SmokeSound

"You say people don't like you. Now I know why people don"t like you!" [Overheard at a local drug store.  One employee to another:]

Not since a decade have I had to introduce myself new to a doctor's office Saying, "I am new, here!" The receptionist asked how old I was in other places, and who.   "I am a juggler's trick," I said.   "I am these old bones, and a titanium hip. I am pills and powders from a chemist's shop, and once I might have done a jig, before titanium and if I knew how to dance." I filled out "these forms" granting permission  to become an example to younger wastards.   "At what age did you suffer childhood diseases?" the doctor asked.   "Childhood," I said, "occurred before I began to remember, or was it before I began to forget?   You may put on there that I do not think kindly of examinations that do not allow me to stand upright." "Is there anything you want to ask me?", he said, when his asking was all-but-one done, knowing that I could not remember.   He advised a shot...

I wonder what it means that I am uneasy in mid-day sitting with a book  for pleasure Retirement meant that I did not have to fall asleep with a book in my lap So now sometimes I deliberately arrange not to have a book when night comes and I am too pointless to go to bed Still I do not know enough to come competent to dawn but now it does not matter so much No one is listening What do they do for pleasure Those who taught literature by grinding through Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce Moby Dick or The Wasteland when retirement comes What do they read in the middle of the day when it does not matter if they know more or less than those who come first time From where did it come that there are things I ought to be doing rather than this book In the middle of a day

Nathaniel Jao Montri Hubbard Sometimes when you get older you forget the real pleasures of life.

Thank God A'mighty,  the Republicans have learned  their lesson!  They are meeting now to set a new course for the future. They learned that no Blacks  will vote for them, and that most Hispanics and Asians will not, either.   Women find them grotesque, as they debate the niceties of rape, and put new batteries in their vaginal probes.   Their campaign to  make it difficult for known Democrats  to get to the polls worked, but it made everyone mad. Bobby Jindal says it is time for them to stop being "the Stupid Party", although Bobby Jindal  might not be the best spokesman for the way forward. After the 2008 election,  the Republican strategy, forged right after that Kenyan-- Barack Obama from Hawaii and Chicago-- took office, thereby tainting every leftover hope for White Testosterone, was simple and elegant: oppose everything Obama wanted! That didn't work out too well. Obama wanted health ca...

How can anybody, alive in the 20th or 21st century, vote for anybody who seriously believes that the big bang or evolution are "lies straight from the pit of Hell"?   That's what Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia believes.   To vote for people like Paul Broun is like voting for ignorance; like voting for dirt floors, or sailing off the edge of earth if you go too far west.  It is like believing that demons cause diarrhea, and that the cure is to sacrifice a chicken.   (Well, I gave that argument away, didn't I:  demons do  cause diarrhea.) How can people, whatever their religion or politics, deny things we know?   Science is a rigorous system for finding and refining what we know .  Even if you think we have the right to believe in tooth fairies if we want to, because they are harmless, or in goblins and gremlins and good fairies, just for fun, no sensible, sane person thinks it is rational to deny what we know .   Politicians ...

And may I say, "Just in time, too!" The primary season for the next Presidential election has begun! We know that because the Republicans in Congress are scared silly that Hillary Clinton is going to run, so they--in the sure and certain way they do everything--have put an end to that!   "Are you aware," they asked her in a hearing about an attack on an embassy in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed,  "that four people were killed?  It's your fault, you know!"   Oh, they are sharp and relentless, those guys! Idiots. They have had no problem with thousands of people killed and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They had no problem cutting funds to protect our overseas embassies:  yes, they did!  But Hillary should have been packing, in Libya!   I don't know whether Hillary Clinton will run, as the Republicans fear she will.  But if she does, they will have reason to fear.  They looked like fools.

"Have you seen the sunrise!", Mari exclaimed. (She was up before me, and when Mari gets up before me, she always seems to notice something that requires me to wake up, and sit up, and get out of bed.)   I performed my ablutions, found my camera, and discovered that the sunrise had gone away, and that the sun had climbed above the clouds it, only an ablution or two earlier, had ignited from below.   No matter!  Mari had taken a picture while my eyes were still sealed by sleep wax and a dead battery.   I will take her word for it.  It was probably beautiful.

Four years ago,  we did something amazing: we elected a Black President. This year, we did something even more amazing. We re-elected him! It is not amazing simply because he is Black, but because we are not ever again going to go back  to where we were before we broke down that wall. We know that now. We still have not  ever elected a woman to the Presidency, but we all know now that we will do that, too. If not next time,  then soon.  Surely soon! And he--Barack Obama-- has not gone back, either, to debate what we used to wonder: whether it could be or could work. He has gone on-- is going on-- to what needs to be next. History gave him almost a hopeless recession, and he not only has managed that, but managed to do so with a wall of left-over racism between him and what he needed to do. Now, he has said, let us end these wars, teach our children, protect our poor, and sieze this moment to become more ...

Stan Musial.   A St. Louis Cardinal from 1941 to 1963. My first baseball hero. I never saw a major league baseball game until I moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1954, at just about the same time the New York Giants became the San Francisco Giants:  Hello, Willy Mays!   How did Stan Musial become a hero to a sub-sized, not very athletic kid in Washington State?  Maybe for that reason.   I played basketball at Weyerhaeuser Grade School #303, in what we called, "The Old School House", which had been where my mother had gone to school, twenty years earlier.  It had become a gymnasium/auditorium, with a ceiling about twelve feet up.  We worked on our layups.  I wasn't very good at basketball.   Baseball was more fun.  The field between the new grade school and the old school house was a ball field, if a ball field could do without grass on the infield.  It was ubiquitous Washington State gravelly dirt, but it did have ...

If you took I-15 northeast out of Los Angeles,  you might find yourself in Barstow,  and if you persisted in following the highway,  and your radiator did not start coughing dust, you might come to Las Vegas.   And, as if that were not enough,  your should eventually come to Salt Lake City. However, if you did not drive that far,  you might find yourself still in the district of Assemblyman Tim Donnelly.   Were that to happen, and should you take my advice, you should get back in the car and head for Barstow, or Sin City; somewhere beyond the reach of Mr. Donnelly and how God wants you to live. "Guns," Mr. Donnelly says, "are used an average of three million times a year. . . . That's like 6,900 times a day." Oh, Mr. Donnelly admits, "That's the high end of the statistics. Other people say its only 200 times a day.  Whatever  that number is, they are used to defend human life. They are used to defend our property and...

I will tell you what nature never intended: nature never intended that a potato should be cored so that bacon, sage, anchovies, and garlic could be stuffed up its new tract, and then baked. "An old-fashioned corer will work," the recipe said.  "Stuff in all the delectable goodness, and then plug the ends with the core, which now lies all over the counter, except for the parts that lie on the floor. Do not worry about the core sticking out a little!" I didn't have to worry about that.   The plugs fell out before I got to the oven.   And after I got to the oven, too.   The whole delectable goodness tasted like a potato without bacon, sage, anchovies, and garlic.  I wish I had a picture of them: you must imagine lovely new potatoes, the color of tidy Yukons,  lying on an oven drydock as if they had been torpedoed lengthwise-- not by a proper torpedo, but by an apple corer-- parts missing, partly mutilated, and ashamed of how they ...

"Look up!" she said.  "These drops will dilate your eyes." Then, of course, they brought papers for me to sign, and marched me from one room to another.   After more "Look up!", "Look down!" and all around, everybody disappeared, promising to come back before lunch.  Then I saw the chair!  Good Lord!  It was nearly twice as wide as its normal partner!   "Is the floor reinforced, too?" I asked the nurse.  She nodded.   It was an eye clinic, not a weight-loss waiting room.  

Pot on the Patio I never thought 'twould happen! Yesterday, fighting valiantly against a deep depression  brought on by cold weather-- so cold that, at night, Jack Frost came tiptoeing in on little cat feet-- I gathered together nearly every root vegetable I could carry and made a vegetable,  beef, barley soup.   It wasn't a very good soup, but there was a lot of it, since I have not internalized that, in this marriage, there are only two of us.  Do not ask me what primal urge lies beneath that observation:  it is just a fact that I always cook too much for too few of us.   Our refrigerator, like many refrigerators,  was not designed  for convenience.   The freezer is up on top,  with the ice maker occupying one corner, and the refrigerator space occupies the lower half, so that the most used items are conveniently at hand if you are three feet tall, and do not need  adjustable shelving.  The ve...

We, here in Baja Arizona--you know how contagious all this secession business is--are trying to focus on two things at once, and it is not easy for some of us.   First, climate change is real, and one of the results of that is that the hot places are getting hotter:   Ouch!   And, second, there has to be some way to put some distance between us and Phoenix.  "Phoenix" is a term referring to Jan Brewer, and Joe Arapaio, and a fine and fair focus on political tea in what is still our capitol city.  Thus, Baja Arizona (Lower Arizona, as in Baja California).   We lived in Minnesota for a decade, until recently.  In Minnesota, "folks" ("folks" are what "people" are, elsewhere)  sometimes referred to the state of Iowa as "Baja Minnesota", so I, having once been an Iowan, too, am used to public scorn.   Texas has always pretended to be a nation, and still has delusions of the Alamo, not seeming to understand that one of the reasons wh...

Photo by Perth Weather Live Photo from blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com Those are haboobs: dust storms caused by strong winds.   The term, "haboob" is Arabic, and I don't know how it came to be used in the west, but I will guess that its use is one of the by-products of war, and veterans returning.   When I first went to Alaska, as a kid, to go halibut fishing, I was struck with the names along the Northwest Coast and beyond:  The Strait of Juan de Fuca, or Cordova (Puerto de Cordova), for instance.  And there were Russian names, and English names.  All of the explorers left names familiar to them on our maps.  Veterans returning from the Spanish-American War brought Spanish names to baptize small towns in Iowa.  There is even a Norway, Iowa.  And now we have haboobs. Climate change--which is not real, you know:  perfectly respectable politicians say so--has produced fierce dust storms in Australia, too, and one of their storms...

In My Fair Lady, Pickering said to 'Enry "Iggins: " Tonight, old man, you did it   You did it...You did it  You said that you would do it  And indeed you did  I thought that you would rue it  I doubted you'd do it  But now I must admit it  That succeed you did You should get a medal  Or be even made a knight" To which "Enry replied:   "It was nothing  Really nothing" And so it was.   We have done it, too. We have eliminated poverty. The proof of it appeared during our last election: nobody ever referred to poor people;  only to Middle Class Americans and Job Providers. Nobody was poor! Oh, there may have been a few people out of work, and some who still did not have health care, and there may have been some homeless people, and, here and there, some hungry kids, and such, but nobody said anything about it.   All of our energy and political will has been channeled into taxing the rich a teeny, l...

In a rare display of humor, Republicans have reappointed Our Belle, Michele Bachmann, to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  Ms. Bachmann is the wacky woman whose handbag is filled with a long list of conspiracy theories, and witch-hunting tools.  She thinks Barack Obama is trying to impose Sharia law on the U.S., and that Congress itself is filled with Un-American types plotting to overthrow our government, the first step of which is to insist that she show some indication of common sense.   I do not know what drives me to think of this, but every time Our Belle says something loony, I wonder what it is about True Religion that drives politicians to say wacky things.   It is not that I so much fear for the intelligence of the House Committee on Intelligence.  After all, Ms. Bachmann graced the Committee during her last, stellar service on that committee.  I fear most for Brent Mussberger, and the future of football in America: ...

John Stewart has a way, not only with political analysis, but with words to express it.   Thinking about how the Republican House of Representatives delayed approving aid for the destruction done by Hurricane Sandy for as long as they possibly could, he said: "What would Jesus--or any other human being that isn't an asshole--do?" *   *   * And here we are:  offended by his use of the word, "asshole", but not by the games politicians play.   Government isn't too big:  our sense of decency is too small.  

"Oh, good!" we said to each other.  "We can help take care of our newest grandson!  What a sweet little tad!" We are in Tucson, now.  The tad is about nine months old, now.   "Want some gruel, Tad?", Mari asked. "Let's see what-cha got," the little tad said.   I don't know about you:  I didn't have an attitude until I was about 80; about the time I got back to Tucson and met our newest grandson.  

I keep thinking of a goodbye line at a party:  "Don't think I haven't had a good time, because I haven't." I keep trying to understand the philosophy of the Republican Party, but I haven't.  They speak of fiscal responsibility, but they are the Party that conducted two wars without paying for it (not even putting them in a budget:  just making special appropriations), cutting taxes without regard to budgetary needs, and initiating a medical drugs program that made drug companies deliriously happy.   They hate the very notion of a federal government, but run like a herd of bison to be elected to office in it.  When they get into office, they continue to run like a stampeded herd of bison, trampling, thundering, bellowing, and blowing.   They accuse almost everybody of being fiscally irresponsible, but will not cut the wartime military budget, even after the war is over, rail against unemployed people, immigrants, the poor, while seeming to defend th...

Was ever there, in the history of humankind,  a kinder sight in early morn,  than a newspaper and a cup of coffee; freshly ground coffee, and re-hashed news?   (Oh, maybe, but maybe I was younger then.)

When we moved into our house, the shower in our bathroom had small venetian blinds over the tryptic windows.  What a mess that would become!  So we had a handy-dandy-glassman install "Rain" windows, designed to let in light but still provide privacy.   Perfect! Almost.  One of the panels cracked!    I tried several times to call the firm, but this is, after all, the holiday season.   If you look, very carefully, you can see the crack in the photo to the left, and the tape I placed over the crack to hold the house together.   No, let us be honest:  the crack went away by itself.  One fine morning, the crack was gone!   So I recreated it. I taped a thin grass stem to the outside of the glass.   It had not been a crack.  It had been a wandering grass stem.   And that is why I believe in miracles, and goblins, and things. Had it not been the holidays, I would have gotten through to the glass firm...