Little Annoyances

 

Little Annoyances

Living/Life is not a singular process. It is a continual series of little tweaks of action, major moves, great storms and ten-minute sun showers.  If we reacted equally to everything that happens to us we’d go nuts. Example: a broken leg and an ingrown toe nail. Both injuries. One extremely painful, perhaps crippling, and debilitating for months, the other probably aggravating but not worth a trip to the doctor. There are many, many little annoyances every day of our lives. We can fight the battles against small injustices and illogical situations but to keep our mental health we’ve got to put the small problems of our existence into perspective. It is an ongoing battle.

We are constantly weighing the depth of our actions and reactions to the problems and perceptions in our daily life. Over-reacting to a small problem is just as disturbing as not reacting to a big problem. If you lose sleep over a $5.00 debt it is no better or worse than lying awake worrying about the U.S.A.’s trade imbalance with China. The end result is You Being Tired. A healthy person resolves to pay the $5.00 asap and goes to sleep. There is not much one can do about the Chinese/American trade imbalance except be aware of it and vote for people who can try to do something about it.  That and buy American! But, still, lying awake worrying about it will not help.

Lately I have been wrestling with a worrying image that has been on TV and in the news a lot. Plastic.

Back in the good old days Dustin Hoffman in a film titled “The Graduate” is given some sage advice by a relative. Trying to get Dustin on a prosperous path in life the uncle ( I think it was an uncle) tells him the key to success in the future in just one word, “Plastic”. Back in the 1960’s plastic was a newish and mostly wonderful material and the uncle’s advice was what a lot of people and industries were insanely preoccupied with. Plastic would eventually become a ubiquitous component material in everything we use and consume. Packaging, tools, appliances, transportation (cars, planes, trains…)and if Dustin had taken his uncle’s advice he would, no doubt, have been in sync with the whole rest of the world and made his fortune with “Plastic”.

But like the Genie in the Lamp or the monster on Doctor Frankenstein’s operating table, once loosed on the world plastic production and consumption ran wild, and the side effects of its proliferation went unnoticed by the general public. We now know that the very qualities of the stuff-its versatility and indestructibility-threatens to change the qualities of our environment in both gross and subtle ways. The evening news shows us images of vast islands of garbage (composed mostly of plastic packaging) floating out at sea. These islands decimate marine life and decompose as they soak up sun and water. The islands make land and cover beaches with miles of decomposing plastic. It chokes out vegetation. It chokes out turtles and fish as they try to eat the floating film. And, now, we are beginning to see that it is starting to “choke us out” as well.

Dustin Hoffman may or may not have become a mogul in the burgeoning plastic boom of the 20^th century but we do know that the fence he had installed in his back yard (made of plastic) lasted 15 years in the sun and then went into a land-fill. There it was exposed to ground water and sun and decomposed into microscopic units. The resultant product is now finding its way into every organic being on the planet. It is in our blood and the blood of the brown bear. It is in the tomato plants in my garden and the trees we cut and burn in our fireplaces. Discarded wrappers from vaping apparatus lie along the road but look but look more closely at the dirt by the side of the road. Not at the obvious plastic water bottles and beer cans and you can easily see tiny shards and granules of discarded, decomposing plastic in almost ever square inch. It is easy to be annoyed by roadside litter. It is so obvious, but shouldn’t we be more concerned by where that litter is going? It is going into us, biologically!

So, here is my little annoyance for today. I hate the plastic tags on my bananas. Do you know what I’m talking about? The plastic tags glued to the skin of my apple and pear. Isn’t it enough that every piece of fruit that one buys comes wrapped up in a plastic bag or box? That no one goes away from the supermarket without contributing to the growth of an insidious island of ocean borne plastic trash? Must we peal a plastic sticker off of each and every piece of fruit we want to eat? My compost bin is full of good things rotting away to make more good soil so I can grow good things and it is also full of little plastic stickers advertising “Chiquita Bananas” or “Mexican Avocados”.  I am proud to be making compost and using it in my garden. I am irritated that those little stickers are in the soil where I have my plantings.

There is not much I can do about the invasion of plastics on Earth but I can do something…complain about those little stickers and I intend to do it from now on. I am writing to all of the producers/packers of produce and complaining. Keep your little plastic stickers off my food.

Evenings Like This

Do you remember evenings like this?

Perhaps in a campsite in Pennsylvania?

A lonely place.

The pines whistling,

Just us “snow birds” nesting,

anticipating the night fall and the cold.

Everyone else in the world

given up for the Winter.

 

Dinner was simply elegant. 

After we’d folded up the dining room table

and converted it into a bed,

It was cold and crisp until we warmed it up.

We watched “Downton Abby”

on a mini-DVD player propped up on our bellies.

One or the other of us,

recognizing snoring,

 shut off the player

and the night outside came up to our little camper

and folded us in darkness and sounds.

 

Perhaps I am too old to do that anymore.

 I’ll never know by watching more TV

or mowing the lawn.

I keep promising myself that,

when the chores are done

and the project-planets are finally aligned,

I will hit the road once more.

Two questions.

Does the to-do list ever really end,

or does it just extend into the future,

odds and ends

continually rushing into the vacuum of one’s life?

Secondly,

Will you be right there next to me?

If not, all deals are off.

 

WTF Is Stormey Daniels

Who in the Fuck is Stormy Daniels?

 

Up until yesterday I never had heard of Stormy Daniels. She is, allegedly, by her word, a fucker of presidents. I have no reason to believe or not believe her. I did a fair amount of investigation into Ms. Daniels video career this morning (for purely academic reasons and I am now confident that she is not really a blond!) and I have formed personal, very subjective opinions on her character based upon approximately an hour of reading news stories, all stating in varying terms, that she’d screwed the leader of the free world and got $130K for it, and now she feels like she has to come clean. Trump’s lawyer, on the other hand, is out $130K which he said he paid from his own funds to Ms. Daniels for-he won’t say exactly what-and Trump is oblivious as to the reason why his lawyer would spend that money on Ms. Daniels. This is a prime example of at least six or seven Not Happy Endings in the making. Well, except for Ms. Daniels, who got $130K and still is unhappy. Hopefully, if Trump did screw Ms. Daniels he got a Happy Ending. Obviously the lawyer who felt compelled to empty his bank account didn’t get one yet! And!! He’s being courted by some of the most tenacious people on the face of the Earth to explain why he gave Ms. Daniels the money. It does not bode well for him. He is going to get the opposite of a Happy Ending for his troubles.

 

 Anyway, this is how I look at it. Ms. Daniels, who I had here-to-fore known nothing about, has every right to screw whomever she wishes. I believe she has the right to get as much for her effort (pay, prizes, etc) as the market will allow. I do not believe she has the legal or moral right to divulge her marvelous adventure to the public, especially as she has signed away her right to do so on a document prepared by Mr. Trump’s Lawyer!! (Who swears he gave her $130K but doesn’t know why). We all sell ourselves. We are all prostitutes on some level whether legally, morally or commercially sanctioned. But, once we tattle we are amoral whores. 

 

Mr. Trump-the leader of the free world-if I judge by the same moral ruler, is a lying piece of shit! (I may have to soften this a bit if I am to get it out there for consideration by the more middle-of-the-road citizenry). One doesn’t fuck and tell. And the Fuck-er doesn’t deserve to be fucked over by the fuck-ee. But as the leader of the free world Truth is a commodity that should never…must never…be prostituted. A perfect illustration in history is the case of one Richard M. Nixon, who by coincidence was also a leader of the free world. 

 

In an example of the truism that it is “not the crime but the cover-up” Mr. Nixon’s lawyers paid off/bribed his own henchmen in an attempt to keep them in line and uncooperative with the prosecutor who was trying to prove that Nixon had authorized the Watergate break-in. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid through Nixon’s lawyers to shut the burglars up and avoid the embarrassment of the President’s (read: leader of the free world) association with the crime. It didn’t work. Nixon was found out. There was so much evidence of his crime and, as importantly, his attempts to cover his tracks, that he quit his great job, lost all the perks and no longer was the leader of the free world any more. If he hadn’t quit he would have been fired (impeached). Luckily for him he had a buddy who took over his job (President Gerald Ford) who kindly pinched Nixon on the cheek, told him to go home and don’t come back to Washington any more, and then told all the other partial leaders of the free world to just forgive and forget. I simplify the situation but it all boils down to one of the ten commandments-don’t get caught and if you do keep your mouth shut!

 

Now, I’m not a Trump fan, but I feel for the guy. This was a hundred and thirty thousand dollar fuck and for that he should have, at least, a happy ending and not have a silicone injected porn actress (“Star” is not a word I can easily associate with a porn film)blabbing to the newspapers. That being said, He also should get his story straight with his own lawyer/bag-man or even better keep his mouth shut. Now, I believe, he should do the right thing and get his ass out of Washington because even in that bastion of mental mediocrity he is in way over his head. He should go back to his bullshit “reality” shows and plastic society. Let him live on his shady wealth and his bleach blond comb-over and his orange tanning booth bravado and leave the governance of the country to people who have at least a modicum of decency. 

 

Back to my original question: who is Stormy Daniels? I really don’t know. I can tell that she is deeply flawed. I can say she seems to need something that this society has not offered her, but what it has offered her is $130 thousand dollars and 15 minutes of “fame”. I think she will find that it was not enough. I think she will find later in her life that bending over and then taking the money was not so bad (just as burglarizing the Democratic National offices at The Watergate was not really such a big deal). Her mistake is in her belief that the public retelling the story of her tryst will create anything of value. There is no value in associating her self as a slut to Donald Trump. It is not really any kind of claim to fame. She should take the $130 K and buy a few shares of Home Depot and put it away.  She will need it some day. She should go to someplace where she is not known and reinvent herself. She should look for something of substance to add to her biography and try to forget where she has been and what she has seen.

 

The Bomb Dance

 Nobody ever did the “bomb dance” like Stephen J. Persons did the “bomb dance” but, then again, I don’t think anyone else ever tried to do the “bomb dance”. Of course you might not know what the “bomb dance” was so I will try to explain but there is a very good chance that even if I do a good job of describing it it will not come close to the actual event. I can try…

The first floor of 507 South Street (what is now a not-so-hot Greek restaurant)was a storefront laboratory of art, music, strange smells-resulting from the decaying building and Tommy’s dog’s excrement-and it was the lower floor of our home. Above was two floors of bedrooms, kitchen and baths where I lived along with the Pott’s (Tommy and Kathy), Steven, and Saint Looie (David Nicholson). The comings and goings of the residents of 507 were unpredictable. At any hour of the day or night Kathy might decide to play the piano or Tommy might be banging around with his bicycles or his movie camera or his paints. Steven might be coming in from who-knows-where after a night prowling Philly with his latest female fascination. Saint Looie might be banging on his poorly tuned electric guitar and I was probably trying to sleep. From time to time, though, all of us (plus a number of people who didn’t live at 507 but seemed to be there much of the time anyway) would coagulate down on the first floor and a party would emerge and spontaneously explode. Pipes and joints would be passed. Music would blast from a radio. The people passing on the street would duck in and join. The party would naturally spill out onto the street occupying the line of ancient theater seats lined up under the storefront windows. The windows were Tommy’s art gallery. He filled them with his paintings and found objects like a thousand baby bottle nipples. Once the crowd hit critical mass, the room was full, and Stephen J. Persons got high enough he might perform the “Bomb Dance”.

Memory is an unreliable thing. I don’t know for sure if my memories are accurate recollection or greatly embellished by time. There is certainly a kernel of truth around which my memories are spun but I couldn’t swear to the accuracy of any of the details. Here is what I remember. Let me paint a picture with my words.

 Whippets. Pot. Quaaludes. A torpedo-like object hanging from the cracked plaster walls of the store-front first floor of 507 South Street. The bomb was hollow and made of painted metal. It had handles. The precipitating stimulus for the dance seemed to be when Steven caught a snippet of the Moody Blues coming from the radio and ran to turn it up full blast. Perhaps he sucked up a lung full of nitrous oxide just before he pulled the “bomb” off of the wall. Grasping the missile by the handles, and clutching closely to him he began to pirouette. Steven was wearing his usual uniform of tight black jeans and a pea coat and a fake fur Russian hat. His thick glasses reflect the candles and the lights as he hoists the bomb to his chest and begins to spin like a clumsy ballerina. His black boots spin and clunk on the splintery wooden floor, faster and faster until the centrifugal force of his motion allows him to extend his arms and the bomb out away from his body. He has to lean backwards to balance the weight of the flying bomb. He is a model of balance. He is moving just fast enough and leaning back far enough that the bomb is flying in a perfect circle around his spinning body level with the floor. The spinning seems to be in perfect time with the pounding music. The crowd is as close as it can be to the path of the bomb and everyone in the crowd is thinking the same thing, “what happens if/when he lets go of that missile?” and “how long can he keep this insane spinning up?”

Steven never let the bomb go, at least I never remember him doing that. No one, in my memory, ever got hit or hurt. I do recall Steven collapsing to the floor clutching the bomb and dropping it as he sank  spent and exhausted. We cheered. The party continued but nothing could match the “bomb dance”.

Some of my friends from back then are dead. After all it has been fifty years since we lived and worked and partied in that tiny portion of cityscape in that tiny portion of time. Even the youngest ones are now collecting Social Security. It has been so long that I can’t even remember some of their names. I can see their faces though and the memories of them and what they meant to me are still strong. It was a powerful time in our lives.

 Dead and gone- Jennifer Barker, David Nicholson, Kathy Potts, E.S. Eddie, Alan the “mola man”, Sharon and Gene, Thomas Rowland Marshall IV, Patti Spring….

Still living as far as I know- Me, Steven J. Persons, Tommy, Heshie, Sandy, Fran, Randy, Joel, Stanley, Cowboy Tom, Anne, Paul, Octavia, Grove, Bob, Bill, Dale, Charlie, Isaiah and Julia…I’m sure there are others to put into each of these lists but, as I’ve said, my memory is not the best. To those who I’ve not included, my apology. The people of South Street were special. Like Stephen J. Persons and the “bomb dance”. Each person I came to know on South Street was interesting and in the time I spent there I never had a serious argument or made and enemy. Recalling them each is my “love letter” to South Street.