Random Notes from a Crank

One of the few positives of the Covid-19 and the stay-at-home orders is this: Catholic priests won't be able to sexually abuse kids. It's darkly humorous, but it's true. 

Speaking of religion, while I'm an agnostic, the Nasty family will celebrate Easter by roasting a turkey, making mashed potatoes, and all that jazz. I bought a frozen lemon meringue pie from Aldi for dessert. 

The recent storm the came through these parts blew down all kinds of dead limbs, which has replenished my stock of kindling for fires. 

The house across the street from us is a rental home. The family that currently occupies it has a mini-van, a Porshe SUV, a Corvette, and the Dad drives a Harley. They have all this, and they can't buy a house? Priorities I guess...

Random Notes from a Crank

This Thanksgiving was the first one for me without both my mom and dad. Back when they still lived in their house, they'd always have the same argument. My mom would want my father to cut the turkey right away, and my dad, being a man who knows many things about meat, would always blow her off and say, "The meat has to rest." My mom would stomp off angrily, and after a short while Virg would mosey into the kitchen to cut the bird. 

I've tried and tried, but I just can't seem to like green bean casserole. I like green beans, but the casserole is just so damn bland. There has to be a way to make this concoction better. 

Over the past couple of weeks, I've bought some turkeys cheap from our local grocery store. If one uses the market's "max card," the turkey is $ .39 a pound. I got a couple of turkeys for later use. 

Instead of eating them at the holidays, people need to eat turkey all year round. You read that turkey industry, I"m trying to promote your birds for the whole year? Why don't you throw some sponsorship money my way? Write the check to "cash." 

I read an article in Utne about philosophical therapy, but it originally appeared in the UC Observer. In "Move Over, Freud," the author talks about a trend in therapy in which folks with a strong background in philosophy help others work through important questions and quandaries in life. 

The practice makes a lot of sense to me because I have gotten much more out of reading philosophical works than studying psychology, especially Fred, who has now become an intellectual anachronism in psychology, a guy often used by scholars in the humanities to support lame-ass analyses of this or that. 

Here are some stats from the the November and December versions of "Harper's Index":

• Estimated number of voters purged from Georgia's voter rolls from 2008 to 2012: 750,000
• From 2012 to 2016:  1,500,000
• Percentage change from 2000 to 2017 in US consumer spending on music: +25
• Percentage of music-industry revenue that is received by musicians: 12
• Percentage of US teenagers who "often" find their parents distracted by their phones during conversations: 14
• Who "sometimes" do: 37
• Number of counties in which no local newspaper is available: 176
• In which only one is available: 1,449
• Estimated number of US newspaper jobs lost since the year 2000: 241,000
• Amount of FEMA funding that has been transferred to ICE this year: $9,800,000
• Minimum number of US cities that have announced plans to establish supervised drug consumption sites: 5
• Estimated minimum number of cities that have such sites worldwide: 100
• Number of people who have ever died of an overdose at one of those sites: 0
• Percentage of interviews with professional baseball players that feature a variation of the phrase "one game at a time": 7
• That feature a variation of "a heck of a game": 50

From the stats above, the one that disturbs me most is the purging of the voter rolls in Georgia, which stole the election for Kemp along with minor mismatches between signatures such as Quin Nasty and Quintilian Nasty. 

The lack of local newspapers is also a problem because the fifth estate even in those small towns keep on eye on what's going on locally whether it's the local city council or local sports. 

Bunny Colvin's idea of "Hamsterdam" in whatever season of The Wire that was was right. Supervised sites makes sense. 

I know Andrew Luck is having an outstanding, comeback season this year so far, but I'll offer him a bit of advice for the hirsute among us. He needs to shore up his beard game. I get that he wants to grow a beard. I've grown one since my dad's funeral. However, Luck needs to shave his neck to make his beard look more presentable, more kept. Step up your beard game, Luck.

[Belated] Music Friday: "Snow and Lights"

It's that time of the year when I watch TV in my living room with all the lights out except for the lights I have around a dead pine tree in our house. 

No real decent snowfall yet, but we got lights. 

Lack of New Year Traditions

Yesterday Daiva Markelis on her blog The Adventures of Mighty Bear Woman provided a post about a past tradition for New Year's Eve when, as part of the title, says, "...I was old enough to stay up late but not old enough to get drunk."

I got to thinking about my own lack of traditions associated with New Year's Eve. While I've been known on occasion to howl at the moon (metaphorically speaking), I don't really care for New Year's Eve much. After close to forty years on this earth, only one New Year's Eve celebration really stands out, and that was a big blow-out for the millennial New Year's Eve at "Chuck's Place" in O'Fallon, Missouri. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to midnight that night. But for the most part I turn a jaundiced eye toward the holiday since it is a hollow one for me.

As my dad told me when I was younger, "Life is a struggle." And Virg knows something about that since he grew up on a farm in rural northeastern Missouri during the Great Depression. Since life is a struggle even though some English professors will try to sell you on the "life is a journey" metaphor provided by The Odyssey, New Year's Eve is just like any other day: another day closer to death.

When I think about my own family's traditions around the holiday, well, we didn't have any that I can remember. Back when I was old enough to stay up late but not old enough to get sloshed, I think I probably just brainlessly watched the New Year's celebration TV shows with my parents as my Dad read the Waterloo Courier.

When I was really young, my dad worked as a meat cutter for National Tea and then got laid off. He then sold insurance for a few years, thankfully got a small business loan to open up his own small grocery on the East side of Waterloo, and once he "retired" from the grocery business, he got bored and started a liquor store near the grocery store he sold to my brother.

I worked at both the grocery store and the liquor store. And December 31st was always a day when we were wonderfully slammed with business. Hours flew by because you were busy. The date is a gold rush for liquor stores as you can imagine. By the time I got off work at 10 or 11 on those New Year's Eves during high school and later when I worked over breaks during college, I was tired and tired of drunks.

But as we said in both stores, New Year's Eve is "amateur night." Rather than serving our regular customers who wanted half-pints, fifths, or Texas fifths (1.75 liters) of "bumpy face" (Seagram's gin), "Mad Dog" (Mogan David 20/20), "Erk & Jerk" (E&J brandy), and all manner of hard liquor, we trucked more in various cheap champagnes and spumante. Andre champagne or Cold Duck (one of my favorite names for a libation) for $5, people. And for whatever reason liquers sold well then but more so around Xmas. Nothing says booze like the holidays. You can even get your beloveds gift sets of booze with glasses and whatnot: liquor as gift ~ a gift that gives and gives.

I also dislike how New Year's spawns resolutions, but maybe that's just because, like most people, I rarely keep them. I've had better luck setting goals and working toward those goals irrelevant of the time of the year.

So why do I still lurch toward making New Year's resolutions though? Damn you socialization.

Lately, I've been drawn to something I read about in Brian Haycock's Dharma Road. As the author details in Chapter 18 "Thank You, Thank You," "Most of us have much more than the bare necessities. A Mahayana Buddhist practice is to make a list of everything we are given in the course of a day--not cab fares, but the small blessings that come our way. A tasty snack. A song on the radio. A water cooler with really cold water. They add up. If we keep a list, we can look back at the end of the day and realize just how lucky we are. And we can be thankful for that."

"Much of Zen practice is just to develop an appreciation for everyday life. Whether it's a glorious sunrise over the green hills of Texas or a frantic street scene anywhere in the world, we should take it all in and see the beauty behind it. And we can appreciate that and give thanks for it. Wherever we are, we're lucky to be there. We're lucky just to be." (120-1).

As he details in the paragraph after those two, "[t]he hard times are valuable as well" since "[w]e can be grateful for the trials we face, the obstacles we have to overcome" (121).

Okay, I admit it. I almost made a resolution to do exactly what he details above: listing the everyday blessings or positive negatives that happened in my day. But I didn't. I'm mulling it over. For a short while a few years ago, I was writing a daily tanka, which was usually fun and interesting but sometimes it just turned into work. And I got enough work. I got enough.

I may just do the list like I do my tankas, when I feel like it. But I'm drawn to the discipline of a daily practice.

For example, for today I could note how Hannah, who starts back at first grade tomorrow, held my hand as we went to and from the mall today. And I could also record how my first attempt at making Swedish meatballs didn't go so well. They came out more as Swedish meatblobs. I failed to remember a lesson I've learned before: adhere strictly to the recipe on your first try making a dish. And Mrs. Nasty joked with me about whether I'd write about that dish.

Well, there you go. I did. Duly noted.

Mistletoe

A while ago on a Facebook status update by Jason Isbell, he made a ribald crack about accessorizing with mistletoe. When I read his post then, maybe a week ago, I thought, "What's the deal with mistletoe anyway? Why mistletoe and kissing?"

Since I was lazy at that moment, I didn't follow up on my questions.

As I was surfing the InterWeb tonight, I came across a short article on Slate about the origin of using mistletoe during the holiday season. While I found the quotation from Dickens' Pickwick Papers to be creepy, the article relates some of the history behind the plant and its connection to the holidays.

In sum, blame the Celtic Druids and the Greeks and especially the concept of the "kissing ball" from 18th century Britain.

You can click HERE to read the article from Slate. But a more detailed explanation about the plant's significance is available by clicking HERE to read a Web article with a title that is poorly (not) punctuated: "Mistletoe its history, meaning and traditions." The latter concisely details the kissing ball and gives more info about the Druids.

Thou Shalt Call Me Minister

After my niece's wedding, I was inspired. The officiant of her wedding, which I missed unfortunately because my car's alternator blew near Galesburg on our way to Waterloo, was able to marry them without going to a seminary. He got his license to be an officiant at the wedding from some online "seminary."

I checked this out, folks, because I too would like to have the ability to marry people, etc.

As of yesterday, I am now an officially ordained Minister under the auspices of Universal Life Church, a church that only has two tenets, principles that I can wholeheartedly get behind: "To promote the freedom of religion" and "To do that which is right."

While I'm not interested in creating a church of my own, which is my right, and I'm not interested, as my certificate relates, to "[a]bsolve others of their sins," and I'm not interested in providing a baptism, performing a marriage would be a suitable task. Also, officiating a funeral, ceremonial rites (renewing vows, etc.), or last rites are options, but I'm not intrigued in those unless someone would really want me to do them for them.

I know what some of you are thinking, that I'm making fun of religion by doing this.

I'm not.

In fact, as much as I've given religious folks good-natured trouble over the years by questioning some of their beliefs, I do believe in the freedom of religion and the freedom to not have to have a religion or belong to a certain denomination or religious worldview. Heck, I'm a guy who subscribes to Shambhala Sun, a Buddhist monthly publication; I have studied religions that are dead, old, and alive; and I've always been interested in different religious/mythological worldviews and perspectives since I was a kid.

One of my favorite courses as an undergrad was Mythology where we studied, in essence, religions of the past and present, and the research and reading I've done in mythological/religious studies broadened my perspective substantially to the extent that I would consider myself leaning toward not being fully agnostic but spiritually inclined because at one time in my life I thought about becoming a minister (for real). I guess if I had to define myself, I'm a spiritual, partial agnostic.

And I'm much more open to others' religious beliefs than most Christians or atheists I've met. So there. I also feel that people should have the right to perform ceremonies as the ones above if the parties involved are okay with it.

So here I am, ordained if you need me.