Headline: “What is the meaning of life? 15 possible answers…”
C’mon. Isn’t it obvious that life has no meaning? It just is.
Live it.

• * * *
  Linda and I went to a concert of the Williamsport Orchestra last week, the first classical-music outing we’ve attended in several years. I’m not sure why I was keen to go, since the program was all dance-related pieces, which don’t, in general, attract me. But the closer was Ravel’s “Bolero,” a big whiz-bang-whoopee of a piece, always fun.
  Also, the Williamsport conductor is Gerardo Edelstein, who has done terrific work in the past, especially with Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.
  The first half was mostly Borodin and Brahms dances, bouncy enough and familiar. The second half included some Johann Strauss waltzes. Strauss has always struck me as elevator music composed before there were elevators.
  A women’s dance group spun to the Bolero and other pieces in massive, elaborate costumes, but with what Linda and I felt was a lack of underlying spirit. Most of the audience seemed to love them.
  But the highlight for us was the opening performance after intermission, selections from “Swan Lake” conducted by Rebekah O’Brien. This may have been the first time I’ve actively enjoyed anything by Tchaikovsky, and it was because O’Brien, through her soaring conducting, became the music. I’ve never before seen anyone so completely embody the rich, unfolding sound she was drawing from the whole orchestra.
  Bravo to the nth power.
• * * *
  Have you noticed that whenever hydrogen sulfide is mentioned, its odor is always compared to that of rotten eggs? In these days of overpriced eggs nestled quietly in their cartons, which of us has smelled a rotten egg in our lives, unless we work on a chicken farm?
• * * *
  Another old-guy throwback: When I was growing up, Lipton’s tea ads credited its supposedly glorious flavor to its “tiny little tea leaves.”
  Years later, I visited a tea shop in Bala, a Philly suburb. The owner had an immense tea-taster’s table – a massive round of wood with an outer rim that revolved, so each taster could pick up the next cup presented, after they had tasted the current sample and spit it out, so as to avoid conflating the flavors.
  What he also told me proved enlightening as to the quality of American tea. Lipton’s, Tetley and our similar bagged swill is tea that is not even bid on at the European auctions. In other words, it’s exactly what it tastes like – floor sweepings.
• * * *
  I’ve come up with a weird way to clear the waking depression that floods my head many mornings. It doesn’t work every time, but often enough to be helpful.
  I find that I can overwrite the negative thought-assault by closing my eyes and allowing a splatter of random images to race across my eyelids. Where do these images come from, and why? No idea.
  Sometimes they appear as a ticker-tape rattle of printed words in boldface type, like isolated bits of headline or caption. They flash by so rapidly that it’s hard to tell how many are even complete words.
  Good god, do they indicate that my brain stores every read image that I’ve encountered in the last week? If so, why is it wasting it’s time with such semi-literate hooey? Maybe to keep it handy for exercises like this?
• * * *
  Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston is one of the top 2 or 3 research hospitals in the country. But where did that name come from – a health-care merger? As it stands, it reads like celebration some mahoff named Brigham, with a bunch of women tossed in as a quick sop.
• * * *
  Did you hear about the guy who was madly looking to buy a new fedora? But when a hat was placed on the counter, he shouted, “Bah, homburg!”
• * * *
  Despite the monumental blunder of he US intelligence and military leaders releasing top-secret info to the entire world, it does reflect one major success that our fearless leader Chump can point to.
  After what must have been an especially grueling search over many months, he actually did manage to assemble a group of underlings who are even dumber than he is!
  Would you have thought that possible? Me either, but he persevered.
  The only remaining question is how one of them, national suckurity devisor Mike Waltz, was able to add the editor of Atlantic magazine to the listeners. Did he suggest, “Hey, we need a Jew on here, there’s this guy Goldberg, whoever he is, has to be a Jew, huh? Let’s toss him in.”
• * * *
  To change the country’s mindset, we need to target the individual voters, not our political “leaders.” Once again, Lump has triumphed. He’s destroying the lives of every one of his voters. Way to go.
• * * *
  What our poor hemlock trees have to deal with up here. First of all, they are beset by the hemlock woolly adelgid. “This tiny aphid-like insect attaches itself to the base of hemlock needles and inserts specialized mouthparts to feed on the tree’s stored starches. Covered in a protective white, woolly wax that resembles cotton balls, a single adelgid can lay up to 300 eggs. The insects gradually drain the tree’s energy reserves, causing needle loss, branch dieback, and eventual death within four to 10 years.”
  Poor bastards. And this is just one of 3 diseases out to get the tree species that covers more than half our local forest.
  But wait! 300 eggs? Get these guys turning out product in our grocery stores.

[A story]

Murky Gervaise, a short guy with straggly whiskers and pouchy eyes, worked for a porn monthly called Beaver Damn! Each issue featured pictures of nude women, often in groups of three, involved in athletic sex, along with a couple stories that relied on four or five verbs and a satchel-load of repetitive adjectives.

What made Beaver Damn! distinctive was that every photo or story had to include an image of a plant or wood in some form. A girl might, for example, be stroking a sapling or making cellulose eyes at a redwood, and there was much possibility for perversity involving twigs and blossoms.

Murky’s job was to check each feature for botanical accuracy. The editor, Chesley Frazier, had a policy that no two pictures or stories in any issue should contain the same species of tree or shrub, nor should there be a preponderance of sawn lumber over standing timber or flowering bulbs.

Over the years, Murky became an expert on birch, beech, poplar and hemlock, on poke, goldenrod, nettle and jewelweed, on twig, branch, limb, trunk, stand, spinney, copse and forest, on bark and heartwood, on stamen, pistol and calix. He even mastered the arcane study of erotic dendrochronology, the determination of the age of jailbait through the counting of tree rings.

His private life, however, left him less satisfied. The women – and sometimes men – of his romantic and erotic activities had begun to assume a disquietingly impermanence for him. They appeared pulpy, squishy, like a felled log invaded by fungi. In time, they lost form altogether in his eyes, taking on the insubstantiality that a moss-mat might have for a hound-dog.

His analyst believed, mistakenly, that Murky was suffering from the repressed recollection of a childhood trauma – perhaps a grisly woodland murder – or that disciplining at the hands of his parents had featured unduly severe paddling.

As treatment progressed, Murky was subjected to hypnosis, but nothing was revealed except dark whorls and pasted-on patterns of cheap panelling. His entire past seemed a peculiar wasteland, a desert arena beset by winds carrying organic detritus. His free associations seldom left the confines of the vegetable kingdom.

When he retired following 34 years at Beaver Damn!, Murky was presented with a pocket watch made by craftsmen of the Black Forest. Its case was ebony, its gears of lignum vitae, its filigreed hands of bamboo whittled by a needle. When he rose to express his thanks, no words came, only the slow creaking of his jaw hinges, the sound of a severed ash as it begins its fall.

Following three days of catatonic rigidity, he passed away with a soft sigh. His autopsy revealed mildew, black spot, and three forms of incipient rot. He required no embalming.

I woke up one morning recently – barely awake, half in dreamland – certain that what I need to do now is ask forgiveness. Not for any specific or even general failings you might recognize, but for failing to become what I was capable of… and for realizing that this lack is the result of deliberate choice.

Overall, I’ve failed those who chose, from necessity (my family), or from perverse association (friends), to believe in me. But the person I’ve most failed is myself. I am not who I would be.

I’m sure many of you are already patting my verbal back and telling me that I’ve done my best or some such rubbishy thing. After all, I’m a Good Guy chock full of Good Intentions. But intentions are so much sludge when you know you had the wherewithal to see those intentions become reality… but chose not to.

Throughout the years I’ve been incompetent in dealing with the drudgery of daily-living. I’ve show little deep regard for most human beings, being concerned, in the end, only with myself. I have failed at some fundamental level of decency which I wanted to embrace but have never been able to define.

I’m distant by nature, as my father was distant with me. I not only didn’t know the words to explain this to my kids as they grew, but doubt I’d have felt the drive to speak them if I did. It’s taken years of slowly percolating comprehension to drag these lacunae into the limelight.

I know I’m a good enough writer to have developed a limited following beyond a few close friends – had I bothered to contact publishers or agents. But somehow the process has always left me with a sense of revulsion. Oh, perhaps I’ll be “discovered” after I’m dead, but somehow I’d like it to happen while I’m around to know it, rather than through pilgrimages to visit my corpse on the Body Farm.

My one exculpatory wheedle is that I take full responsibility for my life; I blame no one else for my lacks.

So, should I then blame myself?

That approach is generally claimed to be counter-productive, and I’ve accepted that claim in the past: Technically, I cannot blame myself, because, like everyone alive, I am an accident of evolutionary unfolding and circumstance, of DNA, of where I was born, of how and why I was raised, of the personalized anvil dropped on me from the leaden sky.

Of late I’ve come to feel that embracing self-blame could be a key part of liberation, of a clear-eyed look at… not external reality, but that internal monitor that oversees the ultimate unidentifiable: the self.

Yet accepting personal responsibility for what I could not have changed leaves me a partial cripple, with one malformed leg to stand on. So what it comes down to in the end is that I can ask forgiveness of no one. Definitely not of myself, who am far from offering it.

What I should do, instead, is try to mitigate my failure by spending these bumbling, humbling final years bringing intensity to how I meet and greet the ever-incomprehensible world, how I deal with my family, my friends – and those I don’t give a damn about.

*   *   *   *

Hastings Ave.

While I worked at the Welcomat, my Austrian friend Goetz Mayer started bringing in articles he called “Suitcase Memories,” random, unconnected recollections from over five decades of travel, delivered as a convoluted heap. They and he taught me one way of presenting tidbits from life, unconcerned about outcome. 

Here, as a tribute to Goetz,  are a few higgledy-piggledy childhood recollections from 130 Hastings Ave., south Ardmore, PA. 

Late fall, about age five, Brother Vic told me that Santa’s helpers roamed everywhere – they might be dressed in dungarees, could be walking down any street, evaluating the goodness or badness of us quivering urchins.

I believed in Santa. I believed in Vic. What might I do wrong in the coming days or weeks to foul up Christmas?

Our next door neighbor, Gus Geigus (sp?), had a pinball machine in his basement. I’ve never met another human being with a pinball machine in their basement. It ran on the insertion of a penny. Did I bring the penny each time I visited? Did he give/lend me one? Gus was a college football referee. Sometimes he also reffed professional games, possibly the Eagles.

As a radio operator in the Navy’s Pacific fleet during WWII, Brother Rod worked first on mine-sweeper destroyers, then on the battleship Missouri, where he witnessed the signing of the unconditional surrender of Japan. He and Mom would exchange letters that were censored – with bits considered militarily or otherwise sensitive eliminated with scissors.

According to Mom, she was worried that Rod would be assigned to handling munitions and so addressed him as “Dear Butterfingers.” Did she really do this? If so, would it have had any effect on a munitions officer reading over Rod’s shoulder?

During WWII, you took your excess bacon grease to the supermarket, to be incorporated into the making of munitions [don’t ask me me how – I’d think it would make them awfully slippery]. Dad kept lots of it at home for cooking – bacon grease was his universal frying medium.

At the end of the war, on VJ (victory over Japan) Day, everybody on our 3-block-long street dashed out to celebrate. We stood on the asphalt, yelled, cheered, and blew our horns along with the rest of the country.

Did I know that meant Rod would be coming home to stay? I must have.

The Hastings dogs, cats, and a mouse:

We had an orange bruiser tabby cat with torn, pustulating ears that never healed. He was an inveterate scrapper, though I don’t think I ever saw him in a fight. I seldom wanted to touch him because he was such an unappetizing mess.

We also had two dogs. Judy, a mid-size collie, was hardly friendly to strangers. One time Rod came home on Navy leave from Brooklyn. I don’t recall which ship he was serving on at the time. He went off to the woods with Judy, who unwisely disturbed a skunk. They both came home stinking like armageddon.

Rod slept in the hammock slung from our apple tree, and next morning Mom put him and Judy through a cleansing operation (tomato juice?). He came out OK by the time he was back on board his ship, though his watchstrap remained suspect.

The other dog was an Irish setter, Sheila, dumb as a concrete post – something I’ve often found with Irish setters. But she was determined. Dad would lock her in the back room when we went out. Over time, she chewed halfway through a solid oak door. Her tail was like a shillelagh. When she would stand by the stove looking for a handout, her madly wagging tail left dents in the metal trash can.

One night she tried to clear the wrought iron fence across the street but ended speared on one of its arrow-head points. Vic found her and pulled her off, and the vet sewed her up, leaving no physical repercussions. When she came home, I was sitting on the kitchen floor, systematically pounding little blocks with a wooden mallet through one of those mindless shape-fitting toys.

I looked up and said, “She looks fine, just fine.” I was four years old, and hearing myself utter this ridiculous adultism left me chagrined. I can still see that scene, hear those words, feel that shame.

Why do I retain such shit from a simple action at such an early age?

The lady next door, to the left, had an all-white cat named Squibby. Who the hell would name a cat Squibby? She (the owner) referred to all cats as “she,” all dogs as “he.” Our cat was male, both dogs female. 

I was inordinately fond of a white lab mouse, probably a gift from Rod, now at UPenn in chem engineering, who would scamper up inside my jacket sleeve and hunker down in one of my pockets. I didn’t have it long.

A thick hedge enclosed a yard at the end of the block. When you walked by, a booming, menacing bark would reverberate behind it, a hell-hound on watch. It was a dachshund, blessed with a deep chest.

Rottweilers were not a feared, ferocious breed in those days. King lived one street over and two blocks down from us, a giant, quiet, magnificent beast. The neighborhood kids rode him like a horse. His owners tried to keep him confined with various restraints. They attached him to a clothesline. He broke it. They attached him to metal pole. He uprooted it. They attached him to the stone pillar of their front porch. He Samsoned it and wandered off in unconcern. 

When he visited our yard, he would woof mildly at our inelegant dogs as they tried to keep him at bay while he nonchalantly uprooted half a raw of Mom’s Swiss chard with a sweep of his paw.

King was a living legend. I’ve never met his equal

*   *   *   *

The latest announced proof of intelligent design:

“Male blue-lined octopuses inject females with venom during sex to avoid being eaten”

*   *   *   *

When you piss upon a star,

The steam you raise will travel far.

When yo piss upon a star

It really stinks.

[I’ve really done it this time, unfolded a segmented politicalesque screed, just to get it out of my system so I can go back to my usual disembodied nonsense. Sometime we have to sacrifice our sanity and artistic decency to take a few deserved swipes at the “real world.”]

*   *   *   *

• I’ve been wondering for awhile, and last seek’s shitshow brought it to the  forefront – is Chump, beyond being power -mad, truly mad, in the sense of clinically insane? He’s not only gone after his enemies with rhetoric that would confuse a bedbug, but has cut his supporters off at the knees, wrecking the lives of those who voted for him and undermining every promise he made to them. 
• I didn’t watch Stunp’s attempted evisceration of Ukrainian president Zelenskii but did listen later, while doing the dishes, to what he had bubbled and squeaked, and was appalled beyond what even I thought possible. I could pick up maybe a quarter of the words, but the words weren’t what was important. It was his tone of voice, the suppressed scream of madness: This man is out of his mind, not just an unhinged orator spewing bilious anger, but the mania of a damaged mind without a shred of attachment to reality.
• God, is America fucked. But we are in shit shape not so much from specific policies as from a man’s mental instability that should not be entertained, much less supported, by any functioning government. And since Lump’s behavior is the outer manifestation of a damaged mind, there’s no way to lay blame on him. But blame, of course, serves no useful purpose. What’s needed is a societal change so embracing that this episode can be erased from our history.
• In a different direction, I’ve also long felt hat Slump has a severe learning disability; it is not a matter of “I don’t like to read,” but that he can’t fully comprehend written words, especially within a specific context.
• Read an opinion piece, about Thump’s foreign policy, by someone who seemed to find something consistent behind it. The mistake she made was believing he gives a shit about the US beyond its benefit to and glorification of him personally.
• Besides refusing to print Dump’s given name, I’d suggest that every one of his quotes be labelled “fiction.” Also that, rather than the day’s news remaining “All Crumpet, All The Time!” each media home page reserve a Rump Corner, roughly 3 x 4 inches, in the bottom right hand, with one-sentence summations or links to inane articles covering his antics. Finally, use the pronoun “it” in all personal references to him/it.

• Within a couple days a week back, a close friend and my eldest daughter both sent me a link to Heather Cox Richardson, who writes a daily fact-filled rundown of our national freak show that summarizes the texture and stench of the whole crap casserole. She must spend at least all her waking hours reading the background material [linked each day in the bottom ‘notes’]. You can read or subscribe at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com. Highly recommended.
• I wish more foreign-policy commentators knew extended Russian history. Russian aggression and tyrannical leadership have been consistent for at least half a millennium, through Ivan the Terrible, Peter and Catherine the Great, the 19^th-century Tsars, Lenin, Stalin and Putin. For all of that period, Russia has been the largest country in the world – and always wanting to be bigger, a bizarre state of  mind geared to more, more, more. I admit it must seem a shame to stereotype a country so blatantly, but it would be more of a shame to ignore it as historical fact. The Soviet Union took that mania to a territorial extreme, yet after World War II, Russia attempted to annex all of Eastern Europe. Chomping bits from Ukraine is nothing unusual, though repulsive.
• Of late, the media have been talking about “the MAGAs.” But who are the MAGAs really? Sometimes an article seems to refer to Republican billionaires and their associates; other stories appear pointing at the right-wing 30% of the worker electorate. These are two very different groups that should not be subsumed under a single term. I’d suggest that the billionaire class instead be termed “the MAGGOTS.”

*   *   *   *

[Getting back to harmless nonsense]

*   *   *   *

Declaring war on useless adjectives:

Quote: More than 10 million people worldwide are living with Parkinson’s, and about one in three have troublesome anxiety that affects their daily life.

So, 2 out of 3 Parkinson’s patients have only non-troublesome anxiety that affects their daily life?

*   *   *   *

And the  joust against idiot headlines:

Among other studies, previous research has suggested people who drink tea may have a lower risk of stroke, dementia and even death.

I think we can guarantee that no one involved, here or elsewhere, will have a lower risk of death.

*   *   *   *

An ancient absurdity:

United States currency, boxes and boxes of it!

An actual line that no one on earth would ever say, uttered following an explosion of cartons of cash in Big Ben Bolt (or another equally worthless comic strip) in late 1950s.

*   *   *   *

Traditional hymn: “Leaning on the everlasting arm.”

Modern update:

Farting, farting,

Safe and secure, though somewhat crass.

Farting, farting,

Farting out the everlasting ass.

*   *   *   *

And, at last, a melon-coly ending:

“Come elope with me, honey, do!”

“No, I can’t elope with you, dear.”