Month: September 2022

Ballpark (audio post)

by Stephen J Frankenberry8 Comments on Ballpark (audio post)

Thought of a new addition/wrinkle to my posts, some of them at least, some older ones maybe to revisit in this regard and then future ones, for a beloved friend who has always enjoyed spending time in the Attic but who would find it easier these days to listen instead of reading while visiting. So I thought to read out some of these Frankenposts audio book-like for her for the assist, an audio POST if you will.

I found with this assist though, as I have made two attempts thus far (the quality of the first not being quite up to what I would consider par doing it from home, where, though I have a really nice microphone along with my PC and sound program, things just ain’t yet been figgered quite right in a production way) I found that I have really enjoyed this reading of them out loud, hearing all the vocal intends that were in my head as I wrote, really enjoy the storytelling nature of it.

And if it gives that assist to that beloved friend and maybe brings a smile? Bonus.

(don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before – another thing to add to my Tales From the Dim I think)

A read then of my most recent post, “Ballpark”, from my little work studio instead.

So a few nights ago I watched the best ballgame of the season, for me at least, with my MLBTV subscription, something I’ve paid for every year since its inception to catch my beloved out of town boys, even when I couldn’t afford it, which has been often. Now as a Pittsburgh Pirates fan it’s not really all that difficult to differentiate between the other “best ballgames of the season” that have come before this one as, well, like I said, I’m a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, there haven’t really been a whole lot to choose from, not a lot to “Raise the Jolly Roger” to in too infrequent texts to my Sis these days, after a win, our thing, even the not so memorable ones, any victory, especially since the All Star Break this year can be considered memorable I guess.  

There was the sweeping the Dodgers in LA for the first time since someone from a Darwin text first started grabbing sticks and hitting stones with ’em (though probably more just simple defense from the stones being thrown AT them from others in a Darwin text – no game yet, not quite, but maybe thoughts a bubblin’). We split a couple with the dreaded hated Yankees earlier in the season when they came down from the Death Star to visit Pittsburgh and get some thick breaded sandwiches with thicker fries and coleslaw on ‘em ‘n that and we did get back at and have a sweep of the Brewers who have owned us in a we’ll wear leather and spikes and hold a whip, you put on this mask kind of way for the longest of time.

But there hasn’t really been any other singular game moment to crow about, or to parrot Pirate squalk “aarrgghh matey’s” about from my shoulder until this one, just the waiting for late August and September to finally see some of the young Bucco’s of the future on a rebuilding team finally being allowed to play regularly, after dead weight DFA off the heap claim roster fills have finally been cast off, and show me some hope that I haven’t felt in , well longer than a while.

That waiting paid off with this “best game”, a combined one hit shutout highlighted by an electric kid’s nasty stuff, Luis Ortiz in his MLB debut. This game was hope. A long suffering Pirate fans hope

/////////////////////////////////////

Now I’ve been a Pirate fan since I first discovered baseball, right around the time when they won only their second of three World Series since the cold war, only two in my lifetime and I was watching this “best” game with two different pairs of glasses, one for the close of the Tablet sitting to my left with the game and the other for distance of the TV for the almost good bad bad good movie I was also watching, that needing two pairs of glasses old now lifetime long.

It was Granddad who turned me black and gold when Grandma would allow me, and only me for some reason, to sit with him on some weekends when we would go to visit the two of them and the aunts and the uncles and the cousins. I’ve often joked that watching sports with Granddad back then (sometimes baseball or often bowling) usually with me sitting cross legged on the floor and he in his big chair in the big living room of a big old dusty breezy house was where I learned how to curse and throw shit at the tube, maybe consider a bowling team when I got to High School and be a Pittsburgh fan. Some Steelers yes, but most importantly the Pirates.

/////////////////////////////////////

Went down to Citifield over the weekend for the first time since 2018, a yearly pilgrimage for a best of best friend of mine and I, Jeremiah, starting back In 2005 but paused in 2019 for what, I don’t remember what, though it must have been a something to cause a pause in a 14 year run and then came the the. Pandemics and useless 60 game seasons that I didn’t’ watch a single inning of for the first and only time in my long baseball fan life and then another year where I wasn’t ready just yet for not quite done pandemic crowds.  

/////////////////////////////////////

We thought, back in ’05, a trip down to Queens and still Shea Stadium back then, would be a cool get together moment for a new morning show crew and we eventually played fetching verbal tag with a group of pretty young women, out on their own cool get together moment in seats so far up and away from the field that we were like in baseball clouds. We knew there was a game going on somewhere down on earth, in between the lines, but we played this fetching instead and had such a time. Couldn’t even tell you who won that one. Baseball has that way, a way to make you sort of forget things even though you knew, a mine vs yours, or a mine vs them, as long as it was being played somewhere near you and you were there meandering, meandering with it as baseball wondrously meanders and you talking and laughing and paying attention on occasion.

But this past weekend Jeremiah and I caught a game again, finally, after these too many years, ones that sneak up on you and have you think of windows closing more than you’d like, years, and “breaking out the fancy chairs tonight” he said in his driveway with a lugging to the car fancy parking lot chairs for lounging pre-game dog grilling and sauerkraut heatin’ in a cat’s water bowl (hey, it’s what I had on hand. It worked for the warmin’ is enough as a good baseball hot dog don’t do cold sauerkraut) and upscale beers and spicy mustard awaitin’ some hot dog buns. And not just regular hot dog buns on this night mind you, no siree Bucco, but brioche hot dog buns, this was an occasion after all, you break out the brioche for an occasion I guess. I know. Nice touch right? I thought the same even though I have no idea what brioche is, other than it just ain’t some regular white bread fashioned as a hot dog bun. It’s fancy sounding where hot dogs ain’t fancy.

/////////////////////////////////////

Everyone was asleep, or close to it as I grabbed that one seat at the back of the car, at now a quite happily baseball night spent almost 1 in the morning that allows you to ride WITH the train and with no one behind you, not ride backwards as some do. I don’t know how people sit in the “backwards” seats as traveling with your back to wherever you’re going is just so unsettling to me. Maybe if you’re with company, for the distraction Ok, but if you’re not with company as is always the case for me on nights like this you just grab that one seat, at the back, that one first step in if you can, that one one that points you forward.

/////////////////////////////////////

Next to Jeremiah and I tonight was a family. A Mom and a Dad and five kids, all tremendously good looking, cover of a family magazine good looking, almost unfairly so to all the regular ol’ families out there, Mom and Dad troopers that took the gang out for a night at the ballpark all around 7 or 8 or younger, and did it so well that I wanted to go back to a trophy store that JJ and I had passed on our way and buy them just one javelin lookin’ throwing gold idol prize or something similar and say well done, maybe even engrave their names that I didn’t know on it. I wanted to buy them their own ice cream too that I watched dad so gingerly walk with, balancing five, while I was in the concourse on line for the loo. What a team these two were with this five. And that would be the emphasis of the story in that family magazine they were featured on the cover of by the way “How to balance five children at a ballgame and look good and accomplished while you’re doing it”.

Jeremiah noted to me that he didn’t think he could do that, have so many kids, his thoughts equally distracted and focused by the fact that he is in the family way, he and his better half, Britney, just a few month to go now, or 12 or so weeks in babyness parlance and he’s scared to death in the best and most understandable of possible ways.

Then Rodolfo Castro got a hit (I love that guy) not a lot of that kind of Pirate thing was happening on this night so I had moment for a hard clap clap into my glove and a holler of “you go Rodolfo!!” and before you ask, yes, I brought my glove as I have for every game since I was 13 at that double header with Dad and Granddad, where I met John Candelaria courtesy of a homemade Candelaria jersey and a chance bumping into his suddenly excited and beaming parents as we were heading out of the ballpark, mom spinning me around to show her husband the back of this “jersey” maybe realizing for the first time what their son had achieved to reach all the way to the suburbs and to some 13 year old kid who spent his hard pedaled earned bicycle paperboy money to fashion a sort of jersey of his favorite ballplayer and then head to a game, two of them (what a bonus that was) with a Dad and a Grandad, to show it off with glove in hand.

You’re never too old to bring your glove to the ballpark.

Just like then I still dream of foul balls.

/////////////////////////////////////

After so many years of not doing this and so many years of not caring to do things LIKE this, I am famously anti-social in my own small circle these days, I finally let myself go a little bit. Train rides on the way down along a gloriously sun glinted Hudson River next to happy laughing college girls with some adventure waiting in the City while sportin’ the coolest of old school kicks, smiling couples being smiling couples with their own anticipated adventures in store and babies singing baby “La-La” songs, singing singing singing and bouncing at the front of the car with an on top of the world Mom & Dad showing bouncing baby off to strangers on a train but not in a dark mystery way, maneuverings through people in a packed stadium playing my soon 100 loss boys no less, as, of course, a playoff push will fill the seats no matter the competition, a multitude of too many folks almost but I endured for baseball’s sake, a ballpark’s sake, ordering a couple of beers from a tiny woman behind fried heat lamped somethings and beer taps who noted my birthday when I jokingly said my license read “Old dude” and admonished me ever not so slightly for her and I sharing a birth year “Hey, we’re not old!” with a pointed wagging finger.

I realized then that, though I don’t really do people anymore, they still have their moments.

That small woman gave me a fist bump before I left to go back to my seat, but with a smiling glare, a double fist bump as a matter of fact to our shared 1964 and the not feeling old, I mean, you can’t be old at a ballgame now can ya?

/////////////////////////////////////

I didn’t completely talk Jeremiah off the ledge of thinking too much of the wonderful and the frightening and the down the roads but maybe I at least made him back up a bit on it, he knowing that I’m not totally unfamiliar with fresh off the line new baby models replete with working horns and racing stripes after having spent the first 5 years of my nephew Jake’s squirmy, screamy, grabby, happy, poopy existence in a house shared by his Mom (my sis), myself and my brother, the two of us playing Daddy-Uncles and I followed that almost immediately with another youngin’ just in the next stage of youngin’ evolution from 6 into the early teens with Jagger (The JG) and his Mom and I wrote of him and all of us quite often.

I was probably not really any good at this as I look back now, look back a long way as both Jake and JG are in their beginning 20’s, or maybe I was Ok for my short stints as both of them are really fine, smart and most importantly just good young men, but I did at least earn a couple of chops along the way, and an I love you and an I hate you and an I love you or two, so maybe enough cred there to at least get JJ’s toes off their curl on the edge.

I know it sounds silly, but baseball did this, it’s where this best of friendships really first began and this weekend it got me and him in a place where we could talk after too long a time as we always could and did at the ballpark, in a dog grilling parking lot, in a couple of really nice seats with cool strangers as momentary companions and especially on the ride “home” to a train station and a sit down at a little pub in Hastings waiting for the 12:27am, it got me out of the house, finally, reminded me of those multitudes at a ballpark, of life, of a Mom and Dad worthy of trophies and an extra ice cream they didn’t get to enjoy at the game after spreading it around, but maybe a reach into the freezer at home after a gang finished and in bed and toes then met on a couch sharing a spoon and a tired knowing nod to a night well done and spent.

You’ll be good JJ. I have absolutely no worries there, you’ll be really good. And maybe in a couple of years we’ll go back and do this again, you and I and Britney and a newbie, Grant, a name I’ve been told to expect and you’ll be the guy who catches a foul ball with a baby in his arms and makes the big screen in center field for replays and the best of “Awwwww” moments from a packed ballpark.

Thanks for the start Grandad, and I did do some bowling on a High School club team just to let you know, not very well, but I did.

Late Bloomin’

by Stephen J Frankenberry1 Comment on Late Bloomin’

Some late blooming somethings here at this House on a Hill that have sort of snuck up on me, still, pictures, maybe hoping of someone offering to tell me what they are, who they is, some striking heck’a pretty blooming vibrant things, new found gold not for fight or claims to stake but for bees and cats and the slightest of breeze, and maybe even other bees in white so I can know their name(s) … each one for right introductions.

Ballpark

by Stephen J Frankenberry2 Comments on Ballpark

So a few nights ago I watched the best ballgame of the season, for me at least, with my MLBTV subscription, something I’ve paid for every year since its inception to catch my beloved out of town boys, even when I couldn’t afford it, which has been often. Now as a Pittsburgh Pirates fan it’s not really all that difficult to differentiate between the other “best ballgames of the season” that have come before this one as, well, like I said, I’m a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, there haven’t really been a whole lot to choose from, not a lot to “Raise the Jolly Roger” to in too infrequent texts to my Sis these days, after a win, our thing, even the not so memorable ones, any victory, especially since the All Star Break this year can be considered memorable I guess.  

There was the sweeping the Dodgers in LA for the first time since someone from a Darwin text first started grabbing sticks and hitting stones with them (though probably more just simple defense from the stones being thrown AT ’em from others in a Darwin text – no game yet, not quite, but maybe thoughts a bubblin’). We split a couple with the dreaded hated Yankees earlier in the season when they came down from the Death Star to visit Pittsburgh and get some thick breaded sandwiches with thicker fries and coleslaw on ‘em ‘n that and we did get back at and have a sweep of the Brewers who have owned us in a we’ll wear leather and spikes and hold a whip, you put on this mask kind of way for the longest of time.

But there hasn’t really been any other singular game moment to crow about, or to parrot Pirate squalk “aarrgghh matey’s” about from my shoulder until this one, just the waiting for late August and September to finally see some of the young Bucco’s of the future on a rebuilding team finally being allowed to play regularly, after dead weight DFA off the heap claim roster fills have finally been cast off, and show me some hope that I haven’t felt in , well longer than a while.

That waiting paid off with this “best game”, a combined one hit shutout highlighted by an electric kid’s nasty stuff, Luis Ortiz in his MLB debut. This game was hope. A long suffering Pirate fans hope.

/////////////////////////////////////

Now I’ve been a Pirate fan since I first discovered baseball, right around the time when they won only their second of three World Series since the cold war, only two in my lifetime and I was watching this game with two different pairs of glasses, one for the close of the Tablet sitting to my left with the game and the other for distance of the TV for the almost good bad bad good movie I was also watching, that needing two pairs of glasses old now lifetime long.

It was Granddad who turned me black and gold when Grandma would allow me, and only me for some reason, to sit with him on some weekends when we would go to visit the two of them and the aunts and the uncles and the cousins. I’ve often joked that watching sports with Granddad back then (sometimes baseball or often bowling) usually with me sitting cross legged on the floor and he in his big chair in the big living room of a big old dusty breezy house was where I learned how to curse and throw shit at the tube, maybe consider a bowling team when I got to High School and be a Pittsburgh fan. Some Steelers yes, but most importantly the Pirates.

/////////////////////////////////////

Went down to Citifield over the weekend for the first time since 2018, a yearly pilgrimage for a best of best friend of mine and I, Jeremiah, starting back In 2005 but paused in 2019 for what, I don’t remember what, though it must have been a something to cause a pause in a 14 year run and then came the the. Pandemics and useless 60 game seasons that I didn’t’ watch a single inning of for the first and only time in my long baseball fan life and then another year where I wasn’t ready just yet for not quite done pandemic crowds.  

/////////////////////////////////////

We thought, back in ’05, a trip down to Queens and still Shea Stadium back then, would be a cool get together moment for a new morning show crew and we eventually played fetching verbal tag with a group of pretty young women, out on their own cool get together moment in seats so far up and away from the field that we were like in baseball clouds. We knew there was a game going on somewhere down on earth, in between the lines, but we played this fetching instead and had such a time. Couldn’t even tell you who won that one. Baseball has that way, a way to make you sort of forget things even though you knew, a mine vs yours, or a mine vs them, as long as it was being played somewhere near you and you were there meandering, meandering with it as baseball wondrously meanders and you talking and laughing and paying attention on occasion.

But this past weekend Jeremiah and I caught a game again, finally, after these too many years, ones that sneak up on you and have you think of windows closing more than you’d like, years, and “breaking out the fancy chairs tonight” he said in his driveway with a lugging to the car fancy parking lot chairs for lounging pre-game dog grilling and sauerkraut heatin’ in a cat’s water bowl (hey, it’s what I had on hand. It worked for the warmin’ is enough as a good baseball hot dog don’t do cold sauerkraut) and upscale beers and spicy mustard awaitin’ some hot dog buns. And not just regular hot dog buns on this night mind you, no siree Bucco, but brioche hot dog buns, this was an occasion after all, you break out the brioche for an occasion I guess. I know. Nice touch right? I thought the same even though I have no idea what brioche is, other than it just ain’t some regular white bread fashioned as a hot dog bun. It’s fancy sounding where hot dogs ain’t fancy.

/////////////////////////////////////

Everyone was asleep, or close to it as I grabbed that one seat at the back of the car, at now a quite happily baseball night spent almost 1 in the morning that allows you to ride WITH the train and with no one behind you, not ride backwards as some do. I don’t know how people sit in the “backwards” seats as traveling with your back to wherever you’re going is just so unsettling to me. Maybe if you’re with company, for the distraction Ok, but if you’re not with company as is always the case for me on nights like this you just grab that one seat, at the back, that one first step in if you can, that one one that points you forward.

/////////////////////////////////////

Next to Jeremiah and I tonight was a family. A Mom and a Dad and five kids, all tremendously good looking, cover of a family magazine good looking, almost unfairly so to all the regular ol’ families out there, Mom and Dad troopers that took the gang out for a night at the ballpark all around 7 or 8 or younger, and did it so well that I wanted to go back to a trophy store that JJ and I had passed on our way and buy them just one javelin lookin’ throwing gold idol prize or something similar and say well done, maybe even engrave their names that I didn’t know on it. I wanted to buy them their own ice cream too that I watched dad so gingerly walk with, balancing five, while I was in the concourse on line for the loo. What a team these two were with this five. And that would be the emphasis of the story in that family magazine they were featured on the cover of by the way “How to balance five children at a ballgame and look good and accomplished while you’re doing it”.

Jeremiah noted to me that he didn’t think he could do that, have so many kids, his thoughts equally distracted and focused by the fact that he is in the family way, he and his better half, Brittany, just a few month to go now, or 12 or so weeks in babyness parlance and he’s scared to death in the best and most understandable of possible ways.

Then Rodolfo Castro got a hit (I love that guy) not a lot of that kind of Pirate thing was happening on this night so I had moment for a hard clap clap into my glove and a holler of “you go Rodolfo!!” and before you ask, yes, I brought my glove as I have for every game since I was 13 at that double header with Dad and Granddad, where I met John Candelaria courtesy of a homemade Candelaria jersey and a chance bumping into his suddenly excited and beaming parents as we were heading out of the ballpark, mom spinning me around to show her husband the back of this “jersey” maybe realizing for the first time what their son had achieved to reach all the way to the suburbs and to some 13 year old kid who spent his hard pedaled earned bicycle paperboy money to fashion a sort of jersey of his favorite ballplayer and then head to a game, two of them (what a bonus that was) with a Dad and a Grandad, to show it off with glove in hand.

You’re never too old to bring your glove to the ballpark.

Just like then I still dream of foul balls.

/////////////////////////////////////

After so many years of not doing this and so many years of not caring to do things LIKE this, I am famously anti-social in my own small circle these days, I finally let myself go a little bit. Train rides on the way down along a gloriously sun glinted Hudson River next to happy laughing college girls with some adventure waiting in the City while sportin’ the coolest of old school kicks, smiling couples being smiling couples with their own anticipated adventures in store and babies singing baby “La-La” songs, singing singing singing and bouncing at the front of the car with an on top of the world Mom & Dad showing bouncing baby off to strangers on a train but not in a dark mystery way, maneuverings through people in a packed stadium playing my soon 100 loss boys no less, as, of course, a playoff push will fill the seats no matter the competition, a multitude of too many folks almost but I endured for baseball’s sake, a ballpark’s sake, ordering a couple of beers from a tiny woman behind fried heat lamped somethings and beer taps who noted my birthday when I jokingly said my license read “Old dude” and admonished me ever not so slightly for her and I sharing a birth year “Hey, we’re not old!” with a pointed wagging finger.

I realized then that, though I don’t really do people anymore, they still have their moments.

That small woman gave me a fist bump before I left to go back to my seat, but with a smiling glare, a double fist bump as a matter of fact to our shared 1964 and the not feeling old, I mean, you can’t be old at a ballgame now can ya?

/////////////////////////////////////

I didn’t completely talk Jeremiah off the ledge of thinking too much of the wonderful and the frightening and the down the roads but maybe I at least made him back up a bit on it, he knowing that I’m not totally unfamiliar with fresh off the line new baby models replete with working horns and racing stripes after having spent the first 5 years of my nephew Jake’s squirmy, screamy, grabby, happy, poopy existence in a house shared by his Mom (my sis), myself and my brother, the two of us playing Daddy-Uncles and I followed that almost immediately with another youngin’ just in the next stage of youngin’ evolution from 6 into the early teens with Jagger (The JG) and his Mom and I wrote of him and all of us quite often.

I was probably not really any good at this as I look back now, look back a long way as both Jake and JG are in their beginning 20’s, or maybe I was Ok for my short stints as both of them are really fine, smart and most importantly just good young men, but I did at least earn a couple of chops along the way, and an I love you and an I hate you and an I love you or two, so maybe enough cred there to at least get JJ’s toes off their curl on the edge.

I know it sounds silly, but baseball did this, it’s where this best of friendships really first began and this weekend it got me and him in a place where we could talk after too long a time as we always could and did at the ballpark, in a dog grilling parking lot, in a couple of really nice seats with cool strangers as momentary companions and especially on the ride “home” to a train station and a sit down at a little pub in Hastings waiting for the 12:27am, it got me out of the house, finally, reminded me of those multitudes at a ballpark, of life, of a Mom and Dad worthy of trophies and an extra ice cream they didn’t get to enjoy at the game after spreading it around, but maybe a reach into the freezer at home after a gang finished and in bed and toes then met on a couch sharing a spoon and a tired knowing nod to a night well done and spent.

You’ll be good JJ. I have absolutely no worries there, you’ll be really good. And maybe in a couple of years we’ll go back and do this again, you and I and Brittany and a newbie, Grant, a name I’ve been told to expect and you’ll be the guy who catches a foul ball with a baby in his arms and makes the big screen in center field for replays and the best of “Awwwww” moments from a packed ballpark.

Thanks for the start Grandad, and I did do some bowling on a High School club team just to let you know, not very well, but I did.

Tales From the Dim – Steve’s Wallet

by Stephen J FrankenberryLeave a Comment on Tales From the Dim – Steve’s Wallet

So just after Christmas last year, with a couple of gift cards in hand, I finally bought myself a new wallet before the old one crumbled into leather dust or, worse, became akin to my dad’s wallet held together with duct tape, one of those big red rubber bands that used to wrap Sunday newspapers when there WERE Sunday newspapers and I wasn’t dating myself and the sad knowledge that if it was going to fall apart it certainly wasn’t going to be from bulging with too much cash, just credit cards and the debt in them.

When I finally cleared out all that was in it and started organizing everything into the new wallet (and after an almost audible old wallet last breath sigh as it was finally allowed to give up the ghost) I noted I had a couple of plastic window slots one of which folded out. With my license already covered in a different window slot (it’s right here officer, not the best pic mind you but cool wallet right? You’re pulling out your cuffs why?) I thought the fold out plastic window would be perfect for my Price Chopper card, my grocery store of choice, to make it an easy pull out for the scanning as I’m there quite often.

For almost the last year then I’ve been pulling this card out of its new wallet fold out plastic window slot, even tearing it a little (this is how a wallet’s demise starts) and presenting it to the cashier and then putting it back.

Then this morning, on a stop for a few things for my lunch I pulled out the card again from its new wallet fold out plastic window slot at the checkout and presented it again for a scan when the latest cashier said to me “Why don’t you just leave it in there but with the back of the card barcode facing out instead of the front of the card like you had it? Then you don’t have to keep pulling the card out to turn it over to get scanned? Just flip open your wallet?”

I stood there for a moment, speechless, stunned, dumbfounded, even almost a little frightened, mind blown with that ‘whoosh’ both hands away from head dramatics …

… fucking genius.

(stay tuned for more Tales From the Dim … new adventures in dim always waiting right around the next Frankenberry corner)

So Then Sunday: Goin’ To The Schoolboard (song)

by Stephen J FrankenberryLeave a Comment on So Then Sunday: Goin’ To The Schoolboard (song)

So Then Sunday. From last December. “Goin’ To The Schoolboard” to The Dixie Cups “Chapel Of Love”. Something of wannabe book bans and soon fires.

Goin’ to the school board

And we’re gonna get carried away

With banning books now that aren’t

In a real right straight white safe way

Gee we’ve got some issues with works

That don’t teach imagined virtues of a

Re-visioned whitewashing day

— 

GOP’s here

To set message clear

Ignorance sings

Of white patriot things

— 

This country was found

On exceptional ground

And we’ll never teach real truth anymore

—


Because we’re

Goin’ to the school board

And we’re gonna get carried away

Might throw books on a pyre now

And dance ‘round with a hey hidey hey how

— 

Gee you don’t need a degree

From any liberal leftist factory   

Goin’ to create history  

—

Whistles will blow

And dogs will crow

We’ll set it right

No CRT will be in sight

We’ll ignore slave-ery

Even though it’s part of the core  

And strike systemic from vocabulary’s lore

— 

Because we’re

Goin’ to the school board

And we’re gonna get carried away

Snowflake about the sensibilities

Of our children’s tender feelings

Gee we don’t know the problem

Of new curriculum’s whitey outcome

—

Goin’ to the school board of dumb

(yeah-a-yeah-a-yeahy-yeah)

—

Goin’ to the school board of dumb  

(yeah-yeah-yeah-yeahy-yeah)

—
Just mind your place and we’ll all get along

The Survey Grain Of Salt (from 2010)

by Stephen J Frankenberry2 Comments on The Survey Grain Of Salt (from 2010)

Threw a dart at a time dartboard of my page tonight. A scroll down and a throw … from 2010 then it is …

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

September 15, 2010

I came across a survey earlier this week about mom’s and how they prepare school lunches for their small people. Quite frankly I was surprised and even dismayed. You would think that Mom’s, being Mom’s an all, would be forthright and honest when it comes to a survey. It’s a survey, a poll of a sampling. Isn’t it supposed to be a true barometer of what the larger population thinks? They’re scientific and precise right? There can’t be any variables to take into account can there? I mean Pew surveys and others such like them are always supplying us with the real pulse of the people correct? Without them how would we, say, know how many people are actually texting while driving and applying makeup or eating home cooked meals not takeout, or voting for dick and not jane or jane and not dick? We wouldn’t.

No, we rely on them to tell us where we stand on every issue under the sun from social to political to economic and, most importantly, as to whether we wear boxers or briefs or whether time is relative or something we just dismiss as a mere annoyance hoping our jeans don’t wear. We have to know if we are running with the pack or blacksheeping ourselves right out of the fold don’t we?

So the dismay I felt at reading this poll I mentioned earlier came from the true dishonesty of it.

Mom Central Consulting surveyed 13-hundred mothers to find out how they shop for their kids’ lunches.

Findings:
–90 percent of them worry about what to put in the lunchbox
–86 percent plan out their children’s meals in advance to ensure they eat a variety of healthy foods
–74 percent select items based on their nutritional value
–72 percent buy items with higher nutritional value even if it means spending more money
–79 percent opt for whole grain or enriched bread instead of white bread
–82 percent regularly pack fruit in their children’s lunchboxes
–76 percent opt for portion-controlled snack packs

Where was the 35% of them that checked the expiration date on the meat for that sandwich on stale bread and decided it was close enough?
Or, the 22% who went rummaging, last minute, through their purse for $3 for the school lunch, sometimes even secretly finding the money in the stash of ‘grandma’ dollars in their kid’s sock drawer?
Or, the 75% who hastily grabbed whatever looked edible and threw it in a lunch box with a Mountain Dew and some cookies just before the bus arrived?
Or what about the 12% that thought the kids ate enough at dinner the night before to make it through tomorrow’s lunch break?

The only one that seemed honest was the first on the list about mom’s worrying about what to put in the lunchbox. Well of course! My own lunch box has whatever wasn’t talking to me or crumbling into disappearance but I worry about it.

No, I think in light of Mom’s trying to paint themselves in a better light, we have to take surveys with a grain. A Gibraltar size one. So the next time you see, for instance, a survey that says Sarah Palin is really in tune with the heartbeat of the American people and you actually take it to be truth hit yourself with a brick and then, well just hit yourself with a brick. Then keep in mind that we are hardly ever told the true context of the survey and the responders: who exactly (were they escaped mental patients?), what (are they financially sound or just like the rest of us?), where (online, in the mail, at a mall, at a prison?), why (is it a corporate behemoth trying to justify bleeding us dry?) when (in the middle of a shootout after they had finally been caught?).

They are indeed only samplings and don’t necessarily speak for the larger public. Hell right now, however much I’d like to be in line with some of those wishfull thinking answer percentiles from the Mom lunchbox survey, I’m trying to find something for Jagger’s lunch tomorrow that isn’t moving. I didn’t get to the store and my foot itches. How many of those survey answers took that variable into account?

Note: just kidding on the searching for something that isn’t moving. He has a healthy sandwich and sides in his lunch box for tomorrow and I threw in a Redbull and a 5 hour energy drink just in case he gets drowsy late in the afternoon.

Note 2: just kidding again. I didn’t get to the store for any Redbull or 5 hour energy’s yesterday.

-fb

Note 3: my foot really does itch by the way

Share this:

Tyranny Theatre (song)

by Stephen J FrankenberryLeave a Comment on Tyranny Theatre (song)

Alright, a new experiment, and a bit of current anger’s fun. Came across a bed at our production site recently that had a really cool sound and beginning and some nice changes within and I thought well, how abouts working some lyrics to it as I have done a couple of times with my “She Said (Old T-Shirt)” song and “We Let Billy Drive the Car”.

No existing song for parody, just a production bed. Though this isn’t lyrics of a me thing or a fun story to be told, this keeps in the vein of the current nightmare, but still a trying to keep within the tune. I guess these production site music beds can sometimes serve as my “band” huh?

So here’s this.

Are we viewing a sur-real horror

Or just watching angry parody  

Only funny in horrific ways

Tickets bought a play called tyranny

Our seats quick-sand of ignorance  

Till lifelines thrown early history   

But still grasp false reality

—

Theatre  

—

Now don’t bother me now, Mom I’m only dancing

In the aisles I’m prancin’

But not in gay way I’m singin’

Bout what end days are bringin’

Performance art playing out at schoolboards

Angry small minds at chalkboards

Who chalk up hate in loud chords

—

We sing of Devil’s discord

Threatens normal we should afford  

Only to those who live accord

Cause if you can’t you’re not on board

That train rolling over those told to

To straighten up and fly right

And only to the right, right

No other way to fly right?

Right?   

—

It’s time now to get on page

To help us harken back to better days

Where men were men and women knew their place

And where the lessers really had no face

And history didn’t happen as they say

No it was wondrous patriotic way

And the whitey’s always saved the day

With better of country their only play

—

“Hey now, that sounds like Jazz …  we don’t do jazz here … there’ll be no jazz … though, we could appropriate it … whattya think Cletus, we could appropriate it right? It’s an idea … and hey, whoa, hold on, that sounds almost a little funky … we don’t do funk here … there’ll be no funk here …  though we could appropriate this too and probably even dance to it with wide lapels and wider pant legs in an embarrassing way and pay lip service to the lesser players … and don’t even go there on blues if that’s next by the way … though we could appropriate that too  … but you know what? we got country, good ol’ American country is ours … top Lee Greenwood and Charlie Pride and Toby Keith if you can… hey, why you laughin’?”

—

We know now, we know the only right right

We’ll push till you surrender fight  

Tyranny now in plain sight

Though we’re too dumb to see plight

Instead looking at it as insight

To future where we new white

Will own again some of you then

Own all your rights superior

Restrict your vote and then some 

Or change votes depending on outcome

Sham democracy gets its run

Till realize too your rights are gone

Tyrants don’t care of your song

Tyranny theatre ticket bought

Backstage phone it sounds now

ring ring

Hello, it’s me great leader

Right? 

Book

by Stephen J FrankenberryLeave a Comment on Book

Thinking knowing only of an extra day I went in search at 3am. It’s just one day I thought on a holiday, hell, you take those unintentionally or intentionally so often Steve they should be par. But there’s something different about shared extra days and plans that might afford time.. I thought to unbox some cat storage window bin sleep spots this weekend with that extra in mind, so many years later and what was in them knowing I had the time at 3am to stray off the usual course of a usual weekend’s days/nights. The one extra day/night for the searching being huge. Hello two Saturdays.

/////////////////////

Jesus, I really gotta pare this shit down, so many books, so many books I’ve held onto as if it were a sacrilege to let them go. It’s heavy and heavier still as plenty of them might be considered questionable these days, according to small minds at smaller minded schoolboards who have never read Fahrenheit 451, damn those classics.

I was in search of something specific, something I wouldn’t find, but instead found something more.

I found your Bible Dad, replete with masking tape to hold it together after so many opens and page turns and devotions, because sometimes masking tape, as paper glue flimsy as it is, a tenuous easily dried and cracked thing, still holds sitting under cat’s asses in storage bin windows and found pictures of Beck and Nick and Ma and Me, Ma in her latest at the time coolest of doo. Mom could easily put any girlfriend wannabe to shame in her cool. I found pictures of Merlin and Benny from a time dearly missed in some of course ways, cats yes, Danielle almost, in Dayton OH, a close to 40 year old Wayneburg College recruitment pamphlet, there were programs from college plays, from Brigadoon to By Jupiter to Our Town where I sometimes played the lead, found children’s artwork thanking us for a show, though I don’t remember such, and they’re all old enough now to have had their own kids, maybe even grandkids, though I applaud what we apparently did in our reaching out of the arts. There WAS a time GOP. Fuck you by the way.

I found memory.

You didn’t make any notations Dad as you should have, in that unmistakable script pen of yours, though you had your placeholders, as I wouldn’t have made any notes either if I had had such a book I guess, it was just yours, it didn’t need any extra notes from you on salvation. Notations for what? What would they say? What would they do other than lead to frustration of a world not on what you thought should be page? Would they sway us with an extra Joe pen scripted word? No, it wasn’t intended for anyone other than you and I think you came about that, you had heart and compassion for other people’s differings. That’s why there is a sudden miss Dad as I uncover cat spots and bibles after so many years of carting things from place to place, and I uncover that you made no notations, you didn’t see this future where page could be forced. You were better than that. It wasn’t meant for anyone else other than you in the daily and in the end, a lesson not learned by the current rabble who wish themselves more than rabble, wish themselves to rabble you with their own notations and interpretations that judge you and want make decisions for you because of, it was just yours held together with a dried cracked masking tape that’s not supposed to hold but still does, protected by cats all these years later through all the moves, it was just yours.

Will I read it, imagine your comfort of it? No, probably not, though maybe, though maybe I already have noting no notations but words bleeding in, maybe for Dad future reference, stories to be told, placeholders a start, but it was a just yours and it framed you.

I have my own things Dad, my own frame, as you always knew, minus the slight disappointment, not of a me, you were always so almost gushingly proud, but of my different frame, my own take on the world, my own books my my own writings my own looks or just thoughts that are really heavy Dad, so fucking heavy as I look at them, around them actually, fearfully sometimes, as straight up looks are a place you don’t wanna go, unlike you in this masking tape wrapped comfort of yours. You were steadfast in your faith and I’m envious of that. Always envious.

There is a miss today Dad.