Our aeronaut was logging his flight time before Friday the 13th could have a go at clipping his wings.
A thousand thank-yous to everyone who wished Herself a happy (mumble-mumblth) birthday yesterday.
The eldest neighbor kid popped by after dinner to give her a hug and sing “Happy Birthday.” Lord, is she ever growing like a weed. A wee babe in arms she was when first we laid eyes on her, and what would become El Rancho Pendejo, during an open house back in the summer of 2014. And now she’s a middle-schooler as tall as Herself.
Earlier in the day, after cake for breakfast, Herself and I went for a 5K jog in the foothills, which is where we saw the paraglider above, setting up for a landing near the Menaul trailhead.
Fun to watch, but as pasatiempos go it’s not for me. Two broken ankles later when faced with a tall curb I long for an escalator.
Especially on Friday the 13th. I ain’t superstitious, but after 70-odd years of acting the fool from coast to coast, something — or Someone — is bound to be out to get me.
By “them” I mean Herself, and by “cake” I mean “half a cinnamon roll,” and why on earth should Herself be eating cake for breakfast?
Because it’s her birthday, that’s why.
There was but a single candle on the “cake,” because record-low snowpack, record-high temperatures, drought continues, red-flag warnings, etc., et al., and so on and so forth. I lit it up and we hopped around the kitchen like crazed bunnies to The Beatles’ “Birthday,” blaring from a JBL Clip 2 fed a YouTube video by my iPhone 13 Mini. Can’t say we Revered Elders are helpless when it comes to managing all these doggone, consarned, newfangled whizbangs, whatchamacallits, and comosellamas, even the ones whose “new” is mostly wore off leaving only the “fangled” bits.
Once breakfast is in the rear view there will be a short trail run followed by some medium-light shopping, a lunch without so much cake in it, and a delicious dinner that may or not conclude with cake, depending upon whether we can get to The Range before they run out and/or close, which happens early in these dire days, when no one can afford gasoline, much less three servings of cake per diem.
You wouldn’t believe the tariff on cake. And you can trust me, because I’m in the media.
Rather than endure The Pestilence breaking wind from the face, I dined informally, at my desk — a bowl of chili, a wedge of buttered cornbread, and a pint of Guinness 0 — while reading about the late and very much unheralded poet Everette Hawthorne Maddox.
Herself was in Fanta Se with a visiting gal pal. Miss Mia Sopaipilla was sprawled nearby in her crinkle tube. The TV was darkly silent in the living room.
I could’ve watched the whole dismal spectacle on the MacBook Pro, but decided that since nobody was paying me to do that, and that I was actually paying for it to take place, I was already down dozens of dollars and not likely to turn a profit on the project anytime soon. A visit to any third-string primate house would have been more informative, with less shit-flinging. Better to read about Maddox for free over at The Poetry Foundation, courtesy of James McWilliams.
Maddox, whom Andrei Codrescu called the “Christ of New Orleans,” published three books of poetry between 1975 and 1988. He died in 1989, just 44 years old, of complications from esophageal cancer. Hundreds crammed into a New Orleans bar to give a proper sendoff to the jobless, homeless, divorced alcoholic who slept in the bed behind the driver’s seat of an 18-wheeler parked outside a used-furniture store. I’d never heard of him before, but McWilliams brought him to life for me:
“Everyone should have an epitaph ready, just in case,” [Maddox] said in a rare radio interview in 1983. He called his version, written around 1974, ‘Hypothetical Self-Epitaph,’ and it comes as close to anything else he wrote to capturing his inner character:
What if I just caved in gave out, pulled over to the side of the road of life, & expired like an old Driver’s license? You might say He didn’t get far in 31 years. But I’d say That’s all right, it was the world’s longest trip on an empty tank.
His few books are hard to find. A plaque in the courtyard of the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street calls him “a mess.” McWilliams, who argues that he nevertheless deserves our attention, writes:
The man was dark and troubled, more so than most. But he aimed to offer his audience — his friends, as we’ll see — the brightest reflection of that darkness that he could project.
Contrast that with what The Pestilence offered in last night’s State of the Union address, which the legacy media swarmed like rats to an overflowing Dumpster and declared a record in terms of duration, if not in unfiltered bullshit. Talk about your long trips on an empty tank.
Yeah, I think I made the right call. I toasted Maddox’s memory with my fake beer, scratched Miss Mia behind the ears, and went to bed early.
• Editor’s note: “I Hope it’s Not Over and Good-By,” selected poems by Everette Hawthorne Maddox, is available from the University of New Orleans Press.
Didn’t we just have a full moon? Is God overstocked with these things and blowing them out? Or has He finally run out of patience and put His foot to the floorboard on the road to the End of Days?
This latest celestial spotlight is the Snow Moon, which, ha ha, etc. Yesterday’s high was 61, 10 (!) degrees above normal. Today’s may be warmer still. What little remains from last week’s snow lurks in dark corners, like ICEholes waiting for women and children to push around.
But we were talking about time, not temperature, yes?
Lately it seems that the instant I’ve finished washing the breakfast dishes it’s time to make lunch. Then, with luck, a bit of exercise, and boom! Dinner and bedtime.
Not a lot of unclaimed space therein to, as Whitman put it, “loafe and invite my soul.” My soul won’t even take my calls. Straight to voicemail they go.
Now, some may say that I burn an awful lot of dawn’s early light slobbering around the Internet like an ADHD kid working out on a Tootsie Pop — the National Weather Service, The Paris Review, various and sundry purveyors of products that I don’t need and can’t afford — before finally biting into its center, the homepage of The New York Times, which almost always shares a deep brown hue with, but is very much not, chocolate.
That this drives me to lunch is only because (a) I no longer drink, and (2) I desperately need something to take the taste of the NYT homepage out of my mouth.
Having eaten my way through the fridge and pantry, I feel a pressing need for either sleep or exercise. And exercise it is, because Miss Mia Sopaipilla is in the bed, and if I try to share a corner of that king-size bed with that 8-pound cat she will get right out of it and stalk around the house, meowing at the top of her lungs. She’s deaf as a post and her voice carries.
So out the door I go. And sure, if it’s 55 or 60 out there I’m liable to stay out a while, because see “the homepage of The New York Times” and “meowing at the top of her lungs” above. Last week I got 100 miles in, plus one trail run.
When I get home I’m hungry again for some reason as Herself inspects a gas range atop which dinner is very much not cooking itself with that look on her face that says, “Some people have to go to work in the morning.” I strive mightily to swallow a cheery, “Not me!” And get out in that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans.
And soon dinner is served, as is something less toothsome on TV, and since some people have to go to work in the morning (not me) everyone is in bed by 8 and asleep shortly thereafter.
Tomorrow, as the fella says, is another day. That Tootsie Pop ain’t gonna lick itself.
OK, it can’t be all fascism and firearms all the time around here, goddamn it all anyways.
The last of the cornbread went down the rathole with coffee this morning. I miss it already.
Our “new” bread machine.
Happily, we have a “new” Panasonic SD-YD250 “Bread Bakery” to play with. I put “new” in quotes because the thing could share a birthday with my Subaru, having first been released in 2005.
A new model is available for $374.99. We didn’t pay that much. Herself acquired ours at an estate sale, for chump change, and I vigorously ignored it for the better part of quite some time until she finally badgered me into taking it for a quick spin around the kitchen by dragging it from its cubby and starting to fiddle with it. Gimme that!
Loaf No. 3.
The first couple loaves came out looking like a Klingon’s head after Captain Kirk backed over it with the USS Enterprise. But the third looked like a loaf of bread, and tasted like one, too. A little less flour, a skosh more water and yeast, and Bob’s your uncle.
Little puzzles like this are good for staving off the dementia, but not so much for the upkeep of social skills. So I intend to keep visiting the neighborhood bakery from time to time.
It takes five hours to bake a loaf but about 15 minutes to buy one, counting driving time. And they sell delicious scones, brownies, and cookies, too.
Mad Blog Media 