The extremes of weather have no power to evoke any memory except another time when it was equally hot, or cold. It's the minor variations, the ineluctable differences, that makes a memory appear, as if a book has hurled itself off the shelf and opened to a favorite passage.
The temps were in the low 70s on the walk to the office, and something in the air made me think of early summer, the first two weeks of June, when I was in junior high. For some reason I was teaching elementary-level Bible Summer School with my friend Peter, who would go on to be an actual pastor.
We had classes outdoors whenever possible, and performed a skit where David brought down Goliath, using a Wham-O wrist rocket. (It was understood that the best toys came from Wham-O, which seemed to employ geniuses. The Frisbee. The Wrist Rocket. My lord, the SUPER BALL. It was one after the other. It was like waiting for your favorite group to come out with a new album.
Anyway. Whichever one of us was Goliath - seems unlikely it was me - increased his height by standing on coffee cans, which were taped to one’s shoes, and made a satisfying clatter when the giant was felled. The only other thing I recall about the week was the exotic treat of Fritos, in small bags, for lunch. It’s a scant memory, but intense, green, fresh, damp from a morning rain, and happy.
Later in the day the rote August heat made me think of the 80s, and not in a good way. It was the flat empty late-afternoon summer part, when you feel aimlessness and unimpressed by anything. The sun over the lakes seems impatient to get to the end of the day. In “A Right to an Answer,” Burgess’ great comic novel about an expat coming home to an English suburb after the war, he describes coming out of the pub after it had closed for the afternoon, and beholding the emptiness and banality of the ordinary world. The way the afternoon gaped. During the licensing laws of the day, pubs closed at 2:40 PM. A well-chosen time: it’s not yet Three, so you have the sense that something can yet be done, although secretly you’re waiting for Three to give you a reason not to do it at all.
Why won't you do it? Because it’s Three O’Clock in the damned afternoon.
(Note: I am writing this at 2:24, so I’m still full of plans.)
It’s National Night Out tonight, and the neighbors will convene in the middle of the block. Didn’t do it last year, for obvious reasons, even though last year was the first in which neighborhood safety felt imperiled. We have a new family on the block, with more kids added to the mix. For a while the tot-population was down. Seemed as if the neighborhood was overrun with children in 2005-2012, and then they grew up and receded into the houses and social groups. Then people move, and the new families move in, and the cycle starts again - this time with you on the outside.
The bus always comes and the bus always leaves, but you take no note anymore, and recognize no one who climbs off.
Except, perhaps, for the tow-headed child I met today whose name is actually MAGNUS. All the kids in the family have sturdy Nordic names. From now on I'll look at that tot and think "Pompey."
WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM
And thank you! I will be doing this for a few more days, then cash the checks and fold the tents. Kidding! Just checking to see if anyone reads anything that comes after a tip-jar rattling.
Sometimes I like to set something aside for a while, just to see if it still seems amusing or instructive a week later. The news cycles rotate every hour these days, and revisiting tweets of a previous week is almost like a news story about a Roman mosaic unearthed in Turkey.
Or, I just set something aside because I wanted to give myself a head-start on the next week's Bleats. You make the call!
This was a kerfluffle last week. Possibly a brouhau. Not enough to be a brouhauhau, though.
Non-alcoholic beer pong. It gets worse:
You know someone has grasped his audience quite keenly when he regards the aroma of a cigar as the finial detail that damns the whole tableau.
What was the problem, exactly?
It is terrible. There are people in the hall having a party and it is terrible. And it is horrifying. There are people in the hall socializing and it is a cause for horror, full body shakes, that sluice of mad dread that seizes your nervous system when you confront uknowable Lovecraftian evil.
It is also a display of decadent apathy, because people are getting sick and dying. In a time when anyone is sick, and some people are coming to the end of their mortal allotment, it is decadent to stand in a hallway and socialize. The Reaper stalks the mean halls of Congressional office corridors, scythe snickering left and right, the cordwood stacked like corpses - and these people are talking with LOUD DEATH BREATH:
Dem staffers may pass through the hall after two hours and 58 minutes and breathe the MURDER FOG.
Two or three months ago he would have assumed they were all unvaccinated, but now we know that the vaccine is just a speed bump, al dente stop-sticks.
The other problem? BAD SKIN. THEY HAVE THE BAD SKIN.
There's no white supremicism quite like white people showing they're better than those other white people. The Eggshell paint strip sneering at the Ivory paint strip.
Also, people who are standing in a hallway drinking from red cups = Christian Fascism:
I swear, “Handmaid’s Tale” is Harry Potter for grey-haired Volvo drivers with peeling COEXIST stickers. READ ANOTHER BOOK.
Elsewhere, weeping:
What has happened to out country that people involved in the sacred act of government are socializing and possibly being cigar-adjacent?
Also I read this one book in high school and it told me everything about human society, or maybe that was a Twilight Zone episode
The most amusing part is the author’s bio:
Oh yeah, dude is totally rock and roll. Iggy Pop says in his best Bill Murray, I want to party with this guy.
Beer pong without beer and the whiff of a cigar: decadence. Practically a Weimar cabaret with some man in silk stockings pleasuring a boar.
It’s 1899. The world is about to change, if only with the psychological readjustment a new century brings. For now? The same old 19th century front page layout.
This one's rather . . . inscrutible. It defies scruting. Lots of ads, and no big headlines. I’m thinking they didn’t rely on a lot of impulse purchases.
The Chicago Platform would refer to the 1896 convention, probably. “Declaration against Expansion” - meaning, what? An anti-imperialism plank?
 |
|
|
 |
|
This is murky. The Press seems to refer to a particular paper, no? But not the one we’re reading. But if the Press exposed the Michell (sic; it was Mitchell) Republican’s lies, then what of the Press that regularly passes falsehoods? Ah: that’s a quote from then Republican! Except it’s not quotes.
As for the Manila letters, I don’t know. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
“The sympathy of the people is with him.”
Well, not all the people.
By the way, it’s pronounced “Leed.” |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Japery! Enjoy these two comical stories.
The first . . . I can’t say.
The second is timeless. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Again . . . I don’t know. The joke depends on vernacular lost to us. I’m wondering if the “plug” is an insult that relates to the conductor. What plug that guy is! Something like that. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
The whole paper’s like that.
By the way: there doesn’t seem to be any Venable, ME. |
|
|
|
That'll do; see you around. Back to the Fifties again, because it's Wednesday. |
