Author: docthink

no one of consequence

never would i ever

Mary Poppins, who is practically perfect in every way, delivers a perfectly sarcastic slow clap.
Mary Poppins, who is practically perfect in every way, delivers a perfectly sarcastic slow clap.

Never would I ever let my kid accidently fall into a gorilla habitat at the zoo.

  • Because I am always vigilant.
  • Because I don’t get distracted by my other children or someone else’s other children.
  • Because I had just told him to step away from the fence because he might fall in.
  • Because I had just told him that, again.
  • Because I have never seen that impish face where he wants to push the envelope too far, and I didn’t realize just how far that little pea brain would go.
  • Because I’ve never egged him on, saying, “Go ahead and let’s see what happens,” as he was testing me.
  • Because I’ve never assumed that a well-established public place would have the barriers to stop a headlong plunge into a moat, or onto a track or whatever the unspeakable.
  • Because I’ve never looked around and experienced that moment of pure terror when you have no idea where your child is.

Oh wait. I have had my heart drop to my stomach and my blood turn to ice as it coarsed through my wicked veins. I have spent seconds, minutes or days in terror, wondering how I could have been so stupid, how I could have been so neglectful, how I could be so horrible. I have donned the sackcloth of recrimination. I have dropped to my knees asking God, Mary and the universe to help undo my error.

Maybe you don’t know that. Maybe you weren’t in a position to see my failure. Or in a position to judge me as an unacceptable, good-for-nothing parent. And maybe you haven’t, yet, put yourself in a most awfully human crisis.

I’m thankful that a child was kept safe. I’m saddened that an amazing animal was killed to keep that child safe. I’m sorry that the family is being castigated for the death of the innocent, captive gorilla.

I’m not judging, though. There but for the grace of god, go I.

Posted on by docthink 1

Shoe In

A pair of worn out sandals. They were good while they lasted.

It’s summer today. Actually it became summer day before yesterday, but I was in the office that day. This is important because I don’t wear the same apparel during my off time.

I am not a fussy dresser. My working wardrobe palette consists of black, white, blue, red, green and a little khaki. These don’t represent a wide array of colors because there is a single shade of blue (sapphire), a single shade of green (emerald) and a single shade of red (ruby). Makes mixing and matching pretty much redundant. My working wardrobe style is classic. No frills. No lace. No prints. No stripes. I do have two items with polka dots, one black with white and one white with black.

I’m pretty simple on the shoe front, too. My shoes are black. My boots are black. I wear black shoes.

I’m no more fussy with my casual wardrobe, except I really don’t care much about what I wear. There may be a few more colors since there are t-shirts from shows and sweaters from the discount racks. I have a few pairs of jeans for fall and winter and some cropped pants and shorts for spring and summer. Cowboy boots for cold weather and sandals for warm.

This being my first day off of summer I rummaged around for hot weather wear. I had a coffee date at the farmer’s market and the temp was already in the red zone. I dug to the bottom of the other dresser to find a pair of shorts. I rifled through the back of the other drawer to find a tank. I was happy to skip the socks.

That’s when I realized that there were no longer any old summer shoes. You see, I wore them all out.

It’s a little odd that I have no well-worn shoes to start off the summer. I usually have an old pair of sandals and an older pair of sandals and some type of dilapidated slip on sneaker. Any given beginning of summer, I would have at least one of those at my feet.

Not this year, though. I remembered that the older pair of sandals got pitched last summer because I kept turning my ankle when I wore them. The Big Guy made a good case for my safety. This made the old pair of sandals the older pair. Turns out they were a wreck, too, as I discovered when I cleaned out the closet. I put them in the trash to extinguish any impulse to wear them this year. The sneakers had holes in the toes and no treads left. Also deep-sixed.

There were, however, a new pair of sandals. I bought them at the end of last year. I don’t really like them, to be honest. They aren’t very attractive, and they aren’t out of the box comfortable. I didn’t send them back in time so I was stuck with them. I put them in the back of the closet. There were also some new sneakers, purchased three weeks ago. They are attractive, and, I believe in my heart of hearts, they will be well worn and very comfy later this summer. Today, though, they are a bit stiff and rub on the joint of my big toe.

So, here I am, the beginning of summer with only shoes to break in. No old worn shoes to start my season. Poop.

I grabbed my big straw hat with the black ribbon that trails almost to my shoulder and started the work of transforming the new sandals into old sandals. They will be that way for two years before they become the older sandals. I’ll get a new pair to become the old sandals and then I’ll be back on schedule.

Posted on by docthink 0

Mozil-low’s Hierarchy of Needs

Huge sign on the side of the building from mozilla ranking Food Water Shelter The Internet

What should people have? Like all people, just because we are people?

The nice people at Mozilla–the open internet organization that spun off of internet OG Netscape and built Firefox for your browsing pleasure–defines a hierarchy of needs to include food, water, shelter and “the Internet.” Now, one could definitely take this list to task. Like how about access to vaccines and health care? Access to clean air? Access to safety?

I wouldn’t disagree with that criticism, but I saw this huge blue sign hanging off the side of a building and started to unpack this Internet thing. What does it mean? What does it mean to have access to the Internet?

Mozilla says

We believe the Internet is at its best as a global public resource, open and accessible to all.

The tag line says to “keep the internet fair and open.” But this begs what it means to be accessible. Is simply being there enough?  Because in order to actually access the internet–if access means to use versus being passively available–there are a bunch of other things you need.

  1. Like electricity, or some way to generate, transfer and store energy to use to power #2
  2.  A device–a computer or cell phone or other type of tool–that can receive and transmit to #3
  3. You need access to the grid. Even if you can make your own electricity, you need some way to jump on the grid–like wire or satellite or a cellular phone tower–so you can get to that fair and open field.

What happens when you arrive at that fair and open space? Well, literacy is pretty important since much of what’s available has to be read. Even non-text information almost always requires text input to connect to it–either typing in a URL or using a search engine or following a link.

Unpacking the ability to read I get to the ability to see–or hear in some cases. (And if you can’t hear, you damn well better be able to read.)

So, maybe Mozilla is really advocating for universal education, improved infrastructure and accessibility to the devices and the ability to get value out of the devices for everyone.

That’s pretty radical. Because ensuring that the internet is fair and open only to people who have access to the tools of access is neither open nor fair.

Next up, let’s take a closer look at that list of basic needs.

Posted on by docthink 2

Just A Cigar

An attractive box of imported cigar matches. From Cuba.

Was the first cigar you experienced between your lips or between your nostrils? I think it matters.

I was walking to the train and the incense from a cigar wafted past me. I didn’t invite it.

It reminded me of the time I left a happy hour and walked along F Street past Shelly’s Backroom. Shelly’s is a cigar bar.

I don’t know for sure, but given the Barcaloungers lined up outside the storefront window, I wondered if in our no-smoking world you can smoke inside the building, or if you had to smoke in the elements. Even at a cigar bar.

It was a narrow roped off patio. It took up less than half the wide sidewalk. Inside the sanctum were recliners full of men separated by little, low tables that displayed snifters and faceted rocks glasses with various amounts of brown liquors. The subtlety of the whiskeys may or may not have been overcome by the rolled leaves. It would be for me.

Some of the men had their legs splayed out in front of them as their heads were cradled by the high back of the chair, their stogies pointed north north east from their faces. They would look quizzically, with slightly squinted eyes, at the cigar while rolling it between their thumb and forefinger as they exhaled a plume of smoke. Other men sat forward with their elbows on their knees, the cigar in their left hand as they reached for the scotch with their right. These men were talking. The men leaning back were listening, or appeared to be.

It was a delicious night out for them. Domestication and requirements of good health be damned. I think they were mostly enjoying themselves in a peacock kind of way. They thought that they were badasses, too. They would never admit it, but it was true.

As I passed, I didn’t hold my breath so I took in the ashy, pungent and sickly smell of cigar. My memories were triggered. I could only think of one thing. Old men.

Old men from the neighborhood. My friends’ grandfathers and their Uncle Vitos and a stray neighbor with a brown beer bottle wearing a sweat-stained, saggy, v-neck undershirt after he mowed his lawn. None of these men drew me in. Indeed, they repelled me. And looking at the men on the sidewalk with their wingtips and hip striped socks, with their suit jackets abandoned and their ties slightly loosened, and puffing big white clouds all I could think was gross Old Men.

So not attractive. I walked a little faster. Away.

Posted on by docthink 0

Summer Is Coming

Dear lord, can't you smell the honeysuckle?!

We have been devoid of Spring. It has not come. It has forsaken us.

Now, it is late May, the trees are in full leaf. As if we had had Spring. But we did not.

Spring comes in small signs and then big gestures. And we have not had that progression. No. We have not.

It is supposed to be portended by the sharp points of the crocus leaves that deliver purple and white blooms in late January or early February and followed immediately by the yellow stars of the forsythia. These flowers bring joy when they disdain the snow and show themselves through the icy crystals. This did not happen.

Instead we had all of the flowers, the crocus, the forsythia, the cherries, the tulips, the daffodils and, even, the iris present themselves all at once and out of order at once. The buds were baffled by the long, rainy and mostly cold time during and after winter, inclusive of the time that we would call Spring.

There have been only four days this month without rain. I didn’t believe it either. I counted. Row by row I counted. And I remembered each cold damp day this month. And unlike any other May that I have seen in Washington, D.C., the temperature did not meet 80°F until yesterday. No. It did not.

There are only five days until the official beginning of summer; Memorial Day when you can fashionably wear white shoes–as if you would, but at least you could.

So tonite as I strolled up and down the street, with The Beast mostly in tow (yes, he tried to tow me, but I was having none of it), I was restored.

I had retrieved him from his hut and swapped my shoes from the sling backs to the sneakers. That damn dog has pulled me out of many a sling back, I tell you.

I didn’t grab an umbrella or don a raincoat or even snuggle into a hoodie for that matter because the night was unusually, albeit appropriate to the calendar, warm. As we ambled, the air was without bite, the hairs on my arms were not called to warm. And then. And then. And then.

There was the perfume of the honeysuckle that filled the entire block, maybe the entire street and perhaps, even, the entire city. It was that big. It was spicy, and sweet and actually radiated warmth, not just in my nose, but on my cheeks and on my forehead and on the exposed backs of my hands and on my knees and my ankles.

It was all of Spring, all that we missed for the past ten weeks, undiluted and concentrated in this fraction of an hour. It was so redolent and so encompassing that I feel that Spring was not stolen from me this year. It just arrived. All at once, in one breath. Yes, it did.

Posted on by docthink 0

Bone-weary and Bleary

A slinky (TM)

I am tired in my whole self. My whole, entire self.

My feet are so tired. I can feel every bone and bonelette in them. The bone along the outside, those fifth metatarsals, feels almost twisted. They aren’t. My toes are tired-sore in a way that they are almost sighing. My shoes were cute and comfortable today, but the feet could only take so much. The balls of my feet are piqued and a little numb on the outside.

My shins feel tired, too. I think it was from standing, but the thin coating on the outside of the bone, is it a skinny muscle? I don’t really know anatomy. Anyway the shin wants a massage and a nap.

My knees are pulled up on the couch so my legs can rest. Where my legs connect to my torso in the back, also known as my ass, is droopy and a bit haggard. I am slouched down on the couch and I don’t care. My shoulders are pressing into the back of the seat, their sharp angles cutting the slipcover to shreds.

The space between my shoulders, at the base of my neck, feels like a crooked slinky. You know how a metal slinky gets a crimp in it and then it’s not right? It will slink back and forth okay, but won’t flip down the stairs?  That.

My earlobes are tired. Seriously. They feel like they are almost pulling away from my head. They feel heavy and my left ear has given up on the day in total exhaustion. The skin around the outside of my face is done. It’s hard to smile, to pick up those corners of my mouth and pull the skin back from my eyes as they squinch up. Squinching is a huge effort.

My head, and that which is inside of it, is like I had two Pacificos to accompany the chicken with green mole. Those beers have accelerated the turn of the tilt wand, slowly and inexorably blocking out the day. My brain is so tired that when the atrocious word, inexorably, presented itself it allowed my lazy fingers to type it. We hate that word, but I have no energy to block it today. Apologies.

I am going to drag myself to the sink, forcing one foot in front of the next and, like the slinky, using that energy to pull the lagging foot up and ahead. I need to brush my teeth, even though my ivories are sapped of energy, too. There is only one cure for this tired of the whole. You know. I have to make it so and put this tired to rest.

Posted on by docthink 0

Morning Mist

When she breaks the dream mirror with her dreaming brain in Inception.

I dreamed about Hillary Clinton in one of those in between the snooze alarms hazy dream sequences. It was one of those dreams you remember because you were just awake and then almost awake but only in your head.

I was someplace doing something. Oh, now I remember. It was at my mother-in-law’s. The new puppy my spouse brought home just peed on the treadmill. As I was cleaning it up, the house suddenly–but without surprise–morphed into some kind of market. Someone was asking me a question, and it turned out on closer inspection (or maybe a dream-swap) to be Madame Secretary herself.

I found myself walking with her through the market. She stopped when she saw a stroller. She asked me how old the baby was. I immediately went into staffing mode to find out. I was struck, however, that Clinton was by herself. I wondered about her absent entourage. She didn’t appear to have any helpers or handlers or protectors. Perhaps the crevices of my mind were a safe space for the candidate.

I moved the stroller canopy up. There were two babies in the stroller. The babe in the front was maybe 15-18 months old. I saw another set of little hands around his waist. The baby was in the other baby’s lap. I looked up and saw the mom. And the dad. And maybe a friend of theirs.

At first I couldn’t tell  if they recognized Clinton. Hillary gave the mom a pen that had appeared in her hand. It seemed like she was giving the woman a pen so the woman could request an autograph. She asked about the family. The woman looked off-balance and a bit overwhelmed, but said “Thank you.” I don’t know what for.

There was a deli in the market. As people surrounded us, someone in a white apron walked up. Clinton ordered a serrano ham and manchego sandwich. The deli person offered something different, maybe their speciality? Clinton crisply repeated her order. I thought it was a cool sandwich to ask for and wished that I was as well travelled and versed as Madame Secretary.

As I got jostled in the crowd, I lost Clinton. I returned to my search for the puppy urine cleanup solution. I walked out of the market and spied our car with its trunk wide open. It wasn’t actually our car, but in the dream it was.

Some teenagers were taking the beer out of the trunk. Other people were looking in the trunk for goodies they could nab. I shooed them away, retrieved my stuff and locked the car. The car was pulled up next to a motel. There was a couch that appeared on a porch that materialized. I sat down. The mother of the beer stealers sat next to me. She was watching TV. The TV was inside a room just off the porch.

I realized that my sweater was on wrong. I saw the beer stealing teenagers around the side of the porch. They glowered at me. They saw their mom and, like a switch, sat down and became friendly, in that sweet way that young people can be curious and engaging.

Someone else asked me about the puppy who I now saw. He had been sleeping next to The Beast in this other unknown space.

The alarm sang again, interrupting the dream. I cleared the madness away, stretched my arms above my head, swung my legs over the side of the bed and started my day.

What a disjointed set of thoughts, I thought. I don’t think that they mean a thing.

Posted on by docthink 0

Shell Game

Oysters, and a few clams i the back.

Oysters are of the sea. Of the rough and tumble sandy, rocky, salty sea. Of dark skies and storms that cold boil brackish water.

The chassis of an oyster tell you that they mean business. They are not the perfectly ridged, delicate, ombré fan of the scallop. They are not the smooth, radial, accreted ridges of a clam shell.

No. Oysters look like street fighters, with a rock hard face that has been pummeled into a misshapen mass of cartilage and bone, awkwardly swollen and of many colors. Not all of them, or maybe none of them, a color of health.

It dares you to open it. It is the door to the witch’s house that you step back from because nothing good can be in there.

What a liar.

When I tip the half shell into my mouth and the oyster sides onto my tongue, my brain hears phantom calls of gulls. I almost look up, to squint into the sun, or to push my face into cold sea spray on a clouded day to see big gray or white big birds challenging me for that briny bite.

I taste the entire ocean, thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, concentrated in a chewy drop of sweet saline. If they are shucked poorly, I will bite into bits of its shells. I roll the shale to the side of my mouth and pull out the nature.

When they are shucked well, and adorned with a squeeze of lemon and a spritz of sweet-sour-peppery mignonette they are still of the wild sea. Because that is what they are.

Of the sea.

Posted on by docthink 2

Who Tells Your Story

Preface to the new edition of a history of the US written by former Princeton and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He was a bigot, too.

I was driving back from the Italian specialty store. They have fabulous capicola and even more fabulosa salami. I bought a bottle of wine for dinner. Oddly I selected Spanish, not Italian.

I had one more stop to make before home. The “you’re almost out of gas you idiot” indicator appeared as I pulled into the parking spot at my earlier destination where I bought a bag of dog food. The Shell station was next.

As I was pulling out of the parking space, I flipped the radio station from the droning trance music. Who knew they played trance on commercial radio? I settled on the left side of the dial. I was sucked in by an intoxicating southern timbre.

A man was talking about historical preservation and public reckoning, but his story was about an old building that was being preserved. The preservation was wrong. You see, the preservationists had confused the front of the house with the back of the house. And, more importantly, they omitted any context for the structure. This was discovered and then reconciled by research that consisted of talking with the people who had actually lived there.

The historian learned that the story about the house that the museum was sharing–the history–was not just incomplete. It told a story different from the truth of the people who were there.

The history hewed to a narrative that supported the dominant culture. It supported the idea that the people who lived there were broken and weak. But the truth was that the people who lived there were strong, with tight families and decent means.

Dr. King said, “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” So the history that we are told makes the people in our heads. It informs not only how we see the people in the past, but how we see their descendants.

It’s important (at least I think it is) to not only seek and share multiple perspectives, but also–and this is from the historian on the radio–to allow ourselves to be surprised. Surprised by what we find, what we learn and to let it challenge what we have believed and what we thought was truth.

Striving to understand people, to accept that their truths may be different, and even that their truth (or my truth, for that matter) might actually be the truth can help align what history makes us with who we actually are.

Wow. That’s a lot of thinking between the salami store and the gas station. If this symposium snippet on c-span was any indication, the new National Museum of African American History and Culture will be a place with a surfeit of surprise. I am open to it. You?

Posted on by docthink 0

Unfashionably Late

General Ambrose Burnside. Better remembered for his facial hair than being a general. Not remembered for a mullet.

You should know something about mullets.

You know what I’m talking about. A mullet. It’s a haircut or a “hairstyle,” when the hair is cut short in the front and on the sides but left long in the back. Long can be anywhere from just brushing your shoulders to maybe a quarter down your back.

Wait. Let me show you.

A mullet. When people thought they looked good. And people watched that stupid show, "Full House."
This is definitely a mullet. He thinks he looks good.
It could be longer than mid-back, I guess, but that might actually be a different hairdo. This style is infamously worn by that county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses, which is part of her job by the way, because she disagreed with the law on who can marry who. Not to be mean, but her hair made me think that she might be behind the times in more than one way. Even though it’s men who usually sport the mullet.

Anyway, the thing you need to know about mullets?

They used to be considered high fashion. MacGyver, the character who could make a fission bomb with a Doublemint gum wrapper, a paper clip, some volatile salt that he scraped off of a barnacle then using his infamous Swiss Army knife as a flint to spark the nylon string (had to be a petroleum based string) from his windbreaker on fire to launch the bomblette. Yes, him. He wore a mullet and still got the ladies–despite being a notorious science nerd. Actually, he had mad swagger for a science nerd.

The Arnold’s boy wore one. I remember seeing mullet shots when his dad was the Govinator of Cal-ee-forn-eye-yay. I wondered if he chose that look for himself. Maybe his parents did, but I somehow couldn’t imagine Maria giving it the nod. He wore it in the days before the family was caught in the maelstrom of the old man’s tawdry scandal. I wonder if Arnold’s love child had a mullet, too. I didn’t wonder before now.

Back to the style.

In it’s day, it was quite the look. Chuck Norris rocked the short on top, tresses in back. Tennis star Andre Agassi had quite the fetching mullet, his locks tamed by a headband as he returned every serve for eight Grand Slams.

You need more? Google “mullet” and “Mel Gibson” (he was YOUNG!), “mullet” and “Charlie Sheen.” Try Brad Pitt, too. Don’t forget the famous mullets of David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Lionel Richie and Paul McCartney. Patrick Swayze and Kurt Russell had leading men mullets. I almost forgot George Clooney. Yes, Clooney, too.

Then there was this.

Wow. Just wow, bono with your mullet. And that frock coat.
In the name of love, Bono, what are you thinking?
The mullet came under disrepute over the years. To be honest, I don’t think it was in repute for very long. People still wear them occasionally, but it’s become a shorthand for being unfashionable and unsophisticated. In the movie Joe Dirt, the loser title character “is a janitor with a mullet hairdo, acid-washed jeans and a dream…” according to Sony Pictures. The mullet defines the anti-hero.

But here’s my point. You don’t want your wedding pictures to show you in a mullet. Wedding pics don’t go away. When the album gets pulled out, everyone laughs. At you. Your wife insists on hanging the portrait prominently despite your apparent lack of style because over the years she feels she never looked better. Your grandkids may only know you by your mullet from this forever photo from the old days. You’re stuck with that mullet. Forever. Like General Sideburns. Without the naming rights.

And you guys sporting those long, luxurious hipster beards that you treat with oils and a special tool set? Take heed. You’re next.

Posted on by docthink 0