Pouty about 2017? We have lots to look forward to.

     Well look at this! A shiny New Year — 2017 apparently, though that's almost hard to believe. The numerals look strange. Were it suddenly 2077 or 20A6 it would hardly seem stranger.
     And that's before we factor in the news.
     Still, a new year, whatever we call it, with much to look forward to. Much to mark on your new calendars — I just unwrapped my Brownline 2017 Daily Planner, well aware that using a physical journal in this era of iPhones is like carrying a walking stick. "They sell the things," I say, huffily, meaning: "It isn't just me, yet."
     A year of exciting occurrences, starting with Friday, Jan. 20. Yes, a lot of garment-rending, but I'll be honest: I'm anticipating the 20th with undiluted enthusiasm and not a trace of ambivalence, as a chance to experience something truly wonderful and inspiring.
     I'm referring, of course, to the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, whose opening night is Jan. 20 at the Biograph Theater. It includes Chicago's Michael Montenegro's "Kick the Klown Presents a Konkatention of Kafka," which might be redundant after Donald Trump's inauguration address earlier in the day.
     Let's not think about that yet, first we need a collective Limbo Party of Lowering Expectations. Right now I'm trying to convince myself that the Ku Klux Klan won't be....

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"Make a vineyard of the curse"

Duke Gardens, Durham, North Carolina

    So now we wait. Twenty days, to see if, or rather how, our fears bear fruition. To step aboard the train that we've all bought a ticket on, destination unknown.  
    I can save you three weeks of uncertainty. We won't know, not Jan. 20, or Feb. 20, or at any given point. There will be the same daily shocks that we're experiencing now, that the thickening cataract of custom won't obscure. 
    Will it be good? Bad? Yes. Of course it will be both, now good, now bad, depending on where you stand and when you ask. And depending on who you are, and how attuned you are. You can focus close and constant, you can track it through latticed fingers.
    We seem to think we can ameliorate the harm by rolling around in it. Maybe. But it hasn't helped much up to now, has it? One thing you can say about Donald Trump, none of this was hidden -- oh, there will be submerged parts revealed: exactly how much he is in bed with the Russians, and such. But even the secret stuff will be expected. You can't be shocked by it. Not anymore.
     There needs to be a way to process this. As always, I find refuge in poetry—"refuge" might be the wrong word. Utility. The comfort of words, of knowing what seems a fresh shock is really just the same old shock, come around the track again.
    I've been reading W.H. Auden's poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" a lot in recent weeks. A half a dozen times at least. It's of the season, beginning, "He disappeared in the dead of winter"—Yeats died Jan. 28, 1939, another period of growing unease, of watching the disaster come into focus, form, grow, unavoidable, before our ever startled eyes.
    An airport shows up, as do suburbs, always a little jarring in a poem, where we expect brooks but not sidewalks, glades but not cul de sacs (these modern totems must have been in the poetic air in the 1930s; another poem about the death of a revered figure, Sir John Betjemen's "Death of King George V" written three years earlier, concludes with both: "At the new suburbs stretched beyond the run-way/Where a young man lands hatless from the air.")  
    Auden serves up some wonderful lines. "And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom." Preach it, brother. Yeats, dying, "became his admirers" and "The words of a dead man/Are modified in the guts of the living." 
    If he's lucky.
    The poem makes me remember the debt a poet like Billy Collins owes to Auden. All Collins' anthropomorphized poems, crackling like breakfast cereal, honking like sea otters, are mere homages to lines like "The death of the poet was kept from his poems."
    We are reminded, "poetry makes nothing happen." Technically true. But it does grease the gears of what's happening.
    Especially in the third section, where Auden clicks into horror movie, ring-around-the-rosy cadences, each blunt line rhyming with the next.

    In the nightmare of the dark
    All the dogs of Europe bark,
    And the living nations wait,
    Each sequestered in its hate;

    Intellectual disgrace
    Stares from every human face,
    And the seas of pity lie
    Locked and frozen in each eye.

    Man that sounds familiar. In a country where the doors of freedom were slammed in the face of Syrian children before Donald Trump arrived. Where those 11 million undocumented Mexicans toiled in rightless limbo every single day of the Obama presidency. Always remember, Trump didn't ruin us. We ruined ourselves, and then he showed up, our reward for falling so below our standards, to violate the corpse. 
    Grim, but who can say inappropriate to now? At the risk of reprinting a block of the poem -- I can argue this is commentary, but if the Auden folk feel ill-used, I'll send 'em a check -- the poem ends with comfort that I feel compelled to share:

    Follow poet, follow right
    To the bottom of the night,
    With your unconstraining voice
    Still persuade us to rejoice;
  
    With the farming of a verse
    Make a vineyard of the curse,
    Sing of human unsuccess
    In a rapture of distress;

    In the desert of the heart
    Let the healing fountain start,
    In the prison of his days
    Teach the free man how to praise.

    "Make a vineyard of the curse." Now that's a plan. Not in the glug-glug-glugging wine aspect, though if you can pull it off, go for it. But in the sense that the vineyard is a lush and joyous place where nature shows off her bounty. "Let the healing fountain start." I can't say what that is, precisely, but I'm ready to bathe in it. Though my hunch is doing so now would be premature, like putting a bandage over a wound you haven't received yet.
    Poetry helps. I can't join those squatting in the dust over Donald Trump, first because he hasn't done anything awful yet, second because life goes on, third because if the choice is to resist him confident or resist him miserable, I choose the former, with an option of shifting into the latter as events warrant. Just as winners are told to win as if they've won before, so those in peril, those in this troubled world as it slides down toward calamity, should keep our heads up, as if we have done this before, because we have, or people very much like us have, our parents and grandparents. They made it through, most of them. So will we.

You have permission not to drink this New Year's Eve

   
     "Red or white?" is the traditional question. When your answer is "neither," it can throw a wrench in the gears of festivity.
     I remember standing in the fancy kitchen of a fancy home before a fancy dinner party. Our hostess, bottle in each hand, realized that she had a guest who, astonishingly, did not drink. She looked desperately around, then ended up sloshing tap water into a cut crystal glass and thrusting it into my hand.
     That worked.
     The holidays are upon us. With the biggest drinking holiday of the year lining up with Saturday night, some people are trying to navigate the arrival of New Year's without ending the weekend in the hospital.
     Doing publicity for my new book on recovery, I've had a number of hosts — TV, radio, podcasts — ask, "How do you cope with the holidays?" I offer some glib reply, but what I really want to say is, "You know Scott, the very same not-drinking-today strategy I use on March 2 and Sept. 3 also works amazingly well on Christmas and Dec. 31."
     But that's condescending. And simplistic. I understand it's hard for many people to get their heads around going to a holiday party and not drinking. It's like going to the movies and hanging out in the lobby. What's the point?
     A few tips.
     First, recognize it is possible. People do it....

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You won't BELIEVE what these famous actresses look like NOW!

     A quarter century ago, Queen Elizabeth II gave a speech where she famously referred to 1992 as an "annus horribilis" — Latin for "horrible year" — for its variety of scandals and setbacks, including a major fire at Windsor Castle.
     The temptation is to dub 2016 the same, for the rise of reaction and xenophobia, and nations lining up to swan dive into folly. Britain's Brexit, the Philippines' elevation of a murderous madman, and of course our own election of an unfit, erratic fraud to lead our country to ... well, we have no clue, do we? Either where he promised, or its opposite, or somewhere in between.
     I will resist that temptation to describe 2016 as an annus horribilis for the simple reason that we need to reserve the phrase for later use. Before I checked, I assumed the Queen had unleashed annus horribilis for the year Diana died, but no, that didn't happen until 1997. You don't want to pull the cord on "horrible" too soon because what happens when things really get bad? "Double horrible" just doesn't pack a punch. 
     And, ever the optimist, I am fully open and receptive to the idea that Trump, through his ham-handedness, ignorance and bullying will not be as effective a tyrant as feared. I'm not hoping he'll ruin the country. Chaos and stasis will never be so welcome. Maybe he'll blunder into solving the immigrant crisis and sealing an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Nixon, remember, went to China.
    Also – and this is important – a strong argument can be made that Trump is merely shining the harsh sodium vapor lamp of his  train wreck ego and self-puffing mania on flaws that were already manifest in the American system. What was shrugged off and clucked at under Barack Obama suddenly seems more more malign – and properly so – under the prospect of a Trump regime. He might have unleashed the haters, but they were already here, in the blocks, set in their runners' crouch, waiting for the gun. 
     OK. So now we've squinted at the big picture, on to the little: 2016 was the third calendar year of this blog, begun on July 1, 2013. I'm happy to report that it has become a quotidian part of life – my life anyway, and maybe yours.  I've never come close to missing a post—though I reserve the right, for being hit by a bus, etc. I did go to Japan with nothing in the can, but it turns out that their country is wired, too, and filing something wasn't a challenge or a chore. 
     None of this is. 
     Looking at the stats, I'm happy with the blog's progress.
    At the end of 2013, after six months of existence, the daily average readership was 918. By Dec. 30, 2014 it was 1200. The end of 2015 was 1539, and now its 1730, nearly double what it was three years ago. And the numbers are trending upward: January, 2015 was the first month to break 50,000 readers—this year, every month since May has done so, with two breaking 60,000, including a record November at 65,166. My gut says in 2017 we'll reach 80,000.
    But those are just numbers, and nothing to brag about on real web success terms. What about quality? I spent the entire year shrieking in alarm over Donald Trump, going back to posts like Jan. 27 "Preparing for President Trump" and Feb. 25  "Silvio Trump." To observe that it didn't help would be obvious—no columnist did, or could. I tried, and that's what is important, and no doubt will be a source of comfort as our nation twists and distorts like a candy wrapper in a campfire. 
    There are some pieces I'm quite proud of – or the cuteness article I researched in Japan, "The Saving Grace of Kumamon," I was able to use the photos on the blog that Mosaic didn't want, and in general I've been glad to have everygoddamnday.com to present versions of stories that I prefer, plus essays that aren't available online. 
    As far as pieces written exclusively for the blog, I didn't notice any original pieces that approached the quality of, say, "Welcome to the Steinberg Bakery" or "Abe Lincoln would not have done it." That is worrisome. Then again, I finished a book and had it published, so maybe my focus was there. And there were a few original highlights: my April 1 post, "The End," managed to fool a lot of readers, despite being inaccurate in every aspect—foreshadowing of Trump's triumph, perhaps. After the paper sent me to buy an assault rifle, leading to June 17 "That old Second Amendment only goes so far," having this blog, a venue where I could set the record straight, to my satisfaction at least, in June 23's "Dunk Tank." That was very important to me when I was getting abuse from all sides, from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and every yahoo with a Twitter account.
    Enough. My wife thinks I shouldn't post the numbers, but my blog, my rules. It was worth doing,, and continuing to do, only because you continue to follow along, and I appreciate it, and thank you. 
    

Curdled sky

 

     Every morning I walk the dog. Were walking the dog a chore, I would dragoon my wife to help. But I am habitually awake far earlier than she, and enjoy walking the dog, as it involves two of my favorite pastimes: walking and the dog. 
     So I do it. Heading down the front walk, sometimes the dog will tack left, curling around the house north toward the library, a route I don't mind because I get to pass my Lake Superior hemlock tree, and note with approval its steady progress skyward. But we typically go right, a standard route -- three blocks down, a block over, and three blocks back. 
    Dogs like routine. As do humans. I make a point to always grab a few old blue newspaper bags before we go, to clean up after the dog—let the Internet try expropriating that important journalistic function. Some dog walkers are careless in this, but I am not. Once, forgetting bags, I used my handkerchief, throwing it away afterward. 
    I seldom forgot a bag after that. What I don't always remember is my phone, a lapse I only think of when confronted with something I'd like to take a photo of, like the banded sky above. I couldn't recall seeing clouds so evenly striped in straight lines like that, and wanted to record it. Clouds don't stick around, typically, waiting to be documented. But when I returned home, I puzzled the dog by leaving her in the foyer, bolting upstairs, grabbing my phone in my office, and heading back outside. Finding the best spot for observing an unbroken expanse of sky, I stood next to a neighbor's house, snapping happily away, until I paused, realizing that I was standing five feet from a brightly-lit window, worried my interest in clouds might be misconstrued, and retreated home.  ("Truly officer, it was an intriguing banded effect....") 
    I plugged "striped clouds" and "banded clouds" into Google and didn't find much. A bunch of chitchat, none of it definitive. But my copy of Fogs and Clouds came through almost immediately. Published in 1926, written by W. J. Humphreys, identified on the title page as the Meteorological Physicist of the United States Weather Bureau, author of Physics of the Air; Weather Proverbs and Paradoxes, Rainmaking and Other Weather Vagaries—who among us wouldn't snap that up in an instant?—among other works.
      The book contains 93 photographs, in stunning black and white, "Radiation fog" and "Billow cloud" and "Cumulus boa," and flipping through them I came to No. 27, a "Cirro-culmulus" that has the same striations as my cloud. 
    Okay, it might not be exactly the same -- Humphreys' looks whispier, and mine seems denser, and more wintry. But it seems very close.
    Cirro-cumulus, Humphreys relates, are "arranged in groups and often in lines," and often referred to, at least in the world Humphreys traveled, as a "mackerel sky," because:

    The term "mackerel sky" is an abbreviation of "mackerel-back sky," so named because of the frequent resemblance of rows of cirro-cumuli to the patterns (not the scales) on the backs of one or more species of mackerel. When the cirro-cumuli are small, numerous, and without order or pattern, they often are called "curdled sky."    

Mackerel

     Which would have the average Chicagoan trying to picture a mackerel. Don't feel bad; I couldn't conjure one up either. Here you go. 
     Interesting word, "mackerel." Disappears into antiquity, at least 700 years old, with the Oxford Dictionary not even hazarding a guess where it might be from, noting that "mackerel sky" is at least 300 years old. ("Mackerel" has also been a synonym for "pimp" for at least 500 years, again for reasons mysterious). 
     A common enough word to inspire a host of sayings—of course you know "Holy Mackerel," a softening of "Holy Mary" with a nod to the Catholic preference for fish on Friday's thrown in (One obscure slang for Catholics was "mackerel-snappers.")  An article in the London Sunday Dispatch from 1936, cited in Supplement One of H.L. Mencken's The American Language claims that London swells had stopped using profanity, and instead were inserting names of flowers and animals, preserving this supposed snippet of their cleaned-up conversation: "Hullo, you old baked walnut. How goes the mackerel-footed flea?"
     Dryden refers to a "mackerel-gale" which Samuel Johnson, in his great 1755 dictionary, guesses means "a strong breeze, such, I suppose, as is desired to bring mackerel fresh to market." 
     Which had to be done quickly, because mackerel were famous for spoiling fast. In his definition of the word, Johnson quotes this bit of verse, from William King's 1709 Art of Cookery: "Law ordered that the Sunday should have rest; And that no nymph her noisy food should sell, Except it were new milk or mackerel." What good is observing the Lord's Day if it results in bad fish?
     Plus there are a variety of similes, "silent as a mackerel," which needs no explanation. 
     You see why the fish is used to describe the clouds. But how do the clouds get those mackerelish rows? That's the aspect that really caught my attention, these broad lines conveyed across the heaven in such regularity. What's the mechanism for that? What holds them together? Humphreys, as if reading our minds, is right there with an answer:

     Those occurring in rows presumably are on the crests of air waves or billows at the interface between wind layers of unequal speeds or different directions, or both, and commonly unequal in temperature and humidity.

     Does that make sense to you? Me neither. But then again, I have a bad cold—been battling it for days; I figure, I picked it up on Lower Wacker Drive last Thursday, visiting the homeless.
     Or maybe I'm just blaming them, post hoc ergo propter hoc. Maybe I caught it from a rich swell at a fancy restaurant. Either way, the last thing Humphreys says about cirro-cumuli (yeah, I dig using the plural) is "they are quite thin and contain but little cloud material."
     Which is about how I'm feeling. So my last question is this: did I truly never see such banded clouds before? Or did I see them but didn't notice? My guess is the former, since seeing them this week drew such immediate interest. But you never know. Have you ever seen any? Perhaps they were there, but I was not in the proper spirit to receive their presence. People often confuse what's going on inside with what's going on outside, such as all those Democrats convinced that our nation went through some kind of epic change over the past two months, when what actually happened was we all suddenly looked up and really noticed how curdled the sky had become.
       

Lies are not only damaging, they're contagious

   

     Et tu, Barack?
     I was biting my lip, trying not to criticize the president in his final weeks. What would be the point? He's history, toast, riding off into the sunset for his date with a postage stamp. Yes, after the 2016 election he reverted to the same Spock-like, over-intellectual passivity he glided in on, nodding pleasantly the way people do in nightmares in the face of imminent danger, as his successor rears out of the swamp of American psychosis and names his misfit Cabinet.
     But Obama must know what he's doing, right? A wily politician to the end. Just as during the 2008 election he knew that one flash of temper would paint him as an Angry Black Man, he sought to maintain whatever slight influence he might have on the Trumpian entity by welcoming it into the White House with grace. At least then Donald Trump might see what grace looks like. Hoping to mitigate the disaster, Obama kept his lip zipped while the scaffolding of our national humiliation is erected.
     Then, talking to David Axelrod for his podcast, Obama blurted out that he would have beat Trump: "I'm confident that if I, if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it."
     Obama's boast is meaningless on several levels. In no particular order: a) he couldn't run again; b) a majority of the American people don't vote at all; c) Hillary Clinton did win most of the votes the American people cast among the candidates and she still lost; and d) Trump has already cornered the market on preening, unwarranted confidence in one's own ability.

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Street medicine brings health care to the homeless

Night Ministry medical case manager Tiffany Green talks to a homeless man on Lower Wacker Drive.

     You can't always tell if it is a person in there, or if that person is alive or dead.
     "Night Ministry!" Jeff Ayoub calls out, approaching a human-shaped pile of blankets on Lower Wacker Drive. "Night Ministry!"
     The Night Ministry is the last strand of our fraying safety net. Despite "ministry" in its name, it is not a religious group, except in the sense that all religions have scripture about helping the downtrodden, edicts generally ignored by the faithful but the linchpin of this 40-year-old Chicago organization, which runs a shelter and a medical clinic on a bus that offers health care, counseling and life necessities to Chicago's homeless.
     I tagged along Thursday because, one year ago, the Night Ministry began a program, where nurses carry backpacks filled with medical gear seek out the homeless under viaducts, in fields, and other odd places where they hide.
     "We were restricted with what we could do with the bus," said David Wywialowski, director health outreach.    

Smoking crack cocaine. 

     The Night Ministry was inspired by Dr. Jim Withers and his Street Medicine Institute in Pittsburgh. So last year they visited him, observed his operation, and brought it here.
     Homeless people are prone to asthma — one complained of the dust raised by cars blasting by. They have allergies from the rat feces scattered inches from their heads, difficulty filling prescriptions, early onset arthritis and undiagnosed diabetes. Not to mention the woes of addiction that cause many to fall off the grid in the first place.
     As we moved from one encampment to another, handing out bottles of water, food, Christmas gift bags of toiletries and sweets, it struck me that homeless people do not gather randomly. They might live on the street, but they separate out into communities that reflect society. Thus you have African Americans along one stretch of Lower Wacker Drive, while around the corner is a neighborhood of young white IV drug users.
     Guatemalans live under an overpass near Chinatown, where some have jobs in nearby restaurants. And the neatly tented people living under Lake Shore Drive at Wilson and Lawrence tend to be the de-institutionalized mentally ill.
     Just as in the society they've tumbled from, different groups scorn one another.
     "They really do," said Matthew Sorenson, 54, a nurse practitioner at the Night Ministry. "There's definitely an elitism among substance abusers. They separate themselves from other groups, have their own identities. The alcoholics will speak badly of the heroin users; the heroin users hate the meth addicts — everyone hates the meth addicts."
     Though they had invited me to see the medical program in action, on Thursday there wasn't a nurse with us — I interviewed Sorenson later, by phone. Requests for inhalers and other treatment requests by the dozens of homeless people we met had to be deferred.
     The big difference between what the Night Ministry is doing in Chicago and Pittsburgh's program is the lack of a Dr. Jim Withers. Their street medicine team started going out only one day a week, saw the enormous need, and now goes out five, but staffing and funding is still an issue.
     They are hoping to hire a part-time nurse, What they could really use are a bunch of medical volunteers — nurse practitioners who want to give back to the city, and maybe get some experience treating trench foot and scabies that they might never get at some shiny suburban hospital. Christmas is over, but the need remains, and one truth of helping such people is that the person you end up helping is yourself.