Rosebud

I had one of these when I was a child and it was my favorite toy. It's a Dennis the Menace doll, in case you didn't recognize the character.

When I was too old to play with it, it sat at the end of my bed with my teddy bear named, Bo-Bo, and a stuffed dog named Fluffy.

When I got to be a teen, I'm not sure what happened to it. My mother probably put it in a plastic bag (which is something she did with a lot of thing; used dry cleaning bags--the really dangerous ones that come with a warning not to let small children play with them) with Bo-Bo and Fluffy, and then put it on a shelf in a closet.

I imagine when I went away to college she threw it away. She did that with a lot of my stuff. (Don't worry, Mom. If you can somehow read this, I was never upset when you did that.)

Buddy Miller: I Worry Too Much

Yup. Can't help myself. I'm a worrier. 

If Sue walks to yoga, I worry about her getting mugged. 

If she drives, I worry about some crazy drunk broadsiding her. If I have a headache, I swear it's a brain tumor. If Sue catches a cold, I'm convinced it's the end. 

I worry about money. About not enough, and crazy: about too much and it will run out. 

And I've actually gotten better over the years, but I'm still an insomniac, which I've been since I was a teenager. I remember so many late nights/early mornings sitting up in my bedroom on Lester Road, sitting on the edge of my bed looking out the window. I would spend a lot of those nights reading and writing.

Yep, I worry too much. 

Sing it, Buddy. 

Two Artists Doing Neil Young Songs

Not better. Just different.

How artists can put their own twists and bends. How they can put their own personal mark on a song.

It's a big topic in theater. Playwrights hand over their work, and Lord knows what could happen to it.

The Timmins family, and Gillian and David are some of the most talented musicians today. So, what do you do when your work falls into the hands of "artists" (ahem) less talented?

Honestly? I think I actually like the Junkies version of Powderfinger much better. It's more controlled. Crazy Horse does it like a ride down the Colorado River rapids. Which is their style. But Margo Timmins? She reminds me of something I once heard about James Taylor. She could sing the phone book and make it sound good.

(If you don't know what a phone book is, I can't help you. I guess you could Google it.)

The Presidential Inauguration, Forty Years Ago

Today, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term.

Forty years ago (actualy, January 20, 1973; thank you Wikipedia) Richard Nixon was inaugurated for the second time. I was there protesting.

I commented today on Facebook about this. I hadn't thought about this for many years. But forty years is a long time, and it's actually a funny story. It was a different time then.

I had a friend named Valerie. We were in high school together and Valerie and I were platonic friends, but I loved her, as only a teenage boy could love a girl. She didn't know it though. I was a hippie. I had shoulder length hair, and wore patched blue jeans and flannel shirts like Neil Young. She was a hippie, too. She had long straight hair, and also wore jeans and flannel shirts. She lived with her single mom, and went out with a guy, another hippie, named Micheal.

I was cool with all that because, well, hippies were cool with everything.

One afternoon Valerie called me. Hey, she said, we're going to Washington to protest Nixon's inaugeration. Do you want to come?

I swear this is what happened next. I turned and yelled to my mom in the kitchen. Hey mom, it's Valerie. She's going to Washington to protest Nixon's inauguration and wants to know if I can come.

And my mom, who I think was probably at her wits end with her youngest child, said sure, why not.

Valerie, Michael, some guy who I've forgotten, and I all crammed into a Volkswagaon Beetle (what else?) and drove through the night to Washington, arriving in the early morning to what I can still remember to be onel of the biggest assemblies of hippies the world had ever seen.

Pot smoke was in the air. We did some sightseeing (you have to remember we were high school students from Ohio on a road trip) but everything was closed for the expected violence. I looking at the Lincoln Memorial with my jaw on the ground. The mall and the Washington Monument were all closed, at least to long-hairs like us. That's what we were called. Long-hairs and freaks and hippies.

I remember signing up with the SDS, only later thinking the table was staffed by the FBI and there would be an agent at my home when I arrived. I mean, there was no email, Twitter, Facebook, anything. What was the SDS going to do? Send me a brochure?

And it was that weekend when I learned about the nature of political movements. A lot of people came just to party, get high or drunk, and cause mayhem, because they were young and bored and just as entitled and young people are accused of being today. Intellectuals weren't any better represented then than they are now. Smart people are always in short supply. I remember seeing a long-hair pounding on the hood of car that held a bunch of straight people, yelling his outrage at them. Then, straight meant mainstream. It has a different meaning today, but I still use the word with its archaic defiinition.

There's a good chance that guy went back to his suburban home in New Jersey, and later worked on Wall Street. That's what happened to those times. Even Neil Young has turned into kind of an old fogey, interested in selling his music in $500 CD collections.

Me? I wrote on Facebook today that then I was 17-years-old, had long hair, and a penchant for blue jeans and flannel shirts. For me at least, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Lance Armstrong: Heroes and Villians

(c) sportsillustrated.com

Tomorrow and Friday Oprah will air her interview with Lance Armstrong when he will supposedly admit, to a greater or lesser degree, that he participated in doping for his entire career.

Do I care? I'm mildly interested since I'm a fan of cycling.

Am I hurt, disappointed, or mad at a person I've never met?  No, I am not.

This is just one more act in the circus called the American media.

But I guess I can say that because I figured out long ago never to bet on a horse if I'm not riding it. I learned not to get emotionally tangled up with sports teams and players, because what logic is there in wanting to slash my wrists after, say the Red Sox blow a ten-game lead in the standing in a matter of weeks? There's nothing I can do about it, and when it comes out that grown men who are making tens of millions of dollars are acting like children, or worse, like drunken sailors on shore leave, why should I care?

It's just one more lesson in human behavior that the Greeks understood 2,500 years ago and we still haven't learned yet. Their gods and heroes were flawed, and why are we always outraged when a human being plummets from the heights of Olympus is beyond me.

We all know sports organizations and athletes are not the squeaky-clean enterprises and gods and goddesses we make them out to be. It's just part of their branding in order to sell overpriced tickets and logo clothing and eight dollar cups of crap beer at their venues. It's marketing, folks, and frankly most of the marketing goes to stem the tide that most sports are going the way of professional wrestling. It's all phoney and geared to make the most money possible.

I was, though, a huge Lance Armstrong fan and have been a fan of the Tour de France since I was a kid and rode a Schwinn Varsity, my first bike, and American Greg LeMond was wearing the yellow jersey. I was following le Tour when people here in the United States were calling it the Tore day France (rhymes with pants) if they were even talking about it at all. What am I saying?--there are still people who pronounce it that way.

During the heyday of the U.S. Postal Services' team's dominance of the Tour, when Lance (see, I call him by his first name, as if I really know him) won seven Tours in a row, for 21 days in July I'd be incommunicado. I still had a television set then, and I'd get up in the morning around 6:00 and watch the race on the Outdoor Network Channel. Then in the afternoon I'd watch the highlights and that night I'd watch the entire race all over again. Wonderful races, very dramatic, and of course in the back of my head I'd wonder if he was doping. What do you think I am?--an idiot?

The same way I imagine any baseball fan with half a dose of common sense had to be wondering about the likes of Mark Maguire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens when they had their runs as sports giants.

Yeah, Clemens (notice I don't refer to him by his first name) was called before Congress, but they let him off. I still don't understand why Congress cared what Clemens shot in his big butt, but, like most people, I don't understand much of anything that Congress does.

I just got finished reading Neil Young's autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, (don't read it unless you're a crazy Neil Young or music fan; it's terribly written) where he admits he wrote all--and he does mean all--his songs while high. When he was writing his book he had quit all drugs including alcohol, and wrote that he had writer's block and hadn't written a single song since going clean. Is anyone saying, hey, Harvest or After the Gold Rush suck now since you wrote them under the influence? No. But then again, everyone knows that drugs play a role in music--as we should just admit in sports.

But I'm digressing. Lance is a little different from the other boys.

After Lance's time on the hero's podium, he's going to have to serve his time getting raked over the coals of the American judicial system, better known as popular opinion run by the media. He didn't just bamboozle us in the hero department, he jeopardized the income of a lot of big names: LiveStrong. Oakley. Nike. Trek. Giro helmets. 24-hour Fitness. Anheuser-Busch. Radio Shack. The Discovery Channel.

What do they say about Bernie Madoff? Why was he the only person from Wall Street who went to jail? Because he ripped off the 1%. The U.S. Postal Service ponied up about $30 million to sponsor the team. South Australia is considering suing him for appearance money paid to him. The Sunday Times is suing him for $1.5 million for a libel settlement. Money, money, money, money. Everybody was making huge sums of money of each other. Now there's hell to pay.

And Lance jeopardized his own income and this poor boy from Texas who rose to those dizzy heights of wealth and popularity isn't going down without a fight. I'm not so enamored with Lance that I don't realize he's probably behind all this noise. He--or rather, his brand, that third-person entity that is composed of not flesh and blood, but rather public opinion--is at stake here.

If I can say one thing about Lance, he did a lot of good. He took his fame and used it to fight cancer. Maybe his story was hokum--a superhuman defeat of the Big C--but it still got people to fight cancer. That's a lot more than a lot of rich celebs ever attempt to do. Seriously, what does Mick Jagger do with all his millions and fame? Of course, Mick Jagger doesn't try to come across like Glinda the Good Witch either. He is who he is, and Lance is who he is, too.

I still think it's our society that's at fault here, as much as Lance. Our society seems rife with people who will do anything for success. And we let them and even encourage them, and then get mad at them when they let us down.

Every day...

Every day, I try to do three things:

1) Something good for myself.
2) Something good for someone else.
3) Something good for the world.

If you think it sounds easy. Try it once. And keep trying it everyday.

Even the first one is hard to do.  We have so many encroachments in our lives. Things that exert demands on us for our time and energy that sometimes we don't even have time for a meal, much lesss time for something that will really be good for us. We have to really like ourselves to pull this one off with any degree of consistancy, because the biggest obstacle is the idea that if we do something for ourselves, we're being selfish.

The second is easy to do if the opportunity presents itself. Taking time to listen to your spouse/partner. Smile at a stranger on the subway. The second one is usually my favorite.

The third is hugely egotistical, isn't it? I'm going to do something for the entire world. I tend to think small. I think recyling in my mulch pile is helping the world. Walking instead of driving to the store. That sort of thing.

What do you think? Are these good ideas? What do you do for yourself, for others, and the world?

Alejandro Escovedo: Bottom of the World

For me, it's usually the melody that hits me first. 

Then I listen and pick up a few words here and there, and then maybe a line sticks. 

And then I'm hooked. 

Ever been just down and out? I mean really down and out? This song gives a good feeling of what it's like. The world used to be one way, you used to be on top of the world. And then, wtf, you found yourself at the bottom and you're a changed person.

Anyway, there's no better person to write and sing about it than Alejendro Escovedo. 

Austin’s changed, it’s true

Show me what hasn’t

Tonight the tv’s throwing colors on the wall

As I watch the cities of the world reduced to ashes

From where I sit, at the bottom of the world

Oh, there used to be a phone booth

Down here on every corner

He used to call me up just to say my name

But now all anybody gets is a busy signal

No you can’t call home, from the bottom of the world

She said, hey newspaper boy

Don’t you think it’s time you delivered?

I said, say the word, your wish is my command

Well she ran me over like an eighteen-wheeler

And dumped my body at the bottom of the world.

You might think you know all there is to know about me

You might think the beast is in the cage

But everything you see is just an illusion

It’s about to get real, at the bottom of the world.

Oh, hey little boy, little boy you look a little frightened

For these aren’t the kind of streets for walking alone

So why don’t you get yourself home back to Houston

No I don’t think you’re ready, for the bottom of the world

No I don’t think you’re ready, for the bottom of the world.

Crazy Horse Never Would Have Used A Smart Phone

"Change was a part of life, Crazy Horse advised. Yet it is wise to hang on to the things that make us all happy and worthwhile as Lakota. In the days of the far past the lance gave way to the bow and arrow as a hunting weapon, yet the essence of being a hunter didn't change. Trading for a blanket or a length of blue cloth didn't have to change the person trading for or using the blanket or the cloth, Crazy Horse was certain. Anything in the hand didn't have to be given the power to change what was in the mind or the heart. And that, he understood, was at the root of many fears, that the essence of being Lakota could be so easily changed by new and different things. It made no sense." --The Journey of Crazy Horse, Joseph M. Marshall III. 

This quote was in reference to how Crazy Horse's father, a medicine man, thought. Crazy Horse at this point in his life still had his boyhood name, Light Hair, so called because, unlike most indigenous Americans, he had brown, wavy hair.

Things do change us though.What Crazy Horse was referring to was changing a way of life. In this case, some of the indigenous people were lounging around Fort Laramie waiting for blankets instead of hunting elk and caribou to make their own blankets, and they were waiting for allotments of beef instead of hunting buffalo. The question is, what makes up a way of life? Of course free blankets and beef made the harsh life the Lakota sometimes had to endure easier. But at what expense? What did the Lakota gain from living as one with the elements? The answer of course, is not just knowledge, but wisdom about the natural world that shaped an entire culture. That's nothing to sneeze at, or to blithely let die.

(Note to right-wing fundamentalists: that last paragraph is not in any way a commentary on what is commonly referred to as the welfare state. Some people do need help, and if nature made it hard on the Lakota in the late nineteenth century, I think our society makes it even harder on some people today.)

I ask that question all the time regarding technology in our own modern lives. I love technology and what it can do, but you can be a slave to it. Right now I'm blogging, and I'm not writing plays. What am I gaining here, and what am I losing?

As I said, I love technology. I do, though you might not expect that from a person who chooses not to have a smart phone and hasn't owned a television for almost six years now. Some people think I'm behind the times, but I think I'm ahead of the curve.

Here's why:

I tell this to people all the time: throw out your televison. Make a party out of it and get all your friends and go up to the second floor and push it out a window so it makes a loud crash when it hits the ground. And here's what will happen: After about six months or so you will have your first original thought since you were about six years old. That's about the time you started into the school system and really got indoctrinated into society.

People don't realize how manipulative television is. Oh, I know you think you're making choices, but you're not. You may even be one of those people who say, I don't care that I'm being manipulated, I like my shows. Or you may be someone who waves the standard of your intelligence and good breeding and only watches PBS and the history channel. You're still being manipulated, in so many ways. You're watching your favorite liberal newscaster, making all those deep, learned statements, and you're identifying with that person, thinking yes, that's exactly what I think, and at the same time you're looking at his/her hair and his/her clothes and you're subconsciously deciding that's how I'm going to dress and wear my hair. And then you go out and spend your hard-earned money on the haircut he has or the suit she's wearing, when the real you is supposed to be wearing t-shirt with Howard the Duck on it and a pair of bowling shoes, but you'd never find that out because the television is blinding you of that fact.

Or something like that.

To people who say they can't live without their shows or their televisions, this is what I say: That's exactly what the heroin addict says about his needle.

Throw out your television for six months. Seriously, what have you got to lose?

I've also made the concerted decsion not to buy a smart phone. Aside from saving myself I don't know how much, I simply don't want to be that person sitting on subway with my nose in a phone instead of looking around and being an active participant in my world.  I sure as heck don't want to be walking down some street in some strange city with my nose against a phone instead of using all of my senses to experience all the new sights of where I am. I don't want some phone telling me where the nearest Italian restaurant is. I want to find it for myself, just like the Lakota should have hunted their own buffalo. I don't want to be told by whoever it was who paid the most money to Google to tell me where to eat. Some of the best experiences of my life came from serendipity. Discovering that little bistro down an alley. A delightful exchange with a stranger when I asked directions, or they asked them of me. I don't want to give up that part of my life.

I'm still connected to the world, but I choose how I'm connected and where I connect. To answer my own question above, I'm blogging right now because I'm choosing to reach out digitally to the world in this manner. I will settle in and work on a play later today.

And I keep up on current events, probably just as well or maybe even better than the person glued to CNN/PBS/Good Morning America/Fox News. The difference is I choose what I'm looking into, and where I get my information. For all you smarty pants out there, PBS is still making decsions for you. Here's the difference: You watching PBS is like you going to a restaurant and choosing from the menu. You can only eat off that menu. The way I do it is like cooking a meal in your own kitchen.

The End of the University as We Know It

Well, I just published a post about not knowing what to post, and then I head over to Twitter and see this piece, and I'm all over it. This is from Elizabeth Scarborough from simpsonscarborough.com. 

She tweeted this article from The American Interest.com about the end of the university as we know it. 

The high cost of an education in the United States is one thing that drives me crazy. Everyone goes to college, and in the good old days (when I was an undergrad student) college was basically finishing school for the middle class. That was okay because it really didn't cost that much and there were plenty of jobs to go around to pay off what amounted to pittance in loans. Now there's no middle class, and what's left of of the middle class is getting charged up the yin yang for a diploma that is becoming as worthless as the one dollar bill.

Thirty years ago, when I started out in business as a writer I didn't need a degree. All you had to do was prove that you could write. Then colleges noticed a hole to fill and started communication curriculums, and today, if you don't have some kind of communications degree (communications or journalism or English) on your resume you won't even be called in for an interview.

I'm not saying degrees aren't important (the Masters I just earned, for instance, was invaluable for jump starting me as a playwright), but there are plenty of jobs that you don't need a degree for, copywriting being one of them.

I've seen and worked with people who have these communications degrees, and I just bite my tongue. My last gig there was an editor who emailed me a jpeg they were going to use on the web site, asking me to email it to one of sources I used, who she knew better than I did. Um, instead of emailing me, why didn't you just email it yourself, I wanted to ask, but of course I didn't. She was too busy "strategizing",which is business for "we don't know what the fuck we're doing but we're going to make it look like we do."

A lot of these people couldn't smell a story if you smeared peanut butter all over it.

But I'm digressing. I do think there will be a huge change soon in higher ed. People simply won't be able to afford it anymore, but they'll still have a thirst for knowledge. When you put people under pressue, they can be awfully resourceful. And God love the Internet for continuing to shake things up. People are learning to ignore the gatekeepers in our society to get what they want, and universities are definitely gatekeepers. As I pointed out, without their sanction you can't even be considered or a job writing marketing swill, and trust me, it isn't that hard. But they make it out like it is, just to justify their own existance.

Again, I want to make it very clear that I think degrees will continue to be important. I mean, copywriting is one thing, brain surgery is quite another.

But after I graduated from BU, I wanted to take a summer course from one of my professors, who was a terrific teacher, and her six-week course was $5,000! I simply can't afford that, and BU doesn't even give discounts to alumni. And frankly, is six weeks of modern drama really worth $5,000? No, it isn't, even from the best of teachers.

But Sue and I consider leaning a life-long pursuit. We have a cabinet filled with Great Courses' material, material that home schoolers and yachties use. We have their series on the history of music, relativity, quantam physics (which I haven't done yet), mythology, and the Greek tragedies, which I'm part-way through. In the spring I'll be taking two music courses from Berklee through Coursera. I just came home with a pile of books from the Boston Public Library. You don't need a lot of money to get an education.

Finally, I'm reminded of this:

Lack of Focus

I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep this up, but each year, like a resolution to lose weight or stop smoking, I come here to Blogger and here on Weebly and write. I'm not sure why, at least each year I understand less and less why I blog.

I try to write in my journal every day. I don't always do it, but I record dreams and my thoughts and sometimes I just vent. A journal is one of the best places to write down what you had wished you said, which is the reason why when I die I want all my journals either deleted or burned. No use leaving that behind.

But then, back around '08 or so, I started blogging. It was all the rage. And I figured I write in my journal, so blogging is really the same.

But blogging isn't like writing in a journal. At least I don't approach it that way. I've seen some blogs where people share everything, and by everything I mean everything. I'm too private of a person for that. I sure don't share what I write in my journal (that's nobody's business but my own) and so I find myself sort of tweaking what I write here. Then what I write becomes compartmentalized. Random thoughts here on Blogger. Only theater here on Weebly.

So I start getting crazy. I start going down this path of thinking, what difference does it make what I think about something? And then I think, well, it makes a difference to me, but what do I care if anyone cares what I think? Just live your life.

In the past decade I've given up worrying what others think in general, or what they think about me specifically. I see it as a mark of growing up. Maturing. Gettin' old. And it sure makes me a lot more comfortable in my skin, but I'm not sure it makes for a good blogger.

Anyway, I can spot rambling when I see it, and this is nothing but rambling. We'll see what tomorrow brings. I'll promise I'll try to focus better.

Standing on the Corner of Walk, Don't Walk

New Year's Eve. On the corner of Arlington and Boylston, right outside the Public Gardens. The streets are filled with people wearing their First Night buttons and, inexplicably, balloons on their heads.

Waiting for the light.

A man and his little boy. The little boy wants to push the walk light button. The man tells him not to. The little boy is insistent. The man is more so.

But why? asks the little boy. (Yeah, why? I wonder.)

The light will change, he says. It won't last forever. Then he adds: People are trying to get to work.

Huh, I thought. I look at the cars driving by. At 2:30 in the afternoon??

I wondered what other strange advice the man gives his son.

A Playwright's Exercise: Spill It On The Floor and See What We Got

Well, it's 2012 and that really doesn't mean anything to me, but I am finding my life shifting and since I'm having a dickens of a time coming up with a project that will occupy my soul for at least six months or a year, I'm finding myself writing bits and pieces like this one. I've been writing in my journal, just putting fingers to the keyboard seeing what comes out, trying to get a bead on what's really bothering me or getting me excited. That gives a writer a pretty good indication of what he or she should be writing about. That's pretty much what I'm going to be doing here. This post is more for me more than it is for you (sorry to say that, but it's the truth.) I just want to see what's in there, and by writing to an actual audience, I'm interested to see what I'm brave enough to share. You're about to get a snootful of the flotsam and jetsam of my life as it pours out of my brain like tipping over a bucket.

Work is coming along but it's still difficult. I graduated at the end of August and it took me about eight weeks to land something. I knew I was going to teach creative writing at BU, but I needed something more. Sue and I live cheap, real cheap, but sometimes it gets down to the bare bones and that can be scary. I had a few nibbles, some that looked really promising, and by that I mean they were conveniently located or paid a lot of money but I knew by the end of the gig I'd be spiritually bankrupted. Then Boston College hired me, and as Sue and I like to always point out, things do always seem to work out. I worked there one other time for a different group, and loved it. This proved to be the same experience. I can't say enough about how wonderful it was to work for Norma and her staff, and be around all the wonderful, fun, intelligent people who work in stewardship. Norma was a sane, sensible manager, and you can walk in the place without checking your morals at the door. Just as a comparison, I just got word yesterday that a company was looking at me and the feedback was, we're afraid he has too much experience. Okay, maybe I'm gun-shy, but to me that's code for he's old. I know I play the age card sometimes (others might say a lot) but until you walk in my shoes I suggest you believe me. Age discrimination is alive and well in corporate America. It is not only tolerated, it seems to be fostered. 

The downside to working two jobs, though, was my entire life was put on hold. By the end of the day I was too knackered to even go to the gym or pick up my guitar. I got fat and sloppy. And it seemed like I forgot over half of whatever I had learned in music. Big, big resolutions for 2012 are get into the gym after about a year and a half of no exercise at all, and picking up the guitar and working it. I mean, playing scales, doing the grunt work that makes you a better musician. I've inherited my father's stomach, which basically means I look like I swallowed a basketball. Not quite, but it could get there. He had a large, round, hard stomach. I could get there if I let myself go. This to me is a silver lining. If I've inherited the bulk of my father's genes, it means I won't die of cancer in ten years, following my mother.

Musically, just today I signed up for a basic ensemble class at Club Passim. I'll be studying with Kimber Ludiker and Austin Nevins. I could have taken a more advanced class, but I want to hang out with these two hip, cool, talented people; I think I can actually learn from them and I've learned in theater (and in business, too) to hang out with people you like and get along with.  Kimber is an awesome musician. She's the fiddle player in Della Mae, one of my favorite bands of recent.  Scroll down on their site and there's a pic of her. I want their song, Blessed Hands, sung at my funeral. (Besides Tom Sawyer, and I the only person who continually plans his funeral? I doubt if a lot of people would show up, so I want to maximize the tears.) I play their CD all the time, and if were the olden days (and someday these will be the olden days, too) it would have been said that I was redigging the grooves on the record. And who can go wrong with a guy whose first name is Austin?

And I'm seeing more sweat equity at the gym. Thankfully, I'm not that out of shape. What seemed to affect me even more than inactivity because I'd walk everywhere on campus, including up and down five flights of stairs in the library, was that bout of spinal stenosis that hammered me last fall. I think there was a little nerve damage done, and I'm just a bit unsteady on my feet, not a good thing for the mountains when you're hopping from rock to rock on a slope. So I want to drop a few pounds and tighten my stomach up, and also get some coordination back. I want to be back in the mountains this summer. It's been way too long, mostly because of school and Roberto, the Wonder Aussie.

Speaking of Bob, he's on his last legs (literally, he can't get up the stairs anymore and has a real hard time going down them.) I grab his hind legs and we have a wheelbarrow race up the stairs. He has hardly any control over his hindquarters, and no control over his bowels, which can get pretty gross in the apartment. It going to be my job to give him the shot, but I'm just not ready yet. Everyone around me, doesn't want the responsibility. I know this is a process. Just yesterday Sue said she wishes he'd just die in his sleep, but he won't; he's still too strong for that to happen. My wish is that the people around me would back me up when I say it's time, but no one wants to that. The hard truth is he's crippled, even though there are days he's happy and alert, even puppy-like. He goes in and out, up and down, and in the meantime, dog shit laced with Lysol smells horrible.

But when it comes to Bob, it's impossible not to draw a comparison between him and any of us who are getting old. What's going to happen to us when we get inconvenient, because truthfully, the bottom line is that's what he is, though trust me, it's a colossal inconvenience. Try the other day, seven degrees outside and he has shit all over him from lying in it and it's too cold to hose him off. I know so many people who silently worry about their future.

I'm not going to touch politics or the state of our country, though I think that's the thing I'd really like to write about, or at least tell a story set against the backdrop of a dying empire. Yep, that's how I see it. And I'm watching all my liberal friends do their typical knee-jerk because most of them don't own houses, have never been laid off or been in fire financial straits because, in this country, that's what really strips off the veneer of our society. When you have to make hard financial decisions in your own life, you start to see who the government and the financial markets (tied to corporations) couldn't care less about any of us. Until you've had to scrape to buy food or pay the heating bill, life has been way too easy on you and you're basically flying blind right now in this economy. They don't see how Obama is no different from Romney, who happens to be the Republican front runner (barely) and how Obama is just following the policies of Bush. They don't want to go there, because they haven't had to. It's easy for them to follow their old ways and beliefs, but what this country needs is someone to hit the ejector button. Democrats and Republicans alike are tainted. That includes Obama, Paul, Romney, Clinton, and anyone else you want to name. I've been bringing up Ron Paul a bit online, not because I support him, but because he's the only politician right now who is saying the things people don't want to hear. Then liberals do exactly what conservatives do: fall back on their doctrine or on something he said ten years ago, which means anything he says is tainted today. I don't understand people who just won't listen, period, to everyone and everything. It's like listening to Christians quote the bible. And it always reaches a point where I just glaze over and want to run away. I said to Sue, though, the only thing that's stopping me right now is how the #ows movement came about, and there are people who realize the system is broken--everyone from Obama on down. I'm not sure what to do next, but that's the start right there: If you just accept that even your favorite liberal politician is just as corrupt as Newt Gingrich, then you've just anted into the game. Before that, it's just the same old mess.

I'm growing my hair. Actually, it's more that I'm not going to a barber and therefore my hair is growing. I've gotten some compliments. Right now I can feel it tickling the back of my neck, and it's long enough so if it gets in my way I just tuck it behind my ears. I'm doing this because I'm tired of going to barbers to whom I say, I want to keep it long, and they say sure, then pull out their scissors and take a big hunk out. I had a great barber a few years ago then she quit. After going to a number of people, including Sue's hairdresser who is a woman and we figured she'd understand how to cut long hair, I got tired of shelling out twenty five to thirty bucks with tip and walk out looking uglier than I did when I walked in. It dawned on me if I want long hair to stay out of the barber and just grow the damn stuff, just like I did when I was a hippie. Hair's like writing, if you want it, just grow it. If you want to write, just write.

The bread machine actually walked off the chopping block today and hit the deck. I'm thinking this is the sort of news my aunt Marcella would have written. "The dern thing walked right off the table right onto the floor," she'd say. Now that I'm not working full-time (and my next gig will involve some work at home) I'm back to cooking. I love cooking and I like it the same way I like gardening. It gets you involved in your food, in your health. I baked a semolina bread today. When you make it yourself--bread soup, sauces, anything that doesn't mean opening up a package and firing up a microwave--it gets us back to a more natural way of living, which I think is necessary for people to have. And it tastes better and it's better for you, though I don't use "natural" ingredients because they are too hard to find and too expensive. It's gotten so only the rich and elite can eat healthy in his country, but I do the best I can.

I think that's about it. Thanks for listening, if you've read this far. This was helpful to me as a writing exercise, and eventually I'll be posting something at my other blog. Hopefully it will be good news, though there is a reading of one of my plays coming up in about a month on Cape Cod.

Happy Birthday, Alice Anne

Today would have been my mom's 94th birthday. I always remember her on Christmas Eve with a candle.

MBTA Red Line Moment

I can put up with just about anything on the T. For starters, the people who hang by the door when people are trying to get in or out, even when they are obviously in the way.

Or people who talk loudly on the phone incessantly, like the guy yesterday morning who turned his face into the door (yes, he was also hanging out in the doorway) and still managed to share his moronic business call with the entire car.

I've even learned to accept all the commuter with their backpacks, the young and old alike, who don't seem to get that that big honking backpack 1) takes up just as much vertical room as another person, and 2) whenever they make the slightest move the backpack swings proportionately more. Think pendulum.

Yes, I can even, God love them, accept the people who sneeze, cough, or whatever into their hands, then grab the overhead bar--with the hand they just expelled bodily fluid into.

The one thing I cannot tolerate, though--the one thing that's fingernails on a chalkboard to me--are the people with the headphones who have their music on so loud, you can still hear this tinny tune going on. It's like a listening to a dripping faucet. Which is exactly what I finally told the guy this morning on the Red Line who was standing next to me. He was wearing full-size headphones, no less, and you could still hear this tinky, tinky, tinky thing going on.

I tapped his bag. Hey man, can you turn your music down a bit. It's like listening to a leaky faucet.

He did, but he didn't seem too happy about it.

Google Dynamic Views Suck. It's Back to Old Blogger.

Well, that was a nice experiment with Google's dynamic views for blogger, wasn't it?  I don't know how many of you got to see it in action because DV's don't work with third party analytics, so I had no idea who was checking out ABM. I know through Google Analytics there were lots of visitors, and because DVs were flashing pictures and links at you like Saturday night at the carnival, there were lots of page views, but I have no idea who you were. Or what you were looking for.

So it's back to the old look until Google gets off its high horse and realizes what people really want (or at least this peep) isn't necessary what Google wants for him.

I'm a sucker for technology. Give me a button to mash down on and I'm there. And I don't read the manual. I just dive in. And I liked the interface it gave to old Action Bob, nice and spiffy and all dynamic just like the name promised and it caused people to at least look at more content. But flash is no substitution for real content, for real information.

I'm loving social networking more and more, especially since now I see it in real action with #Occupy. About a year ago I was at a very high faluting party at BU and there was a Very Big Deal professor (tweeds, flannels, just the right length hair) there holding court for all his pretty little blonde grad students, and he was joking about technology and proud of the fact that he didn't know Twitter from his professorial ass. And this was about the time when China was shutting down the Internet and he asked me with a broad wink to his harem what was Twitter good for. I mentioned China and freedom, and that wasn't good enough for him. He fired off some dumb joke that was meant to dismiss me, but it only lowered my opinion of him to about what Obama's approval rating is today.

But you have to draw a line in the sand. I don't own a smart phone out of choice (well, I'm really broke too, so I can't afford the additional monthly payment) but I really don't want to be that connected. I still want to engage in the world, face to face, in real flesh and blood. And when I'm blogging, I want to know who I'm talking to, and what they're looking for.

The Times They Are A Changing

I feel like I got shot out of a cannon when I finished grad school. Others who had gone through the program warned me about it. You're so steeped in your studies you don't realize how single-focused you are. At times, when Sue wanted me to think about something--anything, plans for the weekend, what to cook for dinner--my answer would be, let me just get through this...and this would be an assignment, finishing a scene, finishing the semester, something, anything that was so encompassing of my mind that I couldn't fit one more thing into my head without the feeling that it would explode.

And then, suddenly, you're back out in the world. And what a world it is. Occupy, and all the craziness and noise that it brings as people shout and argue their values when to me it seems so simple: Our society has been overtaken by corporate greed with a complicit government. Anything that falls from that is suspect, including your political bent (liberal or conservative), your religion, or your place in society. It's something I'm definitely excited about, but it also wears me out as people seem fixated on getting their point across. We know what the problem is. If you don't, you haven't been awake for the past four or five years.

There is an increasingly worse economy that has made it even harder for a fifty-something-year-old man to find a decent job, and by decent I mean one that not only pays enough so I can pay my bills and have a little extra, but also one that I find fulfilling.

There's a political world where the president who I had reluctantly put so much hope and faith in, has done nothing in the line of what he ran for, and he is now putting troops in Africa, even though we're fighting losing and expensive wars on two fronts.

But all this makes for things to be so exciting. My plays are getting good feedback. That's a start. That means so much to me. Those plays are the real me, so personal at their source and they harken back to me as a boy, and now it seems I'm pretty close to where I wanted to be "when I grew up."

My life is Sue grows everyday. I love her a little more each day and I don't know what I'd do without my best friend. We walk through this crazy world hand in hand and as long as I know she still loves me all is right with the world. There are a couple of lines in Highland Center, Indiana about this, where Hank says to Alice Anne, Are you scared? and she answers, Not if I'm with you. That exchange took place between me and the real Alice Anne when we were on a plane coming to Boston when she had two more months to live. See, it's all so personal, as the world should be, I think.

You can even see Action Bob has put on a new face. Google opened the door, I walked through, and though I'm not 100% happy with this new interface, I'm willing to give it a chance. What I don't like is Google forcing me to do things its way. This is just one more example of corporate greed, small yes, but enough is enough. Corporations and governments, I believe, should serve the people. Corporations (are you listening, Google?) should give their customers what the customer wants, not what the corporation wants them to want. The only company that got away with giving customers what they didn't ask for was Apple, and Steve Jobs is dead. Google is no Apple, not by a long shot. Don't give me that free-market line, either: If you don't like Blogger move. You can't. They got you locked in. The free-market, as you call it, is broken, just like our political system. And that's what the Occupiers are protesting about. If you don't get it, that's not my problem. Stay at home and watch your television. Someone will come along shortly and wipe the drool from your mouth.

What it was like for me at today's Occupy Boston protest

I feel I should get this out to people who may be either wondering what is really going on with all the Occupy cities in the United States or rolling their eyes at me going, here he goes again. John just can't keep out of trouble and he's a little too old to be an idealistic hippie.

I don't want to get into why I went, starting with the notion that I truly believe our government is completely broken and dysfunctional. I don't believe our one person/one vote notion of freedom is worth a damn anymore, and I think that anyone who says, If you don't vote you can't complain is truly clueless as to what's going on. Anyone you vote for except maybe on the very local level couldn't care less about you. They're politicians, and all they want is the office. And when they get the office they go to work for the people with the most money. That's not me, that's large multinational corporations. And then they sell off the country to the highest bidder.

It doesn't matter that Occupy Boston or Wall Street or Los Angeles or wherever (did you know they're all over the country? So many people think it's just Wall Street. No, it something like fifty something major cities) are just gathering and protesting. You hear the MSM say they are directionless and wonder what they are they protesting about? That's not the point. That's just the MSM doing what it always does. Hey, Political Candidate, what is your agenda? And the PC gives them one, just so they can tick that off their list. It doesn't matter to the MSM that tomorrow that agenda will change depending on the locale of that day's stump speech, they have an agenda. And this is where the MSM is so clueless. First, the Occupiers don't need them. The MSM is missing the boat on this one the same way they missed the boat on the paradigm that's putting them out of business in the first place. All the news and information is flowing back and forth on the social network and the digital world. At first I couldn't find any info on what was going on. I mean, people were setting up tents in Dewey Square in the shadow of the Federal Reserve Bank, and I couldn't find anything on the Globe's or the Herald's sites? Of course not. They're run by corporations, and their parent corporations aren't going to want that reported on. So I went to Facebook and Twitter and there it all was. (Right now I'm following real-time Twiitter and Facebook feeds as the Boston Police are approaching the tent city. They do this under cover of night, and won't allow the press to watch. When did our country become like this?)

Which is why last week I stopped by the tent city and I was amazed. I wanted to see things for myself. There was all kinds of organization going on there, including a press tent filled with computers. I mean, these people know what they're doing. And here's the thing: the MSM is missing the whole story. The BIG STORY is that for the first time in forty years, people are finally taking to the streets again in the United States. And today, I saw regular middle-class people, because what has been decimated in this country by corporate greed but the middle class, and there it was in full force today. In Boston there were thousands.

I had heard about the march on Facebook. Sue and I actually packed a picnic lunch and headed for the Common where students were going to meet then march to Dewey Square. It was a beautiful day, though kind of hot. We walked around and things seemed a bit scraggly. We walked around some more, and noticed the crowd had grown. People were gathering. Sue and I parked ourselves in the shade and watched for awhile, then the marchers began marching. Should we join them? It seemed weird. We passed some police officers and I heard on say that it seemed the marchers were heading one way. The cops didn't know where the marchers were going. And that's when it hit me. You know the first time you vote you felt this power, this right. I am an American and I am voting. Today I thought, freedom of assembly. That's what I'm doing. I'm free to assemble and a whole crowd can assemble and they don't need a permit from the city, who came up with that rule? This was our freedom and our right at its most basic core.

We wound our way through the Common, past the State House, passed the Fox News offices (it didn't look as if anyone was at home) through Downtown Crossing to Dewey Square. I said to Sue that if and when it comes to the police against the demonstrators, the tiny streets in Downtown Crossing would be the perfect place for the police to trap them.

People seemed awe-struck as we marched by. A lot of support, though. A lot of thumbs up. We got to Dewey Square and Sue and I peeled off and used the capitalistic bathrooms in South Station, then went back outside. The marchers, now thousands since the marchers from the Commons joined the Occupiers at Dewey Square, continued on down Atlantic Ave. If I didn't know better, I would have sworn I was marching in a walk for hunger. The march just continued on. Back through Downtown Crossing and towards the North End. We didn't know where we were going or who was in charge. We just followed the crowd. We marched past Faneuil Hall toward the Garden. It was in the North End where things went ugly. Not real ugly, but not pretty.

I was marching along thinking this is so much like a pretty day in the city, but at some point it's going to end. The nice relationship between the protesters and the police will end. Because as some point the city, as it is doing at this very moment, will impose its will on the protesters. And the police will be ordered to step in. Or you can't just quietly occupy a green space forever and do nothing. Something has to change. Because values will clash, and when that happens, people become unruly.

Check this out. This is the sort of rhetoric that is out there. This is a profile about one of the protesters on Wall Street:

"The goal to people like Ketchup is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word—REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back."

 I can understand that. It's how I feel. The system is broken, and isn't working for me. And it won't anymore. The government is not concerned with me or my loved ones and I have to start taking matters in my own hands. What that means I don't necessarily know. I know getting out and marching made me feel like I was doing something. And we don't know where this is going to take us. I posted something a few days ago where Chris Hedges, who has seen plenty of revolutions, talked about what was going on in the United States. I was most intrigued by what he said about the protesters in Berlin. They thought in a year they might have people crossing between East and West Berlin, and then suddenly the Wall was down. Even the leaders of the protest movement didn't see it coming.

But it was at a bridge in the North End where the police stopped the march. Traffic stopped, and by traffic I mean tour buses and duck boats (oh no, not the duck boats!) Later I read that the police said the bridge wouldn't have held the collected weight of the protesters, but doesn't sound a bit odd to you? I mean, it wasn't a suspension bridge made of jungle vines. But a couple of paddy wagons pulled up, and a couple of locals got into it with a protester in full view of the police, and one of the protesters actually pointed it out to an officer who then had to respond, and the woman said her freedom of speech was being trampled on because she couldn't yell inflammatory inanities at the protesters.

We started talking to a man who I know wouldn't have wanted to be identified, and I'll respect that. He asked what we were protesting, and I asked him, You have to ask? Where have you been the past four or five years? He agreed he knew sort of what it was about, and said it was an anit-capitalistic protest. I told him that was part of it, but also a dysfunctional government that is up for sale to the highest bidder. We had a nice conversation. Later I thought to myself that I should have asked him a question. He admitted to a six-figure income, and I should have asked him how much money in actual dollars and cents did he lose when the stock market crashed. I'm sure it would have been a lot. On that day, Sue and I looked at each other and shrugged, saying if you don't have any money to lose what does it matter? But I'm sure this guy lost big. And there's the big question: You asked me what I'm doing in the street protesting, and I have to ask you, after that, why aren't you off the sidewalk and in the street too?

10.10.11 OccupyBoston Raw Video

Just trying to dump as much of the video and images I shot today. Beautiful day that started out peaceful, but you knew that was going to end. But it was a wonderful crowd, thousands out there finally feeling, I think like I was feeling, finally doing something. I'm sorry, the one person/one vote system is broken, and I didn't know what to do. You vote someone in who promises change, and they then just vote with whoever has the most money. Today I felt like I was really finally voicing my total dissatisfaction with our government, and I was doing it with thousands of great, intelligent people. When you talked to them, they weren't nutbags, they were intelligent concerned people who really cared about their fellow human beings and for society and their country.

A Della Mae Threefer

Della Mae just posted three new videos on YouTube. Really nice ones, too, that really show off not just their talents as musicians but also a flavor of the energy you'll see when they're on stage.

We got turned on to them when Sue started taking fiddle lessons at Club Passim from two-time National Fiddle Champion Kimber Ludiker, Della Mae's fiddle player. The next step was easy: Grab some tickets to one of their concerts and you'll be hooked.

Anyway, give 'em a listen. Here are their three new videos.

Blessed Hands

Polk County

Jamie Dear

I'm Stoned Again

Two days ago I woke up and knew something wasn't right. The fact that it was 6:30 in the a.m. was part of it. I'm rarely awake at that hour. But the pain, discomfort, and general ill feeling was telling me something I was hoping I could head off with a glass of water laced with a bit of orange juice. Not a chance. When you've got kidney stones, you're a goner. Nothing, and I mean nothing, short of some serious intravenous pain killers that you can only get from serious medical professionals, can get you through what a minuscule crystal is about to put you through.

"Oooh, kidney stones. I've heard they're pretty painful." They're the one thing a man can throw at a woman if she starts going on about the pain of labor. Granted, the thing that comes out in one is nothing compared to the thing that comes out in the other, but pain for pain, women even back down from kidney stones. They're even more painful than the excruciating pain I had to bear last fall when I learned I had spinal stenosis. That's a condition caused by your spinal column being too small for your spinal chord. You know what that is, right? It's the entire bundle of nerves that run up and down your spine. Yeah, kidney stones hurt more than that. They hurt more than the symptoms I was exhibiting, numb and paralysis in my leg. Shooting pains up and down my leg, all the way to my ankle. A charlie horse that I called, the Mother of all Charlie Horses. Yeah, kidney stones hurt more than the Mother of all Charlie Horses.

In the ER, the drill is simple. I writhe in pain on a gurney while nurses take blood and my vitals. Then they hook you up to an IV to force fluids in you. You want to hose the mother out. In the meantime, I might be weeping like a Nancy or if I feel like it, vomiting. Real serious pain causes nausea, did you know that? Then the drugs come and you lie there experiencing the best dreams you've ever had in your life. Eventually they let you go with prescriptions for enough Oxy with a street value that could pay off my school loans. And now they also give you this other drug that helps you pee like a racehorse. Like I said, the idea is to hose the little bastard right out of you.

In the meantime, the stone is taking its sweet time negotiating your bladder and ureters, and your body, sensing this intruder, feels that a fever and general malaise is the best thing it can do under the circumstances.

So, you drink and drink and drink. You're supposed to drink up three quart of water a day. Night and day, you're in and out, in and out of the bathroom.  Let it be known that there reaches a point in taking in that much water that it turns from drinking to drowning. Eventually, you can't stand water because you're just forcing it in. Can you say bloated?

I get to the point where I'll drink anything except water. Water with OJ maybe. Today I drank pot after pot of herbal tea with honey, but that eventually starts to get to you, too. Oh, and with all this liquid intake, there's that drug working on you, so you're running to the bathroom every whipstitch.

I don't even want to go into what happens in the bathroom.