Mocking the mockingbirds

The mockingbirds are singing their fool heads off. They like the tops of trees, and one has staked a claim on a scrawny oak near our parking spot, singing to beat the band as I park and let the dogs out for our morning walk. The pups scramble off and begin sniffing bushes — their daily morning “read”: the doggie digest, the canine chronicles.

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New York, New York — who turned the baseball standings upside down?

“We’re Yankees fans. New York is supposed to be in the world series,” their eyes half-close as Yankees fans say these things, in smug self-satisfaction. This winter I had several Yankee fans explain their version of baseball reality to me this way.

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Cut!

Malcolm Cowley wrote a wonderful introduction to a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories where he describes the cultural changes that struck America in the 1920s. It was a sharp rift. The young kids of the Jazz Age felt the older generation was morally bankrupt on issues such as women’s suffrage, prohibition, and the war.

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A Quiet Walk & The Coral Sea

It was gorgeous this morning, just after dawn. Across the bay, wispy clouds were trickling over the peninsula range and down valleys into suburbs. The water of our little cove was tranquil, most of the migrant birds are now long gone. A few cormorants, the usual gulls, one scoter. A little gaggle of mallards was on the pier, but no harbor seals.

A killdeer was giving Edie the broken wing act, so I had to monitor her a little bit. All her hunting instincts kick in, and Edie does not need killdeer chick to supplement her diet. (“Aw, dad dog, just one?” “No.”) She wags in pitiable supplication, then is distracted by the next scent, and romps off.

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My Ernie Dog and Tony Oliva

We have a German shepherd mix (the mix probably something like greyhound — see what you think here) who has gone from young and fleet to acting like an old guy remarkably fast — it might be one of the fastest trips through middle age ever made.

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V: Parsing the Good from the Not So

F. Scott Fitzgerald called it “the separator.” Ernest Hemingway, characteristically, called it “the bullshit detector.”

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Under the Surface

I walked the dogs Sunday morning along the south shore of the old Alameda naval air station, and met a people-watching harbor seal.

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IV: Beyond Enchantment

I like the name Wittgenstein; the first syllable: Witt, the last, a vessel for hefting a cool, frothy beverage. It sounds so precise yet airy and amused. But couple it with the first name Ludwig and mention him as one of the 20th century’s foremost philosophers, and you can almost see people’s eyes glaze.

Which is too bad, especially given his charisma. Clive James, in a Slate article titled “In Search of the Real Artichoke” writes of him: “Wittgenstein’s glamour was Garbo-esque.”

Yet the name is just a label, after all — and I’ve been yammering about how deceptive these words are, and how even our brains are complicit sometimes in a self-deceiving conspiracy, and how we’ve gotten so good at these shenanigans we do it for fun, even when it backfires. And yet …

We do so like to penetrate the veils of deception, don’t we?

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Revenge of the Dead

I got derailed in the last part of the Deception posts by some stuff Raymond Chandler wrote that fits in well. (Mysteries providing further tests for truth-sifting.) So it’s still in the works.

Meanwhile, I just saw this story, about an idiot in Indiana who was wrecking gravestones in a cemetery and got trapped under a half ton tombstone.

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III: Pranks, or Deception at Play

Man oh man, it got hot here fast. I took the dogs out at dawn and could have worn shorts. Mid-summer fry an egg on a sidewalk hot now. And here I am with a pile of leftover notes from the weekend’s posts, including Wittgenstein. But I ought to have my wits about me for that, and it’s too hot. Even in shirtsleeves during my walk down Market street just before 8 AM this morning, it was sticky.

Besides, I have a story to tell — a story involving deception and skullduggery and secrets and male pranks.

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