A Day in the Life of Chaos

Sally Goodloe Christmas and the New Year is a time of reflection. In truth it is simply an artificial line in the sand yet for some reason, it serves as a bookmark, the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one.  A book is a wonderful parable for life.  It has a beginning and an end, a start and a conclusion. When it comes to an end we place it on a shelf where it eventually becomes forgotten.  Perhaps someday, someone will pull the book down and re-read the story, bringing the characters to life once again. We all change in life.  Day by day, hour by our we age and the exterior shape we once occupied ceases to exist.  Despite this fact, sometimes things in life are hard to accept, even hard to look at.  They can be things we love or things we hate.  Either way, there are times when the healing process is so slow the reintroduction of them into our lives takes time.  Sometimes it never happens and we end up dying with the ghosts of our past.  Sally Goodloe

We all have secret little measures that we use to guide and gauge our lives as we make our own journey along the path from birth to death.  They are hidden signposts that measure our progress in our personal journey through life. Henry Winkler "Fonzie" One of mine can be found in a very auspicious place.  It is a face I used to watch along with much of America from the dinner table.  One night a week I remember turning around a TV cart with our color TV to face our dinner table while we ate.  So much for idyllic family communication right?  The show was Happy Day's and each week we would tune in to follow the antics of Richie, Potsie, Ralph Malph and of course, Henry Winkler aka The Fonz.  Happy Days ran from 1974 to 1984 and was a kind of generational show that in truth was simple minded and stupid.  Near the end of the shows run the Fonz traveled to California to jump over a shark pen with his motorcycle spawning the phrase "jumping the shark."  It is the

Last night I was sitting with my son.  With fourteen years of age under his belt he was responsibly doing his homework while I at forty-four I was playing a video game.  I was hacking my way across Oblivion when I felt his finger touch the skin behind my ear.  I imagined I must have had some ugly black piece of crud, perhaps a remnant of nuzzling with the dog.  "I don't like that."  He said. "What is it?" I asked him. I wondered, did I have a cancerous spot or something?  He pushed his finger against my skin again pulling it flat. "It's a wrinkle.  I don't want my pop to grow old."  He said hugging me.  "I have gotten used to the age spots you used to not have yet now do but I don't like this wrinkle." He noticed the distress on my face and added in a consoling way, "I guess you are only in your forties Pop, you are not that old." When you are a child everything seems new.  The girls you know have skin still

Today I was on my way to work driving my blue Nissan Cube 25 miles an hour down a four lane street.  In front of me there was a work truck with a large sticker in the window that said "OBAMA" with a communist hammer and sickle and a subscript saying, "United Socialist States of America." On the radio President Obama was giving a speech talking about wanting to create more jobs and save the middle class.  Suddenly I look to my side and see a giant F-something pickup truck changing lanes on top of me.  With inches to spare I honked my horn jammed on my breaks and he pulled off only to finish his merge in front of me.  I noticed the driver had a cellular telephone on his ear.  He turned, looked at me and gave some pathetic I am sorry wave.  I lowered my window and yelled out without obscenity, "GET OFF THE PHONE!" The man responded by turning, flipping me the bird and yelling back, "WELL FUCK YOU THEN!"  He then resumed talking on his phone. W

Alfredo (L) Me on (R) Today is the last day at work for one of my best friends.   He is not so old, 53 I think.  Despite his relative youth, in the world of special agents and law enforcement personnel, a special deal is made.  They are allowed to retire with only 20 years of service.   This is largely because the years of long hours and professional stress are expected to take their toll on the body and cause many to die younger.   Being a civil service person but not an agent I need to have 30 years of service and be nearly 57 years of age before I can walk away.  In the overall scheme of things it is still a great deal.  This in a world where many people today wonder if they will ever be able to retire.  I think about this every time I see an elderly woman serving fast food at Chick-fila or an elderly man bagging groceries at the Publix. When you think about it, we spend most of our lives working.  Over the years many of us spend more time with our co-workers than we ever do w

I have been having an ongoing conversation with my father about the Occupy Wall Street protests going on around the nation and how they compare to the protests of the 60's.  I was born in the 60's, 1967 to be exact and less then a year later Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both dead.  I wish I could say I remember it but I believe I was likely more concerned with the flavor of my creamed spinach.  As a result in order to gain perspective I have turned to someone that was much more cognizant of the changes going on in the nation.  In an odd way, we tend to remember the period with some nostalgia yet my father reminds me that it was the seeming hopelessness of it all that drove both him and my mother independently of each other to migrate to Alaska. Bloody Sunday, Selma AL I wanted to know if the protests of the 60's as undefined and counter culture as they were, had an impact on public policy.  My father's conclusions were that they did and he listed a

One of the problems of being cognoscente of history and of the world around us is that  leads to self questioning.  What would I have done?  What would I do? They are questions that can be postulated but never really answered.  The truth lies only in the resolution of the moment as it confronts you, nothing more, nothing less. Of course there are the radical questions of true moral sincerity.  For instance if you lived in Germany during the war would you have sheltered a Jewish friend?  What if the decision came at risk to you and the lives of your family?  I like to think that I would have helped but only the moment could have really shed light on the true answer.  It is always easy to find reasons and make excuses for not doing something.  The people I truly admire are the ones that don't.  The ones that have convictions so strong they set aside the implications on their own lives.  I know a woman who gave up a life in America based on her political convictions during the Rea

Today I received a sad piece of news.  No, no one is sick and no one has died.  The news was simply that a certain place has now been officially filed away as a memory because it will soon no longer exist.   Photo by Steve Marcus In a previous blog sometime back I recalled this place in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Las Vegas is an ever changing monster.  Little is ever permanent yet what vanishes often leaves nostalgia in its wake.  The city is like the shifting sands of the desert that surrounds it and if they don't figure out a way to get more water there the whole damn thing might disappear.   Las Vegas is fascinating on so many levels but one of the things I find the most interesting is the fusion of local degeneracy and poverty with visitors from around the world and at times opulent wealth.  Both coexist almost as if battle lines have been drawn around the city separating one from the other.  There is a kind of invisible Berlin Wall.  The old core of the city on Fremont stree

In America we have largely forgotten where Veterans Day came from.  On the 11th of November we put out flags and remember our Veterans.  Well that is what we do if we are not hitting a Veterans Day sale or planning a barbecue.  With each passing day the memory of why we celebrate the 11th day of the 11th month grows fainter.  Scarcely a person alive today aside from a historian remembers the 11th hour.  The Eleventh hour was when the guns fell silent.  Guns that in four year rattled the very foundations of humanity an changed the world forever, shaping the world that we know today.  Once known simply as Armistice Day it was the moment that World War One came to an end.  To be more precise, the moment it ended on the battle field. Kaiser Franz Josef I You see, the repercussions of this conflict still echo imperceptibly in the world we live today.  While the thunderous clap of cannons is no more, everything about our technology, government, economy and social systems can be directly

Within the Bauer family there seems to be some kind of right of male passage established by my father and now being continued with my son.  I am sure every family has their own "requirements for membership."  For my father it was learning from his father who was a machinist building complex parts for Hughes Aircraft.  While his exacting father was often disapproving in his ability, my father's striving to please my grandfather taught my father many skills.  In my case, as I reached junior high school and continuing into high school, it was a directive by my father to take Shop.  I resisted and I complained.  I was an actor, a thespian.  I was a debater, an intellectual.  How could I be expected to take shop?  My father insisted and usually when this was the case it was a battle I would ultimately lose. In junior high school it was the "Industrial Arts."  I learned the names of tools and made boxes out of tin.  I spent a semester continuing an unfinished shop p

Palace Corbelli Classroom Obsolescence is a part of everything.  We see it every day.  Devices we once couldn ’ t live without now no longer serve a purpose.  It could be a record player, the cassette tape or the rotary phone.  We are now even witnessing the demise of the fixed phone for that matter.  Every generation has them and are defined by them.  For my father it might have been the milk man, my grandmother the streetcar or the horse.  Some objects seem to even have programmed obsolescence like the home computer.  The saddest obsolescence of all is when it is our very self that has lost its need.  Time carries away all things but for a shining moment in our own existence in our minds, we exist.  We live, we love and we thrive.  At least those willing to breath, willing to dream willing to love, willing to give will leave the world with a smile on our face. Christian Tanzer and Joe Funk I lived in Vienna the winter of 1987 and spring of 1988. I attended an American program