Lance Mannion

This old house, this old householder

Adapted from the Facebook news feed, Thursday night, February 4, 2021. Posted Tuesday morning, February 9.

We're without a bathroom sink tonight. The drain trap crumbled this afternoon. I bought a replacement. Normally a trip to the hardware store cheers me up, but the top quarter of the old pipe is still on there good and tight. I sprayed it with penetrating oil but now I'm too tired to tackle the job, so it'll have to wait until morning. This old house has been falling apart piece by piece for the last few years but over the last couple of months the deterioration seems to have accelerated. Like house, like owner. I don't know if the house is a metaphor for me, or I'm a metaphor for it. I also don't know if the right word is synecdoche or metonymy so I'm going to worry about that instead of the sink.

The mischief in our diet

Posted New Year’s Day, Friday, January 1, 2021.

“Prang’s Aids for Object Teaching: The Kitchen”, c. 1874, Library of Congress, via Hypothosis.

Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance with society in New England, during the last twenty-five years, with those middle and with those leading sections that may constitute any just representation of the character and aim of the community, will have been struck with the great activity of thought and experimenting…

What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another, that no man should buy or sell: that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another, that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife, that God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment…

---Emerson, from “New England Reformers”, 1844.

Hopes and dreams on hold

Posted Thursday morning, September 17, 2020.

Mrs M's Hopes and Dreams jar with coins in need of counting and sorting. The jar's only a third full even though it's been almost a year since it was last emptied. Spare change is hard to come by these pandemic days since sensible people and retailers are doing their buying and selling with plastic.So it's going to be a while before we get to fulfill our next batch of hopes and dreams.

Other day I found a quarter on the floor of the laundry room of the homestead and my first thought was, Where did that come from?

The answer to myself should have been obvious.

It fell out of somebody’s pocket, Lance, you dummy, as they were loading the washer or unloading the dryer.

Should have been obvious. Would have been obvious in days gone by. It occurred to me that I’d grown used to something that’s been a consequence of all the precautions being taken since the pandemic altered every sensible person’s and retail business owner’s habits of buying and selling. Nobody’s carrying around pocket change. As much as possible we’re all using plastic and avoiding using paper and metal and the hand to hand contact the exchange of germy cash involves.

This is trivial and beside the point. And anyway it’s just accelerating a trend that’s been underway for a long time now. I was pretty much paying for everything with the bank card for years before using plastic became an act of hygiene. But it was curious to me to realize how I’d come to take it for granted, especially the no change part, considering what a rigamarole we Mannions went through when we dealt with found coins.

Many Mother’s Days past, when they were still in grade school, the boys gave Mrs M a ceramic jar for her to keep on her dresser and empty her spare change into at the end of the day, with the hope and the dream that when the jar was filled she’d use the money to buy herself something special she’d been hoping for and dreaming about. House rule, though, became that any change found in anyone’s pocket as the article of clothing equipped with said pocket was loaded or unloaded in the doing of laundry went into the Hopes and Dreams jar. Same rule applied to money found on the floor in any downstairs room of the house or in the cushions of chairs and couches. Most of these coins were ones that had jumped shipped from my pockets. I don’t have an explanation for it, but all my pants automatically dump change as if programmed. This didn’t happen as much when I regularly wore jeans, although back in the days when I regularly wore jeans my pockets were usually empty of money of any kind. At any rate, it used to be that we filled the Hopes and Dreams jar every few months with the tally when we emptied it out usually amounting to between fifty and sixty dollars, depending on the number of quarters. Our hopes and dreams usually didn’t extend beyond buying groceries for the next few days, which was convenient since the coin machine was in the grocery store---imagine that!

But here’s the thing.

When I spotted that quarter on the laundry room floor I made no move to pick it up, not even reflexively. I couldn’t make up my mind what to do with it. It was early in the morning, and if I went searching upstairs in the bedroom for the Hopes and Dreams jar, I worried I might wake Mrs M up. And I saw no point in pocketing it except as an experiment to see where it would wind up next when it inevitably spilled out of my pocket. If it defied the odds, where and when would I spend it anyway? Besides, as far as I know, found quarters aren’t as lucky as found pennies. So I left it there, figuring that when I came back later to put the clothes in the dryer, I’d have figured out what to do with it.

I didn’t. I haven’t. It’s still there. I’m leaving it for one of the Mannion guys to find. I’m thinking they’re still young enough to remember when a quarter was as rare and precious and valuable to them as a magic bean and they’ll snatch up on impulse.

Or if they’ll be faced with the same dilemma and rather than solve it they’ll leave it lie for someone else to deal with.

I dread going back to the laundry room.

A sutra for the poet's father

Posted Father’s Day, Sunday, June 21, 2020.

Detail from “A Deluge” a pen and ink drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci, circa 1517-1518, used as the cover illustration for Garrett Hongo’s 1982 book of poems, “Yellow Light” in which the poem below appears.

At six I lived for spells:
how a few Hawaiian words could call
up the rain, could hymn like the sea
in the long swirl of chambers
curling in the nautilus of a shell,
how Amida’s ballads of the Buddhaland
in the drone of the priest’s liturgy
could conjure money from the poor
and give them nothing but mantras,
the strange syllables that healed desire.

I lived for stories about the war
my grandfather told over hana cards,
slapping them down on the mats
with a sharp Japanese kiai.

I lived for songs my grandmother sang
stirring curry into a thick stew,
weaving a calligraphy of Kannon’s love
into grass mats and straw sandals.

I lived for the red volcano dirt
staining my toes, the salt residue
of surf and sea wind in my hair,
the arc of a flat stone skipping
in the hollow trough of a wave.

I lived in a child’s world, waited
for my father to drag himself home,
dusted with blasts of sand, powdered
and the strange ash of raw cement,
his deafness made worse by the clang
of pneumatic drills, sore in his bones
from the buckings of a jackhammer.

He’d hand me a scarred lunchpail,
let me unlace the hightop G.I. boots,
call him the new name I’d invented
that day in school, write it for him
on his newspaper. He’d rub my face
with hands that felt like gravel roads,
tell me to move, go play, an then he’d
walk to the laundry sink to scrub,
rinse the dirt of his long day
from a face brown and grained as koa wood.

I wanted to take away the pain
in his legs, the swelling in his joints,
give him back his hearing,
clear and rare as crystal chimes,
the fins of glass that wrinkled
and sparked the air with their sound.

I wanted to heal the sores that work
and war had sent to him,
let him play catch in the backyard
with me, tossing a tennis ball
past papaya trees without the shoulders
of pain shrugging back his arms.

I wanted to become a doctor of pure magic,
to string a necklace of sweet words
fragrant as pine needles and plumeria,
fragrant as the bread my mother baked,
place it like a lei of cowrie shells
and pikake flowers around my father’s neck,
and chant him a blessing, a sutra.

---”What For” by Garrett Hongo, collected in “Yellow Light”.

Why I'm not enthusiastic about Medicare for All

Posted Saturday morning, December 14, 2019.

Seems I was over-prepared.

I brought all these books to my meeting at the Social Security office in Poughkeepsie yesterday morning. To my shock and delight and relief I didn’t have a chance to open a single one of them. I was in and out of there in an hour and a half. They don’t let you make an appointment. It’s first come, first serve, and I was told if I wasn’t there when the doors open there was a good chance there’d be dozens of people there ahead of me and I might have to wait all morning, possibly well into the afternoon. I was there to pick up a form. One form. Another hoop to jump through on the road to getting Mrs M’s disability payment approved. (We’ve only been at this for over a year.) I got there around 10 minutes after they opened, and there were about a dozen people waiting ahead of me. But I had only just settled in my seat and dug out my notebook when my number was called. By the time I was done, most of the 100 or so chairs in the waiting area were filled.

Lucky me.

Here’s the thing.

I was lucky. I really was there to pick up the one form. It’s to let the feds know I have Mrs M’s permission to handle her finances. She just has to sign it and mail it back. You’d think this was something that could have been taken care of online or solely through the mail. Nope. I had to present myself in person and prove I’m me and then they had to call Mrs M to hear her say it was me sitting there and it was ok to give me the form. That was the whole of it. A two hour drive round trip, an hour and half’s worth of paperwork in order to proceed with more paperwork. I have a blog rant in the works about this, but for now, I hope you don’t mind if I let off some steam: 

This is why so many people, including me, aren’t enthusiastic about Medicare for All. We expect that it’s going to put us all to work filling out paperwork and making multiple trips to less than congenial and comfortable government offices devoted to keeping the bureaucracy functioning first and helping us a distant second.

The first order of business of any government agency is to cut costs. This is the case whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans in charge. All politicians at every level love to boast as one of their primary achievements that they’ve cut taxes. (This is almost always a lie. What they’ve actually done is shifted the tax burden from their base to someone else’s.) The usual way of cutting taxes is to cut costs, and the usual way to cut costs is to cut them at the lower-levels of government agencies, and the usual way to cut costs at any agency is to cut services, not hire enough people to handle the job, not pay the ones hired enough (thereby shrinking the pool of competent applicants to draw from), and find ways to make anyone who needs the services pay for them, if not with actual dollars and cents then with their time and emotional labor. Our fates are in the hands of overworked, underskilled, not just unmotivated but demoralized paperpushers and keyboard punchers with no incentives to go out of their way to help out the people who come to them for help.

Please don’t try to tell me this is better than having to deal with customer care reps at private insurance companies. You’re talking to someone who’s been dealing with both for almost two years. My worst experiences have been with the feds. I don’t expect it to change, even if some version of Medicare for All is Green Lanterned into being the first day of Bernie Sanders’ presidency.

I do want to say that everybody I dealt with at the Poughkeepsie office was relatively friendly and cheerful and did their best to be helpful despite their already being overwhelmed an hour into their workday.

Chair work: On the therapeutic benefits of minor home repair

Sunday morning, August 25, 2019.

Let’s talk about me.

Because I don’t do enough of that here on the blog.

I hurt.

I’m stiff and I’m sore. I’m tired---all the time. I don’t sleep. Often I’m too tired to think. I have no strength in my legs. I have no strength in my back. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. Some days it’s more than I can take. When I saw my back surgeon in March, I complained about all this. He listened sympathetically. He’s a very sympathetic guy. But he said I need to give myself more time to heal. The CT scan and the x-rays he’d ordered showed I’m holding together. The screws on the cage he built around my deteriorated vertebrae hadn’t come loose. (Go ahead. Say it. Say what, Lance? Don’t play the innocent with me. Say unlike the screws in my head.) But it’s been three years. I had the surgery July 24, 2016. It was successful. It relieved the chronic pain, gave me back a great degree of range of motion, allowed me to stand up straight, and walk---well, hobble---with confidence and authority without a cane. For the first year or so after I was definitely on the mend. I didn’t expect to leap tall buildings in a single bound but I thought that sooner than later I’d be able to bound up a flight of stairs and not have to take them one wobbly step at a time. Then I plateaued. A year and a half went by without noticeable improvement. Noticed by me, at any rate. (I had to cancel my appointment back in April of last year because it was scheduled on the very day Mrs M had to go in for the MRI that confirmed the presence of her tumor.) I told Dr R this. He said I was expecting too much too fast. I am, after all, old. He didn’t say it that bluntly. He said, “You’re not going to be as resilient as you were when you were thirty.”  Then he gave me a new back brace and sent me on my way---permanently. He discharged me from his care. “Don’t come back unless it gets worse,” he said by way of goodbye. Well, friendly and caring words to that effect.

It’s gotten worse.

I hate to whine, considering what else has been going on here. Considering what I know many other people have been going through. But, you know, my blog.

It’s not the intensified hurting, being stiffer and sorer and even more tired that’s got me down. It’s the not being able to do the things I want to do and need to do because I hurt too much, I’m too stiff and sore and tired…

Take long walks. Take short walks. Walk any distance greater than the distance between the house and the car. Sit at the table for extended periods and write. Sit in even our most comfortable chair and read without falling asleep before I finish a chapter---before I finish a paragraph! Do more than minimal household chores. Do yard work. (Honest!) Mow the lawn. (I swear!) Fix things!

This! as they say on Twitter. That last one.

I’m not the world’s greatest handyman. No one would call me Mr Fixit without irony or sarcasm. But there are repairs and home improvements I can do---could do, used to do---and I like---liked, would like to---do them. I take---took---pleasure, satisfaction, and pride in doing them.  I own just about all the tools a handy homeowner is likely to ever need. When I meet---met---with a repair I didn’t have the tool or the part Ito do the job I was happy. It meant a trip to the hardware store. I can’t go to the hardware store anymore. Since our local hardware store went out of business in January, going to the hardware store means going to Lowes and I might as well set out to walk the twelve miles to there as walk around in there. I think it’s a mile from the parking lot to the front doors, another mile from the doors to the lightbulb aisle, and a mile beyond that to the end of the aisle where the style and wattage of bulb I’m after is invariably shelved.

Here are some items I long to tackle on my mental job jar: Paint the porch rails. Patch the living room wall. Replace the locksets on the front doors. Level a kitchen shelf. Hang new blinds in the bedroom. Get the washing machine working again. Get the dryer working again. Get the dishwasher working again. Mend the backyard fence. Tighten the bolts on a wobbly kitchen chair. Wait! I did that!

This morning.

This morning was the perfect morning for it. I was out on the porch. It was sunny. It was only 63 degrees. There was a light breeze of 5 mph blowing in from the north, straight at house. It put me in the mood to strap on the toolbelt. Ok, I don’t have a toolbelt. But I have a toolkit, and I was raring to break it out. As you can see in the photo, the porch needs painting but several of the floorboards need replacing. If I could have I’d have rebuilt the whole porch and painted it. I thought of all my tools I could put to work. My circular saw! My electric drill! My sander and spray painter! I thought of how many trips to the hardware store the job would entail. I thought and I thought and I came close to despair. Then I remembered the kitchen chair.

Here was a job I could do without having to stand. I could do it on my knees. Even while sitting down. No heavy lifting. No ladders to climb. I dashed---hobbled at the highest speed I could attain---into the house, dragged it out onto the porch, and set to work with my flathead and Phillips head screwdrivers and hinged set of hex keys. It didn’t take long to remove every last trace of wobble. That was a bit disappointing. I was still eager to work. The other kitchen chairs are more sturdily put together. This one’s left over from a previous set, the sole survivor of a set of four the other three of members of which had wobbled themselves to pieces over the course of twenty years of use. I’ve had to dewobble this one many times before. I’ve cleaned it and polished it many times too. But, to my delight, it needed it again. Again, I set cheerfully to work. I wiped and I buffed. I detailed the joints using toothpicks I keep on hand for the purpose of detailing whatever needs detailing when I clean it. And when I was done, it shone like gold. I brought it back into the house and put it back in its place at the table and waited for the rest of the Mannions to notice and admire my handiwork when they came down for breakfast. That didn’t happen.

It never has.

The guys seem to be oblivious to these things. I’m convinced Mrs M makes it a point of principle not to acknowledge she's noticed. She doesn’t want any of her praise to go to my head. I didn’t mind. It was like old times. I was satisfied with a job well done...with a job done, at last. 

My only regret is that it didn’t require any trips to the hardware store.

An essential subtlety

Posted Thursday morning, May 23, 2019.

Woke up before dawn this morning feeling lost and depressed, so I spent the hour before sunrise trying to find my way with the Way. Had some success…

Kitchen table, bunkhouse mess hall, the Mannionville Ranch, four-thirty, Thursday morning, May 23, 2019.

Good works are trackless,
good words are flawless,
good planning isn't calculating.
What is well closed has no bolt locking it,
but cannot be opened.
What is well bound has no rope confining it,
but cannot be untied.
Therefore sages always consider it good to save people,
so that there are no wasted humans;
they always consider it good to save beings,
so that there are no wasted beings.
So good people are teachers
of people who are not good.
People who are not good
are students of people who are good.
Those who do not honour teachers or care for students
are greatly deluded, even in knowledgeable.
This is called an essential subtlety.

---Chapter 27, “The Tao Te Ching”, translated by Thomas Cleary.

A madness in March Madness

Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday, April 9, 2019. Posted Thursday, April 11.

University of Cincinnati Bearcats guard Jarron Cumberland (No. 34 in white) defends against University of Iowa Hawkeyes forward Luke Garza (No. 55 in black) in their first round game of this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, Friday, March 22, 2019. Hawkeyes won 79-72. Garza is not the Iowa player whose over-zealous father made me mad and provided the fodder for this post. Screenshot courtesy of CBS Sports.

I wasn’t ready for March Madness. I’m still barely over the January Jitters. Who won? I didn’t watch. I didn’t watch any of the Final Four either. Or the Elite Eight. Or the Sweet Sixteen. I stopped paying attention when Old Father Blonde’s alma mater Villanova lost to Purdue in the second round. All my rooting interest was gone. I don’t fill out a bracket. I look over the list of teams that are in it and pick a few favorites, usually the Catholic schools---the only times of the year I feel like a good Catholic are Christmas and now---and a couple of attractive underdogs. Liberty was not an attractive underdog. Then as the tournament progresses, I’ll learn about a player who is a true student-athlete and hop on the bandwagon of his school. I also root for the schools that are in and of themselves good stories and come accompanied by interesting characters with their own good stories, like last year when Sister Jean prayed the Loyola Chicago Ramblers into the Final Four. Ramblers gave her a ring, by the way. I didn’t know they gave out Final Four rings. This year I didn’t find a player, a story, or a character to root for, no underdog won me over, and the the Catholics all went early. Every year I try to root for Iowa. I got my MFA from there, after all. Two of the best  years of my life I spent in Iowa City. George Raveling was the coach then and I was impressed by him. Their star player Brad Lohaus went on to play five seasons in the NBA. Two with the Celtics. B.J. Armstrong arrived the year after I left. So did Kevin Gamble. Gamble played six seasons with the Celtics. So you’d think I’d have at least a strong, nostalgic rooting interest in the Hawkeyes. But for some reason my heart’s never truly in it. This year my heart was dead set against them.

[Editor’s note: The reason I don’t mention the names of the father and son below is I don’t know much about the father and haven’t turned up much about him on Google. All I have to go on is what the TV announcers said. If you’re a fan, you’ll probably know who they are. If you don’t and really want to know, they’re easy to find via a quick google. But my quarrel here is with a type not any particular individual.]

First round. Game against Cincinnati. Late in the second half. Iowa’s down. Cincinnati’s been playing them tough. Camera cuts to the father of one of the Hawkeye players in the stands. He’s on his feet. You can tell by his expression this game means too much to him. He’s yelling. Not cheering. Not shouting words of encouragement. Yelling. He’s mad. At the team. At his son. I can’t make out all he’s saying but it’s probably not anything Iowa’s coach Fran McCaffrey isn’t telling his players. Probably includes some stuff isn’t telling them because it’s obvious and he has specific instructions he’s trying to give. The father’s too caught up in the moment, but I suspect he’s too caught up in every moment.

The announcers have done their homework. They’re ready to tell us all about him. He has four sons, all were sports standouts from early ages. The son playing for the Hawkeyes is the youngest. He’s considered the most talented, the one with the best chances of having a stellar pro career. One of the announcers characterizes the father as describes the father as having been “aggressive” in his coaching of his sons when they were growing up, and he tells a story to illustrate.

The father tried to go to all his sons’ games when they were kids. That often proved logistically impossible. One time, he had to miss one of the Hawkeye player’s brother’s little league games to go another brother’s game. When he arrived after to pick up the first brother at the field, he saw he was unusually dejected. Kid was down on himself because he’d had a tough time at the plate. Father turned the car around, drove back to the field, and ordered the kid out of the car. He took a bat and a bag of balls out of the trunk and gave them to the kid. I imagine him dropping the bag and bat at the kid’s feet. The drop is more of a throw. Practice your swing, he said. Hit a hundred of these. I’ll be back in an hour. And he drove off. The announcer told that story as if it was funny. His broadcast partners chuckled along with him. What a character, they seemed to agree.

I don’t find him amusing.

I know this guy from my own little league days when I watched two different coaches humiliate their own sons in front of the whole team for not being as good a player as they wanted. I know him from my time as a coach for Ken’s soccer team. He’s a familiar type.

Aggressive isn’t the word I’d use.

Abusive is more like it.

The words the announcer might have wanted to use are “tough” and “demanding”.  But there are all kinds of ways to be tough and demanding without being punishing and and cruel. For instance, a tough and demanding father might have stayed there and thrown a hundred pitches to his son right then. He might have said Let’s work on your swing while it’s still in your mind what you need to fix. He might have waited until the next morning, if it wasn’t a school or a work day, or until the weekend it it was, and then thrown him two hundred pitches. He might have waited and made a point to be at the kid’s next game and see for himself what was what before deciding the kid needed aggressive coaching from him. And then taken him out for some batting practice if he thought he needed it.

It’s hard to know what to do when your kid is blessed with an extraordinary talent. My sister has agonized over this since her daughter was four. My niece is an extraordinarily talented ballet dancer with not just the talent but the charisma and discipline to be a star with a major professional company. How hard do you push your children to make the most of their gifts? There are parents who don’t push hard enough. There are, however, too many who push too hard.

The father played college football. He had one glory year. It might be he thinks he’d have had a better career if his own father had been harder on him or if he’d been harder on himself. It might be he just lets himself get carried away sometimes and he’s otherwise a great dad. But, human nature being what it is, it’s more likely he’s the type of sports parent who use their kids to make up for their own perceived failures and frustrated dreams of glory and fame.

When I think of parents like that I think of these lines from James Wright’s poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”:

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

It’s not just sports parents in working class towns in the Midwest, as the college admissions scandal has shown.

There are probably players for Cincinnati with abusive parents in the stands or at home. It’s not something I hear get talked about during games: how many star athletes are where they are because their parents bullied them to it their whole lives.

Stage mothers are a cliche, but they're real---stage dads too---and they do harm. Sports parents are just as real. It's a curse to be born with talent to parents like that. A worse curse is to be born without talent or with minimal talent to parents like that.

Like I said, the Bearcats were playing the Hawkeyes tough. Cincinnati had the lead at the half. The teams traded leads most of the second half, but Iowa pulled comfortably---but not decisively ahead---with a few minutes left to play. Cincinnati had pulled back to within five with 17 seconds left. But Iowa took over the ball, sank a pair of free throws, and that was all she wrote. Hawkeyes won 79-72.

I can’t say this game and this guy soured me on the tournament. When the game ended I was mad. Mad enough at that guy I was half-determined to root against Iowa in their next game against Tennessee. But by the time that game rolled around, Villanova had already fallen to Purdue, and I was done caring. By last night I’d almost forgotten the men were still playing. Too much real sports has my attention. The baseball season’s started. Pro basketball’s entering its playoff season. The Celtics are in it. The Nets are on their way. The Mets are off to a good start.

By “real sports” I mean sports in which adults are paid for making their employers rich.

I’m ambivalent about college sports as it is. The country is full of real student-athletes with the emphasis on student. The schools they play for take care they get an education the same as they take care of their student-scientists, student-artists, student-doctors and lawyers and teachers and business majors. Some of these schools send student-athletes to the tournament. The Catholic schools have a good record of doing this. But even though they earn degrees they’re still exploited and undercompensated. Many of the schools don’t bother to see their players even get the college educations the NCAA claims is the only compensation the schools need to give these kids.

It didn’t help that Sunday night Oliver Mannion showed us John Oliver’s report from 2015 on the money-madness behind the madness of March Madness. The clip is below. It’s long. Twenty minutes. Here’s a passage from Dave Zirin’s review of the segment in the Nation that will give you enough of a sense of it for now:

If you haven’t witnessed John Oliver’s scabrous, side-splitting shreddage of the NCAA, stop reading for twenty minutes and watch. You will cackle, reach for the nearest stone, and while still joyously bent over, throw it in the general direction of the NCAA’s $85 million headquarters in Indianapolis. Oliver launches a merciless, unassailable argument that the NCAA and their multibillion-dollar machine of nonprofit amateurism is nothing but hypocritical rot. His portrayal of a truly “authentic” videogame deemed “March Sadness,” involving hungry, exhausted players, narcissistic, rageaholic coaches and administrators making snow angels in piles of money, should be watched as a precondition of filling out a bracket.

Yet there is a non-satirical sadness in seeing John Oliver so thoroughly dissect the hypocrisies and odious, sulphur-smelling injustices of the NCAA, because while perhaps never done as hilariously, it has also been done, and done and done again....It recalls arguments made for years by sports columnists like Kevin Blackisone, coaches like Jerry Tarkanian, and an endless line of former NCAA athletes who found themselves used up and tossed aside. In fact, an entire generation of activist athletes, from 81-year-old Bill Russell to 26-year-old Richard Sherman, have argued that the system is unjust. Even the man who founded the modern NCAA, Walter Byers, the executive director of the NCAA from 1952 to 1987, once said, “The coaches own the athletes’ feet, the colleges own the athletes’ bodies, and the supervisors retain the large rewards. That reflects a neo-plantation mentality on the campuses.” The argument against the NCAA is such an entrenched part of the public record, the burden is on those who dare stick their head above ground to defend it.

Yet the system not only survives. It thrives. The same college campuses where people are presumably taught about the importance of liberty, debate and winning the battle of ideas have evidence right on their campuses that none of these post-feudal intellectual staples are worth a damn outside the ivory tower…”

I’d like to say this is why I didn’t watch the game. But it’s not. I’d like to say I feel virtuous for not watching. But I don’t. I’d have tuned in if Nova or even Gonzaga had been in it or if Sister Jean’s prayers had gotten Loyola back to the tournament and again to the Final Four. All I can say is that I plan to resist temptation next year. I expect I’ll have as much luck with that as I have resisting most temptations.

By the way, I really know who won last night. I had planned to watch, even though I couldn’t work up a rooting interest in one team or the other. My loyalties were torn. I was born in Virginia. Lived there for a whole ten and a half months. Another of my talented nieces attends Texas Tech. She’s a theater major. My other sister has agonized over how hard to push her since she was little.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

And now, bloggage, as our old pal Nancy Nall is wont to append to her posts on her webpage. Nance’s extraordinarily talented student-musician daughter is about to graduate from Michigan. Texas Tech bounced the Wolverines from the tournament in the Sweet Sixteen. I haven’t asked but I don’t imagine Nance or her daughter are all that cut up about it…

To read all of Dave Zirin’s column on Oliver’s report, follow the link to “Why Not Even the Mighty John Oliver Can Shame the NCAA”.

For the whole story on Sister Jean, follow the link to “Sister Jean: how a 98-year-old nun became the hottest property in basketball” by Hunter Felt at the Guardian.

For old times’ sake, here’s the Daily Iowan’s report on the Hawkeyes’ win over Cincinnati: “Iowa betting on itself with NCAA Tournament win over Cincinnati”.

Not about college sports but tangentially related: a long read but a must-read on the admissions scandal, “They Had It Coming” by Caitlin Flanagan at the Atlantic.

And now this, from “Last Week Tonight”:

RTFM

Early Friday morning, October 26, 2018.

Six a.m. Sun not yet up. Usually on mornings like this, when I wake before dawn filled with anxiety, loneliness, and dread, I try to drive the darkness from my soul by reading poetry. This morning, though, I’m finding comfort in a different sort of reading material.

Pop Mannion wasn’t much of a handyman. Home repair was one of the few things he wasn’t good at. Mostly I think it was because he didn’t put his mind to it. He didn’t see the point. To him that’s what repairmen and eldest sons were for. But he drilled one lesson into my head early. RTFM, which he translated for my delicate young ears as Read The “Fine” Manual.

I’m pretty sure I can fix the dishwasher. And the clothes washer. And the dryer. It’s just a matter of ordering the parts. The vacuum’s probably not worth it, but I could do it if it was or I had the money and time to burn. I’m having fun right now just imagining getting out my trusty voltage tester, taking the little beast apart to diagnose the problem, ordering the part or parts I need---most likely the motor but maybe just the relay---and putting them in. But like I said, it’s not worth the money or the time or the headache I’ll get when I discover I’ve ordered the wrong part and have to go through the whole rigmarole again. But the dishwasher, washer, and dryer are mine!

Nothing I can do about the hot water heater though. It’s shot and has to be replaced. I’ve got a plumber coming in to take care of it. But that isn’t stopping me from telling myself I probably could do it myself if my back would let me carry the new one in the house and downstairs to the basement and the old one up and out.

I am to being a handyman what Donald Trump is to being a tough guy.

Now…

Where did I put the fine manual for the dryer?

The persistence of old and new regrets

Posted Friday evening, March 9, 2019.

My birthday was over a week ago but those cards from dead writer keep coming in. This one’s from the poet and fiction writer Denis Johnson, who died last May but whose last book, a collection of short stories called “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”,  was published this past January. I don’t think Johnson and I are destined to become as good friends as Ursula Le Guin and I have, but it was nice of him to think of me…

“This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life---the distance I’ve traveled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms---that I almost crashed the car. Getting out at the place where I do the job I don’t feel I’m very good at, I grabbed my briefcase too roughly and dumped half of its contents in my lap and half in the parking lot, and while gathering it all up I left my keyes on the seat and locked the car manually---an old man’s habit-and trapped them in the RAV.”

---from the title story in “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson.

No use making a fuss about growing old: birthday greetings from my new dead writer friend

Posted Thursday evening, March 1, 2018.

Got a birthday card from my new writer friend yesterday.

You knew yesterday was my birthday, right? Yep. Thank you. I know. I don’t look it, do I? Not a day over 365 days from last year. Anyway…

My new writer friend sneaked a birthday message to into her last book. I mean her last book. She won’t be writing any more. My new writer friend is a dead writer. And I don’t mean I recently lost a friend. I mean we didn’t become friends until after she was dead. Ursula Le Guin.

When she died in January, I decided it was time for me to catch up and read her work I hadn’t read when she was alive. Which turned out to be nearly all of it.

I’ve never been a fan of science fiction.

As a genre.

I’ve enjoyed individual novels, stories, movies and TV shows that happen to fall into the genre. I tend not to think of them as science fiction, though, even though that’s what they are. At any rate, science fiction isn’t a thing itself I seek out. Just the opposite sometimes. I’ve actively avoided something that’s come to my notice as science fiction.

This isn’t snobbery. I don’t dismiss science fiction as a lesser form. I don’t think of the science fiction I’ve enjoyed as being good despite their being science fiction. It’s simply a matter of preference. I prefer “literary” fiction. I prefer mysteries. I prefer non-fiction, history, journalism, and biography. There are only so many books you can read in a lifetime, and time is growing short. But even when I had more time ahead of me, I avoided science fiction, mostly out of habit and, like I said, preference. In libraries and bookstores, I drifted towards familiar sections and aisles. It might also have been a matter of association. Science fiction will always be associated in my head with buying a copy of Robert Silverberg’s “Tower of Glass” from the rotating metal rack of the sad grocery store in the sad town on Lake George where for a brief time Mom and Pop Mannion owned a summer home they really couldn’t afford and none of us Mannion kids liked. Mom Mannion had mixed feelings about the place too. Pop loved it for its big front porch where he liked to sit in a rocker all day and take in the panoramic view of the lake. I liked it best---I only liked it---at night when Pop and I would sit inside by one of the two fireplaces and read, each with his own choice of reading material. The previous owner had left behind a bookcase full of Book of the Month Club main selections and that’s how I first came to read writers like John Cheever, David Halberstam, and Kurt Vonnegut. But I must have had them all read when I found myself in that sad grocery store with ninety-five cents burning a hole in my pocket and Silverberg’s book with its icy blue and black cover staring me in the eye.

I knew something about it ahead of buying it. My best friend Sandy was a science fiction fan and he’d read it and told me the highlights. The plot revolved around a secret religion invented by a race of androids who were themselves invented to serve as slaves to the richest man in history who was using them to build a giant communications tower in the Arctic from which he intends to make contact with intelligent life in another galaxy. The female androids had ruby red skin and spent most if not all their time naked. I bought it for the religious symbolism and biblical allusions, of course.

I was fourteen.

It wasn’t as sexy a story as I expected. It was kind of creepy, actually. I expected the sex to be romantic, physically joyful, and mutually satisfying. I was a naive kid and didn’t know much about sex other than than biological basics, but I believed adult lovers finished their lovemaking in love. I hadn’t read “For Whom the Bell Tolls” yet, so I didn’t imagine them asking each other “Did the earth move for you?” but I thought lovers were considerate of each other’s feelings and they’d ask each other something like it and were happily relieved when they each answered “Yes!” Which of course they would. Android-human sex seemed weirdly dispassionate and twisted by self-loathing. I was too young to understand what it meant that the androids were slaves. I finished “Tower of Glass” feeling confused and alienated. From then on, science fiction was all versions of “Tower of Glass” and forever associated with adolescent loneliness, longing, and disappointment. If I was John Updike there’d be a short story in that.

So this is how it happened that although she was already famous when I first heard of her---although it probably wasn’t because she was famous that I heard of her. Either Sandy or some other friend likely called her to my notice.---and she was diligently and prolifically at work my entire adult reading life, growing increasingly famous and more and more highly regarded as a writer, a poet, and a thinker as time wore on---she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997!--- I managed to read very little of her work and what I did read didn’t include Earthsea, not even “A Wizard of Earthsea”.  I might have read “The Left Hand of Darkness”. Back when I worked in a bookstore in Boston I was in charge of our fiction sections, including the science fiction section, and I made a conscientious effort to read the new releases and Hugo and Nebula Award winners and classics so I wouldn’t come across as a complete idiot to customers. I may have read it then but if I did I have no recollection of it. And it explains why now that I’ve set out to read as much of what I didn’t read in the time I have left I’ve started with her non-fiction. And it’s the reason I now think of her as a friend. I’ve grown fond of the person she come across as in the essays and blog posts collected in her newest and last book, “No Time to Spare”.

Of course she had a blog. She was also on Twitter. Le Guin was old-fashioned and conservative in certain ways---I should say in certain of her ways---but she was progressive and forward-thinking in many others, something you might expect of a science fiction writer but is not universally the case. Think of Robert Heinlein. Think of Orson Scott Card. Then again, save yourself the headache and don’t.

Of course I’m aware that the person I’m think I’m chums with is a “person.” A persona. A character Le Guin created for herself to pass off as herself to her readers and audiences when she lectured and read in public. In other words, she is a “she” and as a “she” she's a work of art---a figment of Le Guin’s imagination. “Ursula Le Guin” is somebody Ursula Le Guin made up. That’s what writers do. They make things up. She once said novelists are in the business of lying. She didn’t specify that they only lied when the wrote fiction. So it’s possible I’m pals in my head with a lie. But I have a feeling “she’s” awfully close to the real McCoy or a least “Le Guin” and Le Guin have a whole lot in common. I hope so. Whichever or whoever, I like her. She seems like she’d have been the older, wiser, wryer colleague and friend I wanted and needed when I was a young teacher and ambitious but clueless wannabe writer.

Presumptuous of me to think she’d have wanted me for a friend. But there it is.

Since she wrote the essay in which she sneaked in my birthday card when she was eighty-three, I’m imagining she really meant it for my octogenarian self and expects me to deliver it when I meet the geezer in a couple more decades. I’m not looking forward to meeting him. In fact, I’d rather not meet him. But as Le Guin herself says, “Consider the alternative.” I don’t like considering the alternative or what it will be like when we do meet. I don’t want to think we’ll have anything in common. Lately, though, I have felt some sympathy for the old coot. Things are signs we already have stuff to talk about. Anyway. Here’s Le Guin’s birthday greetings to him via me. It’s from the essay I quoted the other day, “The Diminished Thing”:

A lot of younger people, seeing the reality of old age as entirely negative, see acceptance of age as negative. Wanting to to deal with old people in a positive spirit, they’re led to deny old people their reality.

With all good intentions, people say to me, “Oh, you’re not old!”

And the pope isn’t Catholic.

“You’re only as old as you think you are!”

Now, you don’t honestly think having lived eighty-three years is a matter of opinion…

Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation…

I think the tradition of respecting old age in itself has some justification. Just coping with daily life, doing stuff that was always so easy you didn’t notice it, gets harder in old age, till it may take real courage to do it at all. Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect…

…diminishment isn’t all there is to aging. Far from it…

If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor, an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding. It’s had more time to gather knowledge and more practice in comparison and judgment. No matter if the knowledge is intellectual or practical or emotional., if it concerns alpine ecosystems or the Buddha nature or how to reassure a frightened child: when you meet an old person with that kind of knowledge, if you have the sense of a bean sprout you know you’re in a rare and irreproducible presence.

Same goes for old people who keep their skill at any craft or art they’ve worked at for all those years. Practice does make perfect. They know how, they know it all, and beauty flows effortlessly from what they do.

But all such existential enlargements brought by living long are under threat from the lessening of strength and stamina. However well compensated for by intelligent coping mechanisms, small or large breakdowns in one bit of the body or another begin to restrict activity, while the memory is dealing with overload and slippage. Existence in old age is progressively diminished by each of these losses and restrictions. It’s no use saying it isn’t so, because it is so.

It’s no use making a fuss about it, or being afraid of it, either, because nobody can change it…

Hmm. She left off the “Happy Birthday!”

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Recommended related Mannion re-run: Why I don't like Science Fiction even when I do and vice versa.

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"No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters" by Ursula K. Le Guin is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Ursula Le Guin thinks negatively about the power of positive thinking

Posted Tuesday night, February 27, 2018.

At eighty-three, Le Guin didnt take kindly to suggestions she should think positively about growing old.

Americans believe strongly in positive thinking. Positive thinking is great. It works best when based on a realistic assessment and acceptance of the actual situation. Positive thinking founded on denial may not be so great.

---from the essay “Diminished Thing” collected in “No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters” by Ursula K. Le Guin.

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Top Image: Still from “The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin”, a documentary by Arwen Curry.

"Spotlight" and the last conversation I had with a priest

Posted Saturday night, February 10, 2012.

Rachel McAdams as Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer realizes that a “retired” priest who’s admitted to molesting children lives unsupervised down the street from a school in Spotlight, the movie about the Globe’s investigation of the sex abuse scandal that should have brought about the collapse of the Catholic Church.

The last serious conversation I had with a priest was nearly fifteen years ago and it ended with him calling Mrs M and me bad parents and me telling him to go to hell.

That was the day I was done with the Catholic Church forever. And it broke my heart.

By that point in my life I wasn’t much of a Catholic. I was barely a believer. But I had been both whole-heartedly when I was young. I was proud of having been raised Catholic. I was grateful for my Catholic grade school education. I had nothing but fond memories of being an altar boy. The priests I served with were great guys. The nuns who taught me were smart, progressive, demanding, and kind. Over the years, my faith and the practice of it brought me mostly joy. I was a lazy CAPE Catholic by the time we became parents, but when Mrs M decided she wanted to raise the boys Catholic, I was glad. And when the time came I was happy and proud to send them off to Catholic school. Which is where the trouble began.

In first grade, Ken’s physical and emotional development problems started to show themselves, his several learning disabilities and blocks began to take their toll. And we had no idea what was happening to him. All we knew was that a very bright, imaginative, creative, happy, and kind little boy who wanted nothing so much as to please his parents and teachers and other kids suddenly couldn’t do anything right. With his friends and in class, it seemed to be always the case that whenever he should have turned left, he turned right, whenever he should have pushed the on button, he pushed off. He was constantly annoying the other kids, exasperating his teachers, and frustrating himself.  He became anxious, fretful, lonely, and desperately unhappy. Predictably and understandably, he acted out by misbehaving. Not by being naughty and disobedient, exactly, at least not usually. By either refusing to participate, getting silly, or by melting down in tears.

Having no idea what was wrong and therefore no ideas about how to help him, Mrs M and I turned for guidance and advice to the people whose job, we thought, was to look out for the children in their professional care, his teachers, the principal, the pastor, and eventually the head of the diocesan schools.

That last person was the priest who called us bad parents and I told to go to hell.

We got no help or guidance. The pastor and the principal made it increasingly clear that Ken was our problem to solve and the way they thought we should solve it was by taking him off their hands. We should have done it right then. We might have if we weren’t afraid he’d get lost in the public schools---the public elementary school in our neighborhood was one of the most chaotic in the city, with a reputation for a lack of order and discipline, and one thing we knew was that Ken did best in quiet, structured, predictable situations---and if we weren’t such still-loyal Catholics. We thought it was important that he get a Catholic education because almost unconsciously we believed that was the only kind of real and complete education there was.

Mrs M and I weren’t helpless. We didn’t throw our hands up in despair. We sought out specialists and counselors on our own.  But it was slow going and led to many dead ends. Eventually, our family doctor got Ken in to see the top child neuropsychologist in town and he made the diagnoses of Asperger’s, ADD, and dyscalculia that got Ken the IEP and the special education he needed and essentially saved his life.  But by then he was in fourth grade and well and good out of Catholic school.

Two-thirds of his way through second grade, in the spring of 2001, our pastor told us Ken would not be welcomed back for third grade. Not only that, he would have to finish second grade at home or somewhere else.

That’s when we made one last appeal to the head of the diocesan schools. That’s when he called us bad parents. That’s when it finally dawned on me.

While Ken’s situation was coming to a head, the molestation scandal was breaking.  The Boston Globe’s investigative series that’s at the center of the movie Spotlight hadn’t yet begun to run but there’d been enough stories in the news in the Globe and elsewhere and over a long enough period to realize, if you thought about it, something even more heinous was going on than that a few bad priests here and there were sexual predators.

There were too many for the church higher ups not to have known. There were too many who weren’t defrocked for it not to be a policy not to punish them as they deserved. There were too many put back into regular parish work after a year or so of “counseling” and “therapy” for it not to be the case that pastors and bishops cared more about the deviant priests than about their past and future victims. There were too many of these predator-priests and too much official looking the other way for all the other priests who weren’t idiots or predators themselves not to know what was going on and too few of them on record as having tried to put a stop to it even by complaining to church authorities, never mind going to the police, for it not to be the truth that just about every priest was to some degree complicit.

Even the rare bishops who policed their own dioceses and punished the predators and protected their flocks were guilty of not doing more to stop what they knew was going on in other dioceses.

The Church was rotten from top to bottom, and while it was desperately protecting and enabling child molesters, it was throwing our child to the wolves.

It was hand-feeding other people’s children to monsters.

That was it. I was done. It didn’t feel like a momentous decision at the time. For the past few years, I’d only been going through the motions of being a Catholic anyway, and I’d only been going through those motions for the sakes of Mrs M and Ken and his little brother. But something else had happened it took me a while to notice, something more wrenching when I finally realized it.

In going through the motions, I’d been keeping what residual faith I had alive. When I stopped going through the motions, that last bit of faith died.

Sadder to me than that, though, was that all my joyful memories of my life as a Catholic were tainted and made suspect. I couldn’t go back to church physically in the present and I couldn’t go back in the past by remembering without anger and without mourning. There were priests in the background and foreground of all my memories and I had to wonder. Those great guys I served with, was one of them…? The priest who married Mrs M and M, was he…? How about the priests who baptized Ken and Oliver and gave them their first communions? And what about all the other children, my fellow altar boys, my classmates, Ken and Oliver’s friends…?

And then all around them and through them was the Church itself and weren’t all of us foolish and to an extent complicit too by turning our lives over to an institution that demanded obedience and loyalty but didn’t care about us even enough to protect our children in return?

This is one of the reasons I was so impressed and moved by Spotlight. It’s a terrific film, beautifully directed by Tom McCarthy working in a minor key and with a muted palette to create a world that is somber and sad and fallen but lovely for the warmth of the good hearts beating at its center, and brilliantly acted by a cast led by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Brian d’Arcy James, Live Schreiber, and Stanley Tucci. But it’s the screenplay, by McCarthy and Josh Singer, I want to talk about here.

The dialog isn’t packed with snappy one-liners. There are few big and meaningful speeches. No angry confrontations. No pithy back and forths. It’s realistically conversational. Characters simply talk to each other. And they reveal themselves, their personalities, feelings, thoughts, experiences as people tend to do in conversations in real life, indirectly, off-handedly, often unintentionally, in asides, in lead ups to making a point, or in expressing a concern or working out an idea or asking a question, or wrapped up in their points, concerns, ideas, and questions so that nothing they say doesn’t tell us who and what they are. And who and what the four journalists working on the story---the movie’s four lead characters, editor Robby Robinson and his team of reporters, Mike Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Matt Carroll, played by Keaton, Ruffalo, McAdams, and James---are all lifelong Catholics

All of them were raised Catholic and to varying degrees they’re believers, but none of them think of themselves as that connected to the Church anymore. Carroll attends his wife’s Protestant church. Pfeiffer regularly goes to mass but only as a favor to her grandmother who needs the ride and likes the company. Rezendes hasn’t been in years. And Robinson is more or less a social Catholic---he’s most Catholic when in the company of other Catholics and his ties to the Church are based on friendships, social connections, professional obligations, and nostalgia. And while of course as they investigate the story and uncover the breadth and depth of the scandal they are shocked, angered, and outraged, they are also...wounded.

To different degrees and in different ways they are shaken. Things they thought knew, things they thought they believed, their sense of who and what they are are called into question, become subject to doubt and rejection. Whatever pleasure, comfort, and joy they had gotten out of being Catholic is tainted, even lost, and it breaks their hearts.

Just as it did mine.

And Mrs M’s.

And millions of other Catholics’.

I can’t believe the scandal didn’t bring about the collapse of the Church.

Spotlight might not have been the best movie to see the weekend before Christmas.

I’m glad I did, though. I was forgetting how angry I was.

Am.

We’d never told our sons the story of my conversation with that priest.  I finally did before we went to see the movie.

They wanted to know if I’d really said go to hell to a priest.

I told them of course not.

“I said, ‘Go to hell, father.””

Once an altar boy...

A Millennial’s Lament

Posted Tuesday morning, February 6, 2018.

I remember being this young/old…

Click on the image or follow the link to see MarcinaColdClimate’s original tweet.

Stupid night of the soul

Posted 4 a.m. Friday morning, February 2, 2018.

You don’t need me to tell you that at four in the morning the world seems a gloomy and dreadful place, and I’m sure you know better than to make the mistake I just made, which was to look for comfort and distraction from the gloom and the dread online. But I’ll tell you. The world as seen through a computer screen in the dead of night isn’t just a gloomy and dreadful place. It’s a stupid place. And some of the stupidest people in it are people who think they’re being very smart about politics because by most measures they are very smart other things. What’s stupid about them is the way they use the language and tropes of politics to talk about how unhappy they are with themselves and their lives without seeming to be aware that that’s in fact what they’re talking about. Most of these smart stupid people I meet in my online travels are liberals. That’s because I mostly travel online in liberal circles. Their liberalism is sincere but what they are before---we are, I am---are neurotics.

Neurotics who are people who can’t see past their own hang-ups. Life for them is generally a daily cataloging of the reasons they’re unhappy with themselves and so with the world.

Most of us are unhappy in our own skins. Most of us are dissatisfied with our situations. We work the wrong jobs. We went to the wrong schools. We love the wrong person. We were born to the wrong parents even if we were born to good parents, that is, to parents who may have been the best of people and good parents to our brothers and sisters but didn’t get us, didn’t know how to raise us, didn’t know what to do to help us grow up happy and well-adjusted---those of us who were lucky to grow up with parents or with parents who weren’t monsters. We live in the wrong places. We live in the wrong time.

We keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

This is the human condition, and it’s hardly been unobserved. It’s the over-arching theme of Western Literature, from The Iliad and the Bible to King Arthur to Dante to Hamlet to Moby-Dick to Portnoy’s Complaint, tragedy and comedy: Life stinks. The world stinks. People stink. I stink. And there’s not much I can do about it. The other arts---music, painting, dance, sculpture---are rebuttals to literature’s pessimism. No, they insist, life can be quite beautiful. So can people. So can you. Politics, at its best, progressive politics, liberal politics is, in a way, of applying the message of those other arts to life. Maybe, politically active liberals say, life does stink, but it can be made beautiful or at least we can put more beauty in it, if we all work together.

Politics of the kind we call here in the U.S. of A. conservative takes a more literary view but without literature’s compassion and sympathy. Life does stink, the world does stink, people stink---other people, I mean, and there’s nothing worth doing that I can do to fix that, so I might as well make the most of what I’ve got, and if I’ve got a lot, that’s my good fortune and your bad luck, and if I don’t have a lot, well, I’m keeping it to myself and you can go find your own somewhere else, preferably far away from me.

So, of course, normally, I’m all for thinking and acting politically, Progressively, liberally.

But it’s not looking at the moment, as I read post after tweet after essay after op-ed after status update, that’s what’s going on online. Mostly it looks like people are using politics as a form of what the self-help books used to and for all I know may still call blocking. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, you may have heard.

People are talking politics as a way of not talking about how they are personally unhappy and don’t know what to do about it. They don’t like who they are but don’t know who else to be, but instead of admitting that, they blame the world for their unhappiness but skip the part about their being personally unhappy. Basically, they’re using politics to avoid dealing with their own unhappiness.

Which is only human. Leads to a lot of stupid thinking and bad writing but still, people can’t help being people.

When I get mad is when I see supposed Progressives and liberals being illiberal. When their expressed political views are their way of saying, I would be a lot happier with myself if YOU would think and act the way I think should should think and act to make me happy with myself. When they’re thinking is literary: Life stinks, the world stinks, you stink, and here’s what we’re going to do to change that, by which I mean, change you into a version of me.

Sun’s coming up. The world is about to get a lot smarter and more beautiful.

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The painting up top contradicts my first sentence. The world isn’t a gloomy and dreadful place in Pieter Breugel the Elder’s The Kermess, otherwise known as The Peasant Dance. And it helps make my point about the arts other than literature having as their over-arching theme that life can be beautiful. William Carlos Williams wrote a poem about it, which contradicts my point about literature being about people stinking and being stupid. Actually, I believe that the final statement about literature’s over-arching theme should read “and there’s not much I can do about it except rage, despair, weep, laugh or…dance!”

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

Dishwashing lesson

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, November 29, 2017. Posted Sunday morning, December 10.

Dishwashing triumphalism: See how they sparkle and shine?

Dishwasher's on the fritz again. Not a big deal. Minor fix is all it needs and the part's on the way. But it does mean we've had to wash our dishes by hand and I've had to learn a lesson I've learned before.

I’m the only one in this house who know how to wash dishes.

I'm not the only one who does dishes. What I mean is I'm the only one who knows how to do it quickly and efficiently and get them all clean. Sparkling clean. Even the forks.

This is something I learned how to do in high school.

Learned it from the girl who would eventually become my first girlfriend, the one who looked like Elizabeth Montgomery not the one who looked like Scarlett Johansson, and it's a case of cause and effect.

Christmastime my junior year and her senior year---Yep. She was an older woman.--she hosted a caroling party for our gang and after we went out and frightened the neighbors and set all the dogs to barking her she and her step-mother served us up a hearty dinner, after which I volunteered to help out with the dishes.

I was not trying to be a thoughtful guest.

I realized that it was my chance to be alone with her under circumstances in which we would either awkwardly try to hide our feelings for each other or even more awkwardly try to reveal the. We were both on the shy side.

So for half and hour we stood side by side, pretending there was nothing on our minds but getting those dishes clean as fast as we could so she could then serve up dessert, and talked about this and that and while we were at it she taught me all I know now about how to wash dinner.

There's more to the story but I have to sign off here.

Dishes are piled up in the sink.

The Fighting Irish

Posted Wednesday afternoon, May 24, 2017.

I’d walk out on Mike Pence too. Then I’d walk back in just so I could walk out on him again.

Notre Dame graduates walk out of their own graduation ceremony to protest the policies of commencement speaker Vice-President Mike Pence and the man he works for, Sunday, May 21, 2017. Photo by Robert Franklin, South Bend Tribune, courtesy of AP via WeStandforND.

One of my terrifically talented and intelligent nieces graduated from college last week. My nephews are all talented and intelligent too, but last Saturday was her day. I was just getting my head around the fact that she was a college student and now here she is a diploma-ed adult with a career. And this is the point. The day she graduated she was already not a student any longer. She was a social worker.

She's one of the lucky ones among her cohort to have landed a good job in her chosen field right away, before her first student loan payment is due. When she starts a conversation at work with how are you today it's not going to be a prologue to What can I get you? It will mean Tell me how badly you're hurting today and let's see what we can do to ease the pain? It's a career in which she's setting herself up for daily heartache, frustration, and disappointment, and it's not going to make her rich. But there's a good chance it will make her happy and proud because other people's lives are going to be better thanks to her.

Now, here's the thing.

She's twenty-one. She'll be twenty-two next month. To us old folks, that makes her just a kid. She's not, of course. We don't give kids the responsibility for other people's mental health and well-being.  And that's what we've done. We as a society that relies on good-hearted, hard-working, selfless kids like her have put the lives of her clients in her well-trained but as yet inexperienced hands. She'll have supervision. She'll have colleagues she can turn to for help and advice. But mainly she'll be on her own and her clients will have to trust her professional judgment and expertise, not to mention her character, virtue, and wisdom. It's a weighty responsibility but, naturally, I think her clients are in good hands.  More to the point, though, is that her now former college and her now employer believe she can handle it, even at the age when she's only recently become old enough to order wine with dinner when she goes out to celebrate her graduation.

This needs to be kept in mind when talking about the Notre Dame graduates who walked out of their own graduation ceremony Sunday rather than sit there and listen to our despicable President's despicable Vice-President spout lies masked in pities and banalities. It's not that they are so young. It's that they are so old. No kids walked out on Pence. They were all adults, some of them like my niece with careers already underway.

Most of them were twenty-one or twenty-two. That means most of them are old enough to be elected to the United States Congress. If any of them are going into the military they are most likely going in as officers. If they're going into the Army or Marines, it's with the rank of lieutenant and if they're deployed to Afghanistan they will probably be commanding troops in a combat zone. Men and women nearly twice their age will be depending on their judgment and expertise to keep them alive.

Less dramatically, those who are going to be teachers will be standing at the fronts of classrooms come fall. Those who are going to be engineers will be helping to design and build bridges that better hold up under traffic. Those going into finance and business will be making (often instant) decisions that will affect the economic well-being of countless other people. Those who are going to become social workers are...well, see above.

They should not be assumed to be spoiled children. They should be assumed to be what they are. Adults about to take their place in the world, which is a way of saying, about to take over our places in the world. Where do fifty-something pundits like Ron Fournier who have had their time in the sun get off telling them what to do with theirs?

For those of you who've been happily unaware of his existence until now, Fournier is currently the editor of Crain’s Detroit Business but for most of the Presidential campaign season he was the senior political columnist for the Atlantic. He’s made his bread and butter as a pundit weasel-wording online and on the television bobblehead shows about how it's "Both Sides!" Whenever Trump said something appalling or was revealed to have been even more despicable than was already known, Fournier could be counted upon to, while appearing to acknowledge the appallingness or despicableness of whatever it was Trump said or did, try to mitigate it with some version of “But Hillary's just as bad.”  Fournier tweeted in response to the walkout thusly:

Don't be afraid, kids. Don't run away from opinions and policies that don't conform to your own. https://t.co/GPbLLOT2lq

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) May 21, 2017

Brad Thor mined a similar vein of hypocrisy and phony outrage.

I'm old enough to remember when people could sit for 20 minutes and listen to ideas they didn't agree with. We used to call it "civility." https://t.co/n1AAkBRcCI

— Brad Thor (@BradThor) May 22, 2017

Thor is a best-selling novelist whose merits as a writer of political thrillers I can't judge, not having read them, not on principle, he just wasn’t on my radar. At USC one of his teachers was T.C. Boyle, so maybe he learned a thing or two about the trade. But he also appears to be one of those writers of thrillers and detective novels who come to believe they are one of the manly man heroes of their own books. Thor wears a leather pilot’s jacket and sports an astronaut’s haircut in his author photos even though there’s no mention in his biography that he ever served in the military. Going by his Twitter feed, his webpage, and a quick Googling, I think it's safe to say he's not a liberal. He’s a member of the Heritage Foundation and was one of those #NeverTrump types who jumped on the orange bandwagon late in the campaign when it became real to him that Clinton might very well win. The prospect of a liberal Democratic woman President struck him as more terrifying than the prospect of a raving, corrupt, sexually predatory, racist, crypto-fascist one, so, you know, an expert on civility.

Mike Pence has no opinions worth listening to except to be appalled by. He’s hardly a deep thinker with ideas that can’t be plucked out of a grab bag of conservative cliches. He's a rigid ideologue, a religious bigot, an ignoramus, a smooth and well-practiced and proven liar, a hypocrite, a cynical opportunist, and a sanctimonious and self-satisfied prig, as well as being not very bright and having been an incompetent governor---the reason he was available and willing to be Trump's running mate is that his other job option was to be humiliated in a futile bid for re-election. But he wasn't there as any ordinary supposedly wise elder with controversial or challenging opinions.

He was there as the Vice-President to the most corrupt, divisive, and deliberately destructive President in our nation's history, and I say that fully aware of how destructive and divisive Nixon and Reagan were and how corrupt Nixon was and how much corruption Reagan tolerated in his administration. If they both look worse in comparison, it's because they had more time to accomplish their dirty work and because they were much smarter and much more competent than our Mr President Trump. But Trump is hell bent on burning the country to the ground mainly out of spite and lunacy but also out of vanity and greed, and Pence is an active and enthusiastic assistant arsonist.

I don’t know why Notre Dame invited him. It seems like inviting trouble. It also seems like a deliberate insult to the graduates, all of them, not just the ones who walked out.

If they’re immigrants or the children of immigrants, if they’re Muslim, if they’re LGBT, if they’re black or Hispanic or just about any minority, if they’re women…

If they don’t have good jobs lined up yet or they’re going to grad school and will need to depend on their parents for medical insurance and their parents don’t have insurance through work or if they themselves have a pre-existing condition, which the Trump Administration and the House Republicans have given insurance companies permission to define as any sign you’re not invulnerable and immune to serious disease and might need to see a doctor in the future for more than just a flu shot…

If they’re going into medicine or science, if they’re going to be teachers, if they’re artists…

If they’re going into the military or are in the military or are veterans…

If they’re planning to have children someday or if they have children…

If they have student loan payments looming, which is virtually all of them...

If they’re hoping to live in a country where the air is breathable and the water drinkable and in a world that isn’t drying up and blowing away or sinking under rising seas…

It they’re just good-hearted, decent-minded people who care about what happens to their fellow Americans, particularly those who are poor and unfortunate…

Then Donald Trump’s agenda, which is Mike Pence’s agenda too, is a threat to them and all they hold dear.

So the students who walked out weren't running away from his opinions, horrifying as they are---and as if Pence wasn’t governor of the state where they went to college for most of the time they’ve been there and hasn’t been in the national news constantly since Trump chose him as his running mate and he’d be passing along an opinion they didn’t already know he held.

As for his “policies”, they are Trump’s policies and they are deliberately designed to be destructive and hurtful.

And they weren’t being uncivil by refusing to sit and listen to “ideas” they disagreed with---as if Pence has ideas as opposed to partisan, political convictions and self-serving prejudices masquerading as religious pieties.  No rules of civility require you to listen to in obsequious silence to an evil-minded political hack actively engaged in hurting you and your family and friends mouth platitudes meant to excuse and rationalize the hurt he's inflicting.

These were not special snowflakes who couldn’t take having their feelings hurt. They are graduates of one of the best universities in the country. They've demonstrated their ability and willingness to sit and listen to ideas and opinions that challenge their previous thinking. They've also demonstrated an ability and willingness to interrogate and challenge those ideas and opinions in return and to recognize and reject the ones that are specious, meretricious, pernicious, and just plain wrong. They are not students, not anymore. They are young professionals or soon to be professionals, and they were exercising the sort of judgment based on their learning, intellectual training, and (admittedly still limited) experience and their sense of right and wrong that we're already relying on them to exercise as they begin their careers.

They were, rightly, protesting.

Pence works for a President who is racist, cruel, and vicious. Pence himself is a bigoted, sexist, malicious, and mendacious human being. The grads weren't running away. They were demonstrating their disgust. They were doing what they could at the moment to show they will not be part of the destruction, the cruelty, and the hatred.

They're also graduates of a Catholic university where they learned to spot someone who is opposed to just about all they've been taught about charity, compassion, social justice, the love people owe to one another.  They’ve listened to the Pope, and they know Francis is not a fan of this President.

The walkout was organized by a student activist group called WeStanforND. Here’s the statement they issued explaining what they were doing and why:

On May 21, Notre Dame students will stage a walkout during the commencement exercises in
solidarity with all members of the Notre Dame community affected by the policies advocated by
U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence. “The participation and degree-conferring of VP Pence stand as
an endorsement of policies and actions which directly contradict Catholic social teachings and
values and target vulnerable members of the University’s community,” said Xitlaly Estrada, Notre
Dame undergraduate.

During his time as governor of the state of Indiana and now as a Vice-President, Pence has
targeted the civil rights protections of members of LBGT+ community, rejected the Syrian
refugee resettlement program, supported an unconstitutional ban of religious minorities, and
fought against sanctuary cities. All of these policies have marginalized our vulnerable sisters
and brothers for their religion, skin color, or sexual orientation.

Pope Francis has bestowed upon the world a call to support Syrian refugees, to acknowledge
and respect the humanity of sexual minorities, and to bring down all walls that separate us. Luis
Miranda, a graduate student, noted “at Notre Dame, we cherish the values for which Catholic
social teaching stands and we cannot stand still when an injustice is being done to our sisters
and brothers.”

Following the Notre Dame’s mission to “create a sense of human solidarity and concern for the
common good that will bear fruit as learning becomes service to justice,” as members of the
class of 2017 we will walkout during the commencement exercise. “Like Father Hesburgh, we
seek to stand in solidarity with the vulnerable,” said Bryan Ricketts, undergraduate. We will walk
out in silence, with respect for the human dignity of those with whom we disagree and with an
invitation to the rest of the community to build an inclusive future together.

We invite students, faculty, and families present to join us during this walkout and to use the
hashtag #WalkOutND to share your support.

The issue isn’t whether these graduates were right to walk out of their own graduation ceremony. The question is why didn’t every good Catholic along with every other decent-minded person in the stadium walk out with them?

Less broken

Mined from the notebooks. Saturday, April 29,  2017. Posted Saturday morning, May 6.

Mowed the lawn this morning. This is news for two reasons.

First is...I. Mowed. The lawn!

Haven't done that myself in I can't remember how long. Ken and Oliver took over the lawn mowing duties a long time ago. But I regularly pitched in until my back problems made that impossible. So it’s been at least three years. I've been worried about the slow progress I've made recovering from the surgery. Seems to me I ought to be climbing mountains and lifting cars by their bumpers by now or at least it shouldn’t wear me out to make a trip to the grocery store. But this morning, as I was pulling into the driveway after dropping Oliver off at work, I took a look at the grass and saw that practically overnight (it seemed) it had gotten high enough to lose small children in it and I said to myself, Guess it's time for the first mow of the season.

Ken was still asleep but I didn't even think about waking him. He sprang out of bed as soon as he heard the mower and came rushing out to help but I waved him off. I had developed a rhythm. I only did the front. He mowed the back and the sides after I finished. And I'll probably feel it later and really hate myself in the morning. But I did the job all in one go and didn't collapse when I was done or even feel like collapsing. In fact, I did a little yard work afterwards. I cleared out some spots in the shrubbery that were overgrown and made two trips to the compost heap at the town dump. I feel like doing more but I'm taking Mom Mannion's favorite piece of advice: Don't overdo.

The mountains can wait till next week.

Now, the second thing that makes this news is that the mower started right up. First pull. 

This surprised me so much I almost took my hand off the control bar or, as it's identified in the manual, the operator presence control bar so I almost withdrew my operating presence and let the motor shut itself down.  I was expecting some reluctance on its part about getting back to work, not just because it'd been in hibernation since October. Oliver and Ken had been complaining that it was hard to start, sometimes needing ten good hard pulls and then it didn't exactly roar to life. often it sputtered, coughed, and died, necessitating another set of pulls. And even once it got going it was hesitant and prone to conking out. There was discussion of buying a new mower. I put the kibosh on that out of mix of frugality and pride.  Probably all it needs is a tune-up, I said. And I can do that. To which Ken and Oliver, seconded by Mrs M, responded, That'll be the day.

Truth is, though, when I rolled the little beast out of the garage and gassed it up,  I was actually expecting I'd have to spend the morning and was even preparing myself to having to finally give in and go shopping at Lowes. But when it kicked right in, I remembered.

That day the other Mannions thought wouldn’t come came. I tuned it up last summer and even did a minor repair. Changed the oil and the air filter. Put in a new spark plug. And replaced the governor spring. That spring, which "governs" the engine’s speed, had stretched out over time so that the engine wasn’t opening up. It was a, quick, cheap--about three bucks for the part---and easy fix, although since I had to take off the engine housing to get at it, it felt complicated enough that I was full of self-congratulation at my handyman skills when I had things put back together and the thing actually worked. This came back to me slowly as I set to work. The reason I'd forgotten was that it was one of the last things I did before going into the hospital.

This probably doesn't strike you as as big a deal as it is to me, but you should know that Oliver has joked that my home repair projects are usually a matter of making things less broken. Well, the lawn mower is actually fixed. I'm proud of this, obviously, but now that I 've mowed the lawn I'm proud of something else.

I'm not fixed yet but I'm less broken than I was.

How about that?

Trash Day: An Aubade

Posted Tuesday morning, January 17, 2017.

Why does Trash Day fill me with sadness and dread?

“Road Block” by Norman Rockwell. Courtesy of the Saturday Evening Post.

7:40 a.m. Trash day. Still dark. Neighborhood full of noise though. Trucks rumbling up and down the streets. Two companies, two trucks each, one for the recyclables, one for the trash, two bins at each house. Brakes wheeze, hydraulically, sneeze, cough. Motors growl as the robot arms reach out, grab, lift, dump, and set back down the bins. Bins go down with a clatter and and a hollow slap as their wheels hit the ground and their lids flap back into place or not, hanging open behind, smacking the backs of the resettled bins. But that’s all it is, noise. It’s depressing.

I used to look forward to trash day. I’m not talking about when I was a kid and just watching trucks at work was fun and exciting and practically an adventure by itself. I’m talking about recently, while living here as a grown-up homeowner. Just a few years back. Cheered me up, standing at the window with my coffee, watching. Now it fills me with sadness and dread.

Lots of things do that these days. Nothing to do with the election. Not everything’s politics. Not everything can be solved and salved by politics. I’d feel sad and full of dread if she’d won. Things are weighing on my mind that, considered selfishly and self-interestedly, are of more pressing concern. Probably why I’m not as upset as I otherwise would be, as I should be. Things are going to get harder, again considered selfishly and self-interestedly. He’s going to see to that. But at the moment I’ve got enough to worry about to keep me anxious and miserable. But I don’t think that’s all that’s behind my trash day melancholy.

It’s the noise. Or, rather, it’s the noise that’s missing. The sound of voices. The crews talking to each other. The neighbors calling out good morning to the crews. The crews calling out good morning back. There are no crews. Each truck has a single driver who doesn’t get out of the cab. You can’t even see him in there. I wave but I don’t know if he sees it or waves back. He might as well be a part of the truck. In a way, that’s what he is. The human component of a machine designed to pick up the trash and that’s all.

Once upon a time and not all that long ago, human beings picked up our trash. Their trucks were just big wagons and wheelbarrows they rode on and used to haul their loads. But those humans did the work. There were at least two humans on each truck, usually three. But if there were only two the driver routinely got out to help his partner with the bins. And when he did and when he didn’t and it was only the other guys moving things around at the end of the driveway I could wave at them from the front window and they’d see me and wave back. Often I’d step out on the porch and call out good morning and thanks, guys, as if they were doing me a favor and not a paid for service. And this went on up and down the street and all around the neighborhood as the neighbors did the same and then men waved and called back to them too.

That’s what trash day was, a calling together of neighbors. The noises of the trucks and the voices of people were the sounds of the community waking up and beginning the day as a community, all us lonely isolates escaping from our nightly atomization and finding comfort and cheerfulness in each other’s company again.

Now it’s just noise that wakes us up but leaves us still all alone in the dark.

And it’s a sign and a portent. Every day more and more of us are rendered useless and obsolete by machines. Every day we have to rely on each other less and less. Every day there’s yet another reason not to have to talk to yet another previously necessary human being. I’m no fan of attributing political outcomes to any one thing, of saying things like “She lost because of x or y or z,” but every time a well-meaning liberal pundit or politician says “It’s not trade, it’s automation” I want to roll out the tumbrils myself. As if people are happier to know that their jobs are being taken from them by robots instead of someone in Mexico or Vietnam.

The day is coming when the trash essentially collects itself, when the trucks drive themselves and operate their own robot arms. When the trucks are robots. But we don’t need or want self-driving trucks. We want and need trucks that drive themselves intelligently. Trucks that make judgments and know to keep a look out for darting pets and small children. That expect hurried commuters to come backing out of their driveways without looking. That day is a ways off. I hope a long way off.  We don’t need or want another set of human beings to become obsolete.

I’m thinking of cancelling the service and hauling our trash and recyclables to the transfer station myself. It’d be cheaper. Save us fifty bucks a month. And it’s not that far from here and I go there often as it is to drop off yard waste for compost. But the main attraction is that John, the guy who oversees things down there for the town, knows me and calls me by name. It’s the wrong name but I don’t care. I’m really not sure his name’s John. But when one of us waves hello to the other the other waves back. 

Don't open that closet, McGee!

From the Facebook TL. Monday morning, November 28, 2016.

So. Time to bring down the Christmas decorations. I'm feeling sufficiently recovered that I can do the job by myself. First time I've been up to the store room, which is more of a closet, actually, since before the operation in July. All this time, though, for four months, Mrs M has been putting things "away" up there.

Mrs M is what is clinically known as a "chronic over-stuffer."

I open the door...

You know the running gag from the old radio show Fibber McGee and Molly?

Tain’t funny, McGee.