• We have a loud, eleven-year-old dishwasher. We call it Moaner. I keep asking Moaner to use its “inside voice” when it’s running, but it just blankly returns my stare and grinds its teeth, like all adolescents do.
• My favorite quote? Undoubtedly a double quote, where the opening quotes curl inward toward the quoted material and the closing quotes also curl inward, except that the tails of the closing quotes are at the bottom. That’s my favorite quote — thanks for asking.
• If I were walking down the street and someone called “Young Man!”, I would probably turn around, even though I am no longer a member of that category. Of course, I would also turn around if someone said “Old Man!” but no one except troublemakers say that these days. Besides, I would go home much less happy.
• Woody Allen is a talented writer and director, as if I needed to point that out. But his world is so limited. He seems to be fascinated by, and populates his scripts with, gossippy self-absorbed cosmopolitans who are hard to care about. I liked him better when he was just a mensch.
• Someone near and dear to me in our household asked me to buy a bottle of Crema de Mezcal for a drink recipe. Now, I have enjoyed many an apertif over the years, but this was like someone collected the discharge of the pipeline Andy Dufresne crawled through in Shawshank Redemption, then poured it over a bed of rotten quinoa, whose drippings were distilled ten minutes with a propane torch and then pumped into the air-conditioning system of a 1981 Buick Skylark, which was then driven 2,000 miles through the Ozarks (until the radiator cap blew off) before being filtered through four-day-old gym socks and hand-squeezed into a bowl of dead goldfish.
• Just in case anyone didn’t get the message, you are welcome to what’s left of my bottle of Crema de Mezcal. It’s nearly full. Email me or leave a comment.
• I keep waiting for someone named Cornelius Horatio Collins to become famous. He will soon realize that no one spells Cornelius right the first time, and this will induce him to knock on my internet door and ask me to sell him the rights to my domain, chcollins.com. Cornelius will say, I am sure we can come up with a price. I will say, add a few zeroes and we can start hypertexting over the protocol.
• I am a determinedly non-vocal participant. I only mouth hymns in church and I would never chant om in a yoga class. At dinner parties, of which luckily there are few, I occupy my lips with wine not words. Those who share my affliction are often called introverts, from the Latin for turned toward oneself. But a better term for people like me might be introvocative, or talking to oneself. And this blog fits the description.
• It is much easier to tune out of a bad movie on television than it is to walk out on one that you paid to watch. I have walked out on two movies in my lifetime: Trash by Andy Warhol (1970) which we saw in a theater in Shadyside (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, and 200 Motels by Frank Zappa (1971) which was being shown at a drive-in near Wampum, Pennsylvania. Strictly speaking, the latter was a drive-out, not a walk-out.
• It is also much easier to flip the channel on an annoying television evangelist than it is to walk out of a church service — but we have done that also. (Like good Presbyterians, we waited to leave until the congregation stood for the next hymn.) I would be interested to hear the walk-out stories of my readers, if anyone would care to comment.
The United States is on the eve of completing a process that had its beginnings years and years ago. No, I am not referring to the election of its first female President. I am talking about the process of separating a melting-pot culture with a patchy purplish hue into its stark and clashing colors of red and blue.
In the world of physics, this would be characterized as an entropy-reducing process. The usual analogy for such a process is arranging the balls that are scattered over a pool table so that the striped balls are lined up on one side and the solid balls on the opposite side. That is pretty close to what has taken place in our nation over recent decades.
Such a process just doesn’t happen by itself. That would be breaking the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law says that it takes energy to decrease the entropy of a system. Your refrigerator gets cold inside because of the energy that runs its compressor. Likewise, the process of separating us into camps of red and blue over the years has taken energy, lots of it. The energy comes from demagogue radio talk show hosts who profit by maintaining and appeasing devoted hard-core audiences. It comes from politicians whose main goal is to stay in power — and who better to enlist for that goal than rabid followers? And it comes from corporations and other rich donors who fuel the process with money, without which none of the above takes place.
So, it’s not Clinton vs. Trump tomorrow, not really. It is those who would solve problems vs. those who would gain from conflict and division. Regardless of the election outcome, the forces that separate us today will continue to do so tomorrow. This is because of the many who have something to gain from our polarization, people with money and energy to pump into our system, to make us cold and hostile to each other. Those people know their way around the Second Law.
The answer, at least my answer, is to remain civil and rational. Try not to pick fights with friends, family or Facebookers. Save your most passionate words for the occasions when you are “speaking to your choir.” Be as critical of the leaders and positions of your own political persuasion as you are of others. Don’t just argue about or advocate for specific candidates, as candidates come and go (mostly go). Instead, voice your expectations of how the political process should work and how the business of running the nation should be conducted. Voice it to your friends. Voice it to your representatives.
Unless we think of ourselves as a purple people again, not red or blue, we can’t expect our politicians to treat us differently. We have work to do tomorrow and many days after to bridge the divide that powerful interests invested so much energy in creating.