My mom fussed at me yesterday and this time I fussed right back.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Mom loves me and I hope to goodness she knows I love her. 

Nevertheless, we disagreed disagreeably yesterday.

My friend Lucky says the only good partner is a dead partner.

I think that’s what Mom and I fussed about: we do business together, but it gets mixed up in our familial relationship and vice versa.

I don’t like fussing with Mom (I don’t think she likes fussing with me) and most of the time, I just swallow hard and take it.  After all, she’s my mother and we do that 10 Commandments thing and honor our forebears.  It’s what a good Southern boy does.

All of which is to get to the topic partially covered the other day when I wrote about the end of the world.

I have some very romantic notions that I hold dear that have deep roots in our society but which cannot, upon close examination, be defended intellectually.  Those notions include the ideas of honor, duty, the whole trope about passion and being a personal hero.

It’s that “knight in shining armor” thing.

Intellectually, I’m a situational ethics kinda guy.  A relativist.  A humanist.

Perhaps because I’m emotionally stunted, I retain lots of childhood notions that I picked up reading Robert Louis Stephenson and Rudyard Kipling. 

I believe that there are times that simply because you CAN do something to help another, you have the DUTY to perform the act.

I cannot defend that proposition, but I’m intent on living it.

I believe we owe respect to our elders just for the fact of their longevity — they have experience which may make them “right”, at least from their perspective, that we perhaps cannot see because our perspective isn’t as broad.  This is a big change for me from the 60s, when I believed you couldn’t trust anyone over 30. 

I believe in the truth.  There is a radical impossibility that there is such a thing as The Truth.  Yet, I remain in a state of fidelity to telling and seeing and seeking it.

I believe in true love.  I’ve looked for it all my life and, yet, intellectually, I’m quite sure such a thing does not exist, at least not in the romantic state I imagine and that we see portrayed in films and on television and in books.

“We must act as if there is a God despite the radical impossibility there ever was one,” Sartre wrote. Yet, I believe in a supreme power in the universe, albeit not one with a long beard as seen on the ceiling of the Vatican (and at Flip’s, oddly enough.  Why would Adam have a belly button?).

I’d like to continue this, but apparently I’m required to play fetch right now.

TTFN 

Now that the second of his top aides has pleaded guilty and prosecutors are moving closer to alleging former GOP Majority Leader DeLay ran “a criminal enterprise” out of his congressional offices, he’s decided not to seek re-election from his Houston district, saying it’s a Republican district that will elect someone from the GOP if he doesn’t run.  He oughta know, he drew the district to be solid Republican in a Texas hornswaggle that seemed unconstitutional to me. 

Do you think that it would be a good thing for Congress to take a second look at the bills worked on by disgraced and convicted GOP congressman Duke Cunningham, disgraced and facing indictment Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio and disgraced and indicted Tom DeLay?

 Nah.

That would just be “anti-business” and force large corporations to give out a new set of bribes to a new set of Congressmen.  Hmmmm.  Let’s think that one over.

Do you think the new GOP majority leader, famous for passing out campaign money from big tobacco on the floor of the house, an act for which he was censured by the ethics committee, will think that one over? 

Corrupt cronyism.  It’s not just a campaign slogan, it’s a Washington, D.C., way of life under the Republican “K Street Project”.

but it’s OK since a bribe is so much cheaper than a fair tax.

MOVIE REVIEW

 “V for Vendetta” is one of the worst movies I’ve ever sat through.  If I were Hugh Weaving (Mr. Smith in the Matrix series), I’d want to wear a mask the entire movie, too.  Just to stay anonymous.  How they managed to make Natalie Portman, so sexy in Closer, look so bad so often — especially as the schoolgirl in full costume — is beyond me, but they did.  The movie opens with Weaving giving this alliterative monologue using words that begin with the letter “V” and that lost me right there.  It goes downhill afterwards.  Rated G for Gawdawful.

SINATRA REPORT

Spring has officially begun.  Sinatra stayed out all night, missing curfew.  So, of course, he got extra milk in the sacred blue saucer when he returned this morning because I was so glad to have him back.  Hey, you train your cat your way and I’ll do what I want.

 WEATHER REPORT

The top is down and I’m good.  Jolly Dr. Max has purchased a red ‘Vette.  I have sports car envy.  I’ve written him that it’s a plot to make me go back for more therapy (since it IS all about ME ME ME ME ME), but he denies it, the liar. 

Meanwhile, I can’t stay away from the road that goes around lake Hefner.  It somehow calms and refreshes me to be around the water, to smell the air and hear the waves and the waterfowl.  I’ve taken a look at the joggers and bikers and I can tell you that most of them need to get some exercise.  You’d think it’d be tight, taut bodies, but it’s actually a lot of pretty fat asses sweating profusely.  No Pain?  Good.

HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE

 heard it through the grapevine that the lovely Juliet is taking her Elastic Cafe models to bin 73 Wednesday night.  Might even include Pink Lady, one of her newest.  What was I thinking when I hooked up those two?  Nothing but trouble for me.  Oh, well. 

Also heard the Paseo lottery group won $20.  Not bad considering we’ve invested a couple hundred collectively. LOL.  A tax on the math impaired, no doubt.  It sure is fun to speculate about what you’d do with a hundred million or so.  maybe that’s what makes it worth it.

TTFN

But, as Will Rogers observed, nobody does anything about it.

(Caveat: Mike H says the government is manipulating the weather and all you have to do is notice the criss cross contrails.  I dunno, but that’s what he says.  Whatever.)

Myself, I enjoyed the hell out of the weather this weekend.

The storm Saturday night provided me with a lot more entertainment than any bar or band could possibly provide.  I went to the 60th birthday party of Jolly Dr. Max with a lot of his friends and afterwards became jolly myself with that thunderstorm that rumbled through town. 

I went out to the lake for a short time with the top down and watched the lightning come close enough that it sprinkled on me before I got the top up.  

 Went from there to Starbucks and watched the rain come down in buckets.

From there to a park where I could observe the lightning roll away to the east.

Gosh, but I love Oklahoma thunderstorms!  I’ve always liked them.  The strong winds, the thunder, the flashes of streak and sheet lightning.  I live for the day I can see personally some ball lightning.  So much power and drama in a storm like that, it’s sexually exciting for me.  It seems to just put all my lights on, pushes all my buttons, childhood and onward.  One of my earliest memories is of watching a storm come into my grandmother’s hometown of Lawton while we were there for a visit. I must have been very very young because I’m thinking my first sister, Jaime, had just been born.  That would put me about 3 or 4 years old.

Then, yesterday, everything cleaned by Mother Nature, especially including the air.  It was such a beautiful, sunny day.  Did anyone else notice that the air seemed especially transparent?  My vision seemed so crisp. 

It took a force of will to be inside yesterday.

Everywhere I went, there were people on bikes.  I’m told there was some kind of extra special bike event up in Edmond.  There were also lots of folks out getting in that last good training run before the Red Bud Classic this coming weekend.

Of course, when I feel like exercise, I go lie down until the feeling goes away.

Hey, it works for me.

No pain?  Good.

Anyway, saw lots of good people Sunday.

Hadn’t seen Button in a coon’s age, but there she was with her newest squeeze at Starbucks, looking all cute and skinny in her red shirt, blue jean shorts and a ballcap.  She says she’s selling tee-shirts with the inscription “All Natural Ingredients”. I think that’s what she told me it said.  The back says: “Bike Candy”.  Maybe it says “No Artificial Ingredients”.  Whatever.

Saw DeShan with “stick straight hair” and the lovely Brianne with a bikini under her summery clothes.  Both those women are just the shit.  So damn good looking, it’s not fair to us guys.

I kidnapped DeShan Friday for a short time to take her to the lake for a drink.  She says next time, I have to bind and gag her and take her to the car kicking and screaming.  Kinky bitch.

She’s leaving soon for the land down under, this time permanently. This town will miss her pizzazz, I’m thinking.

Sinatra is having trouble with Daylight Savings Time.  He woke me up this morning at 7 a.m. and I tried to tell him it was really only 6 a.m. according to my body.  He was having none of it and wanted out out out out out out out right then and right there, no excuses or discussion.  I’m thinking there’s a woman involved and it’s spring and a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love.  This old man’s fancy turned to thoughts of castration.

Post Script to Friday’s entry:  I finally decided I was looking at the question all wrong and that the real question was why stay at my desk when it was so lovely outside.  It was self destructive and wrong, but i closed up shop and got out the door.  So, I starve this month, they foreclose the house and repossess the car.  Quel Catastrophe! I’ll come live with you.

The world is coming to an end.  It must be true because I read it in MCARP’s blog.

 I laughed my ass off at Mike’s blog.

Of course, it’s true — in a sense — that the end of the world is certainly coming, whether it’s global warming or an asteroid or the sun burning out. 

One suspects one’s own world will end before the world’s world comes to an end.

In all events, a certain fatalism is implicit in MCARP’s buddhist leanings.  As a jake leg Taoist, in my leanings too.  Of course, I’m also a depressive recovering alcoholic, so what do you expect from me?

The most fatalistic person I know is “Lucky”, a former funeral home employee.  You don’t even want to know.

But, you know, it’s just not reasonable not to recognize one’s own mortality.

Death will come to us all.

The question is HOW and WHEN, if not WHY?

I refuse to have my obituary read:  Long spent his final years of grave illness in seclusion, having lived past anyone who could remember when he was vital, social and deeply engaged in life and into the time that the only possible memory of him was as a sick old bastard with a sharp tongue.

Fuck that.

Don’t you wish you could die a hero?  Maybe saving a village of orphaned African children?

How will you ever die a hero unless you are heroic?

Don’t you wish you could die a warrior?  Turning the tide of some battle, literal or metaphorical? 

How will you ever die a warrior if you are never bold and fearless?

I want to live my life so passionately and well that every day really is a good day to die. 

No regrets.

Nothing left undone.

On any given day, I want every single person in my life who I love to know and to have heard from me recently that I love them.  I’m not there yet, but it’s my goal.

I want my personal integrity and reliability as a friend and as a lawyer to be respected and admired.

I want my kindness and generosity to spring to mind to those who hear of my death with grief and loss.

I want somebody to feel grief and loss at my passing and the more the merrier.

I figure I fall pretty short of the glory of God when it comes to how I’d like to be remembered compared to the reality of my life.  Good.  I also want to be known as someone who worked to make himself a better person and never stopped trying.

Is an unexamined life really a life not worth living?  How would an introspective narcissist like me know the answer to that one?