Category: OCF

Return and Roundup

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I have returned from the Great White North!  I had a quick get-together with the Coffee Walk Brotherhood.  Much booze was imbibed and many cigars were smoked (not by me) and much wet wood was forced to burn using mass quantities of medium length hydrocarbons.  It was a great success with midnight bull sessions and even some very good guitar and singing from the two musicians in the gang.

It ended off with a hearty breakfast while the television aired Caddyshack in all its 1970s glory (“Yo, Lama, how ‘bout somethin’ for the effort?”).  So, after a total of about eight hours of driving I return to the Compound a tired but spiritually enhanced individual after communing, consulting and otherwise hobnobbing with my fellow wizards.

Unfortunately for me I have two very long days Monday and Tuesday so my output will still be constrained but on the positive side I finished my initial re=read of my book and found some clarity for my march to completion and publishing (yaaay!).  Anyway, here I go.

So, the dissident right community has had an outpouring of grief over the passing of the ZMan.  I’m interested to see if his readers find a way to keep their community intact.

I saw that the Supreme Court provided some relief to the Trump administration on the endless lower court injunctions against his immigration and other efforts.  I haven’t had a chance to read much on the details but supposedly it will now require class-action law suits to allow these judges to foul up the works.  Maybe this will slow down the interference somewhat.  But we’ll have to see.  And I saw the good news that SCOTUS ruled that parents of school children can opt out of public-school LGBTQ indoctrination classes and “learning materials.”  Good for them.  It’s part and parcel with the first amendment and freedom of religion.  Hopefully this can be built upon to rein in the blue states.

As for the Israeli/Iran war it looks like Trump may have been able to thread the needle and tamp down the fires.  Anyway, let’s hope so.  Maybe this will force him to end our support for that other war that’s raging out of control.  But I’m not holding my breath.

And finally, here we are almost halfway through Donald Trump’s first year in his last term and it seems he’s starting to make a dent in the “resistance.”  I think it is now apparent that ignoring the Left’s whining and temper tantrums and just going forward with his priorities (like deporting illegal aliens and forcing changes in the trade imbalance and off-shoring of jobs) is a winning strategy both objectively and optically.  Keep it up Mr. Trump!

So here I am at the brink of July but my calendar is cluttered with annoying responsibilities in the short term.  Hopefully by Wednesday the clouds will have parted and serenity and summertime relaxation will be reestablished.  But regardless, we must soldier on.  Okay, I’m halfway back to normalcy and the universe hasn’t exploded around me so I’ll call it a win and move on.  Next!!!

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

photog Country Music Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, Music Reviews, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Photography

Today is the first day of the new OCF editorial regime.  I’ve noticed over the last year that the quality of my posts has been inconsistent.  And I believe the reason for this problem is that sometimes I’m covering old ground again.  I’ve said about all there is to say about some of the political issues of the day and I’m just banging the drum, so to speak.

And this is not a good thing to be doing.  In addition, I really need to finish my book and get it published and see if fiction writing is something I want to do.  So these two separate situations point me to a change in the way I run my website.  I’ll continue to post the photo and quote of the day, same as always.  As far as a daily post, I’ll put something up but if I don’t have a topic that’s truly crying out to be covered then I’ll put something else up.  Maybe some photos that I like or a link to a song or a video that caught my attention.  This will free up more of my time for fiction writing and it will prevent me repeating myself and boring the readers.

I think this is a good idea and I expect it to improve the site significantly.  Anyway, I’ll give it a try and see how it goes.

Probably Not Smart

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Apparently random luck rules our lives to an extent that I think is hard to overemphasize.  Back two weeks ago I wrote about a tree that came down across my driveway.  After I finished cutting the top of the tree away, I took a big wrecking bar and rolled it to the side of the driveway.  For the last two weeks I’ve been planning to cut it up into smaller sections and put it aside.  But there it still is three quarters to the side of the lower driveway and one quarter on.  It looks awful and speaks volumes about my lack of organization and discipline.

But the funniest thing happened yesterday.  A guy was driving on the road by my house when something strange happened.  The shoe he was wearing on the foot that he used for working the brake and gas got tangled up with the gas pedal and he couldn’t get it free.  Somehow, he must have panicked and lost control of the steering while attempting to free his foot from the gas and he ended up turning onto my property close to where the driveway was.  He crashed through some small pines without even slowing down but the trunk of the downed tree was perfectly positioned to stop his car dead.  He wasn’t badly hurt and his car only sustained some damage where it hit the tree so it was able to back out of the debris once he got over the shock.  Looking at the line he was making through my yard the next stop was the bottom floor of my house.  That would have been bad.  That would have been a mess for both of us.

So, this is apropos of nothing.  It’s just kind of crazy how two random acts of fate can interact with each other to some almost purposeful end.  If that tree hadn’t fallen, he would have hit it square on and his car would have been totaled.  If I had cut it up as I had planned in a timely manner he would have landed in my house and we both would be having a very bad month.

It’s funny.  Even when I have bad luck it seems to turn into good luck for me.  For a long time, I’ve had this theory.  I feel like I’ve been borrowing good luck from an account and one day it’s all going to come due and I’m going to have a phenomenally bad day.  But maybe I’m wrong.  The exact mechanism of luck is not apparent to me.  And I think there are different kinds of luck.  For instance, I never win at games of chance.  I’ve never made a fortune investing in stocks.  All my luck runs to bad things not happening to me.  And almost all of my luck involves escaping the consequences of my own poor judgement; sometimes by mere fractions of a second or sixteenths of an inch.  And it’s been going on since I was a child.  And over the course of a lifetime, I’ve become convinced that there really is something called luck.  And some people actually have it significantly in their lives.

Anyway, it’s just something that seems to happen to me from time to time.  Maybe I really do have a guardian angel.  I guess it would be the height of ingratitude to ask him to let me hit the mega-millions just once.  Probably not smart.

Everybody’s Gotta Eat

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The circle of life.  Despite the claim in the song, Disney never shows us the predators, including his highness the King, chowing down on the herbivores that provide the carnivores with their sustenance.  Theoretically Mufasa is the apex of the food chain but all of his meals are “off-camera.”

But Camera Girl claims to be a wildlife realist and the hawks and vultures, the foxes and coyotes according to her “gotta eat.”  So, when a rabbit or a squirrel ends up as a meal somewhere on the property, she shrugs it off, “everyboody’s gotta eat.”

Today one of the local hawks performed its patented power dive a couple of feet away from Camera Girl’s bird feeders and the bird (we think it was a catbird) never knew what hit it.  Oh well.

But there is a more gruesome aspect than just the kill.  The hawk eats the entire bird while plucking the feathers as it goes.  Camera Girl watched this from her kitchen window and I could tell she wasn’t shrugging it off.  She has a soft heart.  And since she feeds the birds and attracts them to the location, she feels that she was responsible in a way for the predation.

And all things considered that is true.  That hawk would not have caught that catbird today if she didn’t feed those birds every day.  But I tried to cheer her up.  I said, “Well, you’ve been feeding these birds for years.  And all those free meals have contributed to the health and longevity of all these birds.  With all that extra food they’ve probably produced double the number of hatchlings they would have raised if they were thin and weak.  Maybe that very catbird would never have been born if his parents hadn’t eaten the seeds you provided.”

So, I threw that out there.  Hopefully it helped a bit.  And I’m sure she’ll bounce back tomorrow when she goes out early to feed Moe and Flo the crows and Poe the raven.  And she’s been watching this skunk (of course, it’s Pepé Le Pew) that appears at dusk and scratches around where Moe’s food was earlier in the day.  He’s almost all white and kind of wide and flat to the ground.  He looks like a giant Tribble or a furry version of the Horta.  But so far, I’ve managed to avoid it while I’m doing my late afternoon watering.  The last thing I need is getting skunked in my own yard.

Of course, the flipside of all this is the fact that the bird feeders also occasionally attract black bears to the property.  The last time the bear used its weight to bend a very substantial steel tube all the way over.  I guess it’s within the realm of possibility that one day the circle of life might mean I could be on the menu for Yogi Bear.  So, there is that to consider.  I’ll mention this to Camera Girl and see if that changes the whole risk to reward ratio for her bird feeding hobby.  I tend to doubt it.  She really likes those birds.

Tomorrow is Another Day

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So today was a day of penance.  Sins of omission had to be paid for with sins of commission.  The pool fence has a gate with a closing/locking mechanism that requires the two posts and the door to be in rather finicky alignment to work properly.  Well, it’s been getting more and more out of whack for the last couple of years but I’ve been putting it off because … well because I’m a very lazy man.

But yesterday the pool guys opened up the pool so I figured I couldn’t stall any longer.  I had all my tools (drill, 200-foot extension cord, screwdrivers, pliers, wrench, two different socket sets and drivers, a small sledge hammer, wheel barrow, shovel, ear protection, eye protection, hacksaw) and the kits I was using to shore up the two posts and the hardware I needed to repair the gate.  The wheelbarrow and shovel were to fill a hole next to one of the posts.  I had dug it and filled it with large stones (~fifty pounds each) to hold the post in place but this wasn’t doing the trick.  So, I removed the stones and replaced it with dirt and compacted it with the sledge hammer.  But unfortunately, I couldn’t get at this post because of a large concrete planter that Camera Girl had filled with plants right on top of the post so I had to wrestle it out of the way.  Who knew concrete and dirt were heavy?

Finally, I could get to work on the posts.  But when I moved the planter, I must have covered over a hornet’s nest.  Because now they were looking for their nest and couldn’t find it.  So, they came looking for me!  So, I’m banging the reinforcing post into the ground and bolting it together and drilling holes into the post while dodging and swatting hornets.  So, I’m swearing and moving erratically to escape the bugs and Camera Girl sees me as she’s walking in the yard.  And she comes over to see what’s wrong.  But she blows up when she gets any kind of bug bite so I’m yelling at her to stay back.  So, she thinks I must be going crazy but after additional arm waving and hollering she retreats.

Finally, I finish with the first post and quickly manhandle the planter back in place and the hornets find their home.  So I go looking for Camera Girl to explain what was going on.  She yeah-yeahs me and tells me to get back to work.  The rest of the job goes fairly well.  Of course, I make approximately a thousand trips back and forth to my tool room in the garage because nothing fits and all the hardware is wrong.  But eventually the posts are square, the gate is straight and the lock works (more or less).  I put away all of the various tools and head to the pool to empty the skimmer for the first time.  But I can tell something’s wrong with the pump.  It sounds wrong.  I turn off the power and I see smoke coming from a union near a valve that the pool guys replaced yesterday.  The union cracked and the pump has been running without water for some unknown amount of time today.  I sigh.  Yep.  One step forward.  Two steps back.

As Scarlett O’Hara wisely observed, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Meanwhile Fifty Year Later

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Six down, one to go.  A fourteen-hour day just ended.  It went better than I expected.  It did end in failure and will have to be repeated in June but that’s a story for another day.  The main thing is I didn’t crash and burn in the middle and if I get through tomorrow, which will be easier than today, I can relax through my root canal or tooth extraction or whatever other dental horror story occurs on Thursday.

And I was completely isolated from the outside world today.  I don’t know whether aliens landed from the Andromeda galaxy and cured Joe Biden’s cancer and started flights of humans to their world based on a book whose title will eventually be translated to mean “To Serve Biden” (it’s a cookbook!).  I looked at the headlines tonight briefly and I couldn’t find anything of note but maybe I’m just tired.

While I was gone, I put Camera Girl in charge.  But the dogs know she is a pushover and they ran amok terrorizing her and just trampling her attempts to maintain order at the Compound.  It’s an old story.  She is acknowledged to be the world’s least effective dog owner.  She spoiled these dogs and now they neither fear no respect her.  I could restore order but what’s the use.  She refuses to discipline them in any meaningful way.  She just screams at them without any result.  But all of this is irrelevant.  Tomorrow is a day fraught with great significance.  Exactly fifty years ago tomorrow I first laid eyes on Camera Girl when she was just a seventeen-year-old babe at the beach in Brooklyn.

That day was an example of fate.  Neither of us was supposed to be at the beach that day.  And neither of us had ever met.  And just by the sheerest accident we each had a friend that knew each other and who had planned to meet at the beach.  So, by third hand luck we met and hit it off.  And now fifty years later we’re still keeping company and trying to figure out what the heck we’re going to do to keep this crazy merry-go-round twirling for a little while longer.

Fifty years is a considerable amount of time.  It’s basically my entire adult life.  The friend who knew her friend is long dead but still comes to mind from time to time because he may have been the funniest human being I’ve ever met.  I guess humor isn’t a good predictor of human success or even survival.  It is a very strange world we live in.  The unlikeliest chance can have a profound impact and steer the course of our whole life.

But all kinds of chance exist.  I had assumed we would celebrate our big day with some enjoyable event at our favorite restaurant.  But instead, I’ve got two chores to take care of and then I’m waiting on a root canal the next day that won’t let me enjoy food for a while.

What’s the expression?  You’ve got to take the good with the bad.  Well, that’s a crummy expression!  But also, very true.  Oh well.  It was a great day at the beach fifty years ago.  And there will be more great days to come.  So, on with the show.

Waiting for Friday

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Five down, two to go.  And tomorrow is the killer.  Well, here goes nothing.

I was gonna review, “The Fifth Element.”  I hadn’t seen it in a long time so I couldn’t remember my overall impression.  Well, I rewatched and remembered.  It’s a movie that has a few “elements” that are interesting or fun but there are enough factors that are awful to make the sum negative.  Gary Oldman has a small but pivotal part as a villain and as always, he is great fun.  Bruce Willis plays Bruce Willis as he always does and he has a few fun moments but it’s a very silly movie so he can only succeed at moments.  The movie itself is a live action fairy tale/cartoon with very broad humor and very wooden characters.  Chris Tucker’s character was among the most bizarre.  But in fairness he was also one of the funnier aspects of this comedy(?).

I’m sure some folks will enjoy this exercise in science fiction fairy tale but I have to give it a thumbs down.  There were just too many annoying factors to allow me to wholeheartedly embrace it.

So, President Trump is really playing up the international agenda this month.  Even his enemies are intrigued by his efforts to talk to the Iranians and normalize our situation with the Arabs.  Of course, the pundits on the Left were horrified by Trump’s speech where he said he is backing away from nation-building and demanding the Middle East adhere to Western mores and customs.  But from my way of looking at it, that’s exactly the message we should be putting forward.  “You live your way in your country and we’ll live ours over here.”  Seems reasonable to me.  But Capon and Books got the vapors hearing it.

As for his efforts to get a ceasefire in Ukraine, I tend to doubt it will come to anything.  The Russians don’t want to give the Ukrainians a breather.  Apparently, they’ve calculated that they will finish off enough Ukrainians before the Ukrainians finish off enough Russians so that Kiev’s defense will collapse this year.  The question is whether Trump has the sense to just walk away from the whole thing and let it end sooner than later.  But looking at the tiny geographic gains that account for thousands of deaths a week on both sides is gut-churning.  Well, I don’t see any change before the fall.

As for the fact that Joe Biden has some kind of cancer; well, he’s eighty-two.  Is it surprising at that age that cancer has come on the scene?  I think as we get older that possibility becomes more real every day.  The only question I have is when did he actually get the diagnosis?  Three, four years ago?  Well, I don’t celebrate his ill-health but I consider him an evil man and maybe this is a good time for him to think about his finish and maybe consider making amends.

I saw that James Comey was trying to get his name back in the news by acting like a moron.  In my youth in Brooklyn, we would have described someone like that as a lousy scumbag.  And that would be playing it down.  I think having the IRS audit him a few times just for fun would be very appropriate.  Just a thought.

Well, that’s enough for today.  Waiting for Friday.

Escape from New York 2025

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Three down, four to go.

So, yesterday I went to Brooklyn for a family reunion.  Driving through the Bronx and Queens I could see the Manhattan skyline and as much as the city has become a cesspool, that skyline is beautiful and impressive.  It’s a bittersweet sight.  My family has lived in New York City for a hundred and forty years.  We loved it and were proud of its grandeur and dynamism.  And now?  Well, pride is impossible.  Just within the time we were travelling down the streets of Brooklyn I could see thuggery and depravity on display.  A city of eight million people that used to be a showcase of culture, business and the Arts reduced to third world barbarity.

Now it’s a dysfunctional space where crime, poverty, homelessness and drug-use dominate the landscape.  It infects everyone who lives there.  It degrades all the magnificent monuments of the past and makes a mockery of their former achievements.  And it makes travelling into its bowels dangerous, frightening and infinitely difficult.  Where can and can’t you drive?  Where can you park your car and find it in one piece when you return?  Where can you walk in the day but not at night?  All the fun questions of NYC urban life.

But ultimately it was worth it all.  For the second time in a few months, I saw members of my extended family that I haven’t otherwise seen in decades.  I met the second and third generations on these branches of the family tree and saw the family resemblances and the new additions to the stock.  Charming.

Ultimately America is convulsing under the forces that the elites can bring to bear.  How we react and compensate for these disturbances is all we have any power over.  My family, for the most part, has abandoned the cities and looked for opportunities and safer surroundings where we could find them.  And that process continues.  Those that stay in these dangerous areas tend to pay a heavy price.  There are physical and mental health consequences to trying to raise children in a hellscape.  Premature death is not unheard of.  And it’s sad to see this reality.  But it’s inspiring when you see someone who has struggled with the traps of that world overcoming the problems and succeeding.

And when it’s over we always have the epic, “Escape from New York!”  I was riding shotgun and the death-defying feats of my driver were truly inspiring.  You haven’t experienced real terror until you’ve cut across five lanes of traffic to make an exit on the BQE.  But we got out and then my drive home from the suburbs was uneventful.

When I reached home Camera Girl was entertaining grandsons Tertius and Quartus with a hockey game on television.  Apparently, this New England sport has caught on with this generation of my descendants.  And I have no objections although I myself have never been able to see the puck on television.  I have to go by the noise of the crowd to know when the puck has actually ended up in the net.  Mostly I just watch the players assaulting each other around the periphery of the rink.  Which is entertaining in its own right.  By the time the boys left it was after midnight and I crashed into the blessed oblivion of sleep.

Well, this was late for obvious reasons.  And the next few days will be equally sketchy because of my slightly punchy condition and the length of my workdays tomorrow and Tuesday but I will attempt to produce some kind of content.  Adios.

All the World’s a Stage

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The Bible (Psalms 90:10) says, “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

So, seventy years are a little less than 25,000 days.  That seems like a big number.  But at the end looking back, it’s the blink of an eye.  That time is swallowed up in sleeping and commuting to work and drinking bad coffee and keeping your boss from firing you and fighting with vendors and trying to satisfy clients and paying the bills.  Hopefully you spent enough time with your wife and kids so that they had some inkling of who you really are.

The best days are carrying the babies home from a family party where everyone was glad to see each other and there was something to celebrate; a holiday or an occasion.  Or taking the kids to the seashore for a week or two in the heat of July.  Or maybe taking your wife out someplace special for a big anniversary.

And then the kids get married and then the grandchildren come along.  So, there’s a progression.  The cycle comes around again.  Only now you’re on the other side of the wheel.  Way out there on the far side.  You recognize the program but now you’re seeing it from far away.

So, the thing to do is try to make yourself useful and try to add a little something to the plot of the story.  You’re no longer the lead.  You’re not even near the center of the stage.  You’re kind of the guy in the wings with a copy of the script ready to whisper the lines to the actors if they forget their lines.  Well, it’s still useful and who knows maybe there’s a non-speaking role for you as a spear carrier.  That’s when you get to be backup driver for soccer games or band practice.  After all it’s honorable service.

But it is weird how life works.  You really can’t delay gratification.  You can’t work for forty years to make enough money to make the last years worth having missed what came before.  You have to figure out how to squeeze the joy out of the process of living.  You have to enjoy being a kid and a young man and your prime and what comes after that.  You have to find some friends along the way, go on those coffee walks at break time and go to your kids’ soccer games and their kids’ baseball games and volunteer around town and even do really annoying stuff like getting involved in local politics.

Like I said, it’s the blink of an eye.  Twenty-five or thirty thousand days is a short span when so much is eaten up by routine that is almost unavoidable.  I guess if you’re a billionaire it’s a little different but I’ll bet it’s still the same tradeoffs, responsibilities versus joy.

Of course I haven’t seen the last page.  As Shakespeare said,

“Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Well, I better hurry up and get my ducks in a row.

Rufus Panhandles a Meal

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A funny thing happened yesterday.  I was heading out to take some photos of a patch of bugle weed that is in bloom.  I had my camera backpack on and I was carrying a small tabletop sized tripod.  And as I walked out on the deck in front of the kitchen a baby fox came walking past me on the upper driveway.  When I closed the door, he noticed me and stopped and turned.  What a strange moment.  Now Camera Girl loves to see the baby foxes when they’re denning in the swamp so I wanted to get a photo for her so I desperately tried to get my camera out of the pack and in hand but the little fox trotted toward the shed and disappeared before I could free the camera.  I followed him behind the shed and looked down into the woods and pond but he was gone.

Camera Girl was out shopping.  When she got home, I told her about it and she was very excited.  She always enjoys when any foxes show up on the property but especially when pups (kits?) are around.  So, she was thrilled when a little while later it returned on the driveway.  And she went and got a bunch of chicken scraps and started feeding it.  I told her to be careful and keep her distance.  A fox walking around in the open in the daytime is a questionable occurrence.  They say that rabid animals tend to show up during the day so I cautioned her.  Well, before you know it, she’d fed the creature and then she put out a small bowl of milk and at that point I’m afraid maybe it’s moving in with us.

I went out with my camera and saw him ducking in and out of a space under the shed.  I got a few not-so-great photos and watched him for a while.  He was young and he didn’t look that strong.  I tried to imagine how a kit that young would be on its own.  I wondered if the den was under the shed but I never saw any sign of the parents or den-mates.  Could his parents have been killed?  It didn’t seem likely.  Was he sickly and abandoned?  Maybe.  After a while he didn’t reappear so I went in.  Camera Girl left out more food and milk.  But by nightfall it was still there.

Last night I heard about how exciting it was that the little fox was about.  I warned her that it wasn’t so good having it around.  I told her it was a health hazard for the dogs to have a wild canid around spreading various diseases they could catch.  She yes-yessed me but I could tell she was hoping it would stick around.  I was preparing myself for the headaches this new “pet” would cause me.  Oh well.

But today Rufus was nowhere to be found.  Even a fresh portion of food and milk wasn’t enough to lure him back.  Is he gone for good?  Maybe.  Camera Girl is disappointed but I can tell she still has hopes.

To be continued.