Author: docthink

no one of consequence

Straight Flush

I came in the house and cast my glance at the 12-year old. I was struck by how he looked.

Me: Hey, are you in love?

Him: (emphatically) NO!

He turned and looked intently and earnestly into my eyes. And man-oh-man, were his eyes green.

Me: Really. Your eyes are so green.

Him: They always are. (with a curious look.)

Me; It’s like, like you are almost like, like glowing. Like not like you played alot of basketball. But you look different.

He tilted his head a bit away from me. And, man-oh-man, he looked like a gazillion bucks. Like he owned the world. But not like he just earned the world. Like it was always his. And that it would always be.

Him: (laughing) Well, I’m not in love.

But, man-oh-man, I am. With him!

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The Trials of Mister Stinky Man

The 15-year-old regaled me with the tale of Mister Stinky Man.

MSM gets on the public metro bus about 1/2 way during the commute. And from his “name” you have probably guessed that he smells not so good. For a bunch of high-school guys, many of whom are only too aware of their personal hygiene, this is troubling. And a source of entertainment.

The 15-year-old: We see him at his stop. And then all the boys from my school run to the windows and open them up. We stick our faces out. Man, he smells bad.

Me: Hmmmm…

The 15-year-old: We NEED to. He really smells bad. Like really bad.

Me: Like piss?

The 15-year-old: Like stink.

Me: Is he in ragged clothes? Is he a bum?

The 15-year-old: No. He just stinks. He puts newspaper down on the seat before he sits down, he stinks so bad.

Me: Hunh. So he knows he stinks. Do you think that he can’t help it?

The 15-year-old pauses. He is thinking.

The next day he missed the morning bus. Had an appointment. On the way home from practice…

The 15-year-old: I was glad I wasn’t on the bus this morning.

Me: The Stinky Man?

The 15-year-old: Some stupid freshman decided to throw a bar of soap at him. And sprayed him with Right Guard.

Me: That’s just wrong.

The 15-year-old took a different route this morning. He didn’t want to be associated with the stupid freshman. He saw one of his classmates on the alternative route. He, too, wasn’t pleased with the action of the underclassman. They thought that he didn’t represent.

The 15-year-old: There is a line. The kid definitely crossed it.

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LonelyTruth15

I caught wind of Lonelygirl15 just a day or two before her story broke. What appeared to be a teen’s self-produced video blog is instead a joke, a hoax, a movie teaser, a conspiracy, and/or an occult recruitment ploy.

Some people are mad, but many “fans” of the “show” say they don’t care if it’s real or not. They are entertained.

Doc-u-drama’s were also big this week. ABC’s miniseries, The Path to 9/11, drew critics and calls for censorship. The argument? Stuff wasn’t true. The defense? It’s a dramatization. The worry? Folks would take as historical fact dramatic embellishments and compressions. To make the show more exciting characters (with the names of the real people) are composites of many people and their actions. And some events are embellished or happen out of sequence. Stuff that made some people look worse than they were. Some stuff that might have made other people–characters??–look better than they were.

It’s a show. So lots of people say it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. It’s entertainment.

What about the biggest entertainment here in D.C.? Politics. The past weeks have had very dramatic revelations by President Bush. About what we have learned from “high-value” detainees. About why we are at war with Iraq. And the continuing on-again, off-again linking of al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein.

Does the truth matter? Or is it all just a show where either truth or fiction are legitimate jumping-off points for the next episode.

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Talk Therapy

I am getting confused over the word anniversary. So I had to look it up to try and figure out why. And it worked.

aniversary

  1. The annually recurring date of a past event, especially one of historical, national, or personal importance: a wedding anniversary; the anniversary of the founding of Rome.
  2. A celebration commemorating such a date.
    American Heritage Dictionary

I usually think of anniversaries in the second definition. The celebration part, especially. So talking about the 5th “anniversary” of the attacks on 9-11 seemed a bit odd.

And talking is alot of what I have found myself and others doing. Maybe this is a D.C./New York thing, but folks that I know have been pouring out what they were doing on that day. Where they were when they heard. Reliving the clutched stomachs of seeing the second tower crumble on live TV. Calls and emails trying to track people down.

In some ways, the memories seem more vivid this year than on past “anniversaries”of this bad day. The parade of others’ memories on TV, radio, Web and print do not cut any less deep. I can be back on September 11, 12, 13, 2001 in less then a second. Fighting back tears and still not understanding it. I don’t know that I ever will.

Posted on by docthink 1

1st Gear

Maybe this is one where you really had to be there. I thought it was hysterical. The 15-year-old was a bit concerned, though.

We were driving back from football practice–me and the 15-year old in the Subaru, about 1/2 mile from home. A very bright yellow car passed us on the left. There was something about the rumble that made me look up and see the Ferrari horse rearing on the back of the car. Like this, only yellow.

I met my foe at the light and quickly assessed the competition. The passenger, some short 30-something guy. Bad hair cut. The driver was much better put together. I could see his cufflinks glint against the steering wheel. MUCH better haircut. A weasel-ly moustache, though.

The light turned and I gunned the Subaru through her paces. That Ferrari ate my 4 cylinder dust. I cackled maniacally. The yellow car met me at the next light.

“So, you think that was funny?”

The 15-year-old raised his eyebrows in warning to me.

“Hey, let’s face it,” said I. “It WAS funny.” The 15-year-old coughed his concern. “I’m from Detroit,” I continued. “We used to race from the lights all the time.” The guy was pissed. I was crying, My laughing was out of control.

The 15-year-old was flashing yellow. I revved the engine. My foe did so, too. About 6 octaves lower than mine. I revved back. The light changed, and I immediately lost my place on the gears. The canary car was long down Michigan Avenue.

Me, still in hysterics, fumbled my way to second (or third?) gear. The smell of burning clutch was everywhere.

But I did beat the Ferrari. At least once.

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Why Didn’t They Leave

Blowing out with the remnants of the once and future Hurricane Ernesto, was this week’s “Katrina-fest.” Amid the 20 ga-zillion stories [a Google News search pulls 56,000 Web stories this week. and that doesn’t include radio and TV like the CNN-FOX-MSNBC gaggle] was alot of talk about people who didn’t evacuate. Folks left behind. And some commentators, around the water-cooler for example, blame the people who stayed. That doesn’t seem right, though. Let’s think about why some people stayed.

Well, some people didn’t have a place to go–cost of going someplace, wherewithal. Frankly, I could easily pack up the kids, dog and spouse and head off with a credit card to the Holiday Inn.

Some people didn’t have a way to get there. There were problems with public transportation, no transportation. Again, me and my VISA resolves all such issues.

But here’s an obvious thing that hasn’t gotten much attention. Some people didn’t believe it would actually happen. “It” being the worst case scenario.

“Well,” you say, “some people are just stupid.”

I say, then, most of us are stupid.

How many of you think that you will in a car accident on your way to work tomorrow? As you are fiddling with your coffee in one hand, changing radio stations, shaving, putting on makeup, talking on your phone, reading your Blackberry while you drive?

Here’s another one. How many are actually prepared for a disaster? Have fresh water for 3 days, food stuff, family emergency plan. Time Magazine reports that only 16%–yup like less than 2 houses on my block–are “well prepared” for an emergency. These are post-Katrina numbers.

Who wants to think about bad things? Who wants to take their minds to the place where the unthinkable happens. OF COURSE, we want to keep our families safe. But we can’t stand to imagine the worst case. So we do our personal risk management assessment and figure, it’s highly unlikely to happen to me.

Folks that didn’t leave New Orleans couldn’t believe that the worst would happen. They aren’t stupid. They are just human. It hurts too much to be prepared.

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President Thinks Gas Is Funny

ALERT: I am really not making this up. This was actually published in U.S. News and World Report, written by Paul Bedard and posted August 20, 2006.

Animal House in the West Wing

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we’re learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he’s still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

Now, I am far from above a good poopie joke. And a well placed fart is always good for a laugh. And I don’t hold it against the President that he has a sense of humor similar to mine–that of a nine-year old boy. But you think that he would feel that he could control it in front of women, or even heads of state during a G-8 meeting.

I wonder, though, if Condi can burp the A, B, C’s.

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The Party’s Over

Yes, that party known as SUMMER VACATION is coming to an abrupt end. The 14-year-old will need to get up at the butt-crack of dawn. This may be the first time that he has seen a morning hour since June 3rd. Except for when we drove all night to make the early ferry to the beach. He mostly slept on the way.

The 12-year-old* has one more day, but, frankly, it’s over for him, too. He is furiously printing out his summer reading assignment. Turns out he needed 5X8 index cards for this assignment. At least that’s what he said. The summer reading info was misplaced sometime at the beginning of summer, so I have to go with his story.

The really good news is that we were able to find all the clean uniforms that were put away a 11 or 12 weeks ago. Well, some pieces were replaced, but others were found, still clean. Sometimes clean clothes that have been put away become less put away. And then they have to be rewashed. We are still, however, without the bucs for the 14-year-old. His size 13’s are backordered. He claims he can wear sneakers until they arrive. Again, I have to go with his story.

So the party’s over for this year. And a New Year starts.

* Don’t get confused. He was the 11-year-old two weeks back. See Naming Convention. I can’t help it if I worry about you, Loyal Reader! Also, I must admit that I originally typed “11-year-old.” He was looking over my shoulder and promptly corrected my big error.

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Gutenberg Fallout

The printing press begot newspapers, posters and novels.

The World Wide Web begot blogs, photos and video to a broad audience.

The printing press, after a few hundred years, brought information to the masses. It took the Web just a few short years to proliferate into ga-zillions of pages and millions of viewers.

Today, I am thinking about the results of the latter proliferation. If everyone can contribute, and contribution is almost free (I recognize that there are costs for cameras, computers, and connectivity, but this is a relatively low barrier. Do you know how much it costs to print and distribute a book!??!), is there any value? Is there value when something is cheap and easily available? Would this entry have more value in China, where it would be harder to get to? Are we all diminishing the value of the web by posting every piece of junk we can think of?

And in this democratization of information, is there a risk that with so much information, so many voices, such a proliferation of choices we will turn to a few standard sources?

Well, not if you’re from high-school to post-grad. Ask Tom.

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