shining through

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two months into the new job, and god knows it couldn't be easier.

every afternoon i leave my house with a mere twelve minutes to spare, slip-slide my way into century city in virtual solitude past the congested rush-hour mob headed the other way, pull into the garage of my building, take my pick of prime spaces, ride the empty elevator up to the plaza--the doorman always rushes to meet me me since i'm his only incoming at that late hour.

another empty elevator up to the 21st floor, i wave at the receptionist [whatever the fuck her name is--she always smiles back because she'll be leaving soon], head for my suite, drop my shit, start my day.

first thing, i review the day's email, most of it from people who have worked there for 20 years [and, since they all leave before i arrive, i'll never meet].

the work, if it comes at all, usually comes via email; when it's done, i traverse endless lavish, deserted corridors to deliver the finished product to dark, empty offices.

eight hours later when it's time to go home, century park east and santa monica boulevard are ghost towns, and i glide easily through the empty streets of beverly hills all the way home, making every light.

easy-peasy, right?

so tell me--why do i wanna fuckin' strangle somebody?

because perspective is everything

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I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side. . . Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

klan member and future liberal icon robert byrd

in 1945 on the integration of the armed services

and since the phony charge of "racist" is tossed about with such facile, promiscuous abandon by the left these days, i thought it might be instructive to use the occasion of the good senator's passing to remind everyone of what the real thing looks like.

a summer story

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there's this story my mother loves to tell about the summer i played little-league, and she tells it well--great wind-up, pitch-perfect delivery, dramatic pauses in all the right places--and by the time she's done, she always has her audience in stitches.


i always go along with it, smiling good-naturedly and making self-deprecating noises--but the truth is, she might as well be talking about somebody else, because i have no more recollection of the incident that is the subject of this post than of the day i was born.


how, you ask, could i have so thoroughly excised from my consciousness a memory which will apparently live on in my mother's steel-trap mind unto the end of time?


oh, i dunno--you tell me.

*     *     *     *     *

our team was called the stars, and it was but one of many in a neighborhood full of sons and fathers [and don't even get me started on the mothers] who were batshit-crazy about baseball.

and every kid on birdwood road--all my friends--signed up for the team, so what the fuck was i supposed to do?  and besides, mr. harberger next door and mr. ramsey across the street were gonna coach us, and the uniforms were cool--and what the hell, it'd make my dad proud.

i shoulda been a natural, coming as i did from a family of athletes--my father had played baseball in college, his brother had been a college and pro quarterback, their young cousin alvin was a high-school football star who'd go on to quarterback at baylor--hell, my family was lousy with outstanding athletes, and as the firstborn of the latest generation (and literally from the moment i was born),

expectations for me ran high.

sadly, by the time young mike signed up for his season with the stars, it was pretty clear to everybody that he was hopeless at sports.

and it wasn't merely that i was clumsy and uncoordinated; bigger problem was, i found the whole athlete thing really tedious and boring.

and more than a little scary.  i remember that first week of batting practice i'd step up to the plate, those balls would come whizzing past me--way too fast and way too close--and i'd freeze.

[i remember i kept waiting for mr. harberger or mr. ramsey (or maybe even my father) to notice, take me aside and coach me through my fear, but that shit only happens in movies.]

whatever; by the second week of the season, i'd been relegated to last at-bat when we were up, and center field [because no nine-year-old ever hit out that far] when we weren't.  this arrangement would work well--until the last and most important game of the summer, anyway.

and it's at this point in the story where my mother's memory takes over.

to hear her tell it, everybody's there that day--not only the usual moms in their lawn chairs, but most of the dads have taken off work because it's the championship or some such shit.  and it's gonna be close--the teams are pretty evenly matched, so tensions are running high.

and the game lives up to its promise:  inning after inning, the teams match each other run for run, until

in the bottom of the final inning the stars are one run up, the other team's at bat, they've got two outs and one man on, this big, fat kid steps up to the plate--and on the second pitch, he absolutely and unbelievably creams one straight out to center field.

center field--young mike's chance to shine at last.

as the ball cracks off the fat kid's bat and arcs majestically upward, every eye turns to its inevitable destination--and suddenly every mother, father, sister and brother from birdwood road are on their feet, screaming

mike, mike, MIKE, MIKE!!!


i'd love to tell you, gentle readers, that young mike caught that goddam ball; hell, i'd happily settle for telling you he gave it his all and missed.

but the sad truth is, apparently young mike was far more interested in a high-flying jet passing overhead than anything that was happening around him.

yeah, that's right--in the midst of all the excitement, i apparently stood there dumbly gawking up at the sky, oblivious of the screams from the crowd--much less the game-winning losing ball which bounced harmlessly to earth within ten feet of my limp, useless glove and rolled away.

stevie or davy or somebody--i dunno who--ran out, snagged the ball and threw it in, but of course by then it was too late--the game was over, and the stars had lost.

and since back in those halcyon days little league wasn't the blood sport it is today, young mike was allowed to live.

[sorry if the dénouement of this story was a little flat--trust me, my mother's version is much funnier.]

*     *     *     *     *

flash-forward several years:  i'm bigger, stronger and angrier, and i've got a bat in my hands for the first time in years.

it's only high-school P.E. softball, so the balls are big, underhand and slow.  doesn't matter--i've got something to prove, even if it's only to myself.

i wait for the right pitch, and when it comes, i swing with all my might and connect with a solid, satisfying thwack--a double, easy.  all of a sudden, i understand that feeling i missed out on way back when.

by the time i round second, i'm grinning in triumph--it's only then that i look around and realize i'm all alone out there; everybody else is running toward home for some reason.

i trot back to find out why, push my way through the crowd and see the catcher rolling around on the ground in agony, clutching his knees--turns out instead of dropping the bat after creaming that ball out to center field, in my excitement i'd slung it backwards instead.

*     *     *     *     *

to grant knight [i couldn't name five people i went to high school with today if you held a gun to my head, but i'll never forget him]:  if it's any consolation, (a) i'm still sorry, and (b) i haven't gone near a baseball diamond since.

and to the guy at work who couldn't shut up about his son's little-league team the other day and asked me if i'd ever played:  thanks, asshole, for dredging up this post.

here's what's really happening in arizona

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[because god knows you're not hearing it in the mainstream media]

as the obama administration prepares to file suit against the state of arizona for its racist new law--all the while assuring the credulous media that the southern border has never been safer--the US bureau of land management is quietly hammering up hundreds of signs just like this one all across a wide swath of said state,

effectively ceding a good portion of arizona from the border north to the outskirts of phoenix to the mexican human smugglers and drug cartels.

as pinal county sheriff paul babeu simply put it in a recent (and mostly ignored) press conference, describing the increasingly-sophisticated weaponry and military tactics employed by the enemy,

"we do not have control of this area."

do you get it, gentle readers--does it fully penetrate?  if not, lemme spell it out for you:

while the US government through its DEA pursues, imprisons and confiscates the property of millions of  small-time drug-dealing and -using US citizens with ruthless impunity, it stands back and allows the foreign suppliers of said drugs carte blanche access to our country--hell, even clears a corridor for 'em.

and when the state in which said corridor happens to lie is overwhelmed by the resulting drug-dealing, kidnappings, carjackings, murders and fiscal drain and, after years of being ignored by the federal government finally takes measures to protect itself, it is then attacked by the very federal government which is charged with its preservation, protection and defense.

and why?  all because the democrats figure a little mayhem in arizona is a small price to pay in order to keep their existing hispanic voters happy, and maybe even legalize several million new ones.

don't believe me?  here's the obama administration's latest approach to dealing with the situation.

and if after clicking on the above link you're not convinced that the answer to our border problem lies in making illegal-alien detention centers more like club med resorts, then all i can say is

you racist bastard.

*     *     *     *     *

for the record:


the last time i discussed this topic, i made the following statement as regards arizona's now-infamous SB 1070:

they've suddenly made fully a third of their legal citizens brown-skinned targets for police-state excess, and i can't imagine anything more un-american than that.

since i wrote that post, two things happened:


1.  the arizona legislature clarified the language of the bill to ensure that (a) cops couldn't just arbitrarily pull people over and ask for proof of citizenship or legal visitation--such request could only occur during "lawful contact," defined thereafter as a "lawful stop, detention or arrest;" and (b) race could not be considered as a factor in determining proof of citizenship.


2.  i actually read the bill and did my homework--turns out arizona is doing nothing more than adopting as state law an existing federal law which was signed in 1996 by well-known right-wing racist bill clinton.


in other words, i've done a total 180--you go, arizona.

points to the heathen chinese

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as you check out these images, i want you to consider for a moment how many overeducated and overpaid western designers would happily give the fees from their next ten commissions to be able to achieve even a tenth of the harmonious marriage of form and function accomplished by a bunch of illiterate yunnan peasants who still plow their ancient terraced fields with oxen.

thank you, grubby humanity, for still occasionally managing to snatch my jaded breath away.

pavlov's cat

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lest i forget, change is hard on everyone in the household.

we had our routine down, maggie and i.  for the longest time i'd roll outta bed at 11:15 or so, fill her bowls with food and water, shower, throw on some clothes and, as the last thing before leaving for work--and to her eternal displeasure--put her and her bowls outside.

as i set the bowls down, i'd reach over to give her a goodbye pat and she'd recoil, hissing--a knife through my heart, but only briefly, because i knew that by the time i got home that night, all would be (mostly) forgiven.

same routine like clockwork, every day for years.

flash-forward to now:  new job starts at 5, but i still roll outta bed by 11:15 most days.  and like always, first thing i do is fill maggie's bowls with food and water.

a few days into our new routine, i realize she's not eating--when i put her bowls outside at 4:45 prior to leaving for work, they're still mostly full, and i don't understand this.

until, a week or so later, i get it.

the next day, i roll outta bed at 11:15 or so, fill her bowls, pick 'em up and head for the door--damn cat precedes me, hissing happily all the way.  an hour or so after angrily dining al fresco, she's back in for a purr and a rub.

it's true--pets really are as fucked-up as their owners.

a racist post

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anybody old enough to remember emily litella?

one of gilda radner's best characters, she'd show up on saturday night live's "weekend update" from time to time, dimly and indignantly railing at great length about some issue or other, until her complete cluelessness [in this case, mishearing "violins on television" for "violence on television"] was pointed out to her by the anchor, at which point, she'd . . .

well, watch for yourself.




it was a great bit, made even more so by the sheer ridiculousness of its premise.  i mean, seriously--as if the half-baked views of a loon like that would ever air on a legitimate news program, right?

right?

fast-forward 34 years:  the other day i'm getting ready for work with the local LA news on in the background, a story they'd been teasing for an hour about a racist hallmark card finally comes up, and i sit down to watch:





bottom line for those of you who are click-shy: some idiot of color who'd apparently never heard of astronomy somehow got hold of a talking hallmark "happy graduation" card, pressed "play" and did an emily litella.  he/she then ran straight to the LA chapter of the NAACP screaming "racism;" said organization immediately saw an opportunity and ran straight for the cameras.

when hallmark, who had been successfully selling this astronomy-based card for the past three years, frantically tried to reassure the NAACP that the "black ho's" they thought they heard was actually "black holes"--and even sent them the script to prove it--you'd think that'd be the end of it and the NAACP would abashedly say "never mind," right?

yeah, right.

emboldened by past experience of success, the NAACP instead doubles down--now they insist they hear an "r" in there--the cartoon character is clearly saying "black whores."

and this is where we enter never-neverland, and mkf starts screaming and throwing shit at the tv.

because, once again, the instant some ignorant ethnic organization charges "racism," the news outlets rush out with their cameras and the corporate object of said charge automatically drops to its knees and begs forgiveness.

[i.e., even though there was no reason to do so, hallmark pulled its card--and the NAACP, thus further emboldened, admonished, "make sure this never happens again."]

*     *     *     *     *

i have no doubt that every time the al sharptons, jesse jacksons and NAACPs of the world up the ante on dumbass shit like this, even they are astonished at the payoff they manage to extract from the guilty white world in return.

and--funniest thing--with every such victory, they become more strident and aggrieved.

*     *     *     *     *

so tell me, who's worse--(1) the idiots at the NAACP who think shit like this actually advances the interests of people of color in america; (2) the idiots at KABC who treated this lunacy as a legitimate news story; or (3) the craven corporation that knuckled under, thus ensuring more of this shit in the future?

i honestly dunno, but one of these days some establishment organization who's finally had enough is gonna summon the cojones to stand up to one of these cretinous race-baiting grifters and very publicly tell 'em to fuck off--and find, to its surprise, that most of taxpaying america instantly rallies behind it.

then, and only then, will the tide turn.

me?  my lily-white faggot ass lives for that day.