Four things on my mind

Happy Saturday - and yes, there are more than four things on my mind, but let's go bloggin'!

The Baltimore area has had indignities heaped upon it like slag at a steel mill. If your home computer has been running a bit slowly of late, it might be because The Internets are too busy having videos of city school teachers being pummeled by their students downloaded onto them. These students, apparently driven mad by too much exposure to "enlightened" education (pause for laughter), are alerting their friends that they intend to smack the teacher down so that the cellphone cameras can be rolling. An art teacher at Reginald F. Lewis Academy was confronted by a student who asserted her plan to "bang" the teacher (terms do change their meaning over the years, it would seem) and so the teacher announced her plan to defend her space, if same was invaded. Moments later, the donnybrook was on, and yet the principal of this august academy of learning told the teacher she was inciting the student to violence by warning that she would be offering a defense.

And that's not even the indignity about which I planned to write, since educators are in their own little world about these matters. The indignity I had in mind is the imminent invasion of Jenna Bush (seen here in all her wedding finery :) and her husband. News reports are rampant, indicating that the twin daughter of the dense man who refers to the world wide web as "the internets" and to himself as "the decider" is planning to move to South Baltimore with her new husband, following their gala May 10 nuptials in tony Crawford, TX. Almost certainly with no outside help or influence, her fiance, one Henry Hager, has landed a big job with Constellation Energy, the monolith which even at this moment is generating the power that supplies this computer with the juice that says welcome to town, you crazy newlyweds, you. That $400,000 row house you bought in SoBa would have been available for about $8,450 back in the days when your father was a cheerleader for Andover and your mother was blowing stop signs, but that's the sort of economic progress that your beloved republican party has wrought upon our land, so drink up, kids!

Personal to all those who advised me to eat bananas to ward off the dreaded leg cramps - I have been eating at least one 'nanner per day for some time now, so I am loaded with potassium like a Penn Central rail car, but this morning as I lay abed, here came another one. The cool thing about my leg cramps is that I get this little signal that one is approaching - a little cramplet, one might say - a precursor to the biggie that feels as if some art student from Reginald F. Lewis Academy is running a bandsaw broadwise across my Gastrocnemius (Latin for "calf muscle that makes people hop like they just got a hotfoot.") As a former giver of hotfoots (hotfeet?) I see the karmic twist here. Advice to newlyweds or people who are just beginning to sleep together: if you suffer from nightly leg cramps, tell your partner, lest they be as stunned as Peggy that night, early in our marriage, when I woke her up, jumping around the bedroom as if the angels of death had come to call for me, several decades too soon. "Oh, I forgot to tell you!" I said, ricocheting off a chiffonier, "I get these leg cramps..." It was not to be the last big surprise of our marriage (see blog entry from August 1974, in which I was booked for suspicion as a Watergate co-conspirator.)


I was listening to Mr. Bon Jovi sing his "It's My Life" song, which has the line, "Like Frankie said, I did it my way." Francis A. Sinatra, a once-popular singer, did not write the song "My Way," and he was a bantam-sized man who kept himself surrounded by a coterie of henchmen. Anyone who incurred his bantam-sized wrath was soon set upon by Frankie's men. I'd rather do it my way, which means writing my own stuff and fighting my own battles. Just sayin'.

I feel that an important aspect of my life ended yesterday with the final broadcast of the "Don and Mike" Show. What I love about blogging - the reality, the human contact of real unvarnished lives - was all there with D&M. Sure they were sometimes tasteless, occasionally cruel, wildly funny, all those things, but they were on the air here since late 1991, and over the course of almost 17 years, a lot happens to people. We were there when Mike O'Meara's marriages ended, when his relationships with his daughters flourished, when he opened and closed his restaurant/bar, and so much more. And Don Geronimo, whose real name is Michael Sorce, as newspaper articles about his travails inevitably said, has had a life of triumph and tragedy, and he shared every single second of it on the air. His son Bart was known as "the six-year-old weather boy" when they came to town; he would read the weather for his Dad. Next month he will be graduated from Clemson. But Freda, Don's beloved wife, was killed by some damned fool driver going 90 miles an hour outside Ocean City three summers ago, and Don was never the same. He had to give up the show because being with the same workgroup every day reminded him too much of his loss, and he chose not to continue in sadness. His woebegone brother Jim (who married a woman who worked for the Frito-Lay factory but betrayed him by doing it with some co-worker atop a mountain of freshly-made Fritos), his battles with upper management, utility companies, and people who talk in movie theaters, his dealings with his birth mother whom he located after a long search, only to have her say "I gave you away because I didn't want you then and I don't want you now," his rejection of his adoptive parents and reconciliation with his adoptive mom after his adoptive father died....all fascinating, and no longer to be shared with us.

Good luck to Jenna's husband, any teacher who needs to don armor, and to Don and Mike.