5.21.2021 – Glad! If I had known

Glad! If I had known
that at 20, I wouldn’t
have done anything!

I am not a ‘huge’ William Shatner fan.

I like Star Trek but when I say that, as when I say, “Star Wars’, I mean the original.

I never could figure out the other shows.

There is that one where one feller is light blue/green and is really a computer.

I understand he was supposed to be the modern counter part to Spock

This character was treated as someone with feelings.

But in the original series, Spock was at least half human and could display feeling.

The light blue/green guy WAS A MACHINE.

HELLO.

Would a computer made to look like a human be any less than a machine?

If he got too annoying you could smash him with a baseball bat because he was A MACHINE.

But I digress.

I WILL SAY this though.

The Whale Movie where the Original Team goes back in time to San Francisco was pretty good.

There is that scene where they all stare at a USAToday Newspaper vending machine and read the news above the fold and wait.

Kirk hits the box a few times, but the view of the front page doesn’t change of course.

“Must be broke,” says Kirk and shrugs.

OH SURE I said to myself.

Read a newspaper off a screen.

Like that will happen someday.

Again, I digress.

I remember one teacher at GRJC telling me that the original Star Trek was as close to a play of the genre of the classic Greek Tragedy that our generation would ever produce.

He felt Spock and Dr. McCoy were the pitch-perfect representation of the Greek Chorus whose role in the play, one webpage states, was “to offer important background and summary information that facilitates an audience’s ability to follow the live performance; to offer commentary about and underline main themes animating the action; and to model an ideal audiences response to the unfolding drama. Nietzsche suggests that it was the rhythmic dance and chants of the chorus, positioned always to mediate the physical space separating audience and actor, that evoked the visionary experience that was the very essence of tragedy.“

Can’t argue with that.

But back to Captain Kirk, I mean, William Shatner.

I can never figure him out.

Is Mr. Shatner really dumb but acting smart?

Or is Mr. Shatner really smart and acting dumb?

What cannot be denied is that in a life of 90 years, Mr. Shatner has embraced life.

He has been up.

He has been down.

And when he has been down, he dusts himself off, and gets back up.

I recently read an interview with him and what shined through the interviewer’s writing was that, love him or hate him or don’t care, his life has been full.

About all that he has done, Mr. Shatner said, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just drifted with the currents of happenstance.“

It was how he ended that struck me.

So many times we all hear and we all say, “If only I knew then what I know now.”

At the end of the interview, the question is asked, “what he wishes he had known at 20 that he knows at 90.”

His response?

“Here’s an interesting answer!” he says perkily. “I’m glad I didn’t know because what you know at 90 is: take it easy, nothing matters in the end, what goes up must come down. If I’d known that at 20, I wouldn’t have done anything!”

If I’d known that at 20, I wouldn’t have done anything!

That got me to thinking.

But I am typing this and listening to the 3rd movement of Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto No.2 in D major on the radio and life is a mess and life is pretty good at the same time.

I really can’t account for how I ended up living on the Atlantic Coast of South Carolina or that I have seven kids or almost anything else that has happened to me.

I didn’t just drift with the currents but I thought I was taking in active part in the direction of my life.

Any decision that I made over the last 60 years would have changed how this all came about.

I am pretty sure though that had I started out with this as a goal, I would have screwed it up.

So I got to agree with Mr. Shatner.

I think that by the time you get to this age, the thing that matters is to take it easy.

Don’t sweat the petty stuff.

Don’t pet the sweaty stuff.

What goes up, must come down.

BUT boy am I glad I DID NOT know that back when I was 20.

Had I known that, really known that, I would not have done anything.

5.20.2021 – I saw him and he

I saw him and he
saw me at same time, Second bite,
one that broke the bones

And other reason to stay out of the woods.

Taken from “Second bite is one that broke the bones’: Alaska man describes bear mauling”

“Allen Minish was alone and surveying land for a real estate agent in a wooded, remote part of Alaska, putting some numbers into his GPS unit when he looked up and saw a large brown bear walking about 30ft (10 meters) away.”

This is better (or worse) than the story from down here in the low country and the dog and the alligator.

That headline was, “Didn’t even have time to bark!”

5.19.2021 – a salutary

a salutary
fear of the future, makes one
watchful, combative

The beginning of wisdom, as Tocqueville put it, is to “have that salutary fear of the future that makes one watchful and combative, and not that sort of soft and idle terror that wears hearts down and enervates them.

Have that salutary fear.

Be watchful.

And.

Be combative.

There might be roving groups of ‘tourists’ trying to find their way into local public buildings.

Or maybe that Washington Riot was just an ‘over reaction’ and really did not take place.

Be watchful as the story gets changed.

As one feller said, you’ll be shocked by what never happened.

Then be combative!

Don’t let be overcome by the sort of soft and idle terror that wears hearts down.

Salutary?

An adjective, (especially with reference to something unwelcome or unpleasant) producing good effects; beneficial. IE: “a salutary reminder of where we came from”

Enervates?

To cause (someone) to feel drained of energy or vitality; weaken.

5.18.2021 – cranking up my brain

cranking up my brain
though world going fast enough
by itself today

In my weird new world, I am woke up by the sound of the coffee maker.

Not the alarm.

Not the awareness that I would be driving in morning rush hour traffic in less than an hour.

But the scoooorp scooooorp scooooooooooooooooooooooorp of the coffee maker sucking up the last bits of hot water to drip down over the coffee.

Then three slight beeps that the coffee is ready for me.

I used to pour the coffee into my eyes to get my brain going.

Okay so I just threatened to do that some mornings.

Still I start cranking up my brain.

But I am finding out, more and more, that world going along fast enough all by itself.

But that I mean that my little world is going along fast enough, at a pace that suits me fine, all by itself.

AND that the big mean old world out has also managed to go along fast enough all by itself without me being involved one bit.

My pace for me is just fine.

And the worlds pace by itself for me, without me, is also just fine.

A body could have a lot worse views on the way to work,

5.17.2021 – ineluctable

ineluctable
sonority, sound of sounds
between sounds of sounds

I may have made an amazing discovery about my favorite author.

I have long admired and enjoyed and written about the writing of Mr. Jim Harrison.

Perhaps Reed City, Michigan’s least recognized famous person.

I was aware of Mr. Harrison through my years of selling his books in a bookstore where I worked but in a ‘prophet has no honor is his home town’ mood, I never picked one up to read.

Somewhere along the line I came across a story about him.

I was attracted by the statement in the story that Mr. Harrison has once retyped a 500 page manuscript after he found he had used the same adjective twice.

While I doubted the truthfulness of the statement, it DID get my attention especially when it was pointed out that Mr. Harrison, like me, managed to operated a typewriter with just two fingers.

I picked up the book Sundog and the rest is history.

While my personal library has been slowly whittled away over the years, some 20 plus Jim Harrison books and poetry collections have followed me from Michigan to Georgia and now here in South Carolina.

I enjoy the quality of the writing often over the plot.

I enjoy the way Mr. Harrison says something for as much as what he says.

Last night I picked the Brown Dog stories off the shelf to flip through to start my weekend.

I came to the words, ineluctable sonority, in a sentence about fly fishing that stated, “His favorite fly, along with the muddler, Adams, and woolly worm, was the bitch creek nymph, a name of ineluctable sonority.“

Ineluctable sonority.

I was pretty sure it meant that Brown Dog liked the sound.

The sound of the words alone.

But why be pretty sure in the age of the google?

I fed sonority into the google and I got this:

“the perceptibility or distinctness of speech sounds when spoken in a context in which stress, pitch, and sound duration are constant vowels possessing greater sonority than consonants.”

That made my head hurt.

It also said, “a sonorous tone or speech,”

This I was much more comfortable with.

Then I fed ineluctable into the Google and got this:

“unable to be resisted or avoided; inescapable.”

Ineluctable sonority.

A tone or speech unable to be resisted.

You know.

Darth Vader.

Sorry but I cannot mention Darth Vader without saying that the Wicked Witch of the West would have had Vader (remember when Darth was his first name?) for breakfast. I can make my point but another time.

Darth Vader as I was saying, or at least his voice.

The voice being James Earl Jones.

Which is really weird when you realize Mr. Jones grew up in Brethren, Michigan, about one hour away from Reed City, Michigan.

I guess I should also point out that Mr. Harrison went to State, while Mr. Jones went to Michigan.

That was NOT my amazing discovery.

Remember how I mentioned that what first attracted me to Mr. Harrison was that story about re-typing a manuscript when he found he had used the same adjective twice.

I believe I also motioned I questioned that story.

Good story but would an author really care that much about using words, the right words?

Mark Twain famously said on his choice of words (when being paid by the word) “I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.”

Ernest Hemingway’s word choice was influenced by his years as a foreign correspondent and the newspapers had to pay PER WORD for Mr. Hemingway’s articles to be sent by cable producing Mr. Hemingway’s style of short sentences and short words.

“It was a hot day” from The Big Two Hearted River in the Nick Adams stories.

Still I was shocked and yet not shocked when I fed “ineluctable sonority” into the Google.

In less than one second, the Google came back with 250,000 results.

The top one and the ONLY ONE that used ‘ineluctable sonority’ together in a sentence was in the Brown Dog stories by Jim Harrison.

The very same sentence I read last night.

There isn’t an award or a place where I can submit this for proper recognition but BOY HOWDY let me tell you that Mr. Harrison accomplished something special.

But in the thousands of years of writing and recording the written language, a two finger typist from Reed City, Michigan, pulled off one of the amazing unknow feats of literary genius.

Mr. Harrison wrote out a thought in way no ever had before.

And Mr. Harrison wrote out a thought in way no ever has since.

I think he would be pleased.