Canadiana Bustrow was neither surprised, nor embarrassed … Pappa had kept much too many of the old country ways and had always been more comfortable relieving himself not in a house where, “You eat, you sleep, you read, you make music or silence … you don’t shouldn’t make earth or water! Sickness can only come from this!”

And anyway, the specifics of Pappa’s death wouldn’t be mentioned in the obituary, simply: “Surrounded by his sorrowing family, Frydryck Bustrow, retired professor of astronomy and literature, died of natural causes in his cottage at the age of 88 years.”

“Natural causes” … a black widow spider-bite on his penis … “natural causes” brought about by his inexplicable inability to fully accept that he had every right to adapt to his new culture, use indoor plumbing, and not punish himself for “turning back on home from fear, putting eyes and hopes in direction of this cold, cold country.”

Canadiana would miss the old eccentric … luckily she had seemed to find happiness with her current husband, Colin Gikopoulos, professor of British History who she met at the clothing optional Hanlan’s Beach in Toronto after her third divorce.  He knew how to comfort with mere presence.  She had liked Colin immediately when he didn’t smirk at her name, or even ask, “Why did your parents call you that?!”

They called her that because they wanted her to fit into their new home and not stand out as the child of immigrants. Ah well, she stood out anyway when she reached six feet tall in the seventh grade; her odd name was the least of her worries.

“Nothing much.”  What was that about? I wrote that some time ago, but I will be dipped if I can remember what I was thinking about.  “Nothing much,” probably.  I tend to blather especially when I’m tired, or nervous, or with people … or even when I’m talking to myself.  An actor (male kind) once described another actor (female kind) as having the reputation for being clever because she talked so much something clever was bound to spew out.

I’ve promised myself I would actually purchase this fine WordPress product for quite some time. And today I did.

Yay me!

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said make art, even if it’s bad art.  Well, “Hello WORLD!” Here’s some of my art.  I’m a firm believer that once it’s “out there” it is well and truly out there and I have no more control over it.

So, gentle reader — make of these what you will — or won’t.

So, first full day “out of touch.”

Seems strange not to log-in, scroll-down, left-click, comment, enter, and repeat. One hundred and four of my closest friends and thousands of their closest friends are living their lives and posting them: what we’re eating, where we’re eating it, what we’re angry about, happy about, sad about, bored with.

Testing whether or not we’re really friends if we’ll pass on our cancer-victim relatives’ names; whether or not we’re really committed to justice by reposting pictures of candles, hearts, kittens, puppies, polar bears, refugees; whether or not we’re loved in our struggles against obesity, alcoholism, depression; educating us about the societal misunderstanding of our introversion, our ADHD, our OCD, our alphabet soup lives.

Posting pictures of our cute children, beautiful wives, new homes, lunches, dinners, snacks, drinks, homemade baked goods … it used to be a bore with the accordion picture holder in our wallets or purses … or the slide-shows at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July … now the polite murmurings about our plastic covered pictures or Uncle Bob and Aunt Betty’s 352 slides of the trip to Yosemite are replaced with thumbs-up, blue-hearts, or at the very least a right-click on a “like” button.

“You’re a bad person if you voted for the guy,” “You’re a bad person if you didn’t vote for the guy.”

Day after day, after petty-paced, creeping, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

And I did it too.

I’m swimming out of the maelstrom for awhile is all. No moral judgment, just need a break from hearing about as opposed to hearing from.  And what does it mean, “friend?”

“Small stroke.” I guess the size does matter in this instance. Mother has had a “small stroke” and is now in a “home.” Quotation marks, or as my Commonwealth Country friends would say, inverted commas, are remarkably handy. Denoting the slightest bit of prevarication they hint at, give a clue that, subtly indicate that, what is being said is not what is being meant, that there’s more, and sometimes less, to the words than their dictionary definition.

Kind of like “alternative” facts. The alternative to a fact is a lie, a misrepresentation, a “not-fact.”

Some other day I’ll explore the difference between truth and fact, and lie and myth. Not today however.

Fact:  I have to clean Mother’s house to get it ready to sell.

Fact:  cleaning a mother’s house to sell used to take place only after a mother’s death.

Fact:  Mother is not dead.

Fact: Something is “amiss.”

“Amiss:” difficult, sad, sometimes gut-wrenching, somehow wrong.

I do like quotation marks.

Well, happy year of the rooster!

If my new dental hygienist wasn’t six feet tall, blond, green eyed, had shoulders broader than mine, a last name with nine letters (three of which are vowels), and was called Petrushka, she could pass for my former dental hygienist May Ling who is Chinese.

Their teeth cleaning styles are as different as their physiques.

May Ling is subtle and gentle as she cleans and polishes, all wrists and fingers, making cooing sounds like a dove as she works.

‘trushka is all shoulders and elbows with judgmental grunts and “tsks” during her scraping and digging task. From where I was sitting it looked like what a large pot of borscht might see as it was being stirred … or maybe what a ditch sees while being dug.

The ultimate outcome of their ministrations is the same: clean, shiny teeth.

Both are first generation in this country, families fleeing oppressive Communist regimes in the 1970s. My family has been on this continent since the reign of King Charles the First, we helped throw off the shackles in 1776.

Both May Ling and Petrushka judge the world from the perspective of the open mouths of strangers … the fizzy soda drinkers, coffee or tea drinkers, cigarette smokers, the flossing and not-flossing. I inherited the stereotypical English gene for bad teeth. It isn’t all my fault.

Cultures clashing, histories rubbing shoulders … roosters have no teeth.

Well, boy-howdy, would you look at this. I not only re-discovered that I have a blog, I managed to reset my password. Now if I could just remember writing the second entry, did I write that? Did anybody actually read it? I think it’s rather good, so if I did write it, good on me. If I didn’t, thank you to whoever did!

Why did I stop writing? Now I remember: there was an article that said blogging was going the way of the dodo … in Mauritius they use the dodo on their money … never been to Mauritius but someone I know has been.

“Dodo” is a strange word to say, and even stranger to write. An article, in a social media platform, said blogging was passé. (This thing knows enough to automatically put accents on French words, cool.) Well, okay, blogging is passé, so call me passé. Most of my cultural references end at whenever the last full original cast Star Trek movie came out and a lot has happened since then so while blogging may be passé it’s new to me! And I think I’ll just keep right on doing it.

Goddam kids, get off my lawn!

I will never deny that actions have consequences, and that these consequences can be metaphors for existential truths.  Sometimes, however, gambling is just a schmuck sitting at a machine with a stupid look developing on his face when he realizes that the $530.00 he won twenty minutes ago has been sucked back, $2.50 at a time, into the casino workers’ pension program.

Yes, sometimes, you need to change slot machines.  Yes, sometimes, you lose.  Sometimes one needs not to go to the casino but to the state park and count the birds.

Damned machines are rigged!

“Share and share alike,” was what I said to my friend.  We had stopped in a casino because the airline had, not surprisingly, and not for the first time that vacation, delayed my flight.

So, from the $200.00 I had in my hand I gave him $100.00 … we only see each other once a year, and he had, as usual, hosted me … so giving him $100.00 was no burden.  Now, I had put $100.00 in the penny slot machine, and after a series of losses and gains, all very exciting, managed to pull out $200.00.  So, in my friend’s mind, because I had won $100.00, if we were to share and share alike, which he didn’t mind doing, we should each receive $50.00.

Ah-HA!  Not, so Gridley! In my own private algebra that first $100.00 is lost, gone, no more, thrown away!  Ergo, so then, and how d’ye do … I won $200.00, of which I gave him half.  I explained this to my friend.  He described my thought process with an ugly word and said, “Whatever algebra works for you,”  and took the hundred.

Open parenthesis … in the business end of the gambling world they think the same way as I do; I won a jackpot once and the machine spit out the jackpot ticket but kept the original bet just in case I wanted to keep playing — I didn’t … Close parenthesis.

Now of course this particular algebra breaks down when one ruminates on the fact that sometimes one spends $500.00 to “win” $300.00.  But ugly facts are too often obvious, mundane, depressing — so “Faugh,”I say to ugly, mundane, depressing facts!

Luckily, I make enough money to throw away $100.00 … or more … at a shot.  Not everybody does.  I’m one of Adam Smith’s lucky ones.  Putting the coin of the realm into a machine in hopes that I’ll receive more in return is definitely a first world capitalist point of view.  But that point of view can be a metaphor for something else can’t it?  Don’t we all put a lot into life hoping we get even just a little back?  Isn’t our judgment of what we get back from life dependent upon the perceived horizon against which we live our lives?

Oh hell, I don’t know.  I had a hernia operation this summer, I just had a tooth extracted in preparation of receiving a partial denture, all that is either the first chill wind of inevitable decay or … or … well … something better than that.  It all depends on how I add things up.