Cinderella dropped her glass slipper early in the evening

and the shards went dancing on their own
with the decaying sun

golden sparks
flirting a fan of new green leaves,
a turmoil in a sky blue mirror

she was warned, she was warned
but she learned a great truth that night

like a gypsy girl, she’d rather dance barefoot

The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.

Captain Ahab

Of all the books I read in college American lit courses, the only one I have reread since is MOBY DICK. Disregard the excursions into whaling lore, metaphysics, stories within stories, meditations on religion and democracy, and Gothic soliloquy and it’s simply a cracking good yarn, with the greatest anti-hero in all literature at the heart of the story: the mad Captain Ahab, who loses his life to an obsession.

It has occurred to me lately that Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale might be fruitfully compared with President Bush’s obsession with overthrowing the late Saddam Hussein and replacing his dictatorship with a democracy.

Look at Ahab, imparting his determination to have his revenge on the whale that took his leg to a crew of hotheads; look at Bush, using fatally flawed if not fabricated intelligence to justify his determination to remove a dictator.

Look at Ahab, who rejected good counsel that would have brought the crew of the PEQUOD home safe and sound; look at Bush, who has dismissed in disgrace anyone who dared to suggest that the war on terror should not be localized to Iraq.

Look at Ahab, willing to sacrifice his whole crew to kill Moby Dick; look at Bush, whose failure to look beyond the immediate goal of bringing down Saddam has left Iraq in chaos and killed 3300 American troops.

The saddest aspect of this whole debacle is that President Bush has concentrated our efforts on the wrong whale altogether. The Pentagon, at long last, has concluded that Saddam Hussein had no connection to the September 11 attacks, a connection President Bush and his neocon cronies have strained mightily to make for four agonizing years. Meanwhile the man who truly was the heart and soul of that evil conspiracy, Osama bin Laden, has had safe haven all this time, if not in the mountains of Afghanistan then in areas of Pakistan closed to our searches.

And so we go on, squandering precious lives and resources because our president chose to go after lesser game instead of devoting those resources to the hunt for the lethal bin Laden. Meanwhile Saddam is dead, and our country grows more weary and less patient with creeping "progress" in Iraq with each passing day. Bush’s purpose is fixed, though, and he, like Ahab, will ride those iron rails, come hell or high water.

Hey, it’s only my opinion, people, out there though it may be. Till next time, fair thee well

Our membership drive for the Ornery as Hellfire Club still isn't gathering steam like we hoped. We decided we might stand a better chance of getting a celebrity endorsement if we offered compensation. After we searched change wells in our cars, checked under couch cushions, emptied vacuum bags, and scavenged the Wal-Mart parking lot, we managed to raise $l3 and some loose change.
Seeing how limited our resources are, Miss A suggested we instead try to hire Billy Mayes, that annoying TV pitchman. The consensus being that he'll pitch ANYTHING for $l9.95 plus shipping and handling, our next problem is how to raise the extra cash. The only one of us young enough to run a lemonade stand without a license, my other niece, the Princess, is unfortunately in the middle of baseball season. Our next move will be to vote on whether to enlist the help of Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines and hold a bake sale. (A wet tee-shirt contest fell through when all the competitors got a look at Willard. They dropped out in droves.)
Willard suggested that we sweeten the deal we offer to Billy Mayes with a box of cheap chocolates, so Tooey got us a box with her employee discount at a famous retail establishment. The chocolates vanished without a trace while we were meeting in a chat room. Before anyone points fingers, none of the membership, including Tooey, the obvious suspect, have been hospitalized for acute chocoholism. Must've been gremlins.
Tooey also submitted a tee-shirt design for the club's approval: an upraised middle finger in shades of blush, peacock blue, seafoam green, and garnet. Unfortunately it looks better in her chosen medium--stained glass--than it does on a tee-shirt. Now she's trying to find out what the Irish Gaelic word for "ornery" is, to incorporate into a new design. Have to admit, though, there is some sentiment among the members for buying matching Yosemite Sam shirts.
SD, Willard and I got identical e-mails from someone called Willie who wanted to know if we blackballed Tucker Carlson as a potential endorser because of that windowpane plaid jacket from the Darren McGavin Kolchak collection. May we reveal here for the first time it was actually the clip tie with roses? It looked to our untrained eyes as if it had been handpainted by a drunken French Impressionist in the throes of a syphilitic fever. That tie was not just bad; it was sadistic.

More later. Till then, fair thee well.

Hi guys. Fairweather here. My nephew Bubba says I’m a bullshit blogger, so I’m back to BS some more

Today I’ve been thinking about events in history I wish I’d been around to witness. I’ve been watching Broadway star Terrence Mann on THE DRESDEN FILES, where he improbably but deliciously plays a ghost named Bob. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, Mann is among other things a dancer, and that circumstance got me thinking about another male dancer I’ve only seen in ancient still photos: the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky.

Nijinsky’s performance in Stravinsky’s LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS caused a riot in l9l3 Paris, but that’s not the scene I wish I’d witnessed. I’d rather have been in the audience at a more romantic ballet called LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE—literally, Ghost of a Rose.

In that ballet, Nijinsky danced the role of the Rose. A young girl comes home from a ball carrying a single rose. She falls asleep and dreams she is dancing with the rose. At the end of the dance, Nijinsky exited by a long high leap into the wings. At the peak of his leap, he appeared to stop in midair, hanging on nothing, before landing offstage.

It’s said that, when asked how he could achieve such a defiance of gravity, Nijinsky shrugged, "You go up there, and then you stop" as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

I’m earthbound myself, so I doubt the feat was that simple, although I’m sure any number of dancers could explain to me exactly how Nijinsky did it. Thing is, I don’t want to know. I only wish I’d been there to see him hang in the air as if the laws of physics broke just for him.

Nijinsky haunts ballet as a ghost of what might have been; a mental breakdown in l9l7 ended his career. He died thirty years later, never having danced again.

Till next time, fair thee well

Hey Guys, Fairweather here. If I'm less coherent than usual,it's from sleep deprivation. I was kept awake by the antics of a remarkably fat mouse in my bedroom. I had a glue trap out but he danced a defiant Irish jig in its edge before executing a graceless scramble into my trashcan, where he spent the rest of the night munching happily on a corn chip.

In the midst of other presumably more urgent news this week came the announcement of Kurt Vonnegut's death. I have never actually read but one of Vonnegut's works. Many years ago, in a magazine called COUNTRY MUSIC, he published an essay about the music of the Statler Brothers. At the time I was only vaguely aware that Kurt Vonnegut was considered a great American writer. What impressed my barely adolescent mind was that he singled out my all-time favorite Statler Brothers song, "Flowers on the Wall," as a heartfelt expression of how it feels to a man to be irrelevant, shut outside family life, once a marriage ends. If I remember correctly, it was a shared experience for Vonnegut and the late Lew DeWitt, the songs composer; both had marriages to break up in the 1960's.

Also, as I get older, I find it wonderful that Vonnegut heard the lonely, desperate sarcasm behind the song's deceptively jocular lyrics. It floored me to realize that a sophisticated, gifted man who experienced the firebombing of Dreden heard heartbreak in the same places I did.

Till next time , fair thee well.