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2022: Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out

Abilene hanging out at Iron Smoke Distillery.

I’m not certain of the actual date, but in the midst of it all, 2022 got to be too much for me. So, with the exception of the stuff I actually get paid to produce – words that bring in the grocery money – I took a break from writing. No blogging: The Critical Mass is a vanity project anyway. I set aside the novel in progress: the bookstores are overloaded with them.

This year, the self-reflection that accompanies lining up words in the correct order felt too much like self-flagellation.

Despite assurances from the anti-Fauci stormtroopers that COVID was imaginary, I contracted the virus in May after attending a radio convention in Philadelphia. It lingered. I still feel it now. Or I still feel something, something’s leached into my bones….

This year, I lost my 92-year-old mom and my 14½-year-old dog. The actuarial tables insist those were good, long runs. That doesn’t make it feel any better. That dog and I, we explored Turning Point Park together many, many times. In the kitchen most mornings, I would hear Abbie’s toenails clicking on the wood floor as she wandered in to see what I was doing.

Making toast.

Of course there’s a piece for you….

My dogs – my college dog Hormel, the first Weimaraner, Mosel – have always made the world a more comfortable fit for me.

But in this most forgettable of years, a loyal dog was not enough salve to ease me through 2022. Beyond death and COVID, many of these other cuts were small, for sure, but they hurt like hell anyway. I have felt robbed of community intimacy and connectiveness.

I was still going into the office. But for vast stretches of 2022, we weren’t going out to hear music or eat at restaurants or see Rochester Red Wings baseball games. If friends visited, we sat on the deck, hoping the summer breeze would blow any lingering virus into the neighbors’ yards.

I’d go to the grocery store. I’d be one of the few wearing a mask. True, the infection rate of the virus had been dropping all summer. So wearing a mask was perhaps less preventative than it was the act of the neighborhood crank yelling, “HAVEN’T YOU HEARD? THIS THING HAS KILLED MORE THAN A MILLION AMERICANS!”

Yet as the year crept on, when I ventured out, even I was leaving my mask in the car. Throwing caution to the wind. Perhaps it was a belief that Americans are blessed, almost to a state of naïveté. As if, if we so choose, any of us can be Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Or, “Herschel Walker Nearly Goes to Washington.”

That right there should be a reminder: It’s not smart to rely on herd mentality, and the public in general making wise choices. My casual maskless summer is now being reversed. From what I have read, COVID might be making a comeback this winter.

Winter. It’s astonishing to see the photos of the record-breaking snowfall in Buffalo. And impassible roads throughout the country. Yet weirdly, here in Rochester, some 70 or so miles east of Buffalo, the snowfall has not been deep enough to completely cover the grass in the front yard. As I’m typing this, on New Year’s Eve, it’s 51 degrees outside with a drizzling rain. No snow in sight.

Earth’s weather. Astronomers tell us Pluto is cold, somewhere between minus-375 and minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit. At least it has an excuse, it’s 3.7 billion miles from the sun.

What’s our excuse? This cold Earth is no comfort for the people of Ukraine. And for the people in the United States who watched as the Supreme Court ruled that it, and not the women of this country, have control over their bodies. We have at hand and we need to lead just and productive and fulfilling lives. Yet we live like we are victims, controlled by circumstances that are within our reach.

As My Friend Frank Bilovsky just wrote on Facebook…

Trump’s tax returns, released by Congress this morning, conclusively show that he is a lair, a cheater and a fraudster. (Example: He earned $50,000 for a speaking engagement but claimed $46,000 in travel expenses to deliver it.) But 30 percent of the voters will excuse it on the grounds that they also fudged their tax returns and got $78 larger refunds than they should have.

That 30 percent is a cold, hard fact standing in the way of charging Trump with instigating the Jan. 6 invasion and vandalizing of the U.S. Capitol building. It will take some gallant nerve to keep pushing it forward.

And when Republicans take over the House next week, it appears they’re going to abandon that investigation and launch endless show trials over whatever is in Hunter Biden’s laptop. Which, according to reputable news reports of its contents, falls a tad – a really big tad – short of instigating an invasion of the Capitol building, where Proud Boys shit on the floor and endangered lives.

Earth is a cold place for the thousands of Americans who mourned death delivered by the teenagers who can legally walk the streets holding a weapon of war. Republicans have made a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who went to a protest following the shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by a police officer (Not the first time that’s happened, if you follow the news). Rittenhouse brought along an automatic rifle, he must have been planning to use, right? And he did, killing two people and wounding a third. Found not guilty of murder, after he bawled like a baby during his court testimony, the kid did a tour of conservative rallies and media outlets, and lent his name and image to a handful of products. Including “Kyle Rittenhouse’s Turkey Shoot,” a video game in which a cartoon Rittenhouse shoots turkeys that represent the media.

It’s all a game. Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert, all Republican members of Congress, battled over which of them would hire Rittenhouse as an intern. He met with Trump at the White House. A $1 million book deal was reportedly in the works.

I’m a writer. Where’s my $1 million book deal? I’d kill to have one.

BE THE FIRST in your neighborhood to know when a new Critical Mass has been turned loose. Go to the “Subscribe” button on the web site jeffspevak.com for an email alert. You can contact me at jeffspevakwriter@gmail.com.

Stephen Hawking was right… the bronteroc always wins

President Orleans models the “Don’t Look Up” hat.

I think we can all agree that one of the finest moments of Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” is the 1963 episode “To Serve Man.” A race of 9-foot-tall aliens, the Kanamits, arrive on Earth and immediately introduce its citizens to all sorts wonders: Machines that provide inexpensive power, stop war, end famine. While visiting the United Nations, one of the aliens inadvertently leaves behind a book. The title is, when translated from their native language, “To Serve Man.”

But this is “The Twlight Zone,” and so there’s a spectacular twist to the story. Humans are volunteering for the opportunity to visit the world of these benevolent aliens. SPOILER ALERT! As the main character, a U.S. government cryptographer, climbs the stairs to the alien spaceship for his own trip to the Kanamits’ planet, one of his co-workers frantically rushes though the crowd. She’s translated enough of the book to shout a warning to him: “‘To Serve Man’… It’s a cookbook!

“To Serve Man.”

Alas, she’s too late. The Kanamits will be having cryptographer for dinner.

That’s the way it always goes when we look up. Up to the stars. From H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” to Ed Woods’ “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” it’s always bad news for Earthlings. As the late physicist Stephen Hawking said, we need to keep our heads low: “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”

Hawking figured if grumpy space travelers in search of minerals to plunder didn’t get us, then we’d die by climate change, viruses, nuclear war or Artificial Intelligence run amuck.

Or Earth getting hit by a comet, causing an extinction-level catastrophe. Hawking was worried about that as well.

What a Gloomy Gus, that Hawking was.

With Hawking in mind, the big news from the cosmos this week is a 3,500-foot wide meteor is heading for Earth at about 47,344 miles per hour. Just to get an idea of what astronomers are talking about, the Empire State Building is 1,454 feet tall, including that big antenna on top made famous by King Kong. So 7482 (1994 PC1), as the astronomers have romantically named this new meteor, is about 2½ times bigger than some of our best architecture.

What a mess that meteor would make if it collided with our planet. Fortunately, when 7482 (1994 PC1) arrives on the afternoon of Jan. 18 – SPOILER ALERT! – it will miss us by a mere 1.2 million miles.

That’s if the astronomers are telling us the truth, of course.

In “Don’t Look Up,” Earth doesn’t get so lucky.

This is the Netflix film that everyone I hang around with is talking about. “Don’t Look Up” stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr. Randall Mindy, a nerdy Michigan State University astrophysicist professor. Working with one of his students, Kate Dibiasky, as played by Jennifer Lawrence, a comet is discovered heading straight for Earth. A certain cosmic collision is just six months away.

That’s time enough for satire. As “Don’t Look Up” unfolds, we watch science and reality corrupted by celebrity and populism. The first opportunity that Dr. Mindy and Dibiasky have to deliver their warning is on a morning television talk show. It doesn’t go well. The airhead hosts are more interested in the troubled marriage of a couple of pop stars than the demise of all life on the planet.

Ignoring the peril, the worst of us try to cash in on this cash cow from space. Politicians eagerly point to the jobs that will be created by mining its valuable comet. Dr. Mindy is hailed as “America’s Sexiest Scientist.”

One of the criticisms I read of “Don’t Look Up” is that President Janie Orlean, played by Meryl Streep and sporting a “Don’t Look Up” baseball cap, is too ridiculously shallow and self-absorbed to be leader of the free world. Really? Does anyone remember that guy in the MAGA cap? I’d say she nailed it.

Interestingly, as “Don’t Look Up” was being created, it was intended as satire excoriating world indifference to climate change. But now, it’s also a direct hit on today’s politics of division over COVID and vaccines. “Don’t Look Up” means pay no attention to the danger closing in on the planet. Our leaders are playing the politics of distraction as a frustrated Dr. Mindy wails, “What we’re really trying to say is get your head out of your ass!”

Don’t Look Up. Don’t believe what you see.

By the way, the nerdy-looking DiCaprio looks a lot like Dr. Peter Hotez. But DiCaprio is merely an actor. Hotez is the Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine. The guy on all of the cable news shows talking about COVID 19.

DiCaprio.

Hotez.

What would you do on the day the world will end? Dr. Mindy and Dibiasky choose fellowship with friends and relatives at a dinner party.

The meteor arrives.

SPOILER ALERT… And there, the world as we know it ends.

Yet faced with what appears to be certain death, President Orlean and her smarmy elites have escaped the planet on a spaceship. Locked away in cryochambers, after 22,740 years they emerge from the ship, naked and filled with wonder, to find themselves on a planet that looks like primordial Earth.

What happens next was foreshadowed earlier in the film, when President Orlean is told that an algorithm predicts, “You’re going to be eaten by a bronteroc. We don’t know what it means.”

FINAL SPOILER ALERT! Never argue with an algorithm. A bronteroc turns out to be an emu-like dinosaur creature on the new planet. Kinda cute. With foofy feathers (As a dinosaur enthusiast, I applaud this acknowledgement that paleontologists now believe that some dinosaurs carried a smattering of feathers). After greeting the newcomers with curiosity, the bronteroc suddenly attacks and eats President Orlean, as more of the creatures close in on her devious cohorts.

The good guys didn’t win. The bad guys didn’t win. A very satisfying ending.

BE THE FIRST in your neighborhood to know when a new Critical Mass has been turned loose. Go to the “Subscribe” button on the web site jeffspevak.com for an email alert. You can contact me at jeffspevakwriter@gmail.com.

The box of manure in our basement  

The song is a beautiful piece of 1960s pop. Melancholy, yet upbeat. Confronting an issue – loneliness – and offering hope:

And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you

Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to

Guide them along …

There is quite a distance between a cry for help and the statement made on Christmas Day by a strange loner who rigged his RV with explosives, drove to downtown Nashville and staged his own death to the soundtrack of Petula Clark singing “Downtown.” The fact that no one was killed does not ameliorate the darkness of the act. He knew better. The people around him who knew he was building bombs knew better.

So for now, we associate a violent act with a song that urges people to seek comfort among strangers. “Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city, linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty.”

The arts is sometimes a strange bedfellow to inhumanity. Paul McCartney didn’t have mass murder in mind when he wrote “Helter Skelter,” with Charles Manson’s followers using the blood of one of their victims to paint the song title on a refrigerator door during their weekend murder spree in 1969. Misspelled as “Healter,” they weren’t scholars.

Mark Chapman and his favorite book, “The Catcher in the Rye.”

The man who murdered John Lennon had an obsession with the novel “The Catcher in the Rye.” Adolph Hitler’s deep admiration for the music of Richard Wagner is well known. Yet the works of McCartney, J.D. Salinger and Wagner have survived those associations. “Downtown” will live on as well.

Of course, these stories are never as simple as all that. Wagner couldn’t control his fan base after his death in 1883. But his raging anti-Semitism (today excused as the rantings typical of a 207-year-old man) remains his responsibility.

Everything created by musicians, painters, dancers, writers and architects is a reflection of the artist. Maybe not in image, but in message. Their art outlives the worst of the self portraits that it reflects. As much as I detest Michael Jackson now, I’m sure his music will survive with future listeners not giving much thought to his alleged pedophilia.

Although, in my mind, they should.

I don’t expect even-handedness in a fractured world. The girlfriend of the Nashville RV bomber reportedly told the police a year ago that he was making bombs. They shrugged and moved on. If that bomb maker had been a Black man, rather than white, it seems likely the cops would have been kicking in the door of his RV, shooting first and worrying about what we think a little too late.

This past year was a product of the bi-polar planet on which we live. One side of it works just fine. There are times when I feel like a hyena creeping out of the desert, to the edge of a campfire, where I watch all of these amazing humans doing incredible things. And I just feel damn lucky to be close to it. Squirreled away in my home through the pandemic, I’ve read some great books. This was unplanned, but more than a few have had something to do with trees. My Friend Michele gave me Richard Preston’s “The Wild Trees,” the story of California redwoods; I learned that falling from a tree any more than 60 feet means you’re dead. Trees are to be found in nature writer Robert MacFarlane’s “Underland: A Deep Time Journey,” but its real soul is uncovered in the world beneath the roots; there is a cavern in China that is so large, it has its own weather system. And now I’m deep into Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Overstory,” in which trees are as much characters as humans. While it’s fiction, much of it is based on fact; as blight was wiping out chestnut trees across the country, an attempt was made to halt the spread of the disease by clearing trees from a 400-mile zone across Pennsylvania. The maneuver failed; the workers’ axes and saws helped carry the plague across the state.

I read that and thought about COVID-19.

Peter Gunn navigates his 1959 Plymouth Fury through another scene.

Television? It hasn’t been of much help. Amazon Prime created special “Holiday” categories of dozens and dozens of films to choose from. It’s astonishing how many really unwatchable Christmas movies have been given the green light over the last 15 years. All attempting to reveal to us The True Meaning of Christmas. Which is basically: Don’t Be An Asshole. None of these films meet the standard set by “A Christmas Story.” In that true classic, The Meaning of Christmas is simply: If the neighbor’s vagabond hounds seize your Christmas Day turkey from the table and viciously dismember it, there is a Chinese restaurant open somewhere.

In this time of quarantine, I have enjoyed an amusing dalliance with “Peter Gunn,” a private-eye series from the late 1950s and early ’60s starring an actor I’d never heard of. But Craig Stevens seems to have set the stage for Sean Connery’s James Bond. “Peter Gunn” is fedoras, jazz and blonde cocktail crooners, casual smoking, cars with big fins, fisticuffs and serious gunplay in warehouses stacked with labyrinthine arrangements of crates, good for chaotic chase scenes. All of this in less than a half hour for each episode. With an immediately recognizable theme by Henry Mancini.

Music, as always. As I’m typing this, I’m listening to Scott Regan’s “Open Tunings” show on WRUR-FM (88.5). His final song of the year is Nina Simone’s version of Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.” It’s elegant, drenched in melancholy and a wistful sense of something lost.

A lost year, perhaps.

A year in which we’ve tumbled backwards.

More than 25 million Americans have either lost their job or seen a significant drop in their income. More than 8 million Americans slid into poverty. That’s all contributing to one in four American households experiencing what those who study social structure call “food insecurity.” People are going hungry. In 21st-century America.

Perhaps they are… I’m searching for the right word here… unlucky? The Institute for Policy Studies published a report that demonstrated that many Americans are not going hungry at all. In fact, since March, when the pandemic started kicking in, the total net worth of the country’s 647 billionaires has grown by almost $960 billion.

A new Gallop poll out this week reveals Trump is the most-admired man in America. I’m thinking the rest of the Top 10 – Obama, Biden, Fauci, Pope Francis, Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates, LeBron James and the Dalai Lama – split the vote among sane people.

The United States is responsible for so many advances in science, yet is populated by so many people who live in denial of clear fact. Fifty-one percent of Republicans still doubt that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. Forty percent of Americans are creationists.

Fifty percent of Republicans believe at least some portions of the QAnon mythology that a secret ring of Satan-worshiping pedophiles runs the U.S. government, and Trump is leading a secret fight against it. A storyline so ridiculous, any self-respecting screenwriter would lock the script in the bottom drawer of his or her desk.

Fact, and demonstrable history, is no match for populist politics. On Columbus Day, we celebrate a cruel slave trader. Town squares remain populated by statues that re-write the American south, leading up to the Civil War, as some kind of antebellum island of nobility.

We know better. At least, some of us know better.

As much as I’d like it to be true, the arts and science are not generally accepted as reflective of truth. We don’t look that deep into ourselves. The internet justification for fact-free beliefs is “owning the libs.” Downtown may be where, “The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares,” but the internet is not such a place. It is a room of darkness and separation, it nurtures troubles in the same way that a box of manure in the basement feeds a crop of mushrooms.

Acknowledging climate change or systemic racism goes nowhere in this environment. Seeing that 340,000 Americans are dead of COVID-19 should be a wake-up call, not something sprouting out of bullshit.

There is no evidence that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. None. And yet…

It all brings to mind the philosopher George Carlin: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

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