To prove that White men in their 60s can be woke and with-it, I've started fasting each day from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. This is not just a Lenten thing. No nothing during those hours, a full quarter of my life. Nutella, Oreos, vegetables, animal products (including ice cream and beef tongue tacos from Taco Taxi), nonalcoholic beverages—all strictly forbidden, I need to "cleanse."
Also, thinking of becoming a Buddhist even though I have ugly feet and don't like sandals.
Here's our good boy enjoying his sunny spot on Easter. You can't tell, but he's 18, give or take, and blind, which has affected his mobility. He doesn't do stairs, and there have been accidents. The front porch now has everything he needs and he's consigned to it at night. I'm a stomach sleeper and miss his weighty presence on the back of my legs at night, but he seems content with his shrinking world. He eats, but I can tell when petting him that he's lost weight, and I'm afraid a bad day is coming. If it happens at the vet's, I'm imagining the ride home, one girl sobbing inconsolably and the other asking, "Now can we finally get a dog?"
Shooting baskets in the driveway with my older daughter when we are joined by the neighbor boy down the street. He's in third grade and plainly views himself as an interloper—just stands off to the side and only shoots when one of us passes him the ball. But it would be wrong to say he stands to the side shyly as he keeps up a steady stream of rather learned commentary, such as:
"I assume you realize that basketball would not be possible if it weren't for gravity, because you'd shoot and the ball would just float off into space."
This is not the kind of conversation we're used to and I try to rise to the occasion by pointing out that, while true, it's complicated by the fact that everything else, like the hoop and we ourselves, would also be floating off into space. It'd be a crazy game! After a brief but perceptible pause, he replies: "I know that." But I think he hadn't thought of it. Thus the pause, as he considered it for the first time, and I attribute "I know that" to his wounded intellectual pride. According to my own theory, I bested a third grader!
Inside, I cut cake and my girls argue loudly over which piece is bigger. I have to cut a third piece, a sliver, to add to one of the plates. Thankfully, I do not overcompensate and this settles it—evidently doesn't occur to them that by keeping up the argument they could get more and more cake, theoretically. I know, I know, I should let the younger one choose but only after the older one cuts. While eating, they discuss whether "hell" is a swear word. This is more like it! Younger girl argues that it can't be since it's contained within "hello" and: "They wouldn't make it so that you have to swear to say a regular word." Older girl rolls eyes. Immature, smart ass dad tries to think of a regular word with consecutive letters s-h-i-t and briefly wonders whether "base hit" qualifies since the "e" is silent. However,
So maybe she's onto something!
I'm among those who tend to regard with scorn all the interest bestowed upon Britain's Royal Family. Why they don't just do away with it is beyond me. Seems like it'd be better for everyone, including the Royals. I've sometimes imagined one of them as a young person, just old enough to have thoughts that keep them awake nights, so one is lying there in his perfect little palace bed thinking, "One life to live, and I have to be the freakin' Prince of Wales!" No one else his age has to wear a necktie. I guess my scorn is polluted by a measure of sympathy. Not too much. We all have burdens to bear but usually Oprah isn't interested.
There is, however, one aspect of the Blockbuster Interview that has captured my attention. That would be the reaction of Brits who tuned in to find out about the royal soap opera and were then swept away, not by the revelation that Meghan had contemplated suicide, but by the "adverts" on American TV. They have the NHS (National Health Service), what some of us call "socialized medicine," and as a result are not accustomed to meds being hawked during the commercial interludes. Their shocked social media commentary places us suddenly in the position of seeing ourselves as others see us: what we don't think twice about strikes them as sketch comedy of a particularly dark variety, the effect of course heightened by the fact that the human intelligence behind the ad is oblivious to its own joke. Here is a fairly representative specimen of British perplexity on this point; you can go here for more:
i’m watching the meghan interview recording and yet again i can’t understand why american tv ads are like “ask your doctor for…” or “tell your doctor…” why the fuck would you be the one to tell a DOCTOR what medicine to give you????? maybe i’m too european to get it but wtf
— agvta♑️ (@siIverskyy) March 8, 2021
Not sure I'd want to live without March Madness and Opening Day, but, on the other hand, during soccer matches she does not find herself fielding questions on ED from the young sports fans of the household.
I have insurance, so this seemed like a lot for a colonoscopy and an office visit. When I called, word salad but no satisfactory resolution. I asked whether it was common to pay about $300 out of pocket for a common, recommended cancer screening. He did not have an opinion about that. Next, I proceeded to appropriate a Jim Gaffigan joke, word-smithed to fit the situation: "I would never have consented to be violated in that fashion if I knew it was also going to cost me $300.” Total effing silence. Evidently not a Gaffigan fan. Maybe it was my delivery.
We'd had enough of each other, so I called the insurance company for another twenty minutes of elevator music before a really helpful person came on the line. "It's common to receive two claims, one for a 'facilities charge' and the other for the practitioner's service," she explained. "In the case of your colonoscopy, we received a claim for the facilities charge, which we paid, but we never received a claim for the actual doctor bill. If we received such a claim, of course we'd cover it. Similarly with the office visit. No claim received for the doctor bill." Armed with this information, I placed another call to 1-888-313-1492. Just my luck to talk to the same guy again! He still had dementia and ended up advising me to "contact the individual provider to straighten this out." I thought that's the activity I was currently engaged in! I guess it's my job to get different parts of their organization to communicate with each other so that I don't take it in the ass again?
I reverted to a tactic that has sometimes worked for me in the past. I ignored the problem and hoped it would disappear. After a couple of weeks, I got an email from them. The new strategy had failed. I still owed the above impossible amount. In the interim, I had heard a story on NPR in which it was reported that, in America, it's rare to receive a medical bill that is both comprehensible and accurate. The former deficiency makes it hard to detect the latter deficiency. If consumers suspect something is wrong, they're almost certainly right. Yes, I had thought, but you need a sequel concerning the challenges consumers face when trying to explain to the submitter of the bill the errors in said bill. Anyway, yesterday I placed another call to 1-888-313-1492. It seems only this one guy works there! The sound of his voice reminded me of what a judge said about pornography*: beforehand, I would not have been able to describe it, but soon as I heard it I knew it was him. We started over. He talks with more people than I do and most likely only I realized we'd had the pleasure of being previously acquainted. I explained again my theory of the case, the "facilities charge" but not the "practitioner's charge," blah, blah, and this time, like a gift from above, he replied, "Ah, yes, I see what you mean, I will put those claims through and get this taken care of for you."
Possibly our first and second conversations occurred on his first day of flying solo on his new job? I feel like I made about $450 on one phone call and am wondering what to blow it on. I've heard of the sunk-cost fallacy, and that doesn't seem to apply, so maybe I do deserve about 30 boxes of cheap wine. Here's the thing about the cheap stuff: its alcohol content is the same. The end of this Public Service Announcement but here's Gaffigan:
* “I can’t define ‘pornography,’ but I know it when I see it.”
I enjoyed this interview, between New York Times staffer Sopan Deb and Zach Zarba, a veteran NBA referee. Here's a teaser, the most interesting exchange of the interview to me (aside from an amusing story about the young Kobe Bryant):
Deb: Do superstars get more leeway?
Zarba: I would disagree and go the other way and I would say that the majority of superstar players in our league don't get all the calls and don't get as many whistles as they deserve.
I guess I would have expected an official either to acknowledge that conventional wisdom about a star system is true, thereby winning points for "candor," or else to defend the honor of his profession by insisting that refs treat star players the same as everyone else. The view that star players get the shaft from officials therefore struck me as actually candid. From my long-ago experience umpiring ball games, I have an idea how this could be true without impugning anyone's good faith. I felt like my judgment could be affected by what I expected to happen, and that it was practically impossible not to have these expectations. For example, a batter hits a sinking line drive into the outfield. I think it's a hit for one second, two seconds—I can't suppress the thought—then the racing outfielder dives and gloves the ball at turf level: Was it a trap or a good catch? Well, from the instant the ball was hit, I'd been thinking: "can't be caught." It seems to me entirely possible that your perception of what actually happened can be colored by what you thought was going to happen—or, to put it another way, by what you thought was possible. It's not hard to see how such a psychological process operating in a good-faith referee might work against an athlete capable of defying expectations.
On the other hand, in the NBA the same officials are working games with the same players over and over again. Zach Zarba knows who is a star, right? Maybe if I had known that the diving player was the Kobe Bryant of outfielders, my expectation about what was going to happen would have shifted and the result of the headlong dive would look more like a good catch. Only thing I'm sure of is that referees are human, a point that comes to the fore when you talk to them, if Deb's conversation with Zarba is representative.
****
Ten seconds of every hour devoted to social media is worth the callous on the tip of my scrolling finger. I know I won't get 59 minutes and 50 seconds back but here's the harvest from the other ten ticks, my candidate for Tweet of the Day:
don’t even bother clicking - I checked, they don’t show you the sandwich. https://t.co/X0fxToheAg
— hend amry (@LibyaLiberty) September 23, 2020
John Boorman is the English movie director best known, at least to me, for Deliverance. Reading up on him, I see that one of his other movies, Point Blank (1967), has like Deliverance been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry on account of being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." I know nothing about Point Blank beyond what I just read in Wikipedia: a crime thriller starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and Carroll O'Connor (who would soon become famous as Archie Bunker), it was ignored on its release but later gained a cultish following.
Boorman also is the author of a memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy. If the following passage concerning one of his misadventures with Lee Marvin is representative, it must be a rollicking good read:
We had arrived together in Lee's Chrysler station wagon. He was staggering, drunk. I begged him to let me drive. "Fuck you." He drew back a fist. He had a whole repertoire of violent gestures, many of them cribbed from his hero, Toshiro Mifune. I tried to grab the keys, but he slashed me with his imaginary samurai sword. These were movie blows an inch short of your neck or chin.
I snatched the keys and got into the driver's seat, the women in back. "Get in Lee." Another battle of wills. How could he meekly submit, this warrior, this conqueror? We pleaded with him. He stalked and staggered around the car, raining blows on it. Finally he found a way of saving face. He climbed up and crouched on the roof rack. Despite our entreaties, he would not come down. I decided to drive slowly down the length of the pier, hoping that the cool ocean air might sober him up. I stopped as we got to the public road. I got out. He snarled at me, would not get down. I was at my wits' end. The streets were deserted. I drove slowly down the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu. Flashing lights in my rearview mirror—sirens. I pulled over. The patrolman approached the car, warily loosening his revolver holster. He looked up, then at me. "Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?"
The punchline is so good I almost forgot my amazement upon learning that Lee Marvin drove a Chrysler grocery–getter with a roof rack.
H/t Scott Shapiro, who retweeted John Frankensteiner's tweeted excerpt.
After seeing this picture somewhere, I took a few minutes to work up a composite of Hell's leading citizen: an outspoken bisexual Catholic lady who's devoted to her vibrator and drinks Chablis directly from the box.
His t-shirt says that coronavirus is God's judgment so maybe he should have added "old people with co-morbidities" to his list of degenerates.
Got out of my car and took a picture of this sign just so I could snottily observe that 35W and 1st Avenue are a block apart and parallel with each other. But now you know they're open (and their longitude). I also love how the phone number was a faint after thought.
Since I'm having fun with their advertising campaign, here's some free publicity connecting with jillions of devoted readers: Hibachi Buffet is on Lake Street a block west of 35W. The sign was at 42nd Street & Bloomington Avenue, which is about three miles from there. I wonder how many of these signs they've stuck in the ground?
I've never eaten at Hibachi Buffet but can vouch for the rice noodle soup at Pho Tau Bay, just on the other side of the KMart site. Once, as my daughter Claire prepared to salt her rice, the server grabbed the shaker right out of her hand and told her in Vietnamese to use soy sauce. So shocked that she reverted to her native tongue. Then, laughing at herself, but still somewhat agitated by what she'd almost witnessed, she set the soy sauce bottle in front of Claire and repeated herself, this time in English. Claire by now was sitting far back in the booth, bug-eyed. It was the first time anyone had objected to her ruining her rice.
She also puts chocolate syrup on orange sherbet.
My mom has checked out of the hereafter in order to join the protests here on Earth.
This is too obscure to help in the event you one day go on Jeopardy, but I put it forward as an example of the (arguably) fun facts you can learn whiling away your life on social media. Today someone posed on Twitter a question about a philosopher who deserves more renown. I suppose they know that a lot of their followers are philosophy professors or something. I'd at least heard of all the candidates mentioned in the replies, except for one: Philippa Foot. Now I've looked her up and it turns out she's the English philosopher who invented the Trolley Problem. You may have heard about it recently, in the context of discussions about the ethical distribution of scarce medical resources. In the Trolley Problem, Foot described a trolley heading down a track to which five people are tied. By throwing a switch, you can send the trolley down a different track where it will kill only one person. Foot was interested in why it seems you ought to throw the switch, thereby saving four lives, though at the same time almost all of us (I think) agree that you cannot kill someone in order to harvest organs that would save the lives of four desperately ill people.
But that's not the fun fact. Philippa Foot was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. Her mother, Esther, was Cleveland's daughter, and was actually born in the White House on September 9, 1893, early in her dad's second term. Esther married some British military hotshot and their philosopher daughter was born in 1920.
But maybe you are more interested in George Clooney. This is highly entertaining.
I think this short film—less than a half hour—is funny and oddly affecting. Watch it if you have 25 minutes of shelter-in-place time to spare.
The main character's opening joke, about maybe being in the wrong place, reminds me of a small incident from my life as an occasional fan of standup comedy. The VFW in Minneapolis's LynLake neighborhood used to have one standup night per month before all the craziness started. Once, arriving alone and early for the show, I took a seat at the back of the room—in case audience participation was a part of someone's act. After the room had begun to fill, this strikingly obese fellow took a seat by himself at the table adjoining mine. Our chairs were next to each other, and I was about to make small talk with him when he pulled out a notebook and began studying it: one of the performers? Sure enough, the show starts, and he's about the third comedian to take the stage. There's no "green room"; the comedians just walk up the aisle and mount the stage after being introduced. Most of them charge right up there, jump onto the stage, and shout something like "Good evening Minneapolis!" All energetic and fun. This guy is way too big for that. He lumbers down the aisle from his seat in the back, next to me. It seems to take him forever. Of course every eye is on him and it's easy to imagine what everyone is thinking: "My God! This guy is huge!" He finally gets to the stage and ascends with difficulty. Now he's finally at the microphone. The room has gone silent. Everyone is waiting for him to speak. He pauses, maybe for effect, like David Finklestein in "A Jew Walks Into a Bar," but it's also possible he's winded and has to catch his breath. And then he speaks.
He says, "No one ever asks me if they need a jacket."
You tell me now?
Since I've recently regaled my legions of readers with miniature disquisitions on Montaigne and Milton, here are some more ordinary pastimes, opinions, and observations.
A good dinner may be secured at McDonald's, brought home, and washed down with two cans of Miller Lite.
Around 11 on Sunday morning is a good time to have two fried eggs, toast with butter and jelly, two strips of bacon, lots of greasy hashbrowns, and several cups of black coffee, though with sugar and cream in the last one, for dessert.
If you go to a "nice" place for brunch, and order a Bloody Mary, it is apt to come with way more than you need or even want. I just want the vodka, the tomato juice, ice, spices, and something to stir it with, like a pickle. Everything else is unnecessary and distracting.
I think I maybe developed my opinions about Bloody Marys at the Poodle Club, a bar on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis. It has since burned down, but in the early-80s, when I first moved into the neighborhood, it had a weekend breakfast special: two eggs any style, two toast, and your choice of a Bloody Mary or a screwdriver—$1.99. This was almost forty years ago, but still, as you'd predict, the Bloody was not accessorized. The first fifty I ever had were at the Poodle. I had them at the bar with the eggs and toast. On Saturday morning, the cigarette haze from Friday night had not lifted and was augmented by the smell of spilled beer on the floor. I'm not sure all the customers had been home. I remember once hearing the guy on the next stool tell the bartender he wanted "the special, with a screwdriver, hold the eggs, hold the toast, and keep them coming." The Poodle Club ambience got imprinted on my brain and associated with the idea of a Bloody Mary. When I finally had one somewhere else, and it came in a curvy glass with pepperoni and a radish. . . seemed sort of ridiculous.
It's odd that I have such strong opinions about food and drink but am not at all particular. Truest sentence my mom ever spoke was, "He's easy to cook for."
Pretty good chance that history will adjudge Trump to have been a subpar president.
The best game is baseball.
A lot of people who vote reliably for the Democrats have an unduly dismissive attitude toward country music. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings: every one of them, beyond merely terrific. Probably others too, more current, but I don't know about them. I do like Nikki Lane.
When I talk to young people who like me prefer the Democrats, and there are a million of them around where I live, I find that their reasons aren't my reasons. With me, it's got nothing to do with yoga or the horrors of genetically modified plants in agriculture. Have they noticed, though, that the other side is depraved and completely whacko? Nixon was a crook, Reagan an avuncular dunce, and George Shrub . . . wasn't avuncular. But look at their team now! Holy shit!
I think I've been channeling (subliminally till just this instant) a Twitter thread I saw in which people were challenged to confess their most "normie" opinion. So someone said they thought the Beatles were a good band. Someone else said with almost any band their best songs are the ones they did after their real fans accused them of having sold out. Someone said they liked the Eagles, to which someone replied: "That's a bridge too far." Or maybe Cold Play was a bridge too far, I can't remember for sure. Some of the responses were pleasingly layered, such as (paraphrasing on all these that are inside quotes): "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a great work of classical music, although people who don't appreciate classical music agree." Naturally, I remember the food ones, like: "The parking lot at Olive Garden is usually packed as the unlimited garden salad is quite good." Another contribution: "Melted cheese elevates many dishes." I got into the thread because someone I follow, Jennifer Frey, offered, "Potato salad, lots of it." My opinion about potato salad is that, as with the Bloody Mary, it's too often too busy. You have to let the potatoes speak for themselves, like the vodka. Within reason though. At Stand Up Frank's, a bar in north Minneapolis, if you ordered a Bloody for yourself and a screwdriver for your friend, the bartender would put a straw in one drink and two straws in the other, so that you'd know which was which, not that it mattered. My normie about that was, if you must have two, have three, so that you won't even be able to find your car in the lot and therefore won't try to drive it.
I've gotten together with some of the other neighborhood parents and worked up an academic schedule for our kids while school is out. None of us is a professional educator, but we are doing our best in these strange times. Feel free to use it yourself, if you have kids who need to keep learning!
It's ambitious, but so far I've found that, once past Tuesday, I'm able to execute the plan.
The caption for this pic, posted on social media, was something like, "While working from home it's important to preserve as much of the daily routine as possible."
In the same spirit, someone said he had built a gym in his basement, then joined, then never went.