…upon the slithering approach of my 86^th birthday

I discovered something interesting about invasive plants over the last week. Apparently, Europe gave us dandelions. In return, we gave them ragweed.

The get-outta-the-way, reckless abandon with which dandelions grow, I’d always assumed they were native. But though they were established in Asia and Europe, they hadn’t made their way across the Atlantic until the western Europeans nations introduced them, along with slavery and capitalism.

In recent decades, ragweed has spread from the U.S. along the coastal areas of Europe, from Norway to Portugal, bringing hay fever to places that hadn’t previously experienced its joys. 

(A couple hundred years ago we also sent over democracy, but we now regret our intrusive error and are intent on removing its stain as rapidly as possible.)

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Waiting for an electric bill, a request to support a candidate you never heard of, or a physical letter from someone you love? Better pick it up soon. Here’s the latest on Sump Pump’s hopes to destroy the USPS:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/24/usps-workers-sound-alarm-over-trump-efforts-to-dismantle-service-the-hounds-are-at-the-door

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Here’s part of why I place what little trust I have these days in the country’s young women:

“While Church membership has been in steady decline, Gen Z women are leaving church at a faster rate than men, according to a 2023 survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.” 

So, if there’s any hope for the country – and that’s definitely debatable – I’d place it in the enlightened competence of the next couple generations of women.

Yeah, there are many crappy women that you could point to – and most of them seem to gravitate to Congress – but they are so wildly outnumbered by crappy men.

I think a lot of it has to do with humans being mammals. Male mammals of most species are shitheads, especially where their treatment of female mammals is concerned. Once again: a paean to evolution and “intelligent design.”

I think part of my belief in women comes from my mother, who was the force in our family. But first I have to note that both my elder brothers hated her with a remarkable passion. I don’t know what went on in their youth – they were 12 and 14 years older than me – but when I came around, she gave me open support and encouragement as a writer and as a blindered, always-first-in-my-class intellectual. It was a mixed blessing, yes, but I think she did form [skew?] my outlook on women as leaders.

I’ve been particularly taken with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young, charismatic ass-kicker in Congress. Do I think she have the chops to be the next President? That’s asking a lot, and I don’t have any fact-based answer. But though she was one of the youngest Congresspersons ever, she turned 35 this year – the constitutional age requirement for becoming chief of state. (And my dog would make a more able and intelligent leader than Lump.)

I’ve never gotten into campaigning, but I’d love to start a group called “Old Farts for AOC.” 

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 Our beloved VP, “Just Die” Vance, has been sent to India to visit its prime minister, following a rewarding weekend with the Pope. Watch out, Mr. Modi!

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth must be one of the dumbest critters ever to stand upright. Just look at any given picture of the man, with that empty squinch of “I’m trying really hard to think.”

But at least he does help reinforce Chump’s superb ability to hire guys even stupider than he is to serve as his inferiors. And it’s good for a president to have at least one solid ability. 

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PA governor Josh Shapiro this week escaped a weird arson attack on his home. Not quite sure what his attacker thought he could pull off, but he planned to take along a hammer to bash Josh’s brains in (if he didn’t fry him first).

The up side: Now Shapiro can run for President behind thumping beat of the Talking Heads’ “Burnin’ Down the House.”

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The continuing push by Musk and others to terraform Mars for human expansion strikes me as a destructive insult to the solar system. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

There’s no upside in this for the human race – or for the other not-very-inhabitable spheres – seeing as how we’ve turned our home planet into a giant dog turd.

Most of this space travel rah-rah originated from a childish love of science fiction and an innate wish for folk and fairy tales to reflect some alternate view of reality – a longing for wish fulfillment that has nothing to do with actual reality.

Why should we have any hope of improving reality? Look at the world today and it should be obvious… though, on the other hand, why not let it all go down the tubes?

We don’t even have to visit the Moon to achieve that.

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I’m Poopass the sailor man,

I shit in a garbage can.

I took off the lid

And I’m glad that I did,

I’m Poopass the sailor man.

[This is a snip from the novel I’m working on. It has nothing to do with the plot, which is one of the reasons I really like it. Jenny is talking to Filt. No time to explain Filt here.]

Jenny looks up, gazing at a far picture playing on a far screen “After Penn, I spent a couple months in Canada, up along the Alberta-British Columbia border, a string of national parks, Banff and Jasper and this one –Yoho.”

“Funny name of anything, ‘cept a candy bar.”

“Indian. I suppose. Anyway, I knew there was a waterfall up there, read about it, Takakaw Falls. Way up the road, gravel road. I could hear it. It’s this low… not a rumble, an undercurrent you pick up and then it gets louder, walking up this gravel road with my backpack. I was hungry, but I hear or I feel the waterfall and I just want to see it. You know? The road ends and there it is –not right there, but a trail going off to 900 feet of water dropping straight down in a strip. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

“Bigger than the one in California?”

“Yosemite? Naw, not that high or wide. But Yosemite doesn’t have water part of most years. This was… August? I think August, so Takakaw was thin, but the thinness made it look higher. Like it was up to heaven, if there was a heaven.”

“You don’t think there’s heaven?”

“I don’t so think. I wouldn’t like it anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Fucking angles playing crappy music. You wanta hear about the falls?”

“Sure.”

She leans forward, the old image coming clearer. “It never got real loud, maybe the sound just drifts sideways? And the water – it came down all those hundreds of feet and it was gentle. I went right up to it, stood under the spray – one of those wilderness areas, no dumb concession stands, no parking lot. No people. You’d think there’d be tourists in August? Just me and the water coming down form near the sky. Goddamn. That’s freedom, guy, you and 900 feet of dropping water.”

“That’s it? A lot of water?”

“I’m standing in the spray, facing back down the path, and I turn around, and right from behind the fall, the main drop of water, a tiny figure walks out. Then another and another and another. Kobolds or pixies or… whatthehell? Elementals. First it was, holy shit I think my body wanted me to be scared, but I wasn’t. They moved along, stepped to the side of the falls, the water, and looked at me – not staring, more like I was something they wanted to figure out. The way I was looking at them, I guess. The leader, the one that came out first, hunched up in a yellow poncho, he bowed.” Jenny stands and demonstrates, a simple tilt. “I waved. The… whatever he was bowed again. Then they all linked hands in a circle and started dancing. You know what I thought? I actually thought I was dreaming, some kind of earth figures sprung from a cavern of the mists. Such things aren’t real. Except I’d planned the trip, come up the road, part of the plan, so I must be awake. And I’ve anyway never dreamed with that much clarity, the detail and… sparkle, feel the heat and scatter of water whipping across my shoulders, doesn’t happen in dreams.”

Jenny doesn’t hear Filt at first, old visions filling all the receptor space in her head.

“Hey – so they disappear, float off like, into the sky? What? What happened?”

Jenny starts to snigger. “They stopped dancing, came around front, where I was, introduced themselves, shook my hand. They’re a circus troupe, on their way to Moosejaw, left their car down the road – I remembered seeing it, wondering, funny, nobody around – they’d gone behind the falls when they saw me on the trail. They liked to do that, goof on people. They were a hell of a good bunch, dwarves, like I’d thought at first, but professional dwarves doing their job. Gave me a ride afterwards and told me about the circus, not any Ringling, but kept them alive and on their toes.”

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This may not be a subject that gets most people’s juices flowing, but I’m continually fascinated by the fundamentals of particle physics.

Thomas Hertog’s On the Origin of Time is the most lucid explanation of the Standard Model of physics I’ve read, and he manages to do it in just a few paragraphs. I have no background in higher math, and am not about to try to glom one this late in life. [I still have to get the laundry done.] 

Almost any non-mathematical discussion of the Standard Model cavalierly bumbles through a single aspect of the theory, which, for such a fundamental and complex subject, always leaves me hanging – what the hell is this actually about? Here, we get the whole log, not just a pickled pig’s foot.

Hertog even has me almost understanding the Higgs field, which I thought wasn’t possible [that’s the field involving the Higgs Boson, identified a few years back at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva].

This is an altogether excellent book, mostly about Hertog’s association with Stephen Hawking during Hawking’s final years, and Hawking’s revision of his own theories of time. 

*   *   *   *

Trying to gain more info about my chronic lower back pain, I discovered that I might well be suffering from – among other things – lumbosacral radiculopathy.

Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. Probably comes from watching too many Looney Tunes cartoons.

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People do not have values or outlooks because they are Dem or Repub, they become Dem or Repub because of their values or outlooks—a somewhat different way of viewing the political system and its varied supporters. 

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I understand how a person can be termed legally blind. But if I’m put in charge of a government department I have no competence to understand, can I be proved illegally blind?

I don’t personally know another non-musician who’s affected by music quite the way I am. Each piece – not just each symphony or song, but sometimes each word or note, can have a specific inherent context for me; playing it at the wrong time or in the wrong context can be ruinous. Yet accidentally tripping over the perfect time and setting brings on something close to ecstasy.

It wasn’t always this way. Growing up, after hating big bands and most ’40s pop, I disliked much of ’50s rock, preferring simpy ballads like Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy.” I had no interest in classical music.

If there was a signal moment that changed my approach to and understanding of music, it was sitting in a friend’s apartment during my sophomore year at Penn and being introduced to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti. What, this is classical music? – this bubbling, rampage coming straight from the soul?

Within days I was scouring record bins and picking up armloads of cheap classical albums, of which there were, then, plenty: Vox boxes, Nonesuch, Mace, Westminster, Richmond (the bottom-feeder pressings of Angel or Columbia, not sure which) and the Connoisseur Society. They put out classical and pre-classical albums for a buck, tucked into the back bins at a slim Chestnut St. record shop. 

I  also took a course at Penn on the history of Western music that introduced me to a sonic background I’d known nothing about. I loved it all – medieval, Renaissance, Baroque. I started my buying with the Baroque and spread out in both directions, up and down the centuries.

When I had enough cash to splurge, I’d get Heifetz playing Beethoven’s violin concerto on RCA (I left my first copy on my amp and it melted over the edge like a Dali watch; my housemates and I may have been the first people alive to play frisbee with Beethoven’s violin concerto) or Pablo Casals bowing Bach’s solo cello works.

Later, I’ve wondered why I dislike opera and most romantic classical. I think it’s because this music is designed to provoke images, and I almost never put pictures to music. For me, music, even vocal, is pure sound – 90% of music videos piss me off. 

Through lack of physical rhythm and small-muscle control, I’ve never been able to play an instrument. After college I bought a guitar, a banjo, a recorder, a harmonica, an African drum – and could make no sound remotely musical arise from any of them. I can sing after a fashion but don’t bother anyone with it; it’s not good enough to satisfy me.

I can’t read music, can’t grasp the idea of keys, of minors and majors, have never read or considered music theory. I can’t play even the simplest of instruments, like the recorder, because the impetus won’t translate from my mind to my fingers. Instead, while listening, each succession of notes, each word in a song’s lyrics, each interaction of instrument and voice elicits a specific welling of recognition – or a sharp rebuke aimed at the poorly conjoined.

I seldom use music as “background” because I can’t ignore it. When I put on something I love, I listen to every note. I can seldom read a book with music going (except “ambient” nonsense like Brian Eno’s early “ambient wallpaper”) because the music overwhelms the print. Sound that I dislike strike me like a personal offense – it should not be.

I sang in the choir in Catholic grade school – a rare pleasant escape there. I came to love Gregorian Chant, the purest melody ever constructed. Singing the midnight Christmas mass was magnificent. I loved the music, the pageantry, the smell of the incense, the sense of resonating place. I didn’t care what the Mass itself meant.

I watched nearly every folk act of the early ’60s. I saw Bob Dylan perform for about 200 people at the Ethical Society in Philadelphia before he’d recorded – a skinny 18-year-old with a mass of curls, looking as unfinished as an unlaced shoe. 

The Second Fret, a coffee house off Rittenhouse Square, run by Manny Rubin, was part of the East Coast folk circuit. There I heard Rev. Gary Davis, the Greenbriar Boys, Sonny Terry, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (blind drunk as usual), Mark Spoelstra, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jean Redpath, John Hurt, Judy Roderick, Jim Kweskin, Geoff Muldaur, and a couple dozen others. 

Elsewhere, I saw Doc Watson, the New Lost City Ramblers, Martin Carthy, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Odetta, etc., etc. Never did see Joan Baez in person, just wept over her albums (these days I find her early work forced).

At a record shop in New York you could pick up seconds of Folkways albums for 94 cents. Each disc had a little hole punched through the label and came with only a paper liner, no dust jacket. One international sampler included a cut of Eskimo water drums, the funniest sound ever produced by human effort. I’d lie on the floor, convulsed in gasps. That album’s long gone and I can’t find even a reference to that particular cut’s existence, even among the Smithsonian’s supposed complete Folkways collection.

Along with my aversion to opera (except Monteverdi) and most romantic (except Brahms’ first symphony, Mahler’s second, St. Saens’ third, and Franck’s only), I generally can’t listen to rap, Broadway, most ’70s rock and, for reasons that mystify me, Latin (except extreme samba school). Pop from almost every era interests me about as much as a melted Creamsicle. As for jazz, most diverts for a few minutes, though I get a charge from pianists like Mose Allison, Ramsay Lewis and, particularly, my (deceased) high school classmate “Father” John D’Amico.

I like specific pieces from almost every other musical tradition, especially those nearest the wavering edge: classical and poplar Indian; east, west and south African; Japanese; punk; the minimalists; Middle Eastern; Scandinavian; Inuit; Tuvan; satire (oh yes); Australian; early rock; gospel; and outfits like the Cocteau Twins that can’t be classified. 

Jim Knipfel introduced me to a range of ’70s-’80s cult or under-the-radar outfits like the Residents and Killdozer – the one band that always makes me bellow with laughter, no matter how sour my mood.

My major vacancy is the inability to share my response, the personal meaning that music has for me. If I put on a CD with a guest at hand and they start talking…

If you like it, shut up and listen.

If you don’t, ask me to turn it off.