Ah, New Year’s Day, when we eat collards and black-eyed peas and look forward to changing ourselves for the better, vowing to practice mindfulness so that the all too ephemeral array of everyday wonders doesn’t flash by unheeded.
Alas, however, our resolutions, more often than not, succumb to the deadly weight of habit as we, distracted by the morning news, fail to appreciate the taste of our buttery toast.
Although I’m not a fan of HD Thoreau (too smug, too self-righteous, too puritanical), he does have somewhat of a point here:
“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, – we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad of instances and applications?”
New Year’s Resolution #1: Don’t read the paper or doom scroll while eating.[1]
On the other hand, you do want to be somewhat cognizant of what’s going on in the world, to base whom you’re voting for on something more concrete than “it’s time for a change” or “the price of avocados has gone through the roof.” Democracy depends on an informed citizenry and all that jazz.
I recall a Mad Magazine parody of the Fifties sitcom Ozzie and Harriet where Harriet, not wanting to upset husband Ozzie, had cut out unpleasant news stories from the paper, which resulted in his booking the family’s vacation in the civil war torn Dominican Republic, the contemporary equivalent booking a tour of the Gaza Strip.
New Year’s Resolution #2: Don’t book vacations in war zones.[2]
Hey, wait, here’s s resolution I hope we all can embrace without caveats.
New Year’s Resolution #3: Strive to be kind.
Hey, y’all, Happy New Year! Thanks for reading.
My son Ned’s Nuremberg rendition of his mother Judy Birdsong’s New Year’s Soup (Bon Choy substituted for collards, which you can’t get in Germany.
[1] Caveat #1: Yeah, but I’m not eating toast, I’m eating some generic cereal, so I’d rather read about the latest baseball transactions than contemplate the taste of cardboard.
[2] Caveat #2. Yeah, but the bluesman Robert Lighthouse recently toured The Ukraine and found it to be one of the most rewarding experiences of his life. (You can read my interview with Robert HERE.)
Well, young and old and in-between, another winter solstice had swirled us into darkness, which means it’s time for my annual attempt to rack up a few more hits by shining a light on what I consider the highlights of a year of blogging.
So let’s get going.
January
In light of the Murdaugh mess, I became more aware of just how disloyal our computers can be, whether they’re ratting us out as we’re careening 80 miles an hour heading down a dirt road to Mama’s looking to cop an alibi or merely chatting it up in a bar and having our words transported to blood-sucking capitalists, which happened to me in The Saint James Infirmary iPhone Blues
Also, I at the start of the new year, I went all self-defacing with some un-wistful memories of motor incoordination. I went all Spasmadaco.
Here Comes the Night features a Van Morrison music clip, which in itself is worth a click.
July
July was fun. I wrote a nostalgic piece claiming not to be nostalgic called A Nostalgic Dismissal.
And I hitched a train up to DC, got to see my son, daughter-in-law, grandson, and fellow grandparent. Alas, though, I suffered misadventures after making some bad choices on the train trip home. There’s no fool like an old fool. You can ride along in Choo Choo Ding a Ling Ling.
August
Kirkus reviewed my novel: Kirkus Review of Today, Oh Boy.
And the delightful Montgomery Boat Brawl balmed my wizened heart.
As she’s wont to do, Nancy Mace made an ass out of herself by thinking being slightly snubbed is the equivalent of standing on a scaffold and being humiliated by an entire town and then being further sexually shamed by having your status as adulteress emblazoned on your breast for the rest of your life.
Although it occurred 71 years ago tomorrow, I remember my birth as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.[1]
I recall grooving in the womb, the temperature a comfortable 98.6, the background music the soothing backbeat of my mother’s twenty-one-year-old heart of gold, womb service delivered umbilically in the amniotic Eden of pre-Natal bliss.
But, alas, on the fourteenth of December, an earthquake, a rupture, unwanted spasms, an excruciating expulsion through an opening not nearly large enough to accommodate the partially deflated soccer ball of my head, which, as it turned out, was covered with Hemoglobins.
Hour after hour of torture. Then I feel the ice cold clamp of forceps on my head, depressing and denting it, as Dr. Snyder yanks me out of the vice of a constricted passageway into the freezing but blinding bright light of Dorchester County Hospital’s delivery room.
To add insult to injury, he grabs me by the ankles and slaps the tiny target of my ass as I let out a hellish, ear-shattering scream.
Welcome to the third planet from the sun, little one.
I was not a pretty sight. Both parents agreed that I was the ugliest baby they’d ever seen. They’d sometimes tell the story to dinner guests in my presence. The punch line was that Daddy had to ride back to Clemson right after the not-so-blessed event, and some lady on the Greyhound asked him why he looked so distraught, and he replied, “Because my wife has just given birth to a seven pound, four ounce monkey.”
After the laughter subsided, my mother would add, “But a week later he was the most beautiful baby you’d ever seen. When I would stroll him around Colonial Lake, strangers would stop and marvel at his beauty.”
Yeah, right. No wonder I’m so messed up.
[1] Of course, at my age, remembering what happened yesterday clearly is not a given.
A speech given in honor of Vaughan Murzursky’s retirement from Porter-Gaud School
Over the years, I’ve had the honor to deliver several of these sending-off speeches for some masterful teachers – the late Tom Evatt, Erica Lesesne, Sue Chanson, Ed Burrows, Natalie Herford. But never have I faced such a daunting task as to encapsulate in under four minutes the five-FEET, two inches of gut-crunching, man-eating terror that is Paula Vaughan Mazursky.
“The Czarina.”
Where to begin?
How about Barnwell, South Carolina, Vaughan’s hometown?
Besides Vaughan, Barnwell has produced more than its share of notable South Carolinians, including, in the political realm, Edgar Brown and Solomon Blatt. However, undisputedly, Barnwell’s most famous native son is James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, the hardest working man in showbiz, or perhaps, nowadays, the hardest working penitent in Purgatory.
Of course, the Godfather was 13 years older than Vaughan, and Barnwell’s schools were segregated in their day, but what an exciting concept to think of them as contemporaries, the Godfather and the Czarina, in an integrated high school, perhaps as chemistry lab partners – if I may quote the Godfather – [holler] – what an explosive combination that would have been!
For, like James Brown, Vaughan Mazursky has Soul, soul with a capital S, which may be the most remarkable trait of this very remarkable, unforgettable woman. I don’t mean to diminish Vaughan’s stellar intelligence – anyone who has had the privilege of being her friend can attest to her quickness and her formidable knowledge of geography, history, art, and politics – but it is her passion that sets her apart from all the rest of us who have taught and teach here; it is her passion that has made her the teacher that former students first ask about when we bump into them years later, the teacher whom they never ever forget.
Add to her intelligence, her passion, and her learnedness – spontaneity – a joie de vivre that might spur her to jump upon a coffee table in the old teacher’s lounge to belt out Marvin Gay’s “A Stubborn Kind of Fellow” or to scream the Georgian word for freedom right in front of a Soviet tank in occupied Tbilisi or to raise both arms in triumphant joy at an Obama rally at the Cistern, an image that appeared internationally in various media (though as a subject of a National Enquirer article, Vaughan is no stranger to the limelight). Absolutely, Vaughan lives her life to the fullest.
Damn the cruise missiles, full speed ahead!
She was a demanding teacher, which endeared her to wise parents, not so much to materialists. Whenever I hear of that proverbial subliterate high school student from No-wheres-ville, USA who points to the Indian Ocean when asked to locate Alaska on a globe, I think of my two sons pouring over maps of godforsaken sub-Saharan countries, labeling rivers and mountain ranges, or strutting around the house doing the Wagga-do-do dance (which, by the way, Vaughan, I have spelled in this speech W-a-g-g-a-d-o-d-o).
O, my brothers and sisters, I have faced the fearsome wrath of MaZoo. In ’89 before I accompanied her and 21 students on a 28-day trip to the Soviet Union, a trek that took us from Leningrad to Moscow to Siberia back through Tashkent, Alma-Ata, Samarkand, and Tbilisi, I had to prove my worthiness by taking geographical tests along with the students on every so-called Republic we passed through. I, too, had to memorize the names of transliterated towns, rivers, lakes, and mountains and spell the transliterations correctly. Let’s say on the first couple of quizzes I didn’t meet the Czarina’s high expectations, but soon learned that she was serious. She wasn’t going to take along to a foreign land anyone not competently aware of the history and topography of his destination.
The good ol’ Evil Empire has been in history’s dustbin for two decades, so many of you may not know that Vaughan taught a senior course in Soviet history back in the day, a course that attracted the very brightest of our students, the de facto AP history course for seniors back when there wasn’t an AP history course for seniors.
It is, I think, the mark of a great teacher that she can effectively teach a wide range of grades. Here, the Czarina reigned supreme – She taught 8th graders geography, current affairs – and had them watch heart-throb ABC news anchor Peter Jennings every Monday thru Thursday – all the while below the radar teaching them organizational and study skills. Meanwhile, in the Upper School, she was having students grapple with the forces that led to the Russian Revolution, the complexities of the emerging Soviet State, the nuts and bolts of economics.
[Sigh] There’s so much more to say – I should talk about her trailblazing as one of the first female teachers in this school – I should talk about the devotion that the very best graduates we’ve produced hold for her, people like George Kent, Paul O’Brien, Blakely Blackford, and Alex Werrell, but I’m nearing the end of page two, which is my self-imposed limit.
* * *
In closing, as I stand here recalling the history of a great history teacher, I would like to mention a name from the past, Berkeley Grimball, who hired Vaughan and me and a handful of others here but without whom none of the rest of you would be here, because this institution would not exist.
By the early Sixties, Porter-Military had been reduced to a school for troublesome boys, and the Gaud School, though excellent in academics, subsisted in dingy, threadbare rooms, in a sort of Dickensian shabbiness.
It was Berkeley Grimball who had the vision to unite the spirituality of Dr. Porter and the academic rigor of Mr. Gaud to create this hyphenated school, and when the three schools merged in 1965 – at the height of Civil Rights Unrest – Porter-Gaud offered enrollment to anyone who qualified, white, black, or yellow, Muslim, Jew, atheist, or Hindu – a liberality of which we all can all be proud, a liberality that Vaughan Mazursky has always proudly embraced.
As we old folks disappear, we are fairly soon mostly forgotten. That is the way of the world.
However, Vaughan, you, for sure, have attained legendary status and your legacy will be remembered and cherished for decades as you remain a part of those students’ lives you have enriched – as you have enriched those of us who have taught with you – and I hope you’ll continue to enrich us, your friends, at parties and taverns and non-violent demonstrations.
Mike Johnson, the hastily installed new Speaker of the House of Representatives, is a religious fanatic who makes my late Bircher literalist cousin Zilla look like a forward thinker.
For example, here’s his take on same-sex marriages:
“Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone. Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”
Oh, I’m sure at the moment Mike’s on a prestige high, puffed up with pride, swamping Jesus’s switchboard with an overload of hallelujahs, enjoying all the attention, but this too shall pass because he’s destined to fail at his new job – understaffed, inexperienced, more or less chosen, not for intellect nor competence but because he possesses a winning Republican combination of rightwing fanaticism softened by a pleasant demeanor.
Affable Mike Johnson believes that the Bible is literally true. He’s on record claiming that the earth is a mere 6,000 years old, which is pretty remarkable for anyone in the 21st Century but especially remarkable for someone so powerful, someone a mere two deaths away from possessing the nuclear codes.
I suspect that the 18 Republican representatives who serve in districts carried by Biden and who voted for Johnson may come to rue their decision come November 2024.
Hey Mike, as St. Teresa of Avila once said, “More tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.”
Man, oh man, is the Internet ever a cesspool for the ol’ scam-o-rama! Daily, I’m informed that my Netflix payment has failed (even though I’m not a subscriber) or that 800 c-notes are headed Norton’s way for malware protection. I suspect that I’m an inviting target because of my advanced age (I don’t even have enough hair to part behind, and bending over far enough to roll my trousers very well might throw my back out).[1] Cobwebs crisscross the attic of my brain where I often have trouble finding the lines of a poem or song lyric I once knew by heart. So, of course, the [redundancy alert] nefarious Russian scam artist stinking of Turkish cigarettes and hacking a precancerous cough zeroes in on me, an old fool, because, as the saying goes, there’s no fool like an old fool.
Detail from an MRI of Wesley’s Brain
On the X social media platform (nee Twitter) it’s not unusual to receive a notification that Lori Buckett (pictured below ha-ha) is following me. It can’t be a coincidence that so many of these lovelies have exactly 22 followers and have posted absolute zilch on their pages, or if they have, it’s whatever the Russian word for cheesecake is.[2]
I wonder if older women receive similar solicitations. From, say, some pictured shirtless studly yet lonely thirty-year-old seeking the digital companionship of recently widowed nanas. I doubt it. After a lifetime of being taken advantage of by unscrupulous males, mature women know better that to click follow. Targeting older women would be like fishing for marlin in koi pond. Not worth the trouble.
I hate to admit it, but I recently fell for one of these would-be people on Facebook. A woman pictured in an army uniform contacted me and claimed that she really liked my writing and wanted to be my friend. She had liked several of my posts, so I checked her page out, and at first glance, it seemed legit, lots of military photos, so I friended her, thinking she might buy my novel.[3]
Sigh sure enough, she DMed me, and even though I replied that I didn’t enjoy communicating with strangers, that I was happily married, collecting social security, etc., etc. The queries kept coming, so I blocked her.
Anyway, I just checked my jink mail, and presto:
Well, I gotta go. I got some beta-reading to do on this bleak, gray windy day on the Edge of America.
[1] Congratulations if you got the “Prufrock” allusion. Yesterday marked the 135th anniversary of Tom Eliot’s birth in St. Louis, Louis.
It’s too bad the quaint cool-sounding derogatory noun oaf is dying out, having been supplanted over the years by bonehead, spastic, and most recently dickhead, all of which lack the specific visual associations we conjure at the sight or sound of the word.
Oafs are male, usually bald, fat, dull-eyed, slack-mouthed, and clumsy whereas dickheads can be good-looking Lotharios who catalog their romantic conquests or gifted athletes who make acrobatic catches or PhDs who lord their petty powers over TAs eking out livings in academia.
The thing is, though, if you close your eyes and attempt to visualize an oaf, chances are you picture some lout in Medieval garb, Chaucer’s Miller or Shakespeare’s Bottom the Weaver.
The Millere was a stout carl for the nones;
Ful byg he was of brawn and eek of bones.
That proved wel, for over-al, ther he cam,
At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram.
He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre;
Ther nas no dore that he nolde heve of harre,
Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed.
His berd as any sowe or fox was reed,
And therto brood, as though it were a spade.
Upon the cop right of his nose he hade
A werte, and thereon stood a toft of herys,
Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys;
His nosethirles blake were and wyde.
A swerd and a bokeler bar he by his syde.
Illustration from Thijs Porck’s leidenmedievalistsblog
Here’s my translation:
The Miller was a stout dude of stone
Very big he was of brawn and bone.
That proved well. When it came
to wrestling, he always won the ram.
He was short, broad-shouldered, a thick tor
Who could rip the hinges off any door
Or break it by ramming it with his head.
His beard like a sow or fox was red
and broad just like a spade.
On the right side of his nose he had
a wart that sprouted a tuft of hairs
red as the bristles of a sow’s ears;
his nostrils were black and wide.
A sword and buckler he had by his side.
You probably wouldn’t call the drooling loud mouth banging his hand on the bar for service an oaf; however, in my research I have discovered a modern day oaf, thanks to that most urbane of publications The Daily Mail, the UK’s version of the National Enquirer. Checkout these headlines.
Foul-mouthed motorist with ‘Big Oaf’ number plate and ‘Fast and the Fuhrerious’ T-shirt rants at coach driver to ‘get a proper job’ in 15-minute road rage stand-off that sees him dubbed ‘the new Ronnie Pickering’
Bald man tells coach driver to ‘get a proper job and shut your mouth’ in video
Overweight VW driver launches an abusive tirade through the coach window
The road rage motorist wore bizarre T-shirt reading ‘Fast and Fuhrerious’
Compared to Ronnie Pickering, whose 2015 row with motorcyclist went viral
Do you know the ‘Big Oaf’? Contact alex.robertson@mailonline.co.uk or call 0203 615 3767
So, dear readers, I encourage you to be on the lookout for oafs and use the word, which is such an unlovely embodiment of sound and sense. Say it out loud – oaf – and feel it coming out your mouth – oaf.
You know how some literates, English majors and their ilk, just for the sake of argument joust about whether we’re living in Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984?
Well, this afternoon Chico Feo is giving off some heavy Huxley vibes. Workers off-the-clock loll in full self-expression, tattoos mapping their life histories in hieroglyphic fashion. A 21st Century version of a Pre-Raphaelite model, wan with auburn ringlets, sits across the bar from me hitting on her vape every now and then, vacant eyed but sort of beautiful in a retro-futuristic tawdry sort of way. I think she is what Aldous had in mind. Across the street at Berts you can buy blunts stuffed with Delta 8 and toke on them in public.
Oh, brave new world, indeed.
Meanwhile, a few billionaires (like the Fords) command a ridiculously disproportionate portion of global wealth, but few of them cotton to giving up not even a sliver of it, especially through taxation. These powerful people – the opposite of folk – possess the means to “dope [us] with religion and sex and [the internet”], to update John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.” TGIF is the rallying cry of drudges content to go with the status quo. It’s so ingrained that even though I’m retired, I still look forward to Fridays.
Huxley prophesized pleasure, drugs, sex, and swing music, which morphed into rock-n-roll, disco, hip-hop, and all the jazz. All of it literally at my fingertips as I key “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” into Spotify.
But that’s in the USA.
Iran, Russia are North Korea are bigtime Orwellian. Not many dropping Soma In Pyongyang. skinny dipping in Tehran, or thumbing their noses at Big Brother in St. Petersburg.
But let’s face it, the US is also Orwellian, but in more subtle ways. It’s not so much Big Brother is spying on us, but that we’re spying on ourselves, paying AT&T, Verizon, and Apple to track our every move, tallying the number steps we’re taking as surveillance cameras video us from storefronts. Computer-equipped automobiles clock our speed as we bounce down dirt roads up to no good. Alex Murdaugh can attest to that.
The good news – and it’s very good news – is that we have freedom of speech. I can burn a Chinese made American flag and not be dragged off to a Gulag while wearing a vulgar tee shirt mocking the President, the Pope, and/or the Dalai Lama. I might get punched in the face or shot by a fellow citizen, but the government will not be coming after me.
Really stoked to have Today, Oh Boy receive such a boffo review from Kirkus. I’m not sure about the legality of presenting it here wholesale, so I’m providing the link HERE.
As I’ve grown older – and I doubt if this is typical – my opinion of my fellow Americans has improved, which makes me somewhat optimistic about the long term prospects for our democracy.
Of course, I could be wrong, as I often am. One MAGA juror could lynch each of the Trump trials.[1] Thanks to the Electoral College, the Petulant One could be reelected, and then, aided and abbeted by right wing SCOTUS justices, pardon himself and his cronies, transform the nation into a full-on Kleptocracy, a fascistic regime that bans public libraries and reconfigures them into massage parlors run under the auspices of the Kushner crime family.
But I really doubt Trump will be reelected.
I suspect most Americans care about, rather than hate, each other. Most people believe in the credo live and let live. Most accept gays and biracial marriages and haven’t amassed an armory of assault weapons in preparation for a second civil war. Even my acquaintances who voted for Trump shy away from admitting they’d vote for him now. Of course, the voting booth is private and all that jazz, but why would a rational person cast a ballot for a venom-spitting narcissistic whiner who buries a former wife on his golf course to save money and then doesn’t bother to tend to her grave.
His megalomania knows no bounds, whether he’s shilling trading cards that depict him as a superhero or idiotically claiming that Hawai’i’s wildfires would not have occurred if he – the Climate-Change-Denier-in-Chief – had been president. If he were in office, the Ukraine war would not have occurred, and if reelected, he’ll end it overnight.
As they say in Queens, “yeah right.”
Although millions of people worship Trump, they make up approximately 30% of the population. The problem lies, of course, in the primary nominating system where fanatics of both parties have a greater say because harried citizens who don’t spend their evenings watching Fox News or MSNBC don’t vote in primaries. Many can’t take off work on a Tuesday, not to mention that fighting traffic after eight hours of labor to stand in line at an elementary school isn’t nearly as pleasant as dropping into a neighborhood bar and having a couple before heading home.
Image on the right by Jenny Kroik of The New Yorker
The general election, on the other hand, is a different story.
For example, the Dodd decision has riled up women, young people, and those of us who disdain forced birth, especially for children impregnated via rape, victims of incest, mothers facing difficult choices with fetuses with severe birth defects, and women whose health could be harmed because of unusual medical situations. When free choice referenda have appeared on ballots, even in the reddest of states voters have opted for choice rather than forced birth. This is a problem up-and-down the ballot for Republicans outside the hinterlands.
Like I say, I could be wrong. Joe Biden isn’t popular, and we have RFK, Jr. and Cornel West siphoning votes, and perhaps a third party a la Nader and Jill Stine could gum up the works, but I suspect Nader voters who aided and abetted the election of W. Bush and those Stine voters who were sure that Hillary was a shoo-in regret their decisions.
At least I hope they do.
PS. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the insurrection, the illegal possession of top secret documents and his refusal to turn them over, and his paying hush money to a porn star. It’s downright exhausting.
[1] If you feel you need to explain your jokes – lynch = hung, a hung jury ha-ha – perhaps the jokes suck.
You Do Hoodoo 