Phthursday Musings: Sooooo vember

Today was the long-awaited big fun run fundraiser at the school. Lots of gimmicks around it all culminating in the kids running 30 small laps where parents and grandparents pledge $1 per lap. So a big day at the school!

And so of course, first thing this morning, small man had a temperature over 100.

This then is November, the beginning of the season Kurt Vonnegut called “locking”, the time when baseball has packed up for the year, when we are peppered by those little disappointments, like even those people who rant and rave about daylight savings finding that it’s dark at 5:00 and they’ve already given up for the rest of the calendar year.

T. S. Eliot famously called April the cruellest month. What then might that make November?

Well, I’ve got a few random musings to offer. Not all of them dreary. Just some. Maybe.

In the not dreary column:

One of the most wonderfully meta things has occurred: the Museum of Science and Industry has opened a temporary exhibit devoted to Mold-A-Rama.

To the best of my recollection, my first trip to MSI was a class trip in second grade, and I don’t know this, but I suspect that was the first time I saw a Mold-A-Rama machine, and I further suspect that one of the machines there kicked out a U505 like this one does:

I am a long-standing fan / admirer / detractor of the self-referential (surely you all know this by now) and of course I have to take my family to this exhibit.

The important question I have is this: Did they have the foresight to place, at the exit to the exhibit, a machine that will make a Mold-A-Rama of a Mold-A-Rama machine?

We held an election last week, we being AMERICA, and I suppose there are a lot of people who have shared a lot of thoughts about it, and I’m not sure I have a lot more to offer, but I’ll chime in with this:

If I didn’t know it already, I learned back in 2006 that even on a good election night, even on a very good election night, the real work starts the next day. Election night is when your proposal is green lighted, and now you’ve got to actually do the work.

That, I think, is something a lot of people have lost track of. When I read about “a very good night for democracy” or whatever… no, the actual work begins all over again. There’s still governance to be done. Maybe not so much governance in a split Washington, but now is when these states like Michigan and Minnesota which went triple blue have to do something pretty goddamn special.

And I’m not just talking about the raw governance of raw politics, because democracy is so much more than that. It might very well be the case that this was the best possible realistic showing for the Democrats nationally, kind of hiding Joe Biden in the corner, just counting on the Republicans to be just buffoonish enough, but we all know that it’s the cities and states which have to take the lead in American politics today. Engage us. Engage us in something new and profound.

Your work has only just begun.

Incidentally I also learned in 2006 that in the aftermath of an election, which also happens to be in the aftermath of the World Series, it’s just a tremendous letdown overall. Even if you’re not super plugged in to the election (which this year I wasn’t) the air just feels thin, the darkness comes early, you go into… well, the locking.

People at work asked me how Vonnecon was this past weekend, and I explained it like this: There were some old hippies, some young hippies, and some people wondering what the deal was with all the hippies.

I’ll revisit Kurt and his works in the near future based on the little bit of feedback I got about organizing some collective reading. I do want to chime in a bit though about: Indianapolis.

Indianapolis, until this weekend, was the city I’d been through the most without ever hardly going to it. (We did go there once, about eleven years ago, for a roller derby tournament!) Grad school at Ohio State meant a lot of trips across the middle of Indiana, sometimes on the huge I-465 loop around Indianapolis, sometimes right through the middle. It always felt like a strange place to me, because ostensibly it was a large city, a major league city, but it also always kind of felt like there wasn’t really anything much there… like it was Peoria times five, not Chicago divided by five.

The Vonnegut Museum is on Indiana Avenue, and right across from it is a historic marker to Indiana Avenue, which the sign identifies as the center of Black culture in Indianapolis. Well, there’s no sign like that in Peoria or Rockford.

The pieces I saw, admittedly not that much… Indianapolis felt like a much more actively diverse city than most of what I’m used to in the Midwest. It felt more historically interesting. Admittedly, if you’ve read enough META-SPIEL, I’ll find historic interest in a place like Herscher, Illinois. But Indianapolis really did seem to have a sense of itself. Louisville, where we were last November, is another place that has that sense of itself going for it.

I’ve only read through a couple of the Belt Publishing city anthology books - I’ve read the Chicago, Columbus, and Youngstown installments so far - but I’m now very interested in reading the Indianapolis installment.

Incidentally, I would very very very very very much like to be a part of bringing into existence a Rockford anthology. They’ve done Youngstown, Flint, Gary… these are Rockford sized places. If you’re reading this and have thoughts about it, let me know. I’ve never edited an anthology or anything of the sort and I don’t see how I’d ever have the time to figure something like that out unless I dropped almost all of my other secondary interests for a couple of years, but some of these have been co-edited, and yeah, I’ve got ideas, I’ve got some damned good ideas if I do say so myself.

This being the correct time of year, this was the week I made chili:

I do not cook a lot. I might “prepare” but not cook. I am very bad at timing things in the kitchen. If I just have something in the oven and frozen corn heated on the stove top, the corn is always five minutes early or five minutes late. I admire people who actually understand the proper sequencing of things in a kitchen.

It is good this year, not great, but good. More heat than usual. I wish I had been in less of a rush and had tried finely chopping some of the vegetables instead of just resorting to using the blender. But it is good.

Tonight we finished watching Get Back, the long Beatles documentary about the Let It Be sessions that most everyone else watched months ago. It’s marvelous, everything it was made out to be and more.

I used to get grief about how all the music I listened to was obscure and I didn’t like anything popular and blah blah blah and yet the reality is that for thirty years I’ve fairly consistently maintained that, yeah, the Beatles were the greatest of them all. I feel reaffirmed in that thinking after seeing Get Back. It doesn’t matter that this wasn’t exactly their greatest collection of songs, and it also doesn’t matter that the whole thing was completely bailed out by happenstance, this was in the end a tremendous document about the creative process and it just reaffirms for me that as humans we’re supposed to go out there and create shit, good shit, ridiculous shit, we’re here to create. We of course also must be stewards, the creation process is not supposed to be akin to just filthy decadence, but the instinct to create and to see it through in big and bold and beautiful and crazy and obscure and obscene ways, this is humanity at its essence, and that’s the proper thing to glean from the Beatles.

Annually I am asked what I want for my birthday or for Christmas and I inevitably have no good answer or I mumble something impossible.

But here is what I have had in my mind to do for literally years now: I want to take a board of something like Masonite, maybe thin plywood is okay, and I have an image in my mind of something I want to paint. What I need is the space to do it in, the right kind of paint (and I don’t know what that is), the right kinds of brushes (I have even less clue what that is), and a lot of tape (but I’m not sure what kind of that either.) And I want to spread like four squares out on the ground, maybe 18 inch squares, and work on four similar paintings at once. I suspect they will not look quite like what I have in my mind, but that is something I very much want to do, I’m just not organized enough in that way to figure out the boards and the paints and the brushes and the tapes.

I would call this set of works “Secondary Modern”, which is an absurd thing to do because I live in AMERICA, but Darren Hayman would appreciate it.

I’d also like a Darren Hayman painting of some type, incidentally. Darren is the Edward Lear of our time, you know. (Would he appreciate me telling him that? I guess I could let him know on Twitter, if it’s still there when I’m done writing this thing…)

I do want to get in a word about the World Cup, which shouldn’t at all be a November thing, but it is this year, because Qatar bribed a bunch of assholes, and then brought in a bunch of migrant labor and worked some of those poor people to death, and yeah, we’re going to watch it all anyway even while we’re cursing the whole thing. Sigh.

My dark horse pick was Senegal, but with Sadio Mane unfortunately out, Senegal is sunk.

I do not trust Brazil, I think Argentina peaked getting Messi his Copa America, I do not think France has it together, I just can’t buy England pulling it off, and although I live in AMERICA I do not see the USA doing much more than maybe squeaking out of the group stage. I will also be rooting for Uruguay, because Uruguay is the coolest, but alas, I don’t see this being the year for La Celeste.

Belgium to win the whole thing.

As a coda to an anti-ode (anti-oda?) to November, here’s an actual video for an actual song with the word “November” in it.

No, not that one.

I think it’s funny that this is only up as something someone recorded off of MTV2 back in the day, and when it ends, there’s a list of upcoming Weird Al concerts, starting with… Rockford. (I never saw Weird Al. I wish I would have!)

Keep it real, kids.