We have reached the point of Assumed Green Supremacy. It's only been a few months since everything was fully green, but it's now the normal state of the world and it's hard to imagine it was ever anything else.

I don't know if Sunderwood Park is absolutely choked with weeds, but does it matter? They're green and thick and Birch likes to walk there, because it's cool and soft.

Last Monday's walk we met some Turkeys, and hence the Bleat Banner was a Turkey Picture. For something completely different, let's celebrate this Tuesday with Turkey Video from Monday's walk.

Idiots. They walk into traffic all the time, right by a 90 degree bend in the road people take too fast. If I stick around I might actually see, as God is my witness, a turkey fly.

(You knew I'd get around to that reference eventually.)

Saturday night I was sitting at my desk, thinking: I am missing my high school reunion. I went to the 25th, but passed on this iteration. I turned away from this one without question, ignored the email offers. The reason seems almost archaic: I am ashamed. The last time I went I had it all, and now it’s all gone, and I just can’t bear the thought of explaining over and over again to my old classmates how everything turned out.

Does that seem like an overreaction? Can’t quite gauge these things anymore.

Don’t always feel like a failure, and there’s the occasional fanfare in my heart that says I did okay overall, but at the end of the arc of life, the line ended up in the drink with a plop / a sizzle / some ripples and bubbles. I used to spend actual mental energy wondering where my whole big body of work would land in the story of American popular culture. Surely in the margins, because that’s where writers end up unless they’re fantastically popular - and even then, they fade. But I’ve outproduced Fran Lebowitz by a factor of 10,000, and I’m in the microfiche and scanned newspapers and magazines in the Library of Congress, and there are books, and maybe, just maybe someone doing a dive on humorists of the late 20th century and early 21st might give me a paragraph. Why, a fella could even hope for a rediscovery and reappraisal and maybe a friendly article in some journal some day.

That . . . seems ridiculous. Irrelevant and laughable. If nothing else the last punishing year has relieved me of that vain concern. No one is going to revisit the work of a LOSER.

But hold on hold on, is that fair? Well. Probably. I wouldn’t call my situation a stunning triumph, a pinnacle achievement. I had these things; I no longer have these things; they were water through my hands, and hence, they were lost, ergo, LOSER.

Your associates and boosters will tell you otherwise, and the magazine articles dealing with Grey Divorce make it sound as if some sort of natural phenomenon inexplicably severed an old bond. It’s life! Happens to many! It’s not a judgment! But this is nonsense, and you know it; there is no more profound judgment. Ah if only I had one or two more salient strengths and positive attributes, that would’ve done it! You know better. This drills down to the core.

I remember being young and regarding this with complete and total horror:

THAT REQUEST CAME FROM HIS WIFE

Outside of dying in the paddies of ‘Nam, was there any worse fate that could befall a man? He staggered along in the rain until he had to sit:

And one of the passersby stopped to look at him, because he was so pathetic.

The source material was much much darker.

It’s played for laffs, but Felix Unger’s response to being kicked out of his home was to go to Times Square and kill himself. Even when he goes to Oscar's, he takes pills.

However. The Saturday mood was good. Bountiful breakfast with hash browns and eggs with a tomato / pepperoni cheddar, an Aldi toaster waffle that had all the characteristics of styrofoam: we’re done with those.Paid a visit to the Giant Swede. Thumped on the treadmill at the gym while listening to a fascinating podcast on the British National Anthem. Absolutely perfect hamburger with scraps and extra bacon for Birch. Good brisk walk after supper, two hours of various creative work, annotated an old Studio One for Black & White World, then opened the laptop at the counter to note that I am proud of what I’ve done today but still feel like a loser, and it’s my fault, and if I’d been better I wouldn’t be alone -

NO, go walk the dog and have a midnight cigar. This we did. Came back, checked the mail. There’s a big envelope that contains a magazine in which my column appears. Yay not loser. An insurance offer. A Costco come-on.

And a letter from the county. I thought it was the final divorce decree, but it’s a letter saying the case has been assigned to a judge. A formality. Wonder if the judge ever read the column. Huh - seemed like a nice guy, but you never know. Journalists, writers, unstable types with preening egos. Now that I think of it though he wrote some things with which I really disagreed. Maybe it’s karma here. Deserves it. Loser. MOTION GRANTED.

Anyway. You’d think we’d be well into the rebuilding portion of ego-reconstruction, but remember: Oct-May was spent together in that unreal interval of common spaces and purposes and nightly dinners and hugs goodnight before the Langoliers disassembled everything in a week and she evaporated, the way Natalie evaporated when she went to Brazil. Technically I’m only seven weeks into dealing with this - the reality, not the expectation of a forthcoming reality. They say it takes a year to really get your head straight.

Just in time for the 51st class reunion.

Every once in a while you want a second-screen show whose plot you needn't follow too closely, because you know the plot already. Most of the Hoarders shows follow the same arc: we meet the person living in accumulated filth and clutter, and they're either resigned and passive, or living in denial. There are seventeen cats in the background. Then the crews show up, and you get the best part: the subject insists on keeping a busted mousetrap, the family despairs, commercial.

There are, however, only so many ways to describe them, and sometimes I feel as if A&E just gave up.

Yeeessss, I think that's why there's a camera crew there. You will also note that since these people are not First 48 victims, they are not beloved.

		Sometimes they just hand it over to Yoda.

I watched the HBO special about the Supermodel Cult. Very 80s, for good and for ill. Not a lot of inadvertant documentary, but there was this:

I had coffee there, but I was never so foolish as to order the food. I can only imagine the novel varieties of Hep C in the fried shrimp.

It’s 195X.

I'm not sure of the date. It can be ascertained by the campaign, though.

Only four this week, for complex and utterly boring reasons that have to do with the 50s site itself. If you've been there, then you know these two:

The childless Lucky Couple.

Here's something I noticed right away. That's her, but that's not him. Is she stepping out? Did they get divorced?

I just realized that everything I have for this week is a duplicate from the last 50s appearance. I could raid the 50s site itself, but that's eating the seed corn.

Don't you love this special look behind the scenes? If I use the next batch of Bleat 50s Product, I'll be up against it when that week rolls around and the folder is empty. Best to find something unsnipped. Hold on . . .

Okay, it's TV Guide from 1955.

The ways in which the brands attempted to distinguish themselves were innumerable, complex, and often full of technobabble Dad liked. Made him feel like a guy who knew some inside skinny.

I'm sure a lot of these things were actual innovations that helped. They didn't transform the experience, though. Or did they? I've no idea.

It's the big swing to silver in '55! RCA gets in the game, but even though they call it "silver" in the name, it's actually super-aluminizing at work.

Larger version here. You didn't have to buy a new TV, you know. You could just swap out the tube. Why don't we do that? Bob did it and Marge says it's so much better. Why don't we do that?

The Cabinet of Light. Literally:

Or, the Halo-Light. "Surround lighting." Looked like this.

How is this possible?

Ah. Okay. They have a bunch of rocks, and maybe one or two are real. Sign up to annoy your friends by asking them to buy Christmas cards from you, and we'll send you a stone - it might be real!

Probably won't be!

Most certainly won't be!

I hate to say it, but you wonder what pill-prep she had to do for this one:

Only the East Coast got the color feed. Everyone else saw a kine.

It survived!

And it did well. It was "a ratings triumph, scoring a 34.8 Nielsen rating. She signed a three-year, US$300,000 (equivalent to $2,730,000 in 2024) contract with the network. Only one additional special was broadcast, however: a live concert-edition of General Electric Theater in 1956. The relationship between the Lufts and CBS then broke down in a dispute over the planned format of upcoming specials."

They don't, but you kinda sorta thought they did.

By the time I started reaching for these in early adulthood, it was generally accepted that they the weakest thing you could take. Tasted okay, though.

That will do. Joe's up around 11.