A cook is now following my blog.

Anything that an average human does three – or more – times a day, will become a feature of religion, culture, history, science and speculation. Eating may be the most human of all activities and whether you do it in a gastronomic cathedral that boasts 5 Michelin stars or at the local burger trough, the activity is universal and meaningful. For more than a decade, food was a central feature of my life. I worked in 12 different restaurant settings from the short order, to the institutional and finally, the fanciest houses in various towns. I even wrote restaurant reviews at $25.00 a pop for a local newspaper. I was Remy the Rat and Anton Ego all at once. I have cooked everything from Beanie-Wienie casserole to Rahm Schnitztel Frieburg and I have flambed everything from Bananas Foster to Steak Diane. This was a means to an end.

The restaurant business paid my tuition in undergraduate and graduate school and my work in restaurants also guaranteed me at least one good meal a day when money was tight. I personally tested Julia Child’s observation that, “people who love to eat are the best people.” They are.

It started early for me as I looked at a needle point sampler in my grandmother’s kitchen that reminded you: “laughter is brightest where food is best.” The sentiment was attributed as follows – Old Irish Proverb. Yep. food is very important to me. It is no surprise that food is central to all major religions. The bread of life is on the menu, as are locusts and wild honey. From the last supper, to the Buddhist monk’s rice bowl we are all looking for soul food.

Imagine my disappointment today as I sought a simple cup of coffee and was told by two establishments that they did not serve it. I come from a part of the country where coffee is available everywhere, from the doctor’s office to the DMV…it is everywhere. I was suddenly in the desert – lost and roaming. Both restaurants suggested that I go to one of the branded coffee outlets. Do we have to go to Peet’s or Starbucks for a simple cup of Joe? One place had coffee and no pastry to go with it…chaos. Are we suffering from the craft beer business model that forces us to travel to satisfy our cravings for the simplest comforts? No coffee or IPAs after 1 :00 pm? It’s inhumane. Don’t they know that Voltaire was said to drink 40 cups a day?

I DIGRESS.

We will improve as a culture when a new respect for food and its healing powers becomes a part of our lives. Can you really dislike anyone when you are sharing a Napoleon with them? I think not. We can repair the Russia relationship with a very large pig roast. Maybe, a five course meal is the cure for most of the world’s problems. With this in mind I am deliberately trying as many 92128 restaurants as time-and funds-will allow. I will not forget the importance of sharing food with friends.

Bon Apetit! Thanks for smelling what I’m cooking.

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” -William Carlos Williams

I learned early that there was a place called the writer’s world and I began to explore that geography. The place was marked by the momentous and the picayune and it was salted with dialog, phrases, scenes and observations, additions, subtractions and re-readings. The land was bounded in language and the environment was intense and variable. In this land of nuance and change it was important to acquire certain skills that helped you capture meaning and some semblance of truth that would assist navigation. Years later, I think the most important survival skills are few…but hard to acquire. First, intense observation and a love of the meticulous are necessary. It also helps to have a very broad definition of the miraculous that includes the knowledge that the seemingly incidental can be truly momentous.

Every story begins because something happened and that something prompts a daisy chain of events that is narrative. In the beginning of my writing journey, I only wrote beginnings, the simple re-telling of events. I wrote from the margins and simply observed the actions of humans without interpretation or empathy. As the years went by and I began to understand the mystery of the human condition I began to venture into the psychology – the emotion – that came with the events I was describing. Eventually, I grasped that we have ONLY beginnings because our lives are so improbable. Joyce Carol Oates once said, “an unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart.” The mystery is shared by all and so is the thorn.

I tried all the exercises: paragraphing for speed, automatic writing, descriptive exercises, sample dialogue…the lot. Today, I simply keep a journal because I fondly believe that my observations may someday lead to a type of truth and I try to remember the words of Albert Einstein – ” Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

I have arrived at the place where writing is fun and fun demands variety. I give myself the right to go on about anything that interests me from the subtleties of human foibles to the dimples on a golf ball. In a way it is all worth noting. I have also learned the lesson given by Edgar Rice Burroughs: “if you write one story it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” I keep whacking away.

Finally I want to thank the person who asked me a very important question…

“Why do you write a blog?”

When situations deteriorate to the point of polarization certain things get ritually executed…subtlety, nuance, complexity are all sacrificed for an absolute dualism that makes human connection impossible. Many of our greatest thinkers have plumbed the depths of this phenomenon. Nietzsche, Freud and Kierkegaard – among many others – have elegantly and eloquently measured the devolution to a conflict between the light and the darkness. In the third century AD a Parthian thinker named Mani posited a cosmology that was completely dualistic: a good spiritual world of light was in constant conflict with evil darkness. We have entered this world today.

We keep hearing that America is at a tipping point, that it is time to choose between two world views in direct opposition. We have become both Jekyll and Hyde and certain inputs will push us to the side of darkness…or of light. Our choice has become simple: between the light of inclusive democracy and the dark of exclusionary oligarchy.

In a way it is the choice between life and death.

Thinkers have used two Greek gods to personify the poles. Thanatos, the god of death is in opposition to Dionysus the god of creativity, life, energy and love. We are now seeing these two forces at work. Thanatos brings us a death wish, trauma, depression and a rage for self annihilation; Dionysus suggests the rage to live, the creative energy and a view to the future. Right now -in America- this choice becomes increasingly clear. We are either builders or experts at demolition.

The death energy is a downward spiral that bends us to an arc of destruction. We become fascinated by what we can’t do, can’t allow and can’t construct. Life energy spins us upward toward inclusion, the future and hope. Our choice has become a simple one… and each of us must decide which journey we will take.

I pray we choose wisely.

In a way it is freeing that our choice is a simple duality, without subtlety. It is easy to step over a line in the sand and take residence in the area of our choice. It is time for all Americans to choose. That is the tipping point.

My recent birthday was a break in the action of living in which songs were sung and time for reflection on the game was provided. As my life enters the late innings it seems wise to consider how the game will end and how we got to this point in the contest.

As we age, ambition is replaced to some degree by humility and the rage to succeed morphs into a desire to help others. You can lift less weight, hike shorter distances and feel the aches and pains that have come with the game but your vision also clears and you play better defense. You will compete to the end and close without the need for relief pitching. It’s your game until the final out.

When I was very young, I listened to baseball games on a transistor radio that was safely cradled under my pillow. My imagination was nurtured by the theater of the mind …I reconstructed the game in mind only… couldn’t see the action but recreated it vividly. Almost smelled the grass, felt the sunshine, saw Nellie Fox send a stream of RedMan onto the perfectly groomed base path. In a way this exercise was the beginning of empathy as I imagined the feelings of players in tight situations.

As the game changed, I changed with it.

Writers from Walt Whitman to George Will, Kinsella and many others have presented the subtleties of baseball for decades. Whitman argued that baseball was “America’s Game” but it didn’t become that until 1947 when Jackie made it so. Yet, it is America’s game because it reflects our goods and bads so clearly. Baseball brings our racism, courage, cleverness, obstinacy into stark relief. I once owned a Roberto Clemente baseball card. On the reverse were his lifetime stats: .317 hitter, NL MVP, 18 years in the Bigs. The front of the card showed this great player above his name which was given as BOB…his Puero Rican heritage was sanitized for the white market. Josh Gibson spent years away from his true resting place…Cooperstown. We have come a long way since then.

I’ve come a long way, too.

I have seen enough innings to know that sometimes you win, sometimes you loose and sometimes it rains. I know excellence is not a matter of race. Baseball has been a passion, a metaphor and a means to understanding human nature. Finally, I agree with Garret Morris:

“Baseball have been berry berry good to me. .”

My love of baseball slang took me to another fascinating place. For those who have read the Sherlock Holmes tales, the name Moriarty, the brilliant sociopath James Moriarty comes to mind. It is not the evil nemesis that is referred to in baseball. The brothers George and Bill Moriarty played in the major leagues and while Ed did a single season with The Cincinnati Redlegs in 1909, George played for 13 years on four different clubs. Neither player was truly outstanding but George is now remembered in baseball lore because of a single quirk: he often took a blind swing at a pitched ball. That’s right, George would swing at a pitch WITHOUT LOOKING AT IT. In defiance of baseball’s cardinal rule-keep your eye on the ball- George miraculously managed to hit .251 lifetime and get a managerial job after his playing days were over. He is the blind hog who found an acorn.

George should be the patron saint of today’s Republican Party.

While the high, hard fastballs of pandemic, domestic terrorism, police misconduct and voter suppression are riding in on our hands, these people close their eyes and swing at transgender rights, Doctor Seuss and the fiction of a “cancel culture.” They do not see the pitches coming but they swing hard in the hope that if they hit something it will travel far. They are constantly doing a moriarty while the game is on the line. Their lifetime batting averages and most Americans will suffer from this approach at the plate. Making policy has everything to do with precise reads on release points, spin, movement and velocity…you have to read the pitch in detail in the hundreths of a second that is the window of observation prior to a swing commitment. Or, you can close your eyes, flail and hope for the best.

I don’t have much hope for the Republicans becoming dangerous, accomplished hitters.

We will be given attacks on morality, stop the steal, and Dr Seuss and it will do our society no good. We will see one moriarty after another. Occasionally, contact might be made but it probably won’t do much to effect the game. What is needed is more time in the batting cages and a commitment to seeing things as they are from release point to the bat.

Sooner or later, people with too many moriarty approaches are no longer on the team. I hope they start to keep their eye on the ball.

We shall see.

We have just experienced the joy and sense of renewal that is baseball’s opening day. Not long ago a baseball phrase was used and that phrase needs to be restored to its former glory. The phrase should have the same cache a “can of corn” or “yellow hammer” …it is the highly descriptive sobriquet “Dick Smith.” A Dick Smith was a player so disengaged that you barely knew his name. He’s the guy who sat in silence in the dugout and did his progressions and hitting practice away from the team. Dick was aloof and the noble idea of team never seemed to cross his mind.

In my years of coaching, I discovered a few things that stand the test of time and the most meaningful discovery is that team play and team values can be no less than exalting. When the team is playing for each other there is a level of inspiration that defies description. Our sports movies depict this elevated emotion. At the end of Hoosiers, Coach Norm’s last words to his team says it all, “I love you guys.” The line of cars winding down an Iowa road in Field of Dreams tells the story of the fevered contagion that spreads when a great game is played by great players. Sadly Dick Smith is the kid who was there but didn’t show up.

Our current version of the American Game includes too many Dick Smiths. Too many players who sit quietly as the game passes in front of them. While the American Team of doctors, voting rights activists, volunteers and others are playing within a team concept, the Dick Smiths remain somewhere else. They won’s wear a mask or seek a vaccine. They are above it all. When the outcome is in the balance they fail to show up.

Experience tells me that the joys of team play require effort, respect for the game and-above all- the desire to perform in order to “get the win for your teammates.” Can you imagine not diving for a ball in the seventh inning of a no-hitter? Your pitcher and your team deserve your best effort at all times. My team-the Gang of Eight- is a group of clutch players that go the extra mile to make life better. They are teachers, workers, and all-around doers who understand the idea that they are on a team that plays for everyone’s betterment. These are the folks that you want on your side.

I hope everyone joins their local team and makes some plays whether they are routine or not. In the long run (we are in extra innings re: covid) we can experience the inspiration that comes from team victories. Mostly I hope we get to a point where giving a damn is America’s Pastime.

Don’t be a Dick.

America’s anthem was not written by Francis Scott Key, Buddy Holly, Ira Gershwin or Aaron Copland, rather, it has been composed over time by a number of contributors. America’s “song” is a symphony of violence.

Symphonies have four distinct movements and our nation has heard them all. The first movement is brash and lively with the pioneer and the cowboy at the forefront; the second movement is slow and lyrical and it played out on the killing fields of the civil war. Movement three is a dance that G-men and gangsters participated in and finally we enter the rollicking finale of mass shootings. At very stage of the music we find a common thread in all of our heroes from Hawkeye and Billy The Kid to the soldier, the majestic criminal (Billy the Kid, Dillinger etc.) to the insanity of the serial killer. At every stage the central figures in the composition are packing heat.

Our love of guns – and what they do – is central to everything in our history.

On the world stage, we ascribe to the formula put forth by historian Samuel Huntington… “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather in its superiority in applying organized violence.” Violence is certainly our history and our theme song. In fact violence has become so central to who we are and what we have become that it is easy to feel that we can’t sing a different song. As Richard Pryor quipped, ” you can’t talk about fucking in America. People say you’re dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that’s cool.” Yes, violence is the new eroticism.

Different takes on the violence issue abound. We are faced with every form of chop logic from a “good guy with a gun” to “guns don’t kill people… people kill people.” Insanity. We seem to forget the simple fact that guns are designed to blow holes in things…from targets, to game, to your loved ones. Now we support psychotic positions like open carry in spite of the fact that writer Greg Vaughn states so well: “when a man carries an instrument of violence he’ll always find the justification to use it.”

We need to sing a new tune.

If we don’t dance to a better tune, thousands more will die. We can no longer live in a place where mass violence has been domesticated. Currently we live in a place where comedian Craig Ferguson reminds us…

” you better watch out

you better not cry

you better not pout

I’m telling you why

Cause Santa Claus might put a cap in your ass.”

In this country- in these times- that is a real possibility.

The heart of the American character and American Destiny is the road. Our heroes – both real and fictive – are road warriors. In Tidewater days we have Daniel Boone traversing the Cumberland Gap, George Rogers Clark seeking the Northwest Passage…and we continue westering with Lewis, Clark, Pike, Bridger and Carson. We have the foundational fiction of Natty Bumpo that leads to Sal Paradise. Americans are made to journey. Often, we don’t know where we are going but we never lose the feeling that we are halfway there. America is not a destination, but an adventure on a road that leads over the next horizon. We are in near-perpetual motion, racing to the next best thing…whether it is a new refrigerator or a mission to Mars.

Perhaps it is time to take the exit from our manic journey. We need to put down some roots …to sit and reflect on who we are and what we have become. Our dramatic contacts with racism and the pandemic in recent days demand reflection and a level of thinking that can’t occur at highway speed. Perhaps our new frontiers are frontiers of the mind. There is a difference between mere movement and effective action.

The covid rescue plan is being voted on in the senate as I write this and I am encouraged by the large scale vision it embodies. Sometimes it is wise to take the time to slow down and think globally… to resist the “white line fever” of our usual passage through space. We can only go so far on intuition…sooner or later some deep and deliberate thought will be required. There is a lingering doubt that frantic American road warriors can slow to a speed that makes thinking possible. The Buddha says this: “if you are quiet enough, you will hear the flow of the universe” and while I am not naive enough to believe that the average Congress person will ever reach this level of insight or clarity of thought, I remain hopeful that we will seek the quiet place of reason.

The Bill just passed.

We have lost a great deal in pandemic times and we have become a nation without morals. We are no longer a national group of likeminded people with a vision of the future, we have become a mob or – more correctly – a large mob composed of smaller mobs. We do not have any particular set of values that clarify the distinction between right and wrong. A system of shared beliefs that directs the creation of societal benefits is no more. We have lost our way.

This troubling state of affairs is the direct result of the violent death of truth.

If we agree with Ghandi who said, “morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality” it is clear that we are unmoored … we are at sea. Smart folks have defined three types of morality and each is in very bad repair. Moral absolutism is the view that actions are by their very nature right or wrong. For example, murder is an act that any civilized society would consider wrong. We place a serial killer in prison yet a person wearing a uniform in a war receives promotion and decorations. This leads us directly to moral relativism which states that moral judgments differ from culture to culture…or they differ in different situations. Moral universalism follows logically…this is the position that all similarly situated individuals are subject to strictures particular to their context. Universalism gives us the Geneva Convention, the Hippocratic oath and a host of other standards that exist in particular contexts. In each case, moral systems are built on a structure of shared truths.

Now that truth is dead for some, it seems that anything goes. Our best word for that state of being is anarchy. Since we are now in a place where alternative facts are readily available, the center cannot hold.

We must return to some form of shared vision.

Perhaps the pandemic and the increased violence of our times will provide us an opportunity to reassess our world. Perhaps we can edge toward an agreement upon what type of government we wish to have. Or, we can plumb the depths of empathy and how we will protect other lives. We can wear a mask and opt for democracy or disregard the health and well being of others as we race to oligarchy. These are yeasty times and so much is bubbling up.

We may be saved if we all embrace the idea of legacy. We can reject the monetary joy of power and wealth and opt for an other-centered world…a world that our children will live in. We can take a global view. We seem to have reached the point of no return and it is time for us to choose. What will be our purpose and how much moral wreckage will we tolerate?

I hope our truth will incorporate a common vision of a better world. I hope we embrace the insight of Immanuel Kant, “morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”

Thinking beyond today – beyond ourselves – is a moral imperative.

It seems a good time to consider life’s absurdity as we convict and simultaneously absolve persons of crimes and we find ourselves suspended between the two poles of life’s magnificence and its fundamental ridiculousness. As Bernard de Fontanelle observed, “the magnificent and the ridiculous are so close that they touch.”

Any human that has ever asked an existential question has encountered this proximity and noted that this relationship makes it clear that absurdity is like a Bowie knife… any way you swing it you will find a sharp, cutting edge.. Absurdity can move in two essential arcs, one positive and the other wickedly destructive. A move in one direction and we will find laughter, nuance and creativity. Reverse the slash and we find conspiracy, demagoguery and deadly certainty. One side gives us Who’s on First and the other will assert that the holocaust is hoax. We must be careful. We must be deft because our absurd nature is unique. We possess as Thomas Hobbes put it, ” the privilege of absurdity, to which no other living creature is subject, but man only.” Yes we own this and we have seen it recently with great clarity.

We are hungry for meaning, so hungry that absurd assertions are often taken as truth. This misapprehension does not always come from laziness or stupidity, rather they seem to arise from our feeling of terror in a world that denies understanding and offers no context for our existence. The absurdities of racism, MAGA and Xenophobia gain traction among those who have a rage to believe in something and to belong with someone. Context. This is a lonely life without the comforts of certainty and belonging and we will suspend our judgment to secure both.

This week we were presented with a series of assertions – backed by massive evidence – that a certain individual committed crimes. Those that wished to prove the assertions went to tremendous lengths to illustrate and document the crimes but the mass of evidence – including first person accounts – achieved an absurd result: exoneration. This result is not simply a matter of Machiavellian strategy it indicates an embrace of absurdity that is truly malevolent. Ben Franklin could have been watching certain people who knew the truth of the crimes and chose the absurd arc: “The people heard it and approved the doctrine and immediately practiced the contrary.”

I am a big fan of absurdity but not this kind. Often, nonsense is hilarious and the masters of the absurdities are creative and heartwarming. This weeks encounter with absurdity was not of that ilk. It was willfully stupid and shortsighted. Frankly, it was offensive. Let’s leave the absurdity business to The Three stooges, SNL, Mark Twain…to those who can safely wield so sharp a weapon.

Absurdity is a privilege that needs to be conferred wisely.