Paradigms...where shift happens!

The Little Frog & Duck Boy in the I.E. Part 9

So there you have it, the tale of two grown men who in one evening dragged an innocent child down to their level via the glorification of farting poultry. It was an aromatic job but one that needed doing, nevertheless.

That was the last night I would be at Alain's. Since ‘She’ was still in the hospital, a host of relatives was due to descend The Little Frog and Duck Boy the next day and Alain needed to be tending to family business. There was one more stop on my itinerary in Rancho Santa Margarita about an hour north and west of Murrieta and then on Sunday, I would one again commit my body, soul and trembling psyche to the tender care of America West Airlines for the return trip to Dulles Airport.

There was another reunion on this trip but it is one I'll not get into just now. The balance of that story is yet to unfold, even for me and time will sort it all out. If I were totally comfortable with the idea of destiny I might be more inclined to wade right in. Still, the last year and a half has been a remarkable period in my life, one during which I have learned a lot and changed a lot but that’s nest saved for another day.

I've delayed posting this final accretion, trying, vainly as it turns out, to come up with some suitable denouement but the loose ends have defied my efforts to tie them up. I thought perhaps there would be some final seed of humor or insight that I could drag out to neatly wrap this up; I was either wrong or unsuccessful in finding such.

The trip back to Washington was a mixture of numbing emotional flatness and a repeating loop of a wonderful but seemingly all too brief interval. I suppose that the freshly created memories did make the transition back into the daily routine easier at first but the rhythmic rut of daily life quickly reclaimed its dominance of my reality.

Thanks to you all for having the patience to wade through all this. If you have read this far I suppose there must have been really one or two moments in the tale that were worth telling. I'm returning to California in September for another visit. The anticipation is beginning to build and perhaps there will be more to tell.

Until then, may all your encounters with the south end of a northbound duck be at the appropriate distance and if not….wait for it!

You did too say it!

He said he was misquoted before he apologized for saying what he was misquoted as saying...huh? He might just be a Democrat....

If you hear a rising crescendo of hoof beats, relax it's not stampeding zebras. It's just the sound of every Republican with any body temperature at all except Tom Delay trying to distance themselves from Pat (Rambo) Robertson. I'll bet that Rush Limbaugh isn't even taking his calls.

 

You remember Robertson don't you? He's the guy from down in Virginia Beach who has his Bluetooth device permanently linked to God's, so he won't miss the next set of instructions.  According to CNN "He has suggested in the past that a meteor could strike Florida because of unofficial "Gay Days" at Disney World and that feminism caused women to kill their children, practice witchcraft and become lesbians."

If it weren't for the age issue I would bet money he is the illegitimate brain damaged love child of Gordon Liddy and Ann Coulter.

 

His latest flight of fancy has us "taking out" the President of Venezuela. And all this time I thought that the stories about a new Marvel Comics version of the Bible was just rumor. Looks like it may be true and Robertson wants to be the new creative consultant for story lines. Pat, keep your day job; even Marvel Comics requires a double digit IQ and that you be house broken.

 

Today he says he didn't mean that we should kill the man, just kidnap him. It's comforting to know that he's not an extremist. I'll bet he just wanted a few small meteorites to hit Florida too, not a whole comet.

 

This man ran for President; can you imagine what we would have been dealing with had he been elected?

Swoosh!! Just do it

April 3, 2005

The sky was jumbled yesterday after the off and on rain that we had since sunrise. Highest were the seemingly immobile white clouds and below that were these tattered grey remnants of the day’s rain clouds crabbing off to the east, seeming to move quickly against the lightly textured white above them. The temperature had dropped and the tatters seemed like a warning that the respite from the unsettled weather would not last forever.

The view from my window is vaguely northeast and so when the sun sets whatever light there is throws itself at the power poles and signs along Route 1 and then seems to bounce up to reflect off the sides of the light tan of the National Bank building. If I look out at just the right time, when the sun is very low but not yet below the horizon, just before sunset, the effect is one of flood lights aimed at those walls. Yesterday the light came in just that way, the air so clear that the new spring grass along the highway was impossibly green. The illusion was of a photograph printed on high gloss paper.

My apartment balcony has a particularly good aspect for viewing rainbows except for all the power lines and buildings in the foreground. Yesterday, a swoosh of rainbow was all there was but it was quite wide at the base. I don’t know if an artist could do a single brush stroke with so many colors but that’s what this one reminded me of…as if God were saying, “Just do it!” If He wears Nike’s he is definitely a power forward or a center.

About two hours later Pope John Paul II died…make of it what you will.

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 8

Yesterday, Alain's Zen postage finally worked it's mellow magic and the pictures arrived. Duck Boy will be obvious and the picture of the two derelicts features the Little Frog in the Virginia t-shirt and yours truly...not in the Virginia t-shirt. As you can see, the word "Little" is a vertical qualifier. If it were horizontal then it would not apply to either of us:

And now the story of how Daniel became Duck Boy….

If there is anyplace more relaxing to be than in a hot tub with an old friend, I don't know where it would be. The second night I was there Alain, Daniel and I adjourned to his hot tub. We thought about getting in the pool but that seemed like an awful lot of trouble. It was to be Daniel's lot that night to be regaled with songs and TV schtick from our creaky cob web cluttered brains. He was a sport about it despite his tender age. At one point for some reason we began to talk about our favorite Brit-coms from PBS. One of my favorites is a lesser known one called "The Vicar of Dibley". It featured Dawn French as a female Anglican priest in the small rural village of Dibley. As is so often the case with small towns Dibley had its traditions, one of which was an annual village talent show. Traditions imply repetition and such was the case in Dibley with the same talent acts being repeated year after year, one of which was a gentleman farmer of rather 'earthy' character and his famous farting duck. When it came his turn on the program he would stride from the wings to center stage. There he would stand erect at center stage with his performing duck tucked securely under his arm, business end pointed towards the audience. A hush of anticipation falls over the audience and when the silence suits his performer's sensitivities, he utters in a quiet but dignified voice. "Wait for it". No sooner are the words spoken but surrepticiosly he squeezes his performing partner with his arm and a subtle but unmistakable rattle bursts forth from the business end of the duck in question. Suitable impressed the dreadfully British audience applauds politely as they no doubt mentally compare this year's duck fart to last year's.

Daniel, having the finely honed taste and perception of any normal 8 year old boy found this to be hilarious and for the balance of my visit 'chez Duck Boy' the watchword, the shibboleth was "Wait for it!" Thus Daniel became Duck Boy although the affectionate moniker did not occur to me until I was on the way home. Indeed Alain, told me that one morning, a couple of days later, while he was still in bed and well before he was prepared to drag himself out of the bed he felt that soundless presence of a child near him just before he woke up. He cracked one eye open and was greeted with "Wait for it!"…Duck Boy had struck and we had created a monster of a memory for all three of us.

That is our story of Daniel's metamorphosis into Duck Boy and we are (WAIT FOR IT!!),  by God, stickin' to it...

More blood in the water!!

No matter whether you are a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent or a political cynic like me, you have to love this. Right on the heels of Sanctimonious Super Sunday II in Tennessee where Dr. James “It's Not Really A Comb Over” Dobson compared Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s position on embryonic stem cell research to Nazi death camp experiments we have yet another brewing brou-ha-ha. Trent Lott is pissed at Bill Frist because he feels Frist sold him down the river out of ambition to become Senate Majority Leader. Hey, it could even be a new bumper sticker: “Honk if you’re pissed at Frist!” It’s worth printing it just for the onomatopoeia.

The old joke was that the difference between the United States Congress and the Cub Scouts was that the Cub Scouts have adult supervision. Here’s another: What’s the difference between Congress and a 7th grade lunch room? The 7th graders get a fruit cup! Ba-dump-bump.

Call  me nuts but I’m seeing the Gipper looking down from up yonder saying “Hey you kids! Don’t make me pull this car over!”

Of course Senator Lott feels used and abused here. Colin Powell didn’t love him anymore and the President spoke sharply about him. He even got dissed by an Independent, Senator Jeffords of Vermont and tossed a couple of political stink bombs towards the Green Mountain State by complaining that Jeffords was constantly trying to get programs approved that would benefit the state of Vermont. Man, if he's racked up about Jeffords, wait until he gets started on the Senators from West Virginia and Alaska.

Senator, get over it! Nobody was holding a gun to your head to make you talk like a racist at Senator Thurmond’s picnic. You could probably have congratulated him for his work with the NAACP and he wouldn’t have known the difference; he might not have even known you were there…or that he was there for that matter.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it….

There's blood in the water...

From the commentary coming out of this year’s “Justice Sunday ” held in Tennessee this past weekend it appears that nothing stirs up the Right Wing like a couple of issues that actually require thought.

The President announced a relatively non-controversial nomination for a Supreme Court vacancy and Senator Bill Frist modified his views on stem cell research. Suddenly the Right is schooling like piranhas, ready to begin feasting on their own young. The eminent political scientist James Dobson weighed in on the role of the Supreme Court and compared Frist’s position on embryonic stem cell research to Nazi experimentation on human subjects.

It’s going to be interesting to watch the Right get gored by their own zero sum political ox.

From the deck...

...coffeebar of the Junkanoo Island Cafe on the Outer banks of North Carolina. This could be a decent place to ride out Hurricane Irene if the miserable witch hits here:



Can you tell how hot it is?

En Garde!

Arrived here on the Outer Banks of North Carolina this morning at about ten. It's hotter than I can ever remember it being here. I tried to do a little coin hunting on the beach but the sun won and I bailed out after about 30 minutes. The water is calm and beautiful though. It's so nice here (except for the heat) that it's hard to believe Hurricane Irene is lurking out there somewhere, waiting perhaps to pounce on the mid-Atlantic coast.

I'm beginning to think this may not have been a great idea though....there are a lot of pot holes on Memory Lane...

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.....

Worth Reading

In May, as I struggled with trying to string together two or three coherent thoughts for this blog, a realization bubbled up through my inert male synapses. It had to do with change and the fact that everything I had written about so far or that was festering in my head was about change. That was when I renamed the blog “Paradigms…where shift happens!”

My friend Alain had a wonderful and thought provoking post titled "Change or Die" in his blog (http://marketingbytesman.typepad.com/) today, August 8th . Ostensibly, Alain’s field is marketing, more specifically health care marketing but today’s post goes far beyond that and I think it might be worth your time to read it. If you do, be sure to click the links he has there. They will take you to a really fascinating article from “Fast Company” magazine and you don't even have to put yourself on a mailing list to access it. I won’t embed a link since the third item in the links list to the left will take you directly there.

As you read, for context, remember that the only person who likes change is a wet baby….
(It was such a temptation to use an emoticon here but I resisted...I'm so proud of me!!)

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 7

Our shuffle or stumble down memory lane began almost immediately…the catch phrases that we remembered, the bizarre sales experiences, the parties, people we had known all began rushing through our brains. Had it not been for a lot fewer follicles in active production it was just like old times.

Reunion reminiscing can grind to a halt at times and so it is important to keep the machinery lubricated. Preventive maintenance is the key here and Alain had stocked up on some fine New Zealand lubricant. He must have sensed that I might be the weak link in the chain of memory because he immediately put a bottle of New Zealand's finest adult discretionary beverage in my hands. We had joked several times about getting a little outlandish so we felt obligated to begin that immediately.

When old friends reconnect, memories don't bubble up slowly; they are like a geyser, rushing to the surface, pausing perhaps for a few moments then erupting again. Properly connected, two people in the throws of reunion reminiscing don't even need complete sentences to do their mischief….

Someplace in the process the conversation will touch on something that's not so funny and then the stories of harder times begin to unfold. A person doesn't live nearly 60 years without spending at least some of those years in Plan B. Maybe sometimes we are in Plan B and don't even know it. Alain has had his share of time there and so have I.

In some ways, Alain is like one of those children’s blow up punching bag toys. Giving that thing your best shot might rock it back to the floor but it doesn't stay there. To put it in more contemporary terms, “he’s got game.” One of my favorite analogies that I either read or made up is the comparison between how a person looks at life and the operation of an automobile. The windshield is so much larger than the rear view mirror that we should know where our focus needs to be. Alain has one of the smallest rear view mirrors of anyone I have ever known.

As tempting as it is to recount a few of the episodes we re-hashed for you here, I’ll spare you that. You’ve probably all been involved in some sort of a reunion scenario and so you know how it goes. The hilarity of the old days is easily recalled by the participants and absolutely unfathomable to the entrapped observer. There is, however, one exception to the “entrapped observer” phenomenon…more on that the next time when you learn at long last how Daniel became “Duck Boy”.

Iconoclastically Speaking

O.K. , I confess, I watched a quasi-reality show last night…something about a woman named Kathy Griffin or Griffith or Griffis…all about her life on the celebrity D-list. Apparently she wants pity as she struggles to move up from the Hollywood D list to a higher echelon in the La-La Land pecking order. It seems like a tough sell to me. Her ‘travail du jour’ or 'nuit' last night was that she was trying to re-decorate her house and only had a $100,000 budget. Poor thing, I felt her pain!

All that being said, the show was mildly entertaining and that leads me to the point of this blather. I have discovered a way to fame and fortune and because I am the Prince that I am I’m going to share it with you. All you need is a stupid idea for a reality TV show. The show I saw last night was on the Bravo channel and apparently they will buy anything.

Bravo re-runs West Wing episodes almost every night. The neo-cons hate it because it depicts a liberal Democratic administration, reason enough to like the show in my opinion. Politics notwithstanding though,West Wing is,in my opinion, one of the best written, best produced and best acted shows in the history of television. The Bravo network, being the paragons of taste that they are will pre-empt re-runs of good material in favor of absolute reality drivel.

This poor comedian’s tale of woe that pre-empted West Wing last night was a TV highpoint though compared to another of Bravo’s monumental television creations, “Pet Show Moms and Dads”, the saga of a whole raft of obsessed neurotic dog owners in search of vicarious recognition through chasing their dream of having a champion poodle, Yorkshire terrier, or some other of the 161 breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club. (Hey, before you scoff, I went and actually counted them!) I never watched the show but the previews told the story. If you have seen Christopher Guest’s gem of a movie, “Best In Show” my guess is that you have seen all the crap from “Show Dog Moms & Dads” that a body could possibly stand.

Anyway ladies and gentlemen, there’s your formula for fame and fortune…find a mindless, stupid idea for a reality show and certainly one of the hundreds of cable channels will find a way to slide it in between info-mercials. You’ll be on your way….that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 6

It's about 70 miles from the Long Beach airport to Murietta, California, home base to the "Little Frog", "Duck Boy" and "She Who Must Be Obeyed" as the L.F. refers to her. As you know by now the "Little Frog" is Alain, my old friend from Fredericksburg. Alain was born in France emigrating to this country when he was 10 years old. He is the sort of person that if his mother had not been ready to come to America, Alain would have come on his own. Ten years in France, another ten years in a French fluent home combined with several years in the Air Force left Alain fluent in French, English and "in a language the clergy do not know."

"Duck Boy" is his 8 year old son, Daniel. It should be self evident how Alain got his nickname but "Duck Boy" is another story, one which I shall inflict upon you in due course. Suffice it to say that Daniel has the same ready smile and devilment in his eye that his father has and they are quite a duo.

"She Who Must Be Obeyed" is Alain's wife, Jeanette, a delightful lady in every respect. I only met Jeanette for a very few minutes during my visit since she was in the hospital recovering from a fairly scary health episode. Knowing Alain as I do I must conclude that "She" is a person of remarkable equanimity. On the other hand I would not want to be the medical provider who told her that she was not yet ready to be released from the hospital when she felt it was time to go. I should note as well that in spite of her health issues, she greeted me as if we had known each other for years. Alain has a way of finding people like that and I think people like that have a way of finding Alain.

After 90 minutes in my very small cobalt blue rented Mitsubishi Something LE (AKA 'my foster car')on California highways, I finally pulled into Alain's driveway, convinced that perhaps there was something worse than flying. At last I was out of the plane and off the road…laissez les bon temps roullez, I had cheated death yet again.

One of the nice things about the 21st Century is that men can hug without feeling totally self conscious. Of course the hug is always punctuated with a hearty rib cracking back slap…just in case anyone is watching. It's best if the back slap is audible as well…just to be sure the hugger and the huggee don't get mistaken for stunt doubles from some show on the Bravo channel.

That's the way Alain and I greeted each other in his driveway that hot southern California afternoon…a fitting punctuation to our nearly 20 year long separation. The hug began two days of random wanderings down Memory Lane…I would not meet Duck Boy until later but damn, it was good to see the Little Frog again.

Gardens of Stone

"Gardens of Stone" was Nicholas Proffit’s image of Arlington National Cemetery in his 1983 novel of the same name. In the late July heat, tourists with blank faces just like me snapped picture after digital picture of the Eternal Flame at the Kennedy grave site before they trudged uphill to the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier in this garden of stone.

After Saturday, I wouldn’t quibble over that imagery except that it is only a single dimension of a multi-dimensional experience. The dignity and respect accorded to the men and women who are buried there is clear. Signs reminding the visitor that respectful conduct is appropriate are tastefully displayed and for the most part everyone I saw behaved accordingly. Yet there was, somehow, a cognitive disconnect from the reality behind those 260,000 graves.

One reality was the memory of that frigid November morning in 1963 when two friends and I stood curbside in Washington to witness the funeral procession of a president, a memory light years removed from the flatness of the Kennedy gravesite today, a flatness broken only by the 6 inch high pedestal of the eternal flame.

The ultimate reality though is quite different. The United States has been involved in one armed conflict after another over the 141 years since Arlington was first designated as a military cemetery by Secretary of War William Stanton. With only 260,000 graves there, we seem to have gotten very good at the craft of war.