Indiana Oh Indiana

This link is a good one to Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-author=John%20Bolinger&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AJohn%20Bolinger

I’ve already given the link to Barnes & Noble. Happy reading!  JB

     In my little library hangs a portrait from about the year 1840 of a man and his child. That child is the man’s son, which surprises many viewers, who are thrown off track by the fact that the little boy is wearing what appears to be a dress. This, however, was the custom through the 18^th Century and 19^th Century, so that boys wore such clothing until approaching puberty. I suppose male clothing was a symbol of reaching a certain stage of maturity. In any event, I’ve had the picture about forty years, and it has become a familiar part of my home.

     The subjects in the portrait were painted in almost a primitive style, even though the painting suggests that the father is a man of means. The swirl of drapery, the expensive sofa, the quality of clothing all suggest that he was perhaps a landowner, banker, or municipal figure of some high station. The gaze of the subjects is unchanging and, in some strange way for me, comforting in the sense that they have been there for almost as long as I can remember. They were there the night my father died, and again when my brother, sister, and mother died, all at different times over the span of twenty-five years. Each time the subjects in that picture looked out at me as though they understood grief and were sympathetic to the terrible feeling of loss. They were there on birthdays, Christmas mornings,on my returns home from travel, always telling me that life was good and that there was something enduring.

     There is another painting, an oil done in London, also in 1840 (artist unknown), of an elderly woman wearing a soft wool shawl. The wisdom and kindness in her face have been a comforting presence also over more years of my life than I care to count. In times of celebration and also mourning, she has looked out at me with a gaze of understanding and compassion that has probably not really changed in the human face for thousands of years. My partner Jim calls her and other old portraits that hang in the library and staircase “the gallery of dead people,” but my affection for those pictures is unwavering.

     There is over my desk a photograph taken by Jim at the Art Institute of Chicago in May of 2007, when we both spent the day looking at wonderful collections throughout the museum. Though neither of us can remember the artist or the actual title of this picture, we call her Minnie, and she continues to energize the hallway, making guests to our home smile at her outrageous level of joy. Everyone who looks at Minnie lights up at the surprise and power of her “joie de vivre.”

     Both paintings and the photograph are reminders to me that we are all connected as a human family, all of us through however long we as a species have been in this world.  JB

I realize that not everyone has or even wants a Kindle reading device from Amazon. All my books are available as paperbacks too from Amazon.

Here is a link to the paperback at Barnes & Noble for Mum’s the Word: Secrets of a Family:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mums-the-word-john-bolinger/1115785821?ean=9781490451053&itm=1&usri=9781490451053

Thanks, everybody.

John Bolinger

     There have been no new posts for a while on my blog, because I’ve been working on two books, which I have just finished editing and submitting for publication.

     The first is an anthology of my essays, poems, one-act plays, and other writing, called Hodgepodge, a Feast for Mind and Spirit. The book is oversized and is 182 pages. It represents what friends have chosen as the best pieces from my blog over the past year and a half. The book is in paperback and Kindle.

 Paperback link:

http://www.amazon.com/Hodgepodge-Spirit-Mr-John-Bolinger/dp/1489598618/ref

Look in the “Book” section at Amazon.com under the title.

The Kindle link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D2FUF32

The other book is Mum’s the Word: Secrets of a Family, also available in paperback and Kindle. The book is about a family trying to keep secret the patriarch’s raging alcoholism. Though the theme is serious, the book is filled with humor and entertaining vignettes based upon the family’s efforts to hide the father’s shenanigans as best they can.

Paperback link:

http://www.amazon.com/Mums-Word-Secrets-John-Bolinger/dp/1490451056/ref=sr

Kindle link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DF7G0LS#reader_B00DF7G0LS

I’m especially happy with Mum’s the Word, because I think it’s entertaining but also cathartic for anyone who has experienced alcoholism in his or her home with a father, mother, brother, sister, or child, who has the terrible affliction.

 JB

Use Pylorexene with caution.  Side effects may include nausea, internal bleeding, blindness, stroke, desire to commit suicide or murder, uncontrollable urges to stick your finger into an electric light socket, to pee on a neighbor’s new car, or to shoplift tubes of expensive toothpastes.  See your doctor if side effects persist, and eat plenty of peanut butter.

Of course, I’ve created an ad exaggerating characteristics of ones I’ve actually watched on television commercials for pharmaceutical products.  There are drug commercials on TV every few minutes, and they have in many cases become so subtle, that I can no longer even identify for what treatments they’re intended.  The happy faces of the “patients,” who are hiking through lovely woodland settings with their dogs, fishing with their grandchildren, or just sitting blissfully on benches in beautiful gardens of public parks, beguile me into forgetting the purposes of the messages, the side effects of the medications often being ultimately worse than those of the ailments being treated with the medications in the first place.  It seems that in our modern culture, there’s really a pill for everything.  JB

This is from my book, Mum’s the Word, Secrets of a Family.  It is the story of a family trying to hide the fact that the father is a raging alcoholic.  There is pathos but also humor throughout the book, which will be ready in June, 2013 as a paperback or Kindle on Amazon. The book will be available at Barnes & Noble beginning September, 2013.  JB

Chapter 11   Transition

Summer came and with it, Lake Michigan’s warmth and humidity to Northwest Indiana, that Midwestern pocket of steel mills, car dealerships, public parks with their monkey bars, worn patches of lawn beneath swings and at the ends of sliding boards.  There were picnic tables that had seen their share of potato salad, and Indiana green bean casseroles, as well as molded plaster Indian heads, painted by the same kids at Hammond’s day camps, who wove little pot holders on hot July afternoons for their mothers, aunts, and school teachers.  It was at that time the only place on earth I knew, even though in the fall of 1963 I had already been on our high school senior trip to New York City and Washington, D.C. Though it was a familiar place, Hammond was a town, where I had always felt a bit out-of-step, in terms of my social life.

My “social life” in high school was hardly worth using the term.  A nerdy, withdrawn kid with eyeglasses, and uninterested in sports beyond a game of chess, I was usually content to observe what I thought were the “cool” people, from a distance of several light years, as though through some powerful telescope.  The “cool” set, as I believed them to be at that time, were the ones considered good looking by our standards of the early 1960’s, which meant girls, who looked even remotely like Sandra Dee, Yvette Mimieux, or Annette Funicello, and boys, who resembled in any way, Troy Donahue, Frankie Avalon,  Tab Hunter, or Elvis.  As in most other fashion eras for teens, clothes had to reflect the styles that were current.  This alone was enough to put me completely out of the chic crowd, as I was still wearing neckties my dad had worn while dating my mom in the early 1940’s.  My receding hairline surrounding the widow’s peak made me look like Eddie Munster, unless I combed the hair down over my forehead, like bangs, which made me look suspiciously like Mamie Eisenhower.  Add to those examples of visual revulsion my clumsiness at sports, or my tendency to trip, even while walking down an empty hallway or across a clear gym floor, and you have someone, who if not absolutely invisible, was certainly not going to win any popularity contests, at least not on this planet.

My best friend was Lawrence Fricke (pronounced Fricky), and no, he did not go by the nickname of Larry.  He was an absolute Lawrence, who at age sixteen had already appeared to be forty.  Tall, lanky, and wearing thick eyeglasses, perfect for starting fires on camping trips, Lawrence wore clothes I suspected had been handed down to him by a grandfather or great-grandfather.  They made Lawrence look like a docent from the Smithsonian Institute , who had somehow got lost from one of the tour groups he was instructing and ended up in the halls of Gavit High School in Hammond, Indiana, lost as last year’s Easter egg.   We were both good students, which increased our popularity at school about as much as our stamp collections, or certificates for good dental hygiene. We were admittedly hopeless, which is probably why we became inseparable friends, cemented further by the fact that Lawrence’s father had been an alcoholic, killed in a drunken automobile accident in 1959.  This, even by itself, was enough for Lawrence to become my trusted confidant.  Our shared impressions and recollections of our fathers made them both seem in some ways to be the same man.  The result was that Lawrence and I were like brothers.

It was important for me, as well as for Lawrence, to have someone to confide in.  We shared memories of our fathers and their terrible addictions, able to laugh at some of them, like the time Mr. Fricke had set off a box of fireworks inside the Bluebird Tap on Kennedy Avenue and cleared the place for over an hour, or my father wearing a tuxedo at the wedding reception of a friend, singing, near the end of the evening, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” from the top of a tree in the courtyard before being driven home by the concerned best man from the wedding ceremony.  We shared our recollections of the horrors too of having alcoholic fathers, but it all meant that for the first time, I had someone my age, who understood.

That summer would be our last one before my heading for Muncie, Indiana, and Lawrence on his way to Evanston, Illinois to Northwestern University.  We both had summer jobs and college reading lists to plow through.  I had been dating a lovely girl named Barbara Parker for two years, but I had never become close enough emotionally to reveal what I believed at the time were the dark secrets of my family’s bout with Dad’s being an alcoholic, so Barbara remained distant, especially after we left for separate colleges.

Lawrence met a girl named Angela Harris at Rand McNally, where he was working part time and developed an almost instant crush on her, but was afraid to approach her with any request more intimate than asking the time of day.  He even spent time in bookstores and libraries, poring over any books or magazines that gave information on “successful dating.”  The hitch for him was that he saw almost any challenge as something that could be met in the same way he worked out chemistry or physics problems.  He thought there was really no conflict that couldn’t be overcome by finding a workable answer in a book somewhere.  Not surprisingly, this rather mechanical view of problem-solving failed usually to bring him much joy in the human relations department , particularly for dating, but he seemed determined to win Angie over, and by some miracle, that made me think briefly that Lawrence had made a secret journey to Fatima or Lourdes over the summer, he managed to get a date with Miss Harris.

Against all odds, that were equal to one’s winning a $100, 000, 000 Lottery, or having cocktails and lunch with the Pope, Lawrence and Angela actually hit it off, she being charmed by his amusingly nerdy innocence, and he by her sweet nature and striking beauty.  This gave me hope for the human race in general, and for me in particular, even though that hope didn’t achieve true fruition until my 20^th, 30^th, and 40^th high school class reunions, each one showing in more vivid ways than the previous one the sheer folly of my teenage years in believing that the “cool” set would always be fabulous and remote creatures, worthy of photo shoots for national magazine covers, and interviews by Barbara Walters, and Mike Wallace, based solely upon the absolutely cool, if snobbish, elegance they had all displayed with such verve during our years in high school.

Bob Strack, the Greek god, who had been star of the basketball team, suffered most in the “good looks” department over the years, arriving at our twenty-year reunion in a rusty old Ford Pinto, and looking like Gabby Hayes.  I didn’t recognize him until Cathy Farrell, a once gorgeous cheerleader, who now looks the spitting image of Barbara Bush on steroids, pointed him out to me. To my intense and everlasting joy, the people who had “held up” best, were the nerds, like me, whose looks had somehow improved, as though Father Time hadn’t thought us cool enough even to bother with.  Each reunion brought a coup that sent me back into the world with increasing confidence, that I had no “spare tire,” or baldness, or those awful aging teeth that sometimes make folks look like smiling jack-o-lanterns.  I’d like to think that this sweet revenge was not at all mean-spirited on my part.  I mean, I wasn’t personally responsible for former cheerleaders, Fay, Marcia, Patty, and Sheila looking like the cast from The Golden Girls, was I?

We live in a nation that has a terrible phobia of aging.  Our youth-centered values saturate the media on everything from cars to clothing and entertainment.  Since the 1920’s, “the age of gin and flappers,” we have increasingly shunned the idea of growing old, even if gracefully, and the result is that youth and their aged counterparts have become more separated than ever before.

In centuries before the 20^th, young people mingled more with their elders, because often grandparents ended up living with their children, so that the household was a blend of generations.  Also, travel was quite a different challenge in that riding a horse or taking a carriage was not usually a spur of the moment decision. Entertainment was at home, whenever there was leisure time. Music, games, and conversation were much more multi-generational, out of necessity. Nowadays, teenagers seem desperate to escape their homes to be anywhere but with their older family members. Though there has always been the phenomenon of youth seeking its own identity through distancing itself from elders during teen years, that separation was not as pronounced until the 20^th Century.  It has now become almost a chasm.

Perhaps behind our terror of growing “old” is a fear of death itself, which in our time seems to many more of a finality than in previous centuries, when an afterlife was more of a reality in general belief than in modern times.  Today our association with all things “chic” are connected in some way with the beauty, energy, and health of being young.  Too few images of contented elders are shown in the media. We tend to see being aged as the end of a journey instead of a journey in itself, one that can provide time, not just for rest, but for further exploration on one’s own terms and at one’s own pace.

I resent ads that speak of getting rid of gray hair as though it’s some kind of cancer that will prevent participation in the modern world and any kind of happiness or respect by others.  People with gray hair are not lepers.  This morning I read about studies being done in England and Germany toward a “cure” for gray hair.  Cure? Growing old is not a disease, but the article suggested that it was, and that not having gray hair would bring back a flaming youth and happiness that would otherwise not be possible.  What rubbish!  Sexiness is wonderful in its place, but so are things like experience, character, and wisdom, all of which gray hair can represent.  And who says that someone with silver hair can’t be sexy anyway?

Almost all the people I know personally, who have gray or white hair are comfortable, stable friends, who have taken care of themselves and are enjoying their golden years.  I include myself among those who are enjoying their “declining” years, still in excellent health, and with goals and projects that keep their creativity and joy of being alive realities.  My hair is silver and on its way to being snow white eventually.  That fact will never keep me up nights worrying that something has been lost.  In fact, I know that much has been gained.  JB

From December 6, 2012 until April 27, 2013, I was living in the beautiful Pompano Beach condo that belongs to my partner Jim and me. Jim needs to work two more years before his retirement, so our cat Riggs lives with Jim in our Colorado house, while our dog Dudley and I spend the fall and winter in the Florida condo. I’ve been retired for nine years, so I’d rather keel over from heart failure playing tennis,  bowling, or swimming, than from shoveling snow.  Because shipping pets can be dangerous or, at best, traumatic for them, I’ve opted to drive the 2200 miles to and from the condo for the dog’s comfort and my peace of mind.  It’s about our trip back to Colorado this past week that I’d like to write today.

I’ve never been a good traveler, probably because I don’t “transition” well or very quickly from one location to another, even though I’ve been to Europe several times.  Though I enjoy occasional change and adventure, there is also something to be said for that feeling of being anchored and secure (however illusory the sensation) in just one or two places.  In a world that is changing ever faster, the emotional comfort of having a safeguard or mainstay location is gratifying.  I’d have made a completely unsatisfactory nomad.

After closing up the condo and leaving a set of keys with a trusted neighbor, Duds and I began the first part of our journey on the southern portion of the Florida Turnpike at around seven that morning of April 27.  The first part of the drive was quiet and uneventful, maybe because it was an early Saturday morning, so I was happy with the minimal traffic, even though there were signs from time to time warning drivers of possible delays due to “Spring break” travel.

Duds and I stopped at the Claremont motel in Valdosta, Georgia late that afternoon.  The room was comfortable, and there was a good restaurant next door.  Drifting off to sleep after watching Rachel Maddow, one of my favorite commentators on MSNBC, I was able to rest until just after two in the morning, when I heard someone pounding on the door two rooms down the hall. The pounding was accompanied by the voice of a man saying loudly, “Aw, come on, baby.  Open the door.  I’m real sorry, sweetie.”  Hoping that the woman would open the door to let the man in some time before dawn, I waited as his pleas degenerated over the next ten minutes to screaming epithets, like, “stupid bitch” and “dirty whore,” along with the insistent percussion of his fists punching and his feet kicking the woman’s door.  I heard a door open, but it was that of another room, from which a man’s voice yelled, “Hey, keep it down, moron!  We’re trying to get some sleep here!” At that point, there was some welcome silence either from the woman letting in the maniac, or from his simply having given up and gone away.  I couldn’t tell which, but it didn’t matter.  Things were quiet again, and I was able to fall asleep fairly soon.  After breakfast, Duds and I checked out, continuing our drive to Antioch, Tennessee, where we checked into a motel called The Knights Inn.

I should have been more aware of what I was in for, when I saw the “lobby” of the inn.  The receptionist was behind what was undoubtedly bullet-proof glass.  The shabbiness of the carpet, furniture, and art prints brought visions of Irskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, about Georgia tenant farmers during The Great Depression.  However, any fear I experienced about possible danger was diminished by my fatigue and hunger, so that I paid for the one night stay, along with the ten-dollar pet fee and took Duds and the luggage to room 202, right next to the caretaker’s room, which had as its window curtain what appeared to be a huge and badly stained tee-shirt from some era long gone.  On walking along the second floor catwalk, I saw a discarded wash cloth, a large hair pic comb, and some empty beer cans.  Again, exhaustion softened the harsh reality of these giant clues.

Inserting the key card, I opened the door to see the room, and the bed which was nailed to the floor.  The smell of the space was that of unmistakable mildew as my eyes were drawn to the upper walls around the room, which at first appeared to have a border of floral design, but which was actually the pattern of mold or mildew recently painted over in order to hide the fact.  My only thought was that we could be gone by early morning before any mold could burst through the paint in time to harm us in any way. There was a TV, but there was no coffee maker or shampoo.  In the shower was a bar of soap that Barbie and Ken would consider too small, and a bath towel that at home I would probably use to dry dishes.  The shower knob had to be turned very carefully to get water, as the knob kept falling off.  The general dinginess of the place made me think briefly that it could be a hot property for any producer doing a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO.  This was really the Bates Motel.

I gave Duds his dinner and a dental chew stick to keep him occupied while I dined at the Mexican restaurant next door, which turned out to be a great place to have dinner on a colorful veranda in the shade.  I needed the extra margarita to face going back to that dreadful room, but by then, I was too tired to be concerned about anything less than a level five tornado or an army of angry red fire ants.

After I took Dudley for a short walk, I noticed three cars in the parking lot that had trunks and hoods that had been pried open.  The scalloped edges spoke of midnight crowbar invasions.  Two hoods were wired shut, and one was closed by duct tape.  Suddenly, by contrast, my Honda Accord looked like a Rolls Royce, but I had a brief vision of tape and wire holding it together on the remainder of the trip home in the event of a nocturnal vandal or thief.  Even all this wasn’t enough to keep me from falling asleep almost immediately after I went to bed.

Just after three in the morning I was awakened from a dream about delicious cheese tostadas by loud voices in the parking lot below my window.  Pulling the curtains aside slightly, so as not to be seen, I saw an enormous black woman wearing a muumuu the size of a camping tent, arguing with another black woman with a gigantic Afro unlike any others I had seen since the early 1970’s.  Though I couldn’t make out much of what the two were screaming at each other, I did recognize the old standard insults of “Bitch!” and “Cunt!” yelled at ear-shattering volumes, followed by physical punches, hair-pulling, and kicking.  The large woman, named Maggie, took off one of her flip-flops and began beating the one named Shaquita over the head with it.  They were only a few feet from my car, which was a greater concern to me than Shaquita’s head, which was protected by enough frizzed hair to fill a mattress, and could most likely not be penetrated anyway by a heavy shovel, let alone a rubber flip-flop.  Then a burly man, even larger than Maggie, entered the fray, trying to calm the two women, who turned on him together, hurling labels, like “Mutha Fucka.”  After ten minutes of what became a real brawl, a police car arrived, siren blaring and red lights flashing, followed by the two women being hauled away, while the burly man waved goodbye, laughing his way back to his room. By that time, I was wide awake.  I mean, after watching people trying to kill each other in a parking lot outside your room, it’s a bit tough to get back to sleep.

For breakfast the next morning, I had a couple of  Kashi Pumpkin Spice energy bars with some cold coffee I had left over in a thermos.  All I wanted was to escape!  Duds and I made a quick exit, never to return.  I threw my key card through the little slot of the bullet-proof glass enclosure around the frightened looking clerk before Duds and I were off to Kentucky, through which we drove pretty much without interest or incident.  Southern Illinois was filled with lovely scenery, which I didn’t know even existed there.  My only mistake was pulling into MacDonalds for lunch and choosing a Quarter Pounder, which I will be digesting until Mothers Day.  The drive that day ended in Missouri at a Ramada Inn which was, by contrast with the Knights Inn, the Taj Mahal.  I spent a relatively luxurious night there, sleeping well, and feeling much renewed by morning.  I wondered why the previous place had been named Knights Inn.  The only reason I came up with was that the renowned Knights of the Round Table in King Arthur’s court had to prove their bravery through tests of endurance during activities, like duels and jousting. Staying at that motel would certainly have earned any Sir Lancelot a place of honor with other knights, who had shown extraordinary courage.  In the end, though, were I attempting to demonstrate daring or boldness enough to become a member of the Round Table, I would probably choose jousting or fighting dragons over staying at the Knights’ Inn.

Tuesday, April 29^th was the fourth day.  Duds and I drove through Kansas, which seems to be, at least along Interstate 70 West, one huge fossil with a few twigs growing out of it (not actual living trees).  Having heard the blizzard warnings for the plains and Colorado coming Wednesday, I chose to keep driving the extra four hours to arrive home early Tuesday evening.  It’s a good thing I did.  There was indeed a blizzard Wednesday, but my car was already parked safely in the garage by then.  Now I’m expecting e-mails from all my friends, who know how much I hate driving.  The notes will all be pretty much the same message:  “Congratulations, John, for not being killed on your trip home.”  JB

I live in a little gated community of condominiums on a small lake in Pompano Beach, Florida.  I like my neighbors, but I’m having a problem with one of them, a seventy-five-year-old woman named Molly, who uses a walker to navigate her way around the second floor, where my apartment is.

Molly is a spry lady, despite her dependence upon the walker, and she has the booming voice of a Teamster union rep. She can be heard all over the complex without the benefit of a megaphone, but a bizarre set of circumstances came about to help me realize why people scattered when they heard Molly’s less than mellifluous voice coming down the walk.  For me, it began when she knocked on my door to ask me to change her air conditioner filter. Then she wanted me to open a jar of pickles, followed by other requests to check this or that in her apartment. I realized finally that there was something terribly amiss, when she knocked on my door to ask me to put a hairnet over her new permanent in order to protect a do for which she had paid fifty dollars.  She said that I should not mention to Steve, Harvey, Pearl, Donna, or Marilyn, the other residents on our floor, that I had helped her.  When I asked why, Molly’s reply was simply, “Oh, they were nasty about it and refused to help.”  At the time, I took her answer at face value, not putting the puzzle pieces together until later.  I simply put the hairnet on her head and continued fixing my lunch.  Minutes later there was another knock on the door.

 “John, my phone isn’t working.  Can you come over and look at it?”  My first thought was, “ Do I look like a telephone repairman to you?” but I held back actually saying it aloud.  I followed Molly to her apartment, where her cell phone was charging.  The illuminated screen read, “Battery charging,” so I told her to leave it alone for at least an hour to allow the battery to be strengthened. With no land line phone, she needed the cell. I understood that.  I returned to my apartment, where only fifteen minutes later there was another knock at my door to say that her phone wasn’t working yet.  I sent her back saying that I would go to her place after the hour was up.  After the phone was turned on and working again, I believed, perhaps naively, that I had seen the last of Molly for the day.

Three more knocks on my door were to inform me that her toaster wasn’t working,  her TV remote was stuck, and that her hair net had come off.  The toaster wasn’t plugged in, the TV remote batteries were loose, and her hair net had snagged on a coat hanger in her closet.  OK, I started to feel that she was simply lonely and looking for any excuse to talk to somebody, anybody.  It was, however, after her sixth knock on my door that I became annoyed enough to ponder the circumstances in order to figure out that the real reason she wasn’t knocking on the doors of other residents was that she had already done that enough times to annoy them too, so that one by one they told her to go jump off the nearest cliff, with or without her walker.  I must have been the only one left who hadn’t rebuffed her requests for help.  I was apparently still fair game.

Today, there were intermittent knocks all afternoon on my door accompanied by Molly’s inimitable voice yelling, “Hey, John.  My phone is on the fritz again. What are we going to do about it?”  I admit it.  I’m a coward in the sense that I don’t want to confront Molly with what I would really like to tell her, which would go something like this:

“Look, Molly.  I’m not your caregiver, and I don’t WANT to be your caregiver.  After your sixth knock on my door yesterday, it occurred to me that you were a lady, who uses people, and that you would continue using me as long as I didn’t protest.  Well, my dear, I’m protesting right now.  I don’t know what makes you think that these are my problems, and I certainly don’t get your sense of extreme entitlement in the matter, but you need to begin solving problems yourself.  Your Miss Congeniality trophy is in serious danger of tarnishing.  Honey, if you can’t even put on your own hairnet, you probably can’t make toast or even brush your own teeth and shouldn’t be living alone in an apartment.  Maybe you need to be in assisted living, a nursing facility, or the hush hush ward at Imperial Point.  You seem to have no sense of borders, limits, or extremes, so I’m telling you now that my door is wired  to deliver a high voltage shock if you ever touch the knocker or doorbell again.  Do you understand what I’m saying, Molly?  Is any of this getting through that hairnet?”

The worst part of all this is that for the past couple of days I’ve been turning out lights, turning down the sound on the TV or radio whenever I heard the sound of Molly’s walker inching its way down the walkway on the second floor, and not answering the door when she knocked or rang the bell. I admit that hiding from a seventy-five-year-old woman is about as cowardly as one can get, but the alternative is being brutally honest with her, which I’m not yet ready to do, but give me a couple more days.  JB

Kim Jong-un, the Supreme Ruler of North Korea, may or may not be simply a figurehead controlled from behind the scenes by his puppet master aunts,  uncles, and the military generals, but he reminds me of one of those frogs that puffs itself up with air to three times its actual size in order to intimidate those whom he sees as threats to his “power.” His Napoleon complex could have dire consequences for the rest of the world, certainly for South Korea. The problem is that he’s flexing his muscles in an irresponsible way.

As someone who is only thirty years old, Kim Jong-un seems to view the world as his personal video game. His apparent bravado comes, I believe, from having been isolated, protected, and seemingly adored in a country where the cult of personality and unmerited hero worship leap practically into the realm of science fiction.  The most intense part of my curiosity wants to know if all those huge, genuflecting crowds of North Korean citizens are as naive as children in their Santa Claus devotion to Kim Jong-un, if they are paid actors playing parts on the world’s biggest stage set, if they have been put under subliminal mass hypnosis, or if they have been threatened with death for not showing in public that sparkling, wide-eyed adoration so evident in media coverage.

The man has never had the experience of having to be diplomatic. Like a spoiled adolescent, he seems used to being deified by all around him, when in fact, however much education he may have received while residing in Switzerland, Kim Jong-un has the social adeptness and mentality of a street gang member shouting threats across a vacant lot at rivals.  The absurdity of his power on the world stage right now is like the United States putting all nuclear weapon decisions in the hands of a seventh grade boy, who received a “D” in his science class.

There are, in fact, people who like Kim Jong-un.  Dennis Rodman said that Kim Jong-un is, “an awesome guy” and that his father and grandfather were, “great leaders.”  I mean, for God’s sake!  What else do you need to know in order to be scared witless?