like events interspersed with getting groceries, clipping your toenails and cleaning the lint filter in the dryer. You get what I mean. We get hired, fired, a baby is born, a grandparent dies, one contracts beriberi and one rejoices at the first tomato. In between is all the "stuff" of normalcy, passing as chores, and "routine".  We get up, we shit, we wash, we dress, we fit widgets with washers and then we come home, eat, vegetate and pass out for a few hours only to do it all over again.

Endlessly.

It's that last part that makes me shudder.

I remember being around 40ish, practicing law in dreary, scary, boring Detroit, and looking at doddering old fools in their 80's shuffling around, dropping files and papers, not being able to hear their case called very well, grabbing their victim client firmly by the arm and marching them through a plea agreement neither one understood much at all.

I cringed, not so much for the luckless client as for the picture of me doing that, that transferred into my mind and made me want to run for the nearest ledge to leap from. I dinna wanna do that when I was 80.

The endless drudgery of sameness damned near stultified my breathing.

I have never been able to comfortably imagine doing the same thing for EVER. I mean the idea of living in the same house for 40 years unnerves me. To live and die within a radius of a hundred miles fills me with such sorrow and terror actually that I would feign take a turn at the local YWCA in Salt Lake rather than live all my life one place.

Why?

Have no clue.

Just is.

Doing the same thing forever, in the same place, fills me with dread. I avoid it, have avoided it for a good portion of my life. I'm not your hi, marry me, lets have babies together, you work, I'll work, and we will raise these kids, retire, adore grandchildren, and die in a bed surrounded by all those we love. It's the scenario most buy into, happily I presume.

Me? Terrifies me. Perhaps it's because I have a family with way too many people I don't really care much for. Spending a lifetime in that company will neutralize whatever intellect one started with I'm quite sure.

Now we get to the OTHER side.

I am not the person you would call to do something spontaneous. I hate spontaneity. I gotta plan ahead. That's all there is to it. No, I will not pack a bag and fly to Paris with you on the "spur of the moment" whatever the hell spur means in that context. No I will not.

Change my pool time, and it will take me a couple of weeks to rearrange all my other rituals and routines to fit the new schedule. And I won't feel the least comfortable until I've tweaked it sufficiently such that it feels "normal" to me.

I'm doing that now. I'm at the pool now at 6 a.m., a full two hours earlier. So no reading in the morning, no breakfast, no planning menus and other trivia. No first load of clothes in the dryer as I leave. It's all upended and I'm uncomfortable.

Tell me how these two very clear focuses on life can live together in one aging body? Please!

Now add this gem.

I separate "ongoing learning" from "set learning". Set learning is that body of knowledge all tend to agree is necessary to be absorbed before one is entitled to call oneself a bricklayer, lawyer, or accountant. Once you have learned the "set" of instructions on any subject, you may be that thing, and do that thing usually with some certificate called a license.

This is the money-making enterprise, the thing that makes everything else go. It earns the bucks that enables the dryer to be bought, the steak to be savored, and the grill to be heated up. Trouble is, I'm one of those "once I have learned the set knowledge, and proven that I get it and can use it properly," I'm pretty much done. Bored out of my skull.

Ready to move on.

Not a healthy way to earn a living consistently.

Ongoing learning is the thing I crave. It's the learning that has no end, each new discovery leading to new questions  and a new line of investigation. I crave it, I love it, I embrace it.

Very cool when the two come together. But I chose law, which is the epitome of set learning. It doesn't mean you don't continually update some of the info, because you do. But one does a lot of it by rote. I shoulda chose something like theology or paleontology, both subjects I've come to love.

Of course, being from a working class family, one doesn't dawdle with foo-foo professions that don't lead to jobs in the known free world. Last time I check Kraft Foods was not looking for a theologian. In fact, about the only people who do look for "on going learning" sorts  are universities. And I didn't think I wanted to teach it.

Kaleidoscope your way into now and see how it all fell out?

Well, being retired, I no longer am bored out of my skull by "beginning with Terry v Ohio,  and Cady v Dombrowski, et al. . . ." dialogues with yawning prosecutors and judges paging through their favorite magazine on the bench. That's the good part.

I made enough money, married enough money, that I was allowed to leave that past behind and concentrate on what I wanted to do NOW.

I figured, as most early retirees do, that just "doin what I want" would be splendid. It is, to a point. Then it becomes boring and meaningless and well, yes, endless. And the old fears return. Is there nothing new under the sun for me?

I seem to have found the right arrangement recently. It's a mixture of "doin what I want" and adding in some ongoing learning, and a bit of set learning too. It's learning new crafts, new ideas, new subjects of interest to concentrate on. It's blending and mixing it all up somehow into an easy but busy day that leave one satisfied at the end that one has "accomplished something."

I always say, feed the mind, the soul, the body. It's balance and each person much figure out what balance works best for them.

Right now, I'm engaged in learning to knit socks (class starts first Sunday in February), learning Spanish, (classes one hour a week), getting to the end of at least one "100 books you should read in your life"list,  and recombining a lot of things I do already that nurture me spiritually and bodily. When those are mastered, I'll seek new adventures. I have some new leads to volunteer work that might suit me as well.

The best part is I have a partner both flexible and with ideas of his own, and we can combine some things (like the Spanish classes) and go our own way on others. Discussing our triumphs and failures, our minor successes and near misses adds variety and excitement to our life together.

So, somehow I come to grips with my need and desire for routine, and my fear and loathing of sameness, and I manage to fashion a life that suits me.

Whether I am odd or normal is really of no concern to me. What you think isn't either but still I'd be interested in how you see the world. Are you married to a spot on this earth that is "home" and feels perfect forever? Or are you like me, always looking for something new to fit into your comfortable routine?

I really hope it turns out I'm odd. I would like to be odd. It's something to aim for.

Rummaging Through My Personality

I've talked a bit about this before. So it should not come as any great shock to those who have hung out and read my shit for some time.

I was born way late.

I mean in human history. Even by creationist standards of six thousand + or - a few hundred years. But way, way late when it comes to real history, as in fourteen billion years. That is late dude.

What do I mean by this? (It's always best to ask and not assume.)

See, if I was one of the first hominids who traipsed across the grasslands of Africa, the so-called Savannah, walking upright, showing off for all the world my new-found not-knuckled-dragginess for all to see, there would be plenty of accomplishments I could list that alas are well beyond me now.

I could have concluded and enunciated to my fellow hominids that it would probably be better to shit downstream than up when the lady hominids are washing out the carved out bowls we use to eat from. I could point out that I realized that that star over there on the horizon always seems to move across the heavens starting in the dry season, and then migrates much like the water buffalo, across the plains.

See, I could discover new stuff, as a non-professional person and be pretty darn sure that I was the first person who thought that new thing. Today? Well, I am just as sure that every seemingly unique idea that pops into my busy head, is in fact an old idea thought of by someone else, perhaps thousands of years before I gasped and screamed "what a ride!" as my mother screamed her final push to "get this damn thing out of me!"

Well, another appearing "unique thing" I thought of the other day, is this. I'm probably the luckiest generation alive today.

Let that sink in.

I think it's true.

Why? Oh deliciously you can't wait for the answer can you?

Simply this:

The state of the world is such that I think my generation may be the last whose composites will in fact mostly live to die of old age. I'm not sure that that will happen much in the future.

Yes, yes, I'm more than aware that probably each generation at some point, feels that the world is going to "hell in a hand basket," (oh do please enlighten me on the genesis of that phrase.) I recognize that life never turns out as we thought, we get disappointed (where are the hover boards?) at the lack of discovery of important stuff like teleportation, and travel to distant stars. We realize that we wasted so many hours, days, months and years chasing false prophets, false dreams, and false truth.

And the world continues to spin, and the next generation will make the same claims.

But, I'm not so sure.

There have always been nativist movements in this country, sometimes quite large. There have always been bigots and racists and wrong-thinking dopes on every subject known to man.

I was recently reading Susan Sontag's essay on "What's Happening in America?" and on her "Trip to Hanoi" and I was struck by the sameness of the arguments, the insipid stupidity of the usual rabble of misfits we call Americans. We marched against the war, and working-class masculine bastions of dumb, ranted at us to "love it or leave it." We did neither. They are back at it today, this time, inviting all people of color, or liberal persuasion to do the same.

Nothing changes.

But things do change.

We communicate at a rate that would have boggled our minds even in the 60's. We are aware of everything everywhere, every time. Idiots gather on websites and chat rooms to discover that they are not as mad as they thought, since others share their insanity. Somehow, if you accumulate enough numbers your insanity turns to brilliant analysis. Multiply that by a few thousand and you see that we have a crowd of crazy people who can work together for the first time to destroy the world.

And they seem pretty much about doing just that.

And we are all getting quite frightened.

I used to be okay with the crazy, since I could bask in the knowledge that the people who say such insane things have families and forever more they will be the embarrassment of those who come after them.

I found perfect delight in saying, "I hope you live to have your grandchildren condemn you for . . . ."

But it may literally be true now.

Truly, I don't much give a damn. The planet will or will not be destroyed by fools, and I'll be dead anyway. Not my problem. But I grieve for those who come after.

We have a mass shooting now every day. EVERY DAY. And we do nothing. We do nothing because we are too busy, too sedated by toys, drugs, alcohol and what passes for entertainment. We say we care, but we ain't in the streets.

The Democrats call for "sane gun safety regulations", the Republicans can only complain about mental health failures and jihadists. But NOTHING can stand in the way of the most important right ever given to a human being--the pseudo-"right" to have as much weaponry as you can afford. The folks who claim they are drowning in taxes and can't possible spend another cent on feeding the poor, can spend between $1-3000.00 bucks for the latest assaulty-lookin penis enhancer.

Bullshit.

Nobody in history ever thought the 2nd Amendment was about this. Until the NRA decided that teaching gun safety, the point of their existence, when shortsighted when there was so much money to be made if only they could convince stupid people that guns meant safety and more guns meant more safety.

We have more guns than any nation on earth. We are not the safest, in fact studies prove clearly that countries with more guns have more deaths from guns.

But I'm not here to make the arguments. They have been made countless times before. The Right is gleeful at this last attack, since the names of two of the perpetrators are Middle Eastern, and they can turn this into a diatribe against the President for not being "tough enough on Islamic Jihadists." Democrats, as I said, will moan about the fact that 95% of all people agree with some controls. But nobody will do a thing.

I'm just sick at heart.

How are you feeling these days?

Am I weird? Well I guess that depends doesn't it?

How to Bring Comedy Central Home

We were sitting in the comfort of our living room. It was an average day. No angels had floated by, no unicorns had trampled the herb garden. All in all, quite normal. 

We were watching a football game. We were not drugging or drinking. We were quite sober in outlook and demeanor. What happened next, well you decide what it means.

Out of nowhere and apropos of nothing this ensued:

He: "I recall the saddest thing I ever saw." 

Me: As I tried mentally to associate that statement to Larry Fitzgerald running a crossing pattern near the 35 yard line. I failed to see the connection, so I did what I always do, and always later regret. I responded, "What was that?"

He: Showing no signs that he was the least aware of my mental gymnastics, he gravely continued, "it was on the old Ted Mack Amateur Hour. You remember it of course?" 

Me: The statement, more fairly a question, obviously was meant to elicit a response from me. Being of a certain age, (aren't they all? ages that is, certain), I was well aware of Mr. Mack and his talent show. One could of course quibble with the word talent here, since apparently neither Mr. Mack nor his sponsoring network were the least interested in paying for real talent. Thus, the unsuspecting public, in those early years of TV, had little choice but to view what Mr. Mack and his no doubt able group of "talent finders" passed off to us as amazing feats of entertainment pleasure. 

At this point, I figured I was being taken down the shaded lane of "gotcha" but like the lamb going to slaughter, I was unable to resist the lure of shiny things. Before you ask, I have no idea what shiny object the lamb was unable to resist, but it was the first metaphor that popped into my head, and damned if I care if it fits. 

I answered his question with "yes," though I am quite sure, he saw the fear in my eyes.

He: "Well, it was a one-legged tap dancer. But he had no peg leg. (As you know, there have been rather well-known examples of peg-legged dancers of all assortments. If you didn't know that, well, I can but decry the failures of YOUR parents in not teaching you such important things.) No, he, stood there on crutches, and wiggled his shoe, causing a tapping sound upon the floor." 

Me: "That is sad," I agreed.

Yet, I saw, as I said those agreeing words, that a twinkle could be seen in his eyes, and his lips definitely curved upward just a tad, and for all the world looked remarkably like a smile. If I were to be nuanced about it, I could easily add, smirk, sly grin, or something similar. Actually cross all that out and just say mirthful, a word not sufficiently used in the modern era. 

"You seem to find it amusing?" I queried, now thoroughly puzzled. 

He: "Well, yessssss," he offered tentatively. I was sure that there was a "don't you?" in that long intonation of yes. 

Me: "So you recognize that the correct emotion would be sadness at the man's plight and that he is reduced to begging for charity by tapping his foot, but your actual response is amusement? In other words, KNOW the right response but choose not to conform yourself to it? Would that be it?" 

He: "Yes, yes, of course that is right. I do KNOW it was a sad display." And then with some slight bit of forethought, he added, "I'm not a monster after all!" 

Me: I sat up straight and stared. He was now openly chortling.

Now if you have never had occasion to see someone chortle. I highly recommend it. It's that sort of guffaw (oh shades of Mittens Romney), that turns the face bright pink, the eyes bug a bit, the lips quiver, and the diaphragm locks up, causing a near choking, that brings a slight sheen of tears to the eyes, as the lungs recover their monotonous in and out, and the throat unconstricts just in time to avoid a serious spewing forth of spittle. Do always look for the opportunity to enjoy a good chortle.

Once again, of course I had been had. 

There is no telling how long this particular gem of a joke had been lurking in the recesses of his very strange and one-of-a-kind brain. It's best not to ask, nor even think of such questions. It has been shown quite clearly and awfully that having more than one loose nut in the house, spoils the entire family. 

Here's to you from the smoky limpid pools of my private cave of reality.