I'm All About Solutions

Had a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast and a tumbler of V8 juice.

Pretty much took care of all my problems right there.

When The Meetings Are Over

The NFL Annual League Meeting is going on right now down in Palm Beach, Florida.

It is generally referred to as the owners meeting.

Has to be the most obnoxious collection of pretentious, privileged, rich, white guys sitting in a room anywhere on planet earth.

Every single one of these guys has a big, fat, head. Owning a football team is the ultimate toy for the rich. Fucking trump tried to buy a team many years ago, but was ignored by the league, fucking clown that he is.

Although there is irony in the thought of Jerry Jones thumbing his nose at trump.

These guys are hypocrites. They call the game "product." They pretend to care about protecting players from concussions, pretend to care about players' health. They only care about themselves.

They pretend to care about the game.

They don't love football, they love the prestige of owning a football team. It is merely an investment to them; players and coaches are inventory, pieces that can be used up, discarded and replaced without any thought to fairness or human dignity.

I imagine these rich fucks party their asses off nightly at these meetings. These pampered jack-asses who are surrounded by opulence and treated like royalty. Truth be told, if I was down there (I don't understand why I'm never invited) I would do the same. To the victor go the spoils.

Read a book on football written by Mark Leibovich called Big Game. One of many books on football that dot my bookcases. In it he tells a story of him interviewing Jerry Jones on Jerry's fancy-ass bus. Jerry was consuming large quanities of Johnny Walker Blue and Mark had a hard time keeping up. Of course the Johnny Walker Blue is a pretentious statement in and of itself - a standard 750mL bottle costs $240. And that's at New Hampshire prices, which are generally reasonable. A fucking 50 mL nip costs $20.

I love football, hate the NFL. Management has become corrupt (maybe always was), they are far removed from the reality of the game, they are self-serving, racially prejudiced, cold-hearted, bloated caricatures of what a team owner should be and what a team owner should represent.

I want to love Robert Kraft, but how stupid do you have to be to get caught receiving sexual attention in a massage parlor, getting swept up in an undercover raid? He was 78 at the time. The guy is worth $8.3 billion. He could fly hookers in from Hong Kong, for Christ sake, get his rocks off in the safety and anonymity of his own home, and fly them back to the Orient. No fuss, no muss.

That's what I would do.

I want to believe the original owners, people like George Halas and Tim Mara, absolutely loved the game and wanted to do the right thing. But I'm probably being naive.

Fucking Roger Goodell is nothing more than a corporate puppet, and a stiff, uninteresting guy who gets paid $63.9 million per year.

I imagine when the meetings are over, Palm Beach locals will sanitize every surface touched by these pretentious fucks.

A Whiter Shade of Pale

Got out of work at 11:00 last Friday night.

I don't necessarily like working that late, then again I do. Driving home from work at 11:00 at night feels dark and delicious. 

At one low point in my life I worked second shift on a menial, stupid job. Got out at 12:30. A.M. This is when my hair was still down to my ass. Summer nights, man - summer nights.

It was a short drive home but I'd take the elastic out of my ponytail, roll down my windows and let my hair whip around my head. Radio loud. I was a bit stupider then, so I also always had a beer going or a bit of whiskey.

Felt like freedom. Felt like rebellion.

The current situation is not quite the same - my fucking hair is short and I don't drink on the way home - but the radio is loud, it is late at night and the road is unpopulated. All the drunks are already home or in the drunk tank or still drinkin'. I feel more alive then than I do almost anytime else.

But that's not the point. Procol Harum is the point.

It's after eleven on a Friday night, I'm driving home alone with my thoughts and A Whiter Shade of Pale floats out of my radio.

My emotional reaction was intense. The mood of that song captured - in that moment - everything dark I've been feeling lately.

Everybody's dying.

People who are important to me, people who allowed me to escape the vapidity of my life, people who made me cry, made me feel, breathed life into my soul - people who provided for me a release that kept me alive - these people are dying. It's too finite. Too sad. It is reality in the form of the cruelty of life, slapping me in the face.

All of this was captured in that one song in that one moment.

Gary Brooker was the lead singer of Procol Harum - his is the voice that haunts your soul. He died on February 19 at the age of 76. When I heard of his death I was saddened. When I heard the song, I was shattered.

That song is iconic to anyone from my generation. Assuming you can still feel anything this far down the road.

When regular people die it is sad. Death equals the end of hope. When creative people die it is worse. 

Creative people have lightened the load of the common man, given them beauty to distract them. They leave their beauty behind, but their mortality bothers me.

Creative people should be immortal. In a sense they are, of course. But I'm talking physically immortal. So they can continue to create and soothe the lives of generation after generation. They should be given a pass.

What else do we have?

Every death like Gary Brookers amplifies the fragility of my own mortality. I take it personally. Sixties rock was my true birth, not some fucking hospital on January 1, 1954.

I am not doing much to protect myself lately. Kind of down. But I feel my anger burning. Anger in me is always a good sign, as opposed to depression, which is self-defeating (but hard to defeat).

I am stewing. I am heating up, I am restless, pissed off and aware. I stalk around the house but my brain moves quicker.

I am working backwards to where I was at the end of 2021.

I will be back on track shortly.

My sadness at the death of Gary Brooker is now a dark emotion breathing quietly in my soul. Along with all the others who inspired me, then died.

A Whiter Shade of Pale will crush me every time I hear it from now on.

Club Random

Bill Maher has a podcast.

He calls it Club Random because that is what he calls his bar at home and that is where the podcast is filmed. You can watch it on YouTube.

The only rule - no politics. I love the idea of this. He is talking to his guests as human beings and totally avoiding the topic of politics which, of course, is the main focus of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. Plus he is drinking and smoking, so he is very loose.

Episode 1 features William Shatner, which Carol and I watched yesterday.

Shatner is 91 years old, so naturally he brought thoughts of death into the conversation. Like if his appetite is failing him he wonders "Am I dying?" Maher talked about how life forces you to think about mortality as you age. Like the fact that he just mailed off his shit to be analyzed.

Patsy and Emmy Lou have taken up every inch of space in my heart and my soul. I did not think it possible for me to love another cat more than I loved Lakota and Maka but it has happened. I love them more than I thought it was possible for a heart to love.

When I look at them I think they will be the last pets I ever love. 

That is how I look at everything now.

My body is failing me.

I have prostate cancer. I am fat. Knee surgery coming up. And now it's my teeth.

While I was having an errant crown re-glued to a tooth, I mentioned that another tooth was bothering me. Dr. Feelgood checked it out and said "Oh, yeah - that's the tooth we identified two years ago as needing a crown."

I never had it done because old people are not allowed to have dental or vision insurance. Which makes perfect sense - teeth and sight are two areas that the elderly never have to worry about.

But there are always consequences to procrastinating about dental work. His revelation led to a round of x-rays and an appointment on Wednesday to have another crown installed. Total financial commitment - $2,000. 

They can patch me up, fix this, replace that - but the ultimate message here is that I am in decline.

Nothing can change that. It is a sobering thought.

And I am wasting my time with a part time job that devours time. I worked 36 hours this week. 4 days in the box office plus three shows. I'm supposed to work 20 hours/week. Eternal Disclaimer: My fault. I created this situation. No one to blame but me.

Thinking optimistically, if the job continues to eat up all my time, I will be distracted from the harsh reality of my failing health.

An annoying customer will say something stupid to me, I will respond "Fuck You", and then keel over and die.

Unfortunately, this will be sad for Patsy and Emmy Lou. 

When a pet dies, it is heartwrenching. It takes months to recover, along with liberal doses of whiskey. But humans move on and snatch up new pets.

When I die, Emmy Lou and Patsy will have no clue what the hell happened. They don't understand death. Thank god. They will just know that I am not around. These two cats who sleep in my lap every night, will be bewildered. They will be lost.

I wish I could shield them from this but I can't.

Patsy is lying in my lap right now as I write. She keeps looking up at me with the cutest cat face in history.

She is so precious to me.

It breaks my heart.

Quiet Reverie

 My quiet reverie is often disturbed by the shrieking of my soul.

Alone

 Ultimately, I just want to be left alone.

Deserve To Suffer

I give up the things that I love.

Started thinking about it when I read Andre Agassi's autobiography.

I love tennis. Always did. Played tennis a lot when I was in high school and I was pretty damn good at it.

Probably haven't played now for 50 years. Why?

I love to watch tennis. I rarely watch tennis.

I love playing the trumpet. And I was pretty damn good at it. First trumpet, first chair in high school (for what that's worth). Rarely played since.

I have a trumpet. My family gave it to me. I pick it up from time to time and play it and think "Gee whiz, this feels pretty good, feels so right." I don't pick it up again for 10 years.

Know what I don't do a lot of when I am home? Listen to music. Why?

Music is my life's blood. What the fuck am I thinking?

I could list five more "things that I love that I don't do", but I sense that you are getting bored.

I believe I have some deep rooted darkness in my twisted psyche that intentionally keeps me from doing the things that I love to do. As a form of punishment. All because my mother forced me to eat fish.

Subconsciously I believe I deserve to suffer. 

In the world of addiction and mental illness it is recognized that patients believe they deserve to suffer, and that they don't deserve happiness and peace, that they deserve lives of pain and struggle. They develop emotional, thought, and behavioral patterns that revolve around these toxic beliefs. They become self-hating and obsessed with their insecurities, and become self-destructive and self-sabotaging.

Hmmmmmmmmm............

Am I incapable of being happy? There's a word for that - anhedonia: "The inability to feel pleasure, a common symptom of depression and other mental health disorders."

Larry David and Richard Lewis come to mind. Two very close friends of mine.

Since I haven't lined up a therapist yet, I started talking to a hooker.

Turned out to be a brilliant move. Talking to her has led me to discover that I am brilliant. With a killer sense of humor and a deep, deep mind. An intellectual giant and superb physical specimen.

She makes me feel good about myself. At least when I'm with her.

It's early. I have time to clean up and play my trumpet, time to watch tennis, time to listen to music.

But..........................maybe I'll just sit in my recliner, sip whiskey and watch the Sweet 16 leg of March Madness.

Gotta conserve energy.

Gotta work tomorrow.

(Editor's Note: Psychology Today identifies laziness and procrastination as strong indicators of mental incapacity. Or, more generally, as indicators of a slothful approach to life.)