Your Thursday Update

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Gee, there are about five things I could rant on today, but since my intestines are revolting against me in what can only be the worst, bile-laden coup d’etat in the history of human gastroenterology, I’ll spare you and keep the subject matter down to two things, maybe three…if you’re lucky.    But the Jewish part of my genetic coding– the one that seems to come to the forefront when I’m sick, compels me to share with you that I continue to have sporadic bouts with 100° fever , complete with muscle aches and pain (even my hands hurt) and a lethargy and malaise that could make a sloth seem industrious.

Don’t worry…I’ll live, but the good news is that I’ve also lost four pounds to the Houston sewer system.    That means I’m about 21 stomach flues away from reaching my goal weight.    Hot damn.

 Now, on to the business at hand.

Austin, Texas. 

The state’s iconic capital city is a place where I once called home.  In my twenties, I thought Austin to be the coolest place on the planet.   It was and still is liberal, hip and bohemian and let’s make no mistake, Austin tries damn hard to stay that way.  Well, its wonderfully self-appointed status of being a blue oasis stuck in the middle of a red state, was shaken to the core today when  53-year old Joe Stack flew his Piper Cub airplane into the second floor of a seven-story office building in Austin.  This edifice housed a division of the Internal Revenue Service, a federal entity which Stack made abundantly clear, he didn’t like at all.

One must then ask the question,”what makes a man snap like that?”     The same thing was asked about that crazed Korean student who killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech three years ago.   We questioned Timothy McViegh’;s motives, the shooter at the Luby’s and at Fort Hood, both in Killeen, Texas and of course, there were the 19 hijackers who killed themselves and roughly three-thousand others to glorify their version of God and martyrdom.   

I understand emotional stress and even passionate belief, no matter how skewed I think it is.   I can understand how life feels when God seems like He’s “piling on”.  There’s no reprieve.  It’s one thing after the other, like a unyeilding domino affect with each crash worse than the last.   You’re unemployed and that’s compounded by the fact that you’re in debt up to you uncle’s asshole;  your marriage is on the rocks and getting worse by the minute;  the bank is dying to take your house away; creditors call every hour;  you have back taxes; your three months late on your car payment; you have two kids about to graduate from High School and they have visions of higher education dancing in their heads.    You’ve all but depleted your savings and the term “retirement” now only exists in the dictionary.   You’ve used yours to pay bills and food for another month.

What’s the difference between a person who’s beaten down, but not out and the person who ends it all and leaves behind  a body count in his or her wake?     What made 900 people believe Jim Jones’ insanity and drink cyanide laced Kool-Aid in the jungles of Guyana some 32-years ago?   I suppose if  they were gullible enough to think he could lead them to a utopian life in a banana republic in South America, surely they were gullible enough to believe he could lead them into a spiritual “promised land” in the afterlife.  

This…that…it all makes my head reel.  Sociologists, psychologists and behaviorists will discuss this man, this Joseph A. Stack and his modus operandi in great detail over the next few days.  His pathology and motivations will be discussed to the point of delirium.  His life, from childhood to  this past Wednesday will be the subject of debate.   The question of “red flags” will come up and then we’ll wonder if any of them were flying at full staff. Did anyone notice anything wrong?  Could something have been done?

These experts will delve into their own form of Monday morning quarterbacking, just as they did with McVeigh,  Charlie Manson,  Jim Jones and his 900 member flock of sheep, George Hennard and that idiot James Huberty, who went “hunting humans” at the McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California in the early 80′s.    All of them now, are nothing more than sad, tragic footnotes and obscure Wikipedia entries.

But the problem is, it will happen again.   Death, taxes and tragedy are the only certainties we have in this life.  And when a narcissist decides to end his; when he decides he must exit this mortal coil, it must be done so with bluster and bravado.     But what made this man different?   People snap every day and  of the ones who  aren’t mentally or emotionally cohesive?  Well, at least most of those people will have “the decency” to only off themselves and no one else.    

Joe Stack said in a multi-page suicide note/manifesto/rant that change can’t come about without violence.   Actually, he’s right on one level.   Air travel is made safer every time there’s a crash, regardless of the reason.    But that’s hardly something that can be said about life with any degree of “across the board” accuracy.

Delusional, sick Stack did the only thing delusional sick man  felt he could do:  he killed himself and possibly others by crashing a plane into the office building that housed his federal nemesis.     But Stack was wrong.  Nothing significant will change as a result of his actions.

The Echelon office building in Austin, will be rebuilt. The FAA might take a closer look at the submission of flight plans for small aircraft prior to take off and more people will know Joe Stack’s name, for a while anyway and accompanying that will be descriptives such as,  a kook; a nut…a whack job loser who got into financial straights and didn’t have wherewithal to get himself out of it.

In the end, Joseph A. Stack did nothing but eliminate himself from the earthly equation and frankly, that made this a red-letter day for Darwinians.   

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And now I must break for nausea as you enjoy this video which is on a much brighter note:  never doubt the dexterity of dogs ever again.

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Random Observations From Yesterday & Today

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My God, I have become my mother.

I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that young people make me crazy. I was never like this before but somehow along the way, as I’ve aged, I’ve become far less forgiving.

And less tolerant.   And unamused.  Not unlike my mother.

This particular rant begins with a shopping venture at a department store. I needed some stuff. I won’t mention it the store by name, but let’s just say it sounds a lot like “Target”.

It was early in the morning–the store had just opened its doors, so I was the only one in the check out aisle. The checker greeted me with a wide smile with these multi-colored braces.

She was probably 16, maybe and the tag pinned to her red shirt indicated her name was McKenzie.  Ever notice that every 14, 15 and 16 year old in America is (seemingly) named McKenzie?   That was THEE name all those years ago. And do you remember about 14, 15 and 16 years ago, when giving little girl and boy babies surnames as first names was all the rage?   Especially popular were names of presidents: Madison, McKinley, Tyler, Jefferson and Grant. I even met a young  “Clinton” not long ago.

Odd isn’ it that the name “Nixon” never really took off?   You never run into Lindsay and her younger brother, Eisenhower and I really can’t imagine anyone, especially Cleveland and Fillmore ever being invited to Hoover’s tenth birthday party.

Anyway, McKenzie Jordan Sanford as I learned, was bored and was grateful for my being at her cash register. She was very talkative. Nay, she was extremely talkative.

In between checking out my various and assorted sundries, she gave me her life story and pretty much conveyed the whole schlemiel it in between scanning the bar codes of six packages of light bulbs at $1.49 per packet and Kitty Kat Chow at $4.99 a bag,  limit two.

She told me that she was going to be a Junior at one of Houston’s public high school and that she was working as a checker to earn money for new school clothes. I applauded her for her willingness to be so responsible—— and then it happened:.

She started that insipid “teen speak”….. every other word is “like”.

Here’s a rough example of McKenzie’s very one-sided conversation with me and in order to grasp the full extent of annoyance, please read with an up lilt-inflection at the end of each sentence. As if it were a question:

“So I’m like all…yeah and I was thinking like, I gotta have new clothes and all and like, you have to have new clothes especially at the beginning of the year, right? So I told my mom I was all in like need of new jeans and stuff and she like all got up in my face and said that I’d have to all like earn the money to buy like everything. So, I’m like “OK “and she’s all “Alright then” and I’m like “Fine. So, I”m working here and like slaving but it’s cool and all”.

Nothing and I mean NOTHING makes me crazier than the word “like” used 86 times in one, two minute conversation. I hate talking to kids for this very reason and this time was no exception.

The visceral response to this conversation had left me me nauseous by Young McKenzie’s fourth “like”. By the time she “like told her mom she was like in need of like, clothes and stuff”, my face started to contort.

I could feel my expression and I’m sure to McKenzie, it probably looked as if I smelled a fart.

She stopped in mid-like, looked rather puzzled and asked me if I was OK.

I swiped my card through the machine, thanked God it went through then grabbed my bags and said, “I’m like, fine and stuff”.

As I walked to my car, I realized that I had practically had this same conversation with my mother and grandmother during a shopping trip in early 1971. I’d wanted a pair of negative heal Earth Shoes for weeks. I finally got my mom to agree to buy me a pair. I tried them on in the store . I was in hip, pre-teen fashion heaven.

“Good Lord!”, my grandmother exclaimed looking at one of them. “What’s wrong with the heals on these crazy shoes!”.

“These are Earth Shoes, Granny. The heal is negative, that means lower than the toes which are supposed to be higher. That’s what makes these shoes so far out and groovy!”, I responded.

I looked at my mother. She was staring back at me with the very same contorted expression I’d given McKenzie. The only difference was in this case, her look of disdain wasn’t vernacular inspired. Oh no no no!

See, my grandmother had actually farted.

We left.

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Kids today also “hang out” together. The phrase is used interchangeably as a verb and as a noun. I also think this is the new term for “dating”, but I’m not sure.

When I was their age, we “hung out”, but we didn’t call it that…or did we? I think “hanging out” was something we did at a fixed location for a specific amount of time, as opposed to an all day affair at different locales. For example: sitting in front of the Tasty Freeze for a few hours was “hanging out at the Tasty Freeze for a few hours”.

Even so, things sure have changed since I was a kid. In Junior High, we dated, I guess for lack of a better word. We actually met our boyfriends at “the show”, as we called it. The Rialto was actually in Kenedy…another small town about six miles away from my hometown of Karnes City. The Rialto was the only movie theater in Karnes County. Here’s an actual photo in all it’s blurry glory:

The theater has been closed for 30-plus years, but what memories this photo brings with it.

Look–OK, squint at the picture—– just above the marquee, you’ll see the name “Rialto”. My first boyfriend kissed me under the “O” .

Years later, I did something far more vile to another boyfriend under the “R”.

As you can see, The Rialto was a single screen dwelling that was already old when I first started frequenting it regularly in1971. And that poor screen…it was so abused. Invariably, the film would break–it always did– and the poor screen would be pounded by soft drinks…pickles and other air borne projectiles that just minutes before, had served as a snack. I saw the screen once when the house lights were on. It looked like a big stretched out doo-doo diaper. Stained, dirty…slight tears in some places. It was HORRIBLE!

I remember watching a re-release of “Gone With The Wind” at that theater. I walked out of there worried to death that Vivian Leigh had a full on basal carcinoma on both cheeks. Turned out, it was just Dr. Pepper.

The floors were sticky, the bathrooms were Petri dishes and the seats were cut up all to hell and back with God knows what living in that nasty foam beneath those rips and tears. It was filthy.   God, I loved that place!

But I digress.   Meeting your boyfriend at the show was a big deal. An even bigger deal was when he gave you his I.D. bracelet–then held your hand through the double feature. That meant you were “going together”. That’s what we called it,  as in “Cheryl is going with Mike”.

Years before, when my sisters Karol and Kathy were in Jr. High, the deal was to wear one of your boyfriend’s football cleats  (if he played football) on a string around your neck. How barbaric! That rather pedestrian demonstration of adolescent love died out by the time I got to Jr High.

In High School, Karol and Kathy also wore their boyfriends’ Jr/Sr rings and their football jackets (providing he bought a ring AND played football)  a ring. When a girl was given a ring, she’d wrap that sticky white medical tape around the inner band of the ring to make it fit her finger. You could always tell how long she’d “been going with a guy” based on how dirty the tape was. That ritual was still practiced by the time I got to high school, but was starting to fall out of vogue.

Know what? I just realized something.  I now know why I have so many unresolved issues as an adult. It’s because I was never asked to wear a guy’s ID bracelet in Jr. High, nor was I ever given a Jr/Sr ring or a Letterman’s jacket. Why?

‘Cause I was a rebel.

My first boyfriend–the love of my life when I was in Jr. High– wasn’t local. He was from a neighboring town six miles away, plus he didn’t own an ID bracelet. So that was that.

And my high school boyfriend was also from another city and already well out of school when he and I started dating during my Junior year. He was quite the jock in his day, too…All-State both his Junior and Senior year. He was a talented running back.   A strikingly handsome man who was big and burly guy.  He was “The Jock”.

He never gave it to me, but had he, HIS letterman’s jacket would’ve been littered with patches and all kinds of hardware befitting a much lauded Texas High School football star. My Senior year, I briefly thought about asking him about letting me wear his old Sr. ring or his Letterman jacket, but like I said, he was older, so I didn’;t ask.  I also figured his wife wouldn’t like it much.

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My eldest sister, Kathy married in June 1971 so Karol and I–just 3.5 years apart–grew up together. We also had our own phone, separate number from our parents, of course. It looked exactly like this…same color–everything.

One afternoon, we were both home and both expecting a call. We were downstairs in the playroom watching TV when the phone rang. We raced up the stairs side-by-side in a dead heat, determined to reach the phone first. We got there at the same time, both our hands poised on the receiver.

“It’s Bubba! Let go!!”, Karol cried.

“No, Mark is supposed to call and I haven’t talked to him in three days. YOU let go!!”.

We glared at each other as the phone continued to ring. I thought to myself, “I’ll just reason with her”.

“Look Karol, there’s a 50-50 chance that this call is either Bubba or Mark and if its….” I stopped in mid sentence.

Karol had this horrible, wincing look on her face. She wrinkled up her nose.

I did what all Kendrick women do in these situations:    I farted.

She punched me in the arm and left the room.

 ”Ouch!!   I’m sorry…..uh Hello? Excuse me?  Uh, well yeah, sure. This is the Karnes County Livestock Exchange. What was that? You’re interested in buying a Heifer?  How large?     Oh, well then I know the perfect one. Can you please hold one second, Sir”

I covered the receiver with my hand and yelled, “Karol–its for you!!!”

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