The Latest

The diagnosis is anemia. 

Iron poor blog;  a literary Geritol commercial. 

Permit me to explain:  those who follow me with any regularity (and I thank you both),  know that I haven’t been a very dutiful blogger as of late.   The only excuse I can offer you is that I don’t have one.  Does that make sense?   Well, in  my swirling gray matter, it does.  

The reality is sometimes, I just don’t feel the desire to write.  I feel awfully uninspired these days; even listless.   My attitude toward this blog cavalier.   In previous years, I could stand in line at the check out counter at  Kroger’s and look down and see a woman’s talon like toes and could be motivated to go off in about five different editorial directions.  I couldn’t wait to get home and blog all about it.  Today, I can look at this woman’s toes and think, “Bitch needs a pedicure” and nothing more.

Compounding the problem is the fact that I’m in a relationship which has yet to be completely defined.    Like water, it’ll seek its own level I’m sure, but I’m in the throes of the interim–the here and now.  Not at point A…not at C.  I’m at B–that odd and awkward “ no man’s land”.  I find that I think a lot about  this man and what we have,  but those thoughts  for whatever reason, don’t make the synapse between brain and fingers.  Nothing can be translated on to the screen. It’s like there’s a barrier or an obstruction of some sort.   One would think that a relationship would be enough for me to bloviate upon ad nauseam, but it’s something I want to keep obscure.  I know…odd, right?   Especially since I’ve complained endlessly about my relationship woes and here I am in one  and I have no desire to discuss it.

Mien Gott, perhaps I have finally appropriated boundaries.   

Guess so, but  it’s more than that.  Trying to define the undefinable has taken up a lot of my time lately and yes, it’s taken me away from writing.  Ironic isn’t it,  that my reason for blogging is now one of the reasons why I don’t?

I addition to that, I’m working again in a job that is demanding, but in a far different way.   I work alone for the most part and I rather like the solitude.  I get a lot done and that’s good, but in those  moments when the phone doesn’t ring, when there’s no deadline to meet and no broadcast fire to put out, I get the chance to sit and breathe and remember the peace  that exists in a certain silence .   Sometimes at work, the silence is deafening.  At other times, it’s not loud enough.    I have learned that silence isn’t worth a damn UNLESS it  has volume control

I don’t write much about work either, do I?

So then what’s the deal here?  If I’m not pissing and moaning about love and the lack thereof or my sad state of employment and the lack thereof, then what the hell am I doing?     

I suppose I’m changing.

In fact, I just looked in the mirror and realized that my little girl is growing up.  By that I mean my Jungian inner child of the archetypal variety.     I’d have a going away party for her or at least a Sweet 16 party or a quinceañera, but I’m not inspired to that either.

It’s too bad I’m so lethargic.  If I had more creative stamina I could also write assloads about this divine child and all those developmental issues she continues to work through. 

I could write about Keith Olbermann’s sudden departure from MSNBC (or Obama’s Campaign Headquarters, as we “righties” call it).  He is, I think, completely certifiable and should be placed in protective custody with the other lunatics of his ilk and yes, I mean O’Reilly and that Glen Beck person who God help me,  irritates me  more than a jagged suppository would.  They are walking one-act plays each stuck in their third acts.    I loathe the self-righteous whether legit or contrived and trust me, these men are those men.  That said, Glen Beck personifies everything that’s wrong with the Republican Party.   Olbermann has almost single-handedly tainted and sullied the word “liberal”.      Both induce bile.

Then again, I could also write about the Sisters Kendrick and how we as women, would love to be swept away by the proverbial knight in shining armor.  My we are needy broads.  And so easily swayed by words.  I love you and I want to take care of you are like kryptonite to us.  Tell us these things and we become slack kneed; unable to take a stand.    We have this inexplicable need to be saved…to be rescued.   We don’t want lovers; we seek first responders.

Yes, I could write about all those things but I can’t.  I won’t.  I don’t want to.

In closing, a former classmate of mine contacted me recently and conveyed two things to me:  one made me smile; the other made me sad.  He told me he has to read my blog with a thesaurus.   I smiled then quickly winced:  am I pretentious?    Then he asked me what what’s happened in my life that’s made me so sad?  He moved away in Junior High but said he only remembers that full of life, fun-loving, sweet kid he knew in seventh grade.

What????   Where’s cute in the stream of adjectives????

Ah Tommy, my life has been fraught with good and bad just like everyone else.  My problems are no different.  It’s just that God gave me Clintonian brass ones  and the audacity to think someone would want to read about mine.

And lately, that really isn’t happening.  My readership, while still okay, has faltered some.   Maybe that’s due in part to the fact I’m not blogging as much and I’m not blogging as much because I’ve got other things to contend with;  things that require my attention.   Or has my readership declined along with my blogging frequency because my readers, like me, are bored?   Disenchanted with my self loathing and while still quite adroit and relevant, my bombast, too?   Have I become the very yawn fest I so detest??

Gee,  I don’t know and frankly, I’m just not inspired enough to care.      I’ve got a relationship to define.

Where’s Noah Webster when you need him?

,

random friday crap and memories

I woke up early this morning and by early, I’m talking 3:44 am.  

I must be in the throes of menopause, because sleep is NOT something I’m getting much of lately.   That, I hear along with heart palpitations, mood swings and the odd growth of facial hair, is a sure-fire sign that a woman’s child-bearing abilities are behind her.

And for those of us with a severely prolapsed uterus…the kind that we  have to haul separately in a little red  wagon…our child-bearing abilities were ALWAYS behind us.

But the insomnia aspect of this physiological change–my body’s vehement fight to keep its last vestiges of maidenhood alive, is the worst.  I need sleep. A friend who’s well aware of my battle with it recently gave me a fairly powerful Klonopin–the heavyweight kind that dissolves sublingually.   Oh, it helped me sleep alright….for four hours. 

Don’t suggest exercise.  I’ve tried it. 

Nope.  That doesn’t help either.  Until my hormones decide to settle down and give up this ridiculous and relentless hold out on being reproductive, my two-hour slumbers is what I’m relegated to dealing with each night.

And for me, insomnia is always associated with vast amounts of thinking and reflection.    This morning, the damndest things crossed my mind.  It’s all incredibly rabndom stuff.

This morning, I woke up wondering why tobacco lobbyists haven’t approached the issue of seeking more mass acceptance of this cash crop by trying to proclaim in to be a vegetable.    I mean, think about it.

Then after that,  I remembered for some reason, an old candy machine that stood in the hallway of my elementary school.  

It looked a lot like this one–the mirror; the odd greenish/turquoise color..solid metal and the hard, plastic knobs you had to pull that released this trap door thing that dropped the candy down.    We only had slots for eight varieties at a time…sometimes there would be a peice of paper in one of the slots that was hand written.  It read “Guess What?”  It was filled with random candy.  You tried that knob, you took your chances.   I always suspected that row was filled with confectionary left overs that the candy guy had at the end of his refilling rounds.

But whatever the candy was, it was cheap.   I remember it only cost a nickel.  That was it and five cents  could buy you  some great candy. 

I remember  Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, your standard issue Hershey Bar; Nestle’s Crunch;  Krackles,  the Oh Henry  Bar, a Fifth Avenue,  the Zero Bar, a Clark Bar, Mars too;.

There were M&M’s (plain and peanut),  Big Hunk and Chunkies,  Three Muskateers, the accordion packs of diabetes inducing Lik-A-Maid, gum, Life Savers,  the packet of Root Beer Kegs, Sweetarts, Fire Sticks (green apple and grape were cool flavors, too), SugarBabies, Slow Pokes, Razzles or Red Hots to fall through to the open tray below and always in a thud. 

A kid could hear and recognize that particular metalic sound for miles.

Speaking of Razzles,  they were  my first candy/gum experience.  They were all respberry in the beginning and came in white package.   Tasted like ass.

I used to love Rally bars…peanuts and caramel covered nougat with a hint of malt.  Tasty.   hear they might be released.  Hope so. 

I also LOVED Marathon Bars.   Remember them?  Milk chocolate covered caramel in this odd, braided pattern.

I remember the TV commercials for Marathon bars.  They starred Patrick Wayne (son of John..see above for rather cute mug)  who as our hero, Marathon John, regularly confront villain Quick Carl  for chandy bar supremacy.

Remember when wax was considered both edible AND a musical instrument?  These orange harmonicas actually played music but not well and tasted about the way they sounded.

We bought the harmonica’s cousin, too.  Big red wax lips.

But does anyone else remember this factoid about Red Hots? 

Once you ate all the cinammonish heart-shaped candy inside, you could close the end of the empty box and because of the cellophane window in the front….remember??????

….you could blow into it and turn it into a make-shift kazoo that only played a few notes, then the cardboard got soggy and you had to trash it.  

Why do I remember this?   I’ve not a clue.

♦

Anybody remember this subversive, communist plot??

Shake-A-Pudd’n.

It came with a shaker cup, a lid and your desire to eat whatever the scientists at the Royal labs concocted.   You put powdered pudding mix in the shaker, added milk then shook.  

Your reward? 

Nice biceps and watery, tasteless “pudding”.  Nasty.

♦

I remember going to the Ben Franlin Store (a South Texas equivlant to the Five and Dime)  to by cheap balsa wood gliders–just like this.

I remember the red paint and yes, it  looks just like I remember.  When I first saw this photo, I had to smile.

They only cost a dime…maybe 15-cents at the most and it came unassembled in this wax paper like packet. 

You slipped the wings through the body, got the occasional balsa wood splinter in your finger in the the process and once Mom removed it,  you could start gliding immediately.  It was fun….for a while.

Invariably, we’d have balsa wood glider dog fights and the wood being as delicate as it is, always meant each glider crashed an burned…and I remember one spring in ’65 in which our neighbor Ed actually crashed and burned them (thanks to a pilfered Zippo lighter).

Yep, it crashed and burned and we all got grounded.

♦

I have a confession to make.  It involves Prell and this old 60′s commercial for the shampoo.

.

Remember the pearl in the bottle at the end?   It slowly descended to the bottom of the bottom to prove how rich and luxurious the shampoo was and in a typical 6o’s thought process as bought and sold to us by McMann and Tate and other advertising agencies of the era,  if the shampoo was that thick and luxurious, think what it could do to you hair?  

I remember wanting to see how thick and luxurious Prell really was, so I conducted that experiment myself….with one of my mother’s pearls…..from her necklace.

I took fingernail scissors and cut the string myself.   That pearl stayed n the bottle of that shampoo forever and went unnoticed .    Mother was outraged when she found her loose Mikimotos strewn all over the bottom of her jewelry box.   They were old (read: antique) so, she assumed the string had just rotted.  I never let her think any differently.

I think this is going to have to be one of those rare deathbed confessions…either hers or mine.

♦

I have a brand new fridge in my kitchen.  It’s burnished aluminum with black accents–no fingerprints anywhere.  I like it; it’s sleek and makes its own ice, but I’ve turned off the ice maker.  I hate the way refrigerator ice tastes.   I know it’s convenient, but I don’t like it and never have.   I think it’s because I relate fridge ice with being so labor intensive.

When I was growing up, you only had ice if you made it yourself.  There were various ways to do this, but most people had aluminum ice trays like this:

These were bulky and cumbersome and when and if the lever on top froze along with the ice, it was impossible to pull.   You had to thaw it out by holding it under water and if you did, you often lost some of the cube integrity.   God, these were a pain in the ass.  If memory serves, the metal ice tray evolved into this plastic tray which you could twist each end to get it to release its frozen contents.  Easier and less demanding than their aluminum cousins, but still a pain. 

♦ 

I remember test TV patterns.   I never understood these and I was in the business for years.

 

I mean, I understand it’s always better to put SOMETHING on the screen when you have no other options, but what exactly were they testing back then?  Wasn’t this just something to put up so the control room guys could go home?   In the 50′s early to mid 60′s, there were no 24-hour ”superstations”.   Broadcast days had a defined beginning and end.

I guess the four circles in the corner and the center one and all the numbers mean something to cameras or broadcasting equipment, but what’s up with the T-Rex head at the top?

♦

And speaking of the end of broadcasting days, we grew up in the San Antonio TV market and one or more of the stations ALWAYS played this video at sign off.  It’s a poem called “High Flight” put to music.  It was penned by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Remember this???? 

Interesting story behind this poem and it’s author.  And his last name was Magee…not McGee.

This British poet and aviator but was  killed in 1941, at the age of 19, while flying Spitfire VZ-H.  

He was just 19 years old.

His aircraft was involved in a mid-air collision with an Airspeed Oxford. The two planes collided in cloud cover at about 400 feet over a small British village.  Magee was descending at the time.

At the inquiry afterwards a farmer testified that he saw the Spitfire pilot struggling to push back the canopy.  The pilot stood up to jump from the plane but was too close to the ground for his parachute to open, and died on impact.  ”

Magee’s posthumous fame rests mainly on his sonnet High Flight, started on 18 August 1941, just a few months before his death.  He had flown up to 33,000 feet in a Spitfire Mk I, his seventh flight in a Spitfire. As he orbited and climbed upward, he was struck with the inspiration of a poem—”To touch the face of God.” He completed the poem later that day after landing. 

Magee enclosed the poem on the back of a letter to his parents.   The manuscript  copy of the poem remains at the Library of Congress.

Magee is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Lincolnshire, England.  On his grave are inscribed the first and last lines from his poem High Flight:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth –

Put out my hand and touched the Face of God.

.

Oh yeah???

Well I’ve done that too, man…but with a hit of  Window Pane and a little Black Sabbath.

♦f