Category: Orphans

Some post-Irene thoughts. I know Hurricane Irene certainly wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Does that mean the media and government should be battered for sounding a loud alarm? Well, opinions are, you know, like … (See Paragraph 3.) Luckily my niece and her family in Virginia and my long-time friend Sally in Western Massachusetts all came through Irene just fine.

I had to work earlier tonight so I haven’t had a chance to do all the post-Irene reading that I would like. But inevitably, you are going to have idiots who would bitch if they had a loaf of bread under each arm. With that in mind, I present an article about the those brave Hurricane Hunters who have to fly those old, durable WP-3Ds out across Mississippi Sound and into the eye of the meanest cyclones of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico that one would ever want to see. In this day and age, you have people who are so worried about all the ridiculousness whipped up about the deficit for the sake of politics alone that they would dare to blame people like the Hurricane Hunters who give us the early detection science on tropical cyclones.

And heavens knows we had plenty of problems during the bad old days of “Heckuva Job Brownie’s” FEMA. This includes during Katrina and afterwards when we had massively destructive hurricanes of our own down here in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana with Rita and a couple of years later with Ike. But that doesn’t mean we should play catch with the funding for the disaster du jour as is being planned for by our geniuses in Congress like the House Majority Leader and weasel-lookalike Eric Cantor. Weasel wants disaster funding to be offset by spending cuts. What an a**hole. By the way, Brownie showed up on one of the cable networks over the weekend as a talking head of lettuce.

I remind all who care, hurricane season is not over. Luckily, Tropical Storm remnant Jose is heading into the North Atlantic. Meanwhile Tropical Depression 12 looks to be just east of Puerto Rico at the end of the National Hurricane Center’s famous 5-day cone.

Finally, last week’s earthquake in the Northeast also should remind us that we live in a large country where we have many different types of natural disasters which may try our patience and our federal, state and local governments’ abilities to respond.

Few of us, go through an earthquake and a tropical storm in the same week as did my friend Sally. She recounted in an e-mail how she had no idea what was happening when she felt last week’s shake-up.

 “My chair was rocking front and back and I looked at my legs moving and wondered if I was getting sick,” she said. “I looked up at the wall in front of my desk and it was just weird – moving.  Then I turned my head to the left and saw the coats on the coat rack swaying back and forth about 2-3 inches … “

Sally, who works for her city government, called 9-1-1 and later wondered if she was first to do so. I have never been through an earthquake so I could just imagine how discombobulated I would feel if I had gone through something like that.

People like Eric Cantor and others who don’t know what they’re talking about need to think before they speak. They first should walk in the shoes of others although if they walk in mine I suggest that in the very least they wear a couple of pairs of socks.

Sometimes it is fun, for me at least, to just go random. Hopefully, it will produce less words than the theses I have written lately.

ΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣ

Hurricaneacomin’

The 11 a.m. (EDT) forecast discussion of Hurricane Irene by the National Hurricane Center indicated that the storm was appearing to diminish somewhat in intensity. That said, the NHC says the storm remains quite a threat to the Eastern Seaboard:

IRENE IS EXPECTED TO REMAIN A LARGE AND DANGEROUS TROPICAL CYCLONE AND HAS THE POTENTIAL TO PRODUCE DAMAGING WINDS…STORM SURGE FLOODING…AND EXTREMELY HEAVY RAINS ALMOST ANYWHERE FROM EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA NORTHWARD THROUGH NEW ENGLAND.

The ultimate intensity of the storm might not be as severe as some Nor’easters seen in the region from time-to-time. Nonetheless, I hope people will use as much good sense as is available to them with the approaching hurricane until it is time to sing, like Leadbelly, “Goodnight Irene.”

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(Warning: Some of the links may contain vile, vulgar and objectionable language that is not safe for the office nor in the company of your parole officer.)

One must search diligently for quotes covering the subject of over-thinking. I did some researching and found nothing usable. Of course, I chose not to spend a great deal of time on the subject thus clearly not over-thinking the topic of a suitable quote.

The topic comes up from me singing the David Allan Coe country ballad in my head called “Lately I”ve Been Thinking Too Much Lately.“ A song in which English teachers everywhere would have wished he had added that he had also been a little too redundant lately, redundant lately.

Most of my friends and certainly a couple of my relatives — I ain’t saying which ones — know the name David Allen Coe. The name is familiar because he somehow lumped himself in with the “Texas Outlaw” music movement of the 70s, the likes of which included everyone from Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Earle, Guy Clarke and the list goes on and on. Saying Coe, who was once known as the “Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy,” lumped himself in the bunch might be a little pretentious especially when talking about the Texas outlaws. His music certainly lends itself to the movement, one where many country artists were mostly fed up with the formulaic violins of Nashville country and western of the time. Many of Coe’s songs are more than imaginiative and have an edge sharper than a straight razor competition.

Still, some of those songs also made a point that the listener “better know right here and right now” that David Allan Coe is the original outlaw. “Yeah, Johnny Cash helped get me out of prison/Long before Rodriguez stole that goat,” he sings tongue-in-cheek “Longhaired Redneck.” But he makes you wonder if he is pushing things just a little too far in the same song when he adds: “They tell me I look like Merle Haggard. But I sound a lot like David Allen Coe.” This being some kind of reference to the fact that Coe does sound like his supposed once-incarcerated soul-mate Haggard.

The song stuck in my head, the one with the redundant title, tells one of those stories of a situation in which some of us may have found ourselves in at one point of our lives or the other. It is where we are snug as a bug in bed with our significant other, even though it feels much like one of us is missing and it sure the heck isn’t me.

That the story line tells something I will admit to having felt at one or perhaps more points in my life, it isn’t the song’s meaning which keeps dogging my all too willing mind. No, it’s that I’ve been thinking too much lately, redundant or not.

Coe has put out some very amazing songs in his career. One of my favorite although not written by Coe, “The Ride,” tells of the narrator’s imaginary encounter with Hank Williams Sr. while hitch-hiking.

Other songs by this so-called mysterious man — one who claimed with no real backup other than the fact he had actually served prison time that he was once on death row — will never see radio play and have been labeled as racist and misogynistic. His, more or less “standard” and a tune I have long enjoyed, “If That Ain’t Country (I’ll Kiss Your Ass),” is mild compared to some in these latter categories.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be sitting here ruminating over a tune with a redundant title had I have actually been in a fight that could have happened with this very singer during the one time I saw him at “Billy Bob’s Texas” in Fort Worth. As has thankfully been the case in these few of my lifetime experiences, I was the voice of sanity while a friend with more liquor inside him at the time than good judgment began yelling insults as the performers were beginning a break. I can’t remember every issue which surfaced in my friend’s mind but one of them was Coe’s scooter trash creds, which was in hindsight might or might not have been a legitimate line of query. Nonetheless, there is a time and place for all things and having a drunk friend arguing with someone who has — right or wrong — allegedly thrown a punch or two at a performance seemed neither timely nor “placely?”

So I have been thinking way too much lately, which phrased as I do doesn’t sound like a country song worth diddly,  about a song in which the next line Coe sings is: “Lately I’ve been staying kind of stoned.” Well, that will do it, by gosh. I mean, if you’ve been staying kind of stoned — not that I know anything about the subject — then you might have been lately thinking too much lately.

I rest my case.