AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR
Michael has been a busy bee, lately, and a friend of mine says I am in denial if I think he is not hovering around me. The chain on my living room ceiling fan has taken to hitting the lightbulbs with a tinkling sound, which never happened in the five years I've been living in this house. It so far has a perfect record of only tinkling when something is said that Mike would have a strong opinion about. I dreamed about him week before last, and he actually predicted something is going to happen. Personal. I told a friend if it actually happens, I will have no further choice but to accept that personality does survive the grave. She said "Yeah, you will. You are addicted to denial." So we'll see.
Last week Michael's beloved baby brother loaned me a scrapbook Michael made. It was during the first half of 1983. I can actually remember him sitting cross legged on his bed or the floor with his glue sticks chortling at only he knew what while hosting gatherings and playing angry baboon disc jockey in a party factory. I had no idea what he was putting into scrapbooks -- he was creeping me out reminding me of Mycroft Holmes, in his spider web, just thinking circles around us. I just assumed it was all SPORTS and figured the least said the soonest I would not have to hear about SPORTS, so I never asked. So Mike's brother Eric wants me to return this scrapbook to him, and I figured the best way to handle this is to flip through it and feature stuff he catalogued, here on his blog, until I reach the end of the scrapbook. Break time for the book, which isn't going anywhere. I am intensely grateful and marveling at how his thoughts and words keep cropping up in the path of this humble chronicler.
On the front of the scrapbook, Michael wrote on labels:
"Old Reds clips, and clips from January through June, 1983. History is LOST."
And then, on another label:
"Actual and ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times."
(God knows I could hold with some BOREDOM, ANY DECADE NOW. PLEASE.)
So here, are some bits of posterity assembled before my unquestioning eyes, many interesting moons ago:
** Translation: "Throw some glass in that pneumonia hole!' Means close the window. Usually heard on car trips.
** Ricky Dean Nelson, 25, parachuted to his death near the Perris County Airport [no clue as to where]. He just didn't open his chute. Local authorities, including the Medical Examiner, said he died of "ground fixation." He said that is when you just get hypnotized at the ground coming up at you. Like you are in a trance.
** he included a Far Side cartoon showing a farmer's wife coming back from the hen house with a basket of eggs over her arm, and passing a chicken leaving her house with the baby in a basket over its wing.
** A line out of Charlie Chaplain's autobiography, published in 1964:
"Meanwhile, the lugubrious [Herbert] Hoover sat and sulked because his disastrous sophistry of allocating money at the top in the belief that it would percolate down to the common people had failed...."
** Mike included a cartoon he composed, which I was delighted to see again. I can't do it justice, but trust me it is hilarious. It is drawn with REALLY good stick men. Mike is smiling away at his typewriter, when his editor at the paper comes up and says he is going to make all sorts of changes in Mike's story on the foster home, but that Mike can keep his byline on the story. Mike's stick figure gets up and says "Editor or not, you ain't changing a WORD of it. PRINT it as it IS." And then you see Mike stalking away with an angry stick man face and his editor on the floor flat out with X's for eyes, and Mike is saying: "And every time you do that, you'll get the same. I'll edit your ASS." The cartoon is called "ASS edition."
** The best curse ever written was by John Synge, who said:
"May I meet him with one tooth and it aching, and one eye to be seeing seven and seventy devils in the twists of the road, and one old timber leg on him to limp into the scalding grave."
Geez
More to come.......