About 15 years back, we visited an abandoned veal barn down the road. The tiny stalls where the calves had been kept still held the decaying restraints that had immobilized the young future dinners.

Why had the barn been abandoned? Because some time in the ’50s the owner had fallen into the feeding machine. Who became whose meal?

What are we willing to do to some other living thing to make a living? 

*    *    *    *

Change of pace: From a failed attempt to provide food carved from a living creature to a restaurant serving far smaller previously living creatures in a most unlikely setting.

I can’t recall the name of the couple who ran the Covered Bridge Restaurant, and it wasn’t on a covered bridge, just near the one that crossed the Loyalsock Creek at Sonestown.

After you parked in the lot out back, you entered a three-story cinderblock addition to what I guess was their house. Inside this tower, you walked up about a story and a half of steps,  past failed equipment of various types, sizes and shapes, and piles of unidentifiable material.

How did we come to be there the first time?  I don’t recall, but we immediately liked the “ambience” because we knew there couldn’t be another place quite like it. And we returned because it served the best seafood, especially scallops, that I ever expect to eat.

The room you entered was larger than you’d expect, with 4 or 5 longish tables and the open kitchen directly behind a counter. It also had several fine waitresses at different times, including perhaps the sexiest woman ever to serve a gin and tonic.

(I’ve mentioned her before, because she’s the one who always knew when you needed a refill; once I emptied my glass and made a personal bet that she would notice before I counted to 15. At my internal “13” her finger shot out, pointing at my glass.)

God, where those scallops magnificent. But the owner who made them was, well… beside the off-putting – to most folk – entrance setup, he wanted to turn the place into a ski lift. Besides his apparently never having raised the money, there was the problem of lack of elevation to ski from, just a half-hearted rise rather than a hunk of mountain.

The restaurant is no more, no idea what, if anything, followed it. It’s funny how you can find something unlikely, even borderline absurd, and wish it would last forever. But Sunday always turns into Monday.

*    *    *    *

What’s with the recent celebration of everything from the ‘80s – music, movies, books, even (god help us) Reagan?

You won’t get that kind of reverence from me, because I’ve never understood popular culture or dominant outlooks of any period, except perhaps the folk-music revival of the ‘60s.

And I don’t listen on Spotify because I don’t want to hear another song exactly like what I just listened to. I want  the next to be something as different as possible.

That was the way WXPN, the UPenn FM station, worked in the ‘80s, close to anarchic radio, where you might hear Beethoven followed by The Residents. In our car, we have about 3,000 “songs” from 2,000 years of music on shuffle on our iPod Mini – which I hope doesn’t break, because Apple no longer makes it.

*   *   *   *

Sometimes I wish I had the sustained push and energy to put together a serious, researched non-fiction volume. Like… a definitive profile of Genghis Khan, the most influential single human being of the last 2,000 (at least) years.

Alexander the Great? Hell, everybody in the Western world admires him (me included). Battled like a motherfucker, overran everything from Macedonia to the borders of India – all before dying at age 33. (Let’s see… at age 33 I was doing really crappy freelance carpentry.)

But Genghis Khan – He drew uncoordinated herdsmen across 3,000 miles into the most terrifying, effective force ever unleashed. He captured, controlled and organized the largest empire in the history of the world, from Mongolia to to Bagdad.

He was not a nice guy, he did not institute wonderful liberties, and he has the most horrific quotes attributed to him that I’ve ever read (though maybe they reflect the press of his day). On the other hand, he instituted perhaps the most efficient long-distant  communication system previous to the 20^th century.

*    *    *    *

To the tune of “I Wish I Was Single Again” (oh, c’mon, somebody out there has to know that song), inspired by a reminder from the lovely lady at the pharmacy that I still need to get a shingles shot (I told her I was also due for an aluminum-siding booster).

I think I have shingles, again, again

I think I have shingles again.

For when I have shingles,

My tummy it tingles,

So I think I have shingles again

*    *    *    *

Two Russians were walking down the road. One was an endangered species, the other was not. The one who was not an endangered species asked the one who was: “How is is that you are an endangered species?”

The other replied: “It is a harrowing tale. For five generations, we have been hunted throughout the countryside. My brother Boris was stuffed and placed on exhibit in the Moscow Museum of Natural History. My mother’s hide was made into a coat for a commissar, two mufflers, and a handbag. As the last of my line, I plan to travel to a distant cave and live the life of a hermit until my days are complete.” 

The first Russian hurled down his cap in rage: “The abominable behavior of man! I am ashamed for all humanity. Come join me at the tavern before you go, that you may not leave in total despair.” 

At the tavern they drank many liters of fine red wine and brooded on the depredations of mankind. As they prepared to leave, the two shook hands like old friends. The first Russian kissed the endangered species on both cheeks and said:

“You may be the last of your line, but also you are the best. It has been my privilege to know you for even this fleeting moment. Now go your way, but before you leave, I have one request. Once you have expired, may I cut off your ears to hang above my mantelpiece?”

[You should be happy to hear that this is the last of my “two-Russians” jokes created many decades ago. Unless I’m overtaken by a sudden Cossack Revival, the two Russians will not be accompanying you on your travels again.]

I fear an insidious transformation may be creeping up on me. I find myself spouting – shudder – philosophy. Such an abomination would lacerate a major tenet of my belief system.

Should you spot this happening, please find a way to stop me. Yes – it’s your responsibility.

*   *   *   *

Up here, in the pleasant PA boonies, Guthrie Healthcare serves almost all our medical needs, and they do it quite well, all things considered, with top-notch docs, nurses and receptionists. I don’t think Linda and I have ever had a negative in person experience with anyone at any office.

But there is one aspect of Guthrie that’s just plain dreadful: a system-wide failure of communication. I don’t mean direct interactions so much as seeming not to know what communication means or how it works. This can range from not placing signs at eye-level in waiting rooms to Linda returning home from hip-replacement surgery and not receiving a “how are you doing?” call or email.

Some examples:

• Linda had an appointment in orthopedics in Sayre, 40 miles up the pike, in the Guthrie main clinic. Once we tracked down the proper waiting room (many have no external signs indicating which specialty they cover), we went to the registration desk to find no one on duty. Turns out, registration that day was being taken in the office corridor 8 feet to the right. There was no sign on the registration desk to alert us; the only visible one was inside the doorway of the office corridor. So every time a new patient entered the waiting room, one of the seated waitees had to point them in the right direction.
• Phone calls reminding us of upcoming appointments arrive at 8:15 in the morning, when us retirees are barely astir, and those with a job are trying to bolt a quick breakfast. The robocall asks you to press 1 to accept the appointment. There is no other way to immediately acknowledge acceptance. And if the call goes to your answering machine or voicemail, it ends with a rapid-fire blast of phone numbers and extensions that you can’t possibly write down at that speed. And with no repetition to help you catch up.
• Through an email reminder, you can access a website to pre-register for your appointment. The purpose of this eludes me, since when you arrive at your appointment you still need to go to the registration desk to show you are actually there.
• Following Linda’s wrist fracture, she arranged for physical therapy near Guthrie’s satellite hospital in Towanda – woohoo! a mere 20-mile drive. We were told to take the first left past the hospital driveway, and given the numbered address of the building. Piece of cake. Alas, the cake was baked by Snow White’s evil stepma. We drove up the short residential street to a large parking lot on the left serving two… oh three… um four? buildings facing in different directions. None of these sported a sign giving building name or address. We recognized one structure where we’d both had physical therapy, so that must be it. No, inside we learned that this particular kind of therapy was held in the long 3-story building on the far side of the parking lot. We trotted over and found, Lord be praised!, a sign for all sorts of specialties housed within – but not the one we were there for. Next, we began our search for an entrance. Once we managed to find a door, we had the choice of stairs or a dwarf elevator off to the left. We chose the elevator, whose internal sign admonished that all medical facilities and practices were on the third floor. (For convenience, I’m sure.) Linda’s appointment went fine, as usual. On the way down in the grindingly slow elevator, which announced each floor with a sound somewhere between a “ding” and a mechanical slap, I thought, “I never want to know what’s on those first two floors.” That may be where Dr Frankenstein stores spare parts.
• Linda had another appointment in Sayre, that 40-mile drive, this time in one of Guthrie’s many outlying buildings. Once we tracked down the correct outlying building and she presented herself, she was told that her appointment had been cancelled two months ago and rescheduled for next year. Linda had received no notice of such rescheduling – and this appointment was itself a rescheduled one. The receptionist was cordial and helpful, setting up a new appointment for a couple weeks later, though she couldn’t fit Linda in before we drove our 40 miles back home. I definitely didn’t want to seem unappreciative, but I said, “Guthrie seems to have a difficulty with communication.” The receptionist’s response: “I agree with you, 100%.” So… it’s not just our imagination.

*   *   *   *

I wonder if the following has been considered legally, and if so with what response:

The note on almost any product this side of toilet paper warns you to “Read all instructions before using this product.”

As we all know by now, this is written not to protect the user, but to protect the manufacturer from being sued. Their lawyers can argue: “He cut off both arms because he did not read the instructions.”

But… If someone does not read the instructions because they did not read the instruction to read the instructions, what kind of legal tangle does this create – a verbal möbius strip?

*   *   *   *

I’m patiently waiting for someone to create a deepfake of Trump speaking logically. Or maybe quoting Aquinas.

*   *   *   *

“Meaning” is a term that has come to piss me off. I don’t want even its shadow over my life.

As I see it, there is no such thing as meaning, on any scale, absolute or personal. The search for meaning is a continually failing attempt to coordinate our assumptions of what should be – an amorphous glue that changes viscosity throughout life, without our registering the change. 

*   *   *   *

As a kid, I didn’t like condiments. Mayonnaise gave me the squirms, and I flat-out hated ketchup. The only item I’d slather ketchup on was scrapple, because scrapple was the worst supposedly edible substance on earth; anything, including demonic intervention, would improve it.

*   *   *   *

When and how did Keanu Reeves become thought of as an actual actor? Didn’t he started out as a joke?

A few of you might remember a question I posed sometime back: “Who is Joe Betz?”

My answer was, a high school classmate about whom I remembered absolutely nothing — not name, face or the fact that such a person existed in my Catholic high school class… but who insisted that we had been together on the school’s toothless and useless student council.

I can’t remember now how he tracked me down [or why], but Linda and I ended up having lunch with Joe and his wife at a restaurant in Media, PA, where he showed me pictures of us together in our high school yearbook that, I fear, he always carried with him. I didn’t recognize myself or him in the pix.

We had a nice time, good people, but it was all very puzzling. Since then we traded a few emails, in which I learned about his position as professor of philosophy at Haverford College, and his devoted work with education of prisoners. He seems, all in all, to have had a far more exemplary life than I can credit to myself.

Despite a couple tries to stop it, I’m still sent the glossy alumni letter from St. Thomas More 2 or 3 times a year. I ignore almost all of it but the necrology, just wondering how many of those from my class that I do remember might have blundered off this mortal coil. 

A few weeks back I idly wondered, “What if Joe Betz’s name shows up there?” Within about a week, I go the latest issue with its “departed list”: Joseph Betz, class of 1957. 

I’m sorry, Joe. I wish I’d had a more decent response to your selfless kindness.

*   *   *   *

All this reminds me, again, how unlike my childhood and teen years were to the norm you read about.

Will Eisner’s Sunday comic, “The Spirit,” Carl Barks’ uncredited work for Disney on Scrooge McDuck, and the radio all day: These, not people or “experience,” formed the basis of my childhood. 

Later, I had no typical teen years. 1953-1957 covered my sludge of high school. Weekdays, I came home from school, started the voluminous homework imposed by my Catholic education, and kept at it through to bedtime.

In those years, I never had a girlfriend or even a date. In fact, I’ve never had a dating period. My first real time with girls began after College. I had to be deeply attracted to a particular person before making any attempt at getting together, and the process of asking was agony.

Altogether, high school was a fairly hideous time, broken only by walking around parts of West Philly and Fairmount Park with two other class losers. I saw few movies, didn’t know of any theater that actually played Roger Corman movies, never saw any of them, never knew his name.

The few I did see were mostly at the wonderful downtown first-run theaters of the day, at $1.80 a pop. (Dover Books has put out an oversize photo paperback of them – those in Philly only). My greater good luck was that the other movies I saw were the leading European and Japanese masterpieces (Kurosawa, deSica, Rosallini, etc.), through my mother’s membership in a film club – a whole different worldview, not shared with anyone else I knew.

As a remarkably cringy example of my ignorance of the world and the effects of Catholic education, I never saw my SAT scores or even realized that I was supposed to. If they were sent home, I was never told. If sent to the school, given the usual mindset there, they were probably deliberately withheld, since they were royally pissed that I didn’t apply to any Catholic college.

I had never been told my scores on the annual diocesan test or on the IQ test we were given in senior year, so I simply assumed we were not supposed to know our standing anywhere outside our own classroom. 

*   *   *   *

Linda and I have a PO box in town, rather than a mailbox at the end of the drive, mostly to force us to exit our isolated home and visit the outer world.

Of late, roughly 80% of the mail addressed to us descends immediately into the recycle box under the sorting desk. Why? Because we donate annually [in two cases, monthly] to a variety of environmental and social causes.

The monthlies are syphoned from our bank account, the others are paid through websites, according to a schedule I’ve set up to spread the load throughout the year. 

Yet week after week, day after day, these outfits send me newsletters and pleas for more donations, each citing a “vital and immediate” need – something I resent to an admittedly rabid degree. And, as a registered Democrat, I’m also asked to finance politicians in states 1,000 miles from my home. 

The most obnoxious, to me, are the environmental groups who, in their efforts to save the planet and reduce pollution, each send me a couple pounds of crap mail a year. They also alert their “Save the Specked Wombat” buddies that I’m a mark, so they too should pile on the begging. In other words, half my donations are being used to print waste paper and pay postage! 

My temptation is to just stop supporting anybody, because it all seems largely pointless. But that would be childish, because at least some of my carefully calculated lucre gets used as intended.

At least I think so.

*   *   *   *

The argument flies back and forth about whether electric vehicles will save the environment or be just another high-cost outlay of hope. 

Well. If solar power can be used to charge these honking huge batteries, that’s a big gain [since solar power, ultimately, is the only “inexhaustible’ and non-polluting energy source]. But you still have the costs of production and getting whatever energy source to the cars.

But none of this is the core problem. The core problem is that lithium-ion batteries are not a solution, they’re a clunky stepping stone toward a solution. Lithium is a middle-stage, not an end-stage material. 

Mining lithium is environmentally ruinous, as is the mining of the rare-earth metals needed to make the batteries work. EVs won’t be practical or realistic until we develop a whole new type and structure of battery, probably based on principles we haven’t stumbled across yet. I don’t think I’ve heard a single commentator talk about this.

*   *   *   *

I’ve uncovered how JD Vance came up with his cat-devouring idiocy. He signed in to Pornhub and found out that some guys really like to eat pussy.

*   *   *   *

Last and definitely least:

Shouldn’t “blank” by the past tense, and “blunk” be the past participle of “blink”?

Listen: blink, blank, blunk. Doesn’t that excite your grammatical lobe?