Gas prices on March 9 along Tramway Boulevard between Lomas and San Bernardino.
Monday’s chores were medium-heavy and I didn’t get a chance to ride until late afternoon.
It was going to have to be a short one, and I was thinking I should just go for a run instead.
But it was a gorgeous day — 77°! — and the forecast for today was looking a little less favorable. So I kitted up, grabbed the Rivendell Sam Hillborne, and set off for a brief inspection tour of gas prices at four stations along Tramway.
As you know, “the roaring economy is roaring like never before,” and though I’ve seen no signs of this at the grocery or anywhere else, The Pestilence says it is so and thus I must be mistaken. Wouldn’t be the first time.
I rarely drive, gassing up the ol’ rice rocket about once every three months or so. And lately I’ve quit collecting receipts because the pumps’ printers are usually on the fritz and damme if I’m stumbling into the kiosk to stand in line with the proles waiting to pay for their Slim Jims, malt-liquor 40s, and coffin nails, whatever they haven’t already shoplifted.
But I’m pretty sure that the last time I filled up — before we decided to bomb Iran into democracy — the price per gallon for regular was $2.83. And yesterday it was as you see above.
Winning? Your mileage may vary, as the fella says.
This may become a regular feature here at Ye Olde Dogge House. Feel free to chime in with the gas prices in your neck of “the roaring economy.” In the meantime, I have a year’s worth of grocery receipts to examine. I suspect that if there is any roaring to be heard as a consequence, it will be coming from me.
The two men were so very different in so many different ways — one a conservative white, born into an admiral’s family in San Diego; the other a liberal Black, spurned by birth father and stepfather in the segregated South — yet both came to immerse themselves completely in their respective roles, impatient with and often heedless of direction.
My favorite version of Duvall was Mac Sledge, the washed-up, alcoholic country singer-songwriter in the 1983 film “Tender Mercies.” He looked like post-Muskogee Merle Haggard and sounded like — well, like Robert Duvall if he’d gone outlaw with Willie and Waylon, because he sang the damn’ songs, after test-driving his pipes with a country band and motoring around East Texas “looking for accents,” according to The New York Times.
But Duvall likewise was top-notch — or maybe top gun — in “The Great Santini,” a 1979 movie based on the book of the same name by Pat Conroy. The titular character he portrayed, Marine fighter pilot Lt. Col. Wilbur “Bull” Meecham, reminded me very much of a certain Southern-fried Air Force colonel who flew C-47s out of New Guinea during World War II.
Duvall’s favorite role was that of Augustus McCrae, a crusty old ex-Texas Ranger in the 1989 TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove,” based on the Larry McMurtry novel … a revelation that weirded me right the hell out because that book is on my nightstand right now, as I’m between books I haven’t already read a few hundred times. Gus is right up there as characters go, and Duvall knew it.
“Let the English play Hamlet and King Lear,” he told interviewers, “and I will play Augustus McCrae, a great character in literature.”
Jackson had the misfortune of being the understudy to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and after King’s assassination he spent the rest of his life auditioning for that elusive starring role. Some in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference thought him a spotlight hog, and some outside the SCLC found him easy to caricature, especially the white folks who ran the big casino — though plenty of them stopped laughing after he turned in strong performances as a presidential candidate in 1984 and ’88.
He lost the nominations to Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, who went on to get beaten like rented mules by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and Jackson gave up tilting at that particular windmill.
Jackson continued trying to remind America that there were choices other than wrong right, hard right, and centrist, though as The Times notes, “for all his rhetorical thunder the Democrats never fully embraced his vision of an unashamedly liberal party based not on the white middle class but rather on his coalition of poor and working-class people of all colors.”
More’s the pity.
I don’t remember who I voted for in 1984. I was in a union then, and it’s possible that I pulled the lever for the old commie Gus Hall, because after brief flirtations with the Socialist Workers Party, the October League and the Communist Party (M-L) I occasionally enjoyed being a red pain in the ass. And no way was I gonna vote for a Hollywood cowboy who wasn’t Robert Duvall.
Four years later I was all about Gary Hart, until he self-destructed, and then I caucused for Jackson, for all the good it did him. His people charged that Colorado slow-walked its count to give Dukakis a boost going into the Wisconsin primary, but in the end, Jackson lost the caucus and the nomination to Dukakis.
Later that year at the behest of political pals I worked one event for the Democratic candidate. The people his campaign sent to Denver proved to be outlandish assholes, so much so that I didn’t bother to vote come November. It seemed pointless, another dry well in a decades-long drought. Barack Obama was light-years away.
But Jackson didn’t give up. And neither did Duvall. Both continued to find roles to play, and both helped make our lives worth the price of admission. Peace to them, their families, fans, and friends.
Author George Saunders is much in the news of late, chatting up the press in preparation for going on tour to promote his latest book, “Virgil,” due out later this month.
Speaking with The Guardian, Saunders said he was still trying to decide how to speak about politics when he hits the road. Preaching to the converted feels “a little too good, like it’s too much sugar,” he said, adding that while his nature is to seek peace, “that’s dangerous right now because I don’t want to be a peacemaker for this regime.”
I’m not a celebrated author, prepping for a book tour, or a Tibetan Buddhist. I blog irregularly and without distinction, the only tours I take are by Subaru, and the only thing I’m promoting is my own mental health. My devotion to Zen is sporadic at best.
But I sure dig where Saunders is coming from when he says The Work is the thing.
The one thing I’m doubling down on is: just keep making fictive worlds. Improve the quality of your thought, improve the quality of your compassion, by that sacramental exercise, then whatever you have to do you’ll be better equipped.
It reminds me of the Zen proverb, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Also, and too, of the Epistle of James, which goes, “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”
And I was pleasantly surprised to see Saunders prescribe a spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down: “Also start weightlifting, build a machine-gun turret. …”
Sounds like the right sort of work for an old blogger short on faith as the reign of His Excremency Donald the Dozy barrels along unhindered. We’re running out of water to carry in the Southwest, and we don’t burn wood. But you never know when a buffed-up bod’ and a machine-gun turret are liable to come in handy.
In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The odyssey that followed included a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The Army could have raised an infantryman from birth to within two years of enlistment age in the time it will have taken to get him a new handgun.
Unsurprisingly, our elected representatives are part of the problem:
As the House and Senate work toward the country’s first trillion-dollar defense budget, over $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon’s wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Jaysis. Planes that can’t fly. $13 billion sitting ducks. Millions for retrofitting Vietnam-era helicopters to carry and launch drones. For Ike’s fabled Military-Industrial Complex it’s like robbing the same bank, over and over and over again, because you have a guy on the inside. You don’t even need to bring that pistol you can’t seem to acquire for some mysterious reason.
Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” revisited for the modern era.
“We have faults which we have hardly used yet.” — cartoonist Walt Kelly, from “The Right Freedom, for the Right People, in the Right Place, at the Right Time,” published in the fall 1955 edition of the University of Chicago’s Chicago Review
Choices.
At times when we cast our ballots it seems we’re doomed to choose between getting stomped by the Hell’s Angels or chain-whipped by the Gypsy Jokers when all we wanted to do was ride our motorcycles. Or decide whether we should buy our bacon and beans from Safeway or Albertsons when we feel peckish. Just another shift in the barrel, and the view through the bunghole rarely changes for the better.
There simply is no “good choice.”
“Boy, you sure get offered some shitty choices,” a Marine once said to me, and I couldn’t help but feel that what he really meant was that you didn’t get offered any at all. Specifically, he was just talking about a couple of C-ration cans, “dinner,” but considering his young life you couldn’t blame him for thinking that if he knew one thing for sure, it was that there was no one anywhere who cared less about what he wanted. — Michael Herr, “Breathing In,” from his Vietnam book “Dispatches”
Six decades later every can we open is full of worms. We couldn’t care less about what they want, and they feel likewise about what we want. Nobody loves us, everybody hates us, we’re gonna eat some worms. Thus we shit the bed that our forefathers built for us.
Oh, but we’ve done our research. A podcaster on YouTube, this gal on TikTok, a Facebook group. Even worse, some dipshit blogger.
Nope. Democracy is not a spectator sport. Sure, you can pick a side, be a fan, follow “your” team online, on TV, or even in the newspaper … if your town still has one, and informing the readership still outweighs entertaining an audience. But you didn’t pick a single person in the lineup, from the head coach right on down to the waterboys. “Your” team was presented to you by its owners, who won’t even give you a ball cap. Not for free, anyway.
Citizens of a republic have to come off the bench and find the time, somehow, to engage with The System: study its mechanisms, learn how (and whether) they work, decide who might be best qualified to pull its levers and punch its buttons, and dismiss the time-servers and shovel-leaners who always seem to be on a coffee break or beavering away at some more lucrative side hustle.
Many if not most of us gave that up long ago, just like that Marine gave up looking for Mom’s apple pie in those C-rat tins. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.
Most Americans are not regular voters. Even across the three most recent national elections, which featured higher-than-normal turnout, just 41% of adult citizens who were old enough to vote cast a ballot in all three. About one-in-four (26%) did not vote in any of them.
Nonvoters tend to be younger, with no college and lower family incomes, the Pew research indicates.So, the future’s not so bright that we need to wear shades at the old ballgame. Or so it seems to this geezer on the dole with his cowtown B.A. in journalism.
I could rave on, but it all seems kind of obvious, yeah? Back in the Day® there was a bumper sticker — a hippie riposte to the rednecks’ “America: Love It or Leave It” challenge — that read “America: Fix It or Fuck It.”
Hm. Which one do you think we picked? Pass the C-rats, bruh, maybe there’s some chicken salad in one of ’em instead of the usual.
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