End Of Summer Ramblings

Sooooo... the end of summer. What to think about that? Suicide? I guess it is inappropriate to joke about suicide. They tell me with teen agers it is always inappropriate to joke about that. The idea that teen agers have anything to really want to kill themselves about is laughable... until it is not. I have never really suffered from ideations of suicide even as a teenager. I think I had better brain chemistry... then...but I digress.... summers end.

I sent my oldest back to Valparaiso today. As I type he is broken down in Champaign Illinois. As ineptly a named town as there has ever been and exactly equidistant from St. Louis and Valparaiso with what appears to be a broken alternator. It was depressing having him leave and it is even more so with him stuck in Chapaign. Who knows whether he wil find a place to fix it tomorrow. He might be stranded there for the duration. Perhaps he should transfer.

The end of summer always sucks. It comes earlier and earlier each year. I believe I have ranted about that in the past. Summer should of course run Memorial Day to Labor Day (as God intended) but now school starts August 15 whther you like it or not and everyone (other then my friends in the state of Michigan are back in school well before September. It is an abomination.
Pat goes back to Truman on Monday. He will not need a ride either but he will quickly recede on his own into the great waste land that we call Kirksville. He has had a summer of summer school and has resided in our basement once again for a summer without activity and natural light. Still... he will be missed AND by the end of the summer with Sandy working all the time he actually learned to straighten up the place. Not bad for 20 years old.

Having your father in law do a quad bypass this last week did not do a lot to bring the summer to the shining conclusion I would have hoped for. He got through it well or at least sort of well. Heart attack on the table evidently and then 5-6 bad hours of post op where they could not stabilizie him. He is recovering to the doctors satisfaction but is in a lot of pain and is sick a lot. My mother in law is generally performing like a champ but it takes a toll and my wife of course wants to be there for everyone.

My daughter.... she has already re-entered the school environment and has made various announcements and decisions, some of which are as follows:
"School sucks"
"I am so bored already"
"I lost my day planner immediately after I got it"
"The Freshman are fat"
"I am quitting band"
"I think I will major in business in college"
"I am NOT ""in a relationship""
"A Boy is coming down from college to visit"
"It feels like I have been in school forever"
This is all just in a week. And she is only a Junior. Join me, if you will in saying a brief, but heartfelt prayer for the teachers and administrators at Lutheran High School South. On a related note the perennially weak and often embarrassing Lutheran South football team is showing signs of life under it's new Coach. Standing where I am standing, with a team that has not won three games total in four years I am predicting... THREE VICTORIES THIS YEAR! You heard it here first.

“the boys in their summer bands
sweat as they give it their all
the bands might be good
but probably won't last through the fall”
Lucero-Summer Song

The great news at the end of this summer is the Cardinals. Even in the dog days with 40 games left it is exciting. How about that line up now? They have a chance at every spot in the line up. For a while we had only lonely Albert Pujols but now, though not a murderers row we certainly give a pitcher quite a bit to think on. And our pitching, which I have much maligned seems to have gelled. Chris Carpenter (who I belittled the teams investment in) has remained healthy and dominant. Wainwright found his stride and now they have aquired Schmoltz. Schmoltz... who might be old and washed up according to the Red Sox has a competitors heart and it looks like he might still have a live arm. I think he struck out 7 in a row tonight. Give him a lead and he never looks back and he has so much playoff experience. I still remember his dead fish eye stare from the mound whether at Atlanta or Houston... mowing down out batters. Kudos to Cardinal management who in a tremendous public relations coup said “we bought players because the fans suported the team!” Without answering the question about the fans supporting the team for previous two years without opening up their wallets, they did it right, and smart this year. It could be a fun October and even when mourning the end of summer it gives one reason for hope and... perhaps even light.

Rainy Days & Sundays and Tiger and The Curse of the Supermodel

Soooo... Sunday afternoon with golf and rained out Cardinal baseball. I have a lot of work I should be doing but here I am. Posted a few new albums on Facebook from the summer and learned how to make a slide show from an iPhoto album. Conceivably I could have been more unproductive but it would be difficult to ascertain how. It looks like Tiger might have lost the lead to this nice young Korean gentlemen. He has never lost the lead before but he cannot make a putt to save his life. It is always hard to remember that Minnesota can be beautiful. He is also having a problem straightening out his approach shots and Y.E. Yeng is playing him hard and conservative as he protects this little lead.

I remember when Tiger burst onto the scene and I was explaining to my then teen aged son Jon that we might not see anyone win a tournament again. Once again i was wrong as Tiger proved that he could follow the fate of rock stars and other athletes and would sleep with and marry a supermodel. Current victims aside from Tiger are Tony Roma of Dallas and the jury is still out on Brady and the Patriots with that Giselle whatever her name is person. Other victims are musicians (name the lead singer of any great band for the last 30 years as these woman have sucked the creativity and will to live out of way too many to count). Once you have one of them, even as a friend, you are of course done. Obviously the first thing a woman like that does is such the soul out of a man. There is after all a price to pay. Second, and perhaps for these artists worse then losing their soul they find out that having sex with these women after six months is not better or worse then any of the women in their experience.... and it crushes them. That is my theory anyway.

Woods is one down going into 17 and I am hoping they end the Cardinal rain delay since they are losing to the hated (not really) San Diego Padres. Waiting to go out and visit my father in law at St. Lukes as he waits for a quadruple bypass next week. I know he is watching the same golf and hoping for a lift of the rain delay as well. Occasionally we get thunder and my psychotic dog Lola goes into a whimpering fit where she mewls and howls and rubs against me looking for comfort. When we are not here she goes really crazy and we find things knocked off the wall and paw prints on bathroom vanities as she looks for a “safe” place in our house. I am not sure whether Lola was crazy when we got her or whether we made her that way. Probably a coin flip, just like my kids.

On the Par three 17 Yeng put his on the green and Tiger hit a beautiful shot....that skipped over into the rough. It looked like it was going to the flag for a tap in and then it skipped rather then stuck. Once again I blame Elen Norgreden or Mrs. Tiger Woods. I feel like of these athletes would come to the midwest and marry a nice Lutheran girl to keep them grounded.... everything would fall into place for them. He just failed to make his chip shot run to the hole, likely while he was thinking about how irritable his wife was going to be with him for coming in second and fearing that she might leave him for this young man Y.E. Yeng. But Yeng flubs his up and leaves the door open. Tiger has what looks be like every 12 footer he has missed all day.... and he does. If Yeng makes his he will carry a 2 shot lead into 18... but Yeng lips out and we go to 18 with Tiger down 1.

Yeng rips his drive down the left side. During the break i went down to get a beer and saw my 16 year old daughter and 19 year old son watching “Keeping Up With The Khardashians”. I weep for our countries future. Tiger rips one down the right side but he needs to something extraordinary or he will prove to be too human...again. If Yeng, a Korean wins this, will we be forced to address him as “our most beloved and wonderful PGA Champion”? He just hit an almost perfect approach to within 8 feet. Tiger is going to try and hit a 5 iron 197 yards.... into the rough on the left. It looks like it is over. All Tiger needs to do is chip in from 20 feet. Missed it and is about 10 foot out. They let Yeng putt first. This is the first lead he has blown after 54 holes ever. Yeng birdies. Tiger misses ANOTHER putt and loses by 3. Perhaps when his wife leaves him he can get some retired Victoria’s Secret model or something. It could be happen.

What I am Listening To (Because You Care)

Mid Year Music Update

Sooooo it is midyear and I have been listening to a lot of new things and not sharing it with anyone. I am such a shit. So in a bout of boredom with a healthy dose of self loathing let me tell you about some fun stuff out there, some of it new, some....not so much. iTunes is evolving or devolving the way I sample music. I follow two music sights on Twitter, Pitchfork and No Depression and I save the tweets with certain references to new bands. My tatstes as you know lean towards the twang but occasionally I venture out. Anyway, I get a tweet about a band, I go to iTunes and sample a song and if I like it I download a few of the most popular songs by the band. In so doing I have found some good stuff. the problem is that I do not always go back and buy the whole CD and so am probably missing a lot. These thoughts plague me at night.

Blind Pilot: "Three Rounds & A Sound": This band sounds like Bon Iver on steroids. if you do not get the reference don’t worry about this one. Download the song "The Story I Heard".

Cracker: "Sunrise In The Land": More funny well written songs with Johnny Hickman tearing it up on guitar. Adam Durvitz of the Counting Crows and Patterson Hood formerly of The Drive By Truckers assist on some songs. Countrier then some their stuff. The song "Darling One" sounds like classic Tom Petty. Creepy.

Rhett Miller: "Rhett Miller": It took him till his 3rd Cd to make one named after him and there is a reason he put his name on it. It kicks ass. It is too pretty for most people but the bot knows a hook, knows bad relationships and has a voice that I could listen to while he sang the phone book. Buy it. The whole thing.

We Were Promised Jetpacks: "These Four Walls": Furriners from Glasgow Scotland they are funny and rock a little. It is not quite as pretty as the band The Frames but is amped up more. The band name makes me smile.

Levon Helm: "Electric Dirt": More great, gritty performances by the former drummer of “The Band”. He does a cover of Randy Newman’s “Kingfish” but every song is good. It is late night music. Play it quietly and drink bourbon so you can sing like him.

Elvis Costello: Secret, Profane and Sugarcane: More great work by a genius. Once again in a country vein but the title track, “Changing Partners” and him covering his own song “Complicated Shadows” make it his best in several years.Buy it for yourself. Buy it out of respect for the artist, but buy it.

One song download necessities: William Elliot Whitmore: "Hell or High Water". Joe Pug: "Hymn 101".

I Come Here Not To Praise Books, But To Bury Them!

Sooooo...reading.... The newspapers are dying. Books are threatened. Kindle is being suggested as “the next big thing” for reading books, newspapers and magazines. Dogs are sleeping with cats, we have a socialist in the White House and apparently all is NOT right with the world. But what about reading.

I was brought to this rant by my friends at Borders. I like Borders more then Barnes & Noble. I am told if I go to the Barnes and Noble at West County it will change my mind but as a matter of preference I prefer Borders. Cannot tell you why. Perhaps they at first seemed less corporate. I still feel guilty every time I do not go to locally owned Left Bank Books but they are inconvenient and book shopping for me is always spur of the moment.

Anyway...the Rant was started by my quest for Izaak Walton’s “The Compleat Angler”. It is a remarkable book and I had a friend who I wanted to give it to a friend who is struggling a little in his professional and personal life. It is a great primer on fishing and contemplation and has been in publication for 350 years which is no mean feat. Which leads us to Borders. They didn’t have it in stock.

I have gotten use to their stocking system and that they only have best seller hardbacks and paper backs by mainstream authors but you can always find the classics tucked somewhere in some form. It was like going to a book store and not being able to by “Old Man and the Sea” or “Crime and Punishment” or the “The Grapes of Wrath”. How can this be?

It has been explained to me that only assholes read. I hope that this is not true. Not because i do not want to be labeled an asshole but because over all I do believe most people are not assholes so I continue to hope that most people will read. Readers have probably caused our own demise with condescending (assholes) people like me pretentiously dismissing other peoples books, popular books, Grisham novels, self help literature and of course religious books (other then the Bible). Readers as a stereotype are not lovable but seriously, we need to read.

Never has our world been more in need of people reading, talking and thinking about difficult, big concepts. Forget about National Health Care for a minute and think about the challenges of world population growth, a global economy, nuclear war and yes, even though by a recent poll well over 70% of Republicans think it is myth, global warming (in 2007 only 23% of Republican Senators thought it had been proven to any reasonable certainty, even after President Bush had come around).
Despite what people might tell you, reading is good. I have been hugely benefitted by reading a lot. When you read it expands your vocabulary dramatically. People often (almost always in my experience) confuse a large vocabulary with intelligence. I am a living refutation of that theory. It also can challenge your own thought processes. While I believe fiction and non fiction have value I have a heart for fiction. Reading other peoples constructs and losing yourself in them can initiate thought processes that examining the factual world can never arrive at. 

Fiction is not for everyone. Grown men seem to eschew it instead reading books on management techniques, money making techniques, organizational techniques, sports books and sometimes porn. Women are more likely to relax with a book and I guess I am nothing if not womanly. I like all kinds of fiction but prefer modern authors and hate anything Irish. James Joyce and his legion of followers remind me of the new big hat country music that sounds like the Eagles. Everyone is so concerned about being so authentic and if you want to be that authentic then do it like Joyce and like Hank williams and drink yourself yourself to death.

My favorite authors are people like Richard Russo, Madison Smartt (two T’s) Bell and Cormac Mc carthy but I also have a lot of Grisham Books, every murder mystery by Jonathan Sanford and a large embarrassing number of volumes of Dick Francis’ horse race mysteries. I like em all. I am not really, despite my pretenses, a very selective or discriminating reader. As i think I stated in an old blog my book collection has been likened (by a former friend) to a Barnes & Noble remainder sale.
I guess my question is whether people are really not reading or whether people have never read. Sometime when you get a minute hit this site:

http://www.readfaster.com/education_stats.asp#literacystatistics

It will tell you among other things that:

“When the State of Arizona projects how many prison beds it will need, it factors in the number of kids who read well in fourth grade. “ (poor readers, more prisoners)

“46% of American adults cannot understand the label on their prescription medicine. “ (How does that effect health care reform? How about the cost of health care?)

“U.S. adults ranked 12th among 20 high income countries in composite (document, prose, and quantitative) literacy”. (Makes competing in a global economy pretty tough).

I don’t know what all that means but it would seem that reading might be linked to some types of success in our society. But how are we going to read? The Kindle is all the rage among the reading intelligentsia but the Luddites among us like our books. It will be interesting to see where these reading devices take us. Will I really read my paper on it? Will I even want to read the Post Dispatch on it? I like the feel of a news paper like I like the fell and the smell of a book. I cannot imaging having a machine in my hands with display screen being at all esthetically satisfying or soothing. It seems like work. Then there is also the issue of someone knowing what I am reading and recently we had Amazon zap and erase off of everyone’s Kindles copies of Orwell’s “1984” which evidently came from an inappropriate source. Ironic? Sure. Chilling? Maybe.

Encourage someone to read. Buy a book. Buy a used book. Buy a paperback. Read a magazine that does not talk about Jon and Kate’s troubles but read. Encourage other people to read and stop wasting so much damn time on line. There is no there, there.

Ahhhhh..The Return of the ANGRY MOB!

I love America. Seriously, this is without question the most awesome place in the world to live in. I wish I was even more grateful for the supreme privilege of having been born here, at this time and being raised by two parents who loved me and took care of me and gave me options and chances in this great country. Even with those awesome parents it would be impossible for me to have this much opportunity anywhere else. But we are spurning all this bounty. Spurning it so we can be divisive, unhappy and angry.

Congress is going home on break and in traditions held for past decade or so they are convening town hall meetings to listen to and converse with their constituents. The tea party protesters are getting energized not to take part in these meeting but merely to come in, shout down the congressmen and disrupt the meetings and "be heard". Congressmen Tim Bishop's case is typical:

"In Bishop’s case, his decision came on the heels of a June 22 event he held in Setauket, N.Y., in which protesters dominated the meeting by shouting criticisms at the congressman for his positions on energy policy, health care and the bailout of the auto industry. Within an hour of the disruption, police were called in to escort the 59-year-old Democrat — who has held more than 100 town hall meetings since he was elected in 2002 — to his car safely."

You have got to feel good about this. Angry mobs showing up and being obnoxious. Not interested in expressing their views and listening to other views BUT only in disrupting and punishing Democratic legislators. This is not happening to republican leaders. Only Democrats.



Glen Beck had this to add to the discussion:

http://glennbeck.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/08/05/are-you-a-right-wing-extremist/

This is what one tea party site is urging:

"One tea-party friendly group has disseminated a strategy memo for other anti-reform and anti-government groups, outlining what they consider best-practices for protesters who plan to enter and disrupt town hall events hosted by members of Congress over the August recess--practices that, according to the memo, "could be useful to activists in just about any district where their Congressperson has supported the socialist agenda of the Democrat leadership in Washington."
The memo, authored by Robert MacGuffie, who runs the website rightprinciples.com, suggests that tea partiers should "pack the hall... spread out" to make their numbers seem more significant, and to "rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation...to yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early.... to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda...stand up and shout and sit right back down." I like it. It promotes discussion and democracy.I know a lot of people who are angry. Angry with the government. Angry, because it is pointless. They are ANGRYy with the President. Angry about all the spending that is unsustainable. I cannot argue with any of them. THEY ARE ANGRY! When your angry you cannot listen. I am not even trying to say this healthcare plan is good or even tolerable because THERE IS NO HEALTHCARE BILL! there are snippets and pieces and a long draft of one in the House but I keep coming back to the same question which is why are people so angry?

The angry people I know are not missing any meals. They are not missing house payments. They are not losing jobs. They have not paid a penny more in taxes yet. The economy had already gone to hell before Obama came in and his initial moves were to continue the ones begun by his predecessor. The economy has not crashed yet. It still might and I think we are on a long slow slide to the bottom but that is still preferable to the free fall that we were in. Obama said what he was going to do. He got elected by a pretty large majority. It remains to be seen whether it can be done or should be done. People should be going to town hall meetings and expressing their views but shouting and disrupting legitimate efforts by our deeply flawed legislators t connect to their constituents is small minded and reeks of the kind of herd mentality that sets up my country, the greatest country in the world for another demagogue. Someone else who can channel all that hate and heat and passion for their own agenda and to the damage of the greatest country in the world.

I am going to take action and inform my legislators my feelings about health care reform. It needs to be reformed but my only message is going to be a simple one. If you do not make sure that you are part of whatever system you put in place, I will remember and I will take it out on your ass when I vote next time. I will not shout it at them. I will not shout down other people. I will see if they respond. I will report.