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Weak II

9 January 2016

No. 4,619 (cartoon)

My puppy is my treasure.

You should bury it.

10 January 2016

Another Slow News Day

A local Internet site, which devolved from an actual ink on pulp newspaper, published even more fluff today. That report was certainly not newsworthy, and neither was theirs.

Someone recycled a human body; that’s news?!

Everyone here recycles everything, including homo sapien carcasses. After all, they’re a rich source of nutrients, minerals, and the odd prosthetic device. It’s such a waste when they’re sent to cemeteries, which are really just inefficient landfills with good landscaping.

I look forward to the day when recycling center workers don’t send out a press release when they find a human corpse in the arrivals lounge.

Here’s an idea that I’m putting in the public domain in the hope that someone will implement it. Right now, every house in Sans Frisco has three receptacles for the bin women and men to pick up: a blue one for metal, paper, and glass, a green one for compost, and a black one for contributions to the landfill. I think we need fourth one for human remains. And even though I’m a chromophobe, I think cherry red would a cheery color—and most auspicious too—even though I’m not Chinese.

11 January 2016

David Bowie

David Bowie is dead, but everyone knows that. 1947-2016. Popped his clogs. RIP. And all the usual. I’m not going to eulogize him; everyone else is doing a fine job of that.

I’ve always been a bit disappointed in him, not because of the great work he did, but because of the great work he didn’t do. When he was my age, he was in the middle of a ten-year hiatus from releasing new work. This is probably unfair and inaccurate, but I always had the impression that he never worked that hard. That may or may not have been because of a scathing review I read of a lackluster performance he gave when he performed near me when I was young. According to the critic, he apparently didn’t put much effort into the concert and quit singing after only forty minutes.

Maybe he wasn’t feeling well, maybe he was just slothful. Who knows? Who cares? The answers, respectively, are, “not me,” and, “not me.”

I’m not really being that critical. At least he never did anything that was annoyingly mediocre. If every trace of all the purported work that Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, et al, made in the last thirty years were completely obliterated, I doubt anyone would notice. Or care.

Bowie was quite prolific in the last few years of his life. I wonder if cancer’s visit made him realize he wasn’t immortal? I fear it will take something of that grim magnitude for me to reach the same conclusion.

What if he’d done more to realize his potential? I think Arthur James Balfour had the answer to that rhetorical question.

“Nothing matters much,” he wrote, “and in the end nothing matters at all.”

12 January 2016

Five Days Later

It’s been five days since my sixty-somethingth birthday, and I’m relieved. Normally, I wouldn’t even notice such a nonevent were it not for recent eventful events. Lemmy died four days after his sixty-somethingth birthday, and David Bowie died two days after his sixty-somethingth birthday.

I’m not at all superstitious, but I do love meaningless numbers and correlations that really don’t correlate at all.

13 January 2016

Why Leave Port?

Don asked me if I’d like to sail here with him from Hawai’i. For free, even. Don’s a good, honest guy, and he does in fact have a lovely sailboat. It was certainly a legitimate, genuine offer, and one I decided to graciously decline after thinking about it for almost seven seconds.

First, while would I want to sail here from Hawai’i when I’m already here? I also noted that I’d have to pay for a plane ticket to the ukulele islands in order to get my free trip.

And then there’s the journey itself. I’ve spent days in the middle of the largest ocean on our planet, and only experienced two emotions. First, there’s the almost relentless tedium of being the middle of a place that’s flatter than Iowa and Kansas combined. The only time there’s a break in the boredom of being thousands of miles away from the nearest taqueria or Rainier Ale purveyor is when a violent storm threatens to lower your life expectancy to less than an hour.

I’m where I want to be. Don’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who can say that whilst sailing on a boat in order to get from here to there or vice versa.

14 January 2016

Then Ate His Beans!

Polly and I had lunch at one of my favorite taquerias, Quemando los dos Extremos. I told her that whenever I hear bouncy Mexican accordion music it makes me salivate and think of burritos; she said it makes her think about drug dealers.

She was talking about narcocorridos, the ballads narcotics dealers commission to celebrate their brutality and business prowess, if that’s not repetitiously redundant. She suggested that I write one since it’s a very remunerative job.

I thought about it for half a minute and came up with a few lines.

I killed some sucker
with my M16;
I chopped off his head,
then ate his beans!

“That’s great!” she enthused, “You should promote yourself.”

“First,” I replied, “business bores me. And even if it didn’t, those are not the kind of people I’d like as clients.”

“Those are also the kind of entrepreneurs whose offers you won’t live long enough to decline more than once,” she advised.

That was indeed good advice, I shall remain gainfully self-unemployed.

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart