The curse of living in interesting times

(570 words)

I don’t remember the first time anyone said it to me or, really, if anyone ever did say it to me or if I’m just imagining it. But I’m always startled whenever I hear it said with the such sunny affirmation.

“May you live during interesting times.”

Its origins are obscure. One debunked theory is it isn’t a well-wish at all, but is actually an ancient Chinese curse. Fake news from a synthetic fortune cookie.

Sounds about right.

I’ve never once heard it said like a curse. Want to hear a curse?

“May the fleas of a 1,000 camels infest your crotch.”

Now, that’s a curse.

This “live during interesting times” always sounds like it’s meant to be a positive, 

like something you say before you down the shots of Bacardi 151.

Hoo-ahh!

Wishing that someone live in interesting times is like wishing expectant parents an interesting delivery room experience.

The situation is already plenty interesting.

North Korean missiles, Syrian chemical warfare, Arkansas executions, Aaron Hernandez hangs himself, MOAB, Sarah/Ted/Kid yucking it up in the Oval Office, Russian bombers cruising Alaska, WWIII scenarios being discussed by mainstream rationals.

Billy Joel says he didn’t start the fire?

Who did?

Gotta be somebody to blame.

“We Didn’t Start The Fire” in 4 minutes and 51 snappy seconds chronicles a tumultuous four-decade epoch from 1949-89.

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray … Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron … Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex, JFK blown away

What else do I have to say?

We’re getting the current events equivalent between each commercial break on our 24/7 news channels.

Not that long ago, I’d enjoy spending about an hour each day reading the morning papers and then be pretty much done consuming news the rest of the day. I’m not sure what I watched when I was free to watch TV, but I can probably guarantee some of it included reruns of things like “Green Acres.”

Now I have to fight the urge to either listen to cable TV news on the car radio or watch cable news on TV. 

There’s just so much going on and I want to keep up with who from somewhere godforsaken around the world or from just around the block is getting blown to smithereens.

Maybe I’m subconsciously watching in the hopes the news will give me a head’s up for when I’m due to duck, sort of like a weather forecast but with terror warnings instead of high and low pressure systems.

I yearn to be bored.

I long to turn on CNN and hear Wolf Blitzer say, “Well, there’s no news today so for the next week or so we’re just going to point the camera at this lava light.”

I fear we’re addicting ourselves to our anxieties.

We check our phones like lab rats conditioned to get sugar cube rewards with each bell tap. We update our Facebook status and set the bar high for that week’s SNL host.

We’re frazzled.

The religious-minded among us say we need to be born again to find true peace.

I’ll settle for being bored again.

I wish I could bank some boredom and make a withdrawal whenever the world gets too crazy.

Yes, there ought to be a boredom bank. Make your deposit and watch your principle grow with the only kind of interest that interests me.

Related …

Who can help me quit caring so much?

Make Billy Joel channel permanent. Now!

Getting real angry about fake news

Real trees, fake news and Trump

PG halts local delivery

Getting real angry about fake news

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I’ll remember yesterday as the day a man with fake hair who spent the last eight years peddling a fake news story about presidential birth origins spent the day decrying fake news about urinary recreations.

It pains me that at the time when so many people choose to be hyper-partisan about real news coincides with the time when those same people choose to abandon those most skilled at providing it.

There’s a difference between being skeptical of real news, which is healthy, and ignoring real news, which is dangerous.

Instead of absorbing the smorgasbord that is a well-rounded daily newspaper, we opt for hand-held distractions and shallow video substitutes.

It’s like for the first time in history humans are engaging in deliberate illiteracy.

I know a guy who brags about never reading newspapers or books — traditional staples of wisdom, creativity and intellect — and ridicules elites renown for their intelligence.

Know what happened to him?

In eight days he becomes our president.

I think the reason Trump relies so heavily on his family's opinions instead of a traditional braintrust is he doesn’t trust brains.

I do and I disdain having to live in an era when our leader’s default reactions to every challenge is either bluster or blame.

He calls his victory an historic landslide — “a mandate” — choosing to dismiss the more than half the country who did not vote for him.

Understand, I’m giving him a chance. A lot of my friends have very sound reasons for supporting him.

It’s a pity so many of them can only express those reasons with either rage or ridicule.

I was hoping a man who brags about the size of his hands would use one of them to reach out to those with whom he disagrees.

But he’s doing things that are ensuring his honeymoon is ending before the limo makes it to the hotel. Polls say his approval rating is 37 percent.

Of course, all my frothing friends on the left say it’s only going to get worse. They believe the fake news stories that say our president elect is a Russian spy who pays prostitutes to do on his bed what our old weak-kidneyed cat used to do on ours for free.

They all seem sensible compared to the fake news all my loony friends on the right so eagerly swallow. 

I’ll not list all of them here -- just google "Comet Pizza" -- because I really ought to wrap up this essay on fake news and try to move on to some real work.

But the people have spoken. And what they said can’t be printed in a family newspaper and even if it was, who’d bother to read it?

He thinks Meryl Streep is overrated as an actress. I disagree, but have no frame of reference to judge whom he thinks is great.

Maybe it’s the guy who played Chachi.

So I’ll not argue Meryl’s on-screen merits. I think she’s terrific.

But after the Golden Globes, I think she’s underrated as a speech maker. She aptly articulated everything I fear about the Trump presidency.

It seems certain to further coarsen what’s left of our vanishing civility, our sense that we’re all in this together. 

He lost the popular election by 3 million votes and declares he won in a landslide.

He appoints a climate change denier to head the federal agency to oversee how our government deals with things like changing climates.

He belittles the men and women who run the intelligence agencies he’ll soon rely on to make national security decisions.

He cruelly mocks a disabled reporter then denies what we can see with our own eyes.

And this is all ripe for hostile interpretation in a country where one side sees black and the other adamantly declares it’s white — and don’t get me started on race issues.

God, I only wish the news was fake.

Related … 

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Trump’s no jackass; he’s under-qualified

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Farewell, Sarah, America’s flirt

Who can help me quit caring so much?

Trump dominates August tweets

My truths/Weiner's lies

Anthony Weiner’s been in free fall for nearly seven days now and we’re still not sure if he’s hit bottom.

But you can bet a squad of reporters are pursuing spanking allegations. And, yes, they’re bound to be crack reporters.

He’s now in big trouble for all the lying. He must not be able to help himself because here are three consecutive lies he told while apologizing for lying:


• “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Well, take it from me. He was thinking, “Gee, this might get me laid.” That’s a powerful motivation even for men who haven’t spent long stretches in prison. Guys think about this all the time and we know exactly what we’re thinking when we think it.


• “This was a destructive thing to do.”

Actually, it was more creative than destructive. I never would have thought of taking those kinds of pictures and sending them to any of the 85 people who follow my Twitter account -- and I consider myself a creative sort. Plus, if nature and social media would have taken their logical course he might have taken part in creating a brand new constituent. That’s what Schwarzenegger did.


• “I’m apologetic for doing it.”

A huge whopper. He’s apologetic he got caught and finally had to fess up to his wife.

When does a rich and powerful man ever have enough? 

This is a guy who is on a first name basis with Wolf Blitzer.

Me, I’m not even sure I’ve ever even seen a wolf in the wild, let alone one prowling the CNN set of The Situation Room.

I felt cheesy doing it, but I did track down the twitter pictures he sent when I heard he was a fitness fanatic.

I’m as competitive as the next guy.

My body’s in an odd place right now -- and I’m not talking about being located 10-feet above and not seated in my favorite bar stool.

Parts of my body are in the best shape they’ve ever been while parts of it are in the worst.

My upper body is ripped and it’s mostly been due to boredom. The guy that used to live here left a pull-up bar.

I remember seeing it and thinking, man, I haven’t done a pull-up since the 8th grade.

So I started doing them. Now I can do 10, mostly in a row.

Yet while this is going on my stomach has gone flabby and is popping the gut buttons off heirloom lawn mowing shorts.

I can’t tell whether I’m buff or a beer-bellied slob. It’s very confusing.

So I thought I’d let you, my readers, decide.

That’s my torso pictured above.

If you find it sexy, feel free to tweet it around the world with all your provocative endorsements.

And let me say this: I know exactly what I’m doing. It makes perfect sense. And I’m proud to have thought of it.

At least until my wife busts me. 

Back when meltdowns were quaint

It hasn’t even been a week and I’m already nostalgic for days when sobering meltdowns had less to do with damaged core reactors and more to do with Charlie Sheen.

In fact, few words in history have changed their meanings as dramatically as meltdown, a term that has its actual roots in ice cream consumption.

This from the March 1937 edition of Ice Cream Trade Journal: “The (featured) ice cream melts down cleanly in the mouth. Due to the clean meltdown, a cooler sensation results in the mouth than with gelatin ice cream.”

Yes, I’m one of those nutty ice cream trade journal collectors.

Actually, that’s the first citation of the term’s usage from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Until this week, it hadn’t dawned on me just how popular the term meltdown had become. Meltdowns have been reliably splendid entertainment -- as long as it’s not happening to us.

Our celebrities meltdown. So do our 4 year olds. And, gadzooks, so do the nuclear power plants we construct on earthquake-prone tectonic plate shelves.

I don’t doubt every precaution was taken, but can’t help but think in 50 years history-savvy comics will refer to the incident and punchline it with some variation of “What the hell were they thinking?” That is assuming earth lasts another 50 years.

The energies we can’t live without are all killing us.

I see pictures of devastated Japanese clutching smart phones and wonder where they get the energy. Certainly, the charge has by now died right along with tens of thousands of their godforsaken countrymen and women.

Maybe holding the phone gives them some Teddy Bear kind of comfort.

I wonder if you could go back 25 years and say, “Okay, you can have all the cheap power you want, but at some point that power source will fail and contaminate you and your land for the next century. Your choice: cheap, deadly energy or reduced energy availability that’s going to cost you a fortune.”

Guaranteed, we all take the pig-out option.

It’s happening here throughout Pennsylvania where Marcellus Shale drilling is making instant millionaires out of struggling farmers and, it seems, everyone else (except, of course, land-poor bloggers like me).

But extracting techniques couldn’t be more loathsome. Roads sufficient to bear heavy machinery are constructed deep into the woods like the ones in which I live. The big diggers are hauled in and loud, unmanned drilling operations begin to raise  their ruckus.

The drills go thousands of feet beneath the surface to release tiny bubbles of natural gas through a repulsive practice known as “fracking,” firing a toxic brew of chemicals, water and sand into the wells to crack the shale and release the gas.

Of course, we’ve all been assured it’s perfectly safe by the executives who stand to lose millions the instant any of it’s revealed to be anything other than perfectly safe.

To me it sounds like the recipe for an ecological catastrophe that that will one day have our mutant descendants asking “What the hell were they thinking?”

It would be less galling if there was some sense of responsible oversight and if I could see some public good in the way of revenues flowing within all those streams of poisoned water in places where my grandfather used to fish and my children frolic.

But newly elected governor Tom Corbett has vowed he wouldn’t tax the companies being enriched by the drilling. Pennsylvania, the state with the most abundant drilling opportunities, is alone in not taxing the drillers. Corbett’s new budget includes massive layoffs and the end to services many of our neediest residents rely on to function.

And what again makes me most furious is my long-ago vow that I’d keep this blog relatively profanity free.

Geez, I’d love to carpet f-bomb the crap out of Corbett, who seems like an otherwise decent gent, but is either a dunce or a crook on this pivotal issue.

So I look out my back porch and instead of serenity I feel impending doom. I tune into CNN and see a more urgent manifestation of a doom we all dread.

It makes me long for bygone days when I could enjoy a nice Mint Chocolate Chip meltdown in my mouth while watching the latest celebrity meltdown being played out like it was something really significant.

Simpler, less complicated times.

Like last Friday.

Death to Gaddafi

I do not consider myself the bloodthirsty sort, but when CNN broadcasts angry mobs executing Col. Muammar Gaddafi I’ll TiVo the kill.

Like I do with favorite sporting moments, I’ll likely watch it a bunch the first few weeks, then maybe once a month, then maybe once a year on the anniversary.

It’s something I may savor with a glass of cabernet.

He was the first contemporary tyrant I ever hated and you never forget your first.

He was always in the headlines for horrific and bloody mayhem when I was a young newspaper reporter in Nashville and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

To me, he is a Founding Father of state-sponsored terrorism. His money and menace were behind the 1972 Olympic killings and a string of deadly bombings throughout Europe in the 1980s. His bombs blew up discotheques, and machine guns paid for with his oil money slaughtered dozens waiting to board airline flights in Rome and Vienna.

He was an avid supporter of Iran when it held American’s hostage and later when it went to war with Iraq when Saddam Hussein was a key Middle East ally of ours -- and my how times change.

Ronald Reagan tried and failed to kill him with bombing raids in 1986, strikes that killed 45, including Gaddafi’s adopted daughter, but did nothing to deter him.

Then he and his henchmen were behind the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing of Pan Am flight 103 when it was 31,000 feet over Lockerbie, Scotland. The explosion killed 259 crew and passengers and 11 village residents upon whom the thousand pound chunks of debris without warning rained.

Two of the victims were local girls, Elyse Saraceni and Beth Johnson from  Greensburg’s Seton Hill College. The pair were returning from Europe to spend Christmas home with their families. I contributed coverage of the funerals and local outrage over the killings that remains unavenged.

The recollection of those poignant holiday losses still galls.

His body count may or may not be as high as Osama bin Laden’s, but his deadly aspirations have always been the same. 

That’s why I’ve been mystified by the change in Gaddafi’s stature over the last 10 years.

Admittedly, much about U.S. foreign policy mystified me over the last 10 years, but I’ve been most surprised about the shift in attitude toward Gaddafi by the people I count on to know better.

It was summarized thusly by David Blair, diplomatic editor of the prestigious Daily Telegraph in London. Here’s what he wrote in 2009:

"In his four decades as Libya's 'Brother Leader', Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has gone from being the epitome of revolutionary chic to an eccentric statesman with entirely benign relations with the West.”

Revolutionary chic? Eccentric statesman?

Now, I’m not versed in the deft, polite ways of diplomatic conversation, but WTF?

This is not some colorful and benign leader with quaint and idiosyncratic ways. This is a homicidal madman.

The revolution in Egypt was a euphoric triumph. What’s happening in Libya is compelling for more base reasons.

There will be no apologies, no trial, no exile to some cushy Mediterranean splendor.

This ending is preordained.

We’re witnessing the fruits of four decades of bloody repression ripen in real time. We have the opportunity to watch every step as determined mobs advance to an inevitable end that will make squeamish diplomats turn away.

Gaddafi’s vowed to fight to his last drop of blood.

It’s the one public utterance he’s made I wholeheartedly endorse.

Hope you like hell, you son of a bitch. There's a seat saved for you.