Shadow Flutter

You are being led to you own execution.   You are fixated on your impending death, and your mind is in shock as it desperately looks for a path of escape.   For the first time in your life you are forced to face your own immortality.   “This can’t be happening to me,” you say to yourself.   Your senses flip to maximum overdrive as they search for something, anything that might lead to your escape.   But w hen your senses open up everything comes at you all at once, too much, too fast, and so it happens -- your brain overloads and your mind explodes.   Suddenly everything turns surreal, everything happens in slow motion. The input comes at you slower and you can now process it, but a penalty is paid: you see it all through the fog of a numbed brain.   Everything is real and unreal at the same time.   And there is one other thing.   You are now standing outside yourself, looking down at someone marching ever so slowly to his death.   ...

A couple of years ago I really got into walking.   I never run.   Walking is easier on your knees, ankles, and feet than running, and it can be just as effective at keeping you in shape as running.   But there are people who swear by running.   “Great exercise, running.” “I run 7 miles a day and do 5 marathons a year.” “I meditate while running.” To those who say running miles each day and doing a marathon about once every two months is great exercise, I say wait until age 60 when your knees and hips have been replaced with metal and plastic.   Then l et’s see what you think of running. As to meditating while running, well I see people at the recreation center reading books while walking fast on a treadmill, so I guess there are people who can do this, but I’m not one of them.   About the only thing I’d remember from reading a book while on a moving treadmill is how out of breath I was.   And the only thing I can meditate on whil...

I was in my mid twenties living in the New York City area when I had an epiphany: “I hate this place.”   I had lived there all my life, except for a short hiatus in Rhode Island where I went to college but failed to learn anything except how to smoke dope, drink lots of beer, cut class, and play with coeds.   I was tired of the hustle and bustle that was the metropolitan area, tired of the crime and the endless traffic jams.   There is a reason why the Long Island Expressway is called the world’s largest parking lot.   I was tired of the cost of everything.   I once paid $17 to park my car in a parking garage for two hours while I interviewed for a job, and this was the 70’s.   I can only imagine what it must cost now.  Are there enough zeros? I was tired of the gruff impatience of the denizens of a city who, for some reason, felt the need to refer to their city as a fruit.   Once, while standing in line at a cafeteria, when asked what I ...

I'm laid up in bed flat on my back watching the overhead fan go round and round.  I've hurt my back. I have this disc in the lower extremities of my back, that if I don't watch carefully, sneaks out from between vertebrae and wanders off looking for something more interesting to do than keeping my spine erect. If you've ever been laid up in bed due to severe back pain, you know that you have to keep changing positions.  As you remain in one position, the pain slowly increases.  Shift to another position, the pain lessens then slowly increases again.  Of course changing position is easier said than done when one's back is out.  The simple act of shifting from lying on your back to lying on your side can be an act of great courage. The pain makes you wish you could swallow a whole bottle of oxycontin right then and there and end it.  Brush your teeth?  Nope.  Eat?  Nope?  Pea?  Get me a bottle. But it is not the pain that concerns...

I am walking down a street in a neighborhood, happy with the smells of early summer and the sounds of children playing, dogs barking, and birds chirping.  One of life’s many simple pleasures for the healthy and ambulatory.  Up ahead I see four people in conversation. There is a young man and woman of the same age attended by an elderly woman standing slightly behind and to the side of them.  They are facing a second man.  As I move closer I can tell the man and woman are having a disagreement with the other man.  Let’s suppose the young couple are the elderly woman’s grandson son and daughter-in-law, and let’s observe how they ignore her. The conversation continues until the man not related to her asks the elderly woman for her opinion.  There is a pause, and then like a bicyclist maneuvering over a gravelly and treacherous path, her words come forth tentatively and with effort, as much an indicator of her age as are the crevices and age spots etched i...

So how smart are cats? I put a body-length mirror at the top of the stairwell yesterday, and my cat, Romulus, is fascinated by it.  First time he saw it he stood starting into it; I think he realizes he's looking at himself and is fascinated by the idea of it.  Enthralled, his tail flips left and right in strong strokes of inquiry.  But what really got him going was when I walked up the stairs.  First my head appeared in the mirror, then my shoulders, then slowly the rest of my body as I reached the top stair.  Now I'm in front of him and behind him at the same time, and he freaks.  I never saw him display such frenetic energy as he displayed while trying to figure out what was going on.  How could I be behind him and in front of him at the same time?  Looks to me like he recognized both of us.  He would probably have quite a time of it if I took him to a hall of mirrors.  Imagine a cat looking at its reflection in a convex or concave ...

You can read The History of Television — Part I directly below this post. Fast forward to the 1980’s. They say cable television was invented in 1948 or 1950, but I think they are lying.  I think that Wikipedia entry in the History of Television has been put there to test us, to see if we are paying attention, to see if we are exercising our critical analysis skills, because if cable existed in the early ‘80s I never saw it.  They must have been hiding it in some lab.  But the technology had improved in many areas. We now had color TV — black and white had been consigned to the museum — Good Riddance — you could see the picture at night, there was no crackle in the audio, I almost never had to jiggle the antenna wire, and I no longer had to watch potato farming and Gumby on Sunday mornings. But entropy was conserved with the preachers.  Gone were the small town preachers, replaced by televangelists who were everywhere. In addition to being on TV all Sunday morning, t...

1950’s When I was a young shaver, we didn't have TV until my aunt gave us hers. It had a six inch screen with vacuum tubes. The electronics sat in a tray and took up more space than the cathode ray tube. (Which is saying something given the size of cathode ray tubes at the time, even one with a six inch screen).  You'd turn it on and wait and wait and wait while the vacuum tubes “warmed up,” what ever that means. If today's standards applied then, you would be on the phone with the cable company before the picture displayed.  The TV sat inside this massive piece of furniture that looked a lot like a cabinet but was wider than it was tall, yet stood as tall as I did, an eight-year-old boy. The thing weighed a ton and took 4 guys to carry into the house.  I’m convinced with the slightest assistance it would have plowed through the floors to the basement. The six-inch screen looked ridiculous overwhelmed as it was by the size of the cabinet.  All that for this...

Liquid Assets in the state of Georgia Bonds Stocks CDs Guns No, this isn’t one of those SAT or IQ test questions where you are asked to pick the one that doesn’t belong.  A gun is actually a liquid asset in Georgia.  This would be a SAT or IQ test question in the state of Georgia.  Bonds Stocks CDs Cars Cars are definitely not a liquid asset in Georgia. Let me explain. When my brother and I sold our parent’s home in Georgia, we had to do two things before turning the house over to the buyer: get rid of the car in the garage and the guns in the house.  So my brother and I made the 650 mile drive down the freeway, me driving and both of us eating potato chips and Rancho flavored Doritos. In the garage sat my dad’s 1989 Buick Electra, a total of 32,000 miles on it.  My dad getting on in years, and never a good driver , parked it there 10 years ago where it sat till this day.  It had sat there for so long, it had...