The Daily Double, etc.

I am late putting in my oar on a couple of things (reason coming below). One is this tornado in Massachusetts business. It has somewhat more impact in this house than elsewhere in eastern MA, since my spouse's family all hailed from that part of the state. Most are dead or scattered now, but it still "home" in a sense that few people in eastern MA comprehend. We know all those places and feel the loss acutely. That is in addition to the fact that being within 100 miles of a tornado gives me total shit fits.

Moving right along to the main lesson, provided this week by the competing drivers of the GOP clown car. It is hilarious that two people who are most anxious to prove themselves common folks found it necessary to eat pizza with a knife and fork...in front of the cameras. Perhaps, as some say, neither is well-acquainted with pizza. The Donald is surely more of a filet mignon guy and the Palin presumably chews jerky she made from her own wildlife kills...but does she eat jerky with a knife and fork?

The tale brought me back to going on a trip with my mother and brother to the Maritimes when we were in high school. The expedition featured many errors (my mother became a more seasoned traveler later in life) but the one that cut the deepest was our lunch at a very haute restaurant in Halifax, NS. My brother and I were 1960s teenagers. We wanted hamburgers. They actually had them on the menu, presumably having run into obstinate American teenagers before. But my mother, clearly intimidated by her surroundings, insisted that we eat them with knife and fork. There were scowls. There were whispered exchanges that descended into threats. We ate with knife and fork. It was many years before either of us forgave my mother for this imposition.*

The point is that my mother's moment of social anxiety may have a lot in common with the Donald and the Grizzly. Common sense says that when you don't know how to eat something in strange surroundings, you either ask or observe those around you. Insecurity dictates that you fall back on the highest social level in your experience. It seems fair to conclude that the Donald and the Grizzly possess more than their allowance of insecurity, and less than the normal allotment of common sense. But we knew that.

I write this from a recliner, with legs propped on pillows. The price of enthusiastic exercise when sun returns is overuse injury. After a week contending with a sore back, sciatica, and shin splints, my physician has me aggressively treating a sore leg, hoping to keep it merely a sore leg. I have two days to set it to rights. Otherwise, this is possibly compartment syndrome. No, I had never heard of it before either. The short news for cyclists is to take it easy on the hills first time out of the barn. It becomes surgical in a miserably short time. At any rate, I'm trying to follow orders without dying first of boredom.


*My wife reminds me of her first encounter, in France, with escargots. A classmate set to with knife and fork, instead of the proper instrument, sending the snail and its trail of butter soaring across the room to hit a faculty member of the head.