People become semi-strangers over
time, distance, lack of shared
experience. Reacquaintance
brings pain, ripping some kind of
bandage from maintained relationship.
I can't pull this string-can telephone
any tighter due to Earth's curvature,
certainly not through Einstein's
space-time fabric bending thingy.
I want old things to pop from
just-opened cans, fresh, familiar,
just as tasty as before. Is that
too much for me to ask?
55/100
This poem would have been way cooler posted on August 18th when it meant more. I drafted it near midnight, and couldn’t bring myself to polish it, find a photo, etc, until today.
Penultimate:
bridesmaid
celebrated faintly.
Always announcing
never announced.
John the Baptist to
Jesus the Messiah.
Loved by writers
For its erudition.
Why this focus on
opening act before
The Headliner? Who
decided this needed
a word? Why mark
the race's last mile?
Today we trot you out
to perform yet again
your ultimate function:
forty-ninth of fifty,
thus almost halfway.
Thank you, you're done.
49/100
I follow few blogs (he said, cringing at the fact about 150 follow his). One that I follow, belatedly, catching up to its posts when I can, is from Ben East, until recently a member of our country’s foreign service. I’m not sure what though it might have been U. S. Aid. It’s not important. What is important is that he wrote a book about some super-notable people who started in the Peace Corps and went on to distinguished careers in foreign service.
Around the time Ben published his book, he wrote this post which really hits home to the writers among us. I urge you to read it if you consider yourself a writer, even if you’ve written little.
I’ll be shouting out a couple of other blogs in the near future. Ciao for now.
In the late 1960’s I listened to Barbra Streisand on a transistor radio the size of a cheap paperback. She sang “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” I never understood that, emotionally at least. Intellectually I valued it and wanted to be one of those persons. I still do….but….
I don’t like people. There, it’s out. Liking people is inherent to my religious faith. We are supposed to like all people as caricatures of God, as images of God, or at the very least, as created beings who have as much claim to the Kingdom as anyone else. But…I do not gravitate toward people as an instinctive or cultured trait. I’ve known people who show themselves to be introverts, but they put on a social face, forcing themselves to reach out, building a practice that becomes instinctual. I’m not one of those, at least not in most milieus.
It’s more nuanced than it sounds. I like individual examples of “people” just not People in general and certainly not together in a group. Nothing tops my list of activities to be avoided like a cocktail party or “open house”. A group of people in a social situation where I know only one or maybe two of them makes me nervous, shuts me down, inspires my feet to start edging toward the exit, my lips mumbling an excuse to the host. Or that nervousness gets channeled into a babbling energy, creating The Entertainer—usually to my later embarrassment and dismay. After decades of experience with these situations—which mercifully I’ve kept to a limited number of occasions—I’ve learned some coping techniques. Mostly I avoid them unless I know a goodly handful of the people and like those who will be there. When I misjudge I desperately cast about for someone I know at least casually and bother them for as long as I can.
I’ve learned how to maintain a veneer of sociability. I’m verbally talented after all. Talking to an individual about something they like makes you likeable. I’ve a wide range of interests and I’m well-read. I can usually relate to folks. But I’m uncomfortable.
Perhaps this explains my delight in this blog, and in others’. We skip the social chit-chat on these things (usually). We do sometimes utter the banal (“I’m so happy for you” or “Getting that disease is so horrible!”), but mostly we utter honest statements because the beauty and scourge of the Internet lies in its anonymity for those who post. It’s why I’ve chosen to blog under my actual name. That seems contradictory, but it’s not. Most of you know my name, but you don’t actually know me except through these writings—the same way I know you only through what you post. Is it bold or stupid to put my own name? I’d prefer to think “honest” in that I will utter my opinions and not hide behind total anonymity. But y’all know me from a load of coal: except for two of you, and that has inhibited some of the things I would post, which illustrates the difference I’m talking about, this being known but anonymous simultaneously.
Where all of this blather leads turns out to be unexpected. I do need people, but just not the ones who mouth platitudes, clichés, and banal statements about the weather. Symbolic language has its place, but in a social setting it makes for a symbolic encounter signifying nothing. Sure, I can do it, but the sheer uselessness of it bothers me considerably. This need for people has been reinforced (again) by spending a week alone while my wife visits the NC coast with her friend. I’m reminded of living in my head like I did so many years. I believe we all need people to listen to us. That there are so many diaries and journals of people famous and otherwise reveals a deep need for others to understand what they’re going through. I guess I am a “people who need people” but only deep down and selfishly.
Needing and caring for people remains a distinct view of my religious faith. Listen to people with care. They need that. Yes. But so do I. The adroit, talented person knows when to listen and when to ask for a listener. I, however, refer you to the beginnings of this post. I do not possess those talents. I seek for listeners, but not to be the listener. Reminded again and again of my failure in the social arena, I withdraw. This is my learning path, perhaps one of several.
Thanks for listening.
I recently purchased a collection of short stories by the author of one of the blogs I’ve followed the longest, Bridgette Tales. That’s it up there, the dark blue one. I noted with satisfaction it has excellent company!
Nine days since last post, and that one (actually two) appeared from thin air, a gift of a slight lull between printing out our Christmas newsletter and preparing all of the cards for them. I’m still old-fashioned in that way. I believe a pretty card with an appropriate printed message and augmented with a personal one maintains ties of friendship and family better than an email (or worse, a social media post). It shows a commitment to spending time for your recipient, to let them know you still think of them (even if it’s only once per year and due to their inclusion on the Christmas card address list).
One last ‘task’ today: decorate the tree. We had planned to do so Monday and Tuesday, but we were waiting for a new tree-topper which only arrived yesterday evening. We’ll spend a leisurely afternoon doing this, and we’ll end with some delightful liquid Christmas cheer from one of the many special beers I purchased yesterday. From here on it’s preparing to sing for the Midnight Mass in the late evening of Christmas Eve, the drowsy-but-satisfied feeling of Christmas Day, the indulgent-but-hopefully-easy Christmas dinner, and the beginning of Christmastide, otherwise known as the Twelve Days of Christmas. While I may again post daily during this period, I suggest you revisit last year’s which starts here and marches through the twelve days with absolutely no seriousness except for the unintended kind. See ya soon!
I’ve reached the Thanksgiving through who-knows-when-it-all-will-get-done time of the year. My current project, the annual Christmas newsletter, occupies virtually all of my writing bandwidth because it’s a true news letter. This old journalist packages it as a four-page newspaper complete with individual stories, headlines, a masthead, photos, captions, all of it written in the third person. It takes 40 to 80 hours depending how much I agonize over it. (I’m lying: it takes at least 80 hours.)
Meanwhile, one of our cats decided to get his paws on some Vonnegut, but apparently became disgusted it wasn’t Cat’s Cradle.
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.
all the voices in my head 