This morning my waking dream was about a thousand foot or more tidal wave. I was on an elevated coastal plateau that seemed near Pacifica, which in truth would put it in the hundreds, not thousands, of feet of elevation. Pacifica is a smallish coastal town a couple of miles south and adjacent to San Francisco. In the flow of my dream "logic" it then seemed as the wave hit I was somewhere north of San Francisco that really was thousands of feet above sea level. I was with my blood family and we had been going through sorting out books and belongings that had age or water damage. The idea of water damage seems to have been a bit of time play- again resolvable only by dream "logic" and not the result of a coherent narrative because this seems to have been before the wave. There was a sense of only being able to preserve a handful of items before we evacuated the cabin-like place within a mountain campground where numbers of other people were as well.
I saw the first wave as we were in the middle of this process of talking about and then gathering books and other things we were trying to decide the worth of preserving for the future. As I looked west I felt the instant stab of dread as I saw that the wave was a virtual water wall that appeared to tower over the elevated area we were in by hundreds of feet. As it hit the base of the mountainous plateau we were on we dropped what we were doing and ran as quickly as we could.
The wave roared up the mountain, crashed into the edge of the camp and swamped it. It seemed clear some people didn't make it and most of the structures of the camp were destroyed but that my family and many others remained running as the wave, somehow, failed to completely submerge us as had seemed inevitable at first sight .
We scrambled inland to a higher incline of some hundred yards or so which then flattened out and led to lower elevations sloping away from the mountain area. But there were three or four more monstrous waves, each as big or seemingly bigger than the first but the flooding seemed only a kind of spill over which, miraculously, didn't flow over the land to then flood the lower elevations on the inland side of the mountain area where most of us had made it to since the first wave.
There had been a small child- maybe eight years old- who'd lept to the lower elevations out of a combination of panic and a loss of balance. That child landed flat and compressed by the shock of the fall, obviously dead on impact. There was also my own Mom- who, in my real life died last year- but who, in this dreamscape, also fell off one of the edges of the summit area but landed somehow unharmed on a pad of land within the lower elevation of the inland side of our mountain peak area.
As we reacted to our wet reprieve from that last wave and were anticipating the next one which might be the one with no forgiveness I woke up.
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The last few days I've been looking at the attention-grabbing story about North Korea's threat to "nuke" the US after the US and South Korea had airborne military maneuvers over South Korean air. Certainly this apocalyptic bit of propaganda, hyperbole or hysteria might suggest some parallels with my dream.
But today I read an account of the U.S. Supreme Court's influence in keeping life-saving drugs artificially higher, by a multiple factor, in America than anywhere else in the world. That particularly odious bit of collusion is typical of the long tradition of the Supreme Court siding with the defacto "robber barons" of any age in the United States' checkered history. With the brief exceptional periods of the US's founding era and the mid-twentieth century's "liberal" Earl Warren court this particular branch of American government has been on a downhill slide toward an unholy marriage between Big Government and Big Business for most our our star-spangled lifetimes.
There are many, many times I've felt the drama of my muddied, apocalyptic dream life is more profoundly mirrored in the stark paring away of our common humanity in the shrill din and banal daylight of our allegedly "real" world.
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Young TR at Harvard
I've recently finished part one of a trilogy of books that many consider the definitive biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris' "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt".
The somewhat embarrassing part of this is the admission that a conservative Catholic (converted variety) and politically conservative dear friend of mine gave me this volume as a birthday present at least ten years ago, I think.
I've episodically waded into Morris' biographical portrait of the 26th United States President only to get through about 50-60 pages as I became discouraged with the seemingly encyclopediac minutae of the very young boyhood of TR and thereby succumbed to feeling bogged down and then moved on to more immediate projects, chores or pursuits. Fortunately I gave it "the old college try" (remember I dropped out twice, sports fans) and find I was just at the cusp of an enthralling story of one of the most unique yet somehow exemplary Americans in our 237 years as a nation.
Teddy Roosevelt was an unlikely prospect for success due to his frail childhood health and physique and he was a ripe target of ridicule at many of the key points in his life up to and still including his middle age from which he nonetheless became someone greater and transcendant than could've been imagined by those with more traditional and auspicious starts in their lives and careers.
Roosevelt was also someone who won over all but the most cynical or compromised of souls and even many of these lived to be hard-pressed not to admire him even when they disagreed with him or feared the particularly muscular genius he undeniably possessed.
His presidency was a bit over one hundred years ago yet his accomplishments and goals as a political leader and his achievement as a human soul are as relevant now as ever - perhaps even more so as the needs of business, government, the military, our shared physical environment, our societal order and democracy itself seem poised on the brink of a major shift in our collective story.
As I said- the first few chapters are a bit more of a challenge than might be preferred but they are also rather like a science-fiction movie that begins with banalities so pat you may wonder if you somehow escaped into the wrong wing of a multiplex in the first half hour only to find the plot explode into crazed landscapes of the imagination for the last gripping ninety minutes. Mr. Morris' book does sweep us along on the journey of someone whose life is the stuff of legend and maybe even more than a little envy of the kind that is also inspiration even to those of us who are well advanced upon the paths we've chosen or drifted into here in our summarizing years. After all, with any luck at all- we're never too old to be encouraged or imagine turning a new corner.
PLC has the book now and I await his response. ************************************** "Mad Men" cast
Mad about the Men.
Well, in that same manner that PLC and I stumbled onto HBO's "The Wire" after an unpromising start, we have now stumbled onto and then down into the rabbit hole of the AMC network's much lauded show about a group of men and women in the field of advertising during the early and mid 1960s, "Mad Men".
With "The Wire" PLC and I both felt turned off at the opening tone-setting scene as being almost a cliche of ghetto-ese and maybe more than a bit racist. It took a couple of years to get back to it and when we did we found it was really diffent and compelling television about today's crime and punishment from those in the throes of it to those who have to interact with it on a daily basis as the "enforcers" of social mores.
We watched "The Wire" on Netflix- clearly one of the best bargains if you are interested in catching up with what all the talk is/was about but decided you can't afford the cable price to actively participate.
I junked my dvd/streaming Netflix to go for the streaming only one and it has, after about a year, been entirely worth it. It was a difference of paying about $31.00 compared to $7.99 a month. That lower price- and the sudden arrival of Redbox's kiosks throughout the shopping parcels of our great and glorious land with $1.62 24-hour rental dvds- has probably accelerated the pace at which most of our local video stores and megastores are becoming extinct. A few months ago I tried to go to Blockbuster and then Hollywood videos only to see new non-video stores in their place. The Blockbuster outlet is now a grim-looking "Dollarstore" with butcher papered-up windows- depressing in it's own way to be sure- but, perhaps, inevitable with the advances and ubiquity of streaming technology.
But back to our prime story we also had sampled the first episode or two of "Mad Men" and while I was intrigued because of the era and my own sense of nostalgia PLC was truly turned off by what appears as the blatant sexism and misogyny of that era. Feeling that we need to do these things together- actually it's the only practical way for us given our time together- I said, as I had with "The Wire" - that we needed to give it another shot. I have one friend who I have not heard much from lately, a young man who is also an actor- who assured me that if we kept watching we would be rewarded.
It turns out he was right and we are very hooked on "Mad Men". The acting is very good- all the leads have something worthwhile to offer although Jon Hamm as "Don Draper"- the Alpha male man-in-the-middle of several other would-be Alpha males is superb as is his wife, played by January Jones, and virtually all of the main players in their office on Madison Avenue.
Robert Morse- the elfin Broadway actor who hit the big time in Broadways' actual 1960s show "How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying" plays the eccentric, Ayn Rand-loving senior partner in the show's advertising firm with John Slattery as his glib, silver-haired partner who is a WWII vet as well as a smoothie womanizer with all the best puchlines in the show. Hamm's Don Draper is their younger hot-shot ad-man who actually makes the firm go. Elisabeth Moss plays Peggy Olson who begins as a rather Agnes Gooch-type mousy secretary who blooms into something else altogether. Christina Hendricks plays red-headed Joan Holloway who rules the office beyond what she is given credit for and cuts the beautiful, statuesque image formerly referred to as "stacked" along with "bombshell". Yes I'm so old I do remember these terms as well as the advertising jingles I and many of my "boomer" peers have embedded into our collective media DNA.
We keep finding, PLC and I, that when deciding on what to watch for the evening's telly that we guiltily go to the next episode of "Mad Men" rather than any of the alternatives. We have covered about four and a half seasons of the five available currently on Netflix and will probably be caught up by the time the sixth season premieres on April 7.
As show go it's very rare that we've found ourselves getting restless- or in my case nodding off because an episode isn't up to snuff. In fact it's rarer than with just about anything I can recall in recent memory and that's high praise indeed- especially with my varied but reasonably steady red wine consumption.
So PLC and I still don't have a place to move to yet but as long as I have a job and Comcast and Netflix they'll have to pry my remote from my cold, dead fingers.
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Thanks to my Zeno's Paradox Clock I have all the time in the world and beyond even though my clock is never right - even once a day never mind twice as in the case of it's broken cousin- the Neo-Con Clock. But that's enough politics for one dollop of blogsmithing and a story for a 'nother time when you have a few infinite moments to spare.
I think you've suffered enough for one sitting.
Latah, y'all.
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