Michael Shay's Hummingbirdminds
prog-blogging Wyoming
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Progress like it or not
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
A visitor looks for signs of Florida Man.
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Mr. Ripley is coming for your gold but not your woman
Friday, April 12, 2024
There will come a time when lizards will again rule the planet
Monday, April 01, 2024
We got trouble, trouble, right here in Beach City
Chris and I are looking forward to our April trip to Florida. Both of us did some of our growing-up on Florida's east coast, Daytona Beach for me and Ormond Beach for her. Daytona was (and is) a beach town with all of the trappings: beachside motels and souvenir shops, lots of bars, and a very nice beach. Daytona also has the speedway for auto races.
Ormond begins just north and it was looked at as the more genteel neighbor. We went to the Ormond beaches when Daytona's were crowded. The beach sand was deeper and less drivable, but most of it was open to surfers with the main destination the Ormond Pier. If you go further north, there is Ormond-by-the-Sea which is a bit redundant and then Flagler Beach, named for the robber baron railroad magnate of the 19th century.
Flagler used to be a funky little beach town with a good surfing pier but growth has changed it. Palm Coast development is in Flagler County and it replaced thousands of acres of wildlands. For one of my jobs, I used to drop by city and county offices to get lists of building permits and then rush over to Orlando to type all of it into The Construction Report, printed and distributed each Friday. It wasn't really writing but kind of fun.
In case you didn't know, construction is big business in Florida. Big, big business. Florida's big challenge, besides its dingbat governor and legislative troglodytes, is people trying to find affordable home insurance. They could be cast into the homeless by the next climate-change-caused hurricane which can't possibly exist due the state's GOP-heavy legislature banning teaching anything like it in school. I grew up by the beach and we had sand dunes then, created by the Lord Almighty to blunt the impact of big storms' tendency to wash tons of sand back into the ocean.
The so-called peninsula I lived on is a barrier island. It is supposed to serve as barrier to tropic thunder. It did for many millennia before promoters decided they could make beaucoup bucks by selling plots of sand to Howard Johnson's and Steak-n-Shake and Americans bent on living the dream. I lived that dream and it does seem dream-like to me now, a retired bureaucrat in Wyoming.
It was a beautiful place to grow up. We surfed by day and waited on tourists at night. Me and my eight brothers and sisters grew up freckled and barefoot, one of the wandering tribes of Daytona. We had a home to go to but, as time passed and my parents got older and more frazzled, we were turned loose to have fun but not get into trouble. We mostly succeeded.
If I sound sarcastic in my Florida appreciation, I sound like this all of the time. Chris has a whole different set of beachside stories. Most involve teens getting fake IDs at 16 and going into tourist bars. They had fun but didn't get into too much trouble, or so she says.
Sunday, March 24, 2024
We were readers once, and young
Chris, Annie, and I took in “Dune 2” at the Capitol City Digital Cinemas LUXX Studio Theater. It’s new. Not quite as fancy as the ARQ Theater and a step up from one of the boring standard spaces. We sat in handicapped seating in the second row. There’s a first row but you have to recline and bend your neck to take it all in. The place wasn’t packed although there was a chatterbox who sat a few rows behind us. We took him out with one of those wicked Fremen bazookas. I enjoyed the movie, thankful that the story moved along quickly and I didn’t notice the passing of 180 minutes. Long movies used to have an intermission. That’s gone the way of Ben Hur’s chariot. I plan to write a nasty letter to someone about this.
In my youth (early 1970s), I was a Frank Herbert fan
and read “Dune” and “Dune Messiah.” Many of my friends read the books. We were
readers, absorbing Vonnegut, Heller, and Tolkien, even Heinlein. My roommate
was a former outlaw biker from Milwaukee who had to leave his hometown for some
reason he didn’t want to share. My landlord was a friend who lived next door in
a matching concrete block house. He worked in construction. His roomie was my
brother who also worked construction – there was a lot of it in Daytona Beach those
days – and he eventually got fed up with banging nails and joined the USAF. I worked
as an orderly in the county hospital by night and attended community college by
day. We all were readers and enjoyed talking about books over beer and weed. On
weekends, we were in and on the water.
“Lord of the Rings” was probably the favorite. Fantasy
and adventure, cool characters like the Ents, Orcs, and Gandalf. We really had
no sense that Mordor was created from Tolkien’s war memories. We knew about the
war origins of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” because he writes about it in
the introduction. War had been on our minds quite a lot those days. I had not
yet read the great novels by Vietnam vets as they didn’t yet exist. I had no
concept of what war could do to the psyche. Tolkien fought in the far-off Great
War and Vonnegut (and my father) were in the now-ancient war against
totalitarianism. Those battles may loom large as this election season approaches.
“Dune” was a favorite because of the turmoil of Paul
Atreides and the giant sandworms of Arrakis. That was the part of “Dune 2” that
thrilled me and I could watch again. The Fremen and Paul ride the sandworms!
Amazing special effects. Our seats shook. This was also my favorite part of the
novel, Paul and the Sandworms. Herbert did a great job creating them and Denis Villenueve
and crew recreated them wonderfully. These characters and creatures invented by
writers and recreated on the screen became a part of us, a part of me.
One other result of all of this reading. We were
steeped in satiric humor and (I haven’t yet mentioned “Catch-22”) the
ridiculousness of being human. Billy Pilgrim reacts (or he doesn’t) as he time
travels through absurdity. Yossarian does everything he can to cheat death. He
is flummoxed at every turn. Paddling in a small boat from a small island in the
Med to neutral Sweden may seem crazy until Yossarian finds out his tentmate Orr
has accomplished it. He ridicules Orr throughout, wants to bonk him on the head
for his endless fiddling with the tent stove and his absurd stories. He won’t
fly with Orr because he crashes all the time. Turns out, that was Orr’s way of
practicing for his desertion. Yossarian runs away in the book and sets out on a
tiny dinghy in the movie. I thought it was unfortunate that in the last episode
of Hulu’s “Catch-22,” Yossarian flies off on yet-another mission in a B-25.
I really liked “Masters of the Air.” I did wonder in
one episode what Yossarian might make of the Bloody Hundredth. On one mission
to Munster, only one of the unit’s planes makes it back to base. Earlier, we
see others on fire and many airmen in their chutes trying to escape. The
novel’s Yossarian spends three years in combat on 55 missions. His commanding
officers want to make pilots fly 80 missions which means Yossarian may never
get home. He runs.
Flying 80 combat missions may seem outrageous. Rosie
in “Masters” flies his 25 missions and is cleared to go home. He tells his C.O.
he will stay on to lend his experience to the new, untested pilots. The C.O.
then tells him that the men will have to fly more missions and keep flying. They
will be targets, a lure to bring up the Luftwaffe to get shot down by our swift
long-range fighter planes like the P-51
Mustang. The C.O. says something like “we plan to sweep the Luftwaffe from the
skies for the coming invasion.” Rosie flies 52 missions and survives.
They were brave and many died. It does remind me of
Yossarian’s observation: “The
enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”
Monday, March 18, 2024
Poetry Monday: The Letter is in the Wind
The Letter is in the Wind
I
could dry up and blow away before
A
letter arrives
I
drag a lawn chair to a breadbox of a mailbox
The
kind 1950s teens used for bathing practice
I
sit, and imagine letters
Dear
Mike: My love is like a red, red rose.
Mike,
I miss you terribly I ache with it
I
would gladly read whatever missive lands here even
The
bad or sad news
Michael,
dear: F--- you and the horse you rode in on
Note:
my asthma acts up around livestock
Mike:
Grandma died today. She was surrounded by
Friends
and family and you
Were
not one of them
Mike:
Our dog Zeke got run over by the truck delivering
Your
Christmas package, the box containing the latest
Brautigan
book and a chew toy for foundling Zeke.
I
would read them all, even the letter that promised
A
scholarship in a far-off place and an ensign’s gold bar
A
job as reporter in a strange city that will have
Plenty
of stories and you will be lonely.
Dear
Sir: You too could be a winner!
As
I said, I will read them all perched along the
Lonely rural blacktop named Expectations Road.