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Another Squeeze of Lemmonade: The Memoir Continues
The fires in the Catalinas are better contained now, no new flare-ups that I can see. Smoke channels upwards here and there, but not the darkened clouds of a week or so ago. Containment, then break-out, then containment again. People began to be disappointed in the language chosen to convey the situation to Tusconans. Fire is feral — and amoral. The first great blaze to my mind was in Disney’s Bambi. The forest was in flight itself as fire swept through the woods. The sizzling, the crackling, the virulent hissing of this animated fire brought fear. We don’t know what…
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The Lemmonade Stand
There is a large photograph of my sister Harriet and one of me shot in the 40s. They were professionally taken, and shot outdoors at 222 Oceanview Avenue in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. We lived on a corner house in a basement apartment on Brighton 2nd Street. In Harriet’s photo she is shot at an angle with a long stemmed rose in one hand, very well done and very beautiful. Perhaps she was four. I was eight. It is most likely i will never return to that address ever again, although the molecules shed from my family and I permeate the walls.…
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I Can’t See
I am an equal opportunity disliker. I am underwhelmed by the species of which I am a part. Unimpressive, to say it mildly. I keep on learning not to have expectations — of any kind — of friends and family and the larger organisms that populate in masses all the continents. Many of us can’t see, in this country, the appalling administration that has ruled us; many of us can’t see the littleness, the brittleness, the nasty characterological make-up of the twit from Texas. We can’t see that we have put the Gilded Age behind us, to use the jargon,…
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The Dragon at the Gate
When I finished the last blog about Joyce, et al, I free associated to my profile on Myspace. At the end of the profile I cited Bertand Russell who said that religion is the dragon at the gate. A woman had surfed Myspace, landing on my site; she left a note which said, in effect, that I seemed to be an interesting person but given the comment she could not engage me. And so the stranglehold religion has on people. if I wasn’t so jaded, it would take my breath away. I view those who believe in god, heaven and hell, dogma and…