Chasing the blackness
The mist and fog
Glow violet
Then burn golden
With anticipation
Of the new day
Today as I headed in to work, I walked behind a a beautiful young woman for a block or so. The scent of her perfume mingled with cigarette smoke in a decadent mix that completely scattered my thoughts and forced a coffee run to help me get down to work. I'm not a smoker, but I have smoked at times in the past. As I stirred my coffee, I mused for a bit on how powerful smoke is and how different smoke scents have their own places in my life.
If I am indoors, cigarette smoke is not something I welcome. It makes me cough and my eyes burn and I hate the smell on my clothes later. As a New Jerseyan, I was shocked to walk into a suburban Philadelphia restaurant/bar a few weeks back to be confronted with a stinking wall of haze from the 3 bar patrons cheerlessly puffing away. I had completely forgotten that there are exemptions to the smoking ban. I walked out.
But, as noted earlier, my relationship with cigarette smoke is more complex than that. There is something about very intriguing about a woman who smokes. I guess it's and example of the age-old truth of being drawn to a bad girl. (Right up until you kiss her after she's been smoking and then ... blech!) I have picked up a few packs of cigarettes in stressful times and have been calmed by the ritual of smoking, but ultimately I hate that I know how bad it is for me and I throw the rest of the pack away.
Cigar smoke I associate with my Grandpa Neely and golf and winning basketball games. It's a full, mature smoke that smells of accomplishment and relaxation. In my 20s and early 30s, I smoked a couple of cigars a month, sometimes with Scotch, sometimes with brandy, sometimes with fine Bourbon, but always with good friends. I always woke up with the feeling that something had died in my mouth, but until my kids came along, it didn't stop me from firing up another a few weeks later!
There are other powerful kinds of smoke. Nothing says 'suburban summer Saturday afternoon' like the smoke from a charcoal grill. Rarely smelled these days, I occasionally catch the scent of a good burger grilling the old-fashioned way and I am brought back to thoughts of my father obsessively fanning the Kingsford briquets in his Weber kettle, looking for the right mix of orange glow and gray ash before dropping the food on the grill. While the smell of a streak grilling over a gas grill is just fine, the missing element of the charcoal smoke makes it just a bit less interesting, no matter how perfectly the steak is cooked.
Speaking of food and smoke, I am not really a big fan except for the aforementioned backyard grill. Smoked food (and beers or cocktails for that matter) always seems to be just a bit over the top with the smoke, hiding anything else going on in the dish. Add to this the offense of 'liquid smoke,' and I think I'm just going to pass most of the time.
Even after all these years, when I catch a whiff of pot smoke, I still think back to college. The House 6 and 7 guys trying to keep the party to a 'dull roar,' the elicit smoke wafting though the house as Van Morrison and the Grateful Dead boomed. It's far more prevalent now that it used to be. It's no longer unusual to smell pot smoke at a Phils game, and it's darn near unusual to be at a concert where someone doesn't fire up a joint. Heck, it's darn near legal in some states!
The exhaust smoke from a diesel engine reminds me how hard work and life can be sometimes. Whether it's a tractor with its PTO engaged and driving a pump, a trackhoe digging a ditch, a SEPTA bus pulling away from a line of commuters or a generator keeping the air compressors running and work lights on, diesel smoke always makes me feel tired and gritty and desperate to get home and put my feet up.
I lived in a house in the woods for a few years and I swear I can smell the acrid smoke of a forest fire or controlled burn from 15 miles away. Far nastier than the smoke from firewood, this stuff seems to carry with it the fear of everyone in its path. I never had to evacuate, but I know a few folks who have and even the relatively benign amount of smoke generated by the controlled burning of underbrush makes me cringe a bit.
The smell of firewood smoke in the outdoor air is a totally different thing. Woodsmoke always makes me think of family and home and all of the good, conservative values things that get Republicans elected. Never mind that I didn't have a fireplace growing up and don't have one now; this is a powerful scent and evokes these feelings instantly. Oddly, the scent of woodsmoke on my clothes just makes me think of camping and makes me want a shower.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled day. I'll bet you think the next time you smell some kind of smoke!
In honor of National Read in the Bathtub Day (I looked for the only known picture of me in a bathtub, but alas, was unable to find it) we've got a book review for you today. I'm sure you're way more interested in the review than the photo anyway.
'Locked On' is the latest in the Jack Ryan lineage, and includes all of the old gang of Jack Clark, Ding Chavez form the early days as well as newer faces like Jack Ryan, Jr. and cousin Dominic Caruso. The elder Ryan is pursuing a White House bid against a liberal who has gutted the CIA and the younger Ryan and the rest of the gang are running a privately-backed paramilitary group (The Campus) in Northern Virginia.
I have read all of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books and a few of his others, including Red Storm Rising, one of my favorites of all time, but this might be my last one. Written 'with' Mark Greaney, this book has three main plots that converge so that Ryan's buddies can save the world. Each has its own impossible elements and combine in the end for a climax that would make Hollywood's worst action movie directors wince in incredulity.
In the Plot One, a shadowy former Warsaw Pact informer turned liberal American billionaire (A thinly-disguised George Soros) seeks to scuttle Ryan's presidential bid. The plot involves the world's most wanted terrorist, a liberal civil rights group, a deputy director of the CIA, a convenient French detective with a million amazing contacts, a former Soviet spy and his Russian diplomat son. And a few dozen other characters with connections and motives that are incomprehensible. Executed properly, there is enough in just this plot for an entire novel. Sadly, it's executed horribly.
In Plot Two, we've got the insane Pakistani general trying to overthrow his own government by creating a conflict between India and Pakistan. This guy has multiple identities and has been causing trouble in the Indian sub-continent for a decade but no one knew who he was until Jack Ryan, Jr. got on the case! Thankfully Jr. and Cuz zip over to Pakistan to defuse a stolen nuke, kill the plotting general and head back in time for the Inauguration.
And in the Plot Three, a Russian billionaire space tycoon finds out he really isn't Russian, but actually a Muslim, and buys an extra stolen nuke from the Pakistani general to take his revenge on Moscow and force the release of a separatist military leader. Of course, he has 3 former Soviet ICBMs at his disposal and manages to take control of an entire Russian space launch facility to carry out his dastardly plan.
The Rainbow organization of Clancy's middle period has been gutted by lazy, left-leaning Eurotrash governments and can't handle the task of saving the day. Thankfully, a 64-year old John Clark is fresh off being shot and tortured at the hands of the Russian diplomat from Plot One and is available to train up his old Rainbow organization overnight. With the help of his trusty sidekick Ding, who is now also a super-sniper and helo jumper, the hostage crisis is averted and with only minor damage to Moscow, the terrorist plot is foiled.
Even at 853 pages, there are glaring plot holes that you can drive a truck through. Ryan, Sr. is running for president as a far more conservative hawk than the moderate who resigned the presidency four years before. We never hear the reason for his resignation or the startling run to the right. A love interest, Megan Kraft, is introduced to Jr. by old family friend and super spy runner Mary Pat Foley. We have a few pages of her Kraft's inner thoughts and misgivings about the CIA early in the book. By the end of the book, those inner thoughts have apparently been forgotten by the authors and Kraft is a duplicitous agent trying to dig up dirt on the Ryans for the CIA.
There are a few saving graces for the book. It's pretty well written, if not by Clancy himself, then by barely-credited ghostwriter Mark Greaney. The action is well-written and paced and the switches from plot to plot are solidly done. As is true with any Clancy book, the technical aspects are perfect. WIth a wide array of vintage and ultra-modern weaponry, the Jane's addicts will be very happy. There are also a million new technologies mentioned and used, showing someone is keeping up on what makes counter-terrorism work these days.
In the end though, this book is a mess. It's clearly designed as a pre-cursor book to a future Ryan, Sr. presidency book where all the world's evils with be righted with a super-robust CIA and techno-superior military. The three plots are just too over the top, the super-human characters to able to do just too much, the villains just too able to enmesh their own separate agendas to make this book remotely believable.
Sadly, I don't care where the series goes from here. It's been killed by lazy writing, a lack of editing, and obviously greedy publishing. It's a shame, because there is still some degree of interest left for me, especially in the Jack Ryan, Jr. character. But there's just too much other crap going on in the last few books to make me think the next one will be worth the time to read it.
Screw Worldless Wednesday for this week. I am in a rut. I seem to write a lot of the same things on here and i need to break out of that cycle. Sure, I write about my great kids and we all love that, but hearing how great my kid are gets boring even to me after a while.
I write about how things have changed in my life and how it's hard but I am coping with it. Yeah, everyone's life is hard, they just don't all have blogs where they whine about it every day. Seriously, some of the stuff I have written makes we want to listen to James Taylor, grab a bottle of Jack and stare morosely into space for a few days.
A lot of the stuff I have written since starting the blog back up in June have been the basic updates about life. Seriously, reading back, I can't believe several dozen people actually stop by to read this crap every day. I'm bored out of my skull reading it and it's my friggin' life!
Back in the day, I was way more wide-ranging. I did some news analysis, social commentary, sports discussion and reviews of books, restaurants and the like. Semi-interesting stuff that assumed that people cared what I thought.
You're all on notice. I'm going back that way. Yeah there will still be family updates and the like, but there's going to be a more concerted effort to actually write about stuff that matters outside my small circle of family and friends. Not really for more readers, either, but really because I am feeling the need to expand what I am thinking and writing about.
So read the blog if you want to, if not, you've got Facebook for the updates.
Every day there is less around to remind me of you
The ordinary things that summoned you to mind
Are used up or fall to pieces and are swept away
And your existence seems all that much harder to prove
I reach for the phone to call the familiar numbers
And realize I can’t. You are gone. The call won’t go through
How quickly it happened, a short slide and then
One day here, one day gone.
And I wonder, really wonder
What might have been
What will be
And if you’re doing ok
The cold bite of evening frost is made all the harder
By the unexpected warmth of the past day’s sun
The clear shine of the moon’s rise
Kills all beneath it and chases summer finally away
The cold ache of winter drives the promise of spring
To the cold edge of darkness
-- Chris Pesotski - November, 2011- Medford, NJ
There’s a flower called a Columbine that I love. It’s a green, leafy plant that puts out lots of blue flowers with white centers in May. The flowers are tough little things. They can handle wind and rain pretty well. It’s not everybody’s idea of the perfect flower, but I love them.
The house I always wanted is gone now, but I’ll always remember its peeling yellow paint and mis-matched red trim. The bad kitchen and the falling down shed. The wide screened porch was out of place in a fishing village, but it was a great place to sit and read and listen to the harbor sounds. The front yard was swampy and rocks filled the back yard, but there was peace in that house for me.
I don’t know many people who like the smell of low tide, but it has always been one of my favorite things. It is the beginning and the end, life and death. Some how I find all of nature present it that one scent. I’ll drive miles and miles to sit at low tide and have the wind blow in my face. It’s about the most perfect that things can be.
There is a moment of dizziness when you have pushed yourself as far as you can go and you must pause to consider if this is it or if more is possible. Sometimes it comes on the basketball court, other times sitting at a computer keyboard, often just between two people. As your heart races and your chest heaves, your mind reels and you see he expanse of all that is and can be. It’s a moment of perfection. The infinite is possible in that moment, but the abyss yawns as well. The tension in that choice is life and life is beautiful.
-- I wrote this in April, 2004. I recently found it while cleaning up my hard drive and thought its sentiments were worth sharing.
The questions have been coming in greater frequency as the summer winds down. Friends and readers, well meaning but curious. Everyone puts it a bit differently, but the gist is the same. The basic approach: "Has the blog gone dark?" Or the complimentary: "I really miss your writing. I hope you start again soon." The prodding: "The little mobile updates aren't enough."Finally the general concern: "is everything ok?"
It's all very flattering, and you've got to have a bit of an ego to have a personal website and expect folks to read about you and your misadventures, the accomplishments of kids they don't know and reviews of restaurants far from where they live. I'll admit the ego is here. The desire to write just hasn't been.
Even before this summer I had been having somewhat of a crisis of purpose about the blog. It had evolved from the daily series of quick hitting comments on the happenings of the Philadelphia region though a series of fits and starts into what can only really be classified as a 'Daddy Blog." Daddy blogs are great. I enjoy posting about my kids. I love bragging about how smart they are, how well John is pitching and how sweet Emma is. But the interest level outside my family is minimal and the genre doesn't provide much opportunity to stretch my writing skills.
So the blog was in a rut.
Hence the Summer of Benign Neglect.
Benign Neglect turned into flat out neglect as issues with my ex wife heated up, work was more demanding than ever and all of the million things that can get in the way of writing if you let them did just that. That's not the whole story, but it is enough of the story to give you a pretty full picture. The rest is just too boring to write about so I will skip it.
The good news is that I have been feeling the stirrings of wanting to write again, so we will see where this goes. I am not making any promises to myself that I will write every day, but I do feel like using computer to do more than play Facebook games for a while.
I appreciate very much the folks who checked in on me in my blogging absence. Things are fine. They really are. A summer vacation was in order. That's all. Thanks as always for reading.
I grew up a sports-crazed kid in Delaware County, where my grandfathers taught me all there was to know about the Phillies and Eagles and my dad talked about watching games at The Palestra in the heyday of the Big Five. It was a heady time to grow up, with every one of our teams in the hunt for the playoffs nearly every year of my childhood.
Some of the greatest sports voices of a generation were on the air then. Bill Campbell, Whitey, Harry Kalas and Merrill Reese's rich voices were the narrators of the great sports moments of my childhood, both broadcast live and mimicked from the backyard.
And the newspapers! I remember days when I had four papers to read, from the urbane Bulletin to the gritty Daily News to the local flavor of the Daily Times. It was the height of the sports columnist in Philadelphia as well, with names like Frank Dolson, Bill Lyon and Bill Conlin adding color to the players I idolized.
But in Delaware County, one guy was a legend above the rest. Greg Greenday was a local boy from St. James who lived in Brookhaven. Seemingly every day, he was filling in the detail from a Big Five game or the NFC East or setting the line for the epic high school football battles of my teenage years.
Greenday took me places I could never go, inside the Villanova locker room or to Amen corner at Augusta. He taught me, by example, that writing was a ticket that could take a kid from Delaware County just about anywhere he wanted to go.
Sadly, last weekend Greg Greenday's journey ended after 61 years.
When I was working at Widener and coaching at Cabrini, I got to know Greg as more of a person than a mythic figure. I found that the beautifully written game stories and columns came not just from immense talent, but also from a caring person with a diligent research ethic and vast memory that is so rare in journalism today.
Greg was one of the best questioners I ever saw work. He would pause after an answer, make his notes, think for a moment, carefully considering how to approach the next point. Greg was able to ask gently probing questions after losses that gave readers (and young coaches) insights into the game that would have been missed by most. He also brought great humor to an interview, laughing and joking, comfortable among men being boys.
We were always happy when we saw him at the table for a game. We knew we would get a great story the next day, sure. But we also knew he would have something positive to say, along with a funny inside story for us from somewhere he had been that week. He had a perfect sense of the moment, always able to put you at ease or to let you go when you had nothing more to say.
There were a lot of great things written about Greg Greenday this week. One thing that I think did not come through clearly enough is what a great writer he was. He wrote with elegance and poetry, with a style that let you know he loved every minute of what he was doing. But there was no self importance to the work. He had a reverence for the games and the people he covered and he did every thing possible to let you know that. He could cover the Eagles, sure, who couldn't? But Greg made BOWLING interesting enough for me to read his weekly column in the 80s.
When he left the Daily Times a few years ago, I tried to explain to Greg how important his writing had been to me as a young person. I stammered something about him making me want to be a writer. He brushed it off, saying that it was nothing, he was just having fun doing his job.
I am sure there were dozens of other kids like me, Greg. Thanks for writing sports like no one else did.
This is another piece that I recently got back to after a few years' hiatus. It's got some problems, but ultimately I like it. It was originally written in the first person, but I think I am going to try to do this thing in the third person. It's also got two different scenes and moods, but then so does life sometimes.
New writing after the jump - let me know what you think!
Continue reading "Just Another Night On the Road - Or Not" »
This is the first in my series of posts that are designed to get me writing something more than blog posts about my life on a more consistent basis. I wrote this piece a few years back, before my divorce was final and I moved to Moorestown. The exercises was designed to get me to know a bit more about my main character by writing about the place he lives.
What's amazing to me reading and editing this piece a few years later is how eerily similar some parts of it are to the life I have led for the last few years. There are major differences of course. My kids live with me and Tommy's don't. He's got leather furniture that I won't have until the kids are grown and gone. Someone cuts his grass for him. But still the early days of my bachelorhood and his life have some interesting correlations. The kitchen and the kids' rooms are near dead-on for what we've got here today.
Please read more after the jump and let me know what you think.
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