Berkeley Breathed is Back!

I just found out that Berkeley Breathed is back—on Facebook. He’s the creator of Bloom County, graced by the character of Opus, an adorable, guileless, and brilliant penguin. The daily comic strip was syndicated in 1,200 newspapers from 1980 to 1989, then morphed into a Sunday only Opus in 2003, which ran until 2008. Breathed then retired Opus and friends, although I’m pleased to hear Breathed himself had plenty of work, just not in a newspaper in Bloom County.

This is the comic I’ve had on my refrigerator since 2007 from the Opus strip (click to enlarge):

After I “liked” Bloom County on Facebook and got to see all his recent strips (and all the wonderful one liner comments full of puns and quips that accompany each posting) I also found out Breathed was interviewed on Fresh Air, and here I found out a lot of other stuff. One, that he had been miserable when he originally wrote his weekly comic strip (he never said why) but that now he was having the time of his life and couldn’t wait to get up each morning to write his daily strip. Two, that he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons and was shunned by all the other editorial cartoon writers who appeared on the editorial pages of our newspapers, not on the comics page.

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But for me, the most interesting thing he said was about how age had mellowed him in terms of the pointedness of his ridicule of certain people. He used the singer Barry Manilow as an example. Manilow (“Can’t Smile Without You”) is the ‘70s singer in the same category as Neil Diamond, who was immortalized in the movie “What About Bob?” when Bill Murray, playing the barely functional neurotic Bob, reveals that it was he who left his wife, not she who left him, because she liked Neil Diamond.

Back to Barry Manilow. Breathed pilloried Manilow, along with many other deserving public figures like Donald Trump, but years later, he’s out on the street in Santa Barbara (I think that’s where they were) with his son and he sees Manilow walking down the street. He stops, and with his son in tow, goes up to the singer and Manilow tells Breathed’s son that his dad is one of the best cartoonists of all time and Breathed tells his son that Manilow is one of the best pop singers of all time.

This made me stop and think about how I feel about pissing people off now that I’m older. And I’ve pissed a lot of people off over the years even though I’m fairly well known as a nice person (just ask anyone I haven’t pissed off). Like Breathed, it’s my job to investigate, and in the process make people uncomfortable (hopefully), although I wish it were with the genius of his humor rather than the journalistic sarcasm I often employ.

Breathed’s remorse seems to emanate from life experience: maybe it’s not as important as you once thought that you get everyone to acknowledge the schmaltz of Barry Manilow’s pop. Did he deserve being the foil of Breathed’s rapier wit? In the larger scheme of things, probably not.

Mine seems to emanate from the fact that just has my skin has literally thinned with age so too has it thinned in the metaphorical sense: I’m not as stoic about criticism as I used to be. Sometimes I don’t interpret a take down as proof of a job well done but as an arrow that stings. Actually, maybe that’s where Breathed’s comes from as well. If he and I are capable of feeling the pain, maybe all those other folks out there are as well. Does that mean we’re less judgmental? Not really; in fact I’m more judgmental than ever as my half empty jar continues to diminish in these days of absurdity. It just means that I’ve lived long enough to know that life is tough for everyone, even the ones I think are idiots.

While I haven’t reconciled with many who became the enemy, I’ve walked past the animosity with some to a space that allows a little wiggle room for working together on whatever we can. And now that La Jicarita is mostly retired, I probably won’t be involved in nearly as many situations where the possibility of making enemies is endless. There is the fact that the book I wrote about all the enemies I made has just been released—Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities—but it’s old hat: anything I say about anybody in the book was already said to their faces—or in La Jicarita—at some time or another.

I’ll watch Bloom County closely, however, to see if Breathed treats “the Donald” et al. a little more kindly, even though the times, if anything, scream out for pillage. Fortunately, he hasn’t lost a beat when dealing with the representational: see the woman in the crocheted halter top. So I don’t think we need worry that a little bit of kindness here and there will encumber the fun. Berkeley Breathed is indeed back.

Insomnia

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At the ripe old age of 65 I’ve become an insomniac. I go to sleep every night around 10 but bang, between the witching hours of two and four I’m awake and I stay awake for at least a couple of hours until I fall back asleep or give up and get up.

Not that my usual sleep patterns are all that great. They were permanently interrupted upon the birth of my children, especially the second one, Max, who didn’t sleep through the night until he was past two years old. I can’t remember the last time I slept through the night. But at least when I would wake up I’d get up and pee, go back to bed, turn over a few times, push a few thoughts out of my brain, and go back to sleep.

Now when I wake up there are a number of things going on that keep me awake despite all my attempts to breathe deep. One is there’s always a song playing over and over in my head. A couple of nights ago it was the Eagle’s “Witchy Woman.” I don’t like the Eagles (except for my Guilty Pleasure “Cryin’ Eyes”) and I certainly don’t like “Witchy Woman.” Sometimes it’s a much better song running through my head, like “It’s Too Late to Turn Back Now,” which is on my best of rhythm and blues compilation playlist. But then there’ll be a night of “Build Me Up Buttercup” —not a guilty pleasure.

Of course, it’s the inner dialogue stuff that’s the worst. It’s bemoaning the fact that I had to pay a lot more money to the crew stuccoing my house because I fucked up and chose a color that was way too orange instead of the reddish brown I thought it was going to be and made the crew redo the wall with the right color. It’s worrying about the release of my new book and wondering if anyone will actually read it and if they do they’ll think it’s no good. It’s worrying about my teeth, which need some work. It’s worrying about my kids, who are mostly fine but each facing some decisions and life changing events (like a second grandkid in December). It’s wondering what I’m going to do with the rest of my life now that La Jicarita is no longer demanding all my time and I’m not forced to go to meetings unless I really want to.

I can’t turn off the inner dialogue so I resort to drugs. About five years ago, after I’d had orthopedic surgery for a bone spur that caused untold secondary pain and misery, I became addicted to Ambien. That’s the sleep drug of choice prescribed by doctors who seem oblivious to its addictive tendencies and ability to elicit nightmares of epic proportions that cause some people to get up in the middle of the night and create havoc, like driving their cars and smashing into other cars they happen to encounter on the road.

The much better sleep drug is Valium, which I’ve had intermittent access to over the years from sympathetic doctors who don’t cop to its bad rap as “Mother’s little helper.” That began in the ‘50s, I believe, when American housewives were supposedly taking it to enhance the drudgery of their banal lives (and immortalized in the Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper”). The fact that it helped take the edge off real anxiety—and helped one to sleep—got lost in the myth, and the pharma industry was able to make lots more money coming up with sleep aids like Ambien that have much more dastardly side affects.

Mark, my partner, always used pot as his sedative of choice. He suffered from insomnia as long as I knew him, and while smoking marijuana couldn’t prevent it’s onset in the middle of the night, it did help him to eventually get back to sleep. Since I’m out of Valium at the moment I’ve decided I’m going to give it a try. Although I smoked a lot as a teenager and young adult, it hasn’t been my drug of choice for many years. I’m one of the ones whose experience with pot morphed from “taking the edge off” to paranoia. I use alcohol to take the edge off, and it works very well, thank you. But it doesn’t prevent me from waking up in the middle of the night in insomnia mode.

I actually got a medical marijuana card at the urging of my primary care doctor, who urges all his patients with chronic pain to give it a try so he can wean them off opiates. I don’t really need the card to access pot, which is as pervasive in our culture as Coca-cola.  All I needed to do was mention my idea about using it for sleep and voila, everyone was offering me some. Now I have a little stash that will last me awhile, if it’s as strong as everyone says it is and all I need partake is one puff.

I smoked a little last night and woke up at four am with the Hall and Oates song “Rich Girl” playing in my head. No surprise there; I’d watched part of their live concert in Dublin on TV before going to bed. Coincidentally, Max and I had just had a conversation about them and he told me they were the best selling duo of all time, but according to Wikipedia, they were only second to the Carpenters—also not a guilty pleasure. I sat up and smoked a little more pot, but I really don’t know if I went back to sleep or not: I was either dreaming or remembering dreams in some vague space and time. Was this the result of being too stoned or not stoned enough?

So I’ll give it another try tonight and see what happens. Or, as I was just reading in The New York Times Book Review, the “By the Book” writer of the week, whom I’ve never heard of, recommended listening to a talking book to help one fall asleep. Not that I give much credence to someone who includes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris (these last two have given atheism a bad name) in his list of most admired writers. I guess I could download something suitable on my iPod, but in the meantime I’m going to take a nap. If you only sleep for an hour you don’t suffer from insomnia.

Babysitting

I wrote this piece in January of this year, when my granddaughter Lucia was 18 months old, but neglected to post it until today.

Max called me the first time at 6:30 pm.

“Hi, I don’t have time to talk right now, I’m eating, I’ll call you in a half hour,” I told him.

“I’m with the baby,” he said.

“Oh, I didn’t know you guys had agreed on tonight. How’s it going?”

“OK, but what if she poops. How will I know if she poops?”

The she in question is my granddaughter, Lucia, aka Lulu, and Max’s niece. Lulu’s parents, Jakob and Casey, had asked Max to babysit for the first time a few weeks before so they could go out to dinner, but Lulu had come down with a cold and they canceled. But now, here we were, and Max was babysitting.

I’d already shown him how to change a poopy diaper the last time I’d been down to Albuquerque, where they all live. There were a lot of “Oh gods” and “I really hope she doesn’t poop while I have her” but he said he thought he could do it.

“So how’s it going so far?” I asked.

“It’s OK. She had more macaroni and cheese than I’ve ever seen her eat. Do you think that might make her poop?”

“You never know, but she usually poops earlier in the day. Try not to worry about it.”

“Back to my original question. How will I know if she poops?”

“You’ll know.”

I heard Lulu cry out in the background.

“What happened?”

“She just sat down pretty hard. I’m going to give her a pretzel. She really likes pretzels.”

“OK, just play with her like you always do and she’ll be fine. Jakob and Casey will be home soon if they just went out to dinner.”

“OK.”

“Call me if you need me.”

“OK.”

Lulu loves Max. When he goes over to visit he sits on the floor with her and talks to her like she’s a twenty something (what he is), cracking jokes and discussing political economy. She likes the words and appreciates his tone. He follows her around so she doesn’t hurt herself. She calls him “Maa!” as she can’t quite get the “x” out.

Max calls me again at 8:15.

“She pooped.”

“OK, did you change her?”

“Yeah, and I cleaned her up like you showed me but I’m not sure I really got her clean enough.”

“Was it kind of solid? Then you don’t have to worry that you got it all cleaned up.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know. Maybe I should give her a bath. Then I’d know she’s clean.”

“That’s a great idea. She loves to take baths.”

“How hot should I make the water?”

“Not too hot that she would react negatively to it, but hot enough so that it’s comfortable for her to spend some time in it. She loves to play in the tub.”

“OK, I’m going to put her in the bath.”

“Make sure you never take your eye off her while she’s in there.”

I thought for sure my comment would elicit a sarcastic response, but his anxiety negated that.

“Jakob and Casey will probably be home soon. Call me if you need me.”

The next time he called it was a quarter to nine. He was in the car on his way home.

“Jakob and Casey got there while she was still in the bath, so that was good.”

“So you did fine. Did you have fun?”

“Yeah, if you consider following a little thing around trying to keep her from falling down and cracking her head open fun, then I guess I had a really good time.”

“It’ll be much easier next time.”

“I really don’t think I’m a good babysitter.

“I bet they think you’re an excellent babysitter. Believe me, they’ll be back for you.”

When I spoke with Jakob the next day and told him about the phone calls he laughed and said the bath water was completely tepid but Lulu was having a great time in it anyway. All she could say the rest of the night was “Maa!” “Maa!”

Postscript: He came back, many times.

Tree Story

My cottonwood tree has transitioned from male to female. For twenty years it was happy to be a male, as were we with it being a male, as female cottonwoods drop that eponymous stuff every June all over everything, like snow falling in January.

We were OK with the cottonwoods down by the river doing their thing, far enough away to be kind of pretty rather than annoying. But our transgendered cottonwood sits in our front yard, where we planted it 22 years ago as a cotton-less cottonwood, or male, to shade what would become our beautiful courtyard full of flowers, bushes, and grass. It quickly grew to enormous size, as tall as our two-story, 30-foot tall house. And never once did it shed cotton, because, after all it is/was a male. 

When it began raining down its cotton this year I of course went to the Internet to try to figure this out. I found out that nurseries sometimes make mistakes in their gender classification, but the fact that our tree never released cotton for 20 years seems to negate that possibility. Sometimes, female trees take a few years to produce cotton, leading you to believe you have a male instead. A “few years” does not translate to 20 years.

Like so many other places across the world, New Mexico has had an unusual spring and early summer: it’s been raining. Ordinarily, after a few April showers things dry up, warm weather descends, and by the beginning of June it often reaches 100 degrees in Albuquerque. This year, in typically 10 degrees cooler El Valle, I was dressed in wool socks, long pants, and a jacket until about two weeks ago, when temperatures finally reached near normal and the rains abated, at least a little (this is not a complaint, but a celebration). So one could surmise that maybe all the rain and cool temperatures caused the cotton release. Except that MALE COTTONWOODS DO NOT PRODUCE COTTON.

What has my transgendered tree wrought? Well, the largest, most beautiful columbines I’ve ever grown—definitely the product of rain and cool temperatures—are coated with cotton that makes them droop and moan. My green grass is blotted white. Cobwebs of cotton fill every nook and cranny of window casings and doorways. Every time I open a door, cotton blows in to cling to anything soft, particularly the rugs. My dogs make sure it gets distributed upstairs where they join me at night. 

Yesterday a quick rainstorm, with lots of wind, blew through El Valle dropping what I fervently hope is the last of the cotton. I raked up as much as I could from the yard but the columbines took a beating. It kind of reminds me of what’s happening in the transgender world of people. Seems to me that all that fury and disdain dumped on the feminists who created beauty out of hard work and growth, much like my columbines, just clogs the relational paths that we all share

Pilgrim and Waldo on the Appalachian Trail

On the one hand, you have Bill Bryson, the out of shape middle-aged journalist (and his even more out of shape friend Stephen Katz) failing, over many months, to hike the entire 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail but giving us a marvelously funny book full of historical, naturalist, and intellectual ruminations in A Walk in the Woods. On the other hand, you have ultrarunner Scott Jurek’s Instagram postings of an ultra fit man running up and down the trail in his attempt to speed through the entire route in 42 days.

In the middle, you have the 2015 hikers who started out in Georgia in April and are in fine form at the beginning of June in Virginia. That’s where I saw almost 50 of them on the Appalachian Trail near Roanoke, day hiking my measly 9 miles. I wonder what form they’ll be in when they reach Maine in September.

They’re called “thru hikers,” but they also give themselves trail names. The first one we met (I was visiting my friends Elaine and Richard, former Taoseños, now Roanoke residents) was Pilgrim. A German, he looked like he’d just stepped out of an outdoor catalog: polypropylene matching shorts and shirt; Osprey mid-weight backpack; state of the art accordion pad for sitting and sleeping; telescoping hiking poles; mid-weight boots. He told us his basic pack weighted just 20 pounds and he carried 10 pounds of food. A slim, trim, hiking machine.

A thru hiker outfitted in the ubiquitous gear

A young woman—the vast majority of them are millennials—soon came up and bumped him with a “What up?” They weren’t exactly friends—both started out alone and only occasionally hiked together—but as thru hikers they were bonded. They all are, I guess. It helps that they have to share the shelters and campsites spread out over the course of the trail, but affinities are found or formed over the endless days of 10 to 20 miles hikes.

When we reached the overlook at lunch, there were about 10 of them resting on the rocks eating their high energy fare. Soon the sweet smell of pot wafted over us as they broke out the dope. I think I’d be tempted to bring along some stronger stimulants as well, but they seemed very happy with weed as they chatted away during their brief respite.

We met many more coming up the trail as we headed down after lunch. While the gear was identical—Osprey packs with rain covers, hiking poles, etc.—the bodies and apparel weren’t. There was the man with the full Paul Bunyan beard with his tank top/short shorts partner. There was the shirtless man with the wraparound headdress. There was the woman with the umbrella and her backpack-carrying dog (it started to rain but no one wore a raincoat as it was too hot). When we stopped to chat with Waldo, the young man who informed us that he usually hiked 19 or so miles a day but stopped when his body told him to, I asked him why everyone carried the same brand backpack, figuring there was an online promotion of said Osprey. But no, he said, everyone shops at REI where brand Osprey rules.

To someone from the west—me—it was all a bit claustrophobic. The ubiquitous deciduous forests (full of blooming rhododendron) were lush and thick, but without the diversity of terrain and ancient feel of the mixed conifer western forests I’m used to, and with the crowd of thru hikers (albeit they were congregated in Virginia because of the season), it felt a little redundant. Here’s Bryson’s description of the same forest I walked in Virginia:

“So the forest through which Katz and I now passed was nothing like the forest that was known even to people of my father’s generation, but at least it was a forest. It was splendid in any case to be enveloped once more in our familiar surroundings. It was in every detectable respect the same forest we had left in North Carolina—same violently slanted trees, same narrow brown path, same expansive silence, broken only by our tiny grunts and labored breaths as we struggled up hills that proved to be as steep, if not quite as lofty, as those we had left behind.”

The word that is often used to describe the Appalachian Trail environment is pastoral. There’s nothing wrong with pastoral: in other essays I’ve quoted Bryson in his eloquent defense of the mix of wild/domestic terrain that characterizes the trail, as one leaves and enters civilization along the route. I don’t buy into the lament that to have wilderness one must exclude people, the cry of the deep ecologist. 

Pilgrim, communing with nature

I guess it’s just what you’re used to. The operative words in Bryson’s quote are “at least it was a forest.” During our conversation with Pilgrim, he mentioned he’d hiked the Camino de Santiago from the French border through the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain (everyone is Pilgrim there). We questioned him about details: one only has to carry a daypack, with hostels, hotels, and cafes at every night stop along the way. He called it a “cultural hike.” So take your pick: a pastoral hike along the Appalachian Trail (but with plenty of hard work); a wild hike along the Continental Divide Trail; or a cultural hike along the Camino de Santiago. I’ll take them all—as long as I’m not trying to do any of them in 42 days.

Mother's Day Treat

My son Max sent me this slide show for Mother's Day. It's "Unf*#!ing Believably" clever, funny, and spot on with references that only someone who pays attention to my life and work gets. The first link is the photo/story slide show; the second is with the sound track. My love overflows.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27638048/Mom%20Birthday%20Powerpoint%20%20Songs%201.pptx

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27638048/Mom%20Birthday%20Powerpoint%20%20Songs%202.pptx

Russell Brand Tells it Like it Is

I watched Russell Brand on Democracy Now! not long ago. Despite several stupid questions from Amy—“would you run for London mayor” or “would you run for parliament” when he’s sitting there telling her that the elected power elite don’t represent the interests of the people—it was a very entertaining 45 minutes. Humor always makes radical political pontificating more digestible. (And all us ‘Mericans love his accent.)

One thing in particular that Brand said struck me. He called the class of people who used to work in manufacturing the “throwaway class.” Because of the outsourcing of these jobs and the changing nature of manufacturing itself, these people are now seen as the dregs of society, sapping the welfare system because they can’t get jobs, holding back the economy and those who engineer it.

Does this “throwaway” language sound familiar? How about the Facebook page of the Albuquerque cop who described his job  as “human waste disposal.” Or one of the cops who shot homeless James Boyd in the Sandia foothills, talking to a state cop before the shooting: “For this fucking lunatic? I’m going to shoot him with [unintelligible] shotgun here in a second.” The homeless, the mentally ill, the PTSD vets who are in and out of treatment are fair game, it seems, for those in APD who think we’d all be better off without them, but picking them off one by one is not very efficient.

Benjamin Netanyahu is much more efficient. He bombs the Palestinians he wants to be rid of in Gaza and smashes the houses and destroys the crops of the ones in the West Bank. He’s been documented saying he’ll never agree to an Israeli state for anyone other than the Jews, and his foreign minister is quoted saying, “I want to get rid of these people [the Palestinians] through transfer, or exchange.”

What they are all getting at is eugenics, of course. The man who coined the term was another Brit like Brand, albeit of the ruling class, very much unlike Brand. According to Francis Galton, his ruling class was “genetically superior” and should therefore rule the world. Across the ocean, this translated into American policies to protect the Puritan gene pool from inferior “stock” through immigration laws. And while people of color have felt the brunt of this discrimination profoundly over last few centuries, it doesn’t mean that the ruling class is opposed to throwing away other white people.

Orwell brought the conception to its nadir in Nineteen Eighty-four, where the Proles, the rabble that lives outside the brotherhood, are left to their own ignorant devices. Except that the tables are turned: the Proles appear to be the only ones who have the capacity to enjoy themselves, even in their abject conditions and exclusion from power. The carefully conditioned Inner Party can’t remember what a good time might be.

Our “Proles” may end up spoiling the elites’ party, in a different way. With all those good manufacturing jobs gone that raised so many from working class to middle class, who’s going to be buying and consuming the goods—all those iPhones and video games and flat screen TVs rather than cars and washing machines and lawn mowers—that keep the American economy afloat? And when folks can’t pay for healthcare or home mortgages they’ll end up sapping the welfare system even more. Aha! Remember the industrial revolution when workers couldn’t afford to buy any of the things they made?

One could argue that the solution to alienated labor is no labor at all. There is enough wealth in the world to provide every human being enough money to meet our basic material needs. I can just hear the reactionaries screaming that that would be the end to civilization as we know it, but a lot of us would be screaming back: thank god! Feed and clothe and house all of us and see what we’re capable of.