Category: Ruminations

A pause early this morning for praise and thanks and petitions …

For fair skies and safe travels. For hope where there is hate, determination where there is doubt, clarity where there are clouds, peace amid the perils that roil and toss.

We need them now, we need them always, yet we too often lose the center of our focus in the crescendos of minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day.

Let our joys be small, our love strong, our humor great, our gratitude steady and deep.

An early pause. A mindful breath.

After going my entire life without seeing Paul McCartney in concert I’ve been lucky enough to attend his shows in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. in the last month. It’s a bucket-list item, and I don’t know what I really was waiting for – maybe for him to turn 80, you know — but I still needed a push from my son to get off the dime and buy the Philly tickets. He saw him at U.Va. more than a year ago and, to my surprise, raved so long about how good the show was it convinced me to make the effort. 

We bought. We went. My impressions? Watching McCartney is like watching Mozart or somebody, if you get me. It’s like breathing in an interactive museum piece. The history spills from the stage the second you get within sight of it with videos, photos and pre-show music highlighting the span of McCartney’s career. Finally, the last chord to “A Day in the Life” sounds and everyone knows McCartney is next up, bouncing onto the stage the 74-year-old won’t leave for 2 ½ hours, having had not one sip of water.

I am obsessed with that fact: neither McCartney nor his four band members – I don’t know their names, which is something I’ll touch on in a second – drinks a thing during the show, at least in view of the audience. The band leaves during McCartney’s acoustic set, so maybe they’re chugging water in the wings. McCartney doesn’t touch a drop of anything. Is that not weird, or am I making too much of not being thirsty?

He also doesn’t introduce his players. At both shows, he thanked everybody involved with moving the huge set all across the country and world and only glossed over his band’s actual names. In Philly, as fans cheered, I think he hastily mentioned their first names, which you couldn’t hear or understand. But in D.C. he only said “those boys can play,” and moved along. I haven’t Googled the names. I guess I will at some point. They really can play. I shouldn’t have to work to figure out who’s who, though. (I saw Lyle Lovett the next night after D.C. He calls out his players multiple times per show. I liked that better.) So I don’t get that at all, although it fits my long-held sense that McCartney is overall just kind of odd. But what genius do you know who’s not odd, right?

OK, so he doesn’t drink water, and hogs the glory. What other pithy observations do I have, you ask?

• It is impressive, to me at least, the McCartney hasn’t changed the keys in which he sings his songs, even the ones that strain his dry vocal cords. He doesn’t hit ‘em all, but he knows how to gently reach for them, and he still screams, as only he can, when the performance calls for it. No backing down.

• Unlike, say, Springsteen, who likes to run song after song together to build or maintain the momentum, McCartney stands and theatrically accepts applause for every song. It actually gets old, and the show would be even more powerful if he mixed up that pattern. He does a great “Back in the USSR,” but then it all sits there till he slides over to the piano to do “Let It Be.” The energy would crackle and pop if he sandwiched “USSR” between “Can’t Buy Me Love” and, say, “Revolution,” (which he doesn’t perform, btw.) But what do I know?

• He does plenty of Beatles’ tunes, though, starting with “Hard Day’s Night.” That’s where McCartney does play on the sense of excitement. The opening, clashing chord, seconds after he arrives on stage, is goosebump-worthy, and his performance of the song is strong.

• Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think McCartney mails anything in by any means. I think he thoroughly enjoys himself on stage; at his age, why do it if not, right? But the show is completely scripted, like a Broadway play, and by all appearances leaves zero room for spontaneity, most likely because of the intricate light/video accompaniment. If you’ve seen the show more than once, it puts off an antiseptic vibe, that’s all. Don’t like that, but oh well.

• “Temporary Secretary,” a piece of pure, techno-pap from 1980? No thank you. Ditch it, Macca! Oops, you can’t. The set is chiseled into stone. Oy.

• OK, I Googled. Band members Brian Ray (bass and guitars), Rusty Anderson (guitars), Abe Laboriel Jr., a hulking presence on drums, and keyboardist Wix Wickens. There, was that so hard?

 

 

 

It is difficult to write about something you do understand.

I do not understand the problem we have with police shooting people, and people murdering police. And disturbed or inflamed or deranged people mass murdering people in very closed quarters, fish in a barrel.

I do not understand making your very own personal bomb, putting it into a backpack and leaving it to explode on a jammed city street.

I urge my kids to be optimistic, not pessimistic. Hopeful about their friends and their future and the adventures they are pursuing and have laid out for themselves.

I run out of words for my kids.

I am going to walk my dog and breathe a little. Think a little more about the vagaries and, yes I will try, the blessings of life. Picture in my head the Dallas officers down and hear again the shotgun blasts ringing through the downtown center.

It IS a wonderful life — except when it is horrifying, terrifying and unfathomably evil.

I’m sorry to be that way.

I just don’t understand.

 

 

 

 

 

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This “long-form” navel-gazer about downsized journalists is kind of depressing, in an enlightening sort of way.

http://www.thenation.com/article/these-journalists-dedicated-their-lives-to-telling-other-peoples-stories/

So why bother linking? Because it touches on an array of (familiar to some of us) woes and angers and shocks of career newspaper people at odds with a world in which career newspaper people are all but extinct.

It isn’t necessarily climb-onto-the-window-ledge stuff — although it is hardly happy talk. What it is is a paean to a lost era and to its ramifications for remaining newsrooms, as well as for the proverbial halls of power — municipal or otherwise — flush with fresh acres to dally and deal now that prying eyes are fewer and farther between.

I pass it along with pride for having participated for so long, disquieted now by decayed, lusterless landscapes where journalistic indifference and ineptitude reign.

 

I didn’t see a whole lot of the Super Bowl commercial hoopla — sadly, I DID see puppy-monkey-baby or whatever the hell — so I’m catching up. This one caught my attention on Twitter just now. I recommend checking it out. It is well done.

 

 

 

 

Something reminded me yesterday of the classic skit the late Chris Farley did with Paul McCartney on Saturday Night Live in the early ’90s. Do you remember Farley’s petrified “Do you remember when you were in the Beatles” nervous interviewer guy? It’s awesome . . .

Anyway, whatever the trigger was, it flashed me back to one of the worst Nervous Chris Farley moments I foisted upon myself back in the former day. There weren’t many, or else I couldn’t have done the sports writer thing for so long, interviewing some of that world’s biggest personalities. But I remember this one frozen moment, because as soon as it happened, I nearly dropped the phone to punch myself in the head and pull my hair, cursing my hopeless stupidity. 

The object of my vapors? Another sports columnist — turned best-selling author — Mitch Albom. Go figure.

I know, I can’t figure it. But although this was maybe 10 years ago, I do remember Albom was in the middle of a hectic book tour, which was bringing him to Norfolk in a few days, and his people were squeezing me in for a few minutes on the phone from some radio studio somewhere before he went on the air.

So I felt rushed, on top of already being on edge because I was an admitted fan-boy. Albom’s sports columns in Detroit were hardly everybody’s cup of chai — cloying and homerish were two constant criticisms in the biz. Still, he was acclaimed enough to also constantly win best metro sports columnist in the annual Associated Press Sports Editors contest. And I was in his tank, on board with his conversational style and his creative approaches. Few in major markets seemed to be going at columns in fresh ways like Albom. Never mind my later indifference to his formulaic but huge-selling books, although I thought “Tuesdays with Morrie” worked pretty well. The point was, I wanted to write columns like he did and wasn’t necessarily succeeding.

I had my list of questions about his latest book and his career, and I guess it was going OK for a couple of minutes despite my discomfort. But then it struck me as a good idea to stray off-topic and express my admiration for his sports writing, which is where my inner Farley reared its head. I immediately heard myself babbling as I tried to make a connection, columnist to columnist, that really wasn’t there. Words unspooled from my mouth like paper towels off a spindle. Somehow, as I tried to right the ship, I went to my long-ago memory of a series of great pieces Albom had written on the Iditarod dog-sled race in Alaska. But the best I could do was, “Uh, so, do you remember when, uh, you wrote that series on the Iditarod in Alaska? It was awesome . . . ”

I give Albom, pressed for time as he was, credit to this day for not calling me an imbecile and slamming down the phone for injecting such nonsense into his day: “Um, no. Why would I ever remember flying in a bush plane for days over Alaskan tundra following sled dogs . . . ”

“Sure,” I think he helpfully responded, but I can’t be sure of what words came next or for how long we “talked” from there, because my mind was busy plotting which window ledge I was going to leap from.

Whatever I eventually wound up writing, Albom saw it when he came to the Naro in Norfolk for his book-signing. Because I truly have no shame, I dropped by at the end of the signing to say hello.  And rushed but gracious again, Albom said something along the lines of, “Wow, you have a big audience. Lots of people have brought your column here tonight.”

Thanking him, I wandered off knowing Albom had just patted me on the arm — McCartney consoling the crestfallen Farley — and said, “No, Tom, you did fine.”

 

Christmas morning, and I have to apologize to my kids that the central air is broken. Who would have thought that? Not me, which is why in September when I noticed the air wasn’t blowing cold I figured I had more important things to worry about the next six months.

Suddenly, we’ve got baseball weather. Shorts and T-shirts. Sandals. Clammy Christmas skin. And every window in a three-story house wide open, which is just weird. If I wanted to live in Tampa, I’d live in Tampa.

But because Mother Nature taught us very long ago that we all bow to her – a little lower, knave — we carry on with the things we can control, if we are wise. Checking our gratitude meter, for instance, making sure it’s in top operating condition.

The slings and slights and insecurities of life want badly to rattle our bolts, to make us throw a rod, whatever that means. (“Threw a rod, then the engine blow’d up, Junior!”) Each day offers a walk with that darker side, which I guess could be a Star Wars reference, although believe me I am so far from a Star Wars wonk it’s not funny. I realize that temptation, but I take that walk too often anyway.

Except . . . if I just take five seconds to stare out those wide-open windows with the still-cool morning breeze wafting through, a bird cawing across the street, a big yellow lab on the living room floor impatient to go sniff and mark, brilliant kids home and asleep, health, humor and talent soothing, new love lifting, new days calling . . .

Grateful is as grateful does, Forrest. Does mama really have to keep reminding you of this?

Damn the humidity. It’s a wonderful life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On another evil, hateful, murderous day in America I want more than ever to come home and snuzzle my dog. Text my kids how much I love them. Go for a swim. Have a big glass of wine. Ponder fleeting existence, purpose and grace. Question God. Once again.

I’m not incisive enough to know what the hell is going on. To understand what it is, not just here but around the world, with the unchained hate, the smoldering vile, the wanton and soulless ability to take aim at other human beings and propel killing orbs of hot steel and lead into their flesh and vital organs.

I despair over the numbness that gradually takes root one bombing after the next gunning after the next ambush after the next drive-by. I rue the snake-infested swamp that has become of public discourse, steroid-fueled by digital anonymity and vapor dreams of narcissistic grandeur, the dark cloud of doom and cynicism that grows distended even as I try to ignore it.

I cry for my daughter moved now to look two, three and four ways before venturing out in her new city, an adventure that should be filled with delight,  but in many ways induces dread. On both coasts.

These are universal and eternal questions, but I can only join the Greek chorus of endless, unresolvable rhetoric: I don’t know what God wants. I don’t know what the sacrifice of innocents is supposed to mean. I don’t know why whatever I did today for money is supposed to matter. I don’t know what to tell my kids. I hate not knowing what to tell my kids.

Fuck you, gutless Roanoke coward. Fuck you, Charleston pissant.  Fuck you, suicidal ghoul. Fuck you, pirate, monger, terrorist, zombie. Rage and beat the air, the recognition of birth and beauty is overwhelmed with infused poison, time-released with spiraling blades and smithereens of shrapnel for maximum wretchedness.

The reconciling teases, the reasoning defies. Rest in peace, tragic passengers.