Beg pardon, what? in Normal entries

The mercury is creeping on ninety, or, would be if I had mercury in my thermometers. Every digital device I have, including the home thermostat, has a different theory on the very empirical immediate present. If I went by how it felt I’d say fucking hot and wet as a nun at Chippendales. Yeah, not a good one, but I honestly couldn’t think of a wet nun crack off the top of my head. I’ll probably wake up at 2 AM with a million of them.

My older sister has folded us into her Sunday morning routine; go to church, go to the farmers market (right across from the church) come here and go to her daughters. Her and I have always had an interesting relationship. She’s nine years older than I am. I was a toddler when she was in high school … we always sort of missed being peers, so, it might be a more normative sort of sibling relationship. Shortly after I had come back to take care of the folks, I was outside her house smoking in the snow, another Sunday routine when her husband and our father were still alive. She came out asked for a drag. We stood in silence passing a cigarette and she whispered that she was sorry. It encompassed decades of stuff, but mostly the few years prior. For the first year I was here I apologized for not understanding how some things work, explained I’d been living in Oregon and came back for my folks. Almost always got asked if I had other siblings. Sometimes I said I had a sister who lived up the street, sometimes I didn’t.

It was my turn to say I was sorry this spring. An encompassing I’m sorry. Mostly what I meant is for not liking her husband, alive or dead, and hers was for not taking care of the folks. She’s different these days. Without the weight of history, she’d be almost the young woman I hitchhiked to visit in Boston (Wellesley and then a year at the Sorbonne). Wound a little too tight but wholly self-possessing.

I had a song stuck in my head earlier. Made me think of how people experience memory. The lyrics played over and over with a conscious nudge. No orchestra, no lights, no light summer air and a budding girl in a transparent sun skirt; just lyrics. The language for memory implies something else, sight at minimum. Only in dreams are there pictures to memories and my dreams aren’t that … fuck, struggling for a word … representative? Ok, lets go with representative but that’s not precise enough and little colder than I was shooting for. Tangible? Better, but further off track. I can’t describe exactly how a song sticks in my head, but I’m open to you trying. I mean, of course, how it sticks in your head, though, it’d be funnier if tried to explain how it sticks in mine. We (people) are fond of railing against or laughing about our differences, it comes down, often, to hair splitting. Our similarities are much farther reaching. Here in the born-again PC year of 2018 our differences are spotlighted and assigned degrees of blame.

There’s an advertisement for … I don’t know what the fuck for. John Cena is walking down the street says something about patriotism, passes a black woman and a white woman dressed for a seventies revival who are either speaking sign language or who don’t have mikes because John Cena is talking. Patriotism turns quickly to being an American and being an American means love. The little box that usually shows the sponsor says something like love … I don’t know, an updated version of love see no color. John Cena has an armed services haircut, probably to give credence to the patriotism is the first two seconds of a ten second ad. John Cena did not serve. It’s vaguely insulting and patently untrue. Love is not what it means to be an American, and a big motherfucker with a crew cut telling you it is doesn’t make it so. I think the intent was to get people up too late watching things through the toes darkly to quit hating. No, I don’t really think that was the intent, but it’s the closest I can come to a reasonable guess. The PC bug has a way of phrasing even the most innocent and positive of concepts into something vaguely accusatory.

I don’t really have much to say. The whole local immediate present weather report was to demonstrate my distraction. It’s to fucking hot to be coherent about anything important. The local primaries are hitting the fan on Tuesday. The candidates have spent a fuckton of money on flyers and a shit-kilo of energy on knocking at the door. They’ve even gone so far as to explain to me, repeatedly, that I don’t have to be a registered party member to vote in primaries but if I do I can only vote in one. If any of the races meant shit to me I’d vote in the republican primaries just to pick out the worst candidate. I have other things to do than to fuck with the republicans. There’s a Muslim running for governor. So far, I’ve heard his religion a hundred times but not a bit of his platform. I don’t know, not on the Tuesday ballot. The guy is from Detroit. His religion is not really the point of anything. Don’t know anyone else’s platform or religion. It has nothing to do with whether or not I give a fuck, the political landscape here has never been transparent.

So, it’s a few hours later. It was getting to hot to type and now that the mercury, that doesn’t exist, has skipped merrily past dull ninety, it’s too hot to do anything else. Subjectively, of course. Nothing worth the heat has presented itself and I’m loathe to invent. I did discover that in that John Cena ad the ladies really look like they are signing and the ‘label’ in the ad is Love needs no label (give or take a syllable or two). Of course, love has labels, I don’t think they intended for anyone to pay attention to the ad. ‘I love you’ can mean, say, 1) I want inside your pants 2) I got you a milk bone, who’s a good boy 3) Your dress for the father daughter dance, like it? 4) Happy birthday Sis 5) Thirty variations on 4, 3, 2 and the standard deviance on 1. Giving myself another minute and I’d have fifty more. Yet, stop someone on the street and ask for a definition of love (after you’ve built enough rapport and trust not to get walked away from) and … I don’t know what’d happen, who does that? I suspect you’d get a broad variety of answers, even from the same person. I’m also guessing few if any would bring up patriotism or John Cena. He’s sort of like Schwarzenegger for the 2000’s. I mean as in he acting is not proportionate to the number of gigs he’s given. Wow, that was sweet of me.

If love has no labels and is patriotic (the fuck?) why couldn’t the background conversation be a male Innuit and a transgender Canadian doing charades? Ridiculous? Yes, but equally subtle and the same non sequitur. When commercial video is self-conscious about race but not about acting ability or artistic content it borders on insulting. PC is didactic and the premise always seems to be that the audience doesn’t know shit about shit. I don’t think that ad is going to change a bigot’s mind and yet it’s aimed at those who put a premium on ‘patriotism’ even down to Cena’s haircut. If it’s designed to preach to the choir it seems to think the choir has never heard of Jesus (figuratively speaking of course). On the other hand, though, I’d prefer all commercials were about love and stuff instead of cola, pharmaceuticals and fast food. Toss in insurance and automobiles and I’m ok if John Cena is gifted Fox news for boxing day.

Whew. I guess it’s too hot to type coherently without nit-picking. Condensation not condescension. Whatever the fuck this is, it’s over. Yay!