The grandkids are in town!

Shopping and spoiling and hugging, oh my!

 

From The Onion (link at right)

I spent four hours at the Paseo fest yesterday selling beer at the booth by the main stage and my sobriety was on the line.

Just last Thursday, a friend bought me a cranberry and tonic on the art museum roof and didn’t notice the bartender assumed vodka went with that.

These are critical moments for me.  For me, to drink is to die.  For me, a beer, a glass of wine or a mixed drink is poison.  It doesn’t just poison my body, it poisons my mind and heart.

Thank God I’m sober.

I get praise at times due to my long term sobriety — 11 years this June 22 — but it really IS a sheer gift.

It’s not something I earned or deserved.

It’s not something I’ve done with willpower.

I tried to stop drinking many times before June, 1995, with no success.

Alcoholics Anonymous gave me the tools to be sober.

It’s the most important and best decision I’ve made in my life.

I don’t work the program perfectly by any means.  You want to be a perfectionist, you can pick apart how well I measure up to working the program in all my affairs with no problem.  Child’s play.

I am sober as a matter of what theologists might call “grace”.

A power of unqualified love in the universe helped me in 1995 and still helps me today.

Thursday, I reacted to a sip less than a gargle with Listerine as if it were lye I were drinking.  It really hit me how close I came to losing my sobriety just by thoughtlessness.  AND I woke up Friday feeling like I was hungover, but knowing it was all in my mind. 

Damn good reminder of the bad days before I quit.

Last night, I sold multiple beers to people who became, not surprisingly, increasingly intoxicated.

They thought they were having a good time and maybe they were.

I can’t tell you how glad I was not to be them.

I remember all too vividly such Paseo fests.

I also remember the guilt and remorse.  I remember being baffled about how I could have slipped past the “one or two” I swore I’d have and then stop.

I remember the sunburn and headache and bad belly.

I remember the shitty taste in my mouth from too much beer the night before.

I remember the ugly women I flirted with, to the consternation of my wife.

I remember the lowlifes I hung out with.

( Well, of course, the folks I hang out with now you might say are lowlifes, but they’re a much much higher level low life. )

I remember puking and falling down and hurting and scraping and cutting and bruising and not knowing where the injuries came from when I woke up.

How could I sell beer for four hours and not be tempted to take even one single sip?

EASY.

 

The number of American dead in Iraq is about the same as the population of Nicoma Park here in Oklahoma County, just over 2,400.

The remains of the Paseo dinner crowd who came to my house for the movie were treated to a few minutes of a Spanish language film, “Love’s a bitch”, but we couldn’t watch it because it started out with Mexico City dogfights to the death and we collectively couldn’t handle the animal cruelty it portrayed.  We stopped the movie and switched to a 1960s black and white film, “Darling”, starring Julie Christie.

That’s kind of odd, isn’t it?

I mean, it’s commonplace for us to watch movies in which people are injured and killed, but we couldn’t handle the cruelty to these dogs.

In “Darling”, Julie Christie’s character tortures and kills a couple of goldfish.  That seemed OK and no one objected.

I wouldn’t even go see Mel Gibson’s “Passion” because I didn’t want the images of torture that were portrayed as part of Christ’s final hours in my mind.  I also will never again watch Gibson’s “Braveheart” because of the final moments of that film, depicting a torture and castration of the Gibson character.

Sex?  That’s different.  Bring on the nudity and full bore porn.

Violence?  Turns my belly.

Except not always.

“Kill Bill”, either the first or the second, is full of lots of gore and dismemberment and it didn’t bother me in the least.  Cartoonish in many ways.  Same for, say, Antonio Bandaras in “El Mariachi”.  Blow away a couple dozen bad guys?  Not a problem.

I also won’t go see the Freddy/Jason/whatever “slasher” movies, no matter how cartoonish, and don’t even ask about films like “Saw” and “Hostel”.  No way.

Could I get my fill of sex in movies?  Hmmm.  Don’t know.  Porn itself doesn’t bother me, but the porn industry is boring.  The utter lack of plot and character and dialogue leave me cold and enough raw sex on screen actually lowers my libido rather than raise it.

When I go past film to other genres or media, it seems the same.  I’ve seen some very erotic photographs, but a glossy “cum shot” pic just seems silly, boring and stupid and not sexy at all.  How do we compare the sex in, say, D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller, to the sex in those Grove and Evergreen Press lurid whackoff books?

Whether sex or violence, doesn’t less seem more?  Can’t you recall films where a simple slap in the face seemed shockingly violent within the context of the movie?  I can — Roy Schneider’s character getting slapped by the distraught mother in “Jaws”, for example.  I know that the moment in “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” when the main characters’ fingers touch seems deliciously sexy, but there’s nothing like nudity no matter how much I may long to see Ms. Johanssen’s bare body.

Of course, a lot of what this is all about is a matter of taste and sensibilities, not to mention context. 

Art and life imitate each other as well.  There have certainly been those kisses in my life that were better than some of the actual sex I’ve had when the kiss was stolen and the sex was routine and “medicinal”.

As a young reporter, there were moments that stand out vividly of car wrecks and murder scenes, but they seem less relevant, somehow, than the time I walked out of a courtroom with a client who turned to her estranged husband’s new girlfriend and wordlessly slapped the shit out of her and calmly walked away.   

I think it may also be like millions, billions and trillions.  I can understand $10.  That’s real to me.  $1 Trillion in federal deficit spending?  I have no concept.  I can understand a slap in the face or a punch in the stomach.  The genocide of millions by Pol Pot or Hitler is just out of my ken.

This is not a brief to ban either porn or violence from art.  I think the fact that we have such rules makes breaking the rules seem like fun.  In fact, I would have NO rules whatsoever about sex or violence.

On the other hand, I’d say if you don’t like bad porn and/or excessive violence, let your money do your talking.  Don’t go to those movies and spend your money on movies that don’t make you queasy.

However, my queasiness with allowing children to see Gibson’s “Passion” sure makes me want to be the guy who can draw the lines and set the rules.  The parents who let that movie put those images in their children’s heads committed child abuse, in my view, and the notion that it’s religious and that makes it all right is sheer poppycock as far as I’m concerned. 

We now return you to your regular programming.

Haven’t really written much in the blog in awhile for a bunch of reasons, so it’s hard to know what to put in without putting in too much information altogether.

I’ve had my own reasons for being an idiot and lazy about blogging, but that’s not worth detailing.

Today, I had my annual checkup.  As usual, that means there will be followup stuff in the coming weeks.  I have a colonoscopy at the end of next month, for example.  The initial returns have been favorable.  Except for the annual asswhipping about smoking, the doc says I’m more healthy than most 30 somethings.  Bloodpressure, heartrate, weight, prostate, all good.  I’ll be getting the second wave of reports from my bloodwork soon — cholesterol, STD scan, that stuff.  YES, “STD SCAN” IS MAYBE TMI FOR SOME OF YOU (shut the fuck up, Suz), BUT IT’S IMPORTANT AND THERE’S NO REASON FOR GROWNUPS TO BE EMBARRASSED ABOUT SEX, DAMMIT.  Get over it.  If you are sexually active, get checked, fer goodness sake.  And one more thing:  NO GLOVE, NO LOVE.

This past weekend, the Parker family took over my house and life so that the son, Charles, could enjoy a 26th birthday party.  Father Zach was the DJ, Rena was the caterer and I never did figure out what the hell Kat was doing.  Lotsa nice folks, some young’uns having beers and the older folks in the back yard ratcheting jaws as usual.

Went to a fundraiser for children’s pediatric cancer research last Thursday, Taste of Bricktown.  Magnificant food and the Bricktown Coca Cola center was filled to the brim.

That brings me to the death of Fletcher Vines, age 11.  Oh my Lord, my heart goes out to Gail, his mom.  I just don’t know if I could handle the loss of a child.  All through his illness over the past few years, the two of them handled his illness with better sanity than I can muster.  The St. Baldrick’s fundraisers, the church events at Mayflower and at his school.  They handled this with more than aplomb — they got the entire near northwest OKC community involved and turned a fatal illness into an opportunity to do some good for the world.  One thing for certain:  Fletcher’s life and death were an inspiration for me in so many ways.  My little troubles with romance and finance pale in comparison and I’m enormously grateful for my children and grandchildren and mother and sisters and their good health.  I’m not going to even try to eulogize, it’s been done better than I could do by others.  For myself, I think of how much Fletcher accomplished in only 11 years and I celebrate his life and re-dedicate myself to looking at how I can help others and not just to focus on my own crap. 

That pretty much ends the whining portion of the program, I’m guessing.

Just a brief mention of politics.  It looks to me like the Republicans are learning a bad trick from the Democrats.  Used to be, there were lots of Dem candidates and they would beat the hell out of each other all through the summer and then wonder why they seemed so mud smeared when they faced the GOP in the fall.  Here in the 5th Congressional District, you’ve got maybe 5 Repugs who will spend $1 million EACH and it looks like they are going to get into that good old circular firing squad and take potshots until there’s only one standing.  How many times can you spread the rumor that this one is immoral, that one is unethical and the others are crazy?  Stay tuned, but $5 million spent claiming that everyone else is trash and you are the conservative one will hit the TV channels like a tsunami starting in just a week or two.  The CW is that whoever the GOP picks will be the Nov. winner because the Dems, including the one I’m working for, are flying under the radar.  HOWEVER, the national polls showing Bush down around 30% and falling in several political indicators of strength of support among the 1/3 that back him are putting the House of Representatives in play in a way that we haven’t seen since 1994’s Newt Gingrich “Contract With America”.  House districts that were once seen as solid red are starting to look purple and tending to blue.  Repug seats “in play” numbered about 25 only a couple of months ago and that number has risen to 45 today.  IF (big IF) the GOP here does the trash job on each other that they do in the fall routinely against the Dems, the GOP nominee could well go into the fall so damaged that even huge amounts of money won’t help because so many wing nuts will sit on their hands in disgust and so many Dems are so energized by the political pollution of this administration and Congress.  This is a phenomenon I’ve seen before.  Besides, when I was in the news business, an old old hand named Nelson Taylor once wisely said there are two things upon which one should NEVER wager:  the jury box and the ballot box.  Strange things happen in a voting booth. 

Wish I had some polling numbers.  Where is Tom Keilhorn, the estimable “Dr. Doom” of local polling, when I need him?

Ah, my love life.  Haven’t mentioned that yet.  I don’t have one at the moment.  I got stood up Thursday, stood up by a different woman Saturday, and I’m out of bullets at the moment.  I’ll reload one day soon and start shooting at my toes again and y’all will be the first to know.

ttfn  

   

 from The Onion. 

New ‘Anti-Abortion Pill’ Kills Mother, Leaves Fetus Alive
 

Also thought this was funny: