I’ve got a poem for you to check out: “Smell and Envy” by Douglas Goetsch from his collection Nobody’s Hell. If you go to this page for the Writer’s Almanac, and scroll down to Friday October 10, you’ll find it. It’s good. Here’s a line:

… Gravity
is the receiver on the hook. Mortality
we smell on certain people as they pass.

Don’t you hate losing stuff? Boy, I do. It’s just an awful feeling. For example, I’ve lost track of the fact that this subject is redundant. Didn’t I just do a bit on lost stuff?

Anyway, I found my watch. I have a nice one – a Citizen Eco-Drive – for days when I don’t plan to play rough or get dirty. But the one that disappeared was this old Casio.

I bought it eight or ten years ago at Big Five sporting goods in Santa Barbara. The list price was $60, but I got it for $20 on sale. Pretty good deal, huh? It’s been ticking or pulsing or whatever they do for a long time, and it runs perfect. Has a stopwatch, and it’ll store names and phone numbers. Which proves I got it in the days before we kept that data in our phones.

While I was looking for it, I thought that maybe one of the people who’ve come to visit me recently made off with my watch. (Just a ridiculous but inevitable misfiring of neurons.) And I thought about the things – some precious and valuable, some cheap but useful – that make up our little lives. And how, if you’re like me, you’re in no particular rush to replace them, just because they get old and scratched and ugly.

I still have the phone that my parents gave me for my 17th birthday, in 1978. Still have the same number too, which ends in the digits 17 to commemorate the day.

Back in them days, we didn’t need dials or buttons. We just picked it up and said, “Operator, get me ….” OK, that’s not true, and that’s not really the phone. But I really still have it, and compared with today’s digital cell phones my old desk phone is more like that antique than you’d imagine.

The watch was found stuffed in the pocket of a pair of sweats in the closet. The last place I looked, as usual. … And don’t you think I could get a job writing for Andy Rooney?

“There is no such thing as a romantic experience. There are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance—that is all. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so.”
— Oscar Wilde
on his birthday

Just a quick note to keep you up to date: the Bush administration is still absolutely gone to the zoo. I mean these people are crazy, and they’re coming after the middle class.

A White House panel is positioning to slash the mortgage interest deduction, the one thing that makes home ownership financially possible for millions of Americans. This would pull the rug out from under people like me.

These guys are completely nuts. They have to be stopped.

On the bright side, Karl Rove testified for the 4th time. Great. I think the grand jury is after his ass. The Meier nomination is floundering. Ho ho! And Bush’s Army teleconference debacle yesterday was hilarious. W’s bloopers and political jokes.

Finally, afraid your job might wind up in New Delhi? Well, don’t expect help from Congress. Seems they ordered a $28K per page report on outsourcing. When it was done a year late, it was just crap, because it was held up and doctored to meet the Bush agenda.

Excuse me, but I’m tired of Bush’s clowns peeing on my head and claiming it’s the rain, then expecting me to stand still for it. Can somebody please remind me how and why this man was elected? Oh yeah, he wasn’t.

The 2005 Nobel for Literature has been announced, and as is often the case, it goes to someone I’ve never heard of.  

This has been quite a week for literary coups. In an almost entirely unexpected move, the Swedish Academy have this lunchtime announced their decision to award this year’s Nobel prize for Literature to the British playwright, author and recent poet, Harold Pinter and not, as was widely anticipated, to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk or the Syrian poet Adonis.

Well, congratulations, whoever you are.  

It always amuses me to see the quirks in news writing from the UK.  Would an American reporter be inspired to describe the time of any news event as occurring, “this lunchtime?”  Nope, and in that last sentence, the question mark would be outside the quotes.  We are heathen, this side of the pond.

but it appears the common courtesy isn’t so common anymore.  I have to agree with the assessment of these polls.  Americans are getting more rude by the hour.  Present company excepted, of course.

The beating in New Orleans of 64-year-old Robert Davis is all over the news. So much so that I feel driven – perhaps prematurely – to decide. We all have such moral decisions to make, and I try not to rush it.

I’ve decided that the cops were wrong; they were brutal.

Watching the video, slowly, repeatedly, as the news people insist I do, I see not only cruelty but bald incompetence. I see police officers so ill-trained, or so forgetful of their training, they appear as frantic teenage thugs, training to subdue a frightened, weakly man. Their lawyer says their actions were justified by his resistance. Is this how they handle every arrest in which someone resists? Aren’t they trained how to take hold of someone and get his hands behind his back, without punching him in the head?

When I was young, the police rarely resorted to wrestling holds and tackles to arrest anyone. Making someone lie on the ground – as a matter of preliminary procedure – wasn’t done at all. They tried first to simply handcuff the person standing up, frisk him, place him in the car.

I don’t know when or how this habit started, of making people lie on the ground, or get down on their knees, but it’s wrong. Unless the cops have a damn good reason – a serious probable cause – to believe that person is armed, every citizen should be treated with dignity. Hey – they police work for us, for crying out loud!

I remember a cop, who was our scout leader, saying that in his career he’d never drawn his gun on a citizen, because he said you don’t draw it unless you intend to fire it, and you don’t fire it unless you intend to kill. He’d never been forced to kill anyone, so the gun was always holstered. Now, they pull their guns all the time. Have we all changed? Our whole society, in one generation? Or have the cops changed?

In the Davis case, no pretext was ever made to treat this man as a citizen innocent until proven guilty. They simply tackled him like wild thugs, beat him, subdued him. And as far as the charges against him, the last time I checked, we all still had the right to resist an unlawful arrest.

[Link]

— Roethke

Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.

-Samuel James Ervin Jr., lawyer, judge, and senator
(1896-1985)

I went to a wake today. A life celebration party for the mother of an old friend. I’ve known my friend since 5th grade, the fall of 1971. 34 years. That’s quite a long time. And in 1971, my friend’s mom was 34 years old.

She was a kind, soft-spoken, intelligent woman, a teacher. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) 15 years ago, in her early 50s. Not fair, huh? Not fair that my friend has lost his mom, and certainly not fair that his two children have never known their grandma as we did in 1971.

All of which leads us to Tau. Not The Way, the protein in the brain which supports the structure of neuron microtubules. The brain’s communication fiberoptics, I guess. I don’t really understand it, except that in AD, Tau gets tangled up by bonding wrong, and the microtubules collapse. What we have here is a failure to communicate.

What I do understand is that there are people out there who do understand AD a lot better than me, and they’re trying to find a cure. Which costs money. And I understand that our congress has just thrown another $50 Billion down Bush’s War on Terr’r commode. I wonder how much closer that money would have brought those researchers to a cure for AD. And diabetes, heart disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disease, Multiple Sclerosis. Hell, galloping dandruff and global warming for that matter.

We, as a species, need new priorities. Can’t get those without new leadership. Otherwise, I can’t bear to think of my friend’s kids, and my nephew, facing these same terrible, wasting, abjectly sad, diseases.

Let us, please, stop electing myopic fear-mongering monkeyminds like George Bush, and find people who can help us plant good and beautiful trees, in the shade of which we will not sit.

I was down in my garage this afternoon, putting some stuff away. In one of my private storage closets — to which I should mention only I have a key — I found this thing.

What the heck is it? Is it a heater? ‘Cause it looks like a heater, but it doesn’t look like one I’ve ever owned. Where did it come from? Who put it in my closet, and when and how?

Hmm. It looks vaguely familiar, but it ain’t mine. Mighty floggin’ curious, you ask me.

Anybody else have a Logitech Wireless Optical Mouse?

Mine isn’t black, it’s silver and black with blue around the wheel, but I couldn’t find a photo. Guess I could take a photo, but … no. Anyway, it eats batteries like no mouse I’ve had before. I do a lot of mousing around, but wow.