2020 Ennui

2020 has now managed to slog its way into December. COVID is not only still with us, it appears to be ascendant. There is a vaccine on its way, but public confidence in it, along with everything else coming from government officials, seems at an all-time low. We are witnessing a poisonous and petulant transition of power never before seen in American politics. Our new President looks more frail with each passing day, and the old President seems hellbent on blowing everything up on his way out. I returned to the office yesterday to a death claim and more bad COVID news. It is fair to say that I find myself fighting against a rising tide of depression.

That probably sounds more dramatic than I intended. The fact that I feel a bit depressed is no bombshell. Life is full of highs and lows. Not every season is filled with triumphs. There are times in life when events conspire against you. That’s just the way life works. You grind through the dark times and eventually the sun breaks through the clouds. It has always been this way for me and I think for most people. This just happens to be one of the dark moments. When you’re essentially an optimist, having a pessimistic outlook is disconcerting. It catches you off guard, feels foreign, as if your mind has been invaded by an enemy. 

But, I will power through this at some point. I always have in the past. Good COVID news would help. A couple of good productive weeks at work would help. Good things happening to people I love would help the most. I have much to be thankful for. The blessings I have experienced in my life make a very long list. So, you can’t fairly complain when you experience a few setbacks, especially when those setbacks are beyond your control. This is the last I will speak of this in this space. Nobody wants to read about someone else's problems. All of you have plenty of your own problems, right?

Why do mermaids wear seashells?

Because she outgrew her b shells.

Wonder Woman

Spending an entire week helping your daughter move in to a new home is unlike a Maine vacation in one significant way...I actually lost weight. Apparently, packing and unpacking boxes, cleaning and moving furniture, burns more calories than fishing, sitting around a camp fire, and drinking beer. Who knew?

We are back after a week in Columbia, delighted to have slept in our king size bed last night, and so thoroughly proud of Jon and Kaitlin we can hardly stand it. Their new house is beautiful and, for the moment, clean. There’s only one room that remains unfinished—the study— and even that is coming along nicely. We even put up the tree before we left...

At this point I should probably stop using the term we, since although we all put in our fair share of labor, this entire enterprise would have been an unmitigated disaster without...Pam Dunnevant. It is almost impossible to overemphasize just how indispensable she was to the successful completion of this mission. Everyone has their own work style. Some people require supervision to stay on track, others work best when given a list, etc...but my wife thrives in chaos, and this skill is a dramatic thing to behold in action. From the time we pulled into their old driveway on Sunday afternoon until we crawled out of their new one Saturday morning, she was like a cross between the Energizer Bunny and a Teamster foreman. Whether it was her down on her hands and knees scrubbing a stubborn spot on the bathroom floor, or packing up an entire kitchen by herself, or throwing together delicious meals for everyone every night, she was the queen bee around which the rest of us merely buzzed. It was an amazing performance that had all of us glancing at each other asking, Who is this woman, and when is she gonna crash? But, she never did. She would be forgiven for sleeping until noon this morning...but she won’t.

I had my moments. Friday, I was given a list of five objectives for the day. I love having a list. I finished everything by 2 o’clock in the afternoon, but my best moment of the week came later that afternoon when the internet guy showed up to hook the house up to the World Wide Web. This guy was very tall, wore his mask on his chin and was a dead ringer for Snoop Dog. We all understood roughly 25% of what he said, which made it difficult to determine how to proceed with his directives. Eventually we were able to make out the fact that unless he could gain access to the walk-in crawl space under the house he could not continue. The door was locked and Jon, who was at work, had the only key. Snoop was about to pack up and leave when a skill I learned during my misspent youth came back to me at the perfect time. I ran into the back yard, retrieved an old expired credit card from my wallet I keep for just this purpose, and slid it between the lock and the door knob and DING, I was in! We retrieved Snoop before he was able to make his escape, he was able to hook up the internet and everyone lived happily ever after.

But, my wife was the thing this week. Amazing. 

Moving Day

Today is the big day. The moving van guys show up at 9:00. Over the last two days we have packed up tons of boxes, and filled my car up with five loads of them. We have mopped floors, cleaned bathrooms, vacuumed carpets...and have the sore hamstrings and tight backs to prove it. I have endured the soul-crushing traffic on the aptly named, Hardscrabble Road, ten times in two days. In the four years that Jon and Kaitlin have lived in this rental house, the aforementioned city street has been under construction, and in those four years I have yet to determine to what end. Honestly, there are several traffic cones that have spider webs on them. Still, after 48 months of pointless destruction and the eternal meanderings of menacing earth moving equipment, the road still gets reduced to one lane during the peak traffic hours of each day. The guy who holds the sign that says STOP on one side and SLOW on the other was a teenager when we first met. Now he has a receding hairline and a beer gut. But...I digress.

First item of business this morning will feature me taking Jackson across town to a friend’s house for a play date with a husky puppy. These friends are the same ones who will be bringing us our Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, just two of the amazing people that make up Jon and Kaitlin’s life group from Midtown Church. If Jackson makes it over there without throwing up all over the inside of my Cadillac I will consider it a major victory and a giant middle finger to 2020. 

Two jokes:

Hear about the Pharmaceutical company that has combined a laxative with alphabet soup?

They call it....Letter Rip.

What do you call a long line of men waiting for a haircut?

A barberque.

Oh...and then there’s this:

So great. The perfect photograph for 2020, right here. Taken somewhere in London, I think. This brave women, with a crude handmade sign, sums up what’s really going on out there. You might be asking, Yes, but the cop’s hat is blocking out some crucial information. Really? I don’t think so. Do you honestly need any other information besides Electr and Microwave to know that this woman has hit the proverbial nail on the head? Just when we were getting close to stumbling on the truth about the...microwave thing...along comes COVID. How convenient. Coincidence? This woman doesn’t think so. And she took the time to make a really cool sign to let the rest of us in on the truth that the big shots at the power companies and the big shots at the microwave companies don’t want us to know. There’s biological damage, for the love of God! 

Nostalgia and the Big Move

In the Beginning . . .

After much badgering from my family and with crucial technological help from them I am launching this Blog.  It is my intention to record my observations about life as they come to me and as I am  inspired to write. The subjects will cover a broad range of topics from minor daily frustrations to the more profound issues of government, politics and religion. I claim no special wisdom or educational credentials. I am simply a college educated business owner with a wife, kids and a mortgage who happens to have a large library. With all that reading comes the conceit that I might be smarter than the average bear and maybe the world could benefit from my insights. However, having just written that sentence it occurs to me just how vain it sounds so ...I take it back. The world will do perfectly fine without my brilliance. 

  I feel it only fair to declare my biases at the beginning of this adventure.  I am 52, an unapologetic baseball fan, suspicious of anything "big" such as BIG business, BIG government, BIG deals...all are inherently dangerous, a lover of family and being a father, passionate about dogs, especially golden retrievers like Molly.  I also love music that is well written and well performed as it is one of the few things that has the power to bring me to tears.  My personal tastes range from classical through earlier country through the blues and rock and roll and then abruptly end at disco and rap.  Its as if music died with the Beatles..although Ben Folds is clever and there are random contemporary artists that I enjoy. I also much prefer the company of younger people to older ones. On subjects political I lean Libertarian..on matters religious I am Christian.  

So that about covers the biases.  Keep these in mind as you read the many opinionated rants to come.

Above is the very first post in The Tempest, published ten years ago. Amazing and quite encouraging that so much of it is still true, with the glaring exception of the fact that I am no longer 52. Alert readers will notice the smaller font size. My eyes worked better then!

On this Lord’s day Pam and I are leaving for Columbia, South Carolina to spend the week moving Kaitlin and Jon into their first house! Thanksgiving will be a working vacation. But we are indeed thankful for them both and excited to be able to help. Pictures to follow!

The Desire to be Heard

I have been at this for ten years now. 2,300 times I have typed out my thoughts and published them in this space. The Tempest has served as a platform to share my thoughts and opinions with anyone willing to read them. It has been part creative outlet, part opinion column and part confessional. It has also been a sometimes unfortunate public record of the many occasions where I have been wrong about things, sometimes spectacularly. Prior to The Tempest I produced 14 leather bound journals, 19 years of such thoughts which were private, for my own consumption. I’m not sure what to make of it all, what it says about me that I feel compelled to write things down. Part of it is my belief that history is important, the proper understanding of which can be the world’s best teacher. Part of it is the notion that when I am gone perhaps my children and grandchildren will find my recollections instructive, or at the least interesting. I wonder what Dad thought about Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, gay marriage, the designated hitter rule? It’s all in there. Did Pops ever doubt himself? Was he ever afraid? Yes and yes. You can look it up.

But the real reason for The Tempest has become clear to me recently. Human beings all come with various desires baked in to their DNA, a survival instinct, sexual attraction, flight or fight etc. One of the strongest instinctive desires is often overlooked, the the desire to be heard. Look around  and you will see this desire being played out all around you, the quest to be heard and understood. I recognize it in every street protest, every Facebook argument, every long line at the voting booth. I even see it in places of great violence, where all self discipline has been lost. Riots are at their essence a misshapen scream to be heard gone horribly wrong, producing the polar opposite effect in the listener. All we see is the destruction, everything else gets downed out.

I see this desire to be heard and understood in every single divorce I have ever encountered. Although there may have been other reasons, practically every person I have ever talked to about their divorce says something like... He just never listened to me. She never heard me, never tried to understand.

So, I continue to write. For me it’s always been great fun, almost a habit, but always therapeutic. The best part about a blog is that nobody is forced to indulge me. If you aren’t interested in what I have to say, you are free to ignore the post. Also, if you disagree with what I write you are free to register your disagreement in the Comments section. That way, you get to be heard too. The popularity of The Tempest has waxed and waned over the past ten years. There have been times when everything I have posted gets devoured by lots of people, but then there are also times when most of what I write gets totally ignored. You can’t take it personally and I never do. It’s an odd fact that after ten years I still can’t predict with any reliable accuracy which it will be...which is just as well since writing to maximize clicks would be the death knell of this blog. The rule here has always been that I write about things I care about, never what I think the reader might care about. Hence, all my baseball rants.

But, to all of you who have taken the time to read for the past ten years, especially you devoted few who read everything, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Theatre of the Absurd

It’s currently 5:45 AM and my mind is all over the place, even more so than usual. Normally this hour of the day is a time for the sorting out of things, since I always awaken with dozens of competing ideas jockeying with each other for my attention. Surely I am not the only one this happens to, right? Doesn’t everyone wake up to a subconscious run on sentence with sixteen subjects, eleven verbs, and more semi-colons than you can count? Coffee helps, oddly enough. Then, by the time I step out of the shower, things have settled down. For now, its like a monkey juggling chainsaws up there. So, I’m just going to go with it...

My daughter and her husband closed on their first house yesterday. Right after they were handed the keys Kaitlin sent me a text:

So, we wired $**,*** to our attorney today.

I read the line several times and then remarked, “That sentence is quite a thing to hear from the mouth of one’s child.”

Yesterday Pam and I secured a rental on Quantabacook for three weeks next July, giving us five weeks in a row on our favorite lake from July 3 thru August 7. When we shared the news with our kids, the most enthusiastic response came from my daughter-in-law, a girl who had never traveled north of Tennessee before marrying my son. It is a beautiful thing when you discover that both your daughter-in-law and son-in-law have fallen head over heels for Maine just like the rest of us. How dreadful would it be if they hated lake living?

We all love Fall, the colors, the cooler temperatures that arrive after the blistering heat of summer. But eventually the colors fade to brown and everything withers away, leaving homeowners the ridiculous task of gathering the dead. My yard has lots of trees, and for about a six week period which begins the first of November, they all shed their leaves in great annoying waves. As they do you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma. You could ignore it. Why gather up leaves until all of them have died? What’s the point of slaving away out there when as soon as you have finished, you wake up the next morning to a fresh coating of death and decay? Well, your brain suggests to you, if you wait six weeks to get them up they will be a foot deep and it will take you forever! Besides, your neighbors will become annoyed with you every time they walk by your house and see the mess! So, I trudge out there every four or five days and rake them up, stuff them in giant black plastic bags, waiting for the great collection day, when my County comes around and throws all my stuffed bags in a giant truck and speeds them away to the landfill. Henrico County has decreed that my neighborhood has to wait until December the 14th for this blessed event. By that time I will have at least 50 bags. Beautiful.

Ran across this Far Side the other day...

This is a perfect summary of 2020. Certainly, this entire comic opera of a year has all been a fantastic misunderstanding. 

How great is this? Every speaker’s nightmare.

Then there’s this from the Worksgiving celebration at my office yesterday...

Just a little something I like to call the COVID CAFE.

Oh, and Pam made this last night...

One last thing, our church has a new Sacraments protocol in place for the remainder of the year...

So, there you have it. Just a brief glimpse into the theater of the absurd  that is my brain at 5:30 in the morning.

P.S.

Somebody Feed Phil

Yesterday morning I passed through the kitchen on my way out the door. The television was on in the den. As I glanced at it I was greeted with video footage of sucker punches being thrown by combatants at a political demonstration in Washington. I didn’t know who was sucker punching who, just that people were clobbering each other in the most cowardly way possible. It seemed to me the perfect encapsulation of life in 2020 America...the sucker punch. Anger, resentment, and suspicion are a toxic brew leading us to terrible behavior on a larger and larger scale with each passing month. Part of it is our ghastly political climate, but most of it I lay at the feet of COVID. Life with a pandemic hanging in the background of every scene of our lives has had the cumulative effect of bringing out the absolute worst in us.

Pam and I have settled in to a routine first started when we became empty nesters several years ago. When our children lived here we insisted on dinner as a family around the table where no communication devices were allowed. Once they left however, Pam and I became discombobulated by the silence of a dinner table without kids. It only served to remind us how much we missed them. So we improvised. It started when we bought this really super cool coffee table that had a top that raised up to become either a desk or an improvised dinner table. I’m typing this blog at it now...

We started taking our dinners at this coffee table where we would watch something on television together. For the two of us this is a big deal since I would never watch television otherwise. Indeed after dinner is over and I have cleaned the kitchen, Pam stays downstairs with it on in the background and I head upstairs to read. It’s our thing. So this one hour a night we watch stuff on television. In this regard, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, etc. have been a Godsend.

Several weeks ago we found ourselves in a serious show hole. We could find nothing satisfactory to watch. I honestly can’t remember how we found it or who might have recommended it to us, but we have discovered an hour long antidote to 2020....Somebody Feed Phil.

The premise of this show sounds exactly like the sort of thing I would hate. It’s a show about a guy who travels all around the world and eats local food for our edification and enlightenment. Are you kidding me? Sounds painfully boring. The twist is this...the guy isn’t some pompous, nose in the air food critic. He’s not some social commentator who uses food as an excuse to lecture us about our ideological failures. No, the guy is possibly the biggest dork in the history of television who knows literally nothing about food other than the fact that he loves everything. He also happens to be Phil Rosenthal, the executive producer of perhaps the greatest sitcom of all time...Everybody Loves Raymond. Although the show is indeed about truly fabulous and fascinating food from all over the world, what Somebody Feed Phil is really about is...decency, friends, and love. It’s about the mystical power found in a shared meal, how dining together is the great facilitator. Its terribly hard to be angry, resentful and suspicious of somebody who you are eating delicious food with. And boy does this man know how to eat.

So far we have watched Phil eating cuisine from Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Marrakesh, Tel Aviv, Mexico City, New Orleans, Bangkok, Saigon, Venice and Buenos Aires. In each place he travels he finds people who are doing wonderful things. Its as if he is trying to catch people in the act of being good human beings. Along the way Phil gets roped into doing local things that place him in awkward and often hilarious situations made more so by his awkward goofiness and self deprecating humor. But perhaps the best segment of each show is towards the end when he FaceTimes his elderly Jewish parents back in Brooklyn. He tells them where he is and they ask him questions. One or both of his parents end up saying something embarrassingly charming. When Phil calls them from Venice, his Dad cracks...”You hear about the street walker from Venice? She drowned!”

We watch this show to have our faith in humanity renewed. It is heartwarming. It’s lighthearted. Phil Rosenthal doesn’t take himself too seriously. He’s just a guy who loves food and loves people. It’s a beautiful thing to see a middle aged Jewish man sitting on a balcony with a Muslim family on the outskirts of Marrakesh laughing and eating together like they have known each other all of their lives.

So, the next time you happen to see someone get sucker punched on television and you need to wash your brain out with something, I suggest taking in an episode of Somebody Feed Phil. Currently, there are 17 of them on Netflix. Pick one. You won’t be disappointed.