Browsed by
Month: September 2019

Back Biters and Syndicators, Home Again

Back Biters and Syndicators, Home Again

Comments 2 comments

Back biters and syndicators
Standing all around the door
An’ it wished ’bout ev’ryday
Hopin’ I’d go way to stay
Ooo-ooo-wee, ooo
Almost ruin my happy home
Ooo-wee-ooo
Almost ruin my happy home

(Al Smith and John Lee Hooker)

 

 

It’s Friday and it is now about 9 PM and I am about to exit on to Route 18 for the last leg of my trip home to New Jersey.  With Little Steven’s Underground Garage set on my XM radio, I hear John Lee Hooker’s Back Biters and Syndicators begin to play.  I grab one of the three harmonicas on the console,  an “A” harp and it blends right in, happy that I got it right the first time.

Six hours earlier I had left work, got gas, and hit the road.

More than two hours later I was just getting off the DC beltway and heading towards Baltimore on I-95.

One hour later I was stopped in gridlock north of Baltimore where the express lanes converged with the four or five normal lanes.

Somewhere in this mess on the overpass above with a chain link fence, climate control advocates were holding a sign and waving their arms trying to get the impatient drivers below to beep their horns in support, or maybe, I thought,  trying to dispel the carbon monoxide being pumped out of the sea of cars below them.

It reminded me of what driving the beltway and interstates in late September of 2001 would have looked like.  You could barely travel under an overpass that didn’t have an American flag on it with people rallying support for our country recently attacked by terrorists.

What a difference eighteen years makes, I thought.  You don’t see too many American flags anymore.  Maybe we have just forgotten, or maybe some are just afraid of being labeled.

When I first moved to the Washington DC area, I used to drive home to Jersey pretty much every weekend.  I had an old 1969 C10 pickup truck and off I would go.  Generally it was a three and one half hour ride.

Now forty years later the trip I started at 3PM doesn’t begin to wind down until six hours later.  Thankfully around 9:30PM I arrive.

 

It’s now Sunday afternoon and I am ready to start my trip back, hoping this time the drive won’t be so long.

But before leaving I decide to take a trip past the stretch of Long Branch beaches I used to hang at.  I passed the Church of the Presidents, now closed for renovation and remember the time when I was twelve or so and spent the day sitting with my grandfather as he displayed his paintings.  He won a gold medal for his portrait of John Kennedy.

Then on down Ocean Avenue to West End, back in the day it was once referred to as the Greenwich Village of the Jersey shore and past the restaurant where I got my first job.

Finally at the North End beach where I spent most of my teenage years, I got out and took a photo.  It has all changed now.

Now ready to start my way back home I hope for swifter travel and line up my harmonicas for this ride.

It was a good trip.

Now I am ready to return to my happy home.
Ooo-wee-ooo

It’s All Over Now

It’s All Over Now

Comments 0 Comment

I am in a funk.

At 3:50 AM this morning, while I was sleeping, my summer officially ended.

Today at 3:50 AM, the first day of fall began.

Summer is over.

My favorite season of the year has ended.

And I slept through it.

 

And then there is the Steelers.

In preparation for the football season in a moment of team spirit, I pushed the send order button on a really cool, somewhat expensive, Hawaiian style Steelers shirt to replace my AB shirt that is now as valuable as koi poo.  I was pumped, I was ready for the new season.

But alas the Steelers are 0 and 3 to start their season and Big Ben is out at least for this year.  I fear that the season is over.

 

And don’t bust out the sweatshirts just yet because then there is Climate Change!

Because,  even though my Steelers Hawaiian shirt is still sitting in the same place I put it the day I received it in the mail, it’s not due to the weather because we have climate change and it’s the first day of fall and its 91 degrees!

 

This climate change movement is really scary.  It’s like something has our young people possessed.

Friday I listened to a young female college student who said she had no reason to finish college because of climate change we were all going to be dead anyway. Still, others said there was no reason to have children.  And one of the signs I saw displayed in D.C. today said: “capitalism kills.”  I am guessing that means socialism doesn’t.

The world as we knew it, is over, we are going to die.

 

Last week my grandson Christian played Jesus in his Chapel skit at his preschool.

Alexa video chatted me to have Christian tell me about this and the dialog went something like this:

 

Alexa: “Christian who were you in chapel today?”

Christian: “Jesus”

Alexa: “Who was Owen?”  (His friend)

Christian: “He was Matthew the cash register.” (I think he meant tax collector)

Alexa: “Who was Royce?”  (Another classmate)

Christian: “He was a fisher of men.”  (Fisherman probably…Simon Peter I am guessing)

 

In another video Alexa sent the next day,  Christian was singing “I will make you fishers of men…fishers of men…if you follow me…”

Experiencing this, I am reminded of the reason you have children.  And maybe teaching them about Jesus and why it’s important to be a good steward of the world and how we treat each other may be more effective than promoting socialism, creating severe harmful anxiety in our youth, and living with the expectation we are all going to die before I am going to be able to access my 401K.

 

You know what, it’s probably not worth worrying about anyway.

Because…

I read something recently that our attention span has decreased from 12 seconds in the year 2000, to 8 seconds in 2015.  So do the math and that means that in 2019 we are down to 7 seconds and surely by now none of you who are reading this are paying any attention and are off to something else.

Hello…

But think about it, in 26 years, if we all aren’t dead from climate change we probably won’t care because our attention spans will have been reduced to nothing and we won’t have the ability to focus on or have an opinion about anything. Our ability to think will be over.

 

It won’t be business as usual anymore.

And now this, if any of you are still paying attention…

Is over.

 

 

 

Awesome…I Have Plenty of Time

Awesome…I Have Plenty of Time

Comments 1 comment

The clock above my kitchen window says it is 7:00 o’clock.

“Awesome,” I think to myself, “I have plenty of time.”

The problem is the clock above my kitchen window reads 7:00 o’clock all the time lately.

That is because the battery is dead.

But most mornings, even if it just for the briefest moment, I forget, and out of habit I look up at that clock and think:

“Awesome, I have plenty of time.”

 

The last couple of weeks our attention has been on Hurricane Dorian and chicken sandwiches.

Because of my little guys, I was selfishly relieved that the hurricane didn’t impact south Florida as initially predicted. But I can’t help feeling a little ashamed of that selfishness after viewing what happened to the Bahamas.

Then to make it even worse the total anarchy of the situation led to the desperation of looting by armed residents.

While on the flip side of that dose of reality, we had the unreality of desperation with Popeye’s Chicken sandwiches.

Chicken sandwiches that caused chaos and disorder with disgruntled customers, threatening lawsuits; a group rushing the restaurant with at least one brandishing a weapon just to name a couple.

I don’t even eat chicken.

But if I did I wouldn’t want to have to carry a weapon to go buy a sandwich.

I can’t imagine walking into a Burger King brandishing a weapon and rushing the counter for their veggie burger.

Truth is I am not against owning a gun; in fact, the situation that presented itself in the Bahamas, in my opinion, is exactly why you should own a gun.

Who knows when you and your family may find yourselves in these desperate conditions where lawlessness prevails?

 

But this is not about guns.

It’s about time.

The unpredictability of it.

And running out of it.

 

This has been a different summer for Kim and me.

Unlike last year when we got out on our bikes four or five times week, this year we simply got out on our bikes four or five times.

And the excitement and the anticipation of spending time on the kayaks we got for Christmas has so far resulted in only two trips.

All that said we wouldn’t change the summer we had if we had the chance to.

Our parents are in their late 80’s and even 90 in my dad’s case.

Time with our parents we may not have plenty of.

That clock hasn’t stopped.

And that has been our priority and our pleasure this year as I have written before.

Today we remember that eighteen years ago 2,977 of our brothers and sisters boarded planes and went to work all with their own excitement and anticipation of whatever it was they were looking forward to in their lives.  And just recently the husband of a friend of Kim’s drowned off of Cape Hatteras while on vacation with his family. He was just 61, and no doubt had plenty of plans for the future.

 

 

But I am 63.

And the clock above my kitchen window says it is 7:00 o’clock.

Awesome…I have plenty of time.

 

Post Script:

Prayers go out to Frankie Chuday and family, the people of the Bahamas and others affected by Hurricane Dorian, and the individuals and families of those still suffering from the attack on September 11, 2001.