With all that’s been going on here, I felt like I had to take time to do something creative. And so I collected some photos (see ART@CHC) from the past couple of decades that reflect an unusual interest of mine, namely locks, latches and closures. Enjoy, be safe.
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I don’t understand how fascism, cultism, hate, prejudice and division is UP FOR A VOTE in America in two weeks — and that the outcome is up in the air!
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We are in the clean-up stages of navigating the worst natural disaster (and we thought that ice storms were bad) of our 70-plus years. But our situation was mild compared to that of others in the Asheville area: yes, we lost power, data and communications for 16 days and drinking water for 21 days and counting, but our north-side-of-the-mountain location was spared the worst of the storm.
The day Helene blew through (after we already had 12-15 inches of rain), I looked out our living room windows and thought, I’ve seen worse. That was the day before the day after, when we drove through the neighborhood on the windward side of our mountain only to run straight into the devastation and then struggle to back our way out of it.
We had no property damage ourselves other than a boatload of refrigerator/freezer items and some rainwater that leaked through a poorly-caulked window. We were fortunate that our son found us a gas station where we could tank up and leave town, and that he and his family put us up (and put up with us!) in their Virginia home for 17 days until the City of Asheville was finally able to restore a semblance of water service.
Now we are back home, cleaning out our fridges, waiting for our water to run clear and looking forward to one day cooking with it and drinking it again. The authorities claim that we can run our dishwasher on its high-temperature setting, and so we did — and my wife says our glassware and plates looked okay. If this happens to be my last blog post, you will know that the authorities and my wife were wrong.
I originally thought I would forego taking showers until we had crystal-clear water, but the prospect of going to the YMCA… no thank you. These days, you never know when you might run into Donald Trump in a public shower, sizing you up so to speak as the subject of his next genitalia story.
As it happens, Trump himself was here in Asheville yesterday, repeating the rumors that “FEMA has done a very poor job.” I had to make a wide circle around the Trump-created traffic jam to visit the FEMA water tanker at the local Baptist church, where I filled several jugs for our neighbor and ourselves. Trump would rather serve bullshit to Western North Carolina than drinking water.
Clearing the sediment in the reservoir so that the water can be treated seems to be a bigger challenge than the City anticipated. I assume we will be on a boil-water notice for several more weeks, well past Election Day. The tragic part is, Trump sees all this and yet follows his basest instincts, turning our situation into yet another anti-government talking point so that he can get re-elected.
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We don’t need another disaster — we need to vote against the undisciplined, unprincipled, unhinged reality-show provocateur called Trump. How can it be that this is even close? You can prevent the next storm by voting blue on November 5. I approve this message because things are chaotic enough for everyone already.
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• I am surely not the first casual tennis fan to note that the score 30-30 (two points apiece) is situationally equivalent to the score 40-40 (three points apiece) — in both cases, a player who scores consecutive points wins the game. But whereas the score 40-40 is called deuce, 30-30 has no special name despite its status. I suggest they call 30-30 Prince Harry.
• A haunting memory of mine involves my navigating the dark and eerily-quiet hallways of Kodak’s film manufacturing building, which were illuminated by the palest of pale-green baseboard fixtures. The zigs and zags of the hallways were such that, practically speaking, one had to memorize turns and count doorways to find your lab. The rooms had numbers but they were visible only if you held your dim flashlight up to the door.
The reason I mention this is that my present-day dreams too often involve my wandering those creepy hallways, or some other barren and crumbling version of Kodak Park, trying to find my way back to wherever I parked my car so I get can get home.
I’m 71 and I left Kodak 20 years ago. Why the hell can’t I just dream about picking grapes and playing softball?
• In that light: A topic worthy of study might be, what kind of life should one lead — and what experiences should one try to avoid — in order to have pleasant dreams in later life, or is that an impossible ask? A similar study might establish whether having unpleasant dreams is associated with less healthy lives, more stress and/or shorter lifespans. If you’re the kind of person who wants answers to such questions, you might check out The Dream Library Foundation of Portland, Oregon (no shit), not that I buy what they’re selling.
• Fellow word mavens, please describe the formation rule for this list: abracadabra, babble, coccic, diddled, effervescence, feoff, gagging, hashish, indivisibility, juju, knickknack, loblolly, mammogram, nonwinning, octoroon, poppy, quinquennia, referrer, stresslessness, tattiest, unununium, vulvovaginitis, williwaw, xerox, yay, zzz. Answer below.
• Ready for an old-man-shakes-fist-at-clouds item? This one’s about the rock band called the Butthole Surfers, and I regret even typing that. This Texas band was founded by Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary in the 1980s and was still active as of 2020.
Per Wikipedia, Haynes “would often strip throughout a show until he was down to his underwear, or less, by the end. At other times he would hide condoms full of stage blood in his clothes and repeatedly fall to the floor, appearing to bleed profusely.”
“In 1981, Haynes and Trinity classmate Leary published the magazine Strange V.D., which featured photos of abnormal medical ailments, coupled with fictitious, humorous explanations for the diseases.” Humorous or humerus, not sure which applies here.
The Guardian recently weighed in on the Butthole Surfers: “Given they were more akin to a travelling freak show than a band, with live shows that often devolved into riots, their greatest achievement may be surviving – not just as a band, but actually staying alive.”
What a world. With a nod to Rodney Dangerfield, I just don’t get “no respect.”
• Taxes. Some people hate, I mean HATE, the idea of paying taxes, even though taxes fund our defense, schools, roads, air traffic control, etc. If you ask tax-hating Americans why they object to paying taxes, they rarely mention defense or schools or waste — instead, their anger is directed toward free-riders, the people (invariably of different color and/or culture) they believe are getting something for nothing at their expense.
I might forgive those of meager means to question whether others are getting more from their taxes, except that the loudest complaints always come from America’s millionaire and billionaire class, amplified a thousand times by the likes of the Wall Street Journal and Fox Business News.
In today’s United States, being anti-tax is not a high principle but a fetish inherited from puritanical privilege and indulged in mostly by the people who can most afford to pay.
• The formation rule for the word list presented earlier: the shortest word that starts with the letter x and has the most instances of the letter x, where x is the letter of interest.
• Consider the photo below, which I took a while back in a Cincinnati, Ohio, bar and grill:
Opinion: What Elvis song is being sung over the urinal?
(a) All Shook Up
(b) Burning Love
(c) Kentucky Rain
• It’s depressing to me that the likes of Elon Musk, J. D. Vance and other wing-nuts with a burn-the-place-down and blame-others attitude are going to outlive me. I tell myself that my children will somehow manage these bizarre and scary times, and that the bizarre and scary people fomenting the chaos will sooner or later be treated as the crackpots they are. I fear however that Pandora’s Box is open and there’s no going back. Your time will tell.
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