Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Spring approaches as a whisper campaign between crocuses and snowdrops, and secretly plots the unveiling of gawdy daffodils.

The rumors accelerate, and Winter begins to fail stress tests and face bankruptcy as its icy assets dwindle and interest piques in more liquid holdings.

Meanwhile, among humans, Daylight Savings Time upstages the equinox and leaves hilltop Druid pyromaniacs bereft of their sacred nocturnal ritual.

Daybreak gallops inexorably forward, awakening the thwarted revelers to their empty mead bottles, and blinded by a conflagration of…daffodils.

You know, I cruise Youtube a little before I head for bed, and watch as it dons its digital Inspector Clouseau hat and tries to nail me down for the next salvo of relevant content, and, you know, they’re really good at that.

But eventually they run out of European underwear ads that I can neither pronounce nor spell (but speak to me through my retinas), and a clip pops up from Carol Burnett or Johnny Carson that takes me right back to high school.

By the magic of the internet time machine, I’m watching a clip that my parents might likely have watched live, and it’s like I’m sitting with them 50 years ago watching with them as their smoke fills the rec room my dad and I built together in the basement, and fills the ductwork up to my room where I just might be forming a nascent separation strategy.

Years of their lives melted away punctuated by Ed McMahon’s subservient guffaws, but before anything like a judgment can form I realize that I’m looking at a digital funhouse mirror that reflects the same thing right back at me, only with better production values.

No epiphany or call to action, just observation.

Software hat trick for the weekend. Because my work computer is a Macbook but I need a fulsome Windows machine for Excel, Access, etc, I rely on this Russian doll arrangement of the Mac OS hosting a VMware virtual Windows machine hosting Windows. Because each relies on the other, I’ve been reluctant to upgrade one because of the effects on the other two, etc. I’ve just let them age gracefully.

However, more and more frequently new app upgrades/installations have been shunning my architecturally adequate but earthquake-prone edifice, and I decided to upgrade all three this weekend. For the IT-savvy, this was Sierra to Monterey, Windows 7 to 10.  Yes, I’m totally exposed as having lived in a pre-Bush administration world.

Mac Monterey went well, as did VMWare.  I had to coax Win10 with some milk and cookies, but by tonight I am fully compliant.

 Just for fun on Sunday, I upgraded from Office 2010 to Office 365.

I see it there, in friends’ Facebook posts, in ads targeted to my superannuation, in exhortations from Brandi Carlyle’s lovely venerations, the links to Joni’s recent appearance at the Newport Festival

But I find I can’t click on the links, it’s like I’m standing on the Deception Pass Bridge at flood tide and staring into the shape-shifting whirlpools of impermanance and starkly beautiful loss and I just can’t…

 Joni in many ways was the soundtrack of our 70s and 80s, and the arc of her poetry and musicianship mirrored our own maturation, from the effervescence of Chelsea Morning to Help Me (which was not yet a cry for help, but a cry for how to keep going), to the barely constrained angst of Hissing Of Summer Lawns, to the unconstrained freedom of the open road of Hejira.

I want to leave these musical memories, these totemic depictions of my youth, right where they were as I was being formed.

 ”It always seems so righteous at the start,
When there’s so much laughter
When there’s so much spark
When there’s so much sweetness in the dark”

 I can’t bear to click.

*Next-Gen reference

Dental appointment today to replace a silver amalgam filling from what has to be 40+ years ago, cuz my dentist from 1977 until he retired would only work in gold.

 Lots of deft work from a team bristling with expertise and (commensurate billing rate ;-), and I was soon walking under my own power to the billing desk.

When leaving, I asked the tech if it was really my last silver amalgam. She looked at my chart and verified that it was.

I said, “I thought so. I’ve lost contact with the Mother Ship.”

She was WTF for 10 seconds, but then laughed, sorta.

I said, “They’ll be out looking for me, you know.”

She handed me my free toothbrush and hustled me out the back door to the parking lot.

Not sure why this occurred to me, perhaps owing to the time of year and the fact that one of our weekend walks placed us in contact with the roadway that will serve as a minor character in this “story”, but..

In the early 70s Betsy and I lived in Bowling Green, Ohio, waiting for some mistral wind to impose a direction on our lives. I made the acquaintance of a like-minded bicycle enthusiast, and we got work in a bike shop as philosopher-bicycle mechanics. He had a lot of experience with high-quality bikes, and I became a really good mechanic to the bicycles of the day under his example. Along the way, he became the closest male friend I’ve ever had.

One summer (perhaps the only summer I did this) we were at work when a young woman pulled in on a bike loaded with gear and a serious problem with her Raleigh International. She was diminutive, funny and absolutely cut, and we Ohio boys were mesmerized as her story unwound.

Turned out she was a school teacher in Nome, Alaska and, after the school year ended, she traveled to Seattle, bought her International and started riding, (solo) across the country, carrying all her own gear.

As we worked on her bike, we noticed a sticker on the seat tube that said, “Aurora Cycle, Seattle, Washington”. This was before I had been to Seattle, and both of us envisioned a sylvan spot in the rain forest where we might one day tuck into our toe clips just as she had, just as the sun crested the purple Cascade range to the east, and light out across the fruited plain.

She spent the night with Mrs. Perils and me, and headed east the next morning, and we never knew what became of her.

But that idea of a magical Seattle with its evocatively named thoroughfares resonated indelibly, and may have been a subliminal component of the zephyr that eventually impelled us west in 1974.

That Aurora Avenue turned out to be a hundred-mile-long strip mall when we eventually saw it only gave us a little chuckle because by then we loved the place. And it was a really good bike shop.

While doing internet research today on retrograde inertial cosmic behaviors, I formulated a plan for derailing global warming. It’s extremely complicated with lots of vectors and asymptotes and logarithmic rates of radioactive decay, but the takeaway for the lay community is this: we will use thousands of nuclear devices connected in series to first nudge, and then accelerate, a movement of the earth out of its current orbit around the sun and into a new orbit far enough distant from Our Mr. Sun to begin to restore our bellwether polar ice caps, and return fossil fuels from our enemies to our life-affirming friends.

Depending upon the enterprise’s margin for error, it might be a bit chilly for a millenium or so. Humans will realize how much they miss mastodon meat, and those hot platypus-fur teddys. In the worst case, we’ll be wearing red ball caps exhorting Make Pluto A Planet Again as we hurtle out of the solar system.

In case you’re wondering, I first achieved my bona fides as a scientist toiling tirelessly in front of my 5th-grade Gilbert chemistry set, unlocking the mysteries of the interaction of my Bunsen burner and the varieties of bourbon titrated from my dad’s liquor cabinet. This research is ongoing, although the supply chain has shifted.

50 years ago today (1/1/2022) I performed with the OSU marching band in the 1971 Rose Bowl and Rose Parade. We boarded a chartered United DC-8 at Port Columbus for our ride to the golden west. Someone pasted a Buckeye bumper sticker on the fuselage as we walked on the plane.

We took up residence in a UCLA dorm and set about practicing, with a little sight-seeing. We paraded through Disneyland and played a short concert in front of the train station on OSU Day at the park, then got books of tickets and free time.

We were so regimented, forming up and marching to our practice field and back. One day we were marching down to the practice field after the Stanford band had rehearsed, and as they were drifting back to the dorm they lined up along our route and played Up Tight, Out Of Sight. While our precision was always a point of pride, I remember feeling just a tinge of jealousy at the fun the Stanford band was having.

We celebrated New Year’s on Ohio time (9pm Pacific), as we had to depart for the parade at like 5 am.

We lost the game to Jim Plunkett and Stanford, and forfeited the national championship, as well as the title of Team Of The Century. I took this photo on the floor of the Rose Bowl just before our pregame show. It seems like an iconic frieze of what OSU football was at the time: youthful pageantry dominated by the frown of an outsize leader.

The day after the game we flew up to San Francisco and toured the city before our redeye back to frigid Ohio.

 Wow, 50 years just like that.

I took this picture just before we did our pregame show at the ‘71 Rose Bowl

Joan Didion, ‘New Journalist’ Who Explored Culture and Chaos, Dies at 87

For a sliver at least of my generation she made us citizens of California, or perhaps wish we were.

By the strength of her prose she took our adolescent Beach-Boy puppy-love and gave it an intoxicating depth and sense of physical, cultural and metaphoric place for us folks who had left home and were looking to, or how to, plant roots somewhere.

I never ended up living in California, the spell lost its grip as my roots lodged and occupied me elsewhere, but there’s an aura to the south created by Didion (and Chandler and Stegner) that still retains its allure.

When I was a child, Christmas Eve was an occasion for our extended Philbin family to gather at my great-grandparents’ place, to meet or reacquaint with relatives we both knew, and hadn’t known we had. There was a huge ham in the kitchen, and at some point a visit from an uncle-Santa (there were a few over the years) in full regalia, with just a whiff of something flammable in his beard.

At some point in the evening it seemed that the only people who were in the room were women and children.

My great-grandparents’ property had a main house, where the festivities were held, and a second house back in the lot where an uncle and his family lived.

One year I realized that there was a very jolly party happening in the back residence, and I snuck back to see what was up. Turned out that the bulk of the male Philbin population was back there playing cards and having the kind of fun that the uncle-Santas, at least momentarily, had to eschew.

I certainly can’t say that these Christmas gatherings were a Philbin Woodstock. I’m certain that there was classism and old grudges roiling just below the surface, but I find it remarkable that we nonetheless came physically together once a year and, in a way, accounted for each other.

How I wish I could walk back in there as an adult and hear the stories that in our diaspora have slipped under gravestones, unheard by those who could have related them.