Flying into 2020

Have an awesome New Year’s Eve ...

and an even better 2020!

2019 Best-Ofs!

Ah, that time of year again, when a semi-portly Hopper reclines with a glass of port and relaxes and reflects on the past twelvenmonthe. The highs! The lows! The smashes and the, er, trashes. An overall review of what made life worth living in the Hopperverse.

So, dim the lights, crank the Dolby stereo, open the curtains and obey the APPLAUSE signs –

It’s the 2019 Best-Ofs!!!!

… without further ado …

Best fiction, re-read: Weaveworld (1987) by Clive Barker

Best fiction, first-time read: The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953) by James A. Michener

Best nonfiction: Lincoln and His Generals (1952) by T. Harry Williams

Best Short Story: “The Mouse” (1969) by Howard Fast (I dare you to read this and not weep...)

Best TV: Still gotta be The Office. Chronologically binge-watching the seasons with the girls, currently up to mid-season 6.

Most Disappointing TV: The reboot of In Search Of with Zachary Quinto attempting to replace the irreplaceable Leonard Nimoy in yet another genre. That and the bad editing and silly writing doomed this new version.

Best movie: Joker

   Runner-up: Crawl

Worst movie: Godzilla, King of the Monsters

   Runner-up: Zombie Tidal Wave

Best song: “Long, Long, Long” by the Beatles (a Harrison tune)

   Runners-Up: Just about any Lennon song off the White Album or Revolver

Phases:

   Beatles

   Under the Dome and 24 marathons with the girls

   George Armstrong Custer research

   VSI – Very Short Introduction – books

   The Spraining of the Ankle, November 9

   Bundesliga soccer

   Re-reads (The Eye of the World, Weaveworld, False Dawn, The Face of the Waters)

Best phase: Becoming a Beatles archaeologist

   Runner-up: Under the Dome, for the bellylaughs with the little ones.

Least fun phase: The sprained ankle, or that time I slipped on a baby pumpkin and thought I shattered my ankle and that’d need to be amputated and it painfully swelled up and turned all shades of purple gold and green while I hobbled about on crutches while my girls said I was “milking it.”

Funnest Day: (tie) Leisurely strolling round Cape May all day with the Mrs. April 26; biking all over Hilton Head Island with the little ones August 8.

Best Decision: To take off Tax Season ’20. Now I get my nights and weekends back.

Worst Mistake: Choosing, through inaction, to remain a wage slave.

Biggest Life Change: Listening to multiple podcasts/video shows on a daily basis – Ann Barnhart, Red Letter Media, Dr. Taylor Marshall, Steven Crowder, Jocko Willink, Critical Drinker, Uberboyo and Jimmy Boyo. Can I get them in the car so I don’t have to listen to Talk Radio? Also, I was upgraded at work to an office with a window back in April. Nice.

Best Experience I Thought I’d Hate but Didn’t: That wedding in September, dammit! Don’t comment to say “I told ya so” or invite me to another wedding!

Proudest Moment: Watching and listening to high-school aged Little One perform in her concert band back in May and again just last week. It’s phenomenal how great this band now sounds, and next year she’ll be First Chair Clarinet! Plus they did a Sergeant Pepper medley that I absolutely loved. If she only played as much as I strum my guitar she’d be a shoe-in for the Philharmonic in half a decade.

All right … here’s to 2020, just around the corner!

Hmmmm

I came across in some spiritual reading that to some people “life is a ten-speed bicycle with gears we never use.”

Interesting; I like that metaphor.

Seems better than mine: “Life is a research problem in need of a solution.”

Anyway, such are my thoughts as the year, and the decade, comes to a close.

Christmas 2019

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

Ah, Santa must’ve known Hopper was thinking about a Tolkien Silmarillion – Hobbit – Lord of the Rings reread. After all, it’s been four years, and I’ve been restless in my readings of late. That’s why, out of all the clothes that were desperately needed and deeply appreciated, this was my favorite Christmas gift:

Thank you ladies!

The girls made out as well, as did the Mrs. and the even the dog. We’ve had our ups and downs over the past twelve months, but we’re grateful to have each other and to be where we are at this point in time.

Merry Christmas, y’all!

Beatles Breakdown

The Beatles were Hopper’s longest running continuous phase of 2019. Way, way back in January, almost at random, wanting to get away from tomes on war, religion, and science, I picked up a hefty Beatles biography and read it all the way through in six weeks. I somewhat surprisingly enjoyed it. This led to further reading of a half-dozen more books on the band. Over the summer and fall I must have spent a hundred hours listening to all their albums in depth from Rubber Soul to Let It Be. (Not a big fan of early Beatlemania Beatles, but I did listen to a lot of stuff off Anthology 1, primarily to check out original drummer Pete Best.)

Anyway, I discovered a handful of really, really good tunes. Not so much of a shock there, but I reveled the delight, as I always do, of a new artistic experience. Like you, I’m probably aware of 20, 25 songs that are played fairly regularly via classic rock stations and popular media such as TV and movies. But the following are some songs I heard for the first time in 2019 that I truly enjoyed:

I’m Only Sleeping (Lennon)

And Your Bird Can Sing (Lennon)

For No One (McCartney)

Doctor Robert (Lennon)

Tomorrow Never Knows (Lennon)

Flying (instrumental; credited to all four Beatles)

I’m So Tired (Lennon)

Piggies (Harrison)

Julia (Lennon)

Yer Blues (Lennon)

Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey (Lennon)

Sexy Sadie (Lennon)

Long, Long, Long (Harrison)

Savoy Truffle (Harrison)

Cry Baby Cry (Lennon)

Some of those Lennon songs are phenomenal, sonic sculptures of perfection of two or three minutes length. And George Harrison’s ethereal and sublime “Long, Long, Long” still sends goosebumps up and down my arms six months after I first heard it. It’s perhaps the best of those new tunes I got exposed to over the summer.

I recommend them all, but I guess overall I like the stuff off The Beatles, a.k.a., the “White Album”, the best.

All in all, a great musical year for me, great especially since I haven’t really been able to get into anything new classical-wise or jazz-wise. Which has me now thinking of what other supergroups I’ve been unconsciously hearing over the years that I kinda know nothing about and would like to explore. I have some ideas, but nothing has grabbed me yet. Maybe in the new year I’ll head over to one of the big book stores and peruse the entertainment section and see what band bio leaps out at me.

Book Review: False Dawn

© 1979 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Look at this book cover. Take a long, close look at it.

Now imagine you’re Hopper, age 12. Is this book cover not the awesomest thing you’ve ever seen in your life??!!??!!

So back in those halcyon days of the late 70s, those dark days of Jimmy Carter, the Iranian hostage crisis, Three Mile Island, what better way to escape the televised miasma than to read dystopian fiction? Aye, that is what I did. But mainly I did it because of that cool book cover.

False Dawn is basically a tale of the zombie apocalypse without the zombie. And Ms. Quinn keeps it all hidden, which I liked. We don’t know what caused this particular apocalypse, the societal breakdown, though it has to do somehow with chemicals. Animals have mutated. Foliage has mutated. And human beings have mutated too, to varying, sometimes disgustingly graphic degrees. Great fodder for the adolescent male brain. Our heroine, for example, has membranes that cover her eyes during times of extreme stress. Our hero has an arm cut off that regrows during the first third of the novel.

Thea and Evan, our aforementioned mutant heroes, are trekking cross the harsh brutal landscape of what was once Midwest America, carefully avoiding rabid wolves, lethal water spiders, cannibals, and Negan’s Saviors – ah, the Pirates, I mean, ruthless gangs of thugs terrorizing those who want to create better lives for themselves. Big secret revealed early on is that Evan was once the leader of the Pirates, a Negan-gone-good, and he grows a fondness for scarred loner Thea as they both make headway for a fabled town called Gold Lake, a land of milk and honey where there’s no big bad chemicals.

I kid, but I dug it, both back then and now during a quick re-read forty years later. Thought about lending it to Patch but there are a couple of sexually delicate scenes which should have barred young me from reading the book, but will bar her. Overall, though, a nice decent semi-science fiction read.

Grade: A-minus.

A Riddle

Q: How many gender activists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: That’s not funny!

N.B. From a recent Rod Dreher post over at The American Conservative.

Hector Savage, ex-Boxer

Lt. Frank Drebin: Hector Savage. From Detroit. Ex-boxer. His real name was Joey Chicago.

Ed Hocken: Oh, yeah. He fought under the name of Kid Minneapolis.

Nordberg: I saw Kid Minneapolis fight once. In Cincinnati.

Lt. Frank Drebin: No you're thinking of Kid New York. He fought out of Philly.

Ed Hocken: He was killed in the ring in Houston. By Tex Colorado. You know, the Arizona Assassin.

Nordberg: Yeah, from Dakota. I don't remember it was North or South.

Lt. Frank Drebin: North. South Dakota was his brother. From West Virginia.

Ed Hocken: You sure know your boxing, Frank.

Lt. Frank Drebin: All I know is never bet on the white guy.

Astroturf

That was the first word that popped into my mind when I first saw this picture. If you can’t catch my drift, google the urban dictionary definition of the word.

When did Time magazine become a joke? I remember, in the 70s as a kid, eagerly waiting for the weekly issue to arrive in our family mailbox, and I would read it cover to cover. Now, since at least 2000 I suppose, everything is partisan. Newsweek’s gone under (or was going under, last I heard and last I paid attention to it, a few years back), and Time has surpassed partisanship and slid full force into goofy self-parody land.

Time’s Man of the Year was once a respectable honorary. But when did that slide into irrelevancy? It was supposed to denote the figure in the news who, for better or worse, influenced the world the greatest in that year. In my lifetime Reagan graced the cover, as did Soviet dictators Andropov and Gorbachev. Heck, even “the computer,” a silly but accurate choice for 1982, represented not a man but a thing that influenced the world the greatest that year. I think it must have been 1988, when the editors tried to be cute again, and hailed “The Endangered Earth” as planet of the year that the title became obsolete.

Oh well. Rest in Peace, Time Man of the Year. Join such irrelevancies as the Nobel Peace Prize and the Academy Award for Best Picture.

EDIT: While speaking with my wife this morning about this post, she managed to sum it up succinctly in a way which I wish I had: “Time’s Man of the Year is really the Liberal Hero of the Year.” I heartily agreed, and added, “If the Time editorial board had an ounce of intellectual honesty they’d have to have named Trump – and I’m no fan of Trump – Man of the Year every year since 2015.” But as both the Mrs. and me have pointed out, in our direct and indirect ways, that old school definition of “Man of the Year” no longer exists, and hasn’t since some point in the mid-80s.

John Lennon

I first became aware of John Lennon on December 9, 1980. He had been murdered the night before by a mentally ill man with a handgun.

Now, I was peripherally aware of the Beatles, but only peripherally. I was thirteen, and was more familiar with the band ELO, who were played incessantly at my house. At the time I was busy devouring science fiction paperbacks and banging away on my monstrous metallic typewriter, composing bad stories on a daily basis. As far as the Beatles went, I think I knew “I Want to Hold Your Hand” from a transistor radio and I vaguely recall Paul McCartney’s vocals over a car 8-track, possibly while driving with one of my uncles.

Anyway, at school the next morning, December 9, we all sat silent in a weird, unfamiliar and uncomfortable atmosphere of my music class. The teacher, whose name I forget, was an eccentric middle-aged bearded hippie. Along all three walls, just below the ceiling, were large poster pictures of classical composers. These portraits fascinated me, more so than anything the teacher might have said. (Just writing that, I realize how approving John Lennon would be of such a statement.) In this class, which only ran one quarterly marking period, we practiced playing the instrument of our choosing – the acoustic guitar, the recorder, or the glockenspiel. I chose the guitar, and earned an A for the class performing John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads” for the final exam.

But I digress. That drab Tuesday morning my teacher’s eyes were bloodshot, either from crying or staying up the night before watching the news or from self-medicating. Perhaps all three. He sat at his desk, a small lump, leaning down in his chair, mumbling for the next forty-five minutes about who the Beatles were and what they meant to him and, by extension, the world.

He got up twice to play two songs for us. The first was “I Saw Her Standing There,” the opening track on the band’s 1963 debut album. We listened to it mostly in silence, twittering and chuckling nervously with sidelong glances at the “OOOOOOH!”s prior to every sung “I saw her standing there.” Then the teacher played “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and, to be quite honest, I was never creeped out more by sung lyrics in a song before. That creepy feeling has always stuck with me, and I still get the same reaction whenever I hear cellophane flowers of yellow and green …

That night, or maybe it was the following weekend, all the TV news was talking about Lennon, his murder, and his legacy. My uncle and his girlfriend came over, and we overhead the announcers debating whether “Imagine” should become the new national anthem. They played it and my uncle stood up, hand over heart, for the duration of the song, then said, “Nah. Too long.”

Thirty-nine years later, on a whim, I checked out a biography on the Beatles. Over the summer I borrowed Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, and The White Album, and enjoyed my time driving around, to work, to pick up the girls, to run errands, immensely. I also started listening to solo Lennon, particularly “Mind Games”, a tune I hated in my band days but which has grown on me, along with “#9 Dream” and stuff off Double Fantasy.

Can’t rightly explain my fascination with the man. As I tried to state before in a review of that Beatles book I read earlier this year, I don’t find him a sympathetic character. Actually feel sorry for him. Tremendously talented, yet still very childlike. A true wounded artist in a cliché-defying way. Or maybe I find him sympathetic, but unlikeable. But there is something there admirable. Or is there? I dunno … Perhaps I am overthinking something I should simply enjoy.

I wanted to post a Lennon song here, whether solo or with the Beatles, something that would kinda encapsulate what I’m trying to say very poorly, and I find I can’t do it. So much good stuff, so much remarkable stuff I only came across this past summer. I thought about “She Said She Said,” “Tomorrow Never Knows” (the song which changed the course of music more than any other, save, possibly, “Hound Dog” or “Jailhouse Rock”), “Mind Games,” “Beautiful Boy.” Couldn’t decide, so I thought to go a bit more obscure.

In preparation for The White Album, the band recorded demo takes of two dozen songs at George Harrison’s house in Esher; these became known as the Esher Demos. The following tune, “Cry Baby Cry,” is one such demo that features a descending chromatic riff I note in a lot of Lennon songs, as well as the F chord he liked to include. Plus, how many songs have you heard that could – just possibly – be about ghosts in a castle that don’t know they’re dead?

Unwelcome Visitor

So I first found this thing on my shelf the morning of December 1, and immediately an odd feeling halfway between dread and annoyance spread through me. Every morning I see it perched in a different spot in my living room, glaring down at me, accusing me, judging me, scolding me.

I’ve had it. I just can’t seem to get rid of the damn thing. I’ve tried running the AC on with the windows open. I tried jacking the thermostat up to 90. I leave all the lights on in the house, even during the day while I’m at work. Can’t tell you how many plastic straws I’ve thrown her way, then thrown out those open windows along with the air conditioned air.

[Image taken from the absolute funniest site on the web, The Babylon Bee, in an article “New Greta on the Shelf Doll Will Track Your Climate Sins”.]

JFK

The JFK assassination … 56 years ago today.

I first became aware of it sometime around 5th grade or so. Must’ve been 1978, 79. It was one of those SRA kits we had to do back then. An SRA kit was a big box of about a hundred laminated cards the size of a regular sheet of paper. Each card contained a mini-article or a short story that sequentially got more difficult, harder and harder, as you progressed through them. You read through them, answered questions, and every now and then the teacher moved you up a level. Memory is vague, but I believe my first encounter with the events of November 22, 1963 was from one of those cards.

Then nothing for twelve or thirteen years. Oliver Stone’s JFK came out around Christmas 1991, and I saw it with pals and girlfriends in the theaters. It intrigued me, me who knew little of it as back then I was in the thick of my musician / band phase, and I rarely had time to crack a book (and if I did, it was of the horror King – Koontz variety).

Then again nothing for six more years till, one Memorial Day weekend, stood up by friends, I found myself alone doing laundry at my parents’ house. My stepfather had some books on the assassination, and on a whim I cracked one open. (Six Seconds in Dallas, by Josiah Thompson.) I was riveted, and read through the other two or three he had until the wee hours of the morning.

Then again nothing for nine years, till the bizarre fascination returned with a vengeance. From about 2006 to 2011 I bought a dozen or so books on the assassination and read or skimmed through them all. Not sure why, exactly, but I was taken in with the immensity of the alleged conspiracy. The little micro discrepancies as well as the big picture stuff. Like my childhood interest in Squatch and aliens and the paranormal, I was never a true believer, but I enjoyed the creepy campiness of what I was reading.

Then, in 2011, I read Gerald Posner’s book on the assassination and chased it with chunks of Vincent Bugliosi’s. Both men are firmly in the Lone Gunman camp, and both wrote with precision, power and passion and I was persuaded.

But I still appreciate a good conspiracy now and then.

Over the years I’ve posted a bunch of stuff on the topic here at the Hopper:

Overview, written on the forty-fifth anniversary

How I’d investigate the assassination, had I a couple million dollars cash laying around

Elm Street slow-down

How the cult of conspiracy has crept into our culture

Review of the exhaustive Norman Mailer book, Oswald’s Tale

How deep the rabbit hole

And yesterday’s entry into the labyrinth, White SuitConspiracy.

I think I’ll follow up this post with a list. Bloggers like lists! I like lists! I think I’ll list the best books on the JFK Assassination I’ve read, for those who may be interested in dipping a toe in the water or comparing notes …

Stay tuned.

White Suit Conspiracy

OK, I was slumming for a few days. I read a Jesse Ventura book on the JFK assassination. For those in the know, it was slightly closer to reality than the Jim Marrs book Oliver Stone used as background for JFK. But only slightly. Ventura’s book details 63 reasons to believe the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. Much was interesting, much was a rehash of the stuff I read during my JFK heyday a decade ago, and a lot was straight out of left field. It was a quick read, finished in about three hours.

It did mention a new take on small part of the assassination, one thing I had never read or heard before. I don’t believe it for a moment, but it struck me as intriguing.

Remember the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department? He’s escorted out, handcuffed to a detective, into the midst of what seems to be a mob of a hundred men. One lurches forward, a nightclub owner name of Jack Ruby, a man who has absolutely no business in the basement of the Dallas Police Department, and fires a bullet at close range right into Oswald’s abdomen. The alleged presidential assassin dies an hour and 45 minutes later at Parkland Hospital, the same hospital that attempted to save Kennedy.

According to Ventura (or a source in his book, can’t remember which), all the men are wearing dark suits and hats except for one. One man is in a white suit and hat, and he’s the man cuffed to Oswald. The theory states that Ruby was sent in to kill Oswald and would recognize his victim because he would be to the right of the man in the white suit and hat.

Creepy. But I don’t think it’s true.

Take a look at this photo taken the instant Ruby fires at Oswald:

Yes, the detective next to Oswald wears what appears to be a white suit and hat (some describe it as “tan”). But in this picture I can see two guys with white/tan hats, one next to Oswald and the other immediately behind him, and at the right-side edge maybe another man with a white/tan suit. So perhaps this micro-conspiracy is a little half-baked.

But boy does that detective in the white suit and hat stand out.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

© 2019

One major part of my life growing up in the 70s, between the ages of, say, eight and ten, was Godzilla. The original Japanese gorilla-whale. How I loved Godzilla as a kid! From the murky, mature, somewhat adult original Godzilla of 1951 to the acid-rock 1971 Godzilla vs the Smog Monster to all those silly “monster island” movies with baby Godzilla, aliens with funky sunglasses and mecha-monsters such as Mecha-Godzilla and Mecha-Kong. My all-time favorite, which I still watch every couple of years when it’s on regular TV, is 1963’s Godzilla vs. King Kong. Every Saturday morning there’d be a Godzilla flick on, and WABC channel 7 would play a Godzilla-themed week several times a year as their 4:30 movie.

So, a half-dozen years ago, the little boy in me was quite excited when it was announced that a “real” revisioning of Godzilla was coming out. Forget that 1997 Roland Emmerich mistake. This time, though made by an American studio, this new Godzilla would be phenomenal and iconic.

Well, I reviewed that piece of garbage here. My wounded inner child graded it a C-minus.

Then, two years ago, that damn little kid got all worked up again over the Godzilla sequel, where the King of the Monsters would prove he was, uh, king of the monsters by kicking the combined asses of Ghidora, Rodan, and Mothra.

I was more than willing to forgive them for 2014.

Then, last week, I watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

I hated it. Hated, hated, hated it.

But not in an emotional way. More in an existential way. Not as in, “why does this movie exist?” Yes, we all know, to cash in on the hopes and dreams of middle-aged men who grew up on Godzilla decades ago, and also on their CGI-indoctrinated children. But as I watched the flick I was blanketed with a Satrian sense of ennui. Boredom. Existential boredom, where I questioned my own existence. Why was I watching this film? What did I do wrong? Where did I go wrong? Was I being punished for something? If existence precedes essence, why the hell is this sentient entity stretched out in his favorite comfy chair munching on his daughters’ Halloween candy doing watching this wretched excuse for cinema?

I had to take my revenge.

Therefore, I did something I never did before. Before the movie was over, around the halfway point, in fact, I reached for pad and pen and began taking notes on everything that I despised about and disappointed me with this movie.

In no particular order –

– Fat Godzilla’s back. Man, is he huge. More whale than gorilla. BMI greater than the number of Tokyo elderly. It was literally embarrassing to watch him on the screen. All jokes aside, fat monsters are not intimidating. How frightened were you of Jabba the Hut?

– Blurry CGI. Every special effect is seen either in the rain, or through a dust cloud, or at night, or on a TV screen in the movie, or through a camera lens. I know it’s to hide the cheap shoddiness of the final product. It annoyed me early on and all the way through.

– Roller-coaster camera work / camera never stands still. This is perhaps the number one thing I despise about movies today. I’m dizzy after ten minutes of any movie made after the Bourne Identity movies. It’s all shaky cam, even a Godzilla movie. I watched LA Confidential while I was laid up with a sprained ankle this past weekend and the static, unmoving camera work amazed me. I could enjoy the dialogue, the plot developments, the action, on a placid screen without reaching for a barf bag.

– Color-washed film with drab colors. Ugh. Why must the entire movie be various shades and hues of blue? Or sepia? Is it to instill a sense of unreality in the viewer? Not this one. It just took me out of the film entirely.

– Un-scary monster roars. Another peeve of mine. Monster roars are not scary. This goes even for Jurassic Park. Every flick with a monster bigger than a man has to have it roar at 110 decibels. Not scary. Godzilla’s roar is iconic. It is not scary.

– Unrealistic diversity and Mary Sues. Know what a “Mary Sue” is? Google it if you don’t. As soon as I saw the bald 105-point hit woman – the bad guy’s right-hand-man – I began counting all the diversity checkmarks in this film.

– Technically proficient teen daughter cliché. This was a cliché way back in 1993 with Jurassic Park. Teen girls don’t do Information Technology. Sorry, feminists and beta comic book fans. I have two daughters, fifteen and eleven, and though they could work their iPhones in a sandstorm during a midnight apocalypse, they laugh at computer nerds. So do their friends.

– Monsters still second fiddle to humans. This was not as bad as the first movie, where Godzilla was only seen in the background on TV screens in the film, but it was still bad. No one cares about the scientist family. The audience of this movie wanted to see 250-foot tall monsters beating the hell out of each other.

– Obligatory self-sacrifice scene with operatic dirge. This was just schmaltzy. Plus, I am not quite sure the sacrificee had to be sacrificed. But by that point I was completely out of the movie, and probably missed some important detail. Or maybe not.

– Something like ninety percent of the movie filmed before a green screen (background effects digitally added). Nothing seemed real. Everything looked kinda fakey-fake. I wouldn’t be surprised even if the kitchen scenes were done in a green-screen studio.

I do not hate you, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. That would imply much more enthusiasm than I have for you. No, you simply underwhelmed me and wasted two hours and twelve minutes of my life.

Grade: D.

N.B. They’ve been teasing a Godzilla versus King Kong remake, and Kong actually had a two-second cameo (on a video screen, natch, in a military war room) in the movie. Please hold me to this vow not to see that sure atrocity when it arrives in three-to-five years!

First Snowfall

If you want to call it that. Here in NE New Jersey temps are in the high 30s and its rainy and the media is frothing up a panic over the possibility that, for maybe ten minutes or so, actual snow might fall from the sky, which we all know will melt upon landing.

Mathematician Discipline

Q: How did the mathematician scold his child?

A: “If I told you n times, I’ve told you n + 1 times …”

Joke courtesy of Patch, trying to cheer up her clumsy dad recovering from an ankle sprain.

Ankle Sprain

So I got up early yesterday feeling energetic. I stretched, did a brisk 2-set 10-exercise weight workout, showered, changed, gathered up the dry cleaning and the due library books, and headed out the front door. The little ones were in Texas, the wife was doing her own thing, and I was going to get some errands done. Recycling, Barnes and Noble, capped off with a trip to the Giant Farmer’s Fresh market for some incredibly delicious wings.

Then, I met the baby pumpkin. Rather, it met me.

Every Halloween season the wife likes to decorate our porch. We have a concrete porch of three steps. Each step is bookmarked with tiny baby pumpkins, each about the size of a baseball, and two big pumpkins guard either side of the front door. Well, yesterday was November 9, and we still had the pumpkins adorning the porch.

Also, apparently, we had some fierce windstorms the night before.

I rushed out the door with an armful of dress shirts and three cinder-block sized books. Closed the door behind me, took a first step down the porch and immediately my left ankle buckled inward. In the middle of the night the winds had blown a baby pumpkin into the middle of the stairs and I, vision blocked by too much stuff in my hands, failed to see it and stepped right on to it. It immediately went right and I went down to the left.

The pain was so intense and so quick I could do nothing but pitch forward down the remaining steps and wipe out on the lawn. Books and laundry went flying. I landed on my right shoulder and rolled forward.

My first thought was a broken ankle. I got on all fours and realized I couldn’t bear any weight on my left leg. I crawled up the stairs and burst into the living room, flopping on the ground. “Help me! I need help!” was all I could utter.

I laid on the floor for ten minutes while my heart slowed down. My wife put a pillow under my head, cleared off the single chair, pulled out the ottoman, and put some ice in a plastic bag.

For the next ten hours I sat in that chair, left leg raised, iced every two hours for twenty minutes. We watched Creed, L.A. Confidential, Daddy’s Home, Bundesliga soccer, The Wolverine. We did Door Dash for Chipotle for lunch, then some veggie lasagna from the oven for dinner. I found a four foot wooden dowel to use as a makeshift crutch to hobble from the chair to the bathroom every two hours.

What is wrong with the ankle? Well, I decided against a trip to the hospital. I can wiggle my left foot forward, rightward, and backward, but not to the left. The left side of the ankle is completely swollen. The pain is gone except when I put weight on it. The wife is going to the pharmacy later today to pick me up some crutches. If there is no improvement by Monday or Tuesday, I’ll go to the hospital, but I can’t see what they’ll do other than put me in a boot.

Now, however, I have some time to read and write guilt-free ...

Lost in the Woods

Charles Morse: You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame.

Stephen: What?

Charles Morse: Yeah, see, they die of shame. “What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?” And so they sit there and they ... die. Because they didn’t do the one thing that would save their lives.

Robert Green: And what is that, Charles?

Charles Morse: Thinking.

- from The Edge, 1997 survival flick starring Anthony Hopkins

A favorite of mine. Just re-watched the movie the other day and introduced it to Little One. And it got me all retrospective. Hopper hasn’t really done any serious thinking in a long time. Goofy thinking, half-assed thinking, non- and un-serious thinking, sure. But real, serious, life-altering thinking? No, not for a long time. Not since 2015. Definitely not since 2015.

Perhaps it’s time to spend some time in thought …

Infantile Mass

I thought I was doing a good thing this morning. I thought I was, really.

Wishing to get an early jump on the day’s activities and taking advantage of the extra hour we got due to the Daylight Savings thing, I showered upon waking, dressed, grabbed Patch (age eleven), and headed out the door to do a relatively-speaking early mass, the Nine A.M.

I forgot that the Nine A.M. mass at my Novus Ordo church is the “Family Mass.” Or, as Patch described it, the “Children’s Mass.” Or, as I’m going to describe it, the “Infantile Mass.”

First of all, as we sat down ten minutes before the start of mass, I knelt and tried to pray. But it was futile. A small group of young ’uns were loudly rehearsing a song off key. Adults – all rocking their finest pairs of jeans – shuffled in herding toddlers and babies, chatting animatedly to each other and in that overly-exaggerated way to the various youngsters they passed, all oblivious to the Presence of Christ in the tabernacle off to the side. I would have had better success praying in Grand Central Station. After a minute, I stopped.

The mass was said by the priest who had the lowest testosterone-to-estrogen ratio in the parish. A nice man, but not very manly. Everything was caterwauled by the half-dozen member choir, consisting of a sixth-grader my daughter knew from school, a fifth-grader, and four other younger children. Some elderly hippies on guitar and keyboards accompanied them.

The readings were done somewhat respectfully, though in that slower-than-molasses enunciate-every-word-monotonously Novus Ordo way I hate. Give me a televangelist any time over these zombified lectors. The gospel was on Jesus’s interaction with tax collector Zacheus, a perennial favorite the Church runs through every year. When my girls were younger a priest even brought out a Zacheus puppet for the homily.

Ah, that brings me to the homily. The old priest called up all the children from the pews – about two dozen – to sit on the stairs before the altar. Through a faulty mic that keeping cutting out he explained in excruciatingly simplistic detail the “moral” of the gospel reading, via a Q&A with the little ones. Basically, if you do bad, confess to God and make up for it in some way.

The Liturgy of the Eucharist veered back towards a normal, reverential mass, though I balked when I saw six Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion tromp up to the altar to help the priest distribute the Body and Blood to all ninety of us in the pews. I no longer serve as an EMHC as I cannot theologically justify the office of Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. I told Patch to slip into the line feeding to the priest as it came our time to go forward.

Now, to defend myself, as you no doubt consider me a cold-hearted reactionary bastard.

I am not against children learning hymns (but please not those God-awful 70s abominations) and learning some basic lessons in morality and what our Church teaches. No, I am not against this at all. In fact, there should be a special place explicitly devoted to these goals. In fact, there is: Sunday School.

Mass is Mass. Mass is to honor the sacrifice Christ made for us on the Cross. Christ should be the center of the mass. After 1970, with the institution of the Novus Ordo mass, we became the center of the mass. In the “Family Mass,” the children became the center of the mass.

The priest no longer faces Christ on the Cross; he faces us. We no longer kneel and take the Eucharist on the tongue; we stand and take it via our unconsecrated hands. We no longer dress like we are in the presence of the Creator of the Universe; we dress like we’re going to watch a T-Ball game.

I observed the distracted faces of the parents as the mass went on. No one was focused on the readings or the prayers from the priest. Everyone was letting their precious ones climb all over the pews, noisily rip open bags of snacks, burble out loud and smack each other. There was the occasional “hush!” but no discipline at all. Only one grandma left the pews with her granddaughter, and that was to proudly escort her down the center aisle to use the bathroom.

I saw a lack of catechesis in those distracted faces. No one knew why he or she was there. Since 1970 there has been a dearth of catechesis to the “faithful.” Certainly very, very little from the pulpit. Ninety-nine percent of the sermons I hear are on some variation of “being nice.” I have never heard a sermon on the Church’s teaching on abortion, homosexuality, or any non-liberal cause (I did hear one on why the death penalty should be abolished).

It has been written that America worships a religion called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Go ahead, google it. What it means, basically, is that we want a religion that only demands we feel good about ourselves by being nice. The “deism” part is a non-personal God who demands nothing too strenuous of us.

We also are in full communion with Mammon. Mammon, meaning wealth or the pursuit of it. For who would dress in their best pair of jeans to go on a job interview? How many of us are too tired from a week of work to attend Mass on a precious day off? How many of us spend more annually at amazon.com than contribute to the Church or a charity?

Additionally, we commune with the god Athletica. Who would willingly allow our children to miss a practice or miss one of their games? Who would willingly allow our children to be late to a practice or game? Or allow distractions? How come I never see the coaches of both teams allow younger siblings on the field to play with them in a “Family Game”?

What is important to us? Work? Sports? Or worship of the True God?

Now, I admit, though I believe the truth of Catholicism, I disavow the current regime in the Vatican. I disavow the implementation of Vatican II. I disavow the “weaponized ambiguity” of the documents of Vatican II that allows such sillinesses as Clown Masses, Pachamamas, and Family Masses. And so, apparently, whether consciously or not, so do millions of others. Google any statistics on the numbers of Catholics, Catholic marriages, Priests, and Religious Orders, and you’ll see the downward trend. Since 1970 and the “reforms” after Vatican II, the Church has been in freefall.

This “Family Mass” is but one of many, many, many symptoms, and as the years go by and the numbers of faithful decline, nothing ever changes.