Something Borrowed, Something Blue.....

in the perception of most earth-shattering events there is usually a bridge which may ford access to the past, the future as well no matter how wide the river of time spreads... in days, months, years

There is in this acutely poignant even painful moment of Joe Biden’s Last Hurrah, (a moment i see now i personally longed for in my first ever post on this platform included below and not callously “ageist” while certainly prurient enough and apprehended far before any debate stage sprung its steel trap as it did last week and furthermore sympathetically co-incident with my own unavoidable compromising with, reconciling of a life lived mostly as heathen, branded rebel now somewhat brought to bay with my own inevitable decline) there is a bridge in this moment that might lead to some shaded grove where the contemplation of the intrusive even aggressive events to come may be accomplished as antidote to confusion.

I was 65 the winter i wrote this in my North Florida home a year and a half ago and thinking to come clean with whatever the recent past and the future offered, emboldened by gravitating towards a new geography of place wild and remote enough to absorb new passions spread old ones and regret to the wind. I have no more insight now than i did then into what a career politician thinks when confronting the solid barrier of his own limitations other than the various bits i glean like a detective, an interloper on this balky internet in this place where 2 dogs and the coming of winter has laid down a more cohesive necessity. I have even more respect and admiration now for the Biden administration’s accomplishments as then after feeling the relief and triumph wash over of mid-term victory from confines of off-grid trailer Red Sox on radio at night, that enervated autumn and into the cold where i commuted along Lake Superior carving out and on tired legs and hauled back south in snow the motorcycle, the camping gear and still content to be alone. Since then the two animals instinctively embraced prove how strong i must have been, absent even that love and always casting out for it. But as with this moment for Joe Biden there is a greater purpose to be served in an honest appraisal, an acceptance of the thru-line, and for me and as revealed below they are ones of so much more modest import. For him of course the legacy is at stake but more the fight at a crossroads, this one, and will determine the outcome if he is up to making the right decision. If not, we will will, we must, make it for him.

"And Tuesday's just as bad..." 2023 STATE OF UNION

A First Post of confounding length and no real direction home

february 2023

—-Appleton King

In retrospect: Krysten Sinema in that cinematic pale yellow flying nun dress which practically BEGGED for you to hold her aloft in stiff breeze on a windy Atlantic beach and fly her like a kite……ok so the kite string breaks no worrys! Mitt Romney stooping to pick on the weakest Santos in playground….Kevin forlorn, chagrined at podium his second graders running amok….Jill Biden glowing and real, the antithesis to DarkMelania and the Valley of the Dolls…..

I viewed last night’s 2023 State of the Union address solo from re-store salvaged couch perched on weathered heart-pine floor board of this 100 year old home bought and basically salvaged 20 years ago in the presumptively perilous advancing state of middle age, a New England refugee free of any viable encumbrance relocated via blood relations (Georgia) 20 years ago to LA: or Lower Alabama as locals are wont to call this part of the Florida Panhandle which also perched, lies directly north of the more prized certainly more notorious Redneck Riviera. (and in the same spirit of colloquialism shall we say natives also distinguish between going to the “beach” as opposed to the” beach-beach”, the former being the unsightly pastel mess of restaurants bars and shoppes and traffic assembled recklessly over the canvas of former sleepy fishing villages in a frenzy of wanton indeed maniacal development over decades of avarice astride the Gulf of Mexico and the latter a knowing nod to the timeless soma-esque seduction of sun-splashed sand and aquamarine water, to which I myself have succumbed to pleasures at various intervals as needed dose of slothfulness, meditation, voyeurism: brandishing salt water cure for skin rash, aches, pains as an excuse to mingle with the dreams sea nymphs bring to the surface…always have…)

The South, at least the part of it on Panhandle where I live and work (and yes the meagre monthly S.S. payments from a “career” if you will, of eating bologna sandwiches atop sawhorse -mounted plywood or cool shady corner of poured concrete floor, one mostly self employment in building trades, labor, whatnot lol, require the supplement of continued doing of sporadic jobs yet joyfully as they keep a perhaps over-stimulated, dreamy- by- nature soul, semi-grounded)… the South in my experience these past 2 decades as a thoroughly vetted New England W.A.S.P. (and btw: completely biased Boston sports fan whose Dad was a coach and teacher but mostly a coach, if you get my meaning and he never read SHIT except for the Boston Globe Sports page and maybe the '‘The Happy Hooker” or '‘Coffee, Tea or Me?”- the semi bawdy for the time confessions of a feisty Airline Stewardess on camping trips with his drinking pals) the South is as good a place as any to contemplate in light of these past several decades of dizzying cultural divisions, mass neuroses over EVERYTHING including what kind of socially asware beer you drink the fact that Joe Biden last night surprised the FUCK out of me.

Look; as an inveterate grizzled bi-curious observer of history and politics and motivation in general as the key to human understanding ( i’ll keep the “male gaze” part in check for now but yet and still: there IS the thorny problem of Nicole Wallace on MSNBC whom at this point amidst a certain wandering in the desert stretch of my own personal history i find to be the most utterly desirable female on the planet, like when she laughs with the other talking heads, and they have a GOOD REASON to laugh as GOP ranks in past year are devouring themselves like manic hampsters crowding a rank sawdust-strewn cage in basement shadows, it feels like just YOU and HER, and on the couch no less, go figure…) i was excited by this speech and all day anticipated the drama, the denoument of Fox News clueless banality vs the purported woke Lib-Tard Snowflakes almost as i would an NFL playoff game or juicy Sweet Sixteen matchup. I gathered the remote and a bottle of red wine, assembled a glass tube with a little bud in it for the rebuttal by what i presumed to be an over- the -top Huckabee Sanders pratfall worth the wait, a woman of clearly myopic brain who before the shameful and now legendary shilling for Trump as press secretary used to own a home directly on the Gulf on a quiet street across from a project we labored for months on. Ahhh yes: a “More Innocent Time” before all the vengeful groping for identity and on -site vitriol we all got into with onset of Trumpian nonsense (Duck Dynasty now had a more visible incarnation, a SEAT at the TABLE along where Honey Boo-Boo sat like a bizarro world Goldilocks) white resentments blahh blahhh and i was surrounded by MAGA cult inductees with tool belts , an anxious Cheyenne surrounded, outmanned by Red State cowboys who every time a jet flew screaming overhead from nearby Eglin Air Force base declared to ME, the tainted in their midst, from their rooftop perches the butt of a 22 ounce Estwing hammers triumphantly flicked heavenward (and maybe in view out on aquamarine water an armada of expensive boats on Gulf with Trump flags puttering in a grim line offshore at what expense of diesel fuel while professing solidarity with working men vs. “the Swamp”) they call out to me “Hey Duuuuuude!! THATS the sound of Freeeeeeeedom, har har!” These Floridian Champions of Concealed Carry whom already fully perceived my loyalties via lunchtime exchanges over barbecue chips and mountain dew of how i’d once helped get Bernie elected Mayor back in Burlington Vt. in 1981 (always a part of my own particular Origin Story…ugh) and by only 21 votes which jump-started his whole thang, a good one tho, but i was just a college drop out then, the workaday life still ahead, a profession even as carpentry came easy to hand but not always to introspective brain, who, for sure, sat down to some strategy sessions in diners that winter of 1981 when dishwashing jobs even held application lines that curved around buildings, so relieved for the distraction and a radical sure, chatted him up on his advice in bars he knew i frequented armed with $20 bills provided by the candidate and even hosted the victory party because a bunch of us had a big rental house serendiptiously suited for that purpose up by the University green. Of course i was summarily discarded and with good reason after the fait accompli (see bars above also slothfulness, dreaminess) as any viable face to the Revolution. All this to say i am not a perfect fit for this Baptist South neither nor its frightening lightning storms which in their periodic yet malignant ferocity can seem almost personally to WANT TO KILL YOU (ditto fire ants and ground burrowing yellow jackets, minus the noise, also very careless drivers..) but i make do. Oh yes, and i usually do and even in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan now where not knowing a soul and camping in summers/autumns to avoid Alabama humidity last 2 years shoe-horning out of miserable period of regret and self loathing, re-discovering joy of camping, no electric or running water, solving problems with no audience but clear cold rivers and the trout taken from them and eaten over fires aided by google maps on android, trustworthy Tacoma 4x4, stealth, curiosity, glibness and a fly rod. So in September bought a place at tax sale auction and now spend half the year there in this once fabled frontier in proximity to that most precious and heartening of nature’s wonders: the indomitable and humbling in its ghosts of indigenous and then immigrant cultures who carved out with grit, endurance and ok in the wake of the “voyageurs” traders more than partial defoliating of once majestic old growth white pine forest, red maple you name it, their own sacrosanct claims, but the steady backdrop always the majestic proud silent in judgement presence of Lake Superior: or as the Hurons or Gordon Lightfoot or Longfellow might have said: Gitchee Gummee. But thats another subject and perhaps another mis-spelling in the making……

At 80 sumthing Joe Biden appears now and more so than a few years ago, and me at safer distance age-wise but close enough, and increasingly beset by regret of Time’s Dominion, he imparts the idea of: hope. And not the bumper sticker election kind.

He appeared vital, florid, energetic, riding the wave of most sane people’s recognition of the spread of rot in GOP like apples with stems plucked will do to entire crate. No need to go into all the crazies without stems, you know their names, the rot is the key image here. As well, and oddly as i had been disagreeing politely about Joe’s future as nominee given his age and fact i think last night most of cheering due to instances where relief came when he didn’t entirely interrupt flow of powerful oratory by untoward gaffs, the triple axle of carefully scripted oratory punctuated only occasionally with clumsy clashing skates leading to a relieved, catharctic applause that had less to do with accomplishment than perceived SURVIVAL

Id found an unlikely ally in a well-read 76 year old woman in this north Florida town who found my address last winter after i emerged from safer shadowy privacy and tweaking her curiosity in a reflexive chastising letter to editor of our county-wide and mostly subdued weekly paper directed at some regular spouter of religious and MAGA- fueled antagonistic drivel who demanded reigning in as she had been left previously unchallenged but nonetheless given the stakes at hand (another fucking 4 years of Insanity!!!???) irked me and due to the focussed yet somehow generous feel of my retort this wondrously calm lady found my address and wrote to me. We began a correspondence of months duration and while only living a mile apart never pressed a meeting, enjoying the trading of hand written letters, an ongoing discussion which morphed easily from finding rare political allegiance of a sort to sharing of interests in literature, food, family, and mutual regret that youthful selves were while flourishing inside belied by the outward wear and tear of time. She has been a tamper down of my hubris, no doubt. The heart tho is a lonely hunter and when they meet its good. I watched the inaugural seeing through both our eyes…..

Already this is far too long, so to continue ha! :

I intuited the response from Sarah and GOP would be the real entertainment as they dont have much in quiver except for promoting horrors of immigration like it wasn’t basically the national identity from DAY 1 anyways and the idea we democrats are lockstep in pursuit of an entitlement society hiding behind a totalitarian iron fist of mind control (the Squad! George Soros! Bernie and AOC, the Joanie loves Chachi equivalent of the End ….my friend…..ahhh the late Jimmy Morrison we will go There too in future, music is my true love and ok, bacon.)

So im buzzed now when Sarah comes on, but a mellow one, not the kind where you have to feel way to own fridge with tentative steps for a pint of Ben and Jerrys like negotiating a perilous rope bridge strung out across a quarter mile deep jagged edged Peruvian canyon all the while reconsidering the many frank propositions of interest lately to women of wildly varying ages but all uniquely desirable in their own right and not all terribly confused or repulsed by the interest (perhaps majority tho) and even Sarah seems different now, no longer a caricature. One sought top give her a chance even vis a vis her gender, to walk in shoes of another and i tried. Likeable somehow as her eyes are kind now that she is no longer ventriloquist puppet for Shakespearean madness/comedy and has embraced more respectable, power of Governor, mother, daughter and her description of that trip to Iraq in dark on Air Force One better than i can write here, so literate, so seductive with mood….I had to catch myself tho, almost forgetting this is all intolerable theatre, propaganda of the first order and besides sprinkled with the over attenuated addictive sugar of extremist religious thought. Yes. I did catch myself but had felt the seduction creep in there for a second, Frodo with the ring, in this case the simplicity of her message.

Its light out now from dark where i started this and will read the boxscores of the political game we all just witnessed in more reputable sources before re-acclimating to Reality, or maybe just breakfast. But more and more i find my own, OUR own takes, just as cogent even if we dont have our own fucking desks and parking spots, degrees, badges indicating we are to be respected as pundits anymore than the weathered guy you talk to huddled up by the gas pumps with his dog and belongings neatly stacked and eyes smart and lucid with no cliched wino story after a long night sleeping in alley behind Waffle House.

So. Now i am questioning whether she who read my letter and responded and always punches back at my assumptions might be right: why cant Joe run again? Sure he is old. I aint no spring chicken. Btw Nicole doesn’t need to know that…at least for now. Joe and the Party have learned well from the bruised past, hardened some. Did infrastructure and much else, gave hope again and not just the bumper sticker pre-vote kind. Done deal. The Ukraine stuff. In the hands at least of adults now…yet still Ahhhhhmericka needs watching…and carefully….

Yep, we may be in good hands.

Those of you finding way to end of this declaration, affront ….hmmmmm….i’m not so sure of. Onward…..