Christmas Exposed

It’s five days till Christmas, so I sort of feel like I should write something about the holiday. But I’ve also got a dead pornographer and naked chests on my mind as I settle for a one full, glorious week off from work.

So, first, Christmas. When I was driving home from my run in DC this morning, I passed one of the saddest snowmen I’ve ever seen. We’d recently had one of those typical Washington area winter-weather situations in which multiple inches of snow had been predicted but we ended up getting just slightly more than enough of the white stuff to cover the grass. It’s almost all gone at this point, and in fact the mercury is expected to rise to 70 degrees this weekend. But kids will be kids, and apparently one local child was determined to make a snowman or snowperson even if he/she had to use every snowflake in the yard to do so, and even though the location beside a busy road ensured that said snow-being soon would look as pristine as did coastal New York after Hurricane Sandy.

By this morning, the imagined child’s loving rendering—gleefully conceived on a day when local schools had been closed—stood forlornly, half-melted and brown-black, in the middle of an utterly snowless lawn. It was sort of like seeing the before and immediately after photos of that handsome Russian ballet director who’d had acid thrown on his face—or revisiting one’s tidy, well-kept childhood neighborhood and finding nothing but rubble and crack houses.

Why am I opening a discussion of Christmas with that image? I don’t know. I’m not a Christmas hater, and in fact I love Christmas music, and sending out cards, and that spiked eggnog the liquor stores sell at this time of year. (Note to self: A weekend trip to the liquor store is a must.) And snowmen aren’t so much a Christmas thing as they are a winter thing, although it’s not technically winter until tomorrow.

But, that sad snowman somehow was a reminder, to me, of the mixed bag that is The Holidays. Last night Lynn and I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV for perhaps the 10,000th time. Alone among seasonal telecasts, that particular special never gets old for me. It speaks so poignantly to the ambivalence that I think most of us, in the West at least, have toward the contradictory crazy quilt of commercialism and generosity, of secularism and religion, that is Christmas. Sure, A Charlie Brown Christmas ends up coming down on the side of Christianity, but to my mind in a way that’s more hopeful than it is convincing. I’ve read a biography of Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown’s creator, and it’s clear that he was a conflicted and in many ways an unhappy man. In his Christmastime fable, with its less-than-reverent jazz score, Linus ultimately delivers to the sad-sack kid the savior that Charles/Charlie wishes he felt in his heart.

 

That’s my armchair analysis, anyway. Which is worth at least Lucy-the-Entrepreneur-Shrink’s five cents.

Christmas. There’s a lot to like about it, and a lot that’s problematic. Mostly, it’ll never again be as good for us as adults as it was when we were kids and it meant that anything was possible, including Santa. Come to think of it, that may be why spiked eggnog is so very attractive to me now.

So, let’s move on to the dead pornographer. I’m an aficionado of obituaries that are well-written and that truly seem to capture the essence of the deceased, for good or ill. Yesterday I happened to come across the New York Times’ recap of the vulgarly picaresque life of Al Goldstein, a native son best known as the publisher of Screw, a skin magazine that was, by all accounts, exactly as subtle and classy as its name suggested. Goldstein died in Brooklyn of renal failure at age 77.

I write “by all accounts” because I never actually saw a copy of Screw, which debuted in 1968, when I was 10 years old, and had ceased publication by the time I might have researched it on the web, solely in the interest of journalistic science. But here’s how the noted civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz, who sometimes represented Goldstein in the latter’s legal tussles, described Screw in the New York Times obituary: “Hefner did it with taste. Goldstein’s contribution is to be utterly tasteless.”

Elsewhere in the piece, its author, Andy Newman writes, “Sex as depicted in Screw was seldom pretty, romantic or even sexy. It was, primarily, a business, with consumers and suppliers like any other.” Indeed, Newman adds, “The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue was succinct: ‘We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ. We will apologize for nothing.'”

As you might imagine, the obituary isn’t exactly a celebration of a redeeming life well-lived. In fact, it makes abundantly clear that the ugliness of Screw reflected that of its creator, who didn’t even describe himself in flattering terms, choosing instead such adjectives as “infantile” and “compulsive.” (Clearly Goldstein would not have objected to “repulsive,” either, but, rather, would have worn it as a badge of dishonor.)

The obituary's writing is darkly masterful. Consider these two paragraphs, which capture Goldstein in a nutshell:

“Apart from Screw, Mr Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser who seemed to embody a moment in New York City’s cultural history: the sleaze and decay of Times Square in the 1960s and ’70s.

“A bundle of insatiable neuroses and appetites (he once weighed around 350 pounds), Mr Goldstein used and abused the bully pulpit of his magazine and, later, his late-night public-access cable show Midnight Blue, to curse his countless enemies, among them the Nixon administration, an Italian restaurant that omitted garlic from its spaghetti sauce, himself, and, most troubling to his own defenders, his own family.”

Much later in this tour-de-force biography—which prints out to four full pages, and which I urge you to seek out while it is still online if you appreciate great writing and have a reasonably strong stomach—Newman puts a fine point on that mention of “family” by recounting, “After his son, Jordan, disinvited him to his graduation from Harvard Law School, Mr Goldstein published doctored photos showing Jordan having sex with various men and with his own mother—Mr Goldstein’s third ex-wife, Gina.”

Not surprisingly, Goldstein’s final years, as chronicled by Newman, were as unpretty as had been his oeuvre. He was homeless for a time, and he spent his final years in a Brooklyn nursing home where, one gets the impression, he was not exactly besieged by well-wishers. His one late-life “highlight”? A Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Adult Video News Awards for his role in Al Goldstein & Ron Jeremy Are Screwed.

Yes, this was a sad, sad life. But it was one that Goldstein defiantly lived on his own terms, and that a New York Times writer has spun into bleak and darkly entertaining art. I’d heard of Al Goldstein before his death, but it’s only now that I feel I’ve truly experienced him. (Second note to self: While showering today, scrub particularly vigorously.)

Finally, my opening reference to naked chests has to do with an eye-catching headline earlier this week in my daily e-mail from Rolling Stone magazine: “Miley Cyrus Flashes Twitter to ‘Free the Nipple.’

Well, of course she does! was my first thought—given that the tediously rebelling former Disney Good Girl always is in some state of public undress or self-conscious outrageousness. The only question in my mind was whether “Flashes Twitter” was a reference to the social-networking tool or whether “Twitter” now has become a descriptor of an intimate female body part.

It turned out, however, that Cyrus had bared her breasts in support of an upcoming film called Free the Nipple that is part of a wider if loosely-organized campaign to give women the legal right to go topless in public, just like men can. Actually, apparently it’s not technically illegal in most states for women to go topless, but it’s nearly impossible to do so in most places without getting arrested on some charge or another. This even is so in New York City, where female toplessness has been legal since 1992—an abuse of law enforcement that no doubt made Al Goldstein apoplectic.

Did you know there’s even a “Go Topless Day,” which annually is observed on the Sunday nearest to Women’s Equality Day (August 26th) and is the creation of a group led (per Wikipedia) by “former French auto-racing journalist Claude Vorilhon, currently known as Rael, spiritual leader of the Raelian Movement, a UFO religion”? I discovered this in my own research (you’re welcome). Presumably Miley, the Nipples filmmaker and other toplessness advocates would consider association with whack-job fringe groups antithetical to their mammary-liberation efforts.

Anyway, you might think that, as a heterosexual male, I’d be all for women having the freedom to wave their unfettered breasts in my face should they so choose. But that is decidedly not the case. I actually, totally agree that it’s a horribly unfair societal double standard for men to be allowed to walk around shirtless on a hot summer day while women’s breasts must swelter underneath their bras. But my solution to this inequity is to make men put their shirts on.

I hate seeing guys walk around topless. And it’s not because I’m latently gay and plagued by temptation, although I’m certain Al Goldstein would’ve depicted me that way in compromising doctored photos had I ever crossed him in any way. It’s just that it really doesn’t seem fair to women.

And, OK, it’s also that I don’t want to see the exposed chests of flabby guys. (I’m reminded of a great New Yorker cartoon in which a bartender at a beachfront watering hole tells a male patron that the T-shirt he’s holding in his hand is courtesy of the woman at the end of the bar.)  Furthermore, I don’t want to see the exposed chests of ripped guys, either. They’re just showing off. And also feeding my insecurity about my own un-taut upper torso. I don’t need that.

As far as I’m concerned, guys should put their shirts on. And women should keep theirs on. I mean, let’s face it: Most people, regardless of gender, look better clad than unclad. (I certainly include myself in that number.) And here’s where I will speak as a heterosexual guy: There’s something to be said for a bit of suggestiveness and mystery. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Now, how do I bring this post full circle and tie these disparate elements together?

Ah, I’ve got it. That Rolling Stone item about Miley Cyrus noted, “On Saturday, she tweeted an almost topless selfie featuring two strategically placed hearts that read ‘Merry Christmas.’”

Again, this holiday truly is a mixed bag.

 

Maui

Hawaii’s legislature approved gay marriage and the state’s governor signed it into law while Lynn and I were vacationing on Maui earlier this month. I’m not saying my wearing a Human Rights Campaign tank top one morning was the difference maker, but you must concede that it’s a pretty big coincidence.

At any rate, that’s my segue into an account of our historic trip, during which I added Hawaii to my “running states” list, we (atypically for an Abbott-Ries vacation) encountered no cold weather save at 10,000-plus feet, and Lynn actually wore a bathing suit—any of those things being so notable as perhaps to have made the national news. (So, please excuse me if I repeat things you may already have read in print or online in the New York Times or the Washington Post, or which may have been Tweeted or re-Tweeted to you.)

There’s a lot of ground to cover—literally, since Hawaii insists on being something like 4800 miles away from the DC area. Let’s break it down by sections. And no, I’m not starting with the scenery. Which was spectacular, but I’ll get to that.

The Flights

All told, we spent something like 18 to 20 hours in the air, with brief layovers in Los Angeles on the way and San Francisco coming back. I was deeply concerned for Lynn, given that the concept of multi-ton vehicles defying gravity always has unnerved her, and also because her history of having drowning nightmares seemed ill-suited to soaring high above thousands of miles of water. She was determined, however, to self-affirm rather than self-medicate, telling herself that she no longer was that petrified person fatalistically awaiting the Final Splashdown. And by God, it worked.

It undoubtedly helped that we had movies to distract us. Lynn had figured out how to rent and download films onto our computer, and we ended up watching three of them. The best was Sound City, ex-Nirvana and current Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl’s affectionate look at a legendary California recording studio, its pioneering Neve soundboard, and the good old days of pre-digital recording, when you actually had to have some talent in order to be a rock or pop star. It’s kind of hard to focus on dying in a plane crash when you’re hearing the likes of Grohl, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Stevie Nicks reminisce and play their music. And, of course, we were among the choir members to whom Grohl was preaching his “everything was better before technology ate the world” message. (Even though, admittedly, we were watching the flick on an iPad, with our iPhones in our pockets. We never said we were entirely consistent.)

We also read on the flights. During the course of our vacation I started and finished Richard Ford’s Canada, which I loved, and which I urge you to read if you like spare and somber stories about young boys whose lives are forever altered by their parents’ poor decisions and the violence that’s always just a few missteps away from what otherwise might have been a happy childhood. Trust me, it’s a great book. And it’s set in Montana and Saskatchewan—the kinds of cold, underpopulated, scantily touristed places to which Lynn and I more typically travel. Anyway, I recently read a Q&A in the New York Times in which Amy Tan called Canada her favorite book of 2013, although it actually was published in 2012. I’ve never read a word of Amy Tan’s writing, but she’s an acclaimed bestselling author, so maybe you’ll take her word if not mine.

So, where was I? Oh yes, very slowly getting to Maui, the putative subject at hand. Lynn brought food on the planes, so we also spent part of our time eating Tofurky sandwiches and carrot sticks and pita chips with hummus. (In this diet we somehow seemed to be alone.) All that masticating was a welcome distraction from the fact that I felt so straitjacketed by our accommodations that at times I wished I’d been born without legs rather than half of an arm. Count me among those who are delighted that public sentiment seems to be firmly against the airlines allowing people to take and make in-flight phone calls on their cell phones. I fear that no amount of faux meat or diverting documentaries could quell my impulse to throttle such self-important bloviators.

A TSA employee had been murdered by a crazed gunman at the Los Angeles airport just days before we touched down there, prompting me to note that “LAX” is not the ideal identifier for a transportation hub whose security has been fatally breached. Still, we ultimately arrived in Kahului, Maui, without incident either in the air or on the ground, except for that thing where I felt I’d been stuffed into a tiny packing box for a good chunk of an entire day.

The airport in Kahului is relatively small and easily manageable. But I’d thought that someone was supposed to adorn us with leis as we de-boarded onto Hawaiian soil (or carpet, technically). I mean, I’d seen such welcomings depicted by reputable news sources such as an old Brady Bunch episode. Alas, however, no leis. Maybe you need to be on a Hawaiian airliner instead of United. Or perhaps the whole “I got lei’d!” joke simply has gotten so old and stale at this point that nobody has the heart anymore to provoke it.

The Runs

I suppose I should’ve renamed this section. To be clear, while Lynn did contract a cold late in our time on Maui, our stools were utterly unaffected by the change of scenery and climates.
 
As I’d noted in an earlier post, probably the biggest reason we headed to Hawaii was because I have this goal of completing at least one uninterrupted run of an hour’s duration in each of the 50 states, and Hawaii was the farthest-flung of the 18 states I still needed. (Why the island of Maui, as opposed to, say, Oahu? Because Lynn wanted to attend a two-day workshop there that was being led by a renowned Reiki master. And because we didn’t give much of a crap about seeing the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, or Waikiki Beach, or any of the other big Hawaii tourist sites. Which, by the way, appalled my mom. “But, you’re going all that way!” she cried out on the phone when I announced there would be no island-hopping. Sorry, mom.)

We spent our first night on Maui at a hotel in Kahului, which I consistently called “Babalui,” in a totally hilarious spin on the name of fictional bandleader Ricky Ricardo’s biggest hit from the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Oddly, Lynn consistently found this not even slightly funny. Kahului is where the airport and a lot of retail shopping is located, so it’s un-pretty by Maui standards. But it’s hardly without its charms. And by that I don’t just mean the charms of the Whole Foods where we ate or purchased several meals at the beginning and end of our vacation, but also of the majestic hills beyond the Whole Foods shopping center, the palm trees and tropical flowers all around town, and the shoreline rife with surfers. (Even on one stretch that’s across the bay from a container yard for cargo ships.)

Our first morning on the island, Friday the 8th, I acted on  tip from the hotel’s front desk and ran beside a busy road for about a mile, then up a side road into a city park. (Turning the corner, I passed the Maui Arts & Cultural Center, which was heavily promoting an upcoming performance by 1970s hitmaker Boz Scaggs. This gave me a pretty good idea of your concert-going horizons when you’re situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and don’t live in a major population center like Honolulu.) As I ran through the park, I was struck, as one often is in far-off locales, by the clear disconnect between local perceptions of the weather and one’s own. Even just past sunrise, the temperature was in the low 80s, the humidity was moderate to high, and the expected tropical breezes were nowhere to be felt. I basically was sweating my ass off, yet a number of the Mauians I saw running or strolling by had track suits on—and seemed quite comfortable, at that.

I’d been hoping the park was going to be sprawling and lush, but it was small and utilitarian. It didn’t take me long to circle the baseball field, basketball courts and parking lots, so I proceeded up a hill and into a neighborhood of modest homes, zigging and zagging along until I’d killed enough time to be able to head back to the hotel. It wasn’t exactly like the evocative runs I’d had in such otherworldly places as Iceland and northern Newfoundland, but it was good enough to earn me, at 7:35 am local time, the right to cross Hawaii off my running list as state number 33.

Afterward, Lynn and I walked over to Whole Foods for a celebratory tour of the breakfast bar, with its many vegetarian and vegan offerings. No one congratulated me or vied to pick up my bill. But then, most things travel slowly on the islands. Including news.

My runs on mornings two and three were in Hana, which is about 50 miles east of Kahului via the grandiosely named “Highway to Hana”—a two-lane road that’s frequently so narrow you must stop to let opposing traffic pass. (More on that road in the “Scenery” section.) In terms of commercial activity, Hana is the anti-Kahului. The retail touchstone of the crossroads that qualifies as “downtown” is the ramshackle Hasegawa General Store, which sells everything from beer to bolts. There’s a lone restaurant, a gas station and, a slight distance up a side road, a smaller grocery store and a post office. Nearby are two churches and a resort hotel that was far too expensive for us, so I got even by trespassing on its grounds during both of my Hana runs.

There’s not a lot of traffic in Hana at any time, at least not in November, and certainly not before 8 am. Which was good, because the dearth of road choices forced me to run beside the aforementioned “highway” for stretches. The vegetation was lush—lots of palm trees and tropical plants whose names I don’t know—and the terrain was much more densely forested than I’d had any idea Maui would be. The first morning in Hana I checked out the town beach, which is black-sand, well-shaded and host to very rough waves—all of which combines to make the place a little foreboding. The second morning I ran down a back road to the combination high school-elementary school, which is low-slung, old and dated, but features colorful murals on the cinderblock walls of heroic Hawaiian figures in native dress. I saw and heard a lot of wild chickens, which you see all over the island. Most of the few people I passed on the streets said hello or good morning, which doesn’t happen much at home.

No run on morning four on Maui, because we wanted to be atop the Haleakala volcano before every other tourist on the island had the opportunity to join us there, and it was a two-hour drive away. Our ultimate destination that day was Lahaina, which is on the west coast, is a port for cruise ships, and was an adjustment for us after two full days in sleepy Hana.

I beat most of the tourists outside on morning five, however, and started my Lahaina run at the massive banyan tree next to our hotel, which swallows an entire square block of real estate. From there, I headed away from the commercial center, across a highway that was busy even at 7 am, and up a hill in search of the “L” sign I’d seen when Lynn and I were out walking the previous afternoon. It was as if the town had wanted to emulate Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign but couldn’t afford all the letters. I wanted to see what the L looked like up close. But I never could find a road that would take me to it. I hit multiple dead ends and ended up passing a lot of kids waiting for school busses and residents of low-end apartment complexes heading off to work. Running back toward the hotel, I saw a Kaiser Permanente health care facility and thought about how, while I always carry my driver’s license so authorities can identify my body should I be hit by a car or keel over, my Kaiser card remained in my wallet back at the hotel. Fortunately, I didn’t need it.

When I finished my run at the banyan tree, tourists already were lining up at the waterfront for day excursions, and breakfasters were filling the streets. I was happy not to have had to share the roads with many of them.

Morning six was our last on Maui, and we were back at our original hotel in Kahului. This time I decided not to turn off at the road that led to the park, but rather to just keep going up the busy four-lane road that later narrowed to two. The shoulder was plenty wide at all points, and I had the bay to my left on the way back, but it wasn’t exactly a Chamber of Commerce-friendly route. I ran up a hill and past an array of forlorn shops and small businesses. What was interesting to me, though, were the number of bars, restaurants and dedicated spaces offering karaoke, which I knew from having been there is huge in Japan. As I’d seen in Tokyo, there even were karaoke-specific rental spaces. I wondered if Hawaiians sing better than I do (well, that’s almost a given), and exactly how much spiked Hawaiian punch fuels these parties and open-mic competitions.

The Scenery

OK, all right, already. If you haven’t ever been to Maui/Hawaii, what you probably wanted to know from the get-go was, exactly how gorgeous is it? The answer is “extremely,” but I’ve been stalling—in part because I wanted to address other things first (and it’s my blog), but also because I have a lousy descriptive vocabulary and there’s really no way I can do the island justice.

It would help if I knew how to add photos to this blog, which probably isn’t that difficult to do. But I’m lazy, and, anyway, I sort of dig how this space is so low-tech as to be, to modern-day branding, as the 8-track tape is to the iPod. Also, Lynn shot down the idea of my posting here the link to an online album of our collective photos. She told me she didn’t want “the whole world” seeing them. Meaning, given the size of my readership, that she apparently deems Earth’s population to be about a dozen people. I personally think it’s because Lynn fears those bathing suit shots of her somehow will go viral, perhaps on the website “Pasty-White Visions,” if there is such a place. If you aren’t some cyber-rascal looking to embarrass the missus, shoot me an e-mail and I’ll give you the link. Pending spousal approval, of course.

Anyway, the scenery. Well, let’s first consider the previously mentioned highway to Hana, which for about 30 of its miles twists, turns, peaks and valleys, through and around and beside some of the most amazing forests and stretches of coastline I wager you’ll ever see. There are overlooks and pullovers where you can stop and take pictures of waterfalls and exotic foliage and waves crashing against rocks. That’s why—with all the stops, slowdowns at one-lane bridges, and hairpin turns—you really can’t drive from Kahului to Hana in less than three hours.

I shot my only iPhone video—it’s seven seconds long and opens with a great shot of my hand—at the site of an apparent memorial among the rocks at ocean’s edge. It features two crosses and a surfboard. It’s starkly beautiful. I assume it means a surfer died there, but I suppose it could’ve been left by one of the Beach Boys or the Ventures, in loving memory of those heady days when surf music sold lots of records.

Lynn’s workshop was at the home of this big-name Reiki guy who lives just outside Hana. We’d taken a test drive over there on the afternoon before it started to ensure we could find the place—street signs on Maui being a hit-or-miss proposition. (GPS won’t work in Hana, not that we had any such device.) We were glad we’d previewed the trip, because the guy’s half-mile-long “driveway” actually is two ruts with raised mounds of tall grass in between. We were driving a tin-can Mazda 2, which has the horsepower of, well, a horse, and about two inches of ground clearance. At least that was what it felt like as we climbed the hill to the house for the first time. I pictured us trying to explain to the Hertz people at the airport why we had no muffler and our undercarriage appeared to be on a vegetarian diet.

But the payoff was arriving at the extraordinary modernist house and looking down on the countryside and the sea. If you should end up seeing our photos, there are some great ones Lynn took while she was on the premises.

Lynn’s workshop was all day both days, so I used that time to do some exploring. The first day I drove southeast about 15 miles (which again, took longer than you’d think), past the coastal entrance (as opposed to the volcano entrance) to Haleakala National Park. Again, it was beautiful. Lush. Exotic. Other descriptive adjectives. I then drove back to our rental cabin, donned my bathing suit and bodysurfed the waves for about an hour at Hamoa Beach, which is hidden from the roadway—down a flight of stone steps. It was lovely and peaceful, and there were only a few people there. The fancy-pants hotel has a cabana at Hamoa, next to the dingy public restroom. The friendly cabana attendant introduced me to his pit bull and let me rinse my sandy feet at the hotel’s spigot.

The second day of Lynn’s workshop, I drove back to the national park. This time I stayed, and took a two-mile hike to the Waimoku waterfall. The path up a gradual incline takes you across cascading streams and through primordial bamboo forests. At times I was all alone, standing in near-darkness at midday within the tight canopy, with a breeze on my face and the sounds of creaking bamboo all around me. It was amazing. And the waterfall was breathtaking. I took a “selfie” there, which I later sent to friends captioned “Sweaty Geezer Achieves Goal.”

After that I drove a few miles further away from Hana, in search of the burial place of Charles Lindbergh, which I knew from a guidebook was in the small cemetery of a church on a back road. Eventually I found it. Everything about the place is modest—the church, the cemetery, the simple plaque that reads “Charles A. Lindbergh. Born Michigan1902. Died Maui 1974. ‘If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uppermost parts of the sea … .” C.A.L.”  The verse is from the Bible—Psalm 139:9.

The simple graveyard is an incredibly peaceful place, and it’s abutted by a small public park on a bluff that overlooks some of the most striking ocean views I saw anywhere on the island. I don’t know nearly as much about Lindbergh as I should, given his outsized place in 20th century history as aviator hero, victim of a sensational crime, suspected Nazi sympathizer, and, finally, complex figure whose very name tends to divide those familiar with his legacy. But I know that he chose his burial site for its remoteness, beauty and quiet. He certainly got that right.

A different kind of beauty and calm awaited Lynn and me at the Haleakala summit, which was socked in by fog when we arrived by car late Monday morning, November 11th. We couldn’t see the volcano crater down below, but it was an incredible feeling to be up among the clouds, wearing coats and bracing ourselves against cold winds and temperatures in the 40s when it was sunbathing weather 10,000 feet below us. We snapped shots of the fog-shrouded rocks and scrub vegetation, and we took each other’s picture at the elevation sign. Then we proceeded on from chilly and quiet Haleakala to sultry, bustling Lahaina.

Though it’s touristy and coastal, Lahaina hardly is Myrtle Beach or Ocean City. The retail elements are tastefully laid out along a couple of main roads. It’s compact and walkable. There’s that huge banyan tree, and an abundance of trees and flowers. The sunrises and sunsets over the water are beautiful. We in no way felt we were ending our wondrous journey around the island by staying at a glorified mall.

I do wish I’d made it up closer to that “L,” though. Which the Internet tells me stands for Lahainaluna (“overlooking Lahaina”) High School, is 30 feet high, and sits at the 2,000-foot level of Mt Ball in the West Maui Mountains. It’s been there since 1904, which means it predated the Hollywood sign by 19 years.

The Accommodations

Lynn had done all of our lodgings research. Our top criteria were location (near the airport coming and going, near Lynn’s Reiki training in Hana, and one night in happenin’ Lahaina), cost (ideally under $200 a night), and fairly basic amenities such as WiFi access and perhaps a pool. In each case our expectations were far exceeded.

The Maui Seaside Hotel in Kahului, just two miles from the airport, met not only all our criteria for convenience (it also is within easy walking distance of the Whole Foods I’d mentioned earlier), but it also has a beautiful central courtyard with a manicured lawn, views of the bay and a spacious pool that descends to a depth of seven feet. The water was cold, and Lynn would not join me. (This would be a theme throughout our trip.) My presence in the pool proved sufficient to frighten off most would-be bathers, which was great. More room for me to propel myself underwater from one end of the pool to the other, a feat I always deem impressive in pools of a decent size, although I’m still awaiting the oohs and ahhs of onlookers after all these decades.

Returning to the Maui Seaside for our final night on the island felt like being embraced by an old friend. We even were upgraded to a bigger room at no extra cost for a reason I can’t recall. Maybe it was an overdue reward for my ability to hold my breath for an entire pool’s length.

After our arrival night in Kahului, we spent the next three nights in our own cottage in Hana. This was fantastic because it was private, gave us our own kitchen, living room and screened-in front porch, and was very near both “downtown” Hana and the home of Lynn’s Reki master, who had recommended the place in the literature he’d sent his students. My gratitude may in retrospect have been the reason I never once in conversation with Lynn referred to the Reiki guy—one William Lee Rand—as “David Lee Roth,” even though assigning him the name of the one-time Van Halen frontman would have been at least as hilarious as was the Kahalui-Babalui thing.

Really, it was so much fun to go off for the day—Lynn to Reiki, me to my hiking, swimming and sightseeing adventures—and to feel as if we literally were coming home. The cottage was perfect for us, even though it had no air conditioning. Ceiling fans and cooler nighttime temperatures did the trick.

Our other hotel on Maui, for one night only, was the Pioneer Inn in Lahaina, which we’d already known from a black-and-white greeting card we’d seen for sale in the general store in Hana is old and historic—built in 1901 on what once was the personal taro patch of King Kamehameha the Great. It’s a grand structure sitting on prime turf right on the waterfront, with porches adjoining each room on its two-story entrance side, the requisite wooden sea captain out front, and an evocative palm tree-framed interior courtyard with a pool as its centerpiece. The place’s glory has faded a bit, to be honest, but then that’s probably why we could afford it. So what if there was chipping paint here and there, and our room overlooked a dumpster? We still loved being there, feeling that the old girl looked pretty good for 102, and that we’d been delighted to have made her acquaintance.

The Food

OK, I’ll start by saying that we got the owner of the restaurant at the Maui Seaside to bring us a sample of poi—because, “when in Hawaii” and all that. Poi, which, per Webster’s, is “a Hawaiian food of taro root cooked, pounded, and kneaded to a paste and often allowed to ferment” generally is eaten with meat. We could see why it’s not meant to stand alone. It has the consistency of applesauce but not the flavor—or really much flavor at all.

This is going to be a short section (thank God, you’re no doubt saying, if you’ve given up your afternoon to follow me this far), because you know that, as a vegetarian/vegan couple,  we didn’t seek out a luau and eat pig suspended from a spit, or order any seafood. We could’ve grabbed a fresh coconut or pineapple from one of any number of roadside vendors, but we didn’t feel moved to do that either. We did indulge in coconut shave ice in Lahaina, but God knows if there’s any real coconut in that. During our one morning in Lahaina, we had a fantastic breakfast at the imaginatively named Café Café, where Lynn had granola with fresh fruit and I had fresh fruit with chia seeds and Gobi berries. (Lynn took some up-close food-porn photos of those dishes, which are on the aforementioned online site.)

Mostly we ate at Whole Foods or ate items bought from there. We did dine at a couple of nice Thai restaurants—one in Lahaina and the other in Kahului. I scored some Tootsie Roll Pops at the general store in Hana to enjoy on the road in my rental car (and to convey to other tourists what a badass I am).

The Climate

You wouldn’t weather think conditions could vary much on an island that’s only 48 miles long and 26 miles wide as the crow flies. (No, I’m not sure if Maui has crows. But, whatever. “Straight shot.” You know what I mean.) The fact is, though, that it rained like crazy much of the time we were in Hana on the east coast, but hardly at all anywhere else. A lot of the Hana rains came overnight, which certainly was preferable to during the day, but they often were accompanied by howling winds that made things quite noisy—even over the sounds of our white-noise machines and the ceiling fans.

In the Hana area, swells of rain often would arrive without warning, alternating with sunshine. Fortuitously, my entire hike to and from the Waimoku waterfall was rain-free. But precipitation did force me to bag a planned second trip to Hamoa beach.

Temperatures consistently were in the low 80s during the day and the 70s overnight. Which usually was quite comfortable. Atop the Haleakala volcano at 10,000-plus feet above sea level, however, it was quite autumnal, weather-wise. As you might imagine. The temperature was around 50 and wind-chills were in the low 40s, I’d guess.

The Wildlife

We never encountered the state bird—the Nene (pronounced nay-nay), a type of goose—anywhere other than on signage that dutifully notes their relative rarity. But we did see, I determined after we’d gotten home, several mongooses. They’re long, brown and sleek, and they dart across the road. You know they’re not squirrels because there are no squirrels on Maui. I didn’t know what I’d been looking at until I searched “Maui wildlife” and saw a photograph that matched the animal I’d seen.

Hawaii also is big on wild chickens and feral cats, and we saw plenty of each. I’ve no idea if mongooses eat cats, but I’m sensing a natural population-control cycle there.

Our friend Joanne who once lived in Hawaii says everything is bigger there—the plants because of all the rain and the wildlife because of the climate, the abundance of habitat and the lack of predators in some cases. Certainly our cottage in Hana hosted one of the biggest spiders I’d ever seen (on the front porch) and a magnificently large snail (inching his or her way across our driveway.) Again, we have pictures.

What else? It wasn’t whale-watching season, so we didn’t seek out any cetaceans. We saw many, many varieties of colorful and cacophonous birds, but did we know what we were looking at? No.

The End

Even after a magnificent vacation, it was good to get back home to our untidy house and its shedding animals. And even to return to fall in the Mid-Atlantic, as the temperature at Dulles Airport was a brisk 25 degrees when our plane touched down just after 6 am on Thursday the 14th of November. We’d both taken the rest of the week off from work and so could luxuriate in the memories.

Maui wasn’t our usual type of vacation, but we had a blast there. Will we ever seek out another tropical locale, minus the lure of its being an un-trod running state or a Reiki destination? (Lynn, by the way, enjoyed her training and was glad she’d done it, but didn’t feel the Master was quite all that.)  It’s not out of the question. Although frankly I hear a lot of colder-weather “M” places calling our name—Manitoba, Minnesota, Montana, Michigan. We’ll see. But we no longer can rule out places just because they’re warm and popular.

Salute to Circuitry

“It was on this day in 1954 that the first transistor radio appeared on the market.”

That was the first sentence out of Garrison Keillor’s mouth after he introduced today’s segment of The Writer’s Almanac on public radio. His voice issued, in fact, from one of two transistor radios perched most of the time on the windowsill of our basement bathroom. The larger one typically is tuned to 88.5, WAMU-FM, the public radio station of American University. The other, pocket-sized one usually is tuned to 103.5, all-news WTOP-FM.

The pocket-sized one—a Sony that’s currently available at Amazon.com for the low, low price of $14.65 plus shipping—is a triplet. I store an identical radio in a desk upstairs for transport to our bathroom on that level of the house, where I often shower on weekends because the water pressure’s better than in the basement shower. I keep a third Sony in my desk at work.

As Keillor spoke about the transistor radio’s early evolution from a Texas Instruments model that cost a whopping $49.95 to a much-cheaper Sony snapped up by teenagers to listen to rock ‘n’ roll out of their disapproving parents’ earshot, I knew I had to publicly wish this once-transformative device—now rendered so quaint and limited by the iPod, iPhone and its i-ilk—a happy 59th birthday.

How do I love thee, transistor radio? Let me count the memories. Such as how you lulled me to sleep in the 1960s, snug against my ear under the covers while my older brother obliviously slept in the other twin bed. New York City’s “77, WABC” (that jingle!) was a Top 40 station then, at a time when substantial bands like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones actually had Top 40 hits. I felt like a member of a secret society, awake while the world slept. I well remember the 2 a.m. ads for Dennison’s Clothiers that made the store sound vast, though we’d sometimes drive by its tiny building on trips into the city and call it “Dennison’s Clothes Booth.” I recall The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road” edging me closer to slumber thanks to producer George Martin's over-the-top strings arrangement. I recollect the joyful gibberish of one particular percussion-laden tune in a foreign tongue that I’d only decades identify as the work of trailblazing Miriam Makeba—described by Wikipedia as “the first artist from Africa to popularize African music around the world.”

A few years later, I would learn of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ game seven win in the 1971 World Series over the Baltimore Orioles on my transistor radio as I walked my bike up the hill from a playing field at Mountain Park School in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. I’d been far too nervous to watch the game on TV. I lifted the bike’s front off the ground to pop a celebratory wheelie, then arrived home just in time to see a teammate pour champagne over future Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente’s head.

My family’s move a year later to Greensboro, North Carolina, was difficult for me, but it was made a little easier by the fact that I could pick up both the aforementioned WABC and KDKA-AM Pittsburgh at night on my transistor radio.

The compact device’s role as my stalwart companion in times of fraught transition continued through the 1980s and ’90s, as public radio stations helping me adjust to life in such godforsaken outposts as Thomasville, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. In Thomasville, my transistor radio afforded me a world of culture and intrigue in stark contrast to the drawls and parochialism all around me. In steamy Savannah, Marian McPartland literally jazzed things up with her interviews of musicians, and A Prairie Home Companion let me escape, however briefly, to a mythical Midwest of cool temperatures and Lutheran temperaments.

The new century ushered in new technologies and new ways of accessing music and radio stations. But it was via transistor radios that I first became acquainted with the DC stations that would become the mainstays of my morning and afternoon drives to work, and where I first heard most of the music in my ever-growing CD collection.

Today, I enjoy being able to stream radio stations from near and far on my phone, and I appreciate the theoretical musical options of Pandora and iTune playlists, although I haven’t yet gone those routes. Still, just as there’s nothing for me quite like the tactile and visual pleasures of the print newspaper, there’s nothing to match the tactile and auditory pleasures of turning on a transistor radio and carrying it from room to room, or out into the yard for the distractions of baseball, football, rock and bluegrass while I’m cutting the grass and pulling weeds. I enjoy the looks of passers-by as my transistor radio blares—not an earbud in sight—and my neighbors plainly wonder (nostalgically or pityingly, depending on their age) at my anachronistic ways.

In fact, I close out most weekends Sunday night with snatches of “The Big Broadcast” on WAMU, steeling myself for the coming work week by listening in on Joe Friday and Matt Dillon as they handily defeat the rogues of the Old West and of post-war, noir Los Angeles.

Anyway, as Detective Friday used to say, the story you have just heard [read] is true. And here’s hoping that the scrappy, marginalized transistor radio will yet celebrate many more birthdays. Certainly my life would have been—still would be—considerably less rich without it.

One Hundred Posts of Lassitude (More or Less)

This may or may not be my 100th blog post. Blogger, the host site, puts my count of previous posts at 99. But when I conducted my own tally while jotting down brief summaries of each post (to remind myself what the hell I’ve written about in the three-plus years since I started this thing in July 2010), I counted 101 entries to date.

Whatever. Let’s just assume this is number 100, so I can proceed with a retrospective to mark this historic occasion. Never mind that somehow the eyes of world seem not to be on this milestone, what with such distractions as the ongoing war in Syria, the aftermath of the mall siege in Nairobi, the kickoff of “Obamacare,” and the related Republican hissy-fit that has shut down our dysfunctional government. (What is not a distraction is the Navy Yard shooting, as it’s already been forgotten, because America won’t allow anything to sully its all-consuming love affair with guns.)   

Come to think of it, I guess there’s another reason that anticipation of my 100th post hasn’t gone viral. That would be the fact that this blog’s readership has stabilized at somewhere in the low single digits over the course of the past 39 months. Many thanks, regardless, to those of you who continue to read, often checking in vain for new posts. My frequency has dipped since that heady first month—which remains  the standard-bearer, with seven posts. By contrast, I’ve posted no more than twice any month this year. And two months—February and April—went completely dark.

In August I wrote about how I’m going to try to start writing shorter and more frequently, by not making each post a day-long project that I dread because, as much as my ego likes to see my words up there on the Internet, my lazy ass would rather lie on a couch or sit in a movie theater seat on my days off. Suffice it to say, I’m still working on that.

Anyway, a lot has changed in my life and in the world since July 2010, while other things have remained the same, for good and for bad. In that first month of posts, for example, I made reference to our greyhound, Ellie, who had cancer, and to our cat, Winnie, who as far as we knew had many years ahead of her. The Big C since has claimed both of them. Ellie’s successor, Bean the three-legged mutt hound, to whom I dedicated a post in December 2010, still is very much with us. He’s a joy in his own sloppy, massively shedding way. And Tess, Winnie’s littermate or mother (we never knew which; they were rescues we acquired together) continues to delight us with her demanding, complaining ways, which have earned her the nicknames “Crab Cat” and “Crumb Kitten.” Tessie is aging and shows signs of possible serious health issues. As I type this, however, she is luxuriating, stretched out, on the carpet in front of our upstairs bathroom—one of her absolute favorite spots.

Also in that first month of posts, I wrote about John Wojnowski, the obsessed senior citizen who has made it his mission to shame the Catholic Church for its tolerance of child-molesting priests. He’s still out there, battling Rome and his own personal demons, straddling the line between determined and unhinged. I see him whenever I drive down Embassy Row on weekends, hoisting his provocative signs. I haven’t noticed whether John has yet indicted Pope Francis as a “sodomizer,” as he had Francis' predecessor.

In August 2010, my post “The Immortal Mortals” discussed celebrities and other people in the news who seem as if they’ve always been with us and always will be, and whose deaths somehow surprise us when they inevitably occur. Some examples I gave then were newly deceased newsman Daniel Schorr and, before him, comedian and actor George Burns—a guy who’d had played God on film and seemed intent on mimicking His lifespan. Three other luminaries in the same vein who still were plugging happily along at that time—fitness guru Jack Lalanne, comedian Phyllis Diller, and football coach Joe Paterno—since have passed away. And Paterno’s end, of course, was an ignominious one.

In September 2010 I wrote the first of two posts to date about “the other Eric Ries”—a 30-something guru of web-savvy entrepreneurship who hails from California. He has a national following and has relegated the Eric Ries whose words you’re reading now to an extremely deep scroll—several hundred links down—on any given search of our joint name. My “Dynamic Doppelganger,” as I dubbed him in that initial post, hasn’t responded the couple of times I’ve encouraged him to rebut my characterization of his life’s work as so much lucrative bullshit. (And boring, to boot.) When I told my friend Jason that this blog was approaching post number 100, he suggested that, if and when I ever hit 250, I dedicate that one to success in forcing the other Eric to engage me. We’ll see—about getting to post 250 and about goading my Left Coast counterpart to response—but I must say I'm intrigued by this idea.

The death of an older woman named Joyce prompted me, in February 2011, to reminisce about the wonderfully memorable senior citizens I’d gotten to know over the years as a volunteer visitor to Springhouse of Westwood, a local assisted living facility. Joyce had always berated me for having failed to get on Jeopardy!, where she was certain I’d have raked in the dough. She also was incredulous that the dusty junk proffered for appraisal on Antiques Roadshow tended to be valued so highly. God, I missed her when she passed. I still do. Joyce would be appalled that I’ve still never appeared on Jeopardy!, and that the Roadshow continues to find great retail value in all manner of hideous knickknacks and home decorations—items Joyce more likely would have donated to the Salvation Army.

In fact, last fall—as I subsequently noted in a January 2013 post—I  ended my dozen-year run of Monday nights at Springhouse when the last of my most recent group of “TV buddies” died off. I’m grateful for the friendships and memories, but it still feels weird not to drive over there anymore. I recently have taken on a second person to volunteer-visit through a senior services agency in Washington, DC, in part to assuage my ongoing guilt.

My cantankerous senior friend Helen, whose strange middle-of-the-night phone call to me I recounted in a March 2011 post, also has since passed away. I think of her—fondly, mostly—every time I run past her old condo building near American University, where I visited her for years, before her health deteriorated and nursing homes became her fate. When a social worker for that DC senior services agency recently asked me if I could deal with a senior lady who often is “difficult,” I looked back on my friendship with Helen and answered, essentially, “Bring it on.”

April 2011 was the first time I wrote about my long and unhappily dysfunctional relationship with the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team. In fact, the post just before this one, written last month, was about how the “Bucs” finally, after two decades of execrable play, were about to ensure a winning record for the first time since 1992. I wrote that I would celebrate that long-elusive 82nd win of the 162-game baseball season with a celebratory cupcake, which I would savor. Well, what happened was this: Win number 82 was several agonizing days in coming after that post was written. Eating the cupcake just made me feel fat. And, although I’d kidded myself that I’d be content with 82 wins, when the team subsequently blew a couple of games in the late innings on their way to a regular-season record of 94-68, I was bat shit beside myself. At this writing, the Pirates have won the National League wild card play-in game and are set to meet the St Louis Cardinals in the next round of the playoffs, starting later today. I truly feel that I’ll be fine with whatever happens from here. But, well, let’s just say it remains to be seen how well that’ll work out.

I still love my no-longer-so-new driver’s license photo, which I felt compelled to serenade with a post in June 2011. Even now, every time I’m called upon to produce an ID, I think to myself, “Who is that handsome devil?”

July 2011 was the first time I touched on the scourge of gun violence in this space, prompted by the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Phoenix. I revisited the subject in subsequent posts, but I now wonder if there’s anything left to say. After all, nothing ever changes in this gun-crazy country. And I do mean “crazy,” as the defiant disconnect between all the carnage and our laughably lax firearms laws strikes me as insane.

Moving on. The death of Steve Jobs prompted me to write in October 2011 about my mostly hate relationship with the Digital Age he did so much to usher in. The hyper-connected world in which we live continues to disconcert and depress me in myriad ways. But, as I would note in later posts, Lynn and I do now have smartphones. And although I’m far from surgically attached to mine, I do find it useful and I am glad I have it. Still, the 21st century seems not hear my constant cries of “Enough, already!” The digitalization of our every moment (waking and not) continues, at a breathtaking pace.

In a February 2012 post I shared my somewhat counterintuitive affection for bluegrass, given my utterly suburban upbringing and that music genre’s cheerleading veneration of God and country. I remain a fan, but I was saddened by the retirement from the airwaves last week of Ray Davis, my favorite DJ on WAMU Bluegrass Country. Whenever I hear a particularly woeful fiddle-and-banjo-laden tune, however, I’ll think of Ray and pronounce it a “plum pitiful.”

A June 2012 post was devoted to the guilty pleasure I derive from the Investigation Discovery channel’s all-murder-and-mayhem-all-the-time programming—rife as it is with lurid, cheesy reenactments, and as celebratory as it is of the very violence I abhor in American life. But what can I say, it’s still my go-to source for fixes of sex, sadism and serial killers. When a friend told me a few months after that post that she knows the guy who played the BTK killer in one of those cheesy reenactments, it was all I could do to refrain from requesting his autograph.

Re-reading my scant selection of posts so far this year—only 10 in past nine months—I don’t really see anything that needs updating. My nemesis Bruce Feiler (March) continues to vex me. Bertha and I continue to make halting conversation and bemoan our lack of lottery success as she empties my office wastebasket (June). Oh, my British friend Clive, about whom I wrote in August, subsequently e-mailed me to report that he has never himself employed the rather excellent word “rumbustious,” even though it reputedly is a UK creation.

So, that brings us up to date. Thanks for taking this trip with me down the Lassitude Come Home version of Memory Lane. If I ever make good on my intention to start writing shorter and posting more frequently, it won’t take me another three years to reach post 200.  At which point the other Eric Ries had better start watching his back.

Cusp

A couple of days ago, I bought a cupcake at a bakery on my way home from work. That wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but in my world, it was.

I’m pretty obsessive about my weight, seldom allowing myself such fat-and-calorie-laden decadence. But this was a celebratory cupcake. A cupcake purchased specifically to mark an event that last occurred on September 12, 1992—the waning days of the George HW Bush administration, for some way-back machine perspective.  A cupcake that, ideally, I would eat sometime around 11:30 that night, as soon as the Pittsburgh Pirates had wrapped up and made official the 82nd victory of their baseball season. The victory that would assure them a winning record of 82-80, even were they to lose all 24 of their remaining games.

This was Wednesday night. The team was in Milwaukee, facing a woeful Brewers squad that hits particularly poorly against left-handed pitchers. On the mound for the visiting Buccaneers was southpaw Francisco Liriano, who is in the midst of an outstanding season and most recently pitched eight shutout innings against the formidable St Louis Cardinals, with whom the Pirates are improbably vying for first place in the National League’s Central Division. The stage was set for history to be made, and for my near-midnight snack to be consumed.

That didn’t happen. Liriano quickly turned from powerhouse to punching bag. By the end of three innings the Pirates were down 7-2, and, given that offense is not the team’s strong suit, it was evident that win number 82 wasn’t going to happen this night. Lynn advised me to freeze the cupcake, lest it become as stale as are my team’s 20 years of futility. Into the freezer my bakery item went. The Brewers were leading 9-3 in the eighth inning when I went to bed. In the morning, my smartphone told me I’d been smart not to bother staying up. The final score was exactly 9-3.

Thursday—yesterday—was an off day. The Pirates are back in action later tonight, in St Louis. The Cardinals’ home record is 41-25, while the Pirates’ road mark is 36-33. The Redbirds’ pitcher will be right-hander Joe Kelly, who’s put together a string of outstanding starts, including six innings of one-run ball in a St Louis victory over the Pirates last Sunday in Pittsburgh. So, the odds would seem to be against win number 82 coming tonight. Which is why I sort of suspect it will come. Baseball is funny that way. Just when you think you have it figured out, a star gets injured, or a slugger chokes, or a benchwarmer gets the big hit. The counterintuitive steals the limelight from the expected. At any rate, I’ll be monitoring the game’s progress closely on TV, PC and/or smartphone, ready to defrost and eat that celebratory cupcake if and when victory is achieved.

Any freezer-related flavor degradation will be lost on me. That cupcake will taste great to me tonight, tomorrow night, Sunday afternoon, next week—whenever that next win comes. My baseball-fan friends don’t get it. They’ve been telling me my focus should be on whether the Pirates will win the division or instead have to settle for a wild-card spot. They note that with three weeks left in the regular season, a winning record is certain and a playoff spot nearly a lock, given that the Bucs own an 81-58 record and a 10-game lead in the wild-card race. They think my eyes should be focused unblinkingly on the prize of postseason baseball.

But those people haven’t endured the two decades in the wilderness that Pirates’ fans have—an unholy mating of cheap and clueless ownership with bad players and worse luck. Much has changed for the better of late, and even the horrendous late-season collapse that guaranteed a 20th consecutive losing season in 2012 doesn’t sting nearly so badly anymore. The present is bright, the future promising. But I’ve seen too much to get ahead of myself.

First things first. I was a 34-year-old single newspaper reporter living in Savannah, Georgia, the last time I scanned the regular-season final standings and saw a winning percentage of .500 or better next to the Pirates’ won-lost record. To pervert the old football quote, 82 might not be everything, but to me it’s really the only thing.

I will feast on it.

Of Brits and Bumper Stickers

Not that there’s any indication the world has noticed, but I haven’t posted to this blog in more than a month. I feel as if I’ve been failing to do my job for a long time now, posting with great infrequency. But then, that’s a big part of the problem: I’ve been thinking of this blog as a job. I’ve too often approached it as I do my day job—meticulously. In this case, as a process that begins with a specific idea and ends several hours later, after I’ve agonized over precisely which thousand or two words to employ, in what exact combinations.

I need a new approach. So, today I’m going to write off-the-cuff about a few different subjects, none individually at great length. Being me, though, I still like the idea of a unifying theme. It took me a while to come up with one, but then it hit me: Clive and Karen Scorer.

Clive and Karen are brilliant. Not necessarily in the IQ sense, although they’re certainly both smart enough. I don’t know if they’ve ever been tested—or, if so, what their numbers are. No, I mean in the British usage of the word brilliant. Clive and Karen are British, and what Lynn and I found when we met them in Iceland in the summer of 1999 is that they and their countrypersons use “brilliant” as a catch-all for anything that’s good to exceptional. To be sure, like our “awesome,” it’s a word that’s subject to being overused, and thus overextended to many things that are little better than fine or just OK. Still, I think of Clive and Karen as brilliant in a more effusive sense. They’re nice and kind and interesting, and it doesn’t hurt in Lynn’s and my book that they are roughly our age and, like us, childless by choice and crazy about cats. Their senses of humor tend toward the droll in that classically British kind of way. And of course, if they were writing the word” humor” as I just did, they’d stick an utterly superfluous “u” between the “o” and the “r” and insist that that is the only correct spelling. Which is, in my American eyes, rather brilliantly quaint.

So, anyway, that’s them. We’ve kept in touch over the years, and last fall we met up with them on Cape Cod, where their bus full of fellow Brits had stopped as part of a sightseeing/leaf-watching tour across Massachusetts and New Hampshire. One day the four of us rode in my car to Provincetown, on the other side of the Cape. That was a fun day, but its relation to this post has to do with the fact that Clive noted my several bumper stickers. Now, I don’t know if bumper stickers are rare in the UK or if Clive, in his somewhat reserved British way, deemed my sporting more than one to be excessive (I believe my bumper displayed a total of four stickers or decals at the time). At at any rate, when earlier this year I mentioned in an e-mail that I needed to have my bumper replaced, he cheekily inquired as to whether the old one had fallen off under the weight of my stickers.

First of all, wrong bumper. It was the front one that needed to be replaced. Second of all, snide British remarks aside, I like bumper stickers as a form of self-expression, as long as they aren’t lame. And by that, I mean lame in my own idiosyncratic estimation. Lame by my lights is anything from expressing one’s support for politicians and causes I deem abhorrent to insisting on advertising to the world that one’s child is an honor roll student at a given elementary school (damning with faint praise, plus, who cares?) or depicting one’s family with a like number and representational mix of stick figures (this being the inane “Baby on Board” of the 21st century). Also lame: too many bumper stickers. Show me the rear end of a car that’s plastered with stickers and decals and I’ll show you a vehicle that is the automotive mascot of the TV show Hoarders and a driver who, I fear, may be off his or her meds.

(Brief aside. Bumper stickers as self-expression: Acceptable, within reason. But, as regards another form of modern self-expression: Why must everyone have an array of damn tattoos? Nowadays, being tattoo-free is more an expression of uniqueness than are the veritable ink galleries garishly splashed across the fat asses and love handles of so many Americans.)

Anyway, I recently decided my old bumper stickers needed to go. Or at least some of them. Like the one advocating for gay marriage in Maryland, which was approved last fall. And the “equal” sign logo of the Human Rights Campaign, which now adorns every other bumper in the area, making me look trendier than I’d like. Also, while I enjoy trumpeting my cat love given the preponderance of pro-dog bumper stickers on the road, my “Meow” decal was looking tired and uninteresting. So, last weekend I spend considerable time scouring the web for replacement images and messages.

Here’s what I came up with:

·         A cat face in revolutionary red, framed by the words “Viva el Gato!”, with an added exclamation point upside-down at beginning of the sentence, in Spanish-language manner. (Pro-cat, but with attitude—something cats have in abundance.)  

 
·         One of those slash-marked red circles that mean “anti” or “no,” with the word “Guns” inside it. (I could’ve purchased one that slashed through the letters “NRA,” but in this weapons-mad country I consider my chosen design to be risky enough. Were I to call out  the NRA specifically, I'm fairly certain that my car, unlike the gasoline that fuels it, soon would be leaded.)

·         Two stickers related to my love of grammar and wordplay. I’ll likely display one or the other, but likely not both. One says. “Always proofread. You might have something out.” The other is a punchline that reads like the setup to a joke: “The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.”

I’m pleased. My one regret, though, is that I couldn’t find a bumper sticker nuanced enough to convey that while, from a “green” standpoint, I can see the wisdom of sharing the road with cyclists, the fact is that they’re hugely full of themselves, want to be treated like motorists but don’t follow traffic laws, make the roads far less safe for everyone, and I pretty much hate them all. To be fair, though, that’d be a lot for one bumper sticker to convey.

Anyway. I also thought of Clive and Karen recently when I stumbled across my new favorite word: “rumbustious.” One fraught morning recently, I needed to take a break from my workday, so I searched the Internet for an offbeat international story to amuse myself and perhaps share with a friend. I happened to find an Agence France-Press wire story that grabbed me with its headline: “China to Fine Sloppy Pee-ers.” The piece explained that officials in the Chinese city of Shenzen are planning to crack down on men who urinate outside the bowl in public facilities. (One guesses this is because China hasn’t any bigger problems in terms either of environmental degradation or societal grossness.) The article went on to note that the edict has been met with derision by Shenzen citizens, who smell both a governmental money-making scheme and an enforcement issue that raises the specter of uniformed aim-enforcers being stationed in restrooms. (Talk about your yellow perils!)

Suddenly I came upon the following sentence: “Users of China’s rumbustious weibo [Twitter-like] social networks poured scorn upon the measures.” “Rumbustious?” I loved the way it looked, and the way it sounded when I spoke it. But was it really a word? Could it have been some sort of mistake—a bad translation of French to English, perhaps? So, I looked it up online, and discovered that it is a “chiefly British” word that means “uncontrollably exuberant and unruly.” It’s more or less synonymous with what we Americans would describe as being “rambunctious.” But it’s so much better and more expressive. I say “rambunctious” aloud and it just kind of sits there in the air. I say “rumbustious” and I almost feel the clamor and tumult. It “busts” off from the tongue—fueled by intoxicating thoughts of rum, perhaps. I love this word. I will use this word. Thank you, Britain! And please, Clive and Karen, let me know if you ever use it. I like to think you do. Perhaps sometimes to describe unruly Americans who are being entirely too loud or otherwise obnoxious at one of your medieval cathedrals or historic sites?

The last thing I want to write about today is Lynn’s and my upcoming vacation—which also, in a way, brings Clive and Karen Scorer to mind. Again, Lynn and I met them when we were on vacation—or holiday, as they’d have it—in Iceland. And that destination was a perfect example of what Lynn and I like in a vacation venue: cold and under-populated. We like a nip in the air, hills on the horizon, lonely villages down the road. We’ve also traveled in Canada several times, and to National Parks out West in autumn—once the families are gone and the heat has diminished. Not that it was cold when we were in Iceland in July—it was light 24 hours a day, for one thing—but it wasn’t hot, either. Under-populated? Check. The entire nation’s population is about half that of Washington, DC.

This fall, however, we’ll be taking a trip that’s quite atypical for us. Far from cold and under-populated, we’ll be vacationing somewhere tropical and popular with tourists. We’re going to Hawaii. Specifically, Maui. Everyone who hears this sighs dreamily on our behalf and says this is wonderful news. It makes me feel pretty lame, however. Like I’ve sold out and gone mainstream. Like I might just as well get myself several tattoos and a Twitter handle while I’m at it, and buy stick-figure decals of a man, a woman, a cat and a dog to slap on the car.

But ah, there is method in our madness of normalcy. You may or may not recall that I have this desire to run in all 50 states. Not run a race, and certainly not run a marathon or triathlon in every state, like some really driven people aspire to do. No, just run for at least one uninterrupted hour in each of the 50 US states. On that same New England trip last fall when we met Clive and Karen on Cape Cod, Lynn indulged our driving us to Vermont and New Hampshire specifically so that I could cross the last two Atlantic seaboard states off of my running list. That made my state total 32. I am 55 years old. Most of my remaining states are very far from my home in Maryland, and none is farther than Hawaii.

I’d long figured that Hawaii would be one of my last running states, given the distance and expense, and that I’d arrive alone, spend just enough time there to do what I came to do, and fly home. Lynn will fly if she must, but she doesn’t like it. It scares her. Even now, a century into air travel, the idea of heavy machinery somehow defying gravity for hours at a time continues to strike her as a hugely counterintuitive recipe for disaster. Lynn also is prone to nightmares that involve drowning, and there’s an awful lot of water between the West Coast and the Hawaiian islands.

Lynn stunned me, however, a couple of months ago by proposing that we fly to Maui. She wanted me to be able to cross Hawaii off my list, she didn’t want me to have to go alone, and she’d discovered that a renowned Reiki master was going to be giving a two-day class on Maui in the fall. The Reiki opportunity would be her personal inducement to throw caution to the Pacific winds and jet high above a couple of thousand miles of ocean.

So, that’s where we’re going. Not kicking and screaming, exactly. We’re sure Maui is as beautiful as people say it is, and that we’ll have fun there. We’re not even ruling out that the trip could prove to be memorable. But it’s so not our kind of vacation, and the more people ooh and ahh over the word Maui when I share our destination, the more I wish we instead were going to one of my original options for this fall’s vacation, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, or, better yet, Manitoba. (America says Waikiki, I say Winnipeg.)

At any rate, one thing’s for damn sure: Even if the improbable happens, and I return from our island vacation with a newfound appreciation for loud, flowery shirts and ukulele music, you will never pull up behind my car at a traffic light and read on my bumper, “I Heart Hawaii.”