The Names

There are so many names to remember now. Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. Philando Castile. Sandra Bland. Freddie Gray. Botham Jean. Atatiana Jefferson. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd.

They’re all black people killed by police officers, or by yahoos who think they’re police, and in many cases, the perpetrators got off the hook. There are so many names that it’s easy to forget people. It’s easy for their stories to blur together. The list goes back much, much further in time than the names above. There will be more names in the future. There are always more names.

Last week, a white police officer knelt down on George Floyd’s neck and crushed his windpipe. Officer Derek Chauvin stuck a hand casually in his pocket while George Floyd cried out that he couldn’t breathe, cried for his mother, cried for mercy. The officers made jokes about this while the crowd begged them to stop. (Who do you call to report this when it’s the police doing it?)

These officers were fired immediately and should be arrested and charged with George Floyd’s death. They’re under investigation and hopefully that’s just for the FBI to get its ducks in a row before making arrests. It should be a short investigation because the facts are all right there on that profoundly horrifying video. These officers should no longer find work in any police department. Several of them have had discipline problems in the past. Most police officers are good people but these Minneapolis officers do not deserve to wear a badge among any of them.

This is why people march and say “Black Lives Matter”: Because some people need a reminder. Officer Chauvin apparently needed a reminder that George Floyd’s life mattered more than an alleged fake $20 passed at a deli. What a sick fucking joke.

I don’t have the answers to how to solve all this but empathy would help. I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to walk in the shoes of a non-white person but I try to have empathy. Black people must look at these people dying while going for a run or driving or doing whatever and see themselves or their children. Our son has to watch this shit on the news and God knows what goes through his head. That scares the hell out of me.

You can condemn the civil unrest in Minneapolis but a vandalized Target does not change the fact that that police officer knelt on George Floyd’s windpipe for nine minutes and ignored his cries for mercy. It does not change the fact that we have a major problem in America, and it just keeps happening.

More people need to speak out when people like George Floyd die senselessly, and it can’t just be black people speaking out. We can’t use the unrest as an excuse to dismiss the major problems behind the protests. Unfortunately, there are some people who wouldn’t give a shit about somebody like George Floyd anyway and with the unrest, they now have a convenient excuse not to give a shit. There are some people who will go apoplectic at the sight of a TV looted from Target but shrug when a guy dies with his head on the blacktop over a fake $20. There are some people who went volcanic with anger over Colin Kaepernick kneeling to protest police brutality but have no response when a man dies after a police officer kneels on his windpipe.

I don’t have any answers here, or much power, but speaking out when our fellow American citizens are killed in the street is something I can do.

I'm just trying to read my book.

I don’t want to bake any sourdough bread. I don’t want to bake anything or learn a new recipe. What I’ve been cooking is fine. It fills me, leaves me as warm between the ribs as it ever did.

I don’t want to be mollycoddled by the anesthetic tones of the piano in the background of the sales pitch. Don’t tell me you’re “in the people business” when you’re just trying to move a Lexus. I don’t want any inspiration. I have sources I already turn to for that, but thanks anyway.

I don’t want to choreograph a tapdance in our kitchen and send the video into Action News for everyone to see. I get enough of a tapdance trying to get my work done, to push another magazine out the door, while pushing our son to stay on target and extract the last few juices from this virus-truncated school year.

I don’t want a new hobby. I am lucky enough to have built a pillow fort of books and records and DVDs, lucky enough to have a backyard to escape to when my restlessness threatens to break the four walls of Zoom.

Just let me read my book. Let me sink deeper page by page into another world with troubles that I blessedly do not have over my head, and hopes that unfortunately are not mine to share.

Let me read, and let me keep not producing any great American novels, anything worthy enough even to bow and scrape and approach the greatness of the prose that I devour. After all, why should some little plague break the habits started 30 years ago?

Pandemic Pedantry

A pandemic is the perfect time for me to be a pedant about grammar and style.

There is one very common error that bothers me, and it has to do with when people start by describing themselves with “As a person who …” and then offer an opinion. For example, this sentence is wrong: “As a mega-fan of Sheena Easton, ‘Sugar Walls’ is vastly superior to ‘Morning Train (9 to 5).’”

One reason (among many) that this declaration is wrong is that if you start by saying something like “As a,” a pronoun (or other noun as the subject of the sentence) has to follow. In the example above, “Sugar Walls” is the subject when it should be “I.” It would be correct to say, “As a mega-fan of Sheena Easton, I think ‘Sugar Walls’ is vastly superior to ‘Morning Train (9 to 5).’” You are the subject of the sentence. Everybody makes this mistake.

Another thing that bothers me is the use of the word “healthful.” It may be an accepted word but we don’t need it. What was wrong with “healthy”? Just say that. “Healthful” just sounds made up and incorrect. It’s like how people say “historical” when they could just say “historic.” The former may be correct but it sounds like someone just got the latter word wrong once and it caught on with everyone.

Don’t get me started on “ironical.”

I think “nor” should really only follow “neither.” It just sounds weird to me to say “I do not like lutefisk nor electroshock therapy.” It would be more correct to say “I like neither lutefisk nor electroshock therapy.”

“Woman” is singular. “Women” is plural. A lot of people seem to get this wrong, but nobody confuses “man” with “men.”

One more thing: Watch the use of a comma before the word “who.” If you write “Cremated parents, whose ashes have been snorted by Keith Richards, deserved better,” that implies that all cremated parents’ ashes have been snorted by Keith. Delete both commas if you want to say that he has only snorted the ashes of certain parents.

That’s enough for today. Dismissed.  

Gray

My hair has long since reached the point where it’s much more gray than not. I noticed this more during the isolation, since I went a long time between haircuts. The gray is also more noticeable when there’s no gel in my hair.

I’m realizing in recent years that if I had to write down my hair color on an official form or whatever, I can no longer honestly say “black.” Now it’s “gray.” If I had to describe myself to someone I’m about to meet in public for the first time, I’d have to say, “Look for the guy with the gray hair.”

So I’m going gray—correction: I’ve gone gray—and it doesn’t really bother me. That’s probably because I started finding gray hair at about age 16, so I was still a young person when this started, and therefore I don’t necessarily associate gray with age. The advantage to going gray young is that you’re less mortified than when you find gray hair in your 30s and 40s.

I remember a commercial that showed a woman, who had to be only in her 30s, who was counting individual gray hairs. When she got to the 40^th gray hair, she gasped. Forty gray hairs! This was years ago and even then I remember thinking, “Counting individual gray hairs on my head would be like counting grains of sand on the beach in Wildwood.” I just laugh when people in their 30s find gray hair for the first time—not laugh at them but laugh that I reached that milestone 30 years ago. I roll my eyes when celebrities stop dyeing their gray and people call them brave. Where’s my Gray Heart medal for bravery?

I have no interest in dyeing my hair. I did once for a show I was in and the process was deeply annoying and it didn’t look good. Every time I walked in a room, people noticed immediately. It would be even worse now. Can you imagine how ridiculous I’d look if I showed up with black hair? That ship sailed long ago.

I don’t think people look bad or old with gray hair. The increasing gray is just something to remark upon when I see more and more of it falling on my apron when I get a haircut. I’m fine with this. I mean, what do you want at 46?

Oh, he knows what he did

A poem

By a man who wants you to ask CHINA

Uh ... Obamagate!

It's been going on for a long time!

It's been going on

from before I even got

elected,

and it's a disgrace that it

happened,

and if you look at what's gone on

and if you look at now,

all of this information that's being

released,

and from what I understand,

that's

only

the

beginning.

Some terrible things happened,

and it should never be

allowed to happen

in our country

again.

And you'll be seeing

what's going on over the next,

over the coming weeks,

and I wish you'd write

honestly

about it,

but unfortunately you

choose not to do so ...

You know what the crime is.

The crime is very obvious to

everybody.

All you have to do is read the

newspapers,

except yours!

Green Peppers: A Philosophical Debate

Person 1 arrives home. The house smells strongly of green peppers, which Person 2 is cooking in the kitchen.*

Person 1: Wow, that sure is a lot of peppers.

Person 2: Oh, I was hoping to surprise you.

Person 1: Well, it’s hard to do that with that food. Green peppers have a notably strong smell when cooking. I’m sure you know they’re not my favorite.

Person 2: Oh? I never realized.

Person 1: Well, I’ve been telling you for many years that I can’t stand the taste or smell of green peppers, so …

Person 2: Well, we’re having sausage and peppers tonight. But it’s just a few peppers. You can’t even taste them.

Person 1: That … seems unlikely. I could smell them the minute I walked in the door. Since smell and taste are senses that are strongly linked, it stands to reason that a strong smell would mean a strong taste. If you cook peppers in a pan and then cook something else in that pan, I will still taste peppers.

Person 2 (dismissive hand gesture): Oh, you can’t even taste them.

Person 1: Then what’s the point? If you can’t taste an ingredient, then why did you go to the trouble of putting it in?

Person 2 (dismissive hand gesture): Pfft.

Person 1: You’re clearly cooking a metric ton of green peppers, despite the fact that I famously can’t stand them, just because you want to eat them.

Person 2: But they’re just peppers.

Person 1: Exactly. If they’re “just peppers,” then why not leave them out? After all, they’re minor in the dish. You said you can’t even taste them. So why not err on the side of not annoying someone by not cooking a food they hate? Is it more injurious for me to have to eat the peppers or for you not to eat them?

They stand in silence and ponder the imponderable, like the sound of one hand clapping. Curtain.

* Not based on anything that happened with Steve and me.