The Kinks - Better Things (1981)

Here's wishing you the bluest sky,
And hoping something better comes tomorrow.
Hoping all the verses rhyme,
And the very best of choruses to
Follow all the doubt and sadness.
I know that better things are on the way.

Here's hoping all the days ahead
Won't be as bitter as the ones behind you.
Be an optimist instead,
And somehow happiness will find you.
Forget what happened yesterday,
I know that better things are on the way.

It's really good to see you rocking out
And having fun,
Living like you just begun.
Accept your life and what it brings.
I hope tomorrow you'll find better things.
I know tomorrow you'll find better things.

Here's wishing you the bluest sky,
And hoping something better comes tomorrow.
Hoping all the verses rhyme,
And the very best of choruses to
Follow all the doubt and sadness.
I know that better things are on the way.

I know you've got a lot of good things happening up ahead.
The past is gone it's all been said.
So here's to what the future brings,
I know tomorrow you'll find better things.
I know tomorrow you'll find better things.

Christmas 2020

I can't remember the last time I decorated for Christmas! 

Everyone is calling the year 2020 a "dumpster fire" of a year... But for me, 2020 was actually pretty good. 

After complaining about a job for years, I quit in late 2019 and then got hired in Spring 2020 via phone (during the initial stages of Wuhan) for a new job that pays more than I've ever made, and that I like---and that does tele-working pretty well. I got VERY lucky, and I am VERY grateful.

Being at home constantly can be stifling---but it's also sometimes nice to just wake up and roll off the couch to the computer without having to shower and put on makeup and commute and deal with people all day! I haven't had a sick day in 8 months! :)

Also: After 3 years of not talking to my mother, and over 10 years of not talking to my father, 2020 brought a rapprochement with both. Which makes my soul feel happier. As I wrote my mom earlier in an e-mail: "It's not like I'm 35 and you're 60, and we have decades left to not speak."

So today, after years of not decorating for Christmas, I finally dragged down my box labeled "Christmas" and put up a few things. And sent out my first Christmas cards in years: to Mom and Dad.

OJ Simpson "If I Did It" Interview, 2006

I just recently re-watched the excellent 2016 ESPN doc "OJ: Made in America." Which led me to order a cheap used copy of the 2007 book "If I Did It," allegedly the confession of Simpson---originally intended as a money-making project for him but, through the courts, the rights to the book were ultimately turned over to the family of murder victim Ron Goldman.

 

Simpson was interviewed for the book in 2006 by Judith Regan. The interview was initially scheduled to air on Fox in that year but was shelved after widespread protest. In 2018, the below interview was finally aired for the first time.

After reading "If I Did It" and watching the interview, I don't think of Simpson as "The Devil." I think his crime was rather typical---yes, typical. The history of the world is full of angry, jealous lovers killing each other in the heat of passion. And "heat of passion" is the key. I just went and looked up California law: A murder committed in the heat of passion can either be 2nd-Degree Murder (15 years to life) or Voluntary Manslaughter (3, 6, or 11 years). The prosecution, in their quest for publicity, insisted on making this a 1st-Degree Murder case---which I don't think it was.

As Simpson admits ("hypothetically" or not) in this interview, he went over to Nicole's house to either peek in her window (as he'd done before) or actively confront her about some perceived sexual/drug-related "misdeed." His daughter's recital only hours earlier, and his scheduled flight an hour later to Chicago, make it clear, to me at least, that Simpson wasn't thinking about intentionally murdering Nicole when he went over there. The fact that something "set him off" (Goldman's appearance, or did Nicole have a knife at the door?) isn't an excuse for murder, but I think it's an excuse for not being "the Epitome of Evil." Rather, this is a real-life case of a one-time hero brought down by his emotional weakness for a woman---the centuries-old tragic stuff of both literature and myth. Told here in a banal fashion, but tragic, nonetheless.

Trying to Make Sense of Apartment Weirdos

Over the past 6 or 8 months, there's been a kid problem at my apartment complex. 

First, there were the two boys who would skateboard, ride bikes, race cars, etc., on the sidewalk in front of my apartment for hours on end most evenings. I complained to management about them, and, miraculously, the racing outside my window stopped.

Then, there was the autistic girl who jumped my backyard fence and actually entered my apartment on two occasions. I complained to management about her, and she hasn't "visited" in a couple of months.

In the past two weeks or so, there's been a completely different set of kids running amok. One little girl with a couple of varying companions who run SHRIEKING throughout the apartment complex between the hours of 5pm and 7pm. Accompanied by a dad walking his dog AND, apparently, his kids. Because I can hear him making his way around the complex yelling after both the dog and the kids. The kids shriek both directly outside my door and all around the complex. A couple of nights ago, after multiple screams, I walked out to find where the hell the noise was coming from: The man and his dog were sitting outside of the pool, and the kids were running around the pool screaming. I didn't say anything, just made eye contact with the guy and went back into my apartment. Though on two occasions, I've heard the screaming right outside my door and stepped out of my apartment and confronted the kids directly: "You guys have got to stop screaming." (No, no yelling, as I yelled at the autistic brat who had entered my apartment.) Each time, the kids were actually polite and said "Sorry" and then went away.

The above was all a preface. The little screaming girl mentioned above is apparently with the guy in the below story:

Recently, I've been ordering a lot of both personal and Christmas stuff online, which is sometimes delivered to my mailbox, sometimes dropped off at my apartment doorstep. Because I know I have a lot of stuff incoming, I ALWAYS open my front door both in the morning when I wake up and late at night to check to see if I have any packages sitting on my doorstep.

This Saturday morning (12/12), I woke up about 9am, opened the front door to check for packages (none), made breakfast, watched TV, etc. Then fell back asleep on my couch in the early afternoon. Around 3pm, I got up and started to do chores around the house. When I opened my door to take the trash out, I saw a dented package sitting there---it had NOT been there earlier in the morning. As I was standing there looking at the package, a man walked up the sidewalk toward me. 55-ish, white, gray hair, non-shaven, wearing pajama pants and house-shoes and a knit cap. He said to me: "Yeah, last night about 1am, I saw someone trying to steal your package. I chased him off and called the police. They showed up and couldn't find the guy. I would've knocked on your door, but I didn't see any lights on and didn't want to bother you."

Here's the thing: Friday night around 1am, I was fully awake, lying on my couch watching TV. I saw someone passing in front of my window, back and forth, about 6 times. No police officers were there.

And when I got up Saturday morning around 9am and checked outside my front door, there was no package there. Yet at 3pm, this guy walks up and says he saw the package at 1am the night before.

I didn't argue with him, just said "Thanks." Then a few hours later, around 6pm, there's a knock on my door. It's the same pajama-clad guy, this time accompanied by the girl who's been screaming all week. He hands me a different package: "Looks like they delivered this to the wrong door." It was some shoes for me, all right. Really? They delivered them to this guy's apartment?

It's weird and creepy. He obviously lied about the first package. But was the alleged mis-delivery of the second package a coincidence, or did he pick that up from my doorstep and then lie about that, as well? (It made it a little less creepy that he had a child with him when he came to my door---yet it was the obnoxious shrieking child from earlier...)

I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure, based on some of my neighbors, that the apartment complex I'm living in has both "regular rent" apartments and then Section 8 apartments for the decrepit and mentally ill. I have a nice apartment amid some weirdo lowlifes. When I was 20 to 30 (and for patches afterward), I was poor and expected to live around creeps. Post-50, I'm fucking sick of them.

Reading Thomas Hardy

Like many office workers, I've been working from home since last March. And sometimes there's down-time during the official work day. When you're at a real office, you can't pick up a book and start reading (looks bad, so people just surf the Internet---when you're staring at the computer screen, no one can tell if you're working or not). In my at-home case, I got bored with Internet surfing and started going through my bookshelves when I had down-time, trying to read some classics that I normally would not have been immediately compelled to read. (Last time this type of spare time happened, when I was temping in 2010, I got through most of the bios of Tennessee Williams, though not that many of the actual plays.)

I first chose Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories---read a couple, got antsy and quit. Then I chose Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles---a Norton edition left over from college---and immediately got hooked on Hardy. Since last spring, I've read Tess, Jude the Obscure, Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, and nearly every major bio (except for the 1925 one). And I also got caught up in buying both sets and individual items on eBay. I now have a semi-complete set of the 1905 Harpers (New York) edition of Hardy, and the complete 1975 Macmillan (London) "New Wessex" set. Plus lots of (to me) interesting ephemera like Talks with Thomas Hardy, and various pamphlets from both Hardy contemporaries and Hardy scholars meeting up in the 1960s, etc. 

The complete 1975 "New Wessex" set is my current reading set. I've just started at the very beginning with Hardy's first published novel (1871), Desperate Remedies, and the goal is to work my way through every novel in order. (The "New Wessex" set doesn't include the poems or the short stories. I now own the Complete Poems and several original poetry volumes, plus only one short story collection, and will aim for those later, as I continue to collect them.)

Here are photos of my "Hardy Shelf":

The Animals: It's My Life (1965)

"I'm gonna ride the serpent..."

The Animals: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (1965)

The Animals: We Gotta Get Out of This Place (1965)

The Animals: Boom Boom (1964)

I forgot that I knew how to dance! I can still fuckin' dance! :)

'Bye-bye 1985 Panasonic microwave!

My mother first bought this trusty Panasonic microwave on 12/18/85 (see receipt). I can't remember the year she passed it along to me. But I have been using it up until... TODAY! When I finally bought myself a bright-n-shiny new red no-name model, just because it matches my kitchen. Goodbye, Family Heirloom! Will your generic replacement last 35 years? Ha! I'll give it 5! :)

I'll let ya know when I get my new phone (and couch and desk chair)! :)

Ozymandias (by both Shelley and Smith, 1818)

 Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

Horace Smith’s “Ozymandias”

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------

The American version of the above sentiment was expressed cinematically in the last shot of "The Planet of the Apes" (1968).

 

Drummer Hodge (Thomas Hardy, 1899)

 

[Britain's Boer War in South Africa, 1899-1902] 

 

I

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
     Uncoffined—just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
     That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
     Each night above his mound.
 

II

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—
     Fresh from his Wessex home—
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
     The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
     Strange stars amid the gloam.
 

III

Yet portion of that unknown plain
     Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
     Grow up a Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
     His stars eternally.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner (Randall Jarrell, 1945)

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Junior Brown: Too Many Nights in a Roadhouse

Junior Brown: Broke Down South Of Dallas

George Jones: You Couldn't Get The Picture (1991)

Only George can sing a meaningful song about Post-It Notes.

Thomas Hardy: The Voice (1912)

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

Untitled for Ginny (July 22, 1985)

Oh! to have you

on my doorstep

in the cloud

and through my hair

what fun

with you here!

the roaches for laughing

orange and green

the height of art decor

Come! and make me Picasso

these walls I tame

and will paint for no one else.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I wrote the above at age 19, when I was miserable in my first college apartment. Today, at age 55, I still miss Ginny. At the time, I thought I would eventually meet someone who would fill her space, someone to make things better, no matter how terrible. As it turned out, no other person ever came along. But at least, thankfully, scar tissue finally did fill said "space." There's no longer a gaping hole, at least. THAT is what I'm now thankful for.

Eric Clapton - Hello Old Friend (1976)

As I am strolling down the garden park,
I saw a flower glowing in the dark.
It looked so pretty and it was unique;
I had to bend down just to have a peek.

[Chorus:]
Hello old friend,
It's really good to see you once again.
Hello old friend,
It's really good to see you once again.

I saw you walking underneath the stars;
I couldn't stop 'cause I was in a car.
I'm sure the distance wouldn't be too far
If I got out and walked to where you are.

[Chorus]

An old man passed me on the street today;
I thought I knew him but I couldn't say.
I stopped to think if I could place his frame.
When he tipped his hat I knew his name.

Goodbye, Old Friends

This week I finally ordered a new phone and a new microwave oven.

My current old phone is a tiny Nokia that I got for free when I signed up for cell service for the first time in early 2007 right before moving to New York City. As of 2020, it still works fine. But people have long been mocking me for not having a Smart Phone. And not having one is starting to affect me at work. (Plus, what are these wondrous "Apps" of which people speak??)

My current old microwave is a Panasonic hand-me-down from my mother. She bought it in 1985 (passing on the instruction booklet with attached receipt showing the date purchased). As of 2020, it still works fine (at 35 years old). But I'm starting to ask myself if I'm being poisoned.