I was trying to find a quote for a piece I was doing, and I called ten people. Nine didn't respond, because I'd called the institutional number, not their personal phone. They weren't at their desk. This is the new division, I guess. There are certain phone prefexes that make me sigh, because I just assume no one will be there. They're all down in level 5.
Well, not everyone! Tuesday is "come back to work and mill around and look normal" day. To be fair, Tu-Th is almost normal, except for the accellerating proportion of strangers. I swear: every day I see a klatch of people I don't know. I had to gently remonstrate one today, because he made coffee improperly: if you're going to make a half-pot, that's the middle button, and you must do two grinds. Top button, the third position, three grinds. Why is this not obvious, I snapped, dashing a cup of tepid coffee in his face. And who the hell are you anyway? Who are any of you? What happened to my office? Why is everything new?
They took me back to my cubicle and gave me some pudding and it was okay. It was butterscotch. Caramel? No, I don't think they make caramel pudding. Butterscotch has that locked up. Caramel either comes in cube form, or goop you drizzle on ice cream or brownies. I do know that you don't lick the little cup if you're in the office. I did that once and when they came around for the tray the nice lady said well you didn't leave a bit of that, did you. I remember being proud because I didn't get any on the bib.
Then I went home and took a nice nap, after which I had a cup of coffee and opened my laptop and talked to a man who lives in the radio waves and lots of people all over the country heard me talk about newspaper comics! Really. I even remembered Cathy's catch-phrase.
It's "Ack."
Made some disappointing fajitas. I think that's what it said on the sauce packet. May contain nuts, disappointment. We were both a bit sad to see there were leftovers that could make for a solid lunch tomorrow. I will have to leave myself a note so I remember to forget them. I don't know who in the company signed off on this particular flavor profile, which bore no resemblance to any fajitas I've had. Perhaps that means they're authentic, and every fajita I've ever had was a false, Americanized revision of the original. If that's the case I don't want to be right. Oh but the real thing has notes of mole and fire-roasted maize-cob scrapings. Fine. I'm good. It's like eating a hamburger in Europe: you stare at it and think how did they get this wrong? Everywhere? Always? Does no one tell them? We probably don't want to be an ugly American and say "I'm sorry but you've done something here incorrectly, and I cannot say exactly what it is. Maybe it's what your cows eat. It is that? The grass? Would an American cow in England graze in your meadows and say hold on here, this is off. Your grass is off. Perhaps, but the incentive to bring a cow over the Atlantic ocean for this purpose is small, and the cost great. And it's not like she could tell you. I mean, they're going to eat the grass. It was a long flight and they only served peanuts.
So how was your day.
It seems as if the 5th year COVID recap was last week. I think it should be every week for the rest of the year. Every week had a new lesson, a new adjustment. I think about those times a lot, because they didn’t just freeze the clock, they welded the hands in place.
Eh? But we’re well beyond all that now. No, not really. I have the same feeling walking around the empty office today as I did back then. The emotions and isolation aren’t as intense, but the sense that everything has drained away is still there. Perhaps because of my own situation, but mostly because of the general sense of vacancy. I look across the street at the Ameriprise building, and I know and no one’s home.
But yes, we’re well beyond the daily details. I remember taking my mask off every time I stepped out of the building. I don’t remember everyone in the elevator wearing them, although of course they did. We forget - until reminded, and then the memory springs out of the box. We don’t remember the decals on the elevator floor that told us to stand in the corners - until we’re reminded of those, and we wonder if we saw a chart that showed everyone should really face the corner. Was that real? Did it happen? Is it absurd to think it did? We forget about the distancing decals on the grocery store floor, but the moment you think about them it's five years ago, and you're staring at a cheery but stern decal made of some heavy-duty plastic that takes the traffic well. Who made those? How did they all appear at the same time? I don’t remember when plastic barricades between shopper and check-out clerk came down, and how their quiet removal seemed sheepish and abashed, as if we'd all been complicit in something we'd prefer not to bring up again.
I remember taking the escalator down into the lobby in April 2020, texting with friend, noting that I was done with masks and looked forward to the end of the mandate. She was not done with masks and was not looking forward to it at all.
This seemed odd.
How can you not look forward to taking off the masks?
At the time I wasn’t even mask-suspicious. At the time I held on to the idea of masking as some general preventative measure that probably surely sorta kinda might provide protection, even if it was porous and poorly sealed. At the time I purelled the hell out my hands. When a shipment of sanitizer showed up at Target, some odd brand you’d never heard of, I’d buy my ration - but first I checked it against the online database of sanitizers that had poison problems. I was on board for the first two weeks. I expected there would be another. I was wary of infection but did not hide inside; I did the provisioning in the grocery stores, which were eerie and surreal. Everything was absolutely normal in the grocery store, except for the arrows and the barricades. All that fresh produce, shiny and wet. All the happy products and the familiar brands. Everything in abundance, except for paper products; some things in unexpected quantities at low prices, as if there’d been a breakthrough on the Malibar front and we’d captured some pork-producing facilities. Everything was normal except for the tenebrous sense that it was all going to get very, very bad. I mean mobile-morgue bad. I mean bring-out-your-dead bad. I mean 50% fatal bad.
Like that movie we all watched.
It did not happen.
While I would like to say I was a free-facing rebel by June, I wasn’t. By the time the city stopped burning, I was.
I looked back at the papers the other day. COVID was on the front page constantly, with warnings: The Fourth of July will be a superspreader. School canceled because obviously we can’t do that. A thousand cases in Minnesota in October. Thanksgiving looms as a challenge. The stats on the number of cases ran throughout the year on the front page. Stories on disparate racial impacts, very au courant for late 2020. As 2021 came in, it was OMICRON. At the end of 2021 it was still A-section news; how would Times Square go, what with hospitalizations surging? (They were always surging.)
June 2022: front page story on how Omicron hit seniors hard.
August 2022: a COVID surge had stopped return to office.
Again, and again, variants and surges. I stopped worrying. I got it, twice. Or to put it another way: I got it, twice. I stopped worrying. Things came back in stages, yet each relaxation felt not like a step towards the old before times, but an ongoing redefinition of some emerging new paradigm. It did not feel as if restrictions were being removed, but new, tightly defined freedoms were being doled out.
The final stage of all this, I guess, was the NYT running a piece that said "Hey, turned out the authorities and media gatekeepers weren't telling us the whole story."
That, I suspect, is intended to be the end of the old conversation, not the start of a new one.
Some lingering effects we'll never lose, and maybe we won't notice or question, just as 24-year old people who weren't alive in 2001 take their shoes off in the TSA line because well that's what you do. If you ask them who Richard Reid was, they'd have no idea.
It’s 1958.
Because we’re going to be in Tecumseh this month for Main Street, I thought I’d give you a look at the culture 65 years ago. Not that I expect a lot to remain.
Yes, I know, the dreaded all-local paper.
STOP THE PRESSES
The dogs were certainly having the time of their lives. Roaming packs of strays, bonded together for the purpose of sheep-ripping.
1:05 precisely, please note
There’s a bandmaster award named in his honor. In an interview is here he says he was playing in orchestras in New York before he wandered to the wilds of Nebraska.
Something had to make him leave Gotham. Perhaps too much competition, too low wages, not enough work. He ended up celebrated and appreciated for a long time in a Midwestern city, and I'm sure that was its own reward. But you have to wonder if he missed playing in the big leagues.
They always look as though it’s been a grim and scouring experience.
Perhaps the same way someone observes a dead cow in the culvert. You'd think "celebrate" might come to mind. Also, observing your 56th suggests the chances of a 57th are low.
Well good thing everyone listened to them and we didn’t repeat our old mistakes
HOLD ON
DOUTHAT?
Hold on, could it be? Dude’s a Nepo?
No, doesn't seem so. I just interviewed him a few weeks ago! Should've asked.
Two movies of which I’ve never heard.
The Joker is Wild is a biopic of . . . hold on, are you kidding me?
Frank Sinatra plays Joe E. Lewis, a famous comedian of the 1930s-50s. When the movie opens, Lewis is a young, talented singer who performs in speakeasies. When he bolts one job for another, the mob boss who owns the first speakeasy has his thugs try to kill Lewis. Lewis survives, but his vocal cords are cut and he cannot sing.
Really? Apparently so:
In Chicago in 1927, Lewis refused the request of Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn (an Al Capone lieutenant) to renew a contract that would have bound him to sing and perform at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, which was partly owned by Capone. After refusing, because he had been offered more money by a rival gang to appear at their own club, "The New Rendezvous", he was assaulted in his 10th floor Commonwealth Hotel room, on November 8, 1927, by three enforcers sent by McGurn.
The enforcers, who included Sam Giancana and Leonard "Needles" Gianola, mutilated Lewis (his throat and tongue were cut) and left him for dead. It took him several years to be able to speak again.
Capone, who was fond of Lewis, was displeased with the assault, but would not take action against one of his top lieutenants. He instead provided Lewis with $10,000 (equal to $168,467 today) to recover properly and eventually resume his career.
The other one's a racing picture! Just give it that Barton Fink feeling:
Cocky car racer Nick Jargin has retired since he nearly caused the death of his brother at a hairpin bend on a circuit. He now owns a trendy café that keeps him busy full time. One day, Tony Boari, a new champion racer, challenges him. Nick returns to competition, and this time around he will have to beat not only his new rival but also his own demons. Kelly, his pretty lover, and Mrs. Jargin, his no-nonsense mother will help him, too.
No trailer, but there’s this:
Rote japery on the editorial page.
Ha ha he lost all of his money because he has a gambling problem
I include this only because I know it’s a BW version of a color ad I have.
In the original ad she looks like she's watching lions tear men apart in the Flavian Amphitheater, and she really likes it. That'll be coming later this year in the 50s update.
I’m doing ads because the paper itself is so dull. It’s all local news of no interest to us whatsoever.
Quizzy, eh? Some tie-in to the game shows, or the Quiz Kids? Can’t say - not a lot of internet info on G & S Stamps.
They were put out by the General Sales company, in Omaha. This was the Home Office.
In conclusion:News of the past:
Hey wait a minute
Could it be? Googling . . . holy crow, Neil Hefti was born in Nebraska! Could it be?
