Rainy day – and it ain’t even Monday

 

March 11, 2009

 

The drizzle dots my car windows, chilling me in that way I used to feel when I was young.

Rain makes me moody and nostalgic.

But with today being my daughter’s birthday, I also feel old.

I guess Shakespeare is right when he claims each of us struts out onto the stage of life and then retires.

My one time friend, Michael Alexander, used to lament his lack of success when young, hoping that he will become one of the late literary bloomers such as Milton, who found success after 50, rather than the young Turks, whose fame came before 30 burning them out.

I document everything – a perpetual personal history to tell myself where I am and where I’ve been, as well as whom I’ve been there with.

But days like these, with rain like this, I start missing people who are no longer on the stage with me, my mother, my uncles, some friends.

Seeing Garrick the other day brought a lot of that back, and how good we had it during the 1970s when we were all still in the process of becoming something, and still had the potential to become what we dreamed of becoming.

Garrick claims I’m one of the people who kept to my dream, when others did not.

I suppose that is true.

I’m not sure I could live my life any other way.

 

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Maybe there’s something wrong with me but I think Bernard L. Madoff is a hero – along with all the other con men who managed to rip off the ultra rich.

A con scheme only works when the victim gets greedy and believes he or she is getting something for nothing.

The fact that most of Madoff’s victims are among the greediest people on the planet only gives me great pleasure in finally knowing they got what was coming to them.

And while the feds crack down on Madoff for stealing from the poor, they do little or nothing about the so-called respectable banks that steal off the backs of poor people or the phone companies, credit card companies, or utility companies that make poor people miserable.
Several states, for instance, don’t give people unemployment checks, they give them a bank debit card, and the banks charge to use it.

Talk about a con game!

As people get put out of their homes and fired from their jobs, all the federal authorities seem to be interested in is making sure the very wealth investors whose greed got the better of them get back what they invested from Madoff.

Some priorities, eh?

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I’ve been reading Russle Baker’s autobiography. So my conversation with local columnist Earl Morgan struck a particularly sad note with me yesterday.

Baker fell into journalism out of college, and followed it course to his success as a columnist.

Luck and hard work led him out of the poverty of daily reporting.

He learned his craft and then advanced.

But we are witnessing the end of an era, in much the way Mark Twain did with the demise of the riverboat industry.

Morgan believes daily newspapers are a thing of the past, and can’t see anything of worth that will replace it.

The end of print journalism makes me feel the way I did in college, when I became aware that I was part of a dying radical breed, the last gasp of the 1960s before the Reagan revolution destroyed the concept of just society.

I keep hoping I can adjust now as I was unable to with Reagan and do what Mark Twain managed later in life, to reinvent myself.