Sad news: Joe Biden’s Stage IV prostate cancer condition is worsening. Comment from the White House: “I don’t feel sorry for him.”
Joe, you were there for us in our darkest hour, and you turned our wayward nation around. When we needed coolness under fire you were the coolest guy in the room. Thank you.
J and the Legal Heineken
Once upon a couple months ago I was working
And I was in a time crunch
And my co-worker Jalen
Sometimes known as J
Dropped what he was doing to help me
And I was grateful
And I asked him what his favorite beer was
And he said “Heineken”
And I told him
There was a Heineken in his future
But there’s a (completely reasonable) rule
Forbidding employees to bring alcohol
To the workplace
So I mulled it over
And got the notion
That the Heineken in J’s future
Would be in the form of a DRAWING
Of a Heineken
So I drew it
And J next to it
And it looked OK but not quite right
And the oinner voice that tells me what to do said
“Draw his hand holding up the bottle”
So I did
But the pencil’s eraser didn’t erase right
Smeared rather than erased
Being old and oxidized
So I said the hell with erasure
And that’s why the hand is a little ghostly
But J still liked the drawing
And gave me permission
To post it on social media
Like this.
..
He’s a good guy.
swollen eyelid
an eye is awry.
its lid hoods and occludes the iris
and tickles the lachrymal duct so that it weeps
and the tear-filmed pupil makes for blurrish vision
and the man who owns the eye
feels like quasimodo or someone
even more grotesque. he worries
that it may be a staph infection
or, worse, some flesh-eating parasite
chewing his head away.
..
he tries to dismiss such foolish thoughts
by reminding himself
of a lifetime of hypochondria
and the many oh-i’m-gonna-die episodes
that turned out to be laughably untrue.
..
a visit to urgent care
would be a resounding smack in the pocketbook
even if they don’t upsell him like the charming lady
doc who said “you have earwax. want me to
take care of it?” and that two-minute tune-up
cost forty additional out-of-pocket bucks.
..
he looks in the mirror and smiles
with the half of his mouth on the unaffected,
uninfected side.
tries to, anyway.
he wanted to make a comedy/tragedy mask
out of his single face but the other half of his mouth
insists on half-smiling too.
now he half-laughs at his melancholic vanity.
“That’s Life,” he murmurs,
and feels better.
A man in a flimsy T-shirt and polyester running shorts and running shoes affixed to snowshoes with circular-shaped surfaces runs
On a two-inch blanket of freshly-fallen snow on a flat two-acre field on a farm whose owners have given him permission to run for an hour on their land.
He is also wearing glasses that provide a visual readout of what the drone flying overhead is recording. The drone moves according to his voice commands. His last command was for the drone to maintain a position twenty meters over his head, focal point the surface of the snow, field of view to include the running man and a circle of ten meters’ diameter with him at the center.
The conditions are ideal. The temp is just at freezing and it is windless and the snow is doing a remarkable job of retaining the impressions of the snowshoes.
What the man is doing is drawing. He himself is the dot-drawing stylus. An inset in the views reen in his glasses shows him the entire field on which he is running, with his position on the field represented by a green dot, and with his footstrikes trailing him represented as blue dots.
He has not been running long, but he is already on the second iteration of the array of comic-book-style panels that will contain the images of real-time running that he is doing now. An hour will give him enough time to fill in the panels with line drawings with enough detail to discern his facial features.
“Bogie, I want a drink,” he says, and the drone swoops down and dangles tubing connected to the modest water supply it is carrying. Three swallows is sufficient.
“Resume position above my head.” Bogie whizzes upward.
“Play ‘Running On Empty’ by Jackson Browne, any live version with David Lindlay,” he tells his audio feed.
The music starts.
“I effing love technology, I do I do I do,” he exults as he runs, his breath making a puff-pattern of condensation.
I’ve been a fan of Anne Meara since she and Jerry Stiller were on the Ed Sullivan Show as Stiller & Meara. My favorite performance of hers was in the 1980 version of FAME. Fun fact: she won a Writers Guild award.
Some of us have Jobs, some Careers. A lucky few have Callings. Here is one such, the vivacious, acerbic Kathryn Petroff, who, so much like my late, great friend Karen Wilkinson, used her legal skills as a criminal-law attorney, defending the downtrodden and the scorned. And when her career took her beyond criminal defense, to judicial review, she became a force for the public interest, her work instrumental in unseating not one, but two bad judges. (Yes, Virginia, there are all kinds of Bad Judges out there!!)
She is also a courageous cancer survivor. When I asked her for photos to use for her portrait, the first one she sent me looked like she’d done battler with Smaug the Dragon himself, yet she had a tiny brave smile on her face. “What a brave smile,” I texted, and her reply was “Radiation makes me sleepy.” Is she a Trouper, or what?
And she has a fondness for Dorothy Sayers and her hero, Lord Peter Wimsey. (Kat, there is no H in Wimsey. I checked.) And her son Toby followed her legal footsteps, going to Harvard Law, and was a prosecutor, then went civil, and now finds his bliss in bond transactions–I think. Being an ignoramus of both law and bonds I may have gotten that muddled.
But mostly Kathryn Petroff is a keenly intelligent, incandescent human being, and I’m glad to know her.
Here are the words to the acrostic:
Kathryn Petroff
Kick/start a life with labor pains and soap
And Independence ready to say Nope
To surface-y success’s col de Mort
Half Frog-marched down Life’s dusty corridor
RIGHT WRONGS became her conjurable Stuff. O
Yes and Sure, Adversity does scuff
NYET Evil DA to Battle–call their bluff
NOTE: a Col de Mort is a way to weaponize an epee, turning a harmless fencing instrument into a deadly weapon via its sharp-pointed “collar of death.”
He was Stardust. And Golden. And he has returned to the Golden Stardust whence he came. But in between his pre-assembled Stardust and his current celestial state, he took himself on a wild ride, acquiring and losing bandmates, habits, dignity and freedom. One story of his extremism, recounted Graham Nash in his memoir, was so beyond the pale that Nash heard from the Legal department of his publisher. They demanded confirmation of the story that Crosby had sold his Porsche for crack, and upon his crack dealer’s death by overdose, Crosby sneaked back to the dealer’s abode and stole back the pink slip. So Nash called Crosby, and Croz told him that not only was it true, but in a scenario reminiscent of the CSN classic “Deja Vu,” Crosby later again sold the Porsche–for crack.
But he also pushed the limits of music, elevating millions with his jazz influence and harmonic entwinings in CSN and CSNY. And he cleaned up, and he got a new liver, and he outlived his old liver by decades, and he showed us oldsters that the best way to go out is in a blaze of creative glory.
As often happens, I choked a little on my portraiture with this image, wanting to convey his careening, pyrotechnic soul, remaining undecided about how old to make him and what expression to put on his face. I’ve overworked it to the point I had to say “to hell with it” and quit before I made it worse. But the words paint a fuller picture.
David CROZ Crosby
Dude was SCRAGGLY, PsychedeliC
And his HARMONIES pure WondeR
As a liquor–like F r a n g e l i c O
Velvet SMOOTH as distant thunderS
Irascibly zappish, a son of a B
Despite aural daZzle and all honestY
George Santos, a profligate liar, has been elected to Congress after telling a bushel of lies to help get himself elected. The ethical thing for him to do would be to resign. But telling deliberate, self-serving lies is itself not ethical. It is a dysfunctional pattern in American politics of late, largely thanks to the shenanigans of Donald Trump, whom I depict in this image as Yoda to Santos’s Skyler Liewalker.
Here are the words:
George Santos
Get a load of THIS guy’s BS
Embellished as a drag Contessa
OAN got nuthin on him! In
Regurgitory fakery with lament
Gosh darn the Media–so
WHAT? EVERY Politician LIES
One with Clay, Image and Text 