The Sad and Lost Apostles

Bleargh, bleargh.

Vaguely nauseous this morning. I’m sure it is stress. I have read plenty of suggestions and bromides and philosophies for how to deal with stress-how to deny it or defuse it or otherwise shunt its power over me. I can’t honestly say that I have tried them all-I don’t really have the patience to try anything. But it still turns my guts to molten lead when I go in to work.

This is why I have stopped blogging from time to time-I get whiny. I don’t want to just complain all the time. It makes the blogging, especially, tedious and pointless. The life, too.

Charlie Pierce makes an excellent point on this week’s “Only A Game”-the episode where the Spanish men’s basketball team apparently took a picture while using their fingers to pull their eyes into a slanted shape-is both dumb and racist. The two terms are not mutually exclusive. (The question is usually phrased, “Was he being racist? Or merely stupid?”)

One thing you hear a lot of these days is “crying racism” or “playing the race card”. There’s a pretty simple solution to that. If you don’t want to be accused of being racist, don’t be racist. Yes, PC is terribly restrictive of the free flow of ideas, but is it so awful that we try not to offend other human beings? Is it really that hard? It seems to me there are enough words in our language that we can try to pick better ones.

In the novel, “Looking for Rachel Wallace,” my favorite detective, Spenser, says something mildly offensive to the title character, a lesbian activist. She calls him on it, and he apologizes and says, essentially, that he can’t unsay it, but he can try not to say it again. That seems to me to be a pretty sensible policy, from Don Imus on down.

TEN THINGS I BELIEVE

1.Jed Lowrie is a major league shortstop
2.There are too many NFL preseason games
3.It takes an enormous amount of courage to have a baby in 2008.
4.Flip flops are not acceptable on men, and only slightly less so on women.
5.It is possible to appreciate the larger meaning of something, and also just like it.
6.In a decent society, you should be able to go to the doctor if you are sick.
7.Bunting and stealing bases is almost never a good idea.
8.Unless it’s 1911.
9.Evil, at its core, is about denying the humanity of another.
10.Blaming the victim doesn’t accomplish anything.

David Gergen, at a wonderful CUNY Lecture Series podcast with NBC’s Brian Williams and Doris Kearns Goodwin, sees America as being at a “strategic inflection point”-a term borrowed from Intel CEO Andy Grove’s book. The game is changing-and we have become self satisfied, smug and self righteous, demanding bread and circuses and, frankly, blogging about life instead of living it.

Typical old guy snarkiness about blogs, but a good point.

But Kearns Goodwin ripostes with the memory that we have had other moments like this before-the famous painting of the signing of the Declaration, when one of the founders asked if the sun was rising or setting, or the Civil War, or World War II. We’ve always gotten through them before.

This one feels different, though.

Then again, they probably said that back then, too.

I’ve run myself out of podcasts for the moment, so it’s back to music.

I used to just always hit “shuffle songs”, but lately, I have kept it off of shuffle. I’ve already segregated the musicals, so I don’t go from “Creeping Death” to “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” any more. I want to really segregate the metal, so I have a harder playlist and a softer one, beyond that. Plus keeping it off of shuffle lets you play a musical soundtrack in its proper order.

What I do now is find an artist (right now, REM) and let the thing play through the albums alphabetically. I found that I missed the sense of order of an album, even when its not literally ordered like a musical is. (IE order critical, or at least important to the understanding of the action.)

REM’s latest album, “Accelerate,” seems to get better with every listen.

“All you sad and lost apostles…”

Lee Sinins (www.leesinins.com) is reporting that Tom Glavine may retire. 305 wins, very consistent lefthander. Great hitter, great hockey player. Good control pitcher. Surefire HOF player.

Native of Billerica, Massachusetts.