Tired Road Warrior

When I was growing up in the 60s in East Lansing, Michigan, I had a friend whose parents were alcoholics.  My friend was a bit of a nerd.  He loved movies (this era was pre-tapes and pre-DVDs) and he would rent full-length movies on reels.  He would show them in his house for anyone who was interested.  We ended up spending a lot of time at his place.

His parents were always “three sheets to the wind.”  His mother once told me that she wished she had become a nun like she had originally intended.  His father, while I knew him, despite his drinking problem, was able to maintain a job with NCR.  But I understand he was let go after I left East Lansing.  Ultimately, I don’t know what happened to my friend’s parents, but the prognosis was obviously not good.

I was reminded of my friend’s parents when I recently watched the film Crazy Heart.  For his efforts, Jeff Bridges won an Academy for best actor for portraying the role of an over-the-hill country singer with alcohol and drug addictions.  When the film opens, the main character is playing the bowling alley circuit.  The movie also has a subplot involving a May-to-December romance.  Jeff probably didn’t deserve his Academy Award for this flic, but maybe he did for life-time achievement.

Anyway, I found the movie to be very derivative of an earlier movie:  The Wrestler.  The general plots are the same, just substitute a broken-down singer for a broken-down wrestler.  I’m not a country music fan, but I loved the music in Crazy Heart, which also captured an Academy Award.

I didn’t like the ending of Crazy Heart.  The “hero’s” rehab was way too easy and the ending was very unsatisfying.  The conclusion made logical sense (younger woman dumps older man), but lacked emotional punch.  Life just isn’t as clear cut and clean as the movie’s ending.  If movie goers want something that doesn’t pull punches, they should watch the classic movie The Days of Wine and Roses.  I saw the latter movie with some high school buddies, including the one mentioned above.  To this day, I wonder what impact the movie had on my high school pal.  I know I never saw him consume alcohol.

Cultural Definition of “three sheets to the wind”:

To be “three sheets to the wind” is to be drunk.  The sheet is the line that controls the sails on a ship.  If the line is not secured, the sail flops in the wind, and the ship loses headway and control.  If all three sails are loose, the ship is out of control.

The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy

On April 18, 2006, Carl T. Wittwer was a guest speaker at USU.  (Carl was the the 2006 recIpient of the Department of Chemistry/Biochemistry’s Alumni Achievement Award.)  In his talk he reminisced about the academic experiences that shaped his professional journey.  Carl earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a doctorate degree in biochemistry from USU.  According to Insights (a publication of the College of Science):

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In twelve days, my Mother turns 90.  All her children (and their spouses), all her grandchildren (and their spouses), and all her great-grandchildren will be getting together for a birthday celebration in Zions National Park.  On my Grandmother Rees’s side (the Munk family of Benson, UT) of the family, it is not unusual to be a nonagenarian and more.  Grandmother (Mother’s mother) lived to 101.  My Mother has an older brother who will turn 97 this year (his wife is also in her 90s).  Her older sister, Aunt Alda, is 93.

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Two nights ago I watched the movie Everybody’s Fine, starring Robert De Niro as father and several other fine actors as his offspring.  In the movie Frank Goode, a widower played by De Niro, travels around the country visiting his adult children.  Learning their secrets leads first to introspection, then to a determination to make things right.  The important point for me was Goode’s desire to patch things up with his “less-than-perfect” kids.  To do this he needed to reconsider his past expectations for them.

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Traveling around southern Utah and northern Arizona, particularly in isolated areas, I’ve observed a wide variety of hogans (or hooghans), the primary traditional structure of the Navajo people.  When enjoying the Colorado Plateau, the older hogans seem very much a part of the natural landscape. 

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I occasionally witness or hear of primary and junior-sunday-school lesson horror stories.  Where very young Mormon children are subjected, to what I consider to be, very outrageous discussions of inappropriate topics.  Two notables examples:

• A lengthy and bleak discussion of the tribulations and horrors of the Last Days.
• A very descriptive lesson on the gory nature of the crucifixion of Christ, involving such details as driving nails in the hands and feet.

Kids need to be kids.  Growing up needs to be fun.  There is plenty of time to learn the details of the crucifixion and of the Last Days.  And I’m not sure that studying  the latter is ever necessary.  Learning to be good stewards of the Earth might be a better more positive subject.

In his book Working in the Shadows, Gabriel Thompson describes and analyzes the year he spent working undercover alongside Guatemalans, Mexicans, and others at a variety of extremely low paying jobs.  He quickly determined that the jobs, some of which were very dangerous, failed to provide enough income to survive at even the lowest standard of living.  Gabriel was generally successful at lasting 2 months at each job except two:  (1) his subterfuge is discovered at a chicken plant and he is fired and (2) he hangs up his delivery bike after seven weeks of risking his life in New York City traffic.  According to reviewer Frances Romero (Time Magazine, 8 Feb 2010, p. 16)  “Therein lies perhaps the only blemish on the book’s premise:  Thompson has the luxury to quit.”

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French artist Jean Francois Millet painted haunting, and sometimes bleak, scenes of ordinary rural life in the 19th century.  His painting The Sowers became the symbol of European liberalism and socialism.  Millet’s work, while popular in his own century and later with French Impressionists, gradually fell out of favor.  Modernism lost interest in images of the rural poor.

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Former Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, the principal supporter of US involvement with anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan, died on Wednesday of this week (10 Feb 2010).  He was very much the endearing rascal that American voters seem to adore.  His exploits in southcentral Asia were recently chronicled in the underappreciated movie “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

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The following was written in a review by Mary Pols of the book Devotion by Dani Shapiro:

“Devotion does not provide a template for finding your personal Jesus (or whoever).  It’s a history of Shapiro’s quest to explore her own faithlessness.  She grew up in an Orthodox household but cast aside her Hebrew religious study as a teenager.  As an adult, her sense of God was that if he existed, he was not a micromanager.  (”As far as I knew, he had never gotten me a parking space.”)  She wants to believe in something but doesn’t know what.”

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