lickhaven

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.

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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.

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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?