2:47

Ya know how there are certain bodily functions that we would never discuss about ourselves, but parents are sometimes far too eager to share about their kids?

 Yeh, well, I’m not going to do that here, other than to say it has been a looooooooong night at our house.

Also, if you see a little Thomas the Tank Engine laying around somewhere, it’s probably ours. It disappeared sometime Sunday, and our lives have been a living hell ever since.

Hmm, that’s about when his bodily function issue started up. Surely he didn’t…sorry, didn’t mean to go there.

great presidents

It has been a while since I saw a poll on this, but whenever I hear one of those “Who was the greatest President?” polls, I always enjoy the results. Lincoln is always the big winner, with Washington, FDR, Kennedy, or the sitting or previous dudes running for Miss Congeniality.

I offer the following not to make a political statement, but to paint a portrait of a part of American history.

Abraham Lincoln was no angel while in office. They didn’t do presidential approval ratings back then, but there were points where the record would still be standing. Even ignoring the people of the South, he was not well-liked by much of the general population. Does this surprise you? Here are a few things we don’t usually discuss when talking about Lincoln:

• He suspended the writ of habeus corpus
• He arrested judges who were about to declare some of his presidential actions as unconstitutional
• He claimed for himself powers that were not assigned explicitly to the executive branch of government
• When a justice ruled Lincoln’s actions illegal, he ignored the ruling
• He had 13,000 “Peace Democrats” arrested and held
• He suspended civil law in the territories (Kansas and the rest of the wild wild west)

How does history judge the man? We call him the greatest president ever. What? When he trounced on civil liberties? When he acted against the will of many of the people? When he continued to pursue a war that cost the nation around 620,000 men, mostly of its youth?

But we don’t discuss those things now. Most people do not even consider them. And even if we do, most would say, “He did what he had to do – extraordinary measures for extraordinary times.”

Lincoln was handed the duty of dealing with a series of issues the Founding Fathers didn’t want to handle. The leaders of the fledgling nation made temporary agreements in hopes that certain issues (slavery was among them, but not exclusively that) would take care of themselves over time. Many in the North thought nothing of the 4 million slaves in the South. It wasn’t their problem; it wasn’t a fact in their life. But there were a handful of people who agreed that ALL men were created equal, endowed with certain rights by their Creator. And they would not stomach the silent acceptance of the institution of slavery.

Some say this has no relevance to issues facing us today. I believe it does. Whatever your belief, remember this: In much of the North, people called for Lincoln to be tarred and feathered, right up to April 14th, 1865…the night Lincoln was shot. Only then did he become an American saint. 

catching sunlight

tiny fingers

spread wide

flailing fruitlessly

but you giggle

 you keep trying

maybe

if you move your hands fast enough

you might

                     just

                              catch

that beam of sunlight

I wish I were so hopeful

the war on …

I don’t get this war on Tara. Okay, so many of the characters in Gone With the Wind are stereotypical, and it should not be confused with history. But to try to prevent it from being shown – hardly worth a war.

oh, no! where shall we go?

I heard on the radio this morning that Atlanta received an “F” from a group that was rating cities on their ability to evacuate following an emergency.

The group doing the study is an advocacy group for companies that build highways, oddly enough, but that is another issue.

The study said that “The Connector,” a corridor through downtown where I-75 and I-85 merge, would present an unnecesary challenge in trying to evacuate people from the northern suburbs through town.

Okay, let’s think about this for a minute. Atlanta is several hundred miles away from the Atlantic or the Gulf – not likely I’d be packing up the family to run from a hurricane.

The nearest faultline is the New Madrid fault, which runs along the Mississippi River from mid-Illinois to somewhere south of Memphis. If we’re road-tripping to escape an earthquake, there are other cities with bigger problems.

Flooding – there are two fairly large lakes north of town that exist by the hand of the Corps of Engineers. I suppose if the dams broke simultaneously on both Lakes Alatoona and Lanier, there would be some panic…but Alatoona would disperse into a low-lying valley area to the northwest – hardly a threat to the northern burbs. And Lanier – well, we’d be heading away from town, not towards it.

All in all, I can’t see any good reason people from the northern burbs would be fleeing southward. In a worst-case scenario involving a nuke, I suspect downtown Atlanta would make a tastier target than either Acworth or Cartersville.

Besides, anyone who has driven in Atlanta during rush hour (interpreted as the hours between 5 a.m. and 2 a.m.) will tell you that this town would fail any transit-related test – unless it was a competition for worst gridlock.

As I type this, I did just consider one possible reason for a mass rush from the northern burbs to the south side of town – if Ikea built a store down by the airport.

just like a bad neighbor…

I don’t mean to be the neighborhood slug.

I don’t mean to leave the yard untended.

I really tried to finish that paint job on the house this spring.

I fully intended to finish the tree-cutting project on the front corner of the yard.

…but life happened to us this summer, and I developed different priorities.

sorry, neighbors.

emminent domain

The anniversary of my grandmother’s birthday reminded me of how her family was displaced twice for “the greater good of the community.”

The first time – grandma’s uncle had done well for himself, and bought land and built houses for his siblings (five or six, I think). They all lived up and down a dirt road in Barthalomew County, IN. in a tight-knit community. Somewhere between WWI and WWII the government decided they needed an army base in those particular cornfields, so the community was broken apart. If you stand at the fence that lines the base you can see the road where the houses once stood. The area was a POW camp for German soldiers during WWII, and is now used for artillery practice by the Indiana National Gaurd.

The second time – Grandma’s parents moved into a little house on a country road on a plot of property on the opposite side of Columbus, IN. The property had a unique structure – a round barn – that was THE landmark for that part of the county. All directions were given relative to the round barn. I still remember walking around that barn with my great grandfather – a quiet, gentle man, from whom my grandmother drew much of her personality.

The barn’s noteriety was to lead to its demise. As everyone used it as a landmark, the dirt road was one of the first to be paved in the area. And one of the first to be widened. Somewhere in the mid-70’s, the state of Indiana decided highway 9 needed another lane. As the primary bypass around Columbus, it was far busier than a two-lane should be; so the state drew up their plans, and the path of the road was to be much too close to the homestead and the old round barn.

There were protests, even an effort by some to have the barn moved into a park in Columbus; but the efforts were too little and too late. The state did move my great-grandparents into town, next door to my great-aunt’s family. Grandpa would get up in the morning and walk around the tiny garden and the rest of the yard as if he was still making the rounds at the barn. He lasted only a few months before his health deteriorated, and he died. He and the barn met their demise within days of each other. You hear sometimes about that happening wih couples who have been together for a long time. They were linked even beyond this mortal plain of existence.

Oh, and about highway 9 – it was never widened. Thirty years later, the road still sits in its original bed. And the round scar left in the dirt by the fallen barn has healed. But there are more than a few in my family who believe the thought of loosing the barn was what killed its keeper.

‘Nuff for tonight. Goodnight, Mary Ellen.

with apologies to robert frost

Whose words these are I think I know

His mind is on vacation though

He rarely takes much time to think;

Nothing much has he to show.

 

He doesn’t like to raise a stink

So from the cup of silence drinks

And watches a lifetime passing by -

A year is gone each time he blinks

 

I wonder where his youth did fly,

This oh-so-conscientious guy

Was it spent on temporal stuff?

If he thought it through, I bet he’d cry.

 

The words are empty, the thoughts are rough

But I’ll make them sensical soon enough

To know thyself is truly tough

To know thyself is truly tough.

beware of dinosaurs

My daughter is three years old. She would probably correct me and say, “three and a half” if she was doing fractions, but we’re focusing on geopolitics right now rather than math. Anyway, Miss M was playing quietly in the living room last night when she suddenly sat up with a very concerned expression on her face.

What’s wrong, sweetheart? 

Oh, no – dinosaurs! 

She bolted to the couch and climbed as fast as her little legs would go. In a display of siblingly-love, she called out to her little brother – “Zhee-zhee – dinosaurs!” He sat, bewildered, not sure if he should abandon Thomas the Tank Engine to a fate of dino-stomping.  (Side note – “Zhee-zhee” is one of those nicknames only a young sibling could create. We wouldn’t name our son “Zhee-zhee.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) 

All of this happened as I was watching the ongoing coverage of the incident in NYC involving the private plane crashing into an apartment building. The incident was tragic, no question. But I was listening to people on TV expressing concern about it being “another 9-11,” and it made me think about a few things. 

I travel to the NYC area with some regularity. My first trip came in November of 2001, and I’ve noticed that there is a heaviness that permeates the area. It’s a kind of fog that seems to hang over many of the people who live there. I doubt anyone would appreciate me saying so, but it is the smell of defeat. Or defeatism at least.  

I recognize that those who were in downtown Manhattan on 9-11 are likely to have flashbacks, and the oh-so-thorough coverage by the media of the events of that day served primarily to increase the psychosis of America’s already-most-psychotic city… 

But every now and then, I think how nice it would be if we could forget about the dinosaurs, even for a little while.

do you, uh, youtube?

Six bazillion dollars for a site that hasn’t made a cent.

Why didn’t I think of that?

Instead, I keep trying to come up with ideas that are fresh, legal, and profitable.

Maybe two out of three ain’t bad.

Wait, youtube isn’t even fresh – they were just the ones to capture massive attention at just the right time.

So here’s my idea:I love woodworking. It is my hobby, my passion…so I’m going to launch a site that displays pieces of scrapwood. No, not just a few pieces – a veritable forrest of scrap, but only of the arborial variety. Splinters, cut-offs, even rotted-off pieces; I want ‘em all. Search for pine, and I’ll give you 4,237 varieties. Looking for oak? Gotcha covered.

Might even include a picture of Woody Harrelson, just for kicks.

And maybe, just maybe…Norm Abrams will buy me out…