The Modern Marriage Template

A lot of people don’t like Paul McCartney.

That sounds silly, a little, I know. I’ve been alive to see Elvis, and Sinatra, and everybody else who thinks they’re a big deal in music in the last forty years. None of them ever approached the popularity of the Beatles.

No one ever will, either, as the moment for the great mass of people to pay attention to one thing, coupled to the ability to experience it, will never come again. They were the guys standing in the right place at the right time. Attention is atomized now, along with the ability to indulge our atomized tastes. When there was only three TV networks, the Beatles were on all three. I distinctly remember an AM Top Ten List in 1964 with eleven Beatles songs on it, as one slot was a tie. Beat that.

I’m too young for the Beatles, sorta. It was people my older brother’s age that went loopy for them. Fifty something now. I was a kid, watching them on Ed Sullivan in my footie pajamas, after watching grainy video of bandaged, bloody men in fatigues, half a world away, being lifted onto choppers on the news. The yin and yang of the trivial and the life and death washes over a six year old. It gets in, but in a diffuse way. You gain impressions.

Well, here’s an impression: Paul and Linda McCartney are the template for the modern marriage. You heard it here first.

Poor Paul is getting the second wife treatment now. Or his second wife is. Or they both are. At any rate, they’re saying dreadful things in public about one another in an attempt to get the dough or the kids or the kid’s dough or notoriety or something. But it wasn’t always that way for Paul McCartney.

The hipsters hated Paul, if you asked them. It was John Lennon they adored. John Lennon was kind of a nasty guy. They liked that. They couldn’t sing like Paul McCartney, but they could be as antisocial and rude and mindless and addled as John Lennon. Paul was just a music hall musician, lost in a modern time. He sought to entertain. Why settle for that?

But how they aped him. They looked for a handsome spouse — not a golfer’s wife, but a woman like Linda Eastman. They acted bohemian. They didn’t do a bed- in. They indulged their ideas of back to nature living, in a sort of Vermont version of Marie Antoinette’s peasant house, and played farmer. They grew Paul’s beard and gave wildflower immortelles to their beloved, after they married them in a ceremony only official, not official looking. And the women part of the audience went looking for a sloe eyed scruffy rich bohemian guy to sing songs to them and give them handsome children. Their husbands volunteered to change the diapers and wash the dishes as often as they did. Which was never, they had nannies and housekeepers, but the intellectual exercise was performed to everybody’s satisfaction.

They attempted to give the appearance of never soiling their hands by grubbing after money, all the while being quite well off. They had ferocious intermediaries looking after their finances while talking ragtime about socialism. They included their family members in all their affairs, because they could, and ascribed it to being familial, not nepotism. And they were immensely casual about the appearance of all their affairs.

Tell me the vast majority of married people didn’t emulate the family scene shown there accompanying Paul McCartney’s magnificent first effort as a solo artist. Pretty much everything after that was a joke.

They really did love one another, and their children, and seemed happy. That’s the rarest of things in popular entertainers. And then she went and died on him, and left him to the machinations of the world, and it ate him up.

He’s still a Beatle, you know. But he’s not the husband of the woman he loved any more. I wouldn’t trade places with him for anything. There was a time, I assure you, that a great many people would have.

November 7th

I never vote For. It only encourages them.

But rest assured, I’m out there voting — Against. You know who you are.

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

There is a perversion so foul afoot in this great land that I can barely bring myself to write about it.

What’s that? What the hell are you people talking about? Oh, the headline. What’s wrong with you? I’m referring, of course, to the unholy combination shown in that picture.

All thinking people agree. Socks and sandals are a crime against god and man and nature. We need legislation, and we need it now.

Let’s back up a bit. Never mind socks and sandals; I’m tired of your feet. Male, female, you name it; stop showing me your feet. They’re ugly.

Actually, there are people with good looking feet. They are few and far between, and it doesn’t matter much, because good looking feet are fairly ugly anyway. And bad looking feet are hideous. Wear shoes.

And don’t cheat, and have your feet peeking out of your shoes at me. I don’t want to play hide and go seek with your ingrown toenails, thanks. Wear the whole shoe. Thanks again.

You’ve all indulged yourself with this idea that having a proper enclosure for your foot is unhealthy, or uncool, or your feet are too hot, or you’re athletic/earthy, or feminine, or a sorta gladiator, or… look, come to think of it, I don’t give a damn why you’re showing me the hideous appendages. Just please stop. And don’t think painting your toenails bright colors to attract my attention to them is going to help. It just makes it easier to find them and step on them in crowded subway cars.

But you won’t stop. I know you. You’re going to keep on wearing these ridiculous complicated rat’s nests of velcro or leather straps to keep a the only part of your shoe I don’t care about – the bottom- hanging on that jumbled assortment of pedicured hammertoes you’re so proud of.

And so I’m going to compromise. I’m going to find the middle ground here, a kind of civil union we can all join in on, and live together in peace and harmony. If you’re going to wear sandals, by all means do so, and suffer only my derision. But if you wear socks with them, you’re going to be rounded up and sent to re-education camps where all the guards wear wing tip shoes with the little brass dingles on the toe, or steel toed ditch digger boots, and they’ll trod on your gnarly toes over and over until the sock is the only thing holding them together. You will then be forced to walk home, and be mocked like a fat ballerina the whole way.

I’m starting a negative advertising campaign right here and now. I’m going to make Lyndon Johnson showing that nuclear explosion if Goldwater got elected look like a immortelle from an admirer. I’m going to direct you to Sandals And Socks.

After you scroll down a little, you’re bound to join my crusade. Stop the madness!

Post Script:
I have it on good authority that the cat in the picture is wearing that collar to keep him from hanging himself in shame over his owner’s sandals and socks.

Again.

What If It’s All This Bad, And We Don’t Know It?

I don’t remember where I first saw this. It’s been kicking around in my “saved for future execration file” for quite some time. It is, quite simply, the worst music video ever:

Borat’s big right now. Being bad as a way of being good is a big industry. Bill Murray might have invented it thirty years ago. Remember him singing Star Wars in the ski lodge on Saturday Night Live? We all act like that now. Self-consciously unself-consciously bad is the new good.

This isn’t like that. This person was undoubtedly serious. And so it would be mean to make fun of her.

I don’t care. If you think you can make a spectacle of yourself like that, standing beside a randomly chosen backdrop of unmown, littered lawn and a standpipe next to the dirty lake, singing like a deaf soprano bagpipe and looking like a Big and Tall Manatee Clothing Store commercial, without bringing down calumny and derision on yourself, you’ve got another thing coming. I’m unlikely to be the first or the last person to tell you this, but here goes: I’m sorry, but You Stink.

But you don’t simply stink. You represent so much more to me. You’re all the people in the audience who think “I could do that.” And so I’m not really angry at you and your porcine video, it’s the thing you adore that I loathe. Talentless attention mongering celebrity.

It’s not your fault. Like most people, you think being a pop star is the highest calling of humanity, and you’re not interested in being just another citizen. You wanna be big time, at least in a small way. You give me the same melancholy feeling I get seeing the chimps in the zoo. Nature gave them opposable thumbs, just like humans, but all they can manage to do with theirs is fling poo. And flinging poo is the best metaphor for that video I can come up with.

The benighted formerly young lady is correct. God bless her. I hope she had a ball on the back of the Harley with mulletman. I’m sure she had to write a… ahem… big, fat check for the whole thing. She isn’t any worse than 99% of popular entertainment.

What a difference there is in that last percentile.

It’s All Ephemeral

This is gone already, of course. There was a frost last night, and these oak leaves are dry and brown, and will clack and scrape against one another in the winter winds until they’re evicted in the spring by their green replacements. The sound they make — when you step outside in the evening’s darkness to the woodpile, and pause for a moment to feel the cold bracing air in your chest, the stars pinwheeling bright in the winter night sky — is the sound of the unburied dead.
Can you get to a place like this? It’s in my back yard. It goes forever, because we can’t go where it goes. But you can stand on the edge of it, and reflect for a minute on the year that is slipping down the rabbit hole. You can slip on an actual rabbit hole, too, if you’re not careful. The massive cinnamon ferns have shriveled to wizened stalks, the mosquitoes are murdered in their millions by the frost, and you can stand there for a quiet moment now and wonder what might be looking back at you. An osprey will cruise overhead almost every day, and emit that marvelous shriek that means wild to anybody that hears it.
It’s all ephemeral. Work all day, not knowing what the weather is outside. There’s a few minutes to walk to the edge of the grass, with your toddler’s hand in yours, and look out into the nothing. He always throws twigs into the water. Each one makes him giggle. The perfect joke – it always brings a laugh. This too will pass. We go back and sit at the table, and the meal is that most ephemeral of things; soon lost in the memory hole of too many. But each one is sublime, if considered.

What do they add up to? I don’t know. Why waste every bit of your time with arithmetic? Get it while it’s hot.