With the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre only five months back already a fading memory and the next mass shooting closing in–me, you, who?–we must keep the tragedy of  gun craziness alive.

If you hate gun violence check out http://everytown.org and join.  Some of their facts:

Every day 96 Americans, 13,000 a year, die by guns!
For every 1 killed by guns 2 are injured!
62% of suicides are by guns!
7 children and teens are killed every day by guns!
Every month 50 women are shot to death by a husband or partner!
Black males are 13 more times to be killed by guns than white males!
A gun in the home increases the chance of a woman being killed 5 times!
America’s gun homicide rate is 25 times that of the average high-income country,  7 times second place Canada, 361 times Japan and Korea!

Google “mass shooting statistics in the United States–Washington Post” for a June 29 update.

On the heels of Parkland, knowing this too will blow over, with NRA checkbooks out, Trump and Congress said, “Now is not the time to act.”  Pardon me that’s Bullshit!  Now is the time to act!

If you never have and never will again, please share this!

With Super Patriot Trump insulting and snubbing decades and centuries old allies while kissing up to Vladimir Putin  this bears revisiting.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Putin’s Man

For invading and annexing Crimea Russia was kicked out of the “Group of Eight” leaving the “G8” the  “G7”: Canada, France, Germany,  Italy, Japan, The United Kingdom, and The United States, countries who account for two-thirds of net global financial worth.  In his latest instance of siding with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump calls for Russia’s reinstatement into this body.

Intelligence agencies and Congress are convinced Putin worked to engineer Trump’s election.  Donald disagrees.  If Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is a “Witch Hunt” why waste time and energy obsessing and trying to kill it?  President Trump calls an American exercising his right peaceably to protest a “son of a bitch,” but says not a negative word, not a single negative word, against a leader who murders opponents, who rigs his own and meddles in American elections.

Amicable relations between individuals and nations are always good.  I wonder, however, at the motive behind President Trump’s repeatedly sucking-up to an off-again on-again adversary while sometimes rebuffing centuries-long allies?

Exotics of international finance and relations aside, could our President’s defense of Vladimir Putin have more prosaic roots?  Given Donald Trump’s financial wheeling-and-dealing, confessed and alleged sexual shenanigans, paying $130,000 to a porn star, visits to Russian, and given that Moscow bedrooms may have eyes, I wonder?  Does the Dictator in the Kremlin have the goods on Our Guy in the Whitehouse?

Of course Putin may have no leverage whatsoever with Trump.  Leverage or not, the fundamental questions is, in America’s 2016 Main Event why did Russia’s Heavyweight Champion choose to sit in Trump’s corner?  Simple.  Vladimir knows among seasoned punchers and counter-punchers in the International Arena Donald’s a Lightweight.  Photos of “Arab Spring” bouts taped to his locker room mirror, Vladimir Putin is acutely aware that matched toe-to-toe Hill and Bill’s tag team would take him down.

A pink caterpillar,
You crept across the freeway of childhood
–fragile, vulnerable, trusting.

Safely across,
You wrapped yourself in the chrysalis of adolescence
–and wondered.

Now, reborn a woman,
You unfold in the brilliant morning sun and fly
–on iridescent, Technicolor wings!

 

As far back as I remember I knew I’d be a writer.  Besides people, the only thing I really love is writing.  Two obstacles: I have as much talent or interest in English grammar as ballet lessons.  And I am, in the end, a Southern Utah farm boy.  Despite these handicaps, over the decades I’ve continued to scribble, now keyboard, journals, poems, stories, even a novel.  Will I be “published”?  Self-publishing is a narcissist’s last hope.

Mama was  a teacher.  She loved language.  Mama read me the Mother Goose Book of Fairy Tales  more than once.  I have her Major American Writers.  Do American Literature classes today read Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Emerson, Hawthorn, Longfellow?  Mama memorized poetry and “Dramatic Readings.”  Now we’re sophisticated.  Mama’s poems sound melancholy and saccharin.  Dramatic Readings is  forgotten.  The writing Mama loved is as archaic as cooking on a wood-burning stove.

Mama took “Ideals”, a magazine devoted to “old-fashioned ideals, homey philosophy, poetry, music, inspiration, and art.”  I emphasize “old-fashioned ideals.”  Launched on the heels of World War II “Ideals” reflects a time America was optimistic.  A large part of ideals is innocence.  Has America lost innocence?  Have we lost optimism?  Did ideals go the way of black and white television?  Despite how discouraging things seem right now, thinking of folks I know I think not.  “Ideals” is still in print.

In High School they told us to be engineers.  I had as much interest and aptitude for engineering, science for that matter, as learning to knit.  I’m a writer.  I know how to write.  I learned the sound of good writing from Mama.  But there’s this old bugaboo, grammar!  Nominative case, objective case,  subjunctive case, participles, infinitives, and coordinate conjunctions make my head hurt.  Diagram a sentence?  I’d rather have an enema!

BYU Freshmen had to take English.  Each term we met with our professor.  After going over my assignments Dr. Lyman asked if I had considered majoring in English.  English for god’s sake!  I couldn’t have been more stunned if he hit me in the face with a water balloon!  This fellow slashed up my papers with a red pencil.  Did I have to point out that for me English was out of the question?  I could never conquer grammar.  Seeming bemused Dr. Lyman assured me grammar was not a problem.  For me, fresh from a dozen years of public education, this was as believable as being told water runs uphill.  Decades down the road Natalie Goldberg and James Fry finally clarified and confirmed Dr. Lyman’s claim.  And it’s not mastering English grammar!

Cormac McCarthy’s craftsmanship and skill in revealing nature and letting people act and speak for themselves takes my breath away.  Rereading The Orchard Keeper or No Country for Old Men is like seeing Van Gough’s “The Starry Night” for the tenth or hundredth time; it’s far beyond mere words or paint.  It’s said, “Art holds up a mirror to life.”  McCarthy’s writing is a flawless, transparent pane through which readers view the world and see and hear characters with nothing whatsoever in between.  Cormac McCarthy would flunk Freshman English.  Correcting No Country for Old Men Dr. Lyman would need a fistful of red pencils.

As I see it understanding the “mechanics” of English Grammar has as much to do with good writing as a gift for auto mechanics does to French Cuisine.  Having said this, I understand the need for my Harbrace College Handbook.  It’s linguists’ and editors’ heroics in discovering or imposing order on the chaos of the English language, its exhaustive and meticulous organization of mind-numbing issues, leave me in awe.  I confess occasionally to falling back on its carefully ordered contents.  (“To occasionally fall back” would split the infinitive.  Right?  I could use the gerund “falling” back.  Just showing off.  A little learning is a dangerous thing.)

Obstacles notwithstanding, Handbook at my elbow, and ever haunted by the specters of punctuation, verb tense, participles and sentence structure, I continued to scribble–now keyboard–ideas, poems, stories, essays, one and the skeleton of a second novel.  Not surprisingly, a dozen or so queries yielded boiler-plate rejections.

There’s consolation in knowing what gets published depends not on the craftsmanship or value between a book’s covers but economics.  And rightfully so.  Ink on paper is only the end product of a very spendy business.  What gets published is what a publisher believes will sell.  Written today, Hamlet would make it to theaters, bookstores, libraries and classrooms, only if someone believed sales would at least cover expenses.  Nevertheless, walk into a library or Barnes and Noble, browse a hundred-thousands square feet of shelves, bookcases, and tables piled chest-high.  I’m humbled and bewildered  by what gets published: Baking With Goose Grease, The Complete Book of Buttons, All About Butter Churns, Courtship of the Sub-Saharan Dung Beetle.

Natalie Goldberg and James Fry write about writing.  They finally clarified Dr. Lyman’s assertion regarding English grammar.  Fry , if memory serves, “Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, or grammar.  That’s why we have editors.”  Natalie’s Rule 7 for writing, “Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, and grammar.”  I knew that!

Only now I recognize the second issue frustrating my writing.  I’m an Emery County farm boy!  Emery County farm boys do not become writers.  Emery County farm boys become farmers, ranchers, cowboys.  They brand and castrate calves.  They use pocket knives to spear roasted Rocky Mountain Oysters from a ’38 Packard hub cap on a branding fire.  Emery County farm boys become mechanics, drive dump-trucks and bulldozers.  They pound, dig, and chop.  They lug sacks of wheat.  They heft bales of hay.  Emery County farm boys grow-up to sweat, swear, and spit!  They do not read T. S. Eliot.  They damn sure don’t  memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  (Have you read it?)

While I write, the Emery County farm boy feels guilty.  Rather than tapping away on this silly keyboard, pushing words around a monitor, I should be hammering, shoveling, pitching hay, milking cows, feeding hogs, mucking manure!  Doing something useful!  I should be outside mowing the lawn–Karen does it.  Washing the car–Take it to the car wash.  Splitting firewood–We don’t use firewood.  Trimming the roses–We don’t have roses.

James Fry has a second assurance for the boy.  As I recall, “Don’t tell people you’re a writer.  They’re puzzled and wonder why you don’t get a job.”

I’m 81, happy, content, and unpublished.  People and Life got in my way.  I could have pestered publishers more aggressively.  Robert Pirsig queried over a hundred before one took a gamble.  The result, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, my hands-down, all-time favorite.  Still, in my book you’re not a writer if you’re not “published.”

A handful of bogus scriveners, like me, who can’t cut it commercially self-publish.  Sites like WordPress are cheap and easy.  Hoping to guilt-induce defenseless family, friends, and other unfortunates into reading, we shamelessly dump our verbal rambling onto the internet.  I’m reminded of the boy who received a book about penguins from Grandma.  When Mama insisted on a thank-you note the lad wrote, “Dear Grandma.  Thank you for the book.  It tells me more than I want to know about penguins.”  Blogging’s like that.  It’s an ego thing.

So I’ll end with a shameless suggestion.  If you know someone who is burned out on Youtube and Social Media or otherwise needing distraction consider pointing them my way or telling me.

I am amazed and troubled by how far a dropped object can travel.  Drop a multivitamin in the bathroom.  It has to be within a three-foot drop zone.  After ten minutes on hands and knees, despite a flashlight and magnifying glass I give up.  Karen worries.  Her dog, Jamie, can sniff out a flea in a coal bin.  For Jamie a half-inch capsule is a dog biscuit.  For me it’s not a problem.  Dogs needs vitamins.  Karen finds the pill under a sock on the bedroom floor.  That troubles me.

Finding is a women’s thing.  Finding and gathering is in their genes.  They’re born to it.  Men are hunters not finders.  It’s said some men can’t find milk in a refrigerator.

Drop an aspirin in the kitchen?  Don’t waste time on the obvious places.  Look in the family room under the coffee table.  Never mind the door between is closed.  That troubles me.

When America’s military needed chocolate that “melts in your mouth not in your hand” Mars Incorporated came up with M&Ms.  Loose a red M&M on the living room carpet.  After crawling, moving furniture, and lifting the couch you give up.  A week later your wife finds a red M&M in the upstairs bathroom behind the toilet.  That troubles me.

There are more brown M&Ms.  I wonder about that.  Are reds, blues, yellows, and greens smarter?  Can they move faster and farther?  Are browns less clever or agile?  If dropped, a brown M&M may not make it out of the room.  Installing the 48 inch flat screen TV a year later, you find a brown M&M by the baseboard behind the entertainment center.  That troubles me.

Invented not only not to melt but to last M&Ms have an extended “shelf life.”  I have no problem dusting off and eating a year-old brown, or any color, M&M.

When a bridesmaid lost a diamond earring, wedding guests crawled around the altar, moved flower arrangements, checked seats two rows back, and came up empty.  Feeling responsible, at $100 an hour the father of the bride hired a private detective.  After meticulous investigation around and a hundred feet from the nuptials site and querying the wedding party, the Super Sleuth could not crack the case.  A month later, taking the erstwhile flower girl’s wedding frock from a closet her mother heard a “click” on the floor, the truant jewel!  Wedding videos revealed that at no time were the bridesmaid and flower girl closer than ten feet apart.  That troubles me.

Regarding spirits, ghosts, channeling, telepathy, UFOs, and Sasquatch, all that “paranormal” nonsense, I’m a skeptic.  Still, when I drop a peanut on the living room rug, then tip up my recliner and crawl around and Karen finds it at base of the refrigerator I wonder.  That troubles me.

Having brown-skinned babies taken from their mamas breaks my heart.  There is, however, something to consider.  These parents broke the law.  Every day native-born Americans are jailed and imprisoned.  Their children become wards of the state.  It is inaccurate and unfair to brand all these folks “unfit parents.”  Many if not most are good-enough parents who, like the illegal immegrant parents, broke the law.

I love little balsa-wood gliders,
the kind we used to buy for a nickel
and now cost a quarter
or fifty cents.

It seems like magic when they
pause in the air
and dive
and swoop
and glide
and settle silently on the grass
like a leaf
or a feather.

Little balsa-wood gliders make me feel very good inside.

I am very glad God made
little balsa-wood gliders
and air
to glide in
and kids
to throw them.

 

 

 

 

For invading and annexing Crimea Russia was kicked out of the “Group of Eight” leaving the “G8” the “G7”: Canada, France, Germany,  Italy, Japan, The United Kingdom, and The United States, countries who account for two-thirds of net global financial worth.  In his latest instance of siding with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump calls for Russia’s reinstatement into this body.

Intelligence agencies and Congress are convinced Putin worked to engineer Trump’s election.  Donald disagrees.  If Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is a “Witch Hunt” why waste time and energy obsessing and trying to kill it?  President Trump calls an American exercising his right peaceably to protest a “son of a bitch,” but says not a negative word, not a single negative word, against a leader who murders opponents, who rigs his own and meddles in American elections?

Amicable relations between individuals and nations are always good.  I wonder, however, at the motive behind President Trump’s repeatedly sucking-up to an off-again on-again adversary while sometimes rebuffing centuries-long allies?

Exotics of international finance and relations aside, could our President’s defense of Vladimir Putin have more prosaic roots?  Given Donald Trump’s financial wheeling-and-dealing, confessed and alleged sexual shenanigans, paying $130,000 to a porn star, visits to Russian, and given that Moscow bedrooms may have eyes, I wonder?  Does the Dictator in the Kremlin have the goods on Our Guy in the Whitehouse?

Of course Putin may have no leverage whatsoever with Trump.  Leverage or not, the fundamental questions is: In America’s 2016 Main Event why did Russia’s Heavyweight Champion choose to sit in Trump’s corner?  Simple.  Vladimir knows among seasoned punchers and counter-punchers in the International Arena Donald’s a Lightweight.  Photos of “Arab Spring” bouts taped to his locker room mirror, Vladimir Putin is acutely aware that matched toe-to-toe Hill and Bill’s tag team would take him down.

Karen says write something interesting, something people might read.  I have an idea.  Don’t know if it’s what my Editor and Darlin’ has in mind.

At age 81 I’ve become aware how much energy it takes just standing up, moving.  As a boy on the farm I hauled hay, shoveled ditch, pitched manure, climbed trees, walked, and ran a lot!  I was the fastest kid in South Emery High School.  A land surveyor I hiked Nevada and Utah deserts, climbed Alaska mountains and slogged through swamps and tundra.  If you’ve not walked over tundra, imagine hiking miles on mattresses.  In middle age I took up running.  Over thirty years I jogged thirty thousand miles, ran over 160 races including 7 marathons.  Today just plodding for a mile takes grim determination.  I’ve been tired, even exhausted, but given virtually no thought to a major cause of my fatigue.

When I’m not lying down I’m fighting gravity.  It is odd that only recently I finally confronted the culprit, the ubiquitous force tugging at my heels.  Of course I knew about gravity, experienced it, but real appreciation was academic, theoretical.  Curiously, at last looking the beast in the eye raises significant issues heretofore ignored or overlooked.

Back to theory for a moment, Albert Einstein said gravity is matter bending space.  When I don’t tighten my belt and my britches fall to my knees, it’s matter bending space.  Sure Albert.  Right.

In the fight against gravity sitting ranks next best to lying–more on lying later.  We say “sit down.”  We sit.  “Down” is superfluous.  Same for “sit up.”  Don’t need the “up.”  Except for kids.  Kids sit on their knees, one leg, one cheek, they slouch.  Parents and teachers order kids to “sit up.”  Adults slouch.  I never heard an adult told to “sit up.”

“Stand up.”  Here again no need for “up.”  If we stand it’s up.  Except for the military.  When a military maneuver ends the troops “stand down.”  As opposed to “stand up” I suppose.  But they’re still standing, except those who lie down.  It’s a military thing.

When I lie down I don’t fight against gravity.  Which brings me again to the up and down business.  I lie.  No need for “down.”  After countless boring hours in high school and college English, friend Phil explained lie and lay.  When I “lie” I place my body in a supine position.  I “lay” an object on a table; a chicken “lays” an egg.  Phil pointed out, however, that when I place the soft material from between a goose’s feathers and skin on a table I in fact “lay down.”  Understanding even a small piece of this lie, lay business I feel kind of smug.

You can “lay over,” but it’s not about kids or the military.  If weather or terrorists close LaGuardia your flight may “lay over” in Gander, Newfoundland–Gander, I like that name; reminds me of laying down.–  But why “lay over”?  Why not “lay up” or “lie down” in Gander?  Maybe its “lay over” because the pilot lays the aircraft on the tarmac.  Passengers and crew may spend a night “lying”–not “laying”–in a Gander hotel bed.  I heard “lay up”; don’t recall where.

I get side-tracked, better yet bogged down, by what my Harbrace College Handbook calls “appropriate form of the verb.”  Seven pages devoted to that mind-numbing lay, lie, laid, lying laying, sit, set, sat, sitting, setting business.  I’d really like to understand, but just seeing it my eyes want to cross.  I pity the poor folks who have to think about and write it down.  After passing a fifth grade grammar test Grandson Logan said, “Now I want to get that out of my mind as fast as I can.”  From the mouths of babes!

Fighting against gravity raises the business of beds, and it is business, Big Business!  Any evening on TV I see up to three or four bed/mattress ads: Mattress World, Bed Warehouse, BedMart, Tempur-Pedic, Sleep Number, not to mention JC Penney, Sears, Walmart, Costco, and dozens of other retailers.

There are couches, futons, and floors but mostly we sleep on beds.  Most spend a third of our life asleep.  It’s curious that despite buying, sleeping, and making love in them we give little thought or appreciation to beds.  Habitat is defined by beds.  A house without bedrooms is not a home.  Apartments have one, two, three, or more, and every bedroom has at least one bed.  Hospitals, jails, prisons, and hotels are defined by their numbers of beds.  Over a dozen Las Vegas hotels have thousands of rooms, and every room has one or more beds.  In America beds probably outnumber automobiles, even guns!  Consider the number of beds in Paris, London, Singapore, Tokyo.  Developed countries may have more beds than people.

The variety of beds is easily overlooked: twin, double, queen-size, king-size, bunk, rollaway, trundle, Murphy, sofa-beds, hide-a-beds.  Hammocks?  Hammocks are too uncomfortable for sleep, maybe a nap.   A nap is not really sleep.

On average we sleep seven to nine hours.  If I don’t get eight I feel hung-over, like when I used to get drunk.  It’s said President Trump gets something like six hour sleep.  President Trump needs more sleep.

Folks who travel: politicians, salespersons, entertainers, flight crews must sleep in many different beds.  Do they get used to it?  Do they wake rested?  In six months how many different beds does President Trump sleep in?

I just spent five nights in motel and relatives’ beds.  They were okay, but not my bed.  I love my bed.  I couldn’t be a politician, salesperson, entertainer, or in a flight crew.  Fighting against gravity I need sleep.

Friend Joe just put me onto Dale Hansen.  On Youtube his “Hansen Unplugged: Anthem Protest .  .  . ” articulates a feeling and belief with which I concur 100%.  These young men walk in Martin Luther King Jr’s footprints.  You may want to check it out.