Month: November 2008

I chopped all the meat off the Thanksgiving turkey on Saturday.

I always end up with this job, and I have to admit that once I get going on it, it’s kind of enjoyable. It has to be done anyway: Only rarely have I seen an entire turkey consumed down to the skeleton in a single meal, and this means that the carcass has to go into the refrigerator, and each time you want a turkey sandwich you have to get it out and hack away at it for a while, then put it back.

There’s just no efficient way to store a turkey in a refrigerator, what with the odd shape of the platter and the bulges here and there, and each time you make a sandwich it gets harder to find the meat, and you are tempted to take the whole mess and chuck it into the garbage can, but you hate to waste anything in these hard economic times, so eventually the time comes when you have to strip all the edible stuff from the bones, put it in some kind of tidy airtight container and discard the fat, the skin, the gristle and the sad, sad bones.

And so I did.

I started out with a carving knife, which I tried to hone to a razor’s edge but which nonetheless cut sort of like a butter knife. It was good enough for the larger pieces of meat that I could see, but soon it was too big and unwieldy to be of much use. There’s a lot of meat on a turkey that is not immediately apparent to the naked eye.

Tossing the knife in the sink, I flipped the bird over and began clawing at it with my bare hands. This part of the task is the most satisfying, in a primal sort of way. For about ten minutes it was just me and the turkey, a man and his prey, as I tore off the dimpled skin, exposing pockets of flesh and adding to my tasty Tupperware stash. At first, with the knife, I salvaged some pretty good sandwich-style slabs of white meat. As I delved deeper I got a lot of turkey soup kind of stuff, or maybe turkey a la king pieces, those things that are too small and would just fall right out of a sandwich.

I ate a lot of turkey during this, but I still ended up with a good-sized pile of Just the Good Stuff. And then, in the spirit of sharing and giving thanks, both Molly the Cat and Tigger, who had watched the whole process like junkies waiting for their man, each got their own special turkey platter.

Happy Thanksgiving, cool cats.

Here we all are so many years down the road,

all those burned up dreams and daydreams and nightmares past my blurred windows, pale faces entreating us. What was behind that door? I never tried the knob, did you? We live in Dallas and Las Vegas and Seattle and Minneapolis, but mostly in the South because it’s easier on the bones and the sinuses. We’ve been so young so long, so smug we think it’s the Natural Order and we haven’t noticed how everything has changed. That old sport coat, the grey and black checkered one that was too big when I got it for a high school dance — my first sport coat not counting the blue blazer for First Communion, and my first dance or was it the last? I went with my mother and Leon to pick it out at Robert Hall on the traffic circle. That coat still fits, or I should say it fits now for the first time. I must have looked stupid in it. Thank you, Irene, for not laughing. You didn’t think I was as hip as I thought I was, but you let me believe it, and that got me through high school. It wasn’t until years later, when you were fucking your professor in Italy that I saw myself as I really looked in that jacket, stumbling through the clumsy dance steps my friend John taught me in the days before that dance, the magical dance, where I learned my place. I must have known it somewhere deep inside even then, but how Youth blinds us! Now here we all are, at our jobs, with our kids, on our vacations, in our Chinese shoes and our clothes from Target and Nordstrom and Macy’s, all of it fitting pretty good, no more getting things a little big to allow for growth spurts, and most of us still think we are pretty hip, pretty cool. We drop obscure references to the Easybeats and the dbs as if anybody cares, and some of us are still wearing that jacket, only now it actually fits for real, so Mom was right, I did grow into it, and I think I look pretty sharp just like I thought back then. It fits good enough I could wear it to my funeral.

I’ve been posting in this space for four years now.

Sometime last month was the anniversary. I meant to make a big deal of it, but, like all the other years, I forgot. I suppose it’s actually not such a big deal, anyway.

I must be a lonely guy, to do this blogging thing. I mean, I don’t have a lot to say of great import, and I can’t scoop the real news organizations or even the Big Blogs, so in the end the whole endeavor is inconsequential, and what the heck am I doing? I started out just hoping to hook up — virtually — with people I didn’t already know. That part has worked out pretty well, and I’m grateful to the Precious Few who are my bloggin’ buddies. I read your blogs more than I write my own. I know you think I don’t, because your hit trackers aren’t tracking me, but that’s because I read your RSS feeds instead of logging on to your actual blogs. That way I get all of you in the same place, and it’s more like a party.

When I started, it was just weeks before the 2004 presidential election. Holy shit, did that turn out badly! I thought the aberration of George Bush in the White House would end that year, now that people had a chance to see what a dimwit he is. I won’t comment here on the technical validity of that election, but because of what transpired, the life of revision99 closely tracks Bush’s second term.

Thank God that’s almost over now, and let’s hope I’ll be able to continue writing here without paying so much attention to politics (or politix, as it’s categorized in my sidebar).

I think of a lot of things I’d like to write about here, but I can’t seem to get up the energy to do it. If you could all just come and sit in my kitchen I could tell you my thoughts as they occur, without having to get them organized and spell everything correctly. I could also interrupt you when you object to some faulty logic in my rant. That way I wouldn’t have to do any fact checking before I post. Let me know when you want to stop by, and who takes cream or sugar.

Seriously, I want to post less political stuff and more personal stuff, and I want to try to express true, honest thoughts, the better to look back some day and see what I was thinking when I was a young impetuous blogger. I’ll have to walk a careful line, because I know there are some readers who know me in meatspace, and I don’t want to alarm or offend anyone. I probably should have remained totally anonymous right from the start, but I guess it’s too late for that now.

Unless I start a new, totally anonymous blog someplace else. That would free me to be more honest about things, but at the cost of losing all my current bloggin’ buddies. Let me think about that.

I guess the thing that has depressed me the most about my blog has been the gradual realization that I’m not much of a writer. Seriously, there are such good writers out there, unpublished bloggers who are smart, inventive, funny, touching, insightful and compelling. You expect that level of professionalism in a book or a magazine, because there are editors and because the writers are getting paid to do a good job. But it still boggles me how many really great writers there are “out there,” just tossing off post after post after dynamite post, while I struggle just to make sense. I want so much to be good like that, but I’m just not.

I have thought about what I might be really good at, and I believe I can say with some assurance that I am great at driving on the Los Angeles freeway system. This may seem like a small thing to others, but I’m quite proud of it. I rarely bump into anyone, and I am never panicked into getting off at the wrong exit, or getting on in the wrong direction. In the 1960’s, back before Steve Allen became a pompous stuffed shirt, which was a few years before he died, he used to take questions from his studio audience. One tourist asked him what you should do if you miss your exit from a Los Angeles freeway, and without missing a beat his deadpan answer was “Find a girl, get married and settle down, because you’ll never get back to where you were going.”

He was right, and that is totally not me, because I got these freeways wired.

People are standing in line to vote in Los Angeles.

Here in the most nonchalant of states, there is a sense of history in the air, and the coolest kids in school are doing their dorky civic duty. Never mind that California is the bluest of the blue states, the House of Blues, and the presidential outcome here is foregone. People want to be counted.

The place where I work is a polling place, and I have seen three presidential elections here, not counting this one, and numerous state, local and congressionals, and I have never seen crowds like this. When I arrived today there was a line out the door and across the parking lot. One of the poll workers told me that there was already a line when they arrived to set up for the 8:00 AM opening. The polling area remains busy still, in midafternoon.

I’ve received calls from friends around town, reporting the same thing everywhere. On the news they’ve been talking about a record turnout, 130 million voters nationwide, but I didn’t really consider what that would look like on the ground. What it looks like is little “D” democracy.

I’ll be excercising my California right to take time off to vote by leaving here an hour early. I wouldn’t do it except that I have it on good authority that my own polling place has been swamped with voters most of the day already.

I harbor no illusions. This is a historic moment. This election, and the man we are electing, will change this nation forever. At the same time, we face greater challenges than ever before, both as a nation and as a world. After this long, strange, hopeful campaign it feels as if we are at the end of something, and we can finally exhale.

But we’re really at a new beginning. There is a lot of work to do. The problems we all face — the financial collapse, climate change, tribal hatred and war around the world — are bigger than at any time in my life, and make no mistake: we all face them, and there can be no solutions without the work, sacrifice and cooperation of every one of us, regardless of how we vote today.

So please pardon me now, as I go get in line myself. I’ll see you on the other side, and we’ll push on together.

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UPDATE, the morning after: Obama’s acceptance speech — It’s almost too much. I feel as if I have been eating nothing but sticks and dirt for eight years, and I have suddenly been given a spoonful of pure maple syrup. (McCain’s speech wasn’t bad, either.)