What I Did on My Summer Vacation

I was trying to capture all my Facebook commentary and replicate it here for easier reference but it proved far too difficult to edit for backgrounds, omitted photographs, and links, that I'll simply refer you all to my FB page "James Stanley Manista" to look at it all firsthand. I'm certain it's all open to the public so don't feel you have to be a friend, unless, again I'm confused about how this all works.

The whole subject of social media is worthy of comment but I'll limit myself here to the most salient feature of FB: you can "Like" something but you cannot with a mouse click "Dislike" it.

More in another article soon. 

Parking Mr. Wheeler's Yacht

"How do you park into a narrow harbor a super yacht nearly the length of a football field? You back it in, of course. Very carefully. Yachtsman Andy Wheeler enlisted a drone last month to make a video of his Chopi Chopi backing into the harbor at Corsica’s port of Bonifacio. Wheeler’s yacht, the largest ever built in Italy, launched last year. Analysts at that time valued the boat at $107 million." (Photo and caption from Too Much 08/04/14)

Everybody thinks the rich have it so easy. But where do you park your extravagant yacht? Sometimes the vacation spots just don't have the extra long dock yours requires. But you don't want to anchor it out on the Mediterranean Sea where it will get lost among the other mega-yachts, where very few will see it and you'll have to row ashore in your dinghy. 

This member of the profligately wealthy managed to get his floater where everyone will see, "How much more money I can waste than you paltry peasants with your skiffs." 

You think you have problems, Punky, what if you had a boat?

Tissue Is The Issue

I've seen an increase in two items of concern on the grass and on sidewalks: 1. dead birds (I don't know why; other people say they don't see them) and 2. paper tissue (not bathroom type, mind you, just the runny nose type or for wiping makeup from one's face (same thing, cosmetic redress).

The princess and the pea. 

The stone in your sandal. 

The sand in your bathing suit. 

The bird poop in your eye. 

Relatives after three days. 

Granted no one of them big things. Not to go to war about. But they're certainly irritating to the point of instilling a need to rid the nation of them . . . this very instant. Not that I'm in favor of any other kind of injudicious discard (litter). But this one is so personal and so directly filthying up the environment that it screams for public action.

What happened to the handkerchief? I remember being surprised when I substituted in the urban middle schools how when a student hand shot up it was not to answer a question or comment on a text but to ask, "Teacher, do you have a tissue?" often with the other hand pointing to the questioner's mucus-laden nostril. "No," I'd respond honestly because I truly had none and had not been instructed to provide such as a teaching tool.

"Use your handkerchief," I'd offer, and the whole class in unison replied in disgust, "Ooow, how gross!" "Waddaya mean gross? At least you wouldn't be walking around asking for a tissue to wipe up your snootful. Besides, it's not my job to provide you with kleenex, just like I'm not expected to provide paper or pencils." 

Truth was though many teachers had for years been providing paper, pencils, pens, and tissues out of their own pockets (not literally for the last item). Often enough scrounging in the teacher's desk could turn up the nostril-mops. And, once provided, the supply was gone in one 45 minute period.

"Yeah but then you'd have to put that germy old hankie back in your pocket and carry it around all day--carryin' fresh boogers--ooo!" they explained. I should clarify someone came to Snotnose's rescue; he blew loudly, came forward, dramatically deposited the soggy mess in the waste basket at the teacher's desk, returned to his seat, but looked as if he would soon reenact the cycle. 

Kids with long-sleeved shirts did not require tissues as frequently as the short-sleeved urchins but I never could get them to see how brandishing boogers on one's shirtsleeve was tantamount to carrying a used hankie.

"You do know hankies can be laundered? and reused?" I produced my clean hankie from my pocket and again met a chorus of ooos and boos as if I had just pulled a maggot-covered rat out of a hat. 

When I see the volume of "tissues," looking like white poppies strewn over the green grass of my neighborhood park, I sincerely wonder if the whole of the last two generations need to be reinstructed on basic nasal hygiene. Not all the "tissues" are products of hooker handjobs; those are usually accompanied by a single generic ambidextral latex glove. 

My OCD about litter is getting to be like pushing a boulder uphill. Step aside, Sisyphus, I'm not stopping anytime soon.

 

Now It can be told

Scene of the crime:  Except for the Keybank Building which was not even a gleam in an architect's eye in the summer of 1968,  the newer cars parked outside, and all the trees, now missing, which made this location on that Saturday an off-the-beaten-path location, this is where I either facilitated a break-in or saved a secretary a whole weekend of dire lonely captivity in an old Flats warehouse restroom.

My First, and Last, Living Wage Job

All right, in 1968, graduated from college, half a year of graduate study, and a couple of years of chronic depression, I was grateful to be a mailman. I don't remember what the economic conditions were in those years but for me they weren't good. Because of my appearing exceptionally young for my years and probably having a voice pitched high enough to make the appearance credible, I was often laughed out of interviews with a casual, "Look, kid, I don't know who you're trying to fool, but when you get out of high school, give us another shot." 

Or the jobs just didn't pay enough to support a young couple intending soon to be married. I could have gotten into IT early on but learning Fortran and Cobol seemed dreadfully dull at the time and churning out deckfuls of mysteriously punched IBM cards looked like asking Death to kiss you goodnight. Gates and Jobs were probably still friends working in a garage somewhere. I had no crystal ball but I had taken a civil service test for the Post Office. All I had to do was wait for them to write me again instead of pitching the invitations into the waste basket every month. 

So I was a beginning part-time substitute mailman and I was delivering that Saturday on what was called a "mounted" route, a term thrown back not to the Pony Express (which was a contract service, never part of the Post Office) but to delivery involving a vehicle, possibly in earlier years a horse-drawn vehicle. 

What was delightful about this was that on a business route on a Saturday the carrier didn't even take out half the mail, leaving it in the office for businesses who chose not to have a Saturday delivery. Yet one was expected to take the full time for the route and not come in early. Yea! Lots of free time and a Jeep to drive about anywhere you wanted to go on a Saturday. 

In those days the Post Office was pretty much a hiring arm of the federal government and there was lots of slack. Unlike today's Postal Service which is driven by twin devils of government bureaucracy and business efficiency where people are subject to shooting each other if anyone is pushed just a little too hard.

"Mailman, help me! Help me, mailman!"

The area was in downtown Cleveland, actually just down the hillside from Ontario near what was then the Eagle Street ramp. But it was virtually invisible in that corner of the turn of Canal Road. The Cuyahoga flowed another plateau down and could not be seen except from the rear of the old warehouses which dated back to the 1850s or earlier. One could hear the traffic from the busy streets above but Canal Road on a Saturday was like being on the moon. And this was even before we landed on the moon. 

There were several stops along this stretch but few cars parked in the area--not unusual. As I ascended the rickety wooden stairs of the third stop I first tried the doorknob to deliver in person if I could, but the door was locked. Through the glass I could see no one inside and the lights were out. There was a slot in the door and as I pushed the tied up letters and magazines in through the slot I thought I heard a voice calling, "Help me, mailman, help me." 

I looked around. There was no one in sight. I let the slot clamp shut and again I heard the voice but this time much quieter. I knelt down and pushed the slot open so I could see and hear directly and shouted into it, "Hello, is anyone there? I just delivered your mail." 

"Mailman, Oh, my God, thank you but don't leave me," a lady's voice clearly cried out. "Whatever you do don't leave. I've locked myself in the restroom by accident." She explained she had come in to complete some office work and when she went to the restroom the door closed behind her and locked somehow so that she couldn't open it. "Nobody knows I'm here. If I can't get out, I'll be here alone until they come in Monday morning. You're my only hope." 

"Well, look, I can't be breaking into places, but I can call the police to help you, when, and if, I find a place open, which to be blunt, isn't likely to happen." These were the days before cellphones could commonly be found in every pocket and purse.  

"Take a rock and break the glass. Then come in and let me out. Look, I've got other stuff to do today and I don't want my family to worry while the police take all day to decide to help me," she stated. "Don't worry about the glass. The company will pay for repairs." 

"Lady, I'm not comfortable at all about this." I replied getting more nervous about the whole deal. 

"How comfortable will you be on Monday morning when I tell your boss about  refusing to help me?" she queried. 

Here Come the Gang, er, Door, Busters

I felt like I was sinking into a quagmire but now I couldn't just leave her. I checked the area for a rock and found a board I thought would work. "Here goes," I warned her. The glass didn't break until the third whack and it shattered into the office just like in the movies. Now I'm thinking somebody will drive by and see me at the broken door with the board in my hand and think, "Man, when they say they deliver, don't get in their way." 

I carefully reached in, unlatched the inside lock, and pushed the door over the shards. "I'm over here," came a voice from a door down the hallway. I carefully tried the doorknob which refused to rotate. "It's locked," I said stupidly. "I know that. Can you break in?" "Ma'am, I'm not a big guy but I could try."

[If you are now thinking, "This guy is a nut," I don't blame you one bit.] 

It's amazing how hard you have to hit a door to burst it open, and how much it hurts when it stops you like a rhinoceros slamming into a bridge abutment. "Third time is charmed, they say," at which point the door crashes to the floor rather than just opening and the young, powerful part-time substitute letter carrier goes sliding over its surface and ends up in a lump at the feet of the helpless maiden, who was standing there with the door's three hinge pins in her hand.

"I knocked these out with the heel of my shoe, but I still couldn't open the door," she took pains to explain as I rose from a crumpled heap and pointed at the pins. I felt like telling her that if she had mentioned the hinge pins I would have instructed her to pull on the hinges little by little to get the door open--no broken glass, no crushed shoulder. However, by then I realized I could have done a lot of things differently and let it slide.

Sheepishly neither asked for the other's name. I said I was glad to have been some help while thinking the sore shoulder should be fine by the route's end. When I got back to the post office, my shoulder was still hurting and I thought, "My boss doesn't need to know about this." 

An American Month

On June 1when I wrote "Shoving Your Nose in It" is Journalism's Job  I had no idea of the significance awarded this month:

"I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally. In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness Month, or perhaps even Torture Approval Month, and not just in June 2014 but every month of the year." [my emphasis, from Tomdispatch.org]

What author Ariel Dorfman relates in the link below is the human cost to both victim and perpetrator, recently depicted in the film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, about a British officer, Eric Lomax, tortured by a Japanese officer, who was a Buddhist monk, during the construction of the Bangkok to Burma railway, made famous in the motion picture Bridge on the River Kwai.

I never thought that in my waning years I would be writing frequently and earnestly to dissuade our citizenry away from the barbarity of torture. But I never thought I'd have to convince people about freedom of speech or separation of church and state either. 

So here offered for your consideration another article you may decide against reading (this is rather reserved by comparison to others I have linked);

http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=18744fd8cf&e=e8ee0c8340

Past the Tipping Point

Despite the ranting of crazed denialists we are on the way to destroying the planet that gave us life.

Save on winter clothing

Dahr Jamail of Truthout.org promised to update us monthly on ACDs (anthropogenic climate disrupttions) across the world. This grim series continues and, as expected, only gets worse. Like so many of us who have watched the global warming prospect for years, and have cried Cassandra-like to so many who would just not listen, Mr. Jamail presents his findings as one who believes we have already passed the tipping point. His chronicle of these latest events is linked below:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24370-atmospheric-co2-crosses-ominous-threshold

Warning: This article is not encouraging 

Just How Much Better Off Are They Than You?

IMAGES OF INEQUALITY

The hottest “new badge of excess” in the global luxury world? That has to be the “pawbag,” the oh-so-cute miniature replica of high-fashion, high-priced handbagsnow available for the pups of princesses and plutocrats alike. Matching sets for dog and owner start at a mere $1,118 for the Fontanelli little black handbag and can run up to $5,119 for the Leonardo Delfuoco black/green croc.

from http://toomuchonline.org/tmweekly.html