Swirling in the vortex

 

   
     As someone fascinated by the 1912 sinking of the Titanic — who isn't? — you'd think the 1997 blockbuster movie "Titanic" would be right up my alley. But it wasn't, and a quarter century since I last viewed the film, I can still point to the moment when director James Cameron lost me: the chase with a handgun, a bit of business added to goose the story further. I remember thinking, "The ship sinking isn't drama enough? They need a gunfight?" It seemed gilding the lily. 

     That moment flashed back when I was standing in the Coconino National Forest Red Rock Ranger Station, going over potential hikes with Rhett, a helpful volunteer. He was pointing out trails on the map, when I noticed a spot labeled "Airport vortex." 

     "Airport vortex?" I asked.

      It turns out that being set in an absolutely stunning physical vista — really, the place makes Boulder look like Kansas — isn't enough. The paranormal powers of the universe have to be summoned like a pack of performing dogs and ordered to do tricks upon command. 

     "They say there are seven natural vortexes in the world, and Sedona has nine of them," Rhett said, neatly summarizing the local attitude toward the New Age hooha forming here like moss on a stone..

     Not that this spiritual claptrap bothered me, per se. Life is hard, the night is long, people need to conjure up all sorts of rococo nonsense to comfort themselves. I get it. So long as they don't use the laws of the country to force their particular brand of gauzy flimflam upon others, it's a free world. It's when you use your personal fairy tale, hardened by the passage of time, to vet the books at the school library, that I feel the need to disagree.

     I wish upon a star, sometimes. I do not, however, insist you get your medical care by appealing to the indifferent cosmos. It is, I believe, an important distinction.

     I never thought about any of this at all while we were hiking. Heads on swivels, trying not to blunder over a cliff while gawping at a mesa, butte or range. But one evening, we decided to go explore the town of Sedona, and found — at least in the Uptown section — an Estes Park-caliber hellscape of carny come-ons. Crystal shops and palmists, vortex vendors. It being offseason and late in the day, we were about the only tourists, and owners stood in the doorways of their establishments, trying to ballyhoo us in. 

     A man in a knit cap and a swami-length beard urged us inside for a "sound bath," and interpretive reading, an offer so strange I was tempted to inquire about what that might be. But I knew if I made eye contact with them man he'd wrap his arms around my knees and we'd never get away.

      We have friends ... treading carefully here ...  whose broad-minded approach to life allows them explore realms that I'm too narrow to consider. So we hit a few of the shops, looking for presents. Again, the patient work of a thousand millennia, the intense physical forces that formed these quartzes and gemstones, doesn't do the trick, apparently, for some. It isn't enough. These materials also have to heal you if you, oh I don't know, rub them on your afflicted parts — your head, I imagine. Merely being malachite won't satisfy some folks; it has to cure you too. I very much wanted to challenge one of the employees, to say, "If this stuff works, if you're so centered and purified and healed and enriched, spiritually, then why are you hawking wildly overpriced pebbles in a strip mall in Arizona?" But I'm a kind soul, we all struggle. Besides, then I'd be harassing clerks in tourist trap curio shops, and what good is moral clarity if you use it to browbeat people? An insight I wish I could magically impart to my friends on the left.

      The place depressed us. But fortunately I heard music coming out of a restaurant — Agave 89 — a pair of guitarists and a drummer doing Latino-tinged tunes. We slipped in and sat down. The music perked us right the hell up — it so strange that people would feel the need to conjure up all these wild and imaginary claims for inert stones. When a spiritual force that really does refresh and redeem your spirit is always available to anyone who can whistle. Maybe the problem is, music is free. Or at least quite reasonable ready to be rented for the price of an NA beer and a really quite good mushroom quesadilla.

Room with a view

  

View from Room 237, Sky View Lodge, Sedona Arizona.

     My wife and I don't usually pop for a room with a view. The idea being that we aren't planning to spend time in the hotel room, gazing out the window. Instead we'll be outside, experiencing whatever place we are visiting. Stow the luggage, grab a map and get out of there. By the time we get back, it's dark. So why waste the money?

      But something told us to pony up — and it wasn't much; an extra $50 a night, maybe — for a room at the Sky Ranch Lodge in Sedona, Arizona facing Red Rock State Park and, well, just look at it. Our first morning here we took our coffee on the porch and, honestly, for a moment I thought of suggesting we not go anywhere. Spend the day sitting here. Because really, what could be better than this?

     That was a dumb idea, as we found out when we tore ourselves away and spend a delightful three hours exploring the trails off the Sugar Loaf trail head.  We pretty much had the place to ourselves — it's off season here in Arizona, meaning the temperature is in the 40s — balmy compared to Chicago — and we passed other hikers about once every 20 minutes. If that.

     I've been hankering for such a place. The old familiar rooms and vistas are nice. But after a while, you just want to see something incredible. At least I do. The restorative thing about nature, besides the sheer physical beauty, and the physical exertion it takes to clomp through it, is its utter timelessness. The view of Castle Rock is the same now as it was 5,000 years ago, or 5,000 years from now, for that matter, and our petty worries of the moment are reduced to frost on a stone. Thanks nature, I needed that.

    I should add that the people at Sky Ranch Lodge were exceptionally nice — from Larry, who drove the shuttle van, to the kids behind the desk, suggesting hikes and restaurants. I've been to too many places where the staff are so busy daydreaming about whatever they imagine their calling may be when they finally find a way to escape the hospitality business that they forget their job right now is to make you feel welcome. Not here. Our comings and goings were marked by a fanfare of friendliness. 

The same red buttes provided background
for George Herriman's classic comic.

     I brought up the subject to one of the managers, and he suggested it is because the Sky Ranch has been family-owned since 1982. That makes sense to me. When it's y0ur own business, you tend to run it better. With the possible exception of this one here, which certainly has been phoned in the past week while I've been having some R & R out West (in Coconino County. "Krazy Kat country!" I enthused when we passed a sign). So thank you for indulging me, and not complaining too much, and I'll be back in Chicago soon, doing what I do best. Or at least do well enough to get by.

Won't it just get stolen again?

  

      So ... in case you missed it. Two-thirds of Republicans in Iowa told pollsters they believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from them. 
     Returning to a question that sits in the back of the rooms, waving its hand and going "Oh! Oh! Oh!" as the years click by.
     If they believe that ... if they really believe that ... then why are they voting at all? Give their claim that their previous ballot was stolen from them in some ineffable way their supreme leader, Losey L. McLoser can't even explain, never mind prove, then why even go through the motions of voting? Why waste their precious time? When all the Democrats — the same people who stole the last election and got away clean, remember — have to do is flip a switch or spin a dial or whatever they were supposed to have done last time. And wham-o. The election will be stolen again. Why vote? Why campaign? Why buy ads?
     Maybe they don't really believe it? Because they don't really believe anything, anymore. The entire bedrock of factuality having finally eroded away, in the torrent that is Trumpism. Nothing is true, or, rather, anything is true, if it serves the needs of the moment, reality being a paper napkin used to blot the spittle off your lips, then be tossed aside. There is always another one, a whole stack of momentary beliefs, waiting to serve.
     Maybe their fearless leader hasn't addressed this conundrum and so they have no opinions on the matter, the only way a thought enters their head is because someone inserted it there via Fox News. That sounds like a possibility as well. 
     Maybe the problem is mine. This whole applying reason business, this charade of slathering thought over the general confabulation of Republican madness an exercise in futility, like trying to measure a cloud with a calipers; the thing is too far away, moving too fast and dissolving at the same time. The election being stolen is just a bit of faux history, like the Jews killing Christ, used to rationalize whatever it is you want to do. They don't care if it's true or not; the important thing is, it's a story that serves, a means justifying the end.
    Enough. I'm still on vacation — having fun, thank you very much — but I didn't have the heart to dig up another old chestnut or scoop out spoonful of unpublished mash that was better left supperating in a jar in the back of the refrigerator. So I thought I'd try my hand at assembling my inchoate thoughts about Monday's election kabuki into some kind of cogent order. Honestly, I didn't find the news that grim. Almost half of the Republicans caucusing in Iowa didn't vote for Trump. Maybe the spell is lifting a little. Heck, any Republican who would vote for Ron DeSantis might also not vote at all. Or vote for Joe Biden. Anything is possible. In the worst sense of the term. We should all agree on that by now. 

Mentor is a city in Ohio

    Too much of my stuff is cringingly confessional. TMI, as the kids say. But believe it or not, there are actually pieces that I write, then decide are too personal to share. Such as this one, written half a year ago. But then time passes, I need something, and I figure, "Oh fuck it, why not?"

     "I'm sure the young people at the paper must look up to you," my mother said. "And you mentor them."
     I paused. And smiled. A weary kind of smile. Then immediately became lost in a memory from high school. Sophomore year, I hope. So say I was 16, which makes your mother picking out your clothes for you less bad. But I was wearing what she would refer to as "an outfit." Bluejeans. A matching jeans vest. And some kind of western shirt a color I can still see. Sort of a burnt orange. I wore it, and came home, and my mother said, in 1977.
     "Did the kids at school like your outfit?"
     And I remember pausing, struck, 46 years ago. Then smiling, slowly, I imagine that same weary kind of smile. Marveling, really, that my mother imagined I lived in a world where that could conceivable happen, and not my actual high school, where students got into brawls and one threw a teacher through a window. Perhaps some version of Archie comics, with Reggie and Jughead waving as I pull up in my converted Model T with a raccoon's tail on the aerial and school cheer slogans soaped on the doors.
     "Hey Neil, those are some rad threads!"
     "Why thank you Bettie, my mother picked them out for me."
     I don't know how I answered. Probably something terse, "No ma, of course not. People don't even lift up their heads so I can say hello." This was back when employees still went into the office on a regular basis. Though I realize that quality, that expectation, must live in me as well, which is unfortunate, because it has been an engine of disappointment.
     As for the young people at the paper, there is nothing knowledge-based I can say.  Years ago, when people would ask me what the mood at the paper is, I'd say, "There aren't enough people to maintain a mood." Now there are more staffers, enough for a frisson if not a mood. But scattered, and I'd never presume to imagine what they think about anything. You'd have to ask them. I sure wouldn't. My confidence isn't high. I  remember how it was when I was a young reporter, and how I viewed the old fogeys with lip curling contempt. Larry Weintraub, getting a tattoo of a quill pen and ink bottle on his bicep — because he's a writer, see? — and wearing short-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled up, a la Bob Fosse, to show it off. Cringe. The "Weintraub's World" columns where he worked for a day as a dishwasher, or a circus clown, or was dipped in pudding. It seemed the worst trivialization of the lives of working people. At least it kept me from ever doing that sort of thing myself. Long gone.
     I did admire some of my elders — Roger Ebert and M.W. Newman, and Irv Kupcinet. I remember arguing with people who didn't extend to the latter what I considered the proper respect. "Don't you understand? He once got in a brawl with Dizzy Dean and the starting lineup of the St. Louis Cardinals in the lobby of a Florida hotel in 1935? Harry Truman would call him on the phone and ask him to keep an eye on his daughter when she was in town. Clark Gable would go to parties at his apartment in East Lake View."
     But I saw how the rest viewed him, with a "Why is he still here?" smirk. In my heart I agreed with them. He had reached his sell-by date, but there he was, still the shelf, covered in mold. Nobody was buying it anymore.
     Why am I still here? Not mold-covered, I hope. But picking off bits of brown growing here and there, a losing battle. Why? A good question. I suppose for the same reason anybody is anywhere. I got hired once, and here I am, trying to do the best I can with what I've got until somebody or something makes me stop.

     

           

Flashback 2007: He can't Trump us — It's hard to believe Chicagoans could really fall for The Donald's nonsense

     Roseanne Barr is an alarmingly stupid person. She hasn't always been that way — I remember her original appearance on Johnny Carson, when she was a rare blue collar female voice cracking wise about her life. Her first show was pretty good too.
    But obviously the years have not been kind to Roseanne Barr. She managed a comeback, and was starring in ABC's No. 1 show in 2018 when she sent a tweet suggesting that Michelle Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was the progeny of an ape. ABC canned her faster than soup. At the time, I saw it as a cautionary tale about the importance of professional public relations.
    She doesn't have a career to ruin anymore, but is still saying astoundingly stupid things ... her latest gaffe, well, it's too idiotic to describe. Google "Roseanne Barr" and "holocaust" if you want the details. It made me wonder what I've written about her in the past and I noticed this — ANOTHER column mocking Donald Trump YEARS before he decided to inflict himself upon our nation as its president. It doesn't predate my first jab, in 2000, but being from 2007, it's worth sharing, as a reminder that I understood 16 years ago what too many people STILL can't figure out. I've kept the column's subheadings.

Opening Shot

     That Donald Trump sure has gall. After he voided the contracts of those unfortunates who bought early in his condo tower project at Wabash and Wacker, pointing at a hidden line of legalese to yank back the units he sold them and snatch their profit, I assumed it would be a long time before he'd dare set foot in this town again.
     Yet, there he was, in the flesh, trying to lure more dupes to buy, hoping they'll ignore his reneging on sales to the first group.
     Does the Trump name really confer status? In New York, maybe, where they're trained to wait behind red velvet ropes and gawp at minor celebrities. But it's hard to believe that Chicagoans fall for that nonsense. Living in a Trump Building is like driving a Hummer — a lunge at status that indicts more than it elevates.

But they are home...

     Certain subjects rarely get in this column — divorces, for instance. They are inevitably what I call "a dog's breakfast" — a complex jumble of messed-up stuff that would take an enormous amount of effort and energy to make sense of.

     The immigration bill is the same way. At first, I thought, aha, at last, a bipartisan agreement! But the more you look at it, the more it seems a hodgepodge that really doesn't accomplish anything.
     Instead of worrying about the bill itself — which probably will go nowhere, at least in its current form — let's take a moment to glance at the two main alternatives.
     First, there is the "send-'em-back" fantasy. No responsible person actually believes that all 12 million illegal immigrants should be rounded up — held in concentration camps, perhaps — and then shipped back to Mexico.
     But that dream underlies much public opinion. It lurks behind those lashing out at "amnesty." They were wounded somehow, in their past — maybe someone once peed in their alley, maybe they were awakened by a loud car stereo, maybe someone once tried to speak Spanish to them, and they were frightened, and the fear stuck.
     Sending illegals home being impossible, those who find the idea appealing instead tacitly endorse a second route: doing nothing:
     Forget that we've already been doing nothing, for years. Forget that doing nothing leaves us with an enormous underclass of noncitizens who can't vote and have only limited legal rights.
     Which leads us back to the bill. Maybe it'll work, maybe we'll find a new compromise. But we need to do something. Because we've tried nothing and it doesn't work.

Today's chuckle:

     In time for Memorial Day, a tribute to vets, from Roseanne Barr: 

     Vietnam vets, I have a lot of empathy for them. They had to go to a horrible place and perform a hideous job for people who didn't even appreciate it.

     I know what that's like; I used to be a waitress at Denny's.

             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 27, 2007

Flashback 2013: Hello, I’ll be your flu for today . . .

     A lot of illness going around: flu, COVID, RSV — that last one being some kind of lung infection. Whatever it is, I went to get the vaccine Wednesday night. Nothing worse than a sore arm. I'm taking some vacation days from work, but sick or well, I'll still be posting here, a rigor that didn't start with Every goddamn day, but led to it, as this column reminds us. It ran back when the column filled a page, and I've kept the old headings — and the part about going to the opera, a reminder of a lost world.

     Being a workaholic (God, both a workaholic and an alcoholic — I should get some kind of prize) my first thought, when I suspected that the flu jamming emergency rooms and scything through offices is knocking on the side of my head, was to get this written, quick, so I can collapse in a corner and hope to be better 48 hours from now.
     Sure, I could just call in sick, but calling in sick is for the weak; I hate doing that — you’re not in the paper, you might as well be dead; besides, in most offices the present sit around plotting the demise of the absent.
     Plus, it might not be the flu; maybe it’s just some cosmic hand that has reached into my skull, snatched out my brain and is squishing it before my eyes, grey matter oozing through its fingers. Not a terrible feeling, really; a dizzy exhausted numbness. This must be what stupid people feel like all the time.
     Thank goodness I have a few housecleaning topics I’ve been meaning to put in the paper, which shouldn’t demand too much brainpower to relate, or to read, and will keep me in your I hope unflu-flummoxed minds until Friday, when I plan to be better.

Opera winners off to swell nite

     Speaking of Friday . . .
     The Sun-Times is a do-it-yourself kind of place. Not a lot of meetings or memos. No legmen, rare secretaries, certainly none for me, few interns — I’ve never asked anybody to fetch me a cup of coffee in my entire career, frankly because there was never anyone around who I was confident wouldn’t reply, “Get it yourself, you pontificating baboon.”
     Thus when a rare situation arises where I have to depend on other people, it makes me nervous that they will actually hold up their end of the bargain. A trust issue, I suppose.
     Such as my Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Opera contest — 100 lucky readers and I will enjoy “Hansel and Gretel” this Friday at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, with a pre-party at the Rittergut wine bar nearby.
     With the date looming, you can imagine my relief when I got this email from a reader.
     “I am over the moon thrilled,” wrote Lisa Cristia, a Chicago massage therapist, who said she has been in the opera house, kneading a diva, but never actually seen an opera. She’s taking her mom, Darlene, who has never seen an opera either, but adds, “it’s one of those events that you should have on your bucket list to do at least once in your lifetime whether you are an opera fan or not.”
     That it is. I am happy she is excited, but even happier that she was notified. So thanks to Kristen Davis and all the other Sun-Times marketing folk who handled the heavy-lifting. I appreciate it. And congratulations to the 50 winners and their guests. See you Friday.

Correction

     Whenever our digital future is discussed, the typical reaction is to bemoan what will be lost — no folded newspaper tossed at the end of the driveway every day, no chance to shuffle curbward each morning to sample the weather, to dip your toe in the day ahead.
     That’s true enough — the brief stroll is always infused with optimism. But there are advantages to the electronic, the central one being the correction of errors: bam, they’re fixed. As opposed to the typical print way to address significant goofs: run a correction and hope people see it. A hastily applied bandage, at best — the error was given bold play, while the correction is coughed into a fist long afterward. I tend not to run them much, first because I, ahem, tend not to make them, and second because space in print is limited, and I am reluctant to shave off what I’m writing today to revisit some past blunder.
     But being sick, this is an ideal day.
     A few weeks back the phone rang — it was Ald. Ed Burke; no, make that “long-serving alderman” Ed Burke; no, rather, “the longest serving ever” as he informed me, having taken office on March 11, 1969, a date that found me in Miss Maple’s fourth-grade class.
     He was not sharing this information out-of-the-blue, but because, in a column gingerly seizing one Ald. James Cappleman (46th) between my thumb and forefinger and holding him under a bright light for his pigeon fixation, I had wrongly written Ald. Dick Mell (33rd) is the “longest serving alderman” (in my defense, I was listing aldermen off the top of my head, so checking seemed unfair).
     Anyway, in my blubbering, yes-sir-alderman-so-sorry effort to apologize, I told Burke I would run a correction, and then promptly forgot about it, until Mell himself, not satisfied at inflicting one relative, son-in-law Rod Blagojevich, on the world, made news applying political lube to ease his daughter, Deb, into his seat. Not her fault; she seems a good egg, and if my dad could name me to some pantheon of 50 well-paid writers who get to make speeches and send staff for coffee, I’d likely tell him to go ahead, though with a bit more guile than Mell is capable of.
     Anyway, the Sun-Times and I regret the error.
                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, January 9, 2013

Hat in the ring

 

 

     Do people even use the phrase "throw your hat in the ring" anymore? I imagine not, since they don't really wear hats anymore, not ritualistically, and those hats, more often than not, are some cheap fleece job, as opposed to something of quality and substance.
     That's what gave the phrase its meaning. To throw one's hat into the ring — sometimes quite literally, into a boxing ring — meant you were committing yourself to something. Why? Because your hat was there, in the ring, or wherever, and your hat was not only perhaps the most expensive thing you owned, but it had been chosen and molded and formed to match your personality. Where it went, you went, and vice versa.
     A month ago I was downtown, and stopped by Optimo Hats in the Monadnock Building for the pure joy of standing in the store, a glorious jewelry box of a place displaying hats that are luscious and finely crafted. The master was there, Graham Thompson, and we got to to talking. When I encounter people I automatically assume they don't know who I am, have never read anything I've ever written and don't care to start. But Graham actually read my book, "Hatless Jack" and remembered it — there aren't many books looking at men's hats as a socio-historical lens through which to understand culture. Just mine in fact.
     Did I know, he asked, that he had written a book. I did not. He bestowed one upon me, a lovely coffee table book. I began to read it — gorgeously written, an ode, not so much to hats, as to the lost art of craftsmanship, to appreciation of things of quality, increasingly rare in this mass-produced, use-it-once-and-throw-it-away world.
     I closed the book, excited to read it cover to cover. And then a month went by. Whatever I was doing, it wasn't reading Graham's book. Which is a lapse, on my part. So the purpose of this post is to throw my hat in the ring — I'm not going to let another month go by. As a book author, I know how frustrating it is, waiting for someone to read my damn book. So by ... Valentine's Day, I'll have it read and a column in the paper. Feel free to hold me to that and hound me if I don't. My apologies for the delay. I find sometimes the thing you want to do the most is the thing you never get around to doing.