BOOMERS ANONYMOUS -- Care or Quit?

Start here .  I'm visiting the Golden State right now. So this message is pre-programmed. Singing starts at 2:10.  "Mexican Reggae" was a tentative description of the song before the Eagles settled on "Hotel California." Just so you know, there is no Hotel California. The building on the album cover is in fact the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.  I lived in Los Angeles from 1988 to 1991. All this to say growing old ain't for sissies. "Some of the wilder interpretations of that song have been amazing. It was really about the excesses of American culture and certain girls we knew. But it was also about the uneasy balance between art and commerce." -- Don Henley, 9/11/07 On a dark desert highway ,  Cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up through the air. Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light. My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim. I had to stop for the night . There she stood in the d...

 OR . . . as the red-hatted hordes CHEERING for NASCAR driver bRANDON BROWN would say . . . "Right on, Q!" Start here .  Welcome back boomers (and kids) to another edition ... uh, addition, ... or is it merely a rendition?  OK, enough bull about Durham . . . So, a great French comedian once said,  "Zee timing, she eez evereething."    I Think, Therefore I Drink Based on that, I think once a week should be the proper dosage of this comic relief, plus or minus a paragraph or two. If you could just help me calibrate it . . . if you don't mind . . . that would be great. We are hunkered down in the Carolina Piedmont, stocked up with white bread, toilet paper, and almond milk. We got hit by a full inch of snow and sleet, just before MLK Day. Then we got hit again just this weekend.  And the NFL isn't rigged. Hmph. I can hear my Yankee friends laughing scornfully at the Southern facade, the genteel, neurotic, Prince of Tides machismo , panicked at the prosp...

Hello, Whitey. Start here .  Welcome to the nitty gritty.  Or the fucky-wucky. Or whatever idiomatic phrase that implies funtime is over, and where drilling down to real facts inevitablly means losing your audience. So much sex and violence, a mere mouse click away, makes it so reading legal jargon for cultural content just plain sucks. And it sucks more when the content herein suggests the world-as-we-know-it is crumbling. So we grind on.  Welcome to post #3 of my return  to blogging. For those of us at the "boomer" stage of life, I humbly suggest we maintain focus on a prime imperative. We should and quite often do care about what our generation hath wrought, yet growing old gracefully is a tough challenge. Being jaded is part of the deal, as is unrequited sentimentality. So, let's focus on facts, folks. Do with them (true facts) what you will, but remember there are many out there who weave wicked webs, and they practice to deceive the elderly. Think for yoursel...

We are All Boat People Start here . You could look it up, but I'm here so you don't have to.  The word "Durham" should invoke more than the surname of the DOJ Special Counsel whose work triggers both sides of the political echo chamber.   True, from a corporate mass media perspective, that's the first bell rung when you hear a reference to Durham.  Etymologically, the combination of Olde English " dun " (hill) and  Scandinavian " holmr " (city) was adopted by 1st century Normans.  City on a hill? Hmm. They eventually stopped adding the letter -r- because, the Anglo-French quite often lost or combined words containing the letters -l- , -n- , and -r- .  They just couldn't properly pronounce " dunholmr ." Geographically, there are two primary locations called Durham. One Durham is a city and county bordering the North Sea in England (pop. ~511,000). The other Durham is a city located northwest of Raleigh, North Carolina. Durham, NC ...

That'll do, pig. IN THE BEGINNING . . .  there was " WIT , GUN , and STEIN ." That was the title of my first blog.  Some of you already knew that. WGS existed from January 2009 to March 2011.  In it, I mixed blood, sweat, and tears, with golf course and music reviews. Sometimes, I tried to be funny . Not much is left of WGS, other than the internet way-back machine archives , which means some but not all of the internet, lasts forever.  Some of the internet just dies. Notwithstanding the grandiose experiment in literary expression and political polemic, I feel successful in having conducted my verbal excercise, working through variously apt sub-titles, patching together broken phrases, just to say: "Hey. Words mean things." For example:  WGS -- "3 Things You Will Need For The End Times" As it turns out, the reference to  "End Times" was a bit melodramatic. Too early, perhaps? Wittgenstein, get it? Another sub-title was:   WGS - "A Gol...