George Heath Locke Falls In Tub : Local Elder Says "I'm OK"

(I realize that tub falling is no laughing matter and I am not suggesting it was charming at the time. Griswold Home Care, a business directly connected to home injuries has reported that:

"There are nearly 200,000 bathroom accidents each year. Many of these accidents happen to older adults, all too often resulting in fall injuries.
Fall injuries can range from mild to serious, causing broken bones, head contusions and hospital visits. If you have a history of falls, the risk is even greater"

I rode the tub and made it out without a problem. A lot of folks don't, but since I survived with everything intact, I can chuckle a little bit. I hope you will to, keeping always in mind that falling for old guys and gals like us can be terrifyingly painful.)

Riding the tub

The elder spokesman for the powerful Locke clan rode the tub successfully today and reports no problem other then loss of dignify.

George Heath Locke, known as a charming, self effacing bon-vivant and man about town, said the ride occurred shortly after 9:30am when had finished cleaning the bathroom and just before he had finished a shower.

The remarkably youthful Locke (he will turn 74 next month) said that the ride happened so fast it was difficult to maneuver through the twists and turns of the course.

As he faced a plethora of reporters and photographers, eager to hear first hand how the bearded bard had fared on his first ride, Locke appeared calm and quite cool as he narrated his hair raising journey.

"I knew the course fairly well." he said, toweling his sculptured Grecian-like body." The first turn put my feet out from under me and a second later I had ripped down the curtains, yanked the shower hose off the wall and demolished the toilet seat next to me,"

With goggled eyes and hanging on every word the press pressed him for more details.

"Well, like I say, it was quite a trip. With the shower on full blast and water pooling like a small Mediterranean Sea around me and the bathroom floor, I was able to lean up and shut the shower off with my foot, not an easy task."  The handsome adventurer paused to light up a Cuban cigar, his muscles rippling under the lard.

He leaned back and closing his sultry shit-brindle brown eyes, blew a perfect smoke ring, followed by an isosceles triangle, a tetrahedron and the name "Benny" for a reason never explained.

Then he continued.

"I had visions of Mary Petri from an episode of the old "Dick Van Dyke Show". the one where she gets her toe stuck in a spigot of a bathtub while relaxing in a hot bubble bath," He smiled ruefully, pulling out the cigar and examining its tip. "But she had somebody there to help and call the plumber if needed."

He stood up to indicate the interview was over. "Thanks for coming everyone", he said. "And don't worry. I'm OK. Nothing was damaged."  With that, he strode over to the door and slammed his head several times against the frame. He turned and smiled, his eyes looking in two directions at once. "See. Everything is fine. Now if you'll excuse me I have a meeting with Trump to discuss the possibility of a Ambassadorship to Pluto." 

WTF - Bits of Brain Scatt, Odd Thoughts and Robust Musings

Why do guys "take" a leak?  Shouldn't they "give one?

The  line at the store always manages to have one person ahead of you who will cause a massive clog.  Or.....worse yet.

The person "clogging" is you.

In talking with your significant other,  you realize, perhaps even as you're saying it, that you have uttered something really, really stupid that you know will bring on a case of the furries, the hairy eyeball and hours of backtracking. But it's too late.

You find out after the fact that the friend or relative you are so fond of is, alas, a Trump  supporter and it leaves this bruise on your heart.

I have on several occasions been washing and rinsing dishes after supper and the stream of water from the faucet found the opening in my sweater sleeve and bathed my left arm.

You forgot your clean underwear after taking a shower and have to scamper half naked upstairs to get some, hoping all the way nobody (other then your wife) catches you causing them sudden and irreparable blindness at this hideous gaffe on your part.

If things had been skewed a fraction, Bernie Sanders would have been our president.

Bernie in full gear.

I've talked to Republicans who said they would have voted for Bernie.

When I wake up from a nap, for a minute or so I see everything monochromaticly. Really. Not different colors, but everything is different shades of green. And all the doctors to whom I've mentioned it say not to worry. But I do.

My end is closer then my beginning.

I'm never going to pack a full house at Carnegie Hall.

I still don't have all the guitars I need.

The War to End All Wars wasn't.

I love the engineering and pure design of small arms. But, I cannot for the life of me understand why we can't ban selling machine guns, assault rifles and Kevlar coated bullets.

A phenomenal gun sculpture

I will never have a gun in my house.

The house could be falling down around my ears but if I arrange the bath and kitchen towels neatly and without wrinkles, to me the place is immaculate.

I hate to come to the end a good, long book. I have grown fond of where it took me and all the characters I have met there. It's almost a death, except, I know I can return.

I have diabetes and I love to bake. No eight sadder words have ever been spoken.

The older I get, the more I understand Shakespeare.

I have no idea what cats are thinking.

Why doesn't a classy dish you had at a restaurant taste as good if you make it at home?

Our local tv channel WMUR is simply an extension of the NH Chamber of Commerce. And local news is suspended to give us national news from ABC. Why? And the talking heads are so disingenuous that I turn to WCSH in Maine and find real local news, more personal stories, more community involvement and more real people.

I live in fear of cantoring an entire mass with my fly open.

I never liked camping out.

I always look in the mirror and see a person that is far better looking and smarter then reality. And. I don't care.

I have many regrets. But I forgave myself a long time ago.

A man should have the right to pee of his own porch, provided its at night and you don't offend your neighbors.

And since we started with a nod to urination, we shall end it there.

FDR, Johnson, Goldwater and God I Can't Wait Till It's Over!

When I first voted in a national election (Johnson/Goldwater 1964) I was fresh out of the Army, full of piss and vinegar and knew more then anybody about everything.

Back then (I swore never to bore people with those two words...well, there you go) there were few media outlets; radio, television, newspapers and magazines were the only things to help you in making a choice.... plus your own family's political persuasion.

My old man had voted Democratic since FDR and the Great Depression and drove Chevrolets most of his life (except for one year when some car salesman convinced him to purchase a very odd 1957 Packard with a push-button transmission). I followed his footsteps, and brought my view to of life filtered through three plus years of the military and that "just dawning" age of Aquarius and it's attendant image of civil rights and social consciousness.

(l to r) Me, my grandmother on my fathers side, my father (clutching her hand)

my mother (clutching his hand), my grandmother Heath and my grandfather Heath

We did the best we could; voting for our local and national political figures with a minimum of fuss and distraction and a slower heart beat.

Now? Well, now there is an avalanche of information, a tsunami of advice screamed at us from all sides....The press twists and spins their perception of the candidates looking and sounding so profound from deep within their robes of respectability, and whimper if they are attacked as biased. Show me one network that isn't and I will call you slightly mistaken. No. I will call you a liar.

Magazines and tabloids in vivid colors that leap off the racks and beat you senseless
with what they a

nd only they know is the REAL truth of Trump or Clinton or whoever is currently on deck.... are in abundance and lurking at the checkout counters.

Television and radio commercials have become back to back vials of poison that , back in the day, would have outraged even a rock.

And then. Then we are beset with the mega information monster of them all.

The internet.

Never in the history of the human race have homo sapiens been faced with the most insidious and toxic force known to man.

Not only is every conceivable thought, jotting, observation, lie and outright falsehood funneled into our homes, but we, ourselves have the ability to vomit our own misanthropic hate into the blogosphere.

Those guys.

We hate the phone calls from masked spin doctors, survey mavens and door to door politicos, hat in hand, looking for your vote. But this is what democracy is. A little song. A little dance. A little seltzer down our pants.

And, though we complain, we all can imagine the alternative. A military coup ala Banana Republic. Thanks in the streets. The red flag of anarchy. Or.  One party. One candidate. State run media ( yes, I know they are biased, but we can openly accuse them of that and not fear that men in slouch hats and trench coats will come in the middle of the night and carry us out of homes never to be heard of again.) Big brother staring in his Orwellian way will not be the legacy of this country.

Just the dust settling after the first Tuesday in November has come and gone. And we come out of our 16 month hibernation, blinking in the sun and breathing a sigh of relief. For a few years anyway.

Ah, play Django. Play that Gypsy jazz and we will all dance.

Note To Self; Don't Get...Arrgghh!!!

How many times has the comment "Note to self; don't get old" been spoken? Either by you or by some other elderly dude/dudette?

In fact if you are over 65 (heck, over 55) you have begun to notice odd little things that never bothered you before.

Like intriguing aches and pains suddenly rear up and bite you in places you thought were safe from harm.
Liver spots once condemned by you as icky and ugly on others now bloom with ease on your skin.

Eeee-you!!!

Or when you notice for the first time that your hands look like the hands of an old person.
What the heck!

Oh yes. Lest we forget (something else we do on an hourly basis), as we age, our peers appear very old and wrinkly.
Except us, of course.

What a joke we play on ourselves. And we never see it coming.

Speaking of which. I am reminded of a Far Side cartoon. Of course that in itself is a conundrum. Many things remind me of a Far Side cartoon.

However, what I wish to discuss is the odd manifestation of thoughts and memories of our life.

Places and things we had forgotten suddenly come easily.

In the morning as I lie in bed, not fully awake and still wearing that "Darth Vader" CPAP mask. I think, only briefly, that it's sixty-five years ago in my attic room in Wilmington Vt. I sense the stairway in a place where it shouldn't and a window that drifts through the frosted distance of time.

Music wrenches at my being as I hear my mother, dead now these many years, singing "Marzey Doats".
Strange. Very strange.

If I slumber in my recliner during the day and suddenly awake, all my colors are suddenly monochromatic. Usually shades of green. But only for a few moments.

Or if the family gets together, our children  perhaps, (although I'm not certain about this) will discuss the "old folks" when my wife and I leave the room for a moment. Of course she is ten years my junior....but still.

Our children. Grandchildren. Their significant others from years ago.

Memories, names of people you thought were lost forever in that vast jumble of a lumber room we call our minds, suddenly pop up with ease and greet you with vitality.

My God.

Mrs Perkins from 20 Monroe St. where you lived in Concord NH. seventy years ago. And whose large body caused a wooden chair in our house to splinter as she sat down to a visit with my mother and I.

She fainted, and my mother, ever the nurse, asked me so calmly to fetch a glass of water while she gently helped her up.
Why would I suddenly remember a name from decades past and forget the name of someone I met only a few moments ago?

I also find myself checking over some ridiculous thing on the internet with the heading. "How To Know If You Are The First Stages Of Alzheimer's Disease"

And cancer. That disease that shows no partiality. Every time I feel a twinge or behold a lump. my concern goes into overdrive.

I also sense that computers and electronic gizmos and folks calling from Pakistan to let us know there is something wrong with our computer are playing us false.

Sharp as a tack?
You bet.

Hate getting old?
You bet. But what you gonna do?

Grave Robbing 101

As the temperatures start to dip up here and the leaves begin their yearly change of clothes, I am reminded of a story.

Forty-five years ago, a buddy of mine asked me to help him rob a grave.

I had been out of the Army for about a year and had nothing else going on in my life, so I said, "Sure. What the heck." Oh, how many unpleasantrys we begin with those words.

Actually, we had been kicking the idea around for a while; sitting in the basement of my parents old, rented Victorian style house in central New Hampshire; the room shrouded in Holmsian-like pipe smoke. Empty beer bottles stood in yeastey disarray on a blackish-brown, thick oak table.

I had gone through Kerouac, Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Jack Vances' "Dying Earth" lay, flaccid, on a leather covered chair, next to Leibers storys of Fafahrd and The Grey Mouser. "Mad" magazines lay scattered about.('Humor in a Jugular Vein') copies of "Help", and paper-backs of Harvey Kurtzmans' work were also were piled in the corners, along with 1940's editions of Life.

Plus, of course, strategically hidden Playboys.

Flamenco guitar music floated from my record player.

Oh yeah. And candles in empty chianti bottles. Lots of candles, usually lit. Even in the glare of a mid-summer day. We pulled the curtains.

So, anyway, Bill says. "I know a graveyard deep in the woods not too far from here". His eyes glittered. "Wouldn't it be cool to dig up an old skeleton and use the skull to put a candle on?" Copies of Poe leered at us from my bookshelves.

Now, the word 'ghoul' never entered my mind. 'Igor', perhaps. And even the possibility that morally we would be treading on the edge of gibbering madness. Nothing like that. Just......what fun to rob a grave!

So, nighttime came, and as I said, it was just about this time of year. Cool. Crisp. And Bill showed up in his red Volkswagen. A real Volkswagen. Not the tin-cup mirages they sell now-a-days. With shovels and picks in the back seat. And flashlights, equiped with red cellophane. "So as not to mess up our night vision." Bill said. He was the brains of the group.

Off we rattled into the early fall twilight, hearts gay, although we were straight. Out onto a backroad. Up into the foothills of the White Mountains we puttered as the darkness of a New England night bled accross the headlights. Oh, this was going to be fun! Thnk of what we can tell our friends, years from now.

The idea that we could be telling our friends from the inside of a jail-cell never crossed our minds.

"Hey, check this out." Bill reached down and turned off the headlights as we sped through the stygian (a word that is used by Leiber) New England darkness. There was a full moon that night. We were riding in a Volkswagen at about 60 miles an hour through twisting, impossible dirt country roads with no lights. And just the white light of the moon shining flat in front of us.

How cool.

Although.......at this point the thought that I might be headed towards my own demise DID cross my mind. A few years in Korea does that to a guy. I suggested, in a somewhat subdued voice, that Bill might want to slow down. "Hell, no" He guffawed at my skittishness and floored it.

We reached the old grave yard, of which there are hundreds in the back-roads of New Hampshire and Vermont, a-sprout with chalk white tomb-stones and surrounded by moss covered stone walls that meander off into acres of new-growth forest. Hundreds, if not thousands lie forgotten and forlorn among the pine and oak Many are just big enough to hold a generation or two of a family that at one time farmed the surrounding land. They wrenched a living from the soil, spotted with gray-green stones dropped in the last glaciers wake. Then, when the west opened up after the Civil War and provided a less demanding land to struggle a living from, they picked up, left the house and all those before and followed the sun. This was one of those grave yards.

It was miles from any occupied dwelling, hidden deep down a road I had never thought existed, and I knew most of the surrounding area pretty well.

We turned off the key, the head-lights were already off miles ago and piled out, trembling with excitement. "Shut up, man. Your making too much noise with the tools." Bill hissed at me. We fumbled toward the gate, the moon watching down and the crickets a greek-chorus in the background. Frankly, it was years ago, and I don't even remember the name of the guy whos' grave we finally approached. It was a guy. I was pretty sure of that. The idea of robbing a womans grave just didn't seem right to us.

Morality amongst grave robbers.

We started digging and I never realized how hard the ground was. We kept digging. And waiting.every now and then. Liistening. Was that a car? No. Dig. Chop. Dig.

That was a car! No. No it wasn't. Dig. Shovel. Pick-axe. Pause. Sweat. Dig some more. The night crawled by.

"Bill." I wiped my forehead and looked at him. We had barely dug down six inches. "This is too much like work."

He looked at me. "Yeah." He paused. "Much too much like work." He suddenly siffened. "Headlights!" He yelped. We grabbed everything and ran towards the car. We clattered it all inside and Bill started the engine. Off into the night we sped.

There was no car. There was no grave robbed. There was just a couple of nerdy-jerks who thought they would be cool. All they ended up doing was raising a few blisters and almost wetting their pants.

To this day, I realize that Igor was a better man then me. Hump and all.

"Hump? What hump?"

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Will Obama Eat Our Children?

I'm a liberal, pro-life Roman Catholic male in my mid 60's

OK.

So I used all those words in one sentence. That pretty much sums up a part of who I am. But it doesn't say it all.

I grew up (and I swore I would never start a sentence with those words!) in a country that taught respect to those in positions of authority. The cop on the corner, the pastor, the teacher, your parents and grandparents. The old guy named Koskoff down the street who escaped from Czarist Russia in the early part of the 20th Century and set up a cobbler shop where I grew up in Wilmington, Vt. You would show respect to these people and others older then you. Because you knew if you didn't, word would get back to your parents before you got home. And you would hear about it.

And you respected your president.

In my case, a little grey-faced man named Truman who reminded me of my Grandfather on my fathers side, and a bald-headed guy named Eisenhower who always reminded me of Ukelele Ike, the fellow who was the voice of Jimeny Cricket in Disney's "Pinocheo". They never appeared in our classroom on television, of course. We were not set up for that sort of thing in the early and mid-fiftys.

But regardless of who they looked like, I still respected them.

After John Kennedy died on a gurney in a Dallas hospital in 1963, my focus on the president got a little fuzzy. It was the 60's, after all.

He was my commander-in-cheif when I was serving in Korea and when the Russians put up the wall in Berlin, he extended my stay in 'The Land of the Morning Calm' for a few months. My military service was extended even further a year or so later when we came a hairs breadth from nuclear annihilation over a few missles in Cuba.

But I still respected him.

I respected Johnson, yes, even Nixon, Ford, Carter, Regan, Bush, Clinton and Bush.

Don't get me wrong. I didn't always agree with them or their policies. I didn't always agree with the way they ran their personal lives, for that matter. Nixon made me scream at the tv. So did the rest of them, from time to time.

But they were the Presidents of the United States, for corn sakes!

And I know they appeared in thousands of classrooms accross the country in those years. Many times. I don't believe any child was damaged, or hurt, or had their lives ruined because of that.

Let's show a little respect.

Do you think our president is going to eat our children? Or that he will psychicaly scar them for life? He is the president. He is going to talk for a few minutes, take some questions and be on his way. Just as presidents have always done.

We send our children to school evey day. And every day they are exposed to the thoughts and ideas of everybody they come in contact with. From the bus driver down to the principal. Some of the stuff they learn in the locker-room can be pretty rough also, as you probably remember.

Frankly, most kids will be secretly texting or passing notes or trying to remember if the algebra teacher was giving a test that day.

And don't feed me all this jiggery-pokery about the health bill, or socialism or communism or taxes or the economy. Or whatever your personal agenda is. A thousand years from now, none of this stuff will matter. It's all smoke and mirrors anyway.

Let's just all take a deep breath and get on with lives.

We might start by trying to make peace in our own houses with the people we love and sometimes respect. The rest will take care of itself.

Who Is Django?

A lot of you probably know (which is why you probably wound up here) that Django Reinhardt was a Belgium (some say French) gypsy who lived during the early and middle part of the 20th century. He was an exceptional guitar player. But early in life he suffered terrible burns to his left hand and was unable to use his third and fourth fingers. As a guitarist, I know I would not be able to produce any type of chord or even play single strings without some difficulty, if at all. I probably would have given up and taken up harmonica or jews harp. (Both of which I have tried with little success).

But not Django.

Django developed a way of playing that used triads or three notes, plus incredibly lightning fast single string plucking (with a pick, some say, almost a half inch thick). He almost, you should pardon the expression, single handedly developed a whole new style of playing jazz that revolutionized the genre and literally put Europe on the map that had previously only contained New Orleans, Chicago, New York, St. Louis and Kansas City. With a few stops in between, of course, like Memphis, Detroit and Boston. He sought out a new way of looking at something and then went ahead and produced it.

This is how this blog, I hope, will turn out.

I love the joy that listening and playing Django's gypsy jazz gives me. I love all the romantic things in life that sometimes we take for granted, like music, art, poetry, history, television and movies and I would like to talk about them . But, like Django, I suspect some folks will see my take on thing differently and will let me know about it.

Please do.

If it turns out that we end up in the mud, as Shel Silverstein put it in Johnny Cash's wonderful interpretation of 'A Boy Named Sue'; "A kickin' and a gougein', (metaphorically, of course) well, so be it. As long as we can remain friends.

So that is why this is called Django's Djoint. And I hope to be hearing from you real soon.