Monthly Archives: June 2018

The Forever Minute

“For god is but Dog with dyslexia.” — Ssad Mar

Esme and I are prone to rituals, particularly around dinner.

Every day about 5:30 p.m., I prepare my evening meds. Every day about 5:30 p.m., Esme watches, waiting for me to prepare her dinner.

Girl is serious about her kibble. When Teddy was the only pup in Dogtown, I could leave food heaped in a bowl. He would eat what he wanted, when he wanted, and somehow never gained a pound. Leather wallets must increase metabolism rates, because he ate a few of those, too.

But when Esme entered the scene, Teddy quickly learned that if he didn’t eat his entire dinner when it was served, his entire dinner would be eaten for him. She’s as smart as a whip, but Esme clearly believes haste makes taste: She resembles  a penguin who eats her emotions.

Until she finishes her meal and get outside, where she turns into a greyhound racer for another routine, when we say good night to the day.

It goes something like this: I chuck one of her tennis balls on the roof, waiting for it to roll down shingles, clatter over the aluminum patio awning and bounce to a near-perfect height for Esme leap and fetch. We’ll do that, literally, until Esme runs out of energy and retires indoors (with the ball; I guess she presumes me too stupid to know she wants to stop otherwise).

Last week, we were in the middle of the day’s farewell routine. Roll, clatter, bounce. Roll, clatter, bounce.

Perhaps it was the California-coated dusk. Perhaps it was the song playing (“Bittersweet Symphony”). Perhaps it was the sugar high. Whatever the reason, I was so overcome by this sentiment I said it aloud:

“I wish this moment would never end.”

How often, I thought, do I say that? Not enough, that’s for sure. How often do any of us say it enough?

I don’t mean during a trip to Disneyland. Or down the aisle. Or toward the acquisition of something treasured.

I mean in the middle of the dishes. I mean during the morning commute. I mean waiting for the microwave popcorn.

Why does it take something blatantly memorable to be remembered? And even then, it is almost always in retrospect. How often have we told ourselves, ‘Man, I wish I could have that time back. If I realized how special it was, I would have enjoyed it more.’

Great news: Now is special. And it’s just waiting for someone to enjoy the fuck out of it.

Think of that minute just before dinner, perhaps mankind’s favorite moment on the spectrum of human pleasure. It is already a bounty. You may not even be hungry. You may not care for the food you’re eating — yet again. You may have a ton of errands awaiting you after the last swallow.

Even more reason to recognize the beauty of humdrum. Instead of saying grace to some invisible superhero that chose to feed you and starve others, why not collectively wish that everyday moment would never end? Mundane, yes. Dull, you bet. Repetitive, no doubt. But a day will come, sure as sunrise, that we see the beauty of banality. That the absence of hell is, to some measure, heavenly.

Roll, clatter, bounce. Roll, clatter, bounce.

 

 

Donnie, Go Put Your Name on the Yes Board

 

My mother, a first-grade teacher her entire career, implemented the greatest inspiration/discouragement tool  I’ve ever seen in education: The Yes and No Board.

It was a simple chalkboard, divided in two, with the words YES on one side, NO on the other. If a child was especially good, the youngster got his or her name emblazoned under YES. Miscreants and the mischievous went under NO.

The board was clever enough, but here was the coup de grace: Mom had the children write their own names on the board, an act of public pride or  penance. Either way, it was effective: Children beamed like stars to write their name on the YES board, wept like widows at the other fate (though they always had a chance to redeem themselves with good behavior and an eraser).

Washington needs a YES and NO board.

God knows I would have Trump get as used to the NO board as Bart Simpson. From his ever-growing flock to his ever-growing need for one, Trump’s deification in the Republican base has put his ego on steroids. And his love of despots may become our fate of living under one.

But homie deserves to write his name on the YES board for his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this week.

I say this grudgingly. I say this with the taste of crow on my breath. I was prepared for him to tweet the nuclear code after the meeting.

Instead, we got a hugfest. A disingenuous, duplicitous  globular hugfest among egomaniacs. But would we have wanted any other message coming from the confab? Perhaps them angry waddling away from each other? Trading translated barbs?

But it’s inescapable, the reticence of CNN and MSNBC to give the president credit for the meeting. And they do raise valid points: Kim played Trump like a fiddle, earning praise from the leader of the free world. The de-nuclearization process takes a decade at minimum. The letter Kim and Trump penned was, at best, vaguely optimistic.  Trump’s decision to end war games in South Korea was capricious at best, an outright lie at worst.

All of which might be true. To which I say: Who cares? Who gives a shit if a nation the size of Pennsylvania wants to parade Kim’s photos with world leaders, establishing him as a peer? Who cares if the letter wasn’t specific? Did we really expect either of those pudgy lunatics to emerge with a well thought-out plan of disarmament?

The problem appears two-fold: The major outlets’ reluctance to praise anything Trumpian, lest they invoke a boycott or, worse, a decline in ratings; and a misread of the Singapore sit-down altogether.

The first is understandable. Trump invites skepticism in anything he says or does, largely because he says or does nothing. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 17 straight months and, well, I’ve got that coming.

It’s the second media complaint that confuses me. We keep casting Kim as a dictator of a hermit nation, which would be impossible to deny. But I was a cop reporter for 15 years, and I know a hostage stand-off when I see one. And this was a hostage stand-off.

In this case, the hostages were 60 short-, medium- and long-range missiles, including those of the inter ballistic persuasion.  What is Trump going to come out and say? “Dumbo’s gotta get rid of em?” Have you ever seen a cop, trying to negotiate the release of hostages, go on the local TV news and say “That guy is a real nut job. I sure hope he doesn’t kill everybody.” You say what needs to be said til nutso puts down the gun. Isn’t that the hope for both men?

Perhaps Kim will pick it up again and fire away. Perhaps de-arming never happens. Perhaps this was all just a ruse to hack Trump’s iPhone after he left it in the toilet, which he surely did at least once.

But again, who cares? So far, there are no bodies. In any hostage stand-off, you want a lack of corpses, a dearth of gunfire and both sides talking and smiling, even if it cloaks consternation. What’s the alternative?

 

The Species of Origins

 

I can barely microwave a Pop Tart. Yet Anthony Bourdain’s suicide this weekend really threw me for a loop.

Not for my love of food, obviously. But I discovered him during a hospital stay a couple years ago in which the TV remote control broke. One afternoon, I was force-fed  his Parts Unknown series on CNN. Then I watched another. And another. By the end of the stay, I had watched him criss-cross the world in a sort of international potluck dinner prep.

Like I said, boiling water and I are not on speaking terms. But his show, I later discovered, was never really about food. If anything, it was about journalism: meeting strangers, collecting anecdotal histories, asking open questions. Like the comedians of late-night TV, who have used parody to become the nation’s most influential political reporters, Bourdain connected with us by using food as verbs, spices as nouns, sauces as adjectives.

My fandom was confirmed with a tiny bit of research on him, when I discovered he was the son of a New York Times copy editor and routinely wandered newsroom halls. It cemented when I saw an interview in which he waxed philosophical that most of our introductions to new cultures are through the taste bud. More importantly, he said, we seal our relationships over meals, where anecdotes flow like wine. That’s Journalism 101.

Now he’s gone. Like Kate Spade, Robin Williams, Chris Cornell and endlessly on. And these were people at the top of humanity’s evolutionary chain: rich, creative, free to travel and purchase much of the world. It’s enough to draw you to an unnerving realization: We have over-evolved.

While Charles Darwin has no chapter on overevolution in his seminal book on natural selection, he has plenty on underevoltion, instances when a species could not adapt quickly enough to changes in their environment and perished. Roughly 99.5% of every species that ever existed on this planet have joined the cloud circuit, scientists estimate.

But if there are so many examples on that extreme of the continuum, what about the other? The Humane Society estimates an overpopulation of dozens of creatures, from Australia’s kangaroo baby boom to England’s badger surplus to Central America’s coyote explosion to Africa’s python epidemic. America is overrun by white-tailed deer.

And, of course, there’s us, 7.62 billion strong and growing, making us the world leader in overevolution.

Consider our other symptoms of evolving a bridge too far:

  • Suicide There are about 16,000 homicides a year in the U.S. But there are 40,000 annual suicides, a number that has increased 30% since 1999. When a species is three times more likely to kill itself than other members of the species, it’s overevolved.
  • Brain size We’ve gotten too smart for our own good. Our brains have evolved into such large organs that, without medical advancements, more than 20% of the world’s births would end in maternal or infant mortality. When a noggin is a deadly threat during childbirth, it’s overevolved.
  • Host threat When a species is capable of ending all life on its host planet, it’s overevolved.
  • Oxygen bars

I know Darwin died in 1882, but maybe the president could ask him to revise the book. After all, Trump keeps in contact with Frederick Douglass.

And now, less combustible factslaps:

  • About 20% of the world’s tech founders are immigrants, even though immigrants only make up about 4 percent of the world’s population.
  • Richard Nixon was an accomplished musician who could play the piano, accordion, violin, saxophone and clarinet.
  • The Moon gets hit by over 6,000 pounds of meteor material per day.
  • A study found that orcas can learn to speak dolphin.
  • Canada’s national parks are free for children.
  • Researchers have found that muscle soreness after a workout doesn’t necessarily mean you’re growing more muscle.
  • Vicodin’s name is based on it being approximately six (VI in roman numerals) times stronger than codeine.
  • In 1494, Michelangelo, at the age of 19, was commissioned by the ruler of Florence to sculpt a snowman in his mansion’s courtyard.

    Piero de Medici ordered Michelangelo to build a snowman.

    And finally, a neighborly word from Mr. Rogers, who gave the U.S. Senate its most elegant description of what should be mankind’s evolutionary plateau, and would have been such a beautiful message for Tony Bordain to have taken within: