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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
5/14/2001; 1:46:07 AM |
| Topic: |
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| Msg #: |
730 (top msg in thread) |
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729/731 |
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3652 |
Local media fail to show pulse
| | I also discovered, while dodging traffic jams on the way to Irvine yesterday, that the L.A. news stations, KFWB/980 and KNX/1070, have no news. They have ads, traffic, and sports. That's about it. |
| | I arrived at this realization while I punched back and forth for five hours, hoping to hear something about Douglas Adams' death. Oddly, I just found some info from KFWB ... on its Web site. Good gravy, it says he died before giving a commencement speech. |
Yo! Ma! Happy Mutha's Day!
| | Nobody has given me any shit about Fuckers Day. That means the Blog Space is even more wide open and free than I thought. Or that all the mothers that give a shit, including my own, aren't here. |
| | I talked to Mom on the way home from Irvine tonight. Got her somewhere near the Garfield exit on The Five in East L.A., and hung with her all the way through Hollywood. She was amused when I told her we were driving under the Hollywood sign and past the Hollywood bowl, since she was in bed in a hotel room in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. As we drove up past the Mulholland Drive exit, Mom said, "I just hope you don't teach Jeffrey to use that awful word that starts with F." I told her not to worry. He doesn't read my blog yet. |
| | Actually, I finally broke myself of using the word in front of him a couple years ago. This wasn't easy for me. I'm from New Jersey, where a friendly greeting is "Hey, you stupid fuck. You still drivin' that piece of shit?" Mom may have raised me in the Godden State, but she was raised in a home on the range we call North Dakota. To my knowledge she has never uttered a discouraging word. I take her instruction on profanity as a fom of encouragement. |
| | Nothing, however, could have discouraged my foul face more than what happened on July 29, 1998. I was speeding up the coastal road toward Ballygally from Belfast in Northern Ireland, with Joyce in the passenger seat and Jeffrey in the back. I was going a good 100km/hr when I faced a narrow space between a parked car and a huge oncoming lorry. Squeezing a bit too close to the parked car, our mirrors met while Joyce went "eeeeeeeee." With a sound like gunshot, the two mirrors exploded. In an instant all that remained of the mirror on Joyce's side of the car was a little flange and some broken wires. Into the silence of our cabin Jeffrey, a couple months shy of two years old, started yelling: "Fuck, Papa! Shit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Shit!" And on like that, with no promoting or encouragement other than witnessing the obvious fact that something Bad had happened, and that Papa and Mama were both pissed and slipping into that forbearing funk required for facing the consequences of a dumb-ass petty traffic crime in a country whose customs are mostly unknown, except for a certain tension about about religion. |
| | I remember the date because July 29 is my birthday. Also because, when I entered the home of the gentleman whose mirror I trashed, shards in hand, there were birthday cards on the mantle over the fireplace. "Is this somebody's birthday?" I asked. "Yes," the gentleman replied. "It's mine." "Well happy birthday," I said. "Mine too." Then I added, "The mirror excepted, of course." It was very funny and very weird. The whole town flew orange flags. I quietly hoped he wouldn't gather our family was Catholic. |
| | Anyway, I'm happy Mom is still as with-us (and with-it) as ever. Even though we both observed that Perry Como was born the same year (1913) she was, and passed on yesterday. Watching Perry on the telly was a family tradition back in the Fifties. |
| | After I got home I thought about how idylic life was back then. Did we know that Perry Como, like just everything on TV, was a commercial tool? Or was I aware of any irony between that observation and the fact that my own TV was on while I hoped somebody would tell me anything at all about Douglas Adams' death, news of which has come to me only over the Web? Well, no. The irony I chose to savor at the time was delivered by a story on TV told about Anna M. Jarvis, who came up with the idea of Mothers Day as a way to give our old ladies a little peace and quiet. Jarvis reportedly fought her whole life against the idea's commercialization. That effort was already a widespread failure when she died at 84 in 1948. She never had a kid, either. |
| | I was born a year earlier, and my mom is now 88 and still going strong. Even though I hope she doesn't read this, I do wish her a happy one. |
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