August 23, 2018

August
Split down the middle – the humidity and heat of “Toys in the Attic” and the

cool golden Autumnal light of August, that Southern month when folks of

means take vacations--the Greeks to their little islands of white houses and the

Americans to seaside towns in Maine or Nova Scotia. A month, this year of

political scandal and retribution, but wait, if you saw the footage of Detroit

burning in 1967 or the Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations being

busted up with police batons and tear gas, (40 years ago now) you might think,

despite the corruption at the top, we’re in a rather tepid time. There’s violence

a foot for sure-- Afghanistan, Chicago-- but it is not blazing like a billboard

across out TV screens. The TV screens are filled with pundits on the left and

on the right. We have Pepsi and Coke. We have CNN and Fox News. And yet

there is a real rift, a rift that hasn’t healed since those Chicago days near the

Hilton Hotel. It has not yet singed our precious middle class or student heavy

neighborhoods.

I read that there are now 2.3 million Americans in jail. And last week I read

that there were over 70,000 deaths from narcotics in the U.S., now the leading

kind of death, out doing AIDS, gunshots and automobile accidents. August has

always been a month for me when the bottom falls out but the lull of Plum

Beach settles in if only for a day or two. I’m alone, left alone. The solitude is

murderous and generative, both. I read and get sick of it. Then I try to write.
Last Monday I sat in a local diner with my friend Alice (my roommate in college)

and I chatted as my main computer lap top went through the process of re-

installing its operating system, much to my horror when I returned home.

Through some fluke in the system, I’d partitioned the hard drive so it would be

very hard to retrieve the files. The first estimate to retrieve the files was $1,700

– way over my budget-- before my friend Julian, also a computer techie, came

and picked it up to see what some scans could harvest from what might have

been a sort of disastrous personal loss.

I connected my second, smaller lap top to my printer and as the days went by,

became accustomed to this new machine. Something like taking out a modest

rental car with good drive, better even than the one in your old car, now in the

body shop. My missing files were no longer missed. They have been retrieved

but now are designated with an 8 digit number, instead of the original file

name, so I’m left with the task of going through them one by one to save what I

want back.

Blockbuster movie: Another Mission Impossible action film. I still feel the

hypocrisy of being against violence, and indulging in the action-violence of a

movie like this. Bond was better, more suave, more romantic, less American.

It’s not that I dislike Tom Cruise but he has lost his arrogant edge and boyish

good looks. Oh he’s still good looking, but as an action figure he lacks comedy

and sophistication. Except when, in over his head, he half-whispers, “I’ll figure

it out.”
“Speak to me speak to me heart. Hearts will mend, round the bend, paths

that cross will cross again. Paths that cross will cross again.” (Patti Smith,

Dream of Life).