Things I Think About

A guy thinking about a few things…

Many people don’t know this about me but long, long ago I developed a very helpful habit that is also anatomically very unhealthy. While I am always quite aware of my surroundings with great (unto this day!) peripheral vision and excellent spatial bearings and still can see the geometry of people and things moving this way and that, I spend a lot of my upright time thinking with my head bent down. This is now ingrained in me and I am now constantly reminding myself, admonishing myself to ‘get your head up, eyes forward, walk with your hands back behind your hips’ and I will respond but it is always just temporal. My problem is I just love to think about things and thinking lends itself to the creation of a space in which to do that. Thus, the ‘looking down’ is my way of experiencing the world about me and at the same time, isolating my eyes just enough to let my meandering ponderings keep on churning out. There is a lot of creative webbing of my consciousness going on and I don’t want to miss it, sore neck be damned. And at least I’m getting into the good practice being stooped over which is an essential part of getting old and older! 

 I have just returned from a nice, quick trip to San Francisco and Berkeley and environs. If New York City is big, then California is colossally so.  Parts of it are so achingly beautiful with so much flora and fauna and wonderful architecture and of course, parts of it are just detritus and trash and pitiful homeless and depressing decay.  The Cal Berkeley campus is a real beauty and fun to wander around in and say what you will about leftists and green and pink hair and the smell of dope randomly hanging in the air, it is still a world class academic powerhouse. Its creation was modeled after Yale and it has as they say, great bones.

I got a chance to have good visits with youngest and spouse, see their nifty little century old bungalow right on the cusp of Berkley and Oakland - in a place known forever as Glenn Park. Now, you know that  appeals to me, which they’ve gutted down to the studs, had two excellent vegan dinners, one at Burma Super Star and the other at Milennlium (if we had that kind of vegan cuisine in these parts, I could go down that road easily) and stayed at the very classically classy Claremont Hotel with its accompaniment of cool breezes coming off the fog enshrouded bay. I got good, comfortable writing done there every day.

And my return flight was on American and I must say their new Terminal One at SFO is simply spectacular, more like a piece of art than an airport.

I also went out to San Mateo (Half Moon Bay is but a few more miles west) for a fun book club where the ladies not only provided excellent food and potables but also had studied up on me pretty good and asked lots of good, probing questions about both FRIDAY CALLS and YOU HAVE YOUR WAY. In the course of my visit, I was asked where did I come up with my title for YHYW. I thought for a bit and then honestly answered that I had no idea, that it was just something that popped into my mind somewhere near the time I started writing it. Well, how about this: Melanie, one of the book club’s wonderful ringleaders, showed me a quote from the renown German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

It read as follows:

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

I have no conscious memory of ever having read or seen this and think the only place I might have encountered it was in a philosophy class I took in the fall of my junior year at Chapel Hill which would have been 1970. Is it possible ( I suppose it is…) that it has been embedded deep within my gray matter for the last fifty-plus years? Or is my choice of those four words for my title

A simple, inexplicable coincidence?

 Ok, now…where are we with the grisly, sad and morbidly addicting Murdaugh Murder Mess? At one time I thought I had it figured out pretty good but that was now what seems like a long time ago.

If I didn’t have a thought or two, I’d be remiss on so many levels so here’s a sampling for you.

**Was this a planned hit on the son and the mom/wife or just something within the family that got terribly out of hand?

**Seems to me that it sure was convenient that Big Daddy just happened on the scene just after the shootings had occurred..

**How and by whose hand did the mom/wife’s cell phone end up in a ditch beside the highway just up the road from the entrance to the hunting lodge?

**Did someone really take a shot at Alex M. (whom I refer to as Big Daddy) out on a country road while he was changing a (self-sealing) tire that he, himself, had tried to puncture with a knife or was this staged? Whoever took the shot was no marksman…

**The State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) has yet to say they have suspects or that there is or are dangerous folks running around out there so be careful. They have yet to ask the public for help or information.

**Were serious drugs or drug deals involved in this? They say Big Daddy has embezzled millions from his law firm. How much? The audits of operating and trust/escrow accounts are going to take a while. Were others at his law firm in cahoots with him? Or they knew or should have known? I’ll be astonished if there is not ‘another women or women’ eventually in the picture as well.

**Does Big Daddy really have an opioid addiction or is this just a front to get him out of town and view for a while so his lawyers can try to sort things out-It appears to me that under all circumstances, Big Daddy’s remaining life is a wreck and any machinations are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Wonder where he’s gone into Rehab?

**Why haven’t the complete autopsy reports and blood chemistries and ballistics been released? What about diagrams of positions of the bodies? What about tests for gun powder residue on hands?

And I’m sure there is so much more to ask but right now, it’s getting late in the afternoon and all this is making my hair (which I have little of left), so I’ll lay this thread down for now.

Now, think about this. Heart disease and significant obesity and poor diet are very big health issues that black people have to deal with.

Shaquille O’Neal owns 8 Papa John’s franchises and is on the PJ’s Board of Directors.

He is now being featured in ads running across the country touting PJ’s latest dietary disaster, a mega heart bomb called The Shaq-A-Roni with extra cheese and salted meat galore.

The media ads for this thing are grossly oozing cholesterol and caloric explosions and most all of the happily gorging themselves actors in the ads are people of color.

Of course, these ads are targeting minorities.

And Shaq humbly notes that with each one you buy, a buck or two is going to education.

I have a fervent belief in the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech but this pizza pie poseur really strikes me a sick way to make a buck.

“Here my good people who have struggled for centuries with poor and unhealthy diet. Eat lots of this nasty stuff and it may just help you get a better education; that is if you recover from having your carotid arteries cleaned out, your lap-band surgeries and your bypasses and valve replacements…”

Shaq, you just should have said NO.

I find this to be a disgusting, gigantic hypocrisy.

Like I said, I do think about a lot of stuff…