Category Archives: Muddled Musings

O’ Brother, There Art Thou

Halcyon (An Ode to Samuel)

Tell me where the spirit flees
When life has made the choice
To bring the body to its knees
And let the soul rejoice.

Answer.

Here these are the olden days
Here these are the golden days
Here these are the days to remember.

For yesterday’s gone
And tomorrow’s a song
Today is the only glowing  ember.

 

O’ Brother mine! dearest Samuel,

T W E N T Y! Can you fucking believe it? Dude, we may be approaching a record: I looked up double transplants, trying to find the longest living double-organ team, but the records are sketchy. Mayo Clinic is still searching; no word back. I found a case online, in a Dutch medical journal, that said one kidney-pancreas transplant team made it 16 years.

Scrubs.

I still can’t wrap my head around it:  We’ve been wed two decades! Guess what movie came out 20 years ago? O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?. So did Memento (one of my favorites), Cast Away, Almost Famous and High Fidelity. The hottest shows in television were The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Frasier. Music sucked (Britney Spears’ Ooops…I Did It Again was all the rage), but we were too busy recuperating  to listen to that shit anyway.Image result for O Brother, Where Art Thou? imdb

Speaking of recuperating, before I begin this unabashedly schmaltzy love letter, an apology.

I’m sorry I nearly annulled this marriage two days in. It’s just my body wasn’t used to being so close to someone, and I guess I tried to wriggle loose; the band with which Dr. Sutherland bonded us briefly schism-ed at the suture. But with some quick counseling, we were back together. And haven’t had a real fight in 20 years. Cite me another couple with such cohesion.

And I can tell you this, without hesitation or qualification: In 20 years, I have never betrayed you. Not once.

That medicinal fidelity wasn’t always the case. Ask Mom. I sucked at taking meds when I was diabetic.  I’d miss injections, eat like crap, soar over or crawl beneath my assigned sugar levels. Of course, my failures led to us meeting; sorry, I can’t help but see the past through glasses hued rose since we met. It’s one of the things I love about you.

Now, I take our meds as religiously as pastors take confession. Probably, certainly, more. Ask Mom. I haven’t missed an unhospitalized pill or eye drop in 20 years. That’s 7,300 days of meds, administered 14,600 times, totaling more than 150,000 pills. And that’s a conservative estimate. All that, and not one rejection episode yet.

It may still come. But if you had told me in January 2000 that I’d get 20 years of perfect blood sugars, 20 years of no self-injections, 20 years of not having diabetes nibble off fingers, toes, perhaps feet, I would have not only said ‘Hell yeah!’ I would not have believed the offer.

I know your perspective is vastly different. I am sorry and so torn about that, Sam. The decision your mom Valerie made — despite reservations from your father — remains the bravest act of human love I’ve ever witnessed. To weigh that Decision, have that Talk, all while bracing for the Goodbye. She is as cool under pressure as any nerve-steeled Apollo pilot, and I carry her boy as I would a newborn, swaddled and close to my heart, hoping some of that Flegel bravery will wear off on me. In me.

I told Spencer that we were approaching 20 years. He said he would have guessed it had been longer. I would have guessed it had been shorter. Like, 19 years and six months shorter. Time does flatten a man.

But not you. Over the years, you have grown mythical in my eyes. Once you were a 21-year-old kid from Fargo, 14 years my junior. Now you have risen to deity-level. I now see a truly noble soul, angel pure, who loved dogs, waved “Hi” for family pictures (who else is that sincere in happiness?), and overcame educational hurdles to become an engineer at Red River Valley and Western Railroad. You are Paul Bunyan. And i get to soldier forward arm-in-arm with you? Who should be so blessed to be your wing man!

Here’s what I love about you, O’ Brother mine:

You make me feel strong. Whenever I see stories of what passes for bravery nowadays, particularly in our halls of law, I think of you. And I’ll say to ourself, ‘That’s great. Ever laid on a gurney, split open from the belly button downward, for eight straight hours — on a gamble?” You are my definition of strength, and I draw from you for it constantly.

You make me feel wise. Knowing how precariously you and I cling together has altered my definition of…well, everything. Time. Life. Death. Illness. Health. Deadlines. Pressures. You have taught me when to let go (though I often fail). To be content when I’m a bug in amber. To, in truth, see the time-strangling beauty of those moments. You are my definition of wisdom, and I need your counsel daily.

You make me feel loved. In every step of this journey, I have never felt alone. You probably figured out early that I tend to get introverted; I still have danced publicly only once in my life (not everyone is as brave as you). But fleeting is the moment when I feel isolated. You are my definition of love, and I look to you every time I need a heart or shoulder.

You know what’s creepy? A doctor  predicted all this, five years before I was born: that I would meet a soul named Sam; that he would open my eyes to the beauty of life’s fleeting ways; that I would take him profoundly into myself.

The doctor? Theodore Seuss Geisel. Fucking Dr. Seuss!

Surely, you know the story of Green Eggs and Ham. Or at least the refrain: “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.” Green Eggs and Ham.jpg

But read a’ might closer, and you’d swear there was a serendipitous through-line here about us. The story goes like this: Sam-I-Am pesters his friend, Guy-Am-I (!) to eat a dish of green eggs and ham. Guy refuses, even as Sam persistently follows him, asking to eat them in eight locations (house, box, car, tree, train, dark, rain, boat) and with three animals (mouse, fox, goat). Guy still refuses, saying, “I wouldn’t not like them here (Current location) or there (Previous location)! I would not like them anywhere!” Finally, Guy vainly accepts Sam’s offer and samples the green eggs and ham, happily announcing he would eat them anywhere and with anyone and ends the story, saying, “I do so like green eggs and ham. Thank you. Thank you, Sam-I-Am.”

Damn straight, Dr. Ted. Sam, I am.

Those tools in the jewelry business say that a 20-year-anniversary is to be recognized with platinum (a diamond is their recommended gift of 10 years!). I can’t afford their bullshit menu, but I did want to give you the only thing I really own: my word, located just beneath my left rib cage.

It says this: I am with you, to the end. I have your back, and you have mine.

Even that pledge is a pittance, I know, a lowball offer for what you have given me without asking for a thing in return.

So take my arm this time. I have taken yours so often. Rest here for a moment. Rejoice here. Because I have an idea…

You know, a marathon is 26.219 miles. Whaddaya say? We’ve only got 6.219 miles left. Up for more? Why stop now?

We got this, O’ Brother mine.

 

Tater Tots, the Nutritiously Delicious Morsel of Scrumptious Snacking

Image result for tater tots school lunch

Confession: I hate food words. I hate them as adjectives. I hate them as nouns. I hate them as verbs. Always have.

Dunno why. Dad railed against adjectives, so I do in echo. He never, however, railed against verbs and nouns. But if I am reading a profile of someone and the story includes a description of the person “noshing on a tasty morsel” of anything, I first will throw up on my shoe, then jump to the sports section.

This goes back to high school. Buddies on my basketball team would literally get centimeters from my ear and whisper that the school lunch menu surely contained something “nutritiously delicious.” Their whereabouts remain unknown.

So yeah, I said it. I hate food words. But I love food that thinks it’s people:

Teddy would get into shit, but never a toaster.

Ever been taunted by a sandwich? It’s horrifying.

Sadly, Timmy learned to feed his porn addiction with luncheon meats.

Wow, Trump even yells at eggs.

Why so cerealous?

I gotta be me!

A muffin never forgets.

“It’ll need an exorcism, ma’am. Please hand over the brownies.”

If more vegetables could dab, I’d eat them.

E.T., phone Cinnabon.

Whooo’s a good beer foam? Yes you are! Yes you are!

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a tomato.

You know you suck at cooking when even your eggs disapprove.

He said he was boiling lasagna, but fucker clearly murdered Grover.

Ever seen food that knew it was food?

The Politics of Peloton

Image result for peloton commercial

My father was an amateur hoarder. He kept so many things we had to alphabetize our basement shelves simply to catalog the clutter. The floors, which were not cataloged, were even cluttier.

One Christmas, my mother presented him with a non-too-subtle gift: a Shop Vac that also happened to be waterproof, so he could address the puddling in the basement. If I recall, Dad fired it up exactly zero times. But the gift amply delivered the message: the basement shit needs cleaning.I would tease mom about the romantic gesture for years, but now I see the behavior has shifted into American politics, just without the utility, need or clear messaging.

I’m speaking of the Peloton, a $2,245 exercise bike that is suddenly consuming megabytes and media space. The bike commercial, set to Tal Bachman’s 1999 one-hit wonder She’s So High, tells the tale of a husband who buys his wife a Peloton for Christmas. She seems completely surprised — she apparently hadn’t cycled before — and takes videos of her fitness journey, eventually premiering it for her spouse. “A year ago, I didn’t realize how much this would change me,” she says in the end.

The holiday ad for the luxury stationary bike company was released online in November. But this week, it supposedly took the digital world by storm and was hate-tweeted into virality. But both the online reaction and media coverage were conjured from the ether — and underpin a larger problem in politics and civil interaction.

We had a rule at the paper: one is an occasion; two is a coincidence; and three is a trend (and therefore worthy of a story). Look through any paper (or most TV news shows, for that matter), and you’ll see outlets straining for that third example to justify the piece’s existence.

Sadly, that already-tenuous rule of thumb has transferred from print to digital. And the cross-pollination of media has been catastrophic. Papers have already adopted the internet’s viewer count and click bait strategies, with tragic results: A new study by the University of North Carolina shows that since 2004, one in five daily newspapers in the nation have shuttered.

And the journalistic principles that one held governance have lost all grip. We cover the president’s tweetrants like fireside chats. We quote anonymous Twitter users. We have developed a new news arithmetic: One tweet is the internet noticing; two tweets is ‘internet backlash;’ and three tweets is the internet fully ablaze.

And Pelaton became tinder on a dry California afternoon, by media measures. Don’t believe it? Consider the Pelaton “backlash.” Several outlets, in print and on television, ran the same two tweets. The first was this Twitter image, a riff on a hostage horror film:View image on Twitter

The second was this Twitter post:

Siraj Hashmi

Embedded video

2,466 people are talking about this

I couldn’t help but notice that both postings were written by men. Isn’t that a violation of the American Woke Policy? And already, the fabricated backlash has become a real one: Peloton’s stock dropped 10% last week over the perceived outrage.

This is the Left eating itself. This is offense-hunting.  When we liberals wonder how the hell the president can coalesce a legion of followers, the hegemony of the cult cannot be underestimated. While the Right’s rejection of factual evidence puts the slippery in slope, the Left seems eager to yank the rudder just as dramatically port.

Therefore, the HB is suggesting an amendment to its Limited Twitter Policy (which calls for less coverage of what Trump sausage-pecks and more of what his administration actually enacts). In short, the amendment is this: Twitter has a character-count limit of 280 keystrokes. Stories about Twitter should be limited to the same length. After all, how many words do you need to tell readers “People are tweeting about this?”

Our over-inflation of the importance of social media is nearly as destructive as the foreign manipulation of it. The internet is the fire of 20th Century. If we’re not using it to cook the food that expands our gray matter — and instead use it to create political folly where there is none — we are just spinning our wheels.