The Crucifixion from The Robe

Fascist Twerp

The only thing scarier than the anti-logic and naked appeal to emotionalism re: the massive attempt at “gun control” in the wake of the Parkland shooting is that this kid is being held up as the face of the movement.

I haven’t fired a gun since 1984, but I’m edging closer and closer to an NRA donation simply to protect the Second Amendment.

Now, if you want to discuss mental health reform, the overmedication of our youth, and the fact that despite all the best efforts of the nanny state bullying is still widespread throughout our schools, then I’m all ears.

But until then, poses like this (and the incendiary nonsense that preceded it) do nothing except make me want to dig my heels in preference to the opposing position. I’m hoping this little wannabe’s fifteen minutes is about fourteen minutes and fifty-five seconds up.

Holding Pattern

Ah! My sesquibiannual ailment has returned! (That’s an ailment that recurs every nine months or so.) Bronchitis. A virus doctors treat with antibiotics. When I get the z-pack in me, I’m better 48 hours later, though the virus dwells within my bronchial tracts for up to 21 days.

Last Friday the wife and little ladies drove down to DC to visit her sister’s family. I stayed to do tax returns, and I did six or seven of them that day and Saturday. Then, home not a half hour Saturday Eve, I felt a bit dizzy, a bit hot-flashy, and more than a bit tired. It descended on me so fast that by 10 pm I was in complete oblivion, shaking, just about passed out on the couch. How the dog got walked and fed I do not remember.

I called out sick from the day job three days in a row and from the night-time tax return job once. How I did a tax return that Tuesday again I know not. Wednesday we got the fourth nor’easter of the month, and in my shaky weakness managed to shovel us out three times so I wouldn’t throw my back out shoveling us out once.

Sometime Thursday night my strength returned. In fact, I did seven tax returns yesterday and today, and closed them all out. That’s nice.

I made very slow headway in my baseball book over these past couple of days. I even cracked a long anticipated Napoleon bio but only made it 20 or so pages in. Most of the time I spent surfing the web on my cell phone in a hot bath tub, wracked with wheezing coughing fits.

Have to work tomorrow morning, 9-12. It’s the beginning of the final push in the tax season, “peak number two,” (the first peak is the two weeks after W-2s are released). I’m going to be working 32 extra additional hours between now and April 17. Hoping to make some good coin too. So far, to date, I’ve done 73 returns (last year I did 44 total). The more I do, the more I get paid. I’m hoping to do 100-120 this year, but the lead at my office thinks I can do 200. We’ll see.

Tomorrow afternoon is Patch’s first soccer game of the season. That’ll be interesting. My father-in-law is driving up from the Jersey shore to watch it with us, and, per tradition, we’ll probably hit IHOP for an early dinner afterward.

Hopefully more entertaining stuff down the pike as I get healthier. More weirdities, as I always enjoying musing about here on these pages, and haven’t done so in a long while.

Oh, and here are two little pics I texted Little One during the week, which she hearted:

Kingman's Style

From chapter 5 of Dan Epstein’s very enjoyable Stars and Strikes: Baseball and American in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76 –

The Yankees’ crosstown counterparts weren’t starting off the season too badly, either. Despite their impressive pitching staff, few expected the offensively challenged Mets, under the guidance of rookie manager Joe Frazier, to be much of a factor in the NL East. And yet, they played 13-7 ball in April, thanks in part to the bat of their one major offensive weapon, right fielder Dave “Kong” Kingman. Kong – or “Sky King,” as Kingman preferred to be called – hit 36 homers for the Mets in 1975, and appeared to be on track for even more in ’76. The free-swinging Kingman rarely walked, and struck out around four times for every home run he hit; yet, despite an ungainly swing that Sports Illustrated’s Larry Keith likened to “a very tall man falling from a very short tree,” the 6’ 6” slugger specialized in gargantuan rainbow shots that seemed to pierce the very atmosphere before returning to earth. “Dave’s style is to swing hard in case he hits it,” said veteran Mets first baseman Ed Kranepool. “When he’s connecting, the only way to defense him is to sit in the upper deck. I’ve never seen anybody hit the ball farther.”

Nor had too many other people. On April 14, with the wind blowing out at Wrigley Field, Kingman launched a moon shot off of Cubs reliever Tom Dettore that sailed over the left field bleachers, carried across Waveland Avenue, and headed up Kenmore Avenue, where it finally caromed off the air-conditioning unit of a residence three houses up from the corner. Variously estimated at traveling between 530 and 630 feet, Sky King’s blast was widely adjudged to have been the longest home run ever hit at Wrigley. Though the Mets lost that game 6-5, Kingman came back the next day and sent two more baseballs flying out of the park and clanging off building facades along Waveland, with his second of the game plating three runs to give the Mets an eventual 10-8 victory. The three tape-measure blasts in Chicago came as part of a spree that saw Kingman hammer seven homers in seven days.

With his jaw-dropped power – even his infield pop-ups were awe-inspiring – and angular good looks, Kingman could have been a major New York celebrity, but the only swinging this bachelor ever did was on the field. A moody introvert, Kingman preferred to lead a solitary existence at his four-bedroom home in rural Cos Cob, Connecticut, where he spent his downtime building furniture in his garage. “I prefer a private life of my own. I like to live quietly,” he told sportswriter Jack Lang. “I enjoy playing in New York, but I don’t enjoy living in the city. I like peace and quiet. I like to get away from it all. I enjoy woodworking. I enjoy making things.”

* * * * * * *

Me, nine, ten years old, my dad a big Mets fan. Stretched out on the living room floor in the suffocating, air-conditioned-less heat, watching the Mets lose one game after another. Kingman was always exciting (at least to my father; I don’t even know if I understood the game all that well back then or even had the willpower to give it more than a half-inning’s attention). My brother even had Kingman’s autographed 8 ½ x 11, if I recall correctly. I also remember going to several games at the old Shea stadium, and even being quite close to the field one time, maybe a dozen rows behind the third base dugout.

Ah, memories from my youth …

Five Years

Well, today marks the fifth anniversary of the ascendency of St. Humble the Obtuse.

I still orbit Rome, though it is now of a vastly increased radius and tugged at by many, many gravitational pulls. The strongest, I suppose, is sedevacantism, the belief that the Chair of St. Peter, the papacy, has not been held by a legitimate Pope since Pius XII died in 1958. Other massive bodies pulling upon my soul and intellect range from Zen and Mahayana Buddhism to the philosophy of Sartre and Nietzsche. Toss in the Kantian positivism of modern day physics, sprinkle in a heaping dose of Mary Baker Eddy and Billy Graham, serve with plain old head-in-the-sand ostrichism and copious amount of Foster’s lager, and you got the space between Hopper’s ears, served as a high-caloric delicious dish devoid of nutritional value.

And what has the Humble One done to ensnare my soul – and the souls of millions others – for Christ? Well, he’s brought the Church down to us. Instead of looking up to something transcendent, he’s brought the angels and saints and the otherworldly beauty down to us to – to use a favorite expression of his – to mix with the smell of sheep. Forget about raising your eyes to a higher glory above; enjoy the scent of your fellow fallen man. Oh, and let your conscience be your Christ.

I have never felt more alone and adrift in my life. Perhaps it’s midlife crisis; I did turn 50 six months ago. I have unsuccessfully searched for a solid mooring all my life since my parent’s divorce in my early adolescence, and thought I finally found it, via the wife and children, in my two-decade return to the Catholic Church. But when old Benedict abdicated and we got this snake-oil selling clown, I realize again I am set asea in a raft without oars, blindfolded, spinning around fathom-free poles, lost in the Northern Atlantic depths in the early morning hours as the big ship slowly slides down into the darkness.

What to do, what to do? Keep on keeping on, I suppose. Not much else to do unless I suddenly decide to radically –

…

But I digress.

Why do I dislike this man so intensely?

- Amoris Laetitia and his silence towards the “dubia”

- The false humility for the cameras

- His selling out of the largest group of Catholics in the world, those in China

- The perpetual verbal diarrhea called airplane interviews

- “Who am I to judge?”

- The salivating desire to please the liberal intelligentsia (Laudato Si)

- Those monthly politically correct Vatican videos

- Francis’s Little Book of Insults (google it)

- The constant drive to tinker with millennia-old doctrine

- The syrupy simplicity of his teaching (check his twitter feed)

- The promotion of Fr. James Martin to Vatican communications director

There – eleven reasons, one for each faithful apostle, right off the top of my head. Perhaps I’m being disrespectful. Maybe, maybe not. I take this seriously. This man’s capitulation to modernism is no laughing matter, nothing to shrug off, nothing to sigh about. This is Eternal Life and Death we’re talking about.

Anyway, it’s now been five years. Five long years …

New Revolutionaries

WHITE-HAIRED JESUIT HIPPIE: Where are all the Catholic Millennial activists???

ANSWER: At Latin Mass on Sunday morning.

(paraphrase of a recent witty – and correct – answer c/o priest blogger Fr. Dwight Longenecker)

Count me in.

Jackson and Rivers

If you listened to Reggie, you’d think he was the only intelligent guy on the whole Yankee team. That’s what Reggie says – over and over. He told that to Carlos May once. May didn’t give a damn what his IQ was and told him so. Reggie said, “You can’t even spell IQ.” Another time Reggie was giving Mickey Rivers the same jive. “My IQ is 160,” he told Mickey. Mickey looked at Reggie and said, “Out of what, a thousand?” Cracked everybody up. Reggie’s always trying to show Mickey how much smarter he is. One day he asked Mickey, “What am I doing arguing with someone who can’t read or write?” Mickey replied, “You oughta stop reading and writing and start hitting.”

- from The Bronx Zoo, by Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock

Funny stuff.

Baseball starts in three weeks. I’m excited, as I was this time last year. After three months of taxes and payroll and taxes and payroll, I’m ready for a break. This year, as last, I found it difficult to lose myself in my standard regular reading. Particularly since I have so little free time. But I have a couple of baseball books acquired here and there for a few dollars, books I’ve started going through. It’s fun ’cause it takes my mind off the pressures of daily living without pondering all the existential literary questions I usually chase a busy day with.

The Mets are predicted to go .500 and might even challenge for the wild card if they can stay healthy. And the Yanks – according to one of my baseball forecast magazines – are thought to go all the way. We’ll see about both teams. The Mets can’t go any worse than last year, and as long as the Yankees make it to the playoffs, the family will be happy.

We’ve budgeted two trips to the baseball stadium this year. Once to Citi Field, for me, and once to Yankee Stadium, for the girls and my father-in-law. And if the wife can catch a cheap Groupon, we might do a third. I always have a fun time there, Citi Field more than Yankee Stadium but only by a little bit, and whether the temps hover around freezing or close to a hundred, I find those three hours almost as enjoyable as an endless afternoon in a used book store with a wallet full of cash.

And Hundreds of Old White Men Rise in Applause

Still digging this song, “Supper’s Ready” by Genesis, here the ending solo performing by Steve Hackett some forty-odd years after the tune’s release. Ignore the weird goldilocks dude, ignore the fact that Steve’s a senior citizen, ignore that he’s overplaying the solo at the end, just enjoy him tearing the hell out of that chord progression (A-G-A-G-Bm-C#m-C-D-C-G-D-A).

Stella Maris