Reflecting Dad and the Negligee

I came across this old photo. That is my dad there at the top and reflected in the mirror on the left. This was 1973 at some doctor’s thing, my dad being a doctor himself. The photo was torn but taped back together. Everyone is looking at the camera, everyone except the woman sitting to the left of my father – the one who thought it would be a perfect night to wear her negligee to the doctor’s thing.

Her! While she appears to be with the dude to her right, she’s looking across the table at

this guy. Who from this angle looks a bit too, what?, goofy? for the no doubt older negligee lady? I mean, she’s been around the block and that boy looks like he just fell off the turnip truck. But it’s a room with a mirror, so there are two images of each person, and we can see what she is looking at…

This. And it makes sense now. Doesn’t he look way cooler from this angle? Much better from her angle than from ours! Negligee lady’s right. This dude’s cool.

Here’s the whole pic.

That’s my mom – the person at the table furthest to the left in the neat sleeveless white number with the big broach.

Always the best dressed, best looking lady in the room. Now, I don’t want to be mean, but…

This lady is freaking me out. The lighting in that room was not kind to her countenance. Although that vest says outsider at this doctor’s thing so maybe she’s like a proto-Goth and hoping to go into the future in this one photo as the coolest alt chick in the place. Or maybe it’s the red hair… She’s quite beautiful, although not as beautiful as my mom. This, according to me.

Too much sherry, gramps?

I’m finding that I’m really enjoying just lying my head back. At my desk, in the car, my reading chair and everywhere else. Sometimes it feels like it has to go back, like it’s teetering on my spine and just ready to fall one way or the other, so I have to choose and I’m choosing back. Sometimes my eyes close.

My grandpa was the sort of man who would fall asleep at a party or in mid-conversation. And now when my head begins to list, I think of him, and of the fact that he was from a generation of people who would never take advantage of a sleeping person with a sharpie.

I’m a terrible sleeper. Up late and light sleep and need to eat cookies at two am and stuff like that. Maybe my grandpa was too, and that’s why he nodded off frequently wherever. I did not know him for long and so don’t know if this was something he did throughout his life. Or was he like me and so now I’m descending into this newfound narcolepsy, and the joy of allowing my head to lie back is just the start of my slippery slide into the ultimate social faux pas. “You fell asleep. Oh, were you bored with us? The conversation didn’t tickle your fancy, so you decided to, rather than fake interest, just go to fuckin’ sleep?”

So if you see me in public and I’m sleeping know that it was a powerful genetic influence that led to that sleeping man, and not too much whiskey or actual narcolepsy.

YHTFiS

You have to find it somewhere.

What if we chased the evil idiots out of The Real US of A™ and agreed as a nation to go back to pre-trump budgets (and rules and morals and exceptionalism) with the addition of YGTFiS (you can read each letter like LGBTQ or maybe break it into YGT FiS and “Yat Fis” – the G is silent.) We freeze the overall budget forever (tied to inflation), but allow the departments to move budget money from department to department, not wholly but a bit here and a bit there. In emergencies, whatever. And so if a department has a shortfall (or the public wants more money shifted from here to there) they can ask for that and the asked departments say yay or nay. And the departments who give up funds are rewarded somehow – maybe some advantage at the 4-year reset by congress, who cannot make changes that exceed 20%. What exactly does that mean? I have no idea and know exactly: “But how would it work?” and “Well, twenty percent.”

But back to YHTFiS, or Yacht Fish or “aight” Fis. Yeah. That’s perfect! Easy to say and will appeal to Gen z, some of whose pop heroes elided alright to aight and popularized it through music, television, marketing… Now, that I think about it, this was way before Gen Z. This is pure millennial and they’re old enough now to be bitter and jaded, god bless em. Okay, so we’ll have to focus our campaign on millennials (bitter and jaded), Gen X (over it), Boomers (going boom as we speak), and whoever’s hanging on from the generation that preceded the boomers (what are you still doing alive?).

Look. The whole point of this was to go back to the budget levels of the Biden administration and begin with a rule that states that as a nation we can never raise the budget beyond this level. We can lower it, but it cannot exceed it. So, the point of the YHT FiS was that the whole of government will be a part of the allocations of funds because, well, YHTFiS. Departments would elect one allocator generale (pronounced with a soft G) (Oh, and a “lay” for the e on the end). Allocator Generales. That’s it.

So the allocator generales are elected within the department – one person for every hundred workers in that department (not to exceed five [5]) – and they meet every year to tell of their accomplishments and ask for what they need most. In a big hall. I think we could add in purple robes – a nod to Prince, mostly, but it will give the allocator generales a bit more gravitas, and every single allocator generale has to be present in the huge, maybe gothic, hall without mobile phones or computers or any other distractions – just paper and No. 2 pencils because that’s what we used – and no getting up to sharpen your pencil! Bring plenty. You can sharpen them during one of the breaks that come on the hour. We could make them pee into mountain dew bottles. No. I hate plastic.

So the few hundred United States Federal Allocator Generales would – after every department has given their presentations (PowerPoints will be accepted but we’d encourage them explore other options, shit, use AI, we don’t care), they’ll go back to their sleeping quarters (probably a Sheraton) and disrobe. (They have to wear the robes whenever in public during the three-day Federal Allocator Generales Expo or FAG-E. Maybe they could have trucker hats with that on em – logoized. Oh, yeah, so disrobed in their sleeping quarters they can immerse themselves in the coffee-table-style book that is provided and that retells each department’s story with nude pictures. No! Not nude pictures! And it would, wait, let’s not call the departments, but kingdoms, or villages, like the Kingdom of Health and Human Services or the Village of Public Safety. And through the perusing they will come to peace with how they will vote the following day. We might as well make the three-day Federal Allocator Generale Expo a federal holiday so people can watch it on C-span, and also a bacchanalia, so people can be drunk, full and having sex in the streets. Three days.

I hope you’ll join me in supporting YHTFiS and celebrating FAG-E – both the expo and public debauchery. And don’t forget, we’re also be selling purple robes with your favorite allocator generale’s name on the back, in the lobby, after the show.

Hinge Pin Door Stop Wall Protector with Rubber Tip, Design House Polished Brass Adjustable Door Stoppers

I broke mine.

Photo of Hinge Pin Door Stop Wall Protector with Rubber Tip, Design House Polished
Brass Adjustable Door Stopper’s severed arm.

Or mine broke. I didn’t do it. oh, crap I did do it, it wasn’t quite falling off and so I bent it off, but it was just a matter of time! I can’t be blamed for the Hinge Pin Door Stop Wall Protector with Rubber Tip, Design House Polished Brass Adjustable Door Stopper’s ultimate demise.

Do what you need to make you feel better

It was 1976 – the Bicentennial, which was a rather big deal: flags, parades, celebrations, fireworks*, limited edition coins. I was twelve and had just discovered marijuana and was listening to a local radio station on my clock radio and on comes “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether.”

“Do what you need to make you feel better, do what you need to make you feel!”

I loved it! Had to have it!

So I waited for the break after the songs to hear the deejay say who it was and he didn’t! I was so pissed off. But I finally heard it again, got the name, went out to Hot Licks music store and head shop, bought it and I now owned The Alan Parsons Project “Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allen Poe”. It’s a great album. Somehow they always came off to me like a more family-friendly progressive rock band. Emerson Lake and Palmer made some great music but it’s not for kids. It’ll fuck with their minds.

Just kidding. The Alan Parsons Project seemed to be making music for the smart kids (to wit: they do an amazing job of incorporating Poe’s poetry into this album), unlike say, Aerosmith. It’s all very theatrical with operatic and classical flourishes all around and side two is mostly a little rock opera. Big emotions and a little trippy. Maybe that’s why I associated the band with the theater kids in school.

It was always a bit of a mystery to me who Alan Parsons was. The band seemed to consciously and purposefully not showcase Alan Parsons, who was one of two main members – hence the “project”. Parsons was an engineer on Abbey Road, Let it Be and The Dark Side of the Moon, among many other great albums. The other guy, Eric Woolfson, was a songwriter and composer, according to Wikipedia, where I got all this information. This was their first album, which I did not know until today, and most of the musicians were from Pilot (Oh, ho ho, it’s Magic!) and Ambrosia (Baby, Come back).

Tales of mystery and imagination. Makes sense.

*Back in those days we saw fireworks maybe twice a year if we were lucky and somehow geographically near where they were being blown off. I’ll be honest, I never have to see another firework in my life. Redundant redundant redundant. They also fuck with my mental health. But have you seen those huge drone shows all lit up and transmogrifying all over the sky? Totally cool!

Mary, mother of truth

Mary M. Coady nailed it in her letter to the Minnesota Star Tribune today:

We seem to make up words to not use the word lie. Just to be clear, fake news is a lie. Misinformation is a lie. Alternative facts are a lie. Revisionism is a lie. We teach our children to tell the truth and anything else is a lie. Or remember the word fib? I wish the media wouldn’t shy away from saying something is a lie. When someone says that Ukraine started the war, the media should emphatically state that is a lie and that Russia started the war in 2022!

From your lips to God’s ears, Ms. Coady. And so should we. She’s absolutely right. Call it. Every time. Anytime you hear yet another lie from the republicans in any context, say it out loud, “That is a lie.” Like a religious mantra. “That is a lie.”

How about we just go ahead and start a religion: Truthism. But with one moral: Tell the truth.* One Psalm: Lying hurts. One holiday: Every day is truth day. One hymnal: Any song with “the truth will set you free” in it.

So someone says something, in front of you, or on the television, or in something you’re reading, and you know it to be untrue, say it out loud, “That is a lie.” And be ready with your sources and that is all you say, like a captured soldier who will give only name, rank and serial number, “I will email or text my sources.” Like Spock.

Let’s just stop putting up with it. It’s a lie. It’s a lie! It’s a god-damned lie! No. “That is a lie.” “That is a lie.” “That is a lie.”

Our sacred sound and invocation. Our own om.

What if it’s all because of glasses?

What if over the millions of years of evolution each of our eyesight had evolved to be what was best for each of us; the best eyesight for each of us to experience and see the world, to perceive what is happening, to respond, ergo, to survive?

But then we invented glasses and yes, we could all see better, but at the same time started to go just little bit crazy with our evolved eyesight decoupled from our evolved personalities? And with each generation that crazy gets just a little bit stronger?

And that’s what’s happening now? All because of stupid glasses?

Embrace the program fully

“…embrace the program fully.”

I came across that phrase in a quasi-religious book just now and I chafed at it. As a young person I didn’t believe a thing about what they were talking about in our church, but for the be kind to your neighbor and that sort of thing. And I really didn’t like the pressure, the “see you next week!”, the forced camaraderie. I did, no do, like the little flour sprinkled buns with ham and cheese in the church basement though.

I also responded that way in sports. I played park board baseball and football, church basketball, ski raced and ran cross country and I never once felt good or bad about how I did. I tried! I really did. And I had fun. But I didn’t care. I couldn’t get my head around why I should care. “Here’s a made up scenario, now react emotionally to it.” Hey! That’s entertainment!

And to embrace the program fully, you must now react emotionally fully.

Fully doesn’t seem like a real word right now to me. You do that? Suddenly you see a word and think, huh? It could be four letters and you’ve seen it a bajillion times but suddenly it doesn’t look right. Is that how you spell boil?

I do have trouble reacting emotionally, like a lot of people and men in particular. And mine extends to the above. Oh, work, too. Similar inability to be a corporate guy. I once wrote an article about 3M employees who “bleed 3M red.” Super fans. Stans. Blew my mind.

I used to say, “I’m not a joiner,” and it is true. But I think I need to be more of a joiner. Like the church; I’ve attended a few AA meetings and enjoyed the people and the positive effects on my own sobriety. And sports; I could find a bar with a softball team. But then they’ll say, “we missed you last week” or “you’re playing again next year, right?” and I’ll freak out. I gotta get over that.

I often think that I could never organize a game of ultimate frisbee, because that’s way more nearby friends than I got.

Yesterday and Today

[Yesterday]

I’m sick. And I’m sad. And I think I’m losing my mind. Nothing’s falling into place like it tends to. In fact, things seem to be falling upward and out of my control. But I’m sick – sore throat, fever, sleepy as hell, so the falling upward is a good description to my feverish mind. It truly feels like life is being sucked up around me into some slo-mo tornado so I can reach up to try to, but grab nothing. It’s out of reach. It’s out of control. It’s nightmarish.

It’s the emotions
that swirl like air
whirling the debris
of life
of which
I’ve lost control.

***

[Today: So my therapist tells me to journal when I’m at a point like I was yesterday and I got this far in my writing when my phone rang and it was a good friend who just called to see how I was doing. I was able to articulate my frustrations and fears about life, love, work, money and the state of the nation. He talked me back from the ledge and we were soon laughing. He was just doing what friends do and didn’t have any idea how incredibly well-timed, important and helpful it was to me. Keep your friends close. And don’t be afraid to reach out to them before you get to this point – something I need to get much better at.]

Busy Busy

I’m a busy guy and it stresses me out a bit. I run a business and own half of another one. I have two kids – 12^th grade and off to college next year, and one in her second year at the university, I have a large house (2,500 square feet) with a detached garage with a second-floor office space, about an acre of land to take care of, family, friends and all the rest. Many of you can see yourself in much of that. It’s life and it’s freaking busy.

But I have friends that have pretty much none of that and yet they are equally stressed and complain of being way too busy, and I have one friend who doesn’t work but has a few hobbies and watches a lot of TV, and he’s the most stressed of all. It’s like whatever life we lead, we will be stressed. Maybe not when we’re old and have enough of a nest egg to live comfortably. But that was my parents, and my dad would absolutely stress out if I hadn’t taken the dock in at the cabin in mid-September before the lake froze (in late November).

I suppose we’ve evolved to need stress. Our bodies know it’s important to survive in the world – some sort of stress response. We need to run from lions, you know?