“Let’s jump on board, and cut them to pieces!!”
attributed to Blackbeard
Quote of the day – August 20, 205
Looking Forward
These last weeks, my temper has made me a not-so-wonderful individual to live with. It’s crankiness. I’m in the middle of my favorite time of year, and the heat is reminding me not of typical New England, but Baltimore and Virginia. It’s not like I don’t appreciate those places; I’ve spent my share of time in them, but I chose to live in New England. I’m also cranky because I’ve been stuck inland with few opportunities to head to the coast. No offshore adventures this year.
Get A Life!
You say, Get a life! You have nothing to whine about. Well, it’s true on one level, but my least favorite season – winter- looms large as summer wraps up. And surviving winter is always a main concern. I take out pads of paper, and lay down fresh creed, substance, and fantasy regarding what I will do—projects in the shop, weekend trips to museums, taking my wife out, and physical exercise. I’ve already gotten the snowshoes ready and have spoken to my primary care providers about physical therapy for my arthritis.
If you’ve read my posts for a while, you may have heard me whine about this before. Planning for winter starts before the leaves turn – right now in summer. As Eisenhower stated, plans don’t survive, but planning is effective. So rather than roadmaps of weeks or months, there are notes on activities, and issues like accessibility and cost.
Snow?
It’s New England, friends, we get lots of snow, and I have plans for a battery-powered snow blower. My arms and body just can’t manhandle the ancient, heavy tank we’ve used for twenty years. No more pulling on the cord until my arm is ready to fall off. No more contaminated fuel. I’m sure that there will be other issues instead.
Prior Proper Planning
Let’s see, Yoga, guitar practice, regular outings with friends, shop work, more indoor gardening, physical therapy, library time ( local programs?), membership at the health club with an indoor track(? cost?), and new games. We’ll see.
My general take is that Prior, Proper, Planning, Prevents, Piss, Poor, Performance. Half the stuff won’t get done. But it’s not about perfection, it’s about alternatives and prospects. Don’t prepare, then don’t complain when things get depressing at the end of January.
Right now, there is a nice downpour watering my parched garden. It’s 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s a great day to work in the shop on a commission. Enough whining. It’s time to get some work done. All at once, I don’t feel as cranky!
Mel Brooks
The title pretty much gives it away. And depending on how you like Mel Brooks, I can tell whether you see me as a sort of low-brow slapstick type or a provocateur of subtlety. In the case of the first case, I have such a deal for you! We are producing this show and selling shares in the profits. I assure you it ain’t no amateur show! (The Producers)
Now, for you folks in the second case, welcome to my castle, and no, Igor’s hump did not just change sides. What hump? (Young Frankenstein)
My all-time favorite Mel Brooks film has to be Blazing Saddles. It was my entry point into the works of Mr. Brooks, and periodically, I need to revisit it. It’s not so subtle distortions of Frontier American life seem more realistic every year though. Gabby Johnson, the Town of Rock Ridge’s querulous drunk, is even enjoying a new political career in Washington. And Hedley Lamar’s thug army has indeed enlisted KKK and Nazi members.
Recalling the end of the movie, where the hero, Bart, and the Waco Kid, ride away in a limo, has seemed a better and better prospect every year. They were just heading nowhere in particular. That sounds pretty good to me.
****OK, not everyone is familiar with Blazing Saddles. But I assure you that I am not alone in appreciating this film. So, for you who are not here, here is a link to the Wikipedia page on it. No need to sit in splendid solitude while the rest of us laugh our idiot heads off:
Three Things
I write not to remember but to reclaim. I also write for the pleasure. And I write to maintain my memory and mental capabilities.
I write to reclaim. Simple enough. At a point in my life, I walked away from years of who I had been and sealed it off so I could pursue other adventures and a career. At one point, in the 1980s, it was also politically expedient for me to evade. The people I was working with wouldn’t have believed who I was, and wouldn’t have coped well with it. I still can’t write about it because it’s too raw. But writing these past years has helped me reclaim a more complete me; no longer cut off from the older me’s.
That also leads to my writing for therapy. I can write about those long trips in the rainfall, as a Pious Itinerant. Or the days playing guitar on the stoop in Baltimore, for dollars. And the long walks on pavement between rides in the hot sun.
Given that so many of my associates had multiple bad habits, they are gone. Writing is not just an exorcism, it’s a celebration. I knew some unique individuals, had some wild times, and revisiting them is therapeutic. Sometimes I feel as though I get to be their voice, and a way of keeping their escapades alive.
One last thing. I’m no longer a young man. I write to keep my wits sharp. I’ve do believe in the truism that you either use it, or you’ll lose it.
Judy’s Number Game – #86
- There is a long walk going up the hill in Burlington. It faces the lake for some incredible views, and scattered along the retaining wall are small marble carvings like this.
- A practice piece I made for students to refer to. The order of the cuts and their angle are essential to the leaves looking right when carved.
- Stardust was a large sign I carved for the home of a musical family.
- This piece is tiny. It was carved in Occupied Japan by a skilled carver.
- One year I did these frig magnets for presents.
- Sabrina, my female cat, meets Arthur, my grandchild, for the first time.
- One of my earliest maritime jobs was this transom banner for my friend’s boat, Quaak. Quaak is the sound made by a night heron.
- The sign says it all!
Home is
The neighborhood is nothing much to write home about. Just so so. But the home is really where the family is. Well, for a woodcarver, it’s also where your workshop is, too.
Home is where the first thing in the morning, one cat comes in to mutter about breakfast in my ear gently, then the other walks across my hip, and finally the dog bursts in with a thumping tail demanding breakfast for all three. “Dad! Our appetite is gigantic! You have to get up now!”
My wife is a night shift nurse, so home is also where I tiptoe through our bedroom to avoid waking her on my way to my little office.
On the side sits the garden, patrolled faithfully by our dog. At this time of year, it’s mysterious and overgrown.
My shop? Right now, projects are calling to me with a siren song: “finish me fool.” Then you can move on to that clipper ship you want to do so much!”
So what do I love about the place I live? The house houses us, and the neighborhood surrounds us. But it is the living, actualizing, and stimulating nature of our family and the activities that I love. It is the heartbeat of the family.
Lucky Me!
Lucky me. Love is still a predominant emotion. Love for my patient wife, my children, my pets, and even a bit for myself. To date, I’ve successfully resisted the blitz posed by anger and dismay at our national and international political situation.
Some days, the balance teeters from the positive towards the negative, and then Max comes in with his doggy buoyancy, insisting that we go out to the yard so he can chase a chipmunk who had the poor taste to visit. Or my female cat, Sabrina, comes in chatting up a storm about something. These effectively oppose the dark fog bank descending from “Foggy Bottom” in Washington.
I thank God, firmly, that I am blessed with so much that acts in opposition to the negative. My sovereignty remains undefeated.
So I get another cup of coffee, bounce out to the workshop singing a little ditty I composed the other day:
Up the long ladder and down the short rope.
To Hell with King Donald, and God bless our hopes.
If that doesn’t do it, we’ll tear him in two.
And send him to Hell with Melania, too!
Now! Once again with feeling, and don’t forget to stomp!!! Get out those YaYa’s!!!!!
Hard to do!
You’ve all heard the saying that you should keep it simple, stupid? Well, simple is hard to do. There is an urge to complicate. To add details and complexity. “oooh! Look, you can see the little man inside the truck, and he has his hand on the shift! and it’s only half an inch long!” While I don’t want to suggest that complex isn’t hard, I do believe that sometimes simplicity leaves the imagination open to add to the story. Without the complexity.
For me, that means carving a full ship in twelve to fourteen inches and suggesting complexity, but leaving out many smaller details. Just make suggestions. A friend of mine who was a model maker suggested that excess detail can distract from errors in larger things – perhaps the shape of sails.
Life is like art in that regard, too. We admire simplicity, praise it, and sing of it. But overcomplicate our lives.
Of course, he who has the shop stuffed to the gills with tools is no one to talk. But hey…let him who is perfect toss the first wood shaving!
OOOPS!
Let’s start with a quote:
“Luck is what you stumble upon in life. Providence is what God plans for you, and planning is how you thread your way between the two without getting crushed.” First Class Petty Officer John O’Toole, Bosuns-mate USN
The great O’Toole knew whereof he spoke. He spent a career convincing officers that he was the most squared away sailor in the Navy while doing very little other than running a very non-regulation booze distribution routine on cruises, and teaching very junior “drifty-shit” sailors like myself how to “Gundeck” reports ( falsify reports, logs, and other repetitious and meaningless things).
O’Toole was an enemy of the three-hole binder, chapter-by-chapter plan stuck on the shelf. He maintained that it was better to adequately teach people how to behave in an emergency than to have them idiotically pawing through sixty pages of bureaucratese. He could barely restrain his amusement when elaborate plans that no one would read needed review.
The Navy was infamous for having a plan for everything, except maybe what to do if a Time Traveler appeared in the midst of Quarters.
O’Toole eventually retired and took relish in one of his new enterprises reviewing emergency response plans for large corporations.
Politics
A Flashback Friday Presentation from August 15, 2021
Some have a strong belief that we are all formed at birth, and we have been apportioned our share of talent, wit, and intelligence; Period, full stop. How boring. Everything predetermined. It may be true that without stimulation, encouragement, and opportunity, areas of potential may never develop. Take politics for an example.
Sigh…I’ll never be Senator Carreras…my upbringing focused on things other than politics. In fact, in my home, with a few rare exceptions ( Jacob Javits, the Roosevelts, and Nelson Rockefeller), being called a politician was down there with being a pimp.
If I had walked in on a post-dinner conversation at my home and told my parents that I intended to follow a career in politics, I would rapidly come to rue my idiocy. My father especially would have been proud for me to select seaman, marine engineer, carpenter, even bridge officer. But Politician? He would have reacted with true Latin temper at his son’s stupidity. No Carreras had ever fouled the family name in such a manner. Pirates, sure, sharp dealing merchants? of course ! – politicians? Never.
On the other hand, my mother would have been less verbal but no less disapproving. For her, a simple, “Oh, Louis!” said in that drawn-out manner that said it all would have sufficed. I would have crept away to someplace damp and dark in my shame.
So it’s more than what we get apportioned. It’s how we are encouraged, or in this case, discouraged.
Questions?
But does it all have to be bad? Getting the proper guidance, rewards, and occasional punishments for poor behavior shapes behavior. Perhaps the problem with our politicians are us? We reward them for the wrong things and rarely correct their poor behavior. Discouraging entry into politics because we fail to manage political behavior puts us at risk. Because, of course, only the venal will then participate.
As Plato put it: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
Sound familiar?
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