Jake and Elwood hanging out.
Before they got convicted.
Then Jake got out. And Elwood came to pick him up.
Elwood was anxious to please.
Elwood wants Gahd.
Jake was, well, just Jake.
Jake kind of IS Gahd, only with shorter legs.
What they think they’re riding around in. We can live with that.
So. Our guys can handle anything. Elwood is big. Jake swings the whip.
The rest of the time they sleep. Until it’s time to go bye-byes.
Comey. “You’ve got me for 6 and a half more years.”
My favorite Pauline Kael movie review was of Godfather 2. She thought Al Pacino’s performance was genius. Without ever moving his face, he descended from war hero to soulless gangster by rotting inside on camera. She was right.
Rot shows. Doesn’t it?
Toothpick Wisdumb.
Actor Richard Dreyfuss says he made a mistake in voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but that didn’t mean he had nice things to say about President Donald Trump.
In an interview Tuesday on Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto, the Oscar-winning actor and star of the new FOX show Shots Fired said he did vote for Clinton “and I regret it.”
“Because Hillary is too much of a bought-and-paid-for Wall Street…” Dreyfuss explained, trailing off.
When asked about tax reform and the president’s proposed defense budget spending increases, Dreyfuss replied by calling Trump an “idiot” who should not have been elected president.
“I think he’s an idiot. I think that Donald Trump is not the one to be trusted about any of the details,” Dreyfuss said, adding that Trump is “something, like with a big funny nose.”
“Donald Trump, regardless of his party, lacks simple common decency and he should not be in the presidency,” the actor said referring to Trump’s rhetoric toward his Republican rivals during the presidential campaign.
“Right on, dude,” his twin said. “Think I’ll get me one of them cool toothpicks. Cheaper sign of no class than a tattoo, right?”
It should be noted that Richard Dreyfuss has every right to call Donald Trump an idiot. Trump is only a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Dreyfuss on the other hand attended the far more prestigious San Fernando Valley State College for almost a year before he dropped out to become a conscientious objector. Not as a battlefield medic but as an orderly. In California. Ghandian-like credentials, n’est-ce pas?
Recidivism pays.
Redemption waits.
It’s still there 40 and 240 years later. You can’t really erase it or knock it down, snowflakes.
Back in 1978 I was 25 and in objective terms an utter failure. A dropout, a month shy of graduation, from the Cornell Graduate Business School. I had become suddenly afraid that I would become a CPA. And just as suddenly unemployable.
Inherited a job in my hometown from my sister, editor-in-chief of a Bicentennial publication called The Way It Used to Be, sponsored by the Salem County Historical Society.
Her tenure was almost exclusively about women. Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Mine was different: What the hell am I doing here?
But in my usual way, I got lucky. She was editor during the 1776 celebrations, which were national, flag waving, and generic. Why she tried to drill down into ‘issues’ that concerned her, namely women. When I took over, we were on the cusp of Salem County’s REAL participation in the Revolution, a local militia defense against a multi-pronged British offensive on a key barrier to the agricultural resources of South Jersey.
it was called the Skirmish at Quinton’s Bridge. It happened. Big names were involved. Mad Anthony Wayne. John Graves Simcoe, colonel of the Queen’s Rangers. I was handed a manuscript by an elderly Woodstown dentist-historian who had written a pamphlet called “When War Came to Salem.” Review it or something was my instruction.
So I did. In the Salem newspaper, Today’s Sunbeam.
Then I got called into a meeting with the publisher of the Sunbeam and a man named Stony Harris. The publisher, an eminence grise named Thomas Bowen, who couldn’t have cared less about the daily content of his daily paper, said, “Stony thinks we might be able to do a Reenactment. What do you think?”
I knew OF Stony Harris. He was a legend. The founder of Cowtown Rodeo, the local cattleman who prided himself on traveling to cattle rancher conventions in Texas for the express purpose of reminding them that his family’s cattle brand was older than any in Texas. He wore a cool ivory cowboy hat and a string tie. His eyes were miss-nothing blue. He looked at me, friendly, casual, penetrating. “What do you think, son? Tom thinks we can do it.”
Everything after that was kind of a blur. I made a plan, an impossibly ambitious one. At every turn when resources were needed, Stony provided them. I was a general, arranging for Continental and British troops, instructing county works department employees on signs demarking the course of the skirmish in three locations, writing everything from the sign copy to the promos for the event, and when it came time to prepare for the key event, the axing of the bridge over Alloways Creek in Quinton, Stony Harris had the bridge made in a single day. I got to watch like Napoleon on his log at Waterloo. Except disaster never came.
It all came off without a hitch.
And I can prove it happened.
I guess we didn’t hit the right date. My first promo under my own byline for the Skirmish at Quinton’s Bridge was published on September 11, 1978. Go figure.
yeah. Date proven.
It was a five part series in Tom Bowen’s paper.
Part Five was this.
Defiance.
The still missing middle was this:
Don’t be fooled. The conquest of Alloways Creek was for the Brits a phantom victory. While the Salem militia held up the Queen’s Rangers, Mad Anthony Wayne scooped out all the hay, food, and cattle in Cumberland and Atlantic counties. Which was a lot. Hallelujah.
The Cohansey line was my line.
Oh you millennials. Probably no way you get the lessons of this experience. I was a lackadaisical snob in my home of homes, where I had one grandmother in the D.A.R. and one in the Colonial Dames. Meant nothing to me till I got drafted into a re-experiencing of an authentic historical event. And had to work and organize and decide and see and hear and smell it. Command decisions about when to move, responsible for sweat and gunfire and axe blows and genuine yelling, even in reenactment. Call it Project Management 101.
What you’ll probably never learn. Real responsibility is actually fun. I actually found green buckskins for the Queen’s Rangers. Try it. You’ll like it.
P.S. The Brits were thieves too. They stole a grandfather clock from Benjamin Holme in the 1778 raid, which was eventually recovered and is now on display at the Salem Historical Society.
The Benjamin Holme house
Wouldn’t mention it, but I’m a Cohansey boy, meaning a Greenwich boy. I lived in the Benjamin Reeve house on Ye Greate Street. The house is unnaturally tall because Reeve was also a maker of grandfather clocks. We Greenwichers were as instrumental to the times as the Salemites were, if you catch my drift.
The Benjamin Reeve House
It’s in the blood, dude. My grandfather also made grandfather clocks. Want to talk about White Privilege, do you? Some things are earned, come hell or high water, both of which we have in Elsinboro.
See, snowflakes? We really are Satanic. When the grandfather clock chimes twelve, you’re done. But time, the river of history, and our places in it are never done.
Some history. I wrote Deerhound Diary to get away from it all. Then, when I couldn’t get away from it all, I went on to a blog called InstaPunk Rules. Over a thousand posts. But the lords of WordPress decided to shut me down. I can no longer post there. As soon as I log in, I am informed that there has been a system error and I can’t even see my past posts, let alone create a new one.
But I’m an old dog with an old bag of tricks. Deerhound Diary is still where I abandoned it. Raebert is seven now, a divine number in the scheme of things.
I will blog from here as if I had never left. Watch this space.
As I just told my wife, easy for you to say when he’s not on your foot.
I’m three. Or so they told me when they gave me the hamburger last time from the white bag with the yellow legs on it. Which is supposed to make me dumb I guess. But my kind aren’t dumb except for the dumb ones. What we are is ancient instead. I have an old guy who thinks he’s the boss and a mommy who thinks she is too but I know my history whether they recognize it or not. I know every one who has lived in this place because I can smell them. All I need. There was one like me before and the boss and mommy thought I would be just like him.
I am but I’m not too and I know this because I am a sight hound and we are special because we can see mice running in the grass a hundred yards away and all the way through eyes into what bosses and mommies are thinking right now. Not all of us but me anyway. Why I worry about the boss because we have the same blood and there is sadness that runs through our heads the same way we run through fields.
The boss is sad because he used to run his mind through the plastic kibble he never ate but always chewed with his paws in front of the box of pictures he couldn’t take his eyes away from. He has become a sad boss and I have all I can do to take care of him. He needs to go to bed at the right time, which is seven lie downs after my dinner and out, but he never does. He watches the box of colors without his plastic kibble and he doesn’t run in his head the way he did.
His head only works like mine does in dreams. He sees things happening there and the things happening there are terrible. I know the best way out of those dreams is Cheezits and Cheetos. He has these but they don’t please him and I keep trying to make him see that I see what he sees and it is not so bad because there are Cheezits and Cheetos and that is enough.
Eyes are enough. My kind doesn’t need plastic kibble to speak. We just look what we want to say. What I am doing now and you hear what I look don’t you?
I am looking this thing because I want my boss to smile and he does not know how anymore. I am looking harder than I need to look because I need to find how to give him the look he needs to be better. I am seeing names of things he sees and I am working to run through them like he should. Like the worst out there is only one more deer to be run down.
Raebert
So. I’m suddenly a retired blogger. The webmaster who was posting my work suddenly stopped. That’s okay, actually. I probably said what I had to say several times over. What’s not okay is the feeling that your fingers should still be lodged in the dike, preventing the imminent catastrophe.
It’s probably ego that’s holding you against the wall that is the failing dike. You don’t want to admit you never made a difference, ten fingers or none.
Ego fades with age. But habit holds time hostage. I’ve noticed the phenomenon that stars of long-lived TV series look the same year after year. Then, when the show is cancelled and they appear on a new series, they’re suddenly much older. Less makeup, fewer kind cameras? Maybe they just quit clenching their youth.
How I feel. I fought so hard for so long, maintained the same grim convictions at all costs, and now, cancelled, I feel, well, different.
Not better. It’s like the end of a losing war. Defeat was not real as long as you kept fighting, no matter what casualties you saw on the battlefield. But when you lay down your arms at last, there IS a lassitude that sets in. I know it has set in on me. Even the cats and dogs are staring at me strangely.
But every end, even disastrous ones, portend a new start. That’s what this is. My heart still beats, I will still write, and –I know my own DNA by this time — I will never ever give up on what I believe in.
I know that wasn’t exactly a ringing invitation to join me here, but do accept the invitation. When you’re not always in combat, you can be in better tune with yourself and others. You can laugh more easily. Even on the gallows.
I intend for us to have some fun here. And there are donuts in the lobby.
Robert
Here we are at break of day, the wind howling outside, and all the males in the house are surrounding me on the couch. We are our own gang. Raebert the impossibly good and gentle Deerhound. Buster the impossibly cute Scotty, Elliott the impossibly discerning cat, and me the impossibly impossible one who pisses off the whole world and is still the chief of this particular tribe. And right now, precisely in the middle. See how that works?
