Meditations In An Emergency

We have some good news from the COVID-19 desk.

I went to two different stores on Saturday and both stores had, try to restrain yourselves because this is big news, toilet paper! No kidding!  For real! Honest!

Are you ready for some more mind-blowing news?  One of the stores had hand sanitizers! We must be living somewhere over the rainbow.

It has been a wild month.

It started with a government-ordered shelter in place which caused an economic depression. Yes, that's the word. It will be easier to explain this depression to high school students in the years to come than the Great One in 1929.  Basically, most high school and college survey classes give some details about the Great Depression but they don't make a lot of sense. So students are basically left with the impression that everybody was dancing The Charleston one day and then the next they were singing "Buddy Can You Spare A Dime."

Ours isn't that bad, I think (hope).  For one thing, we're singing "Buddy Can You Spare A Roll".

A lot of people lost their jobs and of course, the government came to the rescue.

One program was called The Paycheck Protection Program and it was supposed to help small businesses stay afloat and pay their employees.  It ran out of funds in about two weeks.

President Trump appeared daily in the White House Press  Room to answer as many questions as possible to calm the country's fears both clinically and economically.

Ha, ha, ha.  Just joking. The President appeared daily to engage in the TEE-TEE Battle he has with the press. Some days, you actually side with the President because here the press has access to the most powerful man in the world to ask him the tough questions. Example: will he use his broad pardoning powers to pardon "The Tiger King"?

But mostly it is Trump repeating the fact that the economy was really doing great until the invisible enemy came along and wrecked it. But, we're providing great big beautiful ventilators and companies are making beautiful awesome masks to wear because you're recommended to wear them but you don't have to, but they're still beautiful.

He reiterates that he's working with all of the governors who are doing a really great job except the ones that aren't like Brian Kemp, who is a great, beautiful guy and doing a great job but not really because he did something I didn't like. But he's a good guy.

This goes on and on. The press will then ask the President questions like, "Sir, most respectfully, do you want people to die suddenly?". Trump will answer that they are fake news and their ratings are in the tank.   Next question:  "Mr. President, you say you are a stable genius, but we've never seen you do any Calculus".  Ninety-nine per-cent of the time, Trump gets mad.

The other day, Trump appeared to endorse the idea that you could inject the body with disinfectants and that could cure COVID-19.  You can't say Trump doesn't think outside of the box.

Here are some other things about our crisis.

They said we should wear face masks even though it wouldn't prevent you from getting COVID-19 unless the person with COVID-19 has a mask on too.  So like everybody else who doesn't want to kill his fellow man, my wife and I got some masks.  Problem: early in the crisis, the news told us that we shouldn't wear contact lenses if we could avoid it. Because of this, I wear glasses. When you wear a mask and glasses at the same time, glasses fog up.  That's why you never see any nearsighted bank robbers or Batman wearing a pair of readers.

Also, it is hard to understand people when they are talking through a mask. It's like "Rocket Man" by Elton John.  For years I thought Elton said, "Rocket man, emy-himy-ear-own" instead of "Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone".

But, on the plus side, you can say some really nasty cuss words.

Another thing about this crisis is that it seems to have empowered a lot of peoples' inner Karen.

In New York City, which COVID-19 has hit hard, a lady was running around Central Park yelling at people that they were not social distancing enough.

When Governor Kemp allowed a slow rollout of non-essential business openings, the Karens were in full-throated outrage that Governor Kemp was going to get people killed.

I really wasn't that surprised by the response. My dad was a "yellow dog Democrat" who thought the GOP platform was 1) Kill people and 2) Take all their money. This was basically the logic the Karens used.

It does sound kind of funny that one of the first businesses to open were bowling alleys and tattoo parlors. Unless you owned a bowling alley or a tattoo parlor. Then maybe it just means you can start making money to support yourself and your family.

The Karens never mention the PITA ("Pain In The...") regulations these small business owners have to go through just to open and serve their clientele.

I'm trying to stay positive. Thankfully, the worst-case scenarios did not occur. We still lost John Prine and that sucks enough, but it appears we won't lose the millions that were forecasted.

Things will get better. Honest. Has Uncle Alan ever lied to you before?

White Trash Freak Parade

We've been in this "shelter in place" phase for a little over a month now.

I guess I've gotten used to not "going out to eat".  It was kind of weird not to go to church on Easter.

I'm still not used to this toilet paper issue. At first, it was due to all of the big bad hoarder people and we were promised that the supply chain would catch up.  Here it is a month later and seeing a pack of toilet paper for sale at Kroger is like seeing Haley's Comet.

My next-door neighbor told me, from well over six feet away, that she found a pack of toilet paper at Costco. It is good to know we have a hookup.

Like other Americans during this time of sheltering, my wife and I have watched the Netflix documentary "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, And Madness" Netflix describes the show as "A zoo owner spirals out of control amid a cast of eccentric characters in this true murder-for-hire story from the underworld of big cat breeding."  A better description would be  "A White Trash Freak Parade.  Oh yeah, there are some tigers."

"The Tiger King" is a guy who calls himself Joe Exotic and he runs a tourist trap private zoo in Oklahoma, not Arizona.  He's a gay polygamist who likes lions, tigers, and bears. Oh my. (I never get tired of that joke.)


He breeds tigers in this zoo to sell to people who happen to have two thousand dollars and just a few brain cells.

He has multiple tattoos and multiple earrings. He has this high-pitched nasal twang and sold music videos of himself singing his songs like the haunting (not in a good way) "I Saw A Tiger"'.

To top it off: he has a mullet. 
 
His enemy is Carole Baskin, a sanctimonious bottle blonde with a bit of a past.  She runs a wildlife animal rescue sanctuary in Florida which takes in wildlife when people learn (the hard way) the novelty of a baby tiger ends when it becomes an adult.

Joe and Carole have a mutual dislike for each other and spend a lot of their time making lawyers wealthy by suing and countersuing. While Carole is more right than Joe, she is one of those smug crusading activists who is trying to make the world a better place and makes you sick.  Joe is just a bipolar mess.

A good bit of the documentary is spent on Joe's accusation that Carole had her millionaire (second) husband killed for his money. Joe's evidence:  The husband disappeared and they have never found the body. Now in the real legal world (I know this from years of watching "Perry Mason"), that is not technically "evidence". But Joe harped on it time and time again how "Care-roll kilt her husband and fed hem to the alliegaters" and "Care-roll fed her husban to the tie-gers" and (my favorite), "Care-roll  burreed her huzban unner neath that septic tank".  

From my observation, a lot of people believe Carole was involved with her second husband's disappearance and/or death mainly because Carole seems like a person that would tell the teacher they forgot to assign homework.  For what it's worth, O. J.Simpson, someone who actually, well, you know, says he thinks Carole did it.

You meet a lot of people in Tiger King.  Kelci Saffery, a  transman who is now an amputee due to sticking his hand into a tiger cage.  John Reinke, the zoo's manager, does not have any legs due to a zip line accident. John Finlay, one of Joe's "husbands", barely had any teeth. It was like you had to be missing something to be associated with Joe Exotic.

The zoo's head keeper was a man named Erik Cowie, who along with John Reinke, didn't seem to have a dishonest bone in his body.  You wonder what road he had to go down to end up working in a private zoo headed by Joe Exotic.  Erik is a walking personification of "Sunday Morning Coming Down".

Joe is always doing something outrageous. Like his same-sex wedding to two other men. I didn't think polygamy was legal in Oklahoma.  He had an internet TV show. He ran for President. He ran for governor of Oklahoma. At campaign events, he passed out condoms with his picture on it.

Joe has turned narcissism into a type of performance art. He makes Donald Trump seem like a wallflower.

Joe brings in an investor from Las Vegas named Jeff Lowe who uses baby tigers to score poontang in Vegas.  In fact, one of the points Tiger King makes over and over again is a tiger is an aphrodisiac and not, as popular legend has it, an animal that can eat you.

Joe begins to spiral out of control, I guess. He looked pretty out of control beforehand to me. He hatches an incredibly dumb plan to hire a hitman with an obese strip club owner who has a worse haircut than Joe to kill Carole. It turns out the obese strip club owner was working with the Feds and Joe is now sitting in jail.

What have we learned from Tiger King?  We've learned that there are a lot of people in the wildlife animal subculture and all of them have a screw loose. We've learned that Wal-Mart donated its expired meat and chicken to the zoo and that the zoo employees could go through it and keep the good stuff for themselves.  We've learned no male in Oklahoma wears a shirt.

We've learned that in the middle of a pandemic, we'll watch anything.

The Happiest Enchilada

He said he was kicked off of Noah's Ark because "there was two of everything but one of me".

He was a quiet man, a middle man, and a solider on his way to Montreal.

He had an illegal smile, sour grapes, a blue umbrella, and an eight-track ("Another Side of George Jones").

He told stories through his songs about people like Sam Stone, Donald, Lydia, Sabu, and Cathy who was cleaning the spoons. People like Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard. People like the happy sailors dancing on a sinking ship.

He introduced us to old people. Old people like the woman named after her mother who was married to a child that's grown old. Old people like Grandpa, who was a carpenter. Old people like Grandma who went to school in Bowling Green. Old people who lost sons in the Korean War.

You could not pick out a less improbable singer-songwriter than John Prine

His older brother taught him how to play the guitar. "Three chords. I liked them so much I didn't learn any other".  After high school, he was drafted into the Army, where somehow, he was sent to West Germany to be a mechanic despite not being mechanically inclined.

When he got home, he became a mailman.

One evening, at an open mike, he got up and played some of the songs he was writing as a hobby. From there, he was the regular act at a small club. One evening, Roger Ebert came in a saw him play. Soon, Kris Kristofferson stopped by.

From there, John Prine went to New York and recorded his first album, "John Prine".  The album cover features Prine sitting on a bale of hay for no reason. It also featured the songs "Paradise", "Illegal Smile" "Spanish Pipe Dream", "Hello In There", "Donald And Lydia", and "Angel From Montgomery".  Prine was tagged "The New Dylan" when in reality he was simply the first John Prine.

Unlike Dylan, Prine never reinvented himself. He was always John Prine.

His first spate of albums was on the Atlantic label. Then he signed with David Giffen's Asylum records.  It was the record company of the Eagles.  He released three albums with that label: "Bruised Orange",  "Pink Cadillac", and "Storm Windows".  The record company had no idea what to do with Prine. He wasn't country. He wasn't rock.  He was a hybrid that years later would be called "Americana".

Prine, miffed at Asylum's indifference towards him, did what any good American would do:  he went out and started his own record company: Oh Boy Records.  At first, it was a mail-order record company.  You send John Prine seven bucks plus shipping and handling and he'd send you his album, "Aimless Love".

Prine toured a lot those days.  My wife and I saw him in 1986 and 1987.  He put on a great show and was very personable.  He also smoked, a lot.  Both of my parents were chain smokers and Prine would haven given them a run for their money.

Well, Oh Boy grew and Prine recorded "The Missing Years" produced by Tom Petty's bass player. It won a Grammy.  Prine also got married and quickly had three kids.  He won his second Grammy for his homage to the country music dueling duet  "In Spite Of Ourselves".

After that album was released, it was announced that Prine had a squamous cell carcinoma on his neck. The surgery he had removed a piece of his neck and severed some nerves in his tongue.  It gave him a new look and added a gravelly tone to his voice.

It was announced last week that Prine has COVID-19 and is on a ventilator.  At this time, Prine is listed as "stable", but he has pneumonia in both lungs. He is right in COVID-19's wheelhouse being a 73-year-old man with health issues.

I have been a Prine fan for almost 43 years.  When people would ask me who I listen to  I would say John Prine and they would say "Who?"  Now, thanks to the years of touring, great records and a lot of hard work, Prine has a lot of fans. His fans include Bob Dylan himself who said, "Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism".  I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds good. Other fans: Bill Murray, Roger Waters, and Johnny Cash.

When I heard of his condition, I thought about his song "That's The Way The World Goes Round".   It is a jaunty happy sounding song that an alcoholic wife-beater and a guy that almost dies from hypothermia.

The refrain says, "That's the way the world goes round, you're up one day, the next you're down, it's a half an inch of water and you think you're gonna drown, that's the way the world goes around."

At the concert my wife and I went to 1986, he told this story about this song. He told it again at the 1987 concert.  He was telling it in concerts in 2016.

A lady came up to the stage and asked him to sing his song about the happy enchilada.  Prine was confused because he'd never written a song about any type of enchilada "much less a happy enchilada" and suggested that she had him confused with someone else.  She said no, it was him.  Well, Prine asked how does it go?  She said, "It's a happy enchilada and you think you're gonna drown".

I will be a happy enchilada when Prine beats COVID-19.