our 99th weekly open mike
Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
9/26/2026
Anything goes: 9/26/2026
18 responses to “Anything goes: 9/26/2026”
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Three out of the past three family breakfasts at the diner, Mom’s had to poop. The diner is pre-ADA, the restrooms are telephone-booth size, and Mom’s wheelchair won’t even fit in the door. It’s hard work by both my sister and I to get her onto the toilet and up again, and it’s dangerous.
And it’s happened three times in a row.
I’m open to recommendations, for a post-ADA diner where Mom can eat and safely poop without ten minutes of sweaty work for me and my sister.
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No one ever thinks about these things when writing restaurant reviews! Someone should create a website for that.
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There’s this, but it’s “still in beta.”
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Went to a Mexican restaurant for breakfast today, it’s a bit of a drive but the food and service are good. Had my six month appointment with my doctor yesterday and the news wasn’t great but they also didn’t bother doing labs so I guess at least I can be in denial a bit longer about my overall health–which was great until this past summer. Nothing really happened but I became lax about my diet. Anyway, breakfast was excellent. Now I’m sitting around waiting for word that our busy period at work is officially over–we are supposed to “stand by” today even though at this point there shouldn’t be anything to do. It’s a beautiful Saturday but I have to wait until we get official word that we’re done before I can get out there and do anything else.
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I wish you good health, Joel. Many more fine Mexican breakfasts. And when it’s time to go, let it be sudden and painless.
Not sure I even know what you do for a living, but I remember shifts like what you’re describing. “Stand by.” Do nothing important. Just wait until some schmoe calls. Hope it’s at least time-and-a-half.
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Thanks for the well wishes! I’d had a pretty good handle on my health for most of my 40s but it seemed like I could get away with far less once I got very far into my 50s.
Finally got word around 4:30 that we were done. Not as bad as it sounds, we just had to be “reachable” in the slim chance something needed to be done at the last minute, so I just stayed home most of the day and kept an eye on my texts and my work email every so often. I ended up napping for a lot of it. I would have only gotten paid if I’d actually had to log on and do something. It’s done for the year, it’s always just a few weeks in September that are like this, but the last couple of years it’s only meant a few extra hours per week, so nothing too bad. Now I can pretty much relax for the rest of the year…
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Wait ’til retirement! I never thought I’d be able to afford it, so it’s a joyous surprise to me, but no more stupid bosses. Only my stupid self.
No dying please, until you’ve come north to Seattle for an awkward breakfast with me.
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Sad, yeah, but Mr Tippett deserves to retire if he wishes.
I lived in Berkeley and the area for years, not knowing Tippett was in business there. Stumbling into his shop would’ve been an excellent afternoon.
Cartoon Brew was previously unknown to me, now added to my surf cycle. Their coverage of the Paramount piss merger focuses on animation, and shitfuck it sounds worse than I’d thought:
> For animation, the deal puts Paramount Animation, Nickelodeon Animation Studio, and Skydance Animation under the same owner as Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, Warner Bros. Animation, Cartoon Network Studios, and Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe. They serve different audiences, but they draw on overlapping pools of artists, writers, directors, and outside studios.
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> The terrifying takeaway here is that, despite all of the paltry promises in their settlement with the states, Paramount and Warner Bros. will stop competing as buyers of content and job creators. The industry is about to get far less friendly towards artists and workers.As if it’s ever been ‘friendly’ at all.
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I abhor Fandango clips, because they always end abruptly and immediately launch into the company’s awful music. It always conveys to me that nobody there has passion for the movies. Your say-so is enough, though, without even looking at the clips. Let Him Go goes on the list.
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I happened to open the first five minutes first, which looks wondrous — a movie about a craftsman. The next clip has a guy pointing a gun, which is so very movie-ordinary it dampens my interest, but I have added The Outfit to the list.
Thanks!
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They’re the kind of mid-tier sort-of-genre films that hardly ever get made any more. Worth watching.
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The Chain Gang, by Voltairine de Cleyre
It is far, far down in the southland, and I am back again, thanks be, in the land of wind and snow, where life lives. But that was in the days when I was a wretched thing, that crept and crawled, and shrunk when the wind blew, and feared the snow. So they sent me away down there to the world of the sun, where the wind and the snow are afraid. And the sun was kind to me, and the soft air that does not move lay around me like folds of down, and the poor creeping life in me winked in the light and stared out at the wide caressing air; stared away to the north, to the land of wind and rain, where my heart was,—my heart that would be at home.
Yes, there, in the tender south, my heart was bitter and bowed, for the love of the singing wind and the frost whose edge was death,—bitter and bowed for the strength to bear that was gone, and the strength to love that abode. Day after day I climbed the hills with my face to the north and home. And there, on those southern heights, where the air was resin and balm, there smote on my ears the sound that all the wind of the north can never sing down again, the sound I shall hear till I stand at the door of the last silence.
Cling—clang—cling—From the Georgian hills it sounds; and the snow and the storm cannot drown it,—the far-off, terrible music of the Chain Gang.
I met it there on the road, face to face, with all the light of the sun upon it. Do you know what it is? Do you know that every day men run in long procession, upon the road they build for others’ safe and easy going, bound to a chain? And that other men, with guns upon their shoulders, ride beside them—with orders to kill if the living links break? There it stretched before me, a serpent of human bodies, bound to the iron and wrapped in the merciless folds of justified cruelty.
Clank—clink—clank—There was an order given. The living chain divided; groups fell to work upon the road; and then I saw and heard a miracle.
Have you ever, out of a drowsy, lazy conviction that all knowledges, all arts, all dreams, are only patient sums of many toils of many millions dead and living, suddenly started into an uncanny consciousness that knowledges and arts and dreams are things more real than any living being ever was, which suddenly reveal themselves, unasked and unawaited, in the most obscure corners of soul-life, flashing out in prismatic glory to dazzle and shock all your security of thought, toppling it with vague questions of what is reality, that you cannot silence? When you hear that an untaught child is able, he knows not how, to do the works of the magicians of mathematics, has it never seemed to you that suddenly all books were swept away, and there before you stood a superb, sphinx-like creation, Mathematics itself, posing problems to men whose eyes are cast down, and all at once, out of whim, incorporating itself in that wide-eyed, mysterious child? Have you ever felt that all the works of the masters were swept aside in the burst of a singing voice, unconscious that it sings, and that Music itself, a master-presence, has entered the throat and sung?
No, you have never felt it? But you have never heard the Chain Gang sing!
Their faces were black and brutal and hopeless; their brows were low, their jaws were heavy, their eyes were hard; three hundred years of the scorn that brands had burned its scar upon the face and form of Ignorance,—Ignorance that had sought dully, stupidly, blindly, and been answered with that pitiless brand. But wide beyond the limits of high man and his little scorn, the great, sweet old Music-Soul, the chords of the World, smote through the black man’s fibre in the days of the making of men; and it sings, it sings, with its ever-thrumming strings, through all the voices of the Chain Gang. And never one so low that it does not fill with the humming vibrancy that quivers and bursts out singing things always new and new and new.
I heard it that day.
The leader struck his pick into the earth, and for a moment whistled like some wild, free, living flute in the forest. Then his voice floated out, like a low booming wind, crying an instant, and fell; there was the measure of a grave in the fall of it. Another voice rose up, and lifted the dead note aloft, like a mourner raising his beloved with a kiss. It drifted away to the hills and the sun. Then many voices rolled forward, like a great plunging wave, in a chorus never heard before, perhaps never again; for each man sung his own song as it came, yet all blent. The words were few, simple, filled with a great plaint; the wail of the sea was in it; and no man knew what his brother would sing, yet added his own without thought, as the rhythm swept on, and no voice knew what note its fellow voice would sing, yet they fell in one another as the billow falls in the trough or rolls to the crest, one upon the other, one within the other, over, under, all in the great wave; and now one led and others followed, then it dropped back and another swelled upward, and every voice was soloist and chorister, and never one seemed conscious of itself, but only to sing out the great song.
And always, as the voices rose and sank, the axes swung and fell. And the lean white face of the man with the gun looked on with a stolid, paralyzed smile.
Oh, that wild, sombre melody, that long, appealing plaint, with its hope laid beyond death,—that melody that was made only there, just now, before me, and passing away before me! If I could only seize it, hold it, stop it from passing! that all the world might hear the song of the Chain Gang! might know that here, in these red Georgian hills, convicts, black, brutal convicts, are making the music that is of no man’s compelling, that floods like the tide and ebbs away like the tide, and will not be held—and is gone, far away and forever, out into the abyss where the voices of the centuries have drifted and are lost!
Something about Jesus, and a Lamp in the darkness—a gulfing darkness. Oh, in the mass of sunshine must they still cry for light? All around the sweep and the glory of shimmering ether, sun, sun, a world of sun, and these still calling for light! Sun for the road, sun for the stones, sun for the red clay—and no light for this dark living clay? Only heat that burns and blaze that blinds, but does not lift the darkness!
“And lead me to that Lamp——”
The pathetic prayer for light went trembling away out into the luminous gulf of day, and the axes swung and fell; and the grim dry face of the man with the gun looked on with its frozen smile. “So long as they sing, they work,” said the smile, still and ironical.
“A friend to them that’s got no friend”—Man of Sorrows, lifted up upon Golgotha, in the day when the forces of the Law and the might of Social Order set you there, in the moment of your pain and desperate accusation against Heaven, when that piercing “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” went up to a deaf sky, did you presage this desolate appeal coming to you out of the unlived depths of nineteen hundred years?
Hopeless hope, that cries to the dead! Futile pleading that the cup may pass, while still the lips drink! For, as of old, Order and the Law, in shining helmets and gleaming spears, ringed round the felon of Golgotha, so stand they still in that lean, merciless figure, with its shouldered gun and passive smile. And the moan that died within the Place of Skulls is born again in this great dark cry rising up against the sun.
If but the living might hear it, not the dead! For these are dead who walk about with vengeance and despite within their hearts, and scorn for things dark and lowly, in the odor of self-righteousness, with self-vaunting wisdom in their souls, and pride of race, and iron-shod order, and the preservation of Things that Are; walking stones are these, that cannot hear. But the living are those who seek to know, who wot not of things lowly or things high, but only of things wonderful; and who turn sorrowfully from Things that Are, hoping for Things that May Be. If these should hear the Chain Gang chorus, seize it, make all the living hear it, see it!
If, from among themselves, one man might find “the Lamp,” lift it up! Paint for all the world these Georgian hills, these red, sunburned roads, these toiling figures with their rhythmic axes, these brutal, unillumined faces, dull, groping, depth-covered,—and then unloose that song upon their ears, till they feel the smitten, quivering hearts of the Sons of Music beating against their own; and under and over and around it, the chain that the dead have forged clinking between the heart-beats!
Clang—cling—clang—ng—It is sundown. They are running over the red road now. The voices are silent; only the chain clinks.
[1907]
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Memories Of Trimmers On The Quiet Streets Of Garberville
Driving down the empty main drag of Garberville just now it blows my mind that not many years ago the streets were alive with young travelers and groups of wannabe trimmers speaking many languages. I could have pulled over and talked to a few of them, usually women, and whisked them down to my house five minutes away. Of course I never did that, too cautious and paranoid, no matter how beautiful many were.
It was the only time of year when pleasant and often very attractive young women smiled at us, the old dudes, and said hello. It was charming the way they were all so open and making eye contact while out for one thing: cash. Being friendly was the first step to landing a job trimming weed, often a fun adventure meeting new friends and making good money. There were also shit shows, horror stories with bad working conditions or some asshole young grower who refused to pay until he sold some. (After the crash some stragglers still showed up in the fall for a few years but it looks like everyone has finally gotten the message: it’s over.)
I talked to many and it was fun though they probably didn’t know I was wasting their time and would never take them home right off the street. If I had been really serious about hiring I would have met with them in my usual spot for a cuppa tea, the table in the upstairs window at Calicos, where I did my interviews. I also had meetings there with house-cleaning prospects and fellow subversives plotting to overthrow the credit union board while we watched the lively parade down on the street.
(The last person I interviewed there for a house-cleaning job was a woman about fifty, I was a few years older and as she made a point by putting her hand on mine across the table, I wondered where this was going? Soon we were holding hands as the discussion deepened and it turned out to be the last time I met someone for the first time and we ended up in bed that night. I never got my house cleaned, you should always get paid first before messing around with the boss I guess.)
During another harvest time I met a very tall and pretty young woman when sitting in Flavors cafe with a woman and her small child. (That was Crazy Mati and I’ve written a lot about her.) That setting made me seem pre-approved, a good reference for the twenty-three-year-old trimmer and she joined me at the table when Mati left to do errands. Her mother, a ceramicist from Washington, came by and sat down which gave Cassie an air of recommendation also and I tried to hire them both.
The mother declined so I arranged to meet the daughter back at the cafe half an hour later, after doing some errands around town, and then we did our interview. After we answered each others’ questions we took a stroll up the street, she wrapped her arm around mine and soon we were walking holding hands and I was very happy. When she came to work the next day we danced with our coffees, something we did every morning that week, and I realized that maybe life wasn’t so bad after all.
Now the streets are dead and she’s gone, they’re all gone and they’re never coming back.
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Saving my remarks for the review, but watched and wowed and thanks.
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