jumpingfish

She helped me find a pair of running shoes. The ones I’ve been running in need replacing, or will soon. And the store was having a 10% off sale, so I found myself in the market for a new pair. But I didn’t have the faintest idea what to get, nor did I particularly care, because the days of me feeling strongly about my shoes have passed.

Still, I needed something to replace my wearing out pair, so when she walked past where I was sitting, I asked for some help.

It didn’t take long. She knew what she was talking about. And she was able to bring out several boxes for me to try on that were probably sufficient replacements. 

I tried one pair, and they didn’t feel right. I tried another pair, and they felt great. And the final pair slipped loosely on my heels as I walked, so I never even got up to a jog in them.

“I’ll take the Mizunos,” I told her. “How much are they?”

“$120.00,” she said.

“And with 10% off,” Trudy added…

“Oh, I can’t do that math,” she said.

She can’t do that math. Ten percent of 120? I know I’m being harsh, but what a shame. She knew the shoes in the store. She was a runner. She was friendly and cheerful. But she didn’t know how to calculate ten percent of 120.

No wonder, I thought to myself. No wonder we got to where we are.

0. What I won’t discuss

Yesterday the sky was blue and the sun shined down from the sky as Trudy and I ran our six-mile long run.

Yesterday our Rain Lilies exploded into a white-and-yellow supernova, attracting butterflies away from the other delights here and there in the back and front yard.

Yesterday, I saw a Monarch imbibing on the blossom of a Blue Mist Flower, drunk perhaps with the nectar of it, focused perhaps on making it to Costa Rica for the winter.

But I will not discuss these things.

Rather I have three links to share. In the past weeks, they helped me be (in some sense) more joyful than I might otherwise have been.

They helped me put my head together.

1. Black Jeopardy

SNL has been hitting it out of the park, lately. The skits have been funny, which we might expect of them. But they have been (in my opinion) deep. Perhaps the most significant in my limited sampling of SNL (which I do not watch per se, because we do watch TV and frankly don’t care to devote that much time to something that had of late descended into irrelevance) is the Black Jeopardy skit with Tom Hanks as a good-ol-boy Trump supporter.

It was funny. But more importantly, it was… important. It showed the turning of our left-right political spectrum back on itself. It showed the red and blue ends meeting in some kind of intersection (without over-romanticizing it). This was something I tried to talk about here. It’s something that the establishment (pundits, politicians, bureaucrats, the press) managed to completely ignore.

It’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. There’s a very important message for the left to be derived from it.

2. Live From New York

You’ve probably seen the Clinton skits on SNL. They’ve been going on for a while, and if nothing else they have given Kate McKinnon a chance to show how good she is. In particular, the SNL cold open debate skits in which she and Alec Baldwin parodied Trump and Clinton have been blockbusters.

Last night, McKinnon played Clinton at the piano singing Leonard Cohen’s Halleluja. 

This isn’t comedy. This isn’t what I think of as SNL. It’s literature. It’s philosophy. It’s consolation. And it is something quite different from what I have come to expect from television.

3. Culture Matters

This Golem XIV article is a long read. It’s worth it. I can’t do it justice here.

There’s Brexit. There are immigrants on the beach. There’s a painful clash of cultures. There’s globalism and free trade and the emptiness of being nothing more than an economic entity in a world otherwise devoid of meaning.

The writing is spectacular. The discussion is provocative and profound. It outlines an intellectual framework for making sense of a lot of things that have been bouncing around our society.

So you think that you’ve got trouble.
Well, trouble’s a bubble.
So tell ol’ Mr. Trouble to get lost.
Why not hold your head up high an’
Stop crying’, start tryin’.
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.

When you find the joy of livin’
Is lovin’ and givin’,
You’ll be there when the winning dice are tossed.
A smile is just a frown that’s turned upside down,
So smile and that frown’ll defrost.
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.

You might know the tune. Here’s Dick singing it himself. Good tune for a sad day. Sorry, that’s all I got.

1.

“What’s that?” Trudy asked.

It was dark. It was 4:30 in the morning. Someone outside was yelling — yelling at the top of his lungs.

There’d been some shenanigans at the rental house across the street last week, so I figured it was one of the evicted discontents come back to harass. As I walked from the bedroom out into the living room, I could hear better.

“Get out!” he screamed. “Get out! Get out! GET OUT!”

There was a frantic, desperate sound to his voice. After a few steps into the living room, I saw why. The yelling wasn’t from across the street. It was behind us, on the other side of the alley, just beyond the fence. 

“Trudy!” I yelled. “Call the fire department.”

“What!?”

“Call 9-1-1. There’s a fire in the alley.”

2.

On the other side of our backyard, one house over from us, a roaring inferno was climbing into the black night sky. A duplex was on fire, and the flames had already consumed the backside of the building so that there was nothing to see but orange flames. 

The fire roared and popped. It rose up above the two-story duplex. It rose into the canopy of the trees with dry autumn leaves beginning to fall to the ground. One of the trees caught on fire, and a huge ball of flame went hurdling skyward in an instant. Streams of glowing embers raced upwards into the darkness.

I started a sprinkler at full blast in the back of the yard. The fence behind the neighbor’s house was on fire, but Ron was out there with a hose, and he put it out.

Fewer than five minutes after Trudy called 9-1-1, fire engines began to roll in from both directions. As their lights flashed, and as two hook and ladders began to spray water down from the sky, things began to explode — loud pops and bangs and flashes of bright orange light. Gas cans for mowers? Gas tanks of cars? Then some kind of electrical explosions began to snap, loud pops and buzzing sounds and flashes of bright white light. Breaker panels?

3.

That was early this morning.

This evening I wandered into the back of our yard to peer over the fence. It is a complete loss — the carport burned to the ground, the backside of the duplex charred and most of the siding pulled away, leaving only a skeleton of the building that was there yesterday.

There were nine people and one dog in sleeping there last night. All ten escaped. And they escaped because of that man, their neighbor, who had been sleeping with his window open and woke up when the fire started crackling.

That man who woke up and began to frantically yell and scream. Until they got out.

Dude!

Oh, man. It’s you?

Dude, what did you mean that you managed to steal away with Jenny…?

What!?

What did you mean by that?

By what? We went kayaking. We had peanut butter sandwiches. What on earth are you talking about?

That’s not what you wrote. I read what you wrote, and I see no mention of said kayak. You wrote that you managed to steal away with Jenny while Burt was cutting trees in the woods. And I happen to know that when your fair and industrious Trudy reads about this, well… I’m just sayin’ it ain’t gonna be pretty.

What? Wait. Look here… Oh no.

I think you need to start proof reading your stuff a bit closer, man.

Dude. For once you’re right.