For the past several years, my favorite TV show has been The West Wing. It’s fast-paced, well written, timely, circumspect. As with Northern Exposure before it, I’ve become bonded, in a sense, with the characters; the way you relate to and care about the people in a good book. A book you don’t want to end.

I don’t want West Wing to end either, but I do believe it has jumped the shark. This cool idiom dates back to Happy Days, and an episode in which Fonzy jumps his motorcycle over a shark in a tank. And everybody knew the producers had run out of ideas. The show was dead.

A show often jumps the shark when its characters become diluted, drift apart, lose their dramatic bonds. Northern Exposure jumped when Dr Joel left the show, and they brought in a new Doc from LA. Right? Right. I thought West Wing jumped last season, when Leo had a heart attack; that character lost his bond with the president and the other characters. Can anybody deny the show hasn’t been the same since?

Now we have a bunch of new people – Jimmy Smits, Alan Alda – and the old characters like Josh and Donna have new jobs for campaigns outside the White House. They don’t work for Pres Bartlett anymore. West Wing has jumped, people. Remember you read it here, and saw me say that the merciful, creative thing to do is let it die, at least by the new president’s inauguration. Don’t drag it our for another wheezing, twitching season. Let me remember it as it was.

Did you get the title? It’s Brody from Jaws … shark, get it? Ha! I gotta million of ‘em.

So I stopped at the grocery store this evening, to pick up some fruits and veggies, shampoo, and new insoles for my dress shoes. (Thought I’d try gellin’ in church tomorrow, though I’m not entirely sure it’s not against my religion.)

The total came to more than I thought it would, even considering the stupid gel things are 12 bucks a pair. Especially since I saved $3.72 on my Albertsons Preferred Savings Card. (I definitely don’t understand the social context of this. If they’re lowering the price to encourage people to buy it, what’s the point of singling people out? Sell the stuff and be done with it. And what’s “preferred?” Me? The groceries? The store?)

Leaning on the shopping cart in front of the store, I discovered to my horror that I’d just been charged $6.75 for a 2.71 pound bag of seedless grapes. What the heck? They’re Thompson seedless farking grapes. They’re grown in the San Joaquin Valley, right over the coastal mountains from here! There are acres and acres of them, spreading as far as the eye can see! They pick the things in the summer and haul them from the fields in semi trailers. They’re not truffles from France or Russian caviar, for crying out loud.

I miss Delano, where my grandparents lived. Where Cesar Chavez made his stand against Shinlay, the company that eventually screwed my grandpa out of his pension. And where we used to get big boxes of grapes to eat, and share with the neighbors.

Just another sign that civilization is going to hell in a bucket. You read it here first.

When I think about it, there was a pair of binoculars my Dad gave me when I was in college. They were in my room in Chico, when I wandered off for a while with a mildly crazy and profoundly self-centered young woman. When I got back, they were gone, along with my racketball racket and a few other things I cannot name. I guess I’d forgotten to lock the door, or maybe the window. You gotta keep your head in the game, your eye on the ball.

And a stopwatch stolen when I was about 10, from the pocket of my pants while I was swimming at a public pool. I’d been warned not to carry that thing around, take it on the school field trip. But there were things that needed to be accurately timed.

OK, you’re right: I’ll leave the dogs and grandparents out of this. But there have been a thousand ideas for poems and stories that drifted by as I drifted off to sleep. I was so sure I’d remember them when the sun came up.

It’s not the thing itself; it rarely is. It’s a neural pathway, I suppose, that’s been burned well and brightly, so that it lights easily again, and can be seen from distances that exaggerate its prominence in the night and fog. Or it’s like Donald Hall puts it here:

excerpt from The Old Life

There are miseries
of childhood that an old man’s mind—alien
in the hour of injections
and restraints, ignorant of what
day or season it is—
will clutch to itself with angry tears.
I wanted a Mickey Mouse
watch as much as, later in life,
I wanted a job,
a prize, or a woman. It disappeared
a month after my fifth
birthday, and sixty years afterward
I grieve for it whenever
I regret something lost.

— Donald Hall

*   *   *   *   *   *

"I try every day to write great poetry—as I tried when I was 14. What else is there to do?"

— Donald Hall

Well, here we are, on the first day of autumn.  I can’t hardly believe that the summer is over, though I can’t say I’m sorry for it.  It was a season of struggle for me.  Struggle and grief, and hope and change. 

• I’ve lost 25 pounds this summer. 
• I’ve lost my dog this summer. 
• I’ve gained some hope for the future, hope that change we want is as possible as change we don’t want is inevitable, and inscrutable. 
• I’ve gained a little confidence in my ability to weather crisis, accept loss.
• I’ve gained some lines and wrinkles around my eyes, and couldn’t care less.  So it goes.

How about you?

Can somebody please explain to me why reporters find it necessary to report on storms by standing out in the rain in their silly ponchos? Do they think we won’t believe them unless they’re personally getting wet? I would believe it if they were in their hotel lobby, or a hospital or police station, though it might help to occasionally point the camera out the window. I do enjoy the visual aids.

I think there is a fundamental and deliberate stupidity at work here, which needs to be addressed because stupidity is contagious.

A great opportunity for corporate responsibility in environmental reform.  Had we the leadership, perhaps a turning point for saving some of what’s left for the future. 

Also, a great name for a Bayou Punk band. 

[article at tompaine.com]

In a blistering critique, Kerry said former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown was to Hurricane Katrina "what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq; what George Tenet is to ‘slam dunk intelligence’; … what George Bush is to ‘Mission Accomplished’ and ‘Wanted Dead or Alive.’ … The bottom line is simple: The ‘we’ll do whatever it takes’ administration doesn’t have what it takes to get the job done."  [news link]