Category: Life

Well, not really. But my youngest was bored and came into my office whilst I was trying to work (and not just write twee things for this blog, gentle reader), so I told him to shred the papers that my beautiful wife had brought in for document destruction.

“Do you have to pay sometimes?” he asked.

The shredder has a little slot where you can put your old credit cards in for destruction, but I don’t tend to use it as I prefer to grind my old credit cards exceedingly fine.

But the lad had only seen that sort of iconography on places where you use a credit card to pay for things.

And in this world of interconnectedness of things and pay-as-you-go models, perhaps it would not be at all surprising to have to pay extra to use something you’ve already bought. As a matter of fact, in this third decade of the millennium, that’s the normal for technology.

Remembering loved ones at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery: ‘I get a little emotional.’:

Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, scattered with people Saturday, remained a symbol of freedom and sacrifice for many laying flags on Memorial Weekend.

Traditionally, the cemetery is full of Boy Scouts before Memorial Day, as hundreds of Scouts from across the area plant a flag at each headstone, leaving a sea of red, white and blue waving in the wind. This year is different.

“Normally, I’m with the Scouts,” said Jerry Grunzinger of Kirkwood. Grunzinger serves as a scoutmaster, leading troops in activities including the Memorial Day Good Turn. Due to COVID-19, the event was canceled this year. Families are encouraged to lay flags on their own, instead.

Grunzinger said he stopped by to pay respects to his wife’s grandfather, Leo Joseph Unruh, who served in the Navy during WWII.

“I get a little emotional,” Grunzinger said through a wave of tears. “They served the country so, whether they lived a long life or they died during the war, they made the greatest sacrifice.

You know, I have mentioned that I did not travel to St. Louis for a couple years before last autumn, and on the first couple of trips to visit my aunt, I stayed in the St. Charles area–which meant that I did not travel to the south side of St. Louis (the metropolitan area, not the city itself) to visit my mother’s grave in Jefferson Barracks. So when I went “to see Janet Evra,” I had some time in the afternoon before the show, and I cruised down 270. I stopped at the Walmart right off the highway which was my home Walmart when I lived in South County, twenty-some years ago to get some flowers. It was a weird experience along with an acute fear that I would not remember where her grave was.

I rather worked myself up over it, that I had not been a dutiful son in leaving her alone for so long, but in the end, I found it despite how the cemetery has filled in in the passed decade and how the stones are all the same. I know the trash can to park by along with the bin of used flower vases and the right direction to go, and I can usually find her within a minute or two.

I never have this trouble with my father, as he is buried in a small church cemetery in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, far away from his sons now. But I still visit when I’m in town and leave a duck hunting hat. Strangely enough, up until this last autumn, I had been to my father’s grave twice between visits to my mother’s nearer grave.

And, strangely enough, although I get a touch choked up at my mother’s grave, I just get somber at my father’s grave. Whether that’s the time difference–my father has been dead more than half my life, and he was only an occasional figure for another quarter of it, and I saw my mother at least once a week until she got sick and then daily thereafter. Or I’m just a mama’s boy.

At any rate, neither of them died in the service or of a service-related injury, so perhaps it’s not the post for Memorial Day unless there’s a larger lesson in my fear that I might not remember. But probably not.

So I got an email with an interesting subject line:

Cooking with the Cougars? I haven’t gotten many emails like that lately. So I opened it:

And I thought, Wait a minute, they’re not old enough to be cougars.

Then I looked at the return address: President, Alumni Association .

Somehow, because I’m a supporter of WSIE, I’ve been added to the Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, home of the Cougars, Alumni Association mailing list.

Oh, well.

I have to say whoever crafted that subject line probably saw a pretty good email-opening response.

(Aside: Does mentioning that I support a public radio station count as showing off all your wealth? Sorry, I am going to spend a lot of time in the next few weeks ruminanting on this–ruminanting, of course, means chewing on the same weed of thought over and over again even though you’re not getting much nourishment from it.)

So a cousin of mine shared a Facebook video called Which ZOOM Caller Are You?, one of which is “The one in front of a bookcase”:

To be honest, I’m actually more of the kind that will avoid including video on these calls. In the past, when the team I was on actually had video calls, I had a slow Internet connection, so I didn’t want to tax it. Now, if possible, I try to avoid it because, if it’s a group call, you end up with tiny boxes which kind of subverts the point. And if I have to, I’ll do a video call, but I end up spending the whole time looking at the camera and not the screen, so it does me no good at all as I cannot but glance at the person with whom I’m speaking.

Which is not to say I don’t look at the video on the Zoom calls. When my current employer had a company-wide meeting a couple weeks back, I completely spent the call scrolling through the hundreds of people looking to see who would have more books in the background than I would (if I shared video). A couple people had a bookshelf or two, and my immediate manager might have been close with a wall of books.

I commented on my cousin’s post with a photo I did for a bit on another blog about framing your video so the bookshelves show but the bladed weapons do not:

To which her sister responded:

Quit showing off all your wealth Brian! Not all of us can have the huge riches that you keep throwing in our faces. All I have is a plain wall

And I was all like, wuh?

Because, gentle reader, I worry that I’ll have forgotten where I come from or that people, generally people I knew when I was younger, will think so. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I won’t let you, gentle reader, forget that I come from down a gravel road via the trailer park and city housing projects. I’m like Everclear without a recording contract and, face it, any musical talent whatsoever.

When I was younger, I was sometimes told that I was arrogant and a bit of a show-off, as I was always ready to tell you I got good grades or was really smart.

I like to think I’ve gotten better about it, especially in person, where I won’t even tell you I’m any good at anything at all.

But here on this blog, and probably on Facebook, I am prone to putting a good face on things. I mention I get a lot of books and some number of CDs. I’ve mentioned some periods where I’ve spent dollars a day on trivial things. I have a gym membership and a martial arts school membership. My boys go to private school. I drive a Lexus (albeit a twelve-year-old Lexus we bought with 100,000 miles on it). So, yeah, we’re doing okay, and I somehow have bumbled into a career that isn’t as satisfying as being a best-selling novelist but that leaves me not exhausted and physically not beaten down at the end of the day.

So am I flaunting wealth? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not. But I would have to leave that for you, gentle reader, and for my cousin to assess. I’m not out here trying to be as artificial as an Instagram model but with a dad bod and flabbier prose. I’m just tapping out bits of my story, mostly for myself in a decade when I’m looking back at 2020. (I hope you like some of it.)

Maybe my cousin was just referring to my posting lots of pictures of books, which is what she meant by wealth. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But I got a blog post out of it, anyway.

So my boys were in the living room, dancing to “Astronomia”, and the oldest said, “Google Funeral Dancers.”

“I know what funeral dancers are,” I said.

The boy was taken a bit aback, but come on.

You know the kids these days have been on the Web since they were born, but

I have been on the Web since it was born.

As I might have mentioned, I have assigned each of my boys a book to read, an adult book with few pictures and no comic drawings like you find and they unfortunately find too often in the works of Jeff Kinney and Dav Pilkey. The oldest got The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and the younger got Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. They’re both going to write essays about five lessons they learned from their assigned books; then they will swap books and write an essay on the other book.

As I’ve been posting the last couple of weeks, I’ve mentioned when other bloggers have posted poems that inspired me to include those poems in daily poetry writing. But today I cam across Jack Baruth’s weekly roll-up from last week where he quotes Frederick Douglass because:

The beauty of proper English is that it can be mastered by anyone with the will and capacity to do so. It does not discriminate. It is a tool available to all who might wield it in confidence. Frederick Douglass was one such man. He used the discipline of language to effect major change — in his life, in the life of others. In a Newspeak world, he could never have persuaded as he did, could never have accomplished what he did. In this way, the leveling of English won’t serve to erase oppression or discrimination: it will serve to make it permanent. We will have two official languages: English for the people who make the rules, and Newspeak for those who must follow them. The speakers of the latter will live in the eternal sunshine of a spotless present, never troubled by Shakespeare or Douglass in “the original”, never given the chance to express or consume a contrary opinion. O brave new world, that has such people in it!

Which is why I’ve gotten a little more hands-on in pushing my children. They’ve gotten too accustomed to doing the minimum to get by in elementary school, and it’s about time they started to work with real literature and to become fluent in the language they’ve inherited.

The blog received a visitor from someone in Katy, Texas, the other day:

Which led me to a little reminiscience. The spellchecker assures me reminiscience is not how you spell it, but I feel the narcissistic review of one’s life in “What If?” models is at least as scientifically valid as most social “sciences” taught in the universities and, seemingly, more scientifically valid than a lot of computer models designed to guide public policy and citizen compulsion.

At any rate, back in the early 1980s, my sainted mother was newly separated and soon-to-be newly divorced and was seemingly in retrospect eager to vacate Milwaukee. She had numerous friends there, mostly neighbors or friends of my father’s or ex-wives of my father’s friends that my mother got custody of in the divorce. But her family was mainly in the St. Louis area, where we eventually ended up (eventually being a couple summers after the separation). But my mother briefly, it seemed, considered moving to Katy, Texas, where her youngest sister lived with her then-husband as his work took him there.

As my third grade year ended, I had just finished up my beginning music class learning the saxette (a little whistle later replaced by the new-fangled technology or better marketing program of the recorder which replaced it as the beginning musical instrument). I wanted to sign up for the public-school-offered piano class in fourth grade, but my mother wouldn’t let me sign up for one of the limited spots because she thought we wouldn’t be there for the beginning of the year–we would be in Texas, right down the road from Mickey Gilley’s place (research indicates that “right down the road” means on the other side of Houston in Pasadena but not any more–Gilley moved to Branson at some point, so by my mother’s logic, I live just down the road from it now).

However, that did not actually come to pass. We did another two years at Carleton before moving to St. Charles.

Still, the visit from Katy brought fourth some speculation (a couple minutes’ worth, anyway). How would I be different today had I started the fourth grade outside of Houston, Texas, and graduated from high school down there? Would I have developed an affection for my adopted home state which I really haven’t for Missouri? My aunt shortly decamped for Missouri after a couple of years in Katy; would we also have moved back, or would my mother have gotten a job that compelled her to stay in Houston? Would I have a Texas accent and wear a cowboy hat instead of a fedora? Would I have read Westerns instead of mysteries? Would I actually like bro country in the 21st century?

It’s fun to briefly speculate. Except for the last bit, which is horrifying.

Still, what might have been? This seems appropriate:

Sweet Christmas, that song itself came out, what, ten years after the events I’m talking about, which is to say twenty-five years ago.

I asked my aunt about this to verify whether she was indeed in Katy, or if it was Tyler, Texas–about that time, a Texan girl came to Carleton and said she was the great(x)-granddaughter of John Tyler, so perhaps I was conflating the memories. I say great(x) because in the almost forty years since, I don’t recall how many greats were lined up. Four? Five? At any rate, over almost forty years, I am not sure how many of these memories of mine to trust, and I told my aunt that there aren’t many people left you could set me straight.

My aunt set me straight: she was surprised to hear that my mother considered moving to Texas to be near her. She thought we were already in the St. Louis area when she moved to Texas. In my mind, though, it was more serious than that, but perhaps it was from a child’s perspective, as I at the time wondered how desert-like that part of Texas was, and I worried about facing Gila monsters in the yard. So whatever my mother might have said, even in passing, I took it seriously in my even-then neurotic way, enumerating an unlikely bundle of worries. And a likely one: saying goodbye to friends.

Well, maybe we were in St. Louis before my aunt moved to Texas; perhaps my sainted mother talked about it when living in my other aunt’s basement and when she was separating onion rings on an assembly line aside immigrants and was considering anything an improvement. Maybe I’m mixing the timeline up because we moved several times in those years, from Milwaukee to the basement a modest house in a well-to-do suburb to the trailer park to the gravel road. Perhaps my mother only dreamed of this in Wisconsin, perhaps she talked about it with her mother or my aunts in St. Louis, all of whom have passed away. Who knows? I’ve reached out to my brother to see if he remembers any of it or if I am just making up fancies in my mind about my youth.

Next up: I shall speculate what would have become of my had I learned to play piano in the fourth grade. Certainly, it would have prevented me from the current mental and neurotic roadblocks I have to learning a musical instrument in my forties (the guitar experiment ended shortly after this rather sanguine update a year and a half ago). Would I have been in band? My beautiful wife ensures me that is an unalloyed good in high school and hopes our oldest does it should he go to public school next year, even though he’s not that enthusiastic about it. My youngest, though, started piano lessons in third grade and really swings on the trumpet already. Would I have been like that?

I look forward to the full resumption of normal activities so I can fill my days with normal busyness and not this nonsense.

I don’t normally buy the smaller bottles of HE Tide at the Sam’s Club, but our normal larger bottles of Tide were out of stock, and in the current unpleasantness, one must hoard what is available, not what one wants.

But wait a minute: This Tide leaves clothes smelling like Clean Linen:

By implication and inference, then, should we assume that all other Tides leave clothes smelling dirty?

Well, no. As you might know, gentle reader, Clean Linen with capital letters is a patented scent and is like Grape Soda. It’s not exactly what clean linen dried on a clothesline smells like, but it’s an attempt to artificially replicate it, and it’s consistent across all olfactory delivery platforms (like plug-in scented oils, which I guess are really Glade® PlugIns® Scented Oils from my experience testing S.C. Johnson online programs) and various sprays.

We will keep this between us, gentle reader, as my beautiful wife does not like this Patented Scent (as we’ve learned from other platforms), and I didn’t see it when I bought the soap. Hopefully she won’t notice that she cannot stand the smell of her clothes. Although if this causes her to take her clothes off, well, I’ll count that as a win.

Michael Jordan showed no mercy playing sons in basketball: ‘Earn everything’

When we’re playing one on one or me on two here, I don’t hold back–which unfortunately means I sometimes run over the younger of my boys yet.

But I know that one day soon they will eclipse me in athletic prowess permanently, so I have to pad my winning percentage whilst I can.

I mean, that very same youngest whom I sometimes run over in basketball runs away from me in 5Ks. He ran a 26 minute 5K when he was ten, for crying out loud, only four or five years after I last carried him over the finish line in one. They’ve already completed a modified virtual triathlon of a sprint distance (subbing in five minutes of cardio for a swim, followed by a 10 mile bike ride and then a 5K) last weekend.

So, yeah, no mercy. And hopefully they’ll show the same lack competitiveness with their old man once they’re beating me regularly, assuming that I don’t give up playing with them once they do.

Which I might soon. Because one does not make it into the Dad Hall of Fame with a losing record.

What if the world government overreaction to the current unpleasantness is designed not so much to flatten the current ICU-utilization curve but is instead designed to acclimate people to living in confined spaces and communicating on video screens because They know an asteroid is going to strike Earth in 2024, and They want people prepared to live life on the generation-ship Teslarks that will carry most of humanity to the stars before the asteroid strike?

You read too much science fiction, Brian J. you might say.

But I really don’t read all that much science fiction at all! But when I do, it’s from before the modern era, where the themes are more about current goodthink shibboleths rather than the fate of Humanity, which contains a lot of badthinkers.

UPDATE: Friar spreads a conspiracy theory.

The other day, I was flipping through a paperback collection of poems called Immortal Poems of the English Language, a gift from my high school National Honor Society Secret Pal (a year-long Secret Santa type deal) at the end of the 1989 school year, when I came across “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” by Richard Lovelace:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
     That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
     To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
     The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
     A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
     As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
     Lov’d I not Honour more.

I had forgotten I remember that poem.

I memorized it and performed it once or twice in my coffee house open mic days (whose memories I have shared). But I’d forgotten I’d memorized it. I mean, it’s not like the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet that I liked to open with at a new venue, and it’s not as noteworthy as memorizing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” en toto. So I’d forgotten I know it.

But after we wrote the poem and after my youngest boy read it, I showed them how I could recite it from memory (mostly), and pointed out that when you really liked a poem, you could memorize it and recite it and thus make the poem yours. They did not seem excited at the prospect, although they acknowledged that they’ve memorized song lyrics. So they know what it means. Whether they will ever choose to memorize a poem of their own accord remains to be seen. But I’m hopeful.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan?:

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Thanks to the myriad studies, models, and tests conducted during this current unpleasantness (the COVID-19 pandemic, he says to himself reading this in 2030 when it might not be immediately in mind and assuming he survives the current unpleasantness), and how each is breathlessly reported by a 23-year-old journalist whose only brush with “science” was a freshman class in climate change, we can each have our own facts to clout people who wear masks/people who don’t wear masks/people with whom we disagree politically.

One of my pastors posted this on Facebook:

As governors are trying to figure out how to ease back in to a new normal, please remember:

🛑 Some people don’t agree with the state opening…. that’s okay. Be kind.

🏡 Some people are still planning to stay home…. that’s okay. Be kind.

🦠 Some are still scared of getting the virus and a second wave happening….that’s okay. Be kind.

💰 Some are sighing with relief to go back to work knowing they may not lose their business or their homes….that’s okay. Be kind.

👩🏾‍⚕️Some are thankful they can finally have a surgery they have put off….that’s okay. Be kind.

📝 Some will be able to attend interviews after weeks without a job….that’s okay. Be kind.

😷 Some will wear masks for weeks….that’s okay. Be kind.

💅🏻 Some people will rush out to get the hair or nails done…. that’s okay. Be kind.

❤️ The point is, everyone has different viewpoints/feelings and that’s okay. Be kind.

We each have a different story. If you need to stay home, stay home. But be kind .

If you need to go out, just respect others when in public and be kind!

Don’t judge fellow humans because you’re not in their story. We all are in different mental states than we were months ago. So remember, be kind.

COPY AND PASTED….
Please SHARE this reminder for kindness. ❤

I suspect that ship has already sailed and sunk just off the coast.

Regardless, I’m still going to smile and say “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” to people even if they’re dressed and are treating me like they’re Wuhanfa.

Seen on Facebook:

Of course, I ordered one.

You might remember how impressed I was when I read Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon. And Hannibal, clearly.

Unfortunately, I’ve bought a handful of t-shirts from Facebook ads, so Facebook shows me more t-shirt ads than posts from my friends.

And designer face mask ads. Heaven help us, but there might well be a glut of those in a year or so. I hope you can make quilts from them.

The other night, I dreamed of the trailer park.

It was weird; I was going for a run from our trailer towards the outside of the park. It was nice outside, but I saw some people as I turned onto the main street in the middle of it, but I went wide of them for social distancing purposes. I got to Delores Drive, the thoroughfare that led up to the highway, and I stopped to look at the Stop’n’Go which was a small convenience store, but it might have had a couple of gas pumps. Instead of the Stop’n’Go, a little plaza stood there with a Domino’s Pizza. Suddenly, it was snowy, and I was crawling on the shoulder of Delores Drive headed toward the school bus stop or perhaps up the hill–it was a big hill and not fun to drive on in the snow and ice. So I heard; I was too young to pay attention to real life at thirteen years old.

So I decided to take a spin around the old homestead in Google maps.

This is the entrance to the trailer park. Back when I lived there, the sign was a big wood-carved sign that misspelled it as Siesta Manor Mobil Home Park, although someone tried to squeeze an E in there, but it was far smaller than the other letters. The lot behind the sign was green space with some playground equipment and a swimming pool. It looks as though they’ve filled that area with other pads.

Looks like the pool is still there. Strangely enough, I think I only went to that pool once or twice in the three years I lived there. I might have gone to Noyes Park’s pool in Milwaukee the same number of times in that span.

Even though the number says 108, I’m pretty sure this pad is the one our trailer sat on. Third from the main road. In the first lived a woman and then her son; the son sold my brother Playboy magazines and later gave us a dog we called Buddy, but the dog had been abused and kept us in terror–and took the eye of our Pekingeseish dog in a fight–before my mother had enough and divested the family of the dog whilst I was in college. The second trailer housed an old man who somehow got permission from my mother to let us go with him to Portage Des Souix (about an hour and a half away) to help clean out another trailer of his. Old Frank was a messy, dirty man, but I guess my brother befriended him. On the other side of us was the Hittler trailer, of course. Across the street where Jimmy’s dad lived, next to Cathy, the woman with the double-wide who became a realtor and sold my mother the house down the gravel road. On the other side of Cathy was a guy who worked for the government whom the FBI interviewed when my mother was going for security clearance; he came over right away to let her know the FBI was canvassing the neighborhood.

I’d say it hasn’t changed since the last time I took a look at it, but the image is dated 2013, so of course the 2013 image hasn’t changed. I notice, though, that they built all those pads at the front of the trailer park but had a lot of empty pads in the interior.

Clearly, the little business plaza which featured the Stop’n’Go has not fared so well. In addition to the little convenience store at the left, the building at the right held business offices for a liquid propane dealer and, briefly, something called “Hot Tub Haven” that was open until 2am and, in a stunning turn of events, involved prostitution.

Across the street, we used to stand and wait for the bus in front of a beauty college that stood at the entrance to Brookside Estates, another mobile home park. What’s really weird is that you can see the old building in one spot in Google Maps as you’re moving south on Delores Drive:

That image is dated 2017; in other images dated 2019 which you see for most other spots on Delores Drive, the building is gone:

Google Maps is kind of like my own memory; I think this is true, and sometimes, something can corroborate it, but most of the time, in the 21st century, it’s unbelievable and unproveable, and those who could attest to it don’t remember or are dead.

Atop the hill, the old U Gas is now a Circle K.

On Sunday mornings, my sainted mother would often stop at the U Gas to pick up a dozen gas station doughnuts for us. I remember not being able to afford canvases or art supplies, so I’d cut the corrugated cardboard doughnut boxes to be the canvases for my extra credit poor water color paintings. The U Gas also had a couple video games in rotation, and although I didn’t get into Out Run, all three of us in Triple N Lawns blew all of the money we’d earned and our banked gas money on Rampage one afternoon.

Across from the U Gas was the flea market for a long time until they tried to develop it. They built a Bonanza restaurant deep into the lot and had a sign that said Now Leasing Plaza 30 which must have been up for a decade. Eventually, they put in a mobile home lot. In the last thirty years, though, it has been developed.

I sure missed the flea market, though. A kid with a couple of bucks in his pocket could climb that hill on a Saturday morning and find any number of wonders.

At any rate, man, that was almost 35 years ago. This is the point where I’m supposed to say, “It doesn’t seem like it!” My beautiful wife says something along those lines when we drive through the Missouri State campus where she went to school. And maybe it wasn’t for her, as she has not aged. But for me, yeah, that was a long time ago.