Lost on the Lunatic Fringe

I might be wrong, but did Mandy Patinkin crash Letterman and upstage him? I just can’t get over this. It’s one of my favorite songs, and I guess I never considered him a singer. I don’t know why not, because he went to Julliard with Kelsey Grammar, as written in his Wikipedia entry. I’ve always liked him as an actor, and it took me the longest time to accept that the man who played Inigo Montoya was a serious actor with an incredible range. Surprising is probably the most appropriate word to use for him. He’s a stealth talent. You don’t expect anything he does, but he nails it. There’s something so appropriate about every performance. What got me was that he was raised in a conservative Jewish family, and he’s done albums in Yiddish. I’ve seen Yentl, but I didn’t remember him in it. I may have to give it another look. The man is impressive. There are no two ways about it.

Now, for contrast, here’s the Tom Waits version of the song.

Well, I’m sick. The hubby was sick last week, and now I’m getting all of the symptoms he had. I can’t sleep at night without soaking in sweat and yet not running a fever that I can detect. I wake up in the night and I ache all over. When I move around, it aches more. I can’t stay in bed all day, because I’d go out of my mind. I can’t go to work because I wouldn’t last an hour without feeling so much like shit that I’d have to go home. Mehdi was out for two days last week. I don’t want to lose the pay. He tells me that I have this American denial syndrome whereby I feel guilty for being genuinely sick and staying home. I think that’s a perfect rationalization, or in other words, an excuse. It’s circular, and it’s a bitch. I don’t want to stay home, but I’m perfectly within reason doing so.

I’m going to go lay down and sweat again. Then I’ll wake up, wonder how the hell my wedding band wound up on the dresser in my sleep, put it back on and try to sleep again.

There was a truly harrowing tale of the dangers of Chantix in New York Magazine. Evidently people hallucinate and have waking nightmares. They can’t even have a cigarette to calm them down from it. A man who’d played for Edie Brickell ended up being shot dead because he wigged out on Chantix and alcohol and went over to the neighbor’s house to pound on the door and scream. It doesn’t seem to work well with alcohol, and you can’t sleep. You space out on things and forget how to operate simple devices…like forks. From what I understand, it doesn’t happen to everyone. The problem is, you never know if it will happen to you. Pfizer has changed their patient advice sheet to say that ALL patients on Chantix should be observed for suicidal ideation and mental health/neuropsych problems.
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So anyway, I finally understand why Mehdi wants to move to Bismarck. I’m not going to go into it, but it makes sense. He explained it, and I said something to the effect of “why didn’t you say so in the first place?”. I had been growing conservative in my age, and I guess we weren’t communicating very well on this point. Don’t get me wrong, we made some attempts and got into some arguments, but we didn’t understand each other. I would tell him that we had a house, as little as that is, and relocation costs way more than $1000. We’d have to find a place, and it costs a lot more to live there, and any rental we might consider would ban smokers. I know, alright, it’s a shitty reason to resist, but it’s a valid one as far as I’m concerned.

Now that I look at it his way, it might be a move up. There is more to Bismarck than Minot. In my previous state of mind, I could only see the improved opportunities to spend money. Now I am looking at it again. They have a ballroom dancing school, and that is an attractive thing. I remember a few things from 15 years ago when I lived there. Hopefully there is as much to enjoy as I remember. We’ll see.

I was treated to one of my favorite things tonight as I left work tonight. I walked out to a crescent moon suspended in a twilit sky. I have always liked twilight. It’s this translucent blue bowl overhead shading from light indigo to an almost black dome with a sprinkling of stars in it. The edges of the sky are still purple and magenta and orange. It’s one of the most beautiful ways for the sky to look. It reminds me of summer evenings watching the sun set, and seeing the trees silhouetted against the deepening dusk. Then the stars and the moon come out to decorate it. The song? Call it a weakness. It reminds me of Steven King, of all things. He used the opening part of the lyrics in part III of The Dark Tower. Every time I hear it, I think of its darkened connotations since I read the book. (Darkened, geddit? I slay me. Who’d have thought I’d devolve into puns in my old age.)

Of course, in the summer you have those hot nights when it’s nice to sleep outside and submit to the dog’s slobbering adoration while it has you trapped in a sleeping bag. You can count the stars and watch the shooting stars streaking across the sky in their hundreds. I used to keep track of when meteor showers were going to occur so that I could spend some summer nights outside that way. I remember the show that I listened to on Prairie Public Radio called Star Date. (And of course, Hearts of Space, which had the trippy psychedelic space music.)

Hear hear! If only we had politicians who could articulate the idea as well as Mr. Hannon. I have no idea how well he gets things done, but I am in no doubt as to how well he says what needs to be said. What I must say is that it’s a shame that parliament has minds like that and their country still degenerated into a nanny state.

I had a conversation yesterday about the nature of depression. You see, we’re both in the middle of it. I suspect it’s a more chronic condition with the other party. I stated my point of view that it is useless to shut down. It doesn’t help anything. If you shut down, nothing is going to change about the situation. I guess it’s always been my understanding of things. If you don’t like things the way they are, you have to address the issue causing you problems. Not doing that doesn’t mean you like things the way they are, or at least not always. Most of the time it just means that you have accepted a bad situation as the best you can do. I can understand doing that when you really can’t do anything about it, but for adults that is almost never true of any situation.
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It’s Star Wars in ASCII. An interesting bit of trivia about me, I have a portrait of me and my older brother from when I was about 3 done in ASCII. It’s awesome. I admit that freely.

I was retracing my steps on the internet from years and years of wandering when I found this:

It’s a site called “End of Existence”. Basically it deals with the danger of nuclear war and seeks to make people understand what happens when the bomb is dropped. It’s not the people that die so much as the people who survive for any length of time after a nuclear strike. I was reading Myoko’s story and thinking to myself that The Day After didn’t even approach the reality. It tried hard, but when you read the words of someone who lived through it with the burns and the terror and surrounded by death, you start to understand that….you can’t understand. It would be like telling a holocaust survivor that you understand what they went through. You don’t. There’s no way you could, unless you’d been through it.
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Let’s call this a follow-up to the previous post about nationalism. I might amend that to say that America has a split fucking personality. Why do I say that? Because we can’t decide whether we want to be American or not. It seems to depend on when you ask.

My first encounter this morning with the American “Irish” identity crisis, for one example, was the announcement that the South Side St. Patrick’s day celebration might not happen next year in Chicago because there were too many people to accommodate in the neighborhood.
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