Wednesday, May 13, 2009

 

Today's not so bad, after all

Today is one of those days when if I blogged anything other than this ...

"Everything about me and around me is going to absolute sh-t -- and apologies to Kipling, but I am not keeping my head."

... well, it would be a baldfaced lie.

Hey, I've swallowed or ignored various and sundry pains, toils and troubles to come up with a decent blog post many a time. The daily obsession is an occupational hazard. In the news bidness, the beast must be fed, come hell, high water or hangover.

If I did have my head about me, I might tell some stories about the things I used to have to do as a reporter that, because of my own habits, I had to do with the worst kind of hangover, but ... well, OK:

Infant-mother murder scene; small plane crash; old-lady murder scene; small plane crash; violent psychiatric escapee; flooding; tornado damage; the worst car crashes you can imagine; house fires; house fire with burned bodies; others.

Ah ... this makes me realize that today's not as bad as all that.

Never mind. But let tomorrow be a better day.

--ER

Comments:
Henry, you bore me.

Dream Song 14

BY JOHN BERRYMAN

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
 
Right about here, DrLoboJo will note: "May you live in interesting times."

My times are definitely that!
 
Listen, Scarlet, it could always be worse . . .

I have a friend at work who says that, and I always warn him that saying that usually brings about whatever "worse" may be. sounds like you've covered some horrid stuff - sometimes we non-ink-stained-wretches forget the ugliness reporters are exposed to (kind of like cops; see people at the worst moments of their lives). The reminder keeps the rest of us humble.

Interesting times are around us, to be sure, but if we look carefully enough, the times are usually interesting. It's the people who are boring.
 
My doc is always trying to give me pills for depression. I tell him depression keeps me out of trouble. I get depressed but can' t go 5 minutes without seeing someone worse off than me. It can always be worse.
 
"Right about here, DrLoboJo will note: "May you live in interesting times."
My times are definitely that!"

Well now, all times are interesting, but more interesting always seems to hover just out of sight waiting to surprise you. May your surprises be few.

You might want to reconsider those antidepressants though. Done right, they just make things normal. If however you love the black dog so much you crave his presence then get a bigger dog house bro.
 
Black dog?
 
And they can't be done in isolation. Magic bullets only exist when the magic results not from one thing, but from the cooperation of a few things.
 
Yer right. Take my close personal friend, Mr. Phentermine. We get only when Mr. Subway and Mr. Treadmill ALL get together.
 
"Black Dog" was Winston Churchill's name for his own depressive episodes. He actually took up painting as a cure, and became not only prolific, but skilled. Funny enough, many of his paintings done during his bleakest moments betray a desire to see as much light as possible - they are so bright, light seems to pour out of them.

Unlike another WWII national leader with pretensions as an artist, Churchill understood perspective and contrast, could do both portraits and landscapes with equal aplomb, and had not only a technique, but showed a vision all his own. Hitler's little pencil sketches and water colors from his pre-WWI days (I've actually seen a couple originals, in the special collections at the library at Alfred U; I have no idea how the University obtained them, and holding them made me feel dirty) betray his lack of understanding not only of these basics, but also a preference for imagining grandeur where it didn't exist.

Churchill gave not just light to his subjects, but through that light a view of them as luminescent. Hitler had no inner light, and his subjects were rendered as stilted, not just flat and uninteresting, but more banal than banal.

I think you could benefit from it. You see the light. I would enjoy seeing an attempt to portray your beloved Oklahoma. I think the light would be nearly blinding.
 
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