Our editors request short, snappy blog posts, so I'm continuing the Baby Boomer generalization dissection of definitions posed in Wikipedia.

Like this one, for example:

"Many boomers focus desperately on the successes and failures of their children."

Anyone who ever attended a little league game can vouch for the accuracy of the above statement. Add beer to the mix and it's a free-for-all of parental puppetry.

Maybe Boomers are overcompensating with their own children because they were raised under a foreboding fear of SHAME "How could you do this, do you know you are killing your mother!" and HUMILIATION "What will the neighbors think!"

Maybe our generation was such a let-down after the pride experienced during World War II and we are trying to make up for it through our kids.

Maybe it's a futile attempt to make up for the loss of extended family, for working all the time, for our own neurosis, you know, some of the men never hugged by their fathers...Some of the women scorned for leaving the kitchen for careers.

I can tell you we weren't raised to dote on children. My brother biked 6 miles one way to get to football practice. My dad was at work and my mom didn't drive. The extent of parental involvement was attending the annual school Christmas concert, teacher conferences, an occasional game of Yatzee at night, and a summer trip to the Wisconsin Dells to ride the Ducks and see the Indians selling their wares along the side of the road.

I was brought up Lutheran and much like the people in Lake Wobeggon we learned at a young age 1)Don't talk about yourself (although lamentations were allowed) 2) Don't boast or brag about anything 3) Don't call attention to yourself and 4) If praise comes your way, deny it, practicing phrases like "are you kidding me? I hate my hair!"...."You mean this old rag?" .... "She got straight A's because the classes were so easy"

Who knows what is right or wrong, although some people claim to. The age-old quest of the sage, I suppose, is a life of balance, which, like a brass ring just out of reach on the merry-go-round, I can't quite seem to grasp.

MSN now has a new lifestyle page for Baby Boomers and I thought I'd take a look because I'm supposed to be one.

I was immediately horrified, coming face to face with a gray, mustachioed Dick Van Dyke.

Help me please, I am not one of you.

I used to watch that show when I was kid.
The best episode: when Laura Petri got her big toe stuck in the bathtub faucet. Because of that show, I never put my toes anywhere near a spigot. (See how educational television is?)

So I checked out Wikipedia to see who the baby boomers really are.

The explanation reads like some kind of rocket science. There are Baby Boomer #1s, those born between 1946 -1954; and Baby Boomer #2s (1955 to 1963) also known as Shadow Boomers; not to be confused with the children of Baby Boomers, Echo Boomers.

The defining moment for all 80 million of us, it said, was the Vietnam War, and the new generation of thought that blasted forth.

The blast was short-lived and seemed to take an about face.

According to Wikepedia:

Many boomers focus desperately on the successes and failures of their children.

The generation's tendency is to regulate personal behavior (as in alcohol, drug use, and the content of cultural creations)in a way sterner than that of the "uptight" adults that boomers knew during the Consciousness Revolution. As an example, boomers have been in the forefront of efforts to attack the pathologies (drunk driving, domestic abuse) of drunkenness and drug use. Boomer prosecutors have shown unusual willingness to impose severer sentences on criminal offenders, including "three strikes" laws and the death penalty.

Boomers have played a strong role in attempts to make America more overtly religious. Many have turned to fundamentalist Christianity as a solution to what they see as social rot. Thus, one finds a rise in creationist dogma and the promotion of prayer in public schools to an extent not known since the time of the Scopes Trial.

"Who am I?" someone screamed through my head, reverberating like a super ball.


MSN further divided boomers into categories: the Easy Glider takes each day as it comes; the Adventurer makes daring changes with his or her life; the Continuer continues to use existing skills, interests and activities but modifies them to fit retirement; the Searcher tries out different careers or hobbies to find something that will bring him or her happiness; the Involved Spectator cares deeply about the world, however, because of illness or other circumstances, they are not as involved as they used to be; and the Retreater, the only negative category, is confused and upset about retirement.

I hope someone figures out soon who those of us in the latter part of this generation are supposed to be.

I'm waiting............

Rummaging through some old boxes in the attic I found all my old concert T-shirts crumpled in an army surplus backpack.

The disparaging part of this momentous find was the physical tiny-ness of these shirts. I wondered how they could have shrunk to doll-like proportions after lying in wait for over 30 years for the day an almost 50-year-old would look upon them and weep.

Could I have possibly been that size?

Holy mother of menopause, what the heck happened here?

I teetered on a wobbly wooden ladder, my body wedged up into the hole in the ceiling as I hauled out a halter top with feathers, a floor-length cotton dress embroidered in flowers, a faded pair of bib overalls and purple hip-huggers with white polka dots (I'm not kidding).

"The Pretender" tour by Jackson Browne in dark Navy blue still has the rip under the arm from when the concert crowd, tired of waiting behind fences at Summerfest, broke down the gates and stampeded to gain good seats.

Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run concert T-shirt recalls a drunken friend who fled with my camera at the concert, then dropped it from the highest point in the Milwaukee arena.

Numerous tours of Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse flank the chest area of several articles of apparel that endured numerous washings in a futile attempt to remove stains from various high school, then college art classes. I know the exact shirt I was wearing when Neil's tour bus pulled into Alpine Valley one year, maybe 1979, and Neil stuck his head out the window to gawk at some picketing workers.

Here we are in the years, a bit bigger, but no worse for wear, at least that's what I keep telling myself, though it was no consolation, when, after lamenting the story to a friend he exclaimed "At least you still fit through the hole in ceiling."

Very loud

through

the

newsroom.

Yours is coming.........

On female spontaneity at 50:


One minute you may be standing at the bathroom mirror brushing your teeth and noticing that a haircut is long overdue.

Your intent was to get the phone book out of the cupboard and make a hair appointment.

Instead you grabbed the kitchen scissors and the next thing you know the sink is full of frizzy locks.

The look of shock on your own face...

priceless......

We are facing a soon-to-be national crisis and I've yet to hear anyone in politics step forward with a plan.

I'm beginning to worry.

I'm talking about nursing homes and how they will handle the influx of aging rockers - all equipped with their own sound systems.

There will be music wars. While the Who's "Teenage Wasteland" blasts from one room, another is cranking out Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy" to drown out the screams of Jim Morrison's "L.A. Woman" wafting down the fluorescent hallways. Not to mention the deadheads gathered in the sitting room jamming for 24 hours straight while nearby Beatle-mania fans still play the White Album backwards, ears bent close to the record player.

I wonder how the powers-that-be will get this aging group who grew up on the philosophy "question authority" to follow any rules. If forced to make pot-holders in craft class, exercise to piano music at the sit-and-be-fit activity and eat Cream of Wheat it may just give rise to geriatric anarchy.

They will want their twinkies and burgers, some incense to burn, Starbucks coffee, sleep number mattresses and yoga class.

If I could just find an investor for my "Rust Never Sleeps mini-mall rest home, the future would look inviting....

There's something about January and this time of year that lends a pallid droop to the face, a hollowness around the eyes and echoes of the brain bickering with itself.

Native Americans called this month the "Moon of Bickering."

And though we try to fight it off with all our strength, which of course is very little this time of year, it makes us crave white bread at midnight, toasted, with globs of butter.

Those in the know say it's the month in which incidents of suicides spike, the culprit most likely being the tendrils of self-doubt that drift (and this was scientifically proven during the Ken Kesey acid tests performed in Berkeley in the 1960s) out your mouth and nose, and proceed to strangle you while whispering in your ear "you don't deserve to be happy..."

The 6 a.m. banging of a snow shovel against my condo's sidewalk Tuesday rousted me from an ensuing fight between my capital self, wanting a paycheck, and the crazy woman who tries to talk me out of rising while it's still dark. She wants to leave for a northern California beach, and she wants to leave right now.

(What? Neil Young lives there you say? I didn't realize...)

Second only to smell, sound is a time machine, and the clink of the shovel sent me back to my upstairs bedroom, late 70s. It's still dark, maybe 5 a.m. and my dad is shoveling the driveway outside my bedroom window while everyone sleeps a warm sleep.
He's shoveling my car out of a house-high snow drift.

Tell me how you follow in boot prints that big?

"What value is it to do the right thing only if you feel like it?"
Somebody said this.

Kudos to the communities in this nation that have banned dog tethering or chaining.

According to Unchain Your Dog it's happening from coast to coast and it couldn't be soon enough.

Even as a child my stomach lurched to see dogs living their lives chained to a doghouse. Imagine it. I mean, even caged birds sing, remember? It's because they're not tied up, a fate worse than death.

This morning my contemplative morning route around the pond was shattered by a man in a rickety tri-cycle-like contraption being pulled by a pack of verbally-abused huskies. The guy screamed every expletive in the book, mostly the phrase "(Insert name of some people's Creator here) damn it!" every ten seconds, while the thing on wheels careened and overturned and the dogs left a trail of nasty, poor-grade dog food excrement. Yeesh.

Though I know nothing about the sport of dog sledding this looked like some kind of lesson in pain, the screaming rated "flinch-level."

This brought to mind a sight I saw traveling along Highway 23 in the county, a rural residence with about 50 husky dogs tethered to igloo dog houses. Most stood or sat atop their little shelters...Probably waiting to be set free.

I know huskies are athletes, and like Springsteen, are born to run, but to be tied up when they aren't running, this act still makes my stomach turn.

Technology, video games, television and computers are blamed for the sedentary lifestyles of Americans.

I blame gym teachers who physically and mentally tortured young minds in the sixties to the tune of "Go you chicken fat, go."

I still have nightmares about Mr. Lewer, (who, rumor had it back then, lived in the sewer and ate manure) our gym teacher for the duration of grade school.

If it wasn't for him I believe I could have nurtured some kind of athletic achievement, although my brother insisted there was no one in the world as lacking in coordination as I was.

I don't know if Mr. Lewer had experience in the military, but he was a foreboding presence, who in his spare time, held smokey poker games with two sixth grade teachers over the noon hour in the ball storage room off the gym.


For girls, the humiliation of donning gym clothes - ballooning, blue shorts and a white, short-sleeved blouse - was coupled with the fact our locker room consisted of a circle of lockers set in front of the entrance to the gym. We undressed inside that "corral" with it's peepholes and peering points for leering young boys.

Using humiliation as a tactic, which believe me, wasn't necessary with our pasty-white winter legs, way before our mothers let us shave them, or even use deodorant, Mr. Lewer marched us into the gym and made us line up by height and "sound off" by calling out our numbers.

Though I've tried to block out the worst tortures endured, some of the highlights include pelting each other with stinging rubber balls, often in the face, during raucous rounds of what was called "murder ball;" being weighed as everyone watched, the amount called out so it echoed through the gym; being forced to run what seemed like miles around and around the athletic field with shorts stops to puke along the way; and the requirement of climbing to the top of the gym ceiling on a large rope, and if you couldn't, being forced to "hang and swing" at the bottom while everyone counted in unison.

Once I took a forbidden drink out the bubbler during a rare "open gym day" and was forced to stand in the corner through several classes. He then took me in a small room where he had his own bed, although it was supposed to be for the kids who couldn't stop puking, and grilled me as to whether I was "having any problems at home."

Good old Mr. Lewer. It was with great pain I kept my mouth shut when he showed up at a grade school reunion a few years back. I had promised my twin friend Jane, who organized the gathering, that I wouldn't raise any ruckus but it took all my strength, and a few stiff drinks.

So for all those out there wondering how I could possibly fall and hurt myself just putting on socks, blame Mr. Lewer.

Poor Willow, the missing greyhound that tugged at the heartstrings of people who knew her plight is dead, found lying near railroad tracks in Waupun after a two-week run from domestic life.

Maybe he was having flashbacks of his life as a racing greyhound when he and his pal, Dahlia, decided to bolt through an open gate in their back yard.

I can relate. In a former life I raised collies and showed them, which is a whole 'nother story. If anyone has seen the movie "Best in Show," it's right on in its hilarious depiction of " purebred dog people."

Much of the fruits of my 12-year-long hobby entailed "flushing money that grows from the tree in the back yard" down the toilet.

My last collie was named Pearl, a blue-headed white female who came from Vermont. She was a payback puppy from a male I had sold.

Collies are noble creatures as anyone who loves or read the works of Albert Payson Terhune knows, but Pearl seemed to suffer from a form of dog ADD.

One day someone, let's say a teenage boy related to me, was blowing off Black Cat firecrackers in the back yard firepit, strings of 100 at a time, when Pearl freaked out and vaulted a five-foot chain link fence as if she were Bambi's father bounding over the forest on fire.

She was gone for 11 days, during which time I learned from Sheboygan's Search & Rescue Team that some canines freak-out when they run away, lose their minds and become feral.

Of course, that would apply to Pearl.

She could hear our voices but would run the other way. She was spotted often by neighbors, a white flash disappearing into the tall pines that populate the Northern Kettle Moraine State Forest.

We dumped bags of dog food along the roadways, another trick we learned. One day we got a call that she was sighted and I tore down the road to see her peering out from some brush along the side of the road.

I threw liver out the car window at increments until I was close enough to grab her. The minute I touched her the light bulb went on again and she kind of collapsed in my arms.

Lassie she was not, but "Pearlie Girl" had a good heart and now lives in Minnesota with a registered nurse.

Today is "French Day" at work.
None of us have any idea what this means, and therein, lies the beauty.

We think it may be just an excuse for assistant news editor Tom Guenther to bring in his Brigette Bardot records, but c'est la vie....

I told you early in this blog I would someday explain what "Days" are in The Reporter newsroom, oops, I mean "Information Center." Silly me.

It's a way for those who work the Saturday shift to exercise the collective conscious, somewhat like the Borg, because, alas, we have no access to a "Holodeck," in which we could act out our fantasies, meek ones, of course, like making a living beading hair on a pink-sand beach island, wrapped in a tie-dyed sarong while sipping drinks made of mangos and papayas.

In that life we have perfect toes because we would never have to wear wool socks to bed to keep warm.

It started one day when Gary, the page editor mentioned it was the anniversary of the Concert For Bangladesh.

Gary: "I have the album!"

Tom: "So do I!"

Sharon (near hysteria) "Me too!"

As if, somehow, that were miraculous. (I told you we need real lives).

I won't bore you with details of how we brought our records and forced everyone else to bring in something from the sixties and how editor Mike Mentzer brought "The Letterman" and we tittered, "he is such an innocent!"

Since then this obscure theme day has been relegated to select Saturdays, the pathetic-ness of it being it is no more than a display table set up amidst the mad pounding of key boards, the scanner sounding and pages being sent to the press by deadline.

Some highlights: "Jimmy Hendrix Are You Experienced Day;" "Beatles/Apple Day," which required everyone bring something made of apples; "If There's a Rock 'n Roll Heaven You Know They've Got a Hell of a Band/Thanksgiving Day;" and "Gloria Day," any Gloria.


It's always a free day. Participation and/or an explanation is not required. Since no one is told what to do or bring it's a delightful surprise to see a rare collector Beatles album turn up or a fringed leather jacket, circa 1973.

Or hear sports editor John Casper's horror story of the night he was having dinner with his parents and the debauchle that occurred over reciting the wrong Jimmy Hendrix words, a phrase, in fact, many of us have gotten wrong, John, believe me. Don't be so hard on yourself.

But just for the record it is "'scuze me, while I kiss the sky," not " this guy."

If you viewed the ragged lot of us, personalities that would probably never meet or share a passing glance in real life, it's a very "groovy" happening.

After all, who knew Brigette Bardot could sing?

Take it from me, she can't. It was laughable, at best, although the guys called it "soothing." ;-D

The year 2007 has been a long-time coming (insert David Crosby here).
I could hardly stand the wait.

As I understand it, every seven years our cells regenerate, which means we all get new hair, skin, finger-nails, all that good stuff.

If you do the math, since I'm turning 50 this year, it's the start of a whole new 7-year-cycle, and the year is 2007!

It's going to be a big one, people, believe me. I'm giddy with anticipation....

Here's some more cool stuff from the world of numerology about the number 7 I gleaned from Suite 101.

There are seven main planets in the zodiac.
There are seven continents in the world.
There are seven wonders of the world.
There are seven colors in the rainbow.
There are seven days in a week.
There are seven seas on the Earth.
There are seven petals in the Lotus, the Sacred Seat of Lord Buddha, regarded as the most sacred flower by the people of the Eastern countries.

The book of Revelations, refers to the following:

The seven heavens.
The seven thrones.
The seven seals.
The seven churches.
The seven spirits of God.

Ezekiel speaks of “The seven angels of the Lord that go to and from through the whole earth.”

There are seven generations from David to the birth of Christ.

Egyptian religion repeatedly talks of the seven spirits.


Medically, it is established that every seven years, biological changes take place in the chemistry of human beings, both male and female.

It is commonly said all over the world that every person on this Earth would have six other persons living somewhere with the similar features and looks making it a total of seven persons being look-alikes for each and every one.

Astrologically the number 7 represents the planet Neptune and the zodiacal sign Pisces, a lover and peace maker.

Let's hope, with all the hope we have.

"Time takes a cigarette,
puts it in your mouth, pull on a finger,
then another finger, then your cigarette..."
David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust

What will the gods sniff if we can't put something in our pipe and smoke it?

As of Jan. 1 a new policy at The Reporter, as well as all Gannett-owned businesses, to my knowledge, prohibits employees from smoking anywhere outside the building.

They can't drive away on their 15 minute breaks twice a day to light one up because that is considered company time. Neither can they smoke in their cars, behind a bush, peering from a manhole or crouching in a dumpster, hands cupped over a matchbox (which may well be the case if I know newspaper people like I think I do).

Correct me if I'm wrong. I thought tobacco was legal?

No wonder hobbits can no longer be found this side of Middle Earth.

I'm taking a politically incorrect stand here, and man, does it feel good.

I love the smell of tobacco smoke.

Managing editor Mike Mentzer was waxing nostalgic last night, recreating the days when the newsroom could only be seen through one big cloud of blue smoke.

"The page one editor had one cigarette going in the ashtray and one in his mouth, the ash about 4 inches long," Mentzer related.

Ah, the smell of cigarettes, pipes, a good cigar, the inside of a sweat lodge as the peace pipe is passed around....... the way the wisps of smoke curl through the air like fairy lace... the social nature of a good smoke, the way it clears the mind and calms the nerves.



I grow misty-eyed watching the old black and white movie stars lighting up everywhere and anywhere. Last night, I can't recall the flick, a doctor offered his patient a cig and they both lit up in his office. LOL

Please spare me all the bad things about smoking...that's not my point. We all know what can kill us in excess (INXS!)....fast cars, MOTORCYCLES, crossing the 151 bypass, plastic wrap, deodorant (which one oncologist told me he thought to be the leading cause of breast cancer), cake (the number one culprit - that lust-filled brown-eyed Susan cake from Everix Bakery), Joe's Fox Hut Pizza (and what a way to go), eating any fish but lets' pick on sturgeon, hair spray, wood-burning stoves, the sun's rays, the chemicals in new carpeting, listening to Barry Manilow or watching Regis & Kelly, hair dye, etc., etc., etc.,

In his 1993 book "Cigarettes are Sublime" Richard Klein, a Cornell University French professor, attacks what he calls this country's current craze of "violent antitabagism."


"Healthism in America has sought to make longevity the principal measure of a good life," he writes. "To be a survivor is to acquire moral distinction. But another view, a dandy's perhaps, would say that living, as distinct from surviving, acquires its value from risks and sacrifices that tend to shorten life and hasten dying."

I don't smoke at work, but I confess to a quirky habit: I have two cigarettes after 9 p.m., usually every day. It was my compromise, years ago, with quitting...which seemed to me such "giving in to the man."

Goodbye to the days you could enjoy a good smoke as one of life's simple pleasures.

I just hope Santa doesn't have a nic fit while driving his sleigh.

People, how could I resist.??????????

The Rust List, which is the biggest Neil Young Internet community with a cast of thousands, invited "Rusties" to pose a New Year's Resolution for Neil.

How, tell me how to just keep quiet, not be a fool for the man. "Stop acting 14," I tell myself.

Alas, it's a hopeless cause. Roll your eyes all you want, I can't see you!

Re:1a. Re: New Years resolutions for Neil

Neil, who has been wondering about his soul mate in the back of his mind for some 40 years now....

you know the one....the girl he dreams about but has never met...

the girl he sings all the songs about but could not find ... so he settled for Pegi... (aka Peg-eye)...
not saying she ain't nice, but there's still this girl stuck in Neil's head... wild and freaky hair, blue eyes, slightly overweight, one discolored tooth in the front, spills things daily...the image is stuck in his head...

One night he's playing Milwaukee, a warm summer night on Lake Michigan...

There's a full moon, a soft breeze coming off the lake, it's one of his favorite spots....

He's always energized in Milwaukee, feels these wild, crazy vibes but doesn't know why...

Suddenly he sees a face in the audience, a face he never saw before because she never had front row seats before... but this time she does.....

His fingers freeze about the strings and for a brief second lightning courses through him...

His breath won't come, his eyes are locked on the face....

of

the

girl

from

his

dreams...............

I was looking at that you have-to-hand-wash me sweater in the sink full of cold water today and I didn't even curse its need for indulgence (Although I can never squeeze enough water out of the damn thing and it takes about seven weeks to dry and every time I glance at it I wish I had my mother's old wringer washer with which she had us kids convinced we would lose one of our arms just by living under the same roof with it).

Winter brings out all the tactile pleasures, doesn't it?

Soft sweaters, the hairy kind.
Kid-skin (sorry Lee! I know, geez that is so bad) gloves.
Mukluks (My kids will not know this word).
The warming house at the ice-rink, throw in some hot chocolate and the way it feels going down although I know you are thinking that's taste but it's not.
Strawberry cream lotion on dried-out -half-a-century -old skin.
Smoothing that well-packed snowball.
Opening a card lined in gold foil.
Burying your head in a pillow filled with goose feathers, about 4 p.m.
Scratching your name on a frost-covered window.
Holding a very old hand, skin paper thin.
Sinking into a steaming bubble bath.
Mint chapstick.
Lips on a crystal champagne glass.
Rubbing your bleary eyes at 6 a.m., not yet ready to focus on a new day.

As I write this mosquitoes buzz around my head, mid-winter.Flood waters breed strange bedfellows for Christmas Eve.

I promise this is the last of my indulgences in a rare and out-of-nowhere poetry binge.

Maybe it came from needing to laugh during a season that can turn on you at a moment's notice.

It is for my Jewish friends that I share the work of Hal Sirowitz, who wrote a book of poems about his mother entitled "Mother Said."

Turns out it's about my mother too, although she wouldn't have thought so.

She swore that dragonflies would sew your eyes shut, bats would nest in your hair and wearing underwear to bed would make you sick.

This book makes a great gift for moms who can laugh at themselves.

Chopped-Off Arm

Don't stick your arm out of the window, Mother said.
Another car can sneak upbehind us, & chop it off.
Then your father will have to stop,
stick the severed piece in the trunk, & drive you to the hospital.
It's not like the parts of your telescope that snap back on.
A doctor will have to sew it.
You won't be able to wear short sleeves.
You won't want anyone to see the stitches.

Damaged Body
Don't swim in the ocean while it's raining, Mother said.
Lighning can hit the water, & you'll be paralyzed.
You don't like to eat vegetables. Imagine having to spend the rest of your life being one
Someone will have to wash you, take you to the bathroom, & feed you.
Children will tease you.
But you may be lucky, & get struck by only a small voltage.
Then you'll be a smart vegetable, like aspargas.
You'll be able to make your bed by yourself -which you don't do now - but people will feel too sorry for you to talk to you.
You may think it'll be fun to vegetate around the house all day. But every time you'll think about yourself, like wouldn't it be nice to eat a chocolate ice cream cone,
the thought will flicker,
& then go out.
;-D

God to Noah:

"I want you to build an Ark..... and when you get that done go out into the world and collect all of the animals in the world by twos, male and female, and put them into the ark."

Noah:

"Right!

"Who is this really?"

Bill Cosby's classic Noah/God schtick

Two days of rain in Fond du Lac created a river in my back yard big enough for me to joke with a friend while on the phone "bring me a boat."

Never mock mother nature when she is in a bad mood.

No sooner had I said those words when I heard a rushing of water, like someone was running a bath.

Should I make a long story short for you, to spare you the horror, or, depending how you feel about me, loud guffaws?

There I was, standing in my basement, armed with a mop and several buckets to catch the water pouring out around a filled-to-the-brim and swelling window well, when, as if in slow motion like a movie, the double window bubbled like a concave lens, then burst.

Mixed with shattered glass spraying in a million pieces was, of course, the river, muddy and rushing with pent-up-relief around me as I ran for higher ground, following the cat who was setting world speed records.

The rest of the story is all detail: summoning the Cavalry; "I'M FREAKING OUT" screamed at five minute intervals throughout the day; watching some guy crotch deep in the freezing river trying to unclog a dam of debri; sucking sounds of hoses; the blast of industrial fans; wondering if the liquor store delivers; drying shoes in the oven (yum, what's cooking, rubber mixed with old feet??) and thinking it would be a good time for an aneurism, right about now and why can't Hugh Laurie be a real doctor?

It's the next day and hell, I'm going Christmas shopping for some hip-waders.

Does anyone know how to shut a cat up?

Funny, real funny. I can't do that.

Because of Colleen and the de-manning of cows debauchle and Jared and his hunting of Bambi I'm sure PETA regularly checks all of our Reporter blogs.

Seriously, my 13-year-old cat

never

shuts

up.

Every stinking one of his waking moments is spent caterwauling, in the real sense of the word.

It's not a nice "meow." That I wouldn't mind.

Quasar "YOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWLS" on the top of his lungs, incessantly, which sometimes isn't loud enough for his own pleasure so he goes in the basement where it echoes and really belts it out.

He's no slouch in the cat world. He hails from a breed called Birman or Sacred Cat of Burma, named Quasar because each birth-year for registered Birmans is assigned a letter of the alphabet. 1993 was "Q."

One year he was awarded the prestigious grand champion win at the Fond du Lac County fair, and thankfully, unlike other grand champions, this was not followed by slaughtering him and entering him in a carcass show.

In retrospect...............


I hate to yell at Quasar because he has such a "Heart of Gold" but I'd finally had enough at 5 a.m. this morning when he was bemoaning some cat fact on the top of his lungs outside my bedroom, emphasizing his point by slipping little paws underneath the crack in the door and pounding his head against it.

(Please don't even suggest I sleep with him. He's also an incessant licker, his raspy little tongue a weapon on the defenseless lips and eyelids of those lost in dreamland)

I leaped out of bed, threw open the door like a banshee*, clapping my hands and hissing through my teeth "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

You guessed it. Bad karma happened and I tripped and fell, sprawled in the pre-dawn hour across the living room floor.

Thankfully, I did not crack my head open, but for a minute I did hear a host of t.s. elliot's literary felines laughing their asses off.


Cesar, I'm begging you, can't you whisper cats too?




* Banshee: Afemale spirit in Gaelic folklore whose wailing warns a family that one of them will soon die

I attended the first, of which many, I'm sure, will follow, 50th birthday party for one of my friends.

Sally and I are soul twins and believe this story:

When God said, "No it's not time yet, don't do it," we thumbed our noses at him, held hands and jumped...into the wrong bodies at the wrong time in the wrong universe.

There's some comfort in this realization, knowing we are strangers in a strange land together.

Rebellion, we learned, gets you somewhere, but will you know where when you get there?

There was much discomfort, however, in realizing how my friends are defining each other at this stage in life:

By physical appearance and the success of their children.

Ease drop on their conversations when asked how so-and-so is doing these days.

"You should see Patty, still a girlish figure. She hasn't gained a pound, weighs what she did in high school......"

"Joe, he's completely bald, and fat, my God, he can hardly walk...."

"Her son will be making $80,000 grand a year. Tall, and so handsome, Yale scholarship...."

"All their children are above average and travel the world...."

"Still smokes like a chimney. They put in a pacemaker you know...."

"All new carpeting, a jacuzzi, it's worth about $80 grand..."

I wanted to say these aren't the things I want to know about my old friends, but remembered this:

"Feasting in mid-winter promotes friendship and strengthens the family if like the sage you can be tolerant enough to let others just be themselves with nothing said." --(Taoist) Lao Fzu

But I was thinking this:


The Invitation

by Oriah Mountain Dreamer (seriously)

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty every day.
And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

Carl Sandburg almost ruined poetry for me for life.

Sorry Carl, you are probably a nice guy, but I still shudder at the thought of being in fourth grade, where each week a poetry radio show was piped in through the public address system.

If you've never heard Carl Sandburg read his poetry, consider yourself lucky.
It was like listening to Eeyore on valium, like Satan heavily sedated.
To a fourth grader, it felt like this show went on for hours, days, decades in which only people with voices deep enough to sing "Rawhide" exist.

I ask teachers if kids today actually read poetry, because mine don't.

"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg ruined it for my son., which I thought odd. Remember, he's the free spirit living a hippie-like lifestyle in Oregon, though I'd like to add a disclaimer: He is in no way one of those "fake, trendy, yuppie-hippies" that seem to cluster in the Pacific Northwest. You can tell them by their Birckenstocks, he points out, versus the Dollar Store tennies wrapped in duct tape.

"What a whiner," he said of Ginsberg on the phone the other night.

This all leads me to the delight I felt listening to Billy Collins read his poetry on Garrison Keilor's Prairie Home companion this week.

Being an iconoclast nothing much makes me laugh out loud.

But Billy does.


The Revenant by Billy Collins

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you--not one bit.
When I licked your face, I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.
I resented the way you moved, your lack of animal grace,
the way you would sit in a chair and eat,
a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.
I would have run away, but I was too weak,
a trick you taught me while I was learning to sit and heel,
and--greatest of insults--shake hands without a hand.
I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.
You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car,
the rubber toys,
disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.
The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you was food
and fresh water in my metal bowls.
While you slept,
I watched you breathe
as the moon rose in the sky.
It took all my strength not to raise my head and howl.
Now I am free of the collar,
the yellow raincoat,
monogrammed sweater,
the absurdity of your lawn,
and that is all you need to know about this place
except what you already supposed
and are glad it did not happen sooner--
that everyone here can read and write,
the dogs in poetry,
the cats and the others in prose.


If you recall Maynard G. Krebs from Dobie Gilles you all should be snapping your fingers right about now. ;-D

I know I've been lax in blogging.

This was the week, that besides work, I had to, let's just say in case there are little eyes peering this way, get some stuff together to ship out to the Pacfic Northwest, where it seems, for some inexplicable reason, most of my remaining family have moved.

There's been a definite westward trend, like pioneers, or cowboys, although we all hate country music, so I just don't get it.

When my grandmother got off the boat at Ellis Island she first worked in Pennsylvania as a maid and cook.

Little generational footsteps walking across America.

Anyway, I'll be back tomorrow.

Meanwhile do get these in your email?

"The old man was glad to have his opinion sustained, and by a local home with the potatomasher or the rolling pin, but when duty called along the trail, they often changed their complexion entirely when Mrs. Her followed, even though it involved the using of unfamiliar cockroaches, primitive - through of fear and horror that day - and I tried phenomenon to life-like quiet of marriage, those cone-shaped ceremonies. Maggie let in the clear light of conscience on them, for even she wrote a lengthy letter to Robert Grant, care of The Imperial and the assembled members expenditure of the tribe and reassured her as best I might; prehistoric stimulus but even to me the future looked on and listened in an artificial a sort of way.

Spam jibberish?

Or pure genius?

I leave it to you.

I think it may be the new poetry of our age.

Move over Jack Keroac, P. Diddy Puff Daddy - here come the new voices of our time.