Week in Review - a stream o' conscious post on the week just past
Ahhh...but I can close my eyes and still feel the cruise-sun full on my face and the dispensation that allowed the reading of something as sweet and cotton-candyish as Jack McKeon’s autobiography...
My boss Rick is a character, especially at an office where we all compete for the Most Milquetoast Award. He’s of a perpetually sunny disposition and has large eyes that have a tendency to roll about in his head when he laughs, which is often. He tells me of his appearance at a slot machine tournament in Las Vegas. They take you to the machines in groups of twelve, and he almost got in a fight with someone when he mistakenly took the chair at their slot. He said that you have three or four minutes and you press a button as fast as you can. He said it felt ridiculous. There was even someone there cam-recording the whole thing. He just looked around and thought to himself, ‘look at all these ridiculous people constantly pressing a button’ and then he realized he was doing the same thing. He ended coming in fourth despite the distraction of looking around at his fellow players on the strength of hitting a decent jackpot at the end. He goes often to Vegas and Tahoe and when a co-worker told him he might have a gambling problem, he took it seriously: “I’m taking the month of February off to prove I don’t have a problem,” he told me but then added, “but I chose it because it has the fewest days!”. He may have a problem.
I told him I’d like to have experienced the slot tourney just so I could write about it, which befuddled him since he wondered why would I want to write about it, so I added it “I mean just for the experience of it”. It’s funny to see the expression of those who find out I write; they all can’t imagine I would do so. I learned I’m a blockhead (which you already knew): MamaT quoted Samuel Johnson as saying only a blockhead would write without getting paid. There’s a lot of truth in that. If there’s one thing we learned over the past election cycle is how little impact even paid writers have on the national discourse. Look at the pounding Bush took from editorial writers just before the ’04 election and how he won it handily. The Frank Rich’s and Mo Dowd’s of the world have much less power than they think. They say don’t fight with those who buy ink by the barrel but Bush did and lived to tell about it.
I’m really impressed by Rick Lugari’s website. I think it’s called City of God or something and the tone and design is pitch-perfect. He’s stopped blogging, or resumed briefly to support somebody in the blog awards. But what he’s doing there is attractive. If I could be more like another blogger, I’d be more like the comic Lugari or maybe Bill of Summa Minutiae, who confers a sense of well-being with posts about obscure books collecting dust in old libraries. Blogging about the issues of the day is important but a skill I don’t have because I’m not an expert on them, and given my hit numbers, no reason to be.
Lent is coming, and it seems by the end it’s like I’m struggling for air. I fly through the first two or three weeks, effervescent and enthusiastic, going to extra services and going the extra mile, but by Good Fiday I’m pretty much out of gas and spiritually numb at the very time I’d like to be most keen. Perhaps that's as it should be, though I'd like a different approach this year. Not less difficult, but maybe differently difficult?
What else? Well, we’ve got the whiphand on winter, she’s declining and shows it by how late it stays light now. It feels a bit of a hollow victory, like fighting Frazier when he was past his prime. I mean, come on, this was winter? When I was a kid we had real winters, like the blizzard of ’78. I have to say this was the most pansy-ass’d winter of all time. We had one tough month I guess. But I’m not complaining! I could live with these sorts of Gentle Ben winters where nobody gets hurt...
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