My Costco Adventure

It is time to share how I got everyone’s attention at Costco and a free ride out of their parking lot. All you have to do is pass out on the floor during the Thanksgiving rush and be careful not to be trampled upon by the mob rushing to pick up their $6.00 pumpkin pie. I’m told the crowd cleared a circle around me. I wouldn’t know. I was unconscious, probably planning my afterlife or, at least, the next four years in a comatose state. My first words when I woke were, Is he gone yet?

The drive in the ambulance parted the red sea of shopping carts. When the paramedic announced that I’m having a myocardial infarct I wondered if this was really to be my day of departure. To give up my life at Costco has an ignominious ring to it. As if an homage to consumerism.

My next thought was whether my socks matched and is this the underwear I wanted to take into my next incarnation. It's a sobering moment to think of yourself in the past tense.

As it turned out the well-meaning man in blue spoke out of turn. There were no scavenger birds circling the wagons. I did not have a heart attack but rather a case of syncope and pericarditis. Nothing to sneeze at but neither a cause to round up a zoom memorial. I have miles of pumpkin to eat before I sleep. Apparently, I have some sort of abnormality on my EKG. which he mistook for heart damage. In fact, it has been there for decades and of no consequence except that I embrace my abnormality. Normalcy is overrated. 

My cardiac event earned me the worst turkey sandwich in the history of sandwiches in the hallway of the emergency area of UCLA Medical Center. My loving friend Adele stayed with me for four hours and we got to witness the passing parade of wounded humanity. All that our flesh is heir to is a humbling experience.

My next stop was to be a (nearly) free night at Kaiser hospital. I would be subject to the nocturnal gasps and retches of a sorry roommate, a demented man, down the corridor, moaning all night at high decibels and the conclave of caregivers gathered at the nurse’s station outside my open door.

By now my symptoms were long gone and I was eager to be sprung. I remembered seeing a movie where the protagonist ripped off his I.V. and made his way down a deserted passageway into midnight traffic, probably to avenge the wrongful death of his client’s pet rock. I hope he wasn't wearing his hospital gown open in the back.

I am now home writing this by the fireplace I don’t have unless I set fire to the drapes. I apologize for scaring my family and friends and particularly my daughter Janice. Thank you all for your loving expressions. Hang onto those goodly thoughts. May they have a long shelf-life.  

Thanks-A-Lot-Day

This is certainly the most benign of holidays and the one I most look forward to. We gather; we feel gratitude, eating and drinking with abandon, as we celebrate the accident of geography that landed us here instead of there, though, at times, elsewhere seems like my true address. There is a sense of grace contained in that word, gratitude and maybe in ourselves. The table is a communal moment, well-observed around the hearth even if there is no hearth. What a concept.

We offer a place at the table to that man who can't stop talking and the other guy whom we'd never let our sister marry. Everyone is to be tolerated for a few hours, numbed as we are after a feast of gluttony followed by hours of sloth. This is one of those moments when we practice William Blake's notion that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. But my guess is that we feel more crapulous than sagacious. 

The hymn we used to sing in school ended with the veiled warning that God forgets not his own. I suppose all the rest not in that tent were to be forgotten. He forgot me and I forgot him. Fair enough. This year it's also fair to wonder what the Almighty was thinking when he bestowed the magma of MAGA upon us or as Oliver Hardy said to Stan Laurel, A fine mess you've gotten us into this time. If He wants to hasten and chasten let him hasten their reign and chasten their misdeeds.  

The idea of asking the Lord's blessing suggests some element of forgiveness. Forgive us our transgression for being uninvited guests to this continent, stealing the land from our indigenous hosts and almost wiping them out.

My mother, in her infinite wisdom, decreed that Thanksgiving was a gentile holiday somehow akin to Christmas. Therefore, it was devoutly unobserved. Maybe she never learned how to cook a turkey or Murray, the chicken-plucker,

didn't know about gobblers. 

My first Thanksgiving was at age 21. I remember driving to Burbank in dense fog so thick I mistakenly mistook the shrubbery on the freeway for the off-ramp. I was a pilgrim making my way to this new world landing on a rock with my Plymouth. 

I must have had a yearning to be part of Americana as depicted by Norman Rockwell. So it was, I untangled my car from the landscape and found my way to a chair at that all-American table of new friends. I had arrived for my place in the tableau of this model family. Within a few months the host couple divorced, and the father of my friend shot himself. So much for normalcy.

Thanksgiving goes on even though an estimated 45 million turkeys will be slaughtered. I'm reminded of the school play in 7th grade when I was cast as John Alden. I wonder if anybody got to play the turkey.  

Cleaving

Say that we have cleaved, and you can’t go wrong. Even the word has been cleaved with each meaning, (separating or coming together) derived from a different source. One meaning derives from an old English word meaning to adhere unwaveringly. The other is of Norse origin, to split apart. The result is one of those Janus two-headed words staring off in opposite directions.

Henry the 8th had it both ways. He first cleaved in marriage and then had some wives cleaved by decapitation if they didn’t produce. He gave new meaning to separation anxiety. As a footnote of history let it be known that Anne of Cleves, Henry's 4th wife, did not live up to her name. She died with her head attached forevermore.

It’s come to this…a bifurcated nation with Us, the Good Guys cheering for the demise of MAGA -Them, each watching for the news as it breaks and each off to our respective cable-planets or app to reinforce what we hold to be self-evident.

If Trump was revealed as a double-agent Russian operative on MSNBC and CNN, on Fox they’d be showing a car chase in Wichita. Conversely if Biden lost his way from the Lincoln bedroom to the Oval Office, it would play on a continuous loop on Fox but MSNBC might ignore it.

In reality, the cleaver that divides us cuts three ways, not two. Arguably, the largest segment is neither blue nor red; it is 38% of eligible voters who chose not to participate at all. The tragedy of America is the inability of most people to make a connection between public policy and their own wellbeing. Why else sit it out? Why else vote for the man and party whose mission is to deny basic human services?  

I do believe that we need to separate the shepherds from the sheep in the MAGA movement. The former deserve our scorn; the misled might be brought to new consciousness.

Seems like everyone I know is strategizing how to cleave together with kindred souls as well as in-dwell with artforms that speak to them. Most of all we need to reaffirm the values which are being trampled upon. Never before in my lifetime have the givens of common sense and decency, compassion, and the core precepts of this country been so under siege. I sense a new enlightenment emerging from the threat of this opposing force. 

New Eyes

In these days of despair, I turn to the enchantment offered by art and loving friendships. Here I am on the couch writing these words yet the wall behind me is filled with paintings, a drawing, two constructions and a ceramic piece on the far table I haven’t really looked at for far too long.

In fact, some pieces have faded from my mind’s eye altogether the way furniture becomes unseen. Ironic that our most cherished works of art take a position at our backs. When I enter the room, I head for sofa seldom taking in what adorns the wall.

I can name only three of the six pieces without peeking. The largest is an abstract construction by Laddie John Dill of glass, paint and resin which emits an energy field since it was hung almost forty years ago. To one side is a drawing by Daumier of a windy day in Paris, a woman’s dress billowing and two gentlemen holding on to their hats.

The kinetic drive of these two is answered by a deeply shadowed café where a male figure on a stool is playing the bass and two people are deep in conversation in a back booth. The artist, Werner Nienow, has caught and cast a contemplative mood.

On the other side is a non-figurative collage by a street artist in Venice, Italy which spoke to me and still does in ways without words. Above that is another indoor scene of the Rose Café as it used to look when one could sit with morning coffee at a long table for long stretches. This is a watercolor saturated with color. A male figure in the foreground is either reading or writing and three others fill the back space in isolation.

The ceramic piece is a tall, multicolored sculpture which could serve as a vase but that, I think, would debase it. Now, I’m seeing it again as if for the first time. I'm glad it is indescribable, all the more immersive.

I intend to revisit all my walls which vibrate with photos, masks and woodcarvings along with books and artworks. Thank you, Donald, for these new eyes. Now, will you please leave?

 

Tonsils and Other Unwanted

When I was a mere slip of a lad, shortly after Aristotle and Socrates, it was customary to have one relinquish one’s tonsils. I was probably emotionally attached to my tonsil, vestigial as it might have been.

A tonsillectomy was a sort of rite of passage. We were rewarded with an ice cream cone, vanilla, no doubt. This went on well into the sixties until the jig was up. It served no medical purpose other than providing doctors with a new Oldsmobile every year.

The prospect now looms that the Health and Human Welfare Department will be handed over to the least qualified person ever to head a federal agency. If Robert F. Kennedy is confirmed, he would be a public menace.

I don’t know his views about tonsils, but he threatens to dismantle essential safeguards such as the Food & Drug Administration, Center for Disease Control and National Institute of Health.

This is a man who believes that the Covid virus was designed to protect Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews, while inflicting harm on the rest of humanity. He has publicly claimed that part of his brain was eaten by parasitic worms which might explain his bizarro behavior.

Whether he had swallowed his tonsils as a youngster is still to be determined but his voice is as raspy as Satchmo’s. Yet he toots his horn, propelled on the seat of his pants, with flights of toxic conspiracies.

With his nonsensical prank dragging a dead bear hundreds of miles into Central Park and other lunatic ideas, Kennedy has disgraced the family name, His nomination is unconscionable. One gets the feeling that Trump appointed him just so he wouldn’t suffer by comparison.

If RFK Jr. should restrict the use of early childhood vaccines the consequences would be dire. Over a century of medical progress could be reversed or, at least, halted and we might expect the return of diphtheria, measles and polio epidemics, to name a few. Soon we would be returned to leeches and back plaster. He might even advocate the hemlock smoothie that Socrates drank.                                                                                          

From A to Z

Trying to avoid the contamination by the new regime, I’m on my stationary bike pedaling to elsewhere. Here I am in Africa admiring the four legged-creatures from antelope to zebra, all herbivorous quadrupeds.

The only thing I know about antelopes is that they rhyme with cantaloupes.  And here’s another thing. The word is an umbrella term for a group which include gazelle, impala, and even wildebeest, also known as gnu. They are all undocumented and live happily munching grass in the savannas except when they are running like hell from cheetahs.  

Detroit looks toward four-legged creatures to sell their cars. Neither the Ford Bronco, Chevy Impala nor Dodge Ram could ever compete with the Ford Mustang. The less said about the Pinto the better….and then there’s the Jaguar. But horsepower is still the unit of measure which is an endearing way of honoring the past.

Creationists may argue that zebras got their stripes from the American flag or that God was watching the refs at a Laker game but everyone knows God is really a baseball fan and was fixated on the Yankee pinstripe uniform.

It has long been noted that zebras are social animals. When they congregate, their stripes form what looks to lions as a huge blob and too much to take on. Another more compelling reason for the stripes is that they evolved over millennia as a protection from the tsetse and horseflies.

(You have to admit this is far more interesting than wringing our hands over what went wrong on election night.)

Horses, which lack horse sense didn’t think of stripes and rely on their tail to shoo the flies.  Zebras, with their striped skin, are deemed less inviting to blood-sucking insects. The flies are attracted to solid surfaces because the light waves emitted resemble the light reflected from pools of water where they breed. From the POV of those insects one might say the system is rigged.

Yet zebras, stripes and all, don’t have what it takes for domestication. Horses were feral once also but opted for a barn and steady meal instead. In exchange they had to pull loads of men with whips.

Zebras should be credited as the first to come up with bar codes. They may all look the same to us but each carries a signature on its hide which singles them out to other zebras. In case you are asked what color zebras are, the answer is black with white stripes.      

Whether antelopes eat cantaloupe has yet to be studied.

All life forms evolve to give them the best chance of survival. Mankind seems to be the exception. Our most fearsome predator is ourselves. Four-legged creatures know better than to make such a mess of their habitat.

 

Mourning After

The page is funereal white. I feel the need to fill it up with squiggles that could be buds or birdies, but first some bile.

Did something just die in America or was it a chronic illness only now revealed? I believe Tuesday’s election was a full-body scan showing a long-festering malignancy exacerbated by a megaphone of nostrums causing massive disorientation.

What seemed like a sudden demise is really a pre-existing condition. Perhaps, even a congenital disorder as a consequence of familial misdeeds never addressed. We have yet to wash the blood off our hands from a rapacious past blighted with human bondage.

The underlying cause is systemic with severe maldistribution of needed nutrients. The body politic had grown increasingly sclerotic with an irregular pulse. Organic deficiencies in the bloodstream have long been ignored. Tendencies toward misplaced loathing are not unexpected.

Our free enterprise system yields winners and losers. It has always been thus. Every benefit won by the working class or middle class has been hard fought and earned. Even with new prosperity for many, a large body of aggrieved workers have been left behind.

The usual inequities have been compounded by a bipartisan push to seek cheap labor overseas which has always been the goal of corporations. Jobs vanished with shuttered factories as manufacturing moved offshore. Trump did nothing to confront the problem during his four years in office. Biden has, at least, brought computer chips back to the U.S. 

What we have witnessed, tragically, is a population overthrowing the very forces which offer their best hope. Rage has left them deaf to the menace of his words and blind to his misdirection.  

A new social contract is desperately needed which ensures the health, education and welfare of everyone. Instead, the MAGA program would scrap or weaken the very institutions providing access to the wealth of this affluent nation.

While on life support, we can still live our lives of compassion, creativity and love with even a deeper appreciation for the fragility of those values just rejected. We shall write the psalm needed to see us through this wasteland. Or better yet, live it, forged out of a new dawn with an incandescence to see us through this dark passage within sight of beginning sprouts and the feel of wings.

 

Harp in the Carnage

For every bomb dropped, particle of noxious air belched,

for every last syllable of loathing overheard,

moral violence spewed, every barbed lie,

choke hold, groping, ignorant oath, every

truth denied, every shrug in the midst of indecency,

 

Is there an answer in the stanza,

a poem that can override the filibuster?”

Will the bell in the fuchsia

toll for the mesmerized?

Is there enough nectar in the hibiscus,

enough dew to quench parched minds?

Is that a camellia blooming on the

blood-stained bandage,

a harp in the carnage of a smashed piano?

Can the trumpet in the foxglove be heard?

 

In the pharmacy poison foxglove

becomes digitalis. What can kill also heals.

The leaf that stops the heart

contains the alkaloid that slows

and strengthens it.