gums ache
teeth want out
bones seethe,
agitate,
fight their neighbor—
"just get me out!"—
eyes pulse painfully,
echoing sinuses behind them
"how can this freakin' test
say negative!"
Oh.
Just a bad cold:
grab the Kleenex, drink
fluids, cough, hack,
sneeze—do it
again.
Bouncin' back,
yessiree! And...
...what just blindsided me?
Can barely move. And
testing says...
[15 minutes, please]
positive?
Oh...,
oh.
oh.
Fall, y’all
Like so many things in the American South, the arrival of autumn takes its own sweet time. I should say “fall” also because at two syllables, both of which have a “u” in them, “it “autumn” just seems a bit pretentious here. Our first inkling summer is nearing its end (besides a simple look at the calendar) occurs when “someone turns the humidity off” as a former boss of mine put it. (He was from Michigan.) Humidity levels build quickly in early June, and by mid-month your A/C chokes on the amount of water it’s removing from your indoor atmosphere. Around Labor Day a similarly rapid decline in humidity takes place. It seems even quicker than the ramp up because the lack of humidity means heat no longer lingers around all night, ready to leap into action at dawn. Instead of staying in the high 60’s and low 70’s suddenly one’s body registers temps that are downright cool at dawn. What follows seems like a coda to the summer, a time of 72-80 degree weather, mostly sunny weather, and dawn temperatures in the low 50’s.
For me fall can be said to be truly here when leaves start to turn color. Except for stressed trees and shrubs, this usually occurs around the second to third weekend in October. Even then it’s a slow, drawn out affair. This cluster of leaves seemed representative to me. We’re in the last week of October, and the trees reluctantly turn various colors dependent on species.
We arrived home Monday after a quick dash north for a wedding, when I realized, “Hey the dogwood is really turning color.” One of the first to herald spring with its blossoms, and one of the first to leaf out, it’s also one of the first to say, “Nope, gettin’ a mite too cold. Goodbye.”
And finally this photo to illustrate the sadness of invasive species. The Virginia creeper is native to central and eastern North America. It knows that it’s fall here. The English ivy isn’t native to North America at all. The latter will hang around nearly all winter, and in milder winters I believe I haven’t seen it turn colors at all. It chokes out most undergrowth if allowed, and it adds weight to trees if allowed to proliferate. It creates an eco-desert.
Playlist, travel version
Over the past weekend we attended a wedding in the nexus region for our family: greater Philadelphia. Google maps failed us at least once on our northerly journey, when I disregarded a patently stupid suggestion which turned out to be… not so stupid. Regardless. There are times when silence is the best soundtrack. The rest of the time was spent thusly (in no particular order):
- Greetings from Asbury Park by Bruce Springsteen
- Steve Goodman by Steve Goodman (highlight: “Riding On The City Of New Orleans” which he composed and sang for Arlo Guthrie)
- Sunshine on Leith, The Proclaimers
- Get On Board by Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder (a bit too rootsy for the moment)
- The Color of Love by Ronnie Earle and The Broadcasters
- Live from the Ryman, Vol. 2, by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
- Promise by Sade
- Orleans by Orleans
- Oh Brother by Dawes (Just as good the second time, and my wife loved it)
- Ode To The Village by Bearcat (but not at all like the first album and we abandoned it)
- Legends Live In Concert by Ry Cooder (but again, too hillbilly for the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Ry Cooder has so many different styles across his career. He produced the classic album Buena Vista Social Club of old Cuban musicians, and I have an album of his where he collaborated with Indian musician V.M. Bhatt on A Meeting By the River)
- Blessings and Miracles by Santana
- Try It…You Might Like It: GA-20 Does Hound Dog Taylor by GA-20
Good stuff, Maynard.
How I see the world, lesson #3
As a geometric playground hiding inside randomness.
Although I thought about publishing it like this:
How I see the world, Lesson #2
As a moody, brooding entity. (“I’m gonna have to clean out these pesky humans some day.”)
How I see the world, lesson #1
As a more vibrant place than it would seem to be at times. (Unfortunately the opposite can also be true: seeing gray when the world technicolors.)
I encounter birds of Hawaii
I’m conflicted. I enjoy casual birding, and when I visit Hawai’i and can suddenly see many new birds, I should be thrilled. I did thrill to bright, different birds. Then I learned that virtually every bird I saw had been introduced to the islands in the past 150 years or so. It seemed none of the common ones (the birds hopping around parks and following the tourists around) could claim they were indigenous to any island in Hawaii. Still…they are quite different to commonly spotted birds where I live.
The Common Myna appeared everywhere on Hawaii and Maui. It’s native to Asia, but has spread so much it qualifies as “one of the world’s most invasive species,” according to the IUCN Species Survival Commission which listed it on its 100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Species (one of only three birds on it). When we first landed on the Big Island, and I heard this incessant chattering, I thought Starlings had made it to Hawai’i. It’s a noisy bird, and it looks a little bit like a Starling until you get close enough to see the yellow eye patch, the more brown body, and that it moves rapidly on the ground when it wants to.
The Saffron Finch comes from South America. It’s been on the Big Island (Hawaii) only since 1960. We only saw these in the Lili’uokalani Gardens and around our hotel, both of which are on a very small peninsula on the east edge of Hilo, Mokuako.
There are three common cardinals in Hawai’i, and none of them are native. One of them isn’t even a cardinal! We saw two: I photographed only the Yellow-billed but we also saw the Red-crested. They both originate in Brazil, but the former has a wider range into Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, and northern Argentina. Thankfully we didn’t see any Northern Cardinals. I see plenty of those at home, and it would have been very depressing. Because I have no photos of the Red-crested, I’m including one from Wikimedia Commons.
Photo By lwolfartist – https://www.flickr.com/photos/151817352@N04/53873018807/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150656259
My biggest consternation regarding birds wasn’t the Northern Cardinal. It was the onslaught of House Sparrows which assail one in every open restaurant, marketplace, park, and you name it. The fearless critters even hopped into our room in Hilo on several occasions….
Though we saw plenty of spotted and zebra doves (both introduced from SE Asia), I failed to take a good photo of one. It remained until we traveled to Maui before I saw a bird endemic to the Hawaiian Islands…
Sifting my photos for birds proved beneficial when I tripped over one, and only one, photo of a different group of birds. The Chestnut Munia isn’t native to Hawai’i (of course), but it’s a pretty cool-looking bird nonetheless. In the photo below, the bird on the left is a classic, I’m-sure-it’s-a-Munia example. Moving left to right, birds #2 and #4 appear to be Munias but they’re not supposed to have breasts like that. (Males and females are supposed to look about the same.) Photos of immature birds don’t look like those two. Bird #3? I’ve no idea what that is, but I find it difficult to believe it would just hang out in this group without being one of them.
And in Maui I finally got a photo of one of these long-legged things which had bedeviled me on the Big Island. (Blurry photos? Sure, I’ve got ’em.) I don’t try to identify long-legged birds like this because they are so diverse and so similar. I don’t even know if this one is the same species as the ones which ran around on the rocky coasts of Hilo Bay.
I would be remiss not to include a photo like the one below. Chickens. Yes, chickens. They’re not exactly everywhere but they’re darn common running around many areas where you wouldn’t expect to see them. They apparently are “wild” in the sense they don’t go to a coop and get fed by humans. They hang around the cities and towns, though, so…what is “wild” anyway?
Playlist 241012 & 241013
- Moondial by Pat Metheny
- I Trust You To Kill Me by Rocco DeLuca and The Burden
- Carney by Leon Russell
- “Für Elise” by Jon Batiste (apparently from an upcoming album?)
- “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by Lucinda Williams (almost surely from a forthcoming album entitled Lucinda Williams Sings the Songs of The Beatles from Abbey Road)
- Oh Brother by Dawes
- You Should Be So Lucky by Benmont Tench
- Mudcrutch by Mudcrutch
One of the great things about music streaming services (mine is Tidal), at least for old folks, rests on the opportunities for music discovery. I appreciate that Tidal doesn’t just pop the usual “because-you-listened-to…” stuff, but also just flat suggests stuff from across many genres. (Although it might be because I listen so eclectically. Hadn’t thought of that.) Today’s playlist reflects that. Saturday I listened to Moondial because it showed up on a recommended albums list. Today, a couple tracks on the 5-track “Recommended new tracks” list caught my eye: the Jon Batiste and Lucinda Williams tracks listed above.
The Dawes album appeared on a different list, “Suggested new albums for you”. I cannot believe I’ve gone 15 years without hearing of this group, since they fit comfortably into one of my favorite musical areas where intelligent lyrics and innovative musical lines collide with folk, rock, and jazz. This newest of albums from the group is like Paul Simon meets Jackson Browne meets the Eagles with just a dash of musical thoughts of Iggy Pop. (Yeah, I heard a line in there that I swear is a near rip-off of one from Brick By Brick.) Maybe they listened just a little to They Might Be Giants? Barenaked Ladies? This latest album is the only one I’ve listened to but I’m cueing up more in my near future.
While reading about Dawes on Wikipedia, I ran across the name Benmont Tench and finally separated him mentally from Bobby Tench, a vocalist on a couple of old Jeff Beck Group albums, Rough and Ready and Jeff Beck Group. The band Simon Dawes broke up and out of it came the new group Dawes. They played a bunch of jam sessions which included one with Tench, who’s a pianist/organist and vocalist. Because Tench joined Tom Petty in the group Mudcrutch which later evolved into Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, this led in turn to learning about Mudcrutch which reformed in 2009 (the same year that Dawes formed–huh). Which completes the musical journey that underlies the playlist above.
And just like that, Phillies Phans
It never really began. One victory sandwiched by defeats and garnished with the end to their season? No, the machine ran down and died. Just like that.
I confess to you, my brothers and sisters in Philadelphia baseball, that I greatly sinned. After the Mets rattled off six unanswered runs in Game 3, I quit drinking Yuengling, the talismatic beer whose magic didn’t fail so much as it failed to show up. I lost faith. Our boys lost. Yesterday, with a sinking feeling that foretold the eventual outcome of Game 4, I didn’t watch the game, and I didn’t drink the final Yuengling in the fridge. There it is, Philly. You can blame me–although there are more than one million folks in SE Pennsylvania who certainly felt more pessimistic than I.
Now I face my most depressing season without the solace of fan-fueled postseason baseball. I detest cold weather, and autumn’s ever-cooling presence reminds me of it, like one of those guests who comes to the party late, immediately begins to suck the joy from the festive partygoers, drives away the liveliest guests first, and eventually leaves you alone in your cold, wintery room. Autumn’s first cold mornings might look pretty, but they signal the beginning of the end for summer’s warmth. I need the hopes of postseason baseball. When baseball’s postseason rolls around, fans fall into three groups: those whose teams weren’t expected to make it and didn’t; those whose teams were expected to make it and didn’t; and those who have varying degrees of hope that this time we’ll go all the way. When teams drop out of the postseason, as the Phillies just did, their fans join the middle group, the Group of Dashed Hopes. At times like this we say, “I would rather they were an up-and-coming team that wasn’t expected to make the postseason than to think they were going all the way only to watch them crash and burn.”
Of course, this isn’t true. Phillies fans suffered through two lengthy periods where year after year it seemed no one in charge had a plan for making the team better. I’m talking about the years 1994-2004 after 1993’s appearance in the World Series (the Joe Carter game!), and the period from 2012-2019 following the five-year run of 2007-2011. We know that having no hope tastes worse than this, a bland meal which becomes ever more unpleasant as the season unfolds. (Ask a White Sox fan.) But to savor a .586 season and the first division title in a dozen years, only to be served this…this…what can we call a 1-3 performance in their first round? Something steaming for sure. And to the Mets! There are many insufferable fans in baseball, but the ones who flood your ballpark from barely more than 100 miles away? Who fill your ballpark with their “Let’s go, Mets!” chants? Who have thrown beverages and even batteries at players (1999, John Rocker, Atlanta Braves) and yet somehow dodged the rep while it sticks to Phillies fans like an undeserved judgment? No, please, not to the Mets.
All because I failed to drink a Yuengling? Surely there are greater sins, oh gods of baseball. Give me back my joy. Make this autumnal chill release its grip on my baseball heart. Send me a reason to hope again.
Postseason!
The Phillies opened the postseason with a very disappointing game against the Mets Saturday. Zack Wheeler pitched masterfully, but the Mets ran his pitch count up, then feasted on our supposedly good relievers. Final score, 6-2. At least we were well lubricated. May the Phillies Gods forgive her for not putting a Philly beer into that mug on the left. Mine is on the right: a perfectly acceptable Yuengling Traditional Lager aka The Beer of the Phillies. Sunday’s game was much better–a classic according to some–and the tide turned right when I abandoned my esoteric brews from the Eastern seaboard and grabbed a Yuengling. Coincidence? No such thing in baseball. It’s Yuengling for the remainder of the postseason! (BTW, you’re welcome, Bryce Harper.)
all the voices in my head 