Overheard

This happened a while back before the COVID-19 police closed our eating facility.

 It isn't eavesdropping if the voices just insinuate themselves into your space.

Evening meal and like me, the elderly lady at the table next to mine is alone.  Then a friend comes to join her and I don't know which one says, "I see you found your teeth.  Where were they?"

I tried to suppress the urge to laugh.

Semi-successful.

Psychopharmacology

If you want to impress people with your erudition, drop Psychopharmacology into the conversation sometime. "In college I once considered pursuing an interest in Psychopharmacology but then became distracted by other interests." Something like that.

 But first practice pronouncing it and be prepared to give the definition if a listener has the courage to admit he doesn't have a clue what you're talking about. Try not to be overly condescending when you explain it relates to psychology and was associated with Emil Kraepelin, the German professor from the early 20th century who is considered to be the Father of Psychiatry. You might throw in that Emil didn't think much of Sigmund Freud.

But in these situations it is wise to quickly steer the conversation in another direction before someone with real knowledge of Psychiatry exposes your ignorance. Most people relate to sports so that is a good getaway.

Like this. In 1964 Len Casanova took the University of Oregon Ducks to Indiana University to play the Hoosiers in football. Bob Berry was his quarterback who took snaps from Dave Toby, the center who also did kick-offs. In the first half Oregon couldn't do anything right and trailed by two touchdowns at halftime.  Casanova was furious with his team's performance and left the field a few minutes before the end of the first half and took up a position just inside the team locker room.  As the players filed in he snapped at them, "Sit down, Sit down. Sit down."

Coming off the field, Toby's only thought was getting to a urinal.  Urgent call, but when Casanova barked his order, Toby dropped to the bench. The Coach did a rant all through the halftime until an official stuck his head in the room and said to Casanova, "Get your team out here, coach."

Oregon had to kick to start the second half and when Toby, without relief, made his run to the ball his neglected bladder released its burden.  His flawed kick sent the ball careening off to the left where, just before going out of bounds, an Oregon player pounced on it. It had gone well past the required 10 yards for an on-side kick so Oregon was given possession. The team drove straight down the field and scored a touchdown.

Game changer.

In the second half Oregon filled the hole they had dug in the first half and went on to pull off a come-from-behind victory. The sports headline in the next day's Oregonian read,  "Brilliant Call By Casanova Wins Indiana Game 29-21."

Bob Berry got special credit for taking those second half snaps from under a damply embarrassed center.

Coronamusic

One of the bright spots of World War II was the music that emerged from the emotions of young lovers being separated by the call to arms of its citizen soldiers.  Beautiful music, heart-tugging lyrics. All that is missing in our war against Coronavirus.  Maybe we need to revisit those early '40s years and update their music.

I'll Walk Alone
old lyrics:
,I'll walk alone, because to tell you the truth, I'll be lonely
I don't mind being lonely
When my heart tells me you are lonely, too.

                                

New Lyrics:

I'll walk alone, we must stay six feet apart,

And you can't hold my hand,
Though you still hold my heart.

I think it does capture the vibe of our times although that may not rank as authentic heart-tugging. Here's another possibility:           

Don't Get Around Much Anymore
Old lyrics:

Missed the Saturday dance
Heard they crowded the floor
Couldn't bear it without you
Don't get around much anymore.

New Lyrics
Missed the Saturday dance
Found a lock on the door
Coronavirus surrounds me
Plenty here to deplore.

The experts tell us we will get through this and when we do we will need an updated version of a welcome home ballad to light up our lives:

It's Been a Long Long Time

Old lyrics:

Kiss me once, then kiss me twice

Then kiss me once again

It's been a long, long time.

Haven't felt like this, my dear

Since I can't remember when

It's been a long, long time.

New lyrics

Test me once, then test me twice
Then test me once again
It's isolation time.
Job gone south, sores in mouth
Temperature at 110
Our stocks aren't worth a dime.

Some of those probably need work but what the heck, time is the one thing of which I have an over supply. Better to be focused on creating high art than to keep banging my tin cup on the bars of my cell and screaming, "I'm innocent.  I'm innocent."

Pernicious Pestilence and Plagiarism

Let's deal with the issue of plagiarism right up front: some of the material in the following screed is lifted directly from the King James Bible, but so what?  I'm not the first to plagiarize Ezekiel and Kings and I will not be the last. At this point I need their wisdom to bolster my premise: the Corno 19 plague is all part of the master plan of that mythological clock Master that set the galaxies and the planets and the individual Earth-lives spinning in their assigned orbits.

Here is Ezekiel 5:17 telling us how the LORD made people see things His way: "So will I send upon you famine and evil beasts, and they shall bereave thee; and pestilence and blood shall pass through thee; and I will bring the sword upon thee.  I, the LORD have spoken."

Listen to 1 Kings 8:37, in which Solomon describes how the LORD "sent a pestilence, blasting, mildew, locust, or if there be caterpillar; if their enemy besiege them in the land of their cities; whatsoever plague, whatsoever sickness there be..."

There are many more Biblical authors who beat the same drum, but the point they all agree on is that mighty forces prevail when men or mammals get out of line.  Who, us? Creatures of the Earth?  We get out of line? Let us count the ways:

Remember way back in that other century when those sex-crazed grasshoppers visited those Mormons in Utah and all the grasshoppers wanted to do was procreate and feast on the crops? See what happened. Yo, here come the sea gulls.

The LORD doesn't like it when His flock gets out of balance. Those hoppers weren't satisfied with just becoming fishing lures and providing entertainment for capture-inspired boys and girls.

And yes, you Adam and you too Eve.  You both accepted the mission to go out and multiply but you wayyy overdid it.  And what your progeny did to the Garden is beyond forgiveness. Extracting minerals and carbon-based material with no regard to the environment. Destroying the planet's lungs by cutting down most of its trees.  Filling earth's most precious treasure, its oceans, with plastic garbage and using the life-sustaining reservoir of air as a sewer is only a small list of the insults to the magnificent gifts that were given to a virgin planet.

Need we ask why a non-forgiving agent has come among us, thinning the herd?  No surprise that the ones with walkers and canes who can't keep up are the first to fall. Oh, you don't buy Guy-in-the-Sky meddling?  Try NATURE DEMANDS BALANCE (grasshoppers taken care of but what about these 12 trillion Homo sapiens?). Or something else. The one thing we do know for sure is that something put a really big you-know-what in our punch bowl.

Don't forget to wash your hands.

What If?

I wonder if everyone plays the "What if?" game from time to time? That is, what if this happened instead of what really happened and how that would have changed a complex series of events?  Like you start out your front door and then remember you forgot to bring the letter you wanted to mail and you go back to get it, just as a piano falling from the 12th floor crashes onto your entrance.  And would have ended your stay on this planet had you not returned for the letter. What if?

What a mysterious matrix of life we live in where every second of our existence has so many "What ifs?" that can change everything for so many other people.  A large What if? occurred for me in 1944 when I was 14 years old.  We lived next door to the Robinsons who had a son, Calvin, who was an only child two years older than me.  Calvin's doting parents gave him every toy a boy could wish for. Best bike. At a time when comic books were big he had them all.

One day I was in Calvin's room sitting in a chair reading comic books while he was across the room playing with a 22-calibre pistol he had received for his 16th birthday.  I heard him say, "Alright, Landers, your time has come."  I looked up to see him pointing the pistol at me and then the sound of the bullet exploding from the barrel as he pulled the trigger. It flew past my left ear and lodged in the wall behind me.

At the sound of the shot Calvin's mother, Effie, came running down the hall and immediately sized up the situation, seeing her stunned son sitting with the weapon in his hand and me sitting in shock next to the door. Effie's instinctive reaction was to turn to me and scream, "You go home right now."

She didn't have to tell me twice. I was out of there. Looking back I think of all the lives that would have changed, or not existed, If Calvin had been a better shot.  What if?

A 50th Year Anniversary

Whoever first observed that "time flies" nailed it. Yes it does on bumblebee wings.

The year, 2019, we now see in our rearview mirror, marks the time 50 years ago when I received a call from newly appointed University of Oregon Athletic Director Norv Ritchey.  "Let's have lunch," he said. We did and he offered me the job of public relations director for the athletic department. I asked him to give me three seconds to think it over.  He would later promote me to Assistant Director.

Goodbye Bon Marche feather merchant, hello player in the big time intercollegiate athletics game.  Plus, I would get paid to work there.  The next six years were the most fun I ever had in any work environment.  Who's to say what we accomplished 50 years ago did not lay the foundation for Oregon's current dominance in the Pac-12 star-lit universe? Some things just take time to kick in:

Football Conference Champion/Rose Bowl Champion

Basketball Champion-Men/ Payton Pritchard, Player of the Year

Basketball Champion-Women/Sabrina Ionescu, Player of the Year
Both men's and women's teams given #1 seed in March Madness regional brackets

(March Madness will play without spectators but still have bracket pools)

The friendships I developed in those years give me a basket full of name for dropping in conversations with fellow inmates in my current commune.  Let anyone bring up any sport and I have my list ready (c'mon memory, don't fail me now)..  And every name is attached to a half-dozen stories, while every story has a half-dozen variations.  That is, the protocol of sports stories dictates that you never let facts screw up a good yarn.

So get comfortable in your chair.  I'm going to tell you about that blazing hot Spring day in Husky Stadium where the Ducks were in a dual track meet with U-Dub. Wunderkind Steve Prefontaine would compete in the 5,000 meters on the artificial track surface that looped around the football field. The track had been heating up for hours and was at grilling temperature by the start of the race. After Pre won the event, he took off his shoes to reveal how his feet had been fried to a mass of bloody, burst blisters served up medium rare. His time for the win was excellent.

At This Point

I blame John Dean, the Watergate miscreant who now makes his living appearing on television recounting how he tried to warn Trickey Dickey that the feces was in the air-conditioning unit. I'm almost certain he was the first to use the phrase , "At this point in time". Like a vocabulary virus it made its insidiously evil way into the national newspeak.  And over the years since Watergate it has transmogrified from hideously pretentious nonsense to accepted corruption of intelligent discourse.

Listen to supposedly educated TV talkers say, "At this point in time, yadda, yadda, yadda."

At this point in time, irregardless of...  Double insults.

"So what?" you might ask,  It doesn't send you to the hospital or cause a tax audit so who cares?  I do.  Because adding that verbiage to make a simple declaration poetic is just wrong.  Like picking your nose.  So stop it.