(Vic is shown here wearing the shirt that commemorates his impending 65th year of continuous, successful, sustained respiration on the planet Earth. It reads even more ominous than it sounds. It is a gift from a Black Labrador Retriever, discerning literary critic and Patriot).
We jump around a little like Ricochet Rabbit here at The Daily, and I apologize. It has got to be disorienting for those who like things linear and neat.
This is more like life itself, a torrent of a river chasing down a canyon, swirling wildly, sometimes circling back on itself, sometimes shooting upward in wild spray.
Sometimes the staff wants concert reviews, sometimes the place smells exotic from the recipes we are are trying out- expect a review and test drive with some White Trash Cooking presently, a recommendation from our loyal readership in the green Shenandoah Valley.
Sometimes we do historical events of interest- or non-interest for our more blasé readers. We publish books in bite-sized chunks, easily digestible for those afflicted with my chronic Attention Deficit Disorder, which can be a real detriment to orderly production schedules. But so be it. You can either write about life as it is, or you can come to grips with the fact that it is mostly chaos. It is probably most efficacious to just sit back and enjoy the ride.
It is far shorter than we like to admit.
Anyway, I have been a confirmed political junky since 1959, when as a boy I carried a sign supporting the Michigan Constitutional Convention. I loved the hurly-burly, high elbows and shrewd calculation. Today, though, I find that I prefer listening to a trashy audio-book in the car to incisive political commentary about a system that seems to have gone insane.
I was listening to a local station the other day that had been one of my favorites, and which I actually sent money to. A Senator from a popular state was waxing eloquent about something or another, a grand scheme that would provide world peace and cook dinner on the engine block while you drove home from work.
I had to pull the police cruiser over to the side of the road and retch onto the black top. The number of things we are expected to believe- and which seem, according to some, to be the inevitable arc of the space-time continuum- is quite remarkable. Why are we so emotional about things that really don’t matter much in the grand scheme or things, and so pointedly ignoring things that do?
Accordingly, I can’t dredge up the interest to rouse myself from the cynical fugue state into which the situation has driven me. Perhaps I will rouse during the Party Conventions, when they come, though things seem to be well down the road to what we might have suspected months and months ago. Just get me to the voting booth in November, and don’t bother me until then.
So, not being able to gather the necessary energy to get up on what used to be my favorite hobby-horses, I thought I would wrap up a couple loose ends.
Today, the 7th of June, 1942, the United States Navy was wrapping up the Battle of Midway. The little atoll was saved. The tide was turning, and though the legion of the dead was still to come, American and Japanese, the world had turned. I wrote about all this because of the preparations for the commemoration in Hawaii. Then I promptly moved on. Well, the time came this week, along with the anniversary of the invasion of Europe, which in an astonishing bit of historic rhyming, is happening again.
That string of stories about the Med Cruise? There is an epilogue to that. I mentioned that the negative to fifty or so packs of film, taken between the 1980s and 1990s was recently digitized and showed up on my doorstep, courtesy of the elves at Scan Café. If I had seen them, I would have included this one, of your humble scribe with his young sons in his arms at the Fly-In at Master Jet Base Cecil Field.
That is a memory for the ages, and I could not resist sharing it with you the afternoon.
In the meantime, I am going to be on the road, or at least a jet, for a little jaunt over the next few days, and wanted to let you know that comms connectivity could be intermittent. I have no idea what is going to happen, since there is nothing in particular on the schedule, but it seems like a good opportunity to catch up on some things as I turn- gasp- 65 years old.
Heck, it might even be a chance to put the book back together and see what it looks like, all linear, and maybe it will even make sense.
You never can tell.
Copyright 2016