Like most customer-minded modern businesses, the waiting room has an array of amenities, including vending machines for packaged goodies (mainly candy bars and pastries), several urns of coffee in vacuum pump reservoirs in a choice of flavors, including decaf and hot water for tea.

There is another vending machine for cold beverages, including bottled water, the ubiquitous Dasani, which is, I believe, a brand of Coca-Cola and its bottlers.

There are three large-screen monitors, two above my head which I have to crane my neck to view. One of these features a live Instagram feed of marketing and promotional material related to the dealership itself. The other screen, silenced, seems mainly to be showing a succession of commercials from a variety of advertisers, including Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a variety of law firms of local provenance, etc. It does seem, now that I’ve watched for about 30 seconds, to be tuned to the local major affiliate for ABC. At this hour of the morning (it’s just about to turn 9:30) the show is “Live Kelly and Ryan,” which features the eponymous perpetually mirthful hosts speaking to a round robin of guests who are there to tout whatever it is they are touting, and to bathe in the prompted glorification from the studio audience, consisting of hooting, cheers, laughter, much clapping and general expressions of guiltless, non-judgmental approbation.

The screen, about four feet above my head and located about eight feet on center from my field of vision, repeats the content of the screen on the opposite wall across the waiting room, above the alcoved coffee station. There is a mate across the way as well to the screen with the live “house” feed of marketing information.

The screen near me is muted. The screen behind me provides the main sound track for the entirety of the waiting room, which has a capacity, I would approximate, of about four times as many individuals as now occupy the space. In addition to the endless stream of mirth and enthusiasm that issues from the programming stream of Kelly and Ryan’s production, including all commercial messages (all, in some way, hopeful and upbeat, even when advertising the services of advocates for personal justice when a malign social milieu has, unjustified and fearfully, targeted the consumer’s well-being for the usual mayhem-laden reasons: suits of various kinds, including divorce, malpractice, fraud, etc.).

However, in addition to this foundational layer of sound, there are additional ceaseless audible tracks from various sources located on vectors that are no doubt random and accidental, but which serve to present a current of perpetual counterpoint one to another, and challenging the listener, to exercise a significant effort of mindful aural focus. It’s the only way to distinguish one stream of audible content from another.

The effect is not unlike, say, a rough mix of the intended soundtrack of a more artfully crafted (and intended) work of cinematic presentation...very reminiscent, in fact, of a Robert Altman movie, any of the iconic ones, like MASH, Nashville, or a film from his oeuvre sometimes criticized for its extremity of sound effects, McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

The difference being, of course, that, successfully or not, Altman sought to encourage the willing viewer not only to focus, but sharpen their observational and analytical skills on the strength of more than mere visual cues and image manipulation, as one would expect from an art form like the cinema, and learn something about the cumulative and aggregate impact of a nexus of discrete and individualized coded aural content occurring stochastically in a suburban Toyota dealer showroom. Here in the specific waiting room of the Ardmore Toyota dealer’s service facility, the effect is to create, as stated, a cacophony.

The only aural signals that register and capture the attention of the listener, providing a focus, are those arising randomly from the throats of the platoon of service representatives who are monitoring the progress of all jobs being shepherded and tended to in the system. Every so often a name is announced, usually the surname of the customer, and a head twitches or jerks, or perhaps less spasmodically reorients and signals attentiveness, turning like a dish antenna in the direction of the interjection.

A hushed conference ensues, and the service representative returns to his or her station with the consent of the owner to proceed. This is usually the only hushed or modulated verbal exchange that occurs in the course of the morning.

Most other conversations are conducted at not merely audible levels to a narrow locus of accidental listeners in the vicinity of the communicant – and almost needless to say representing one end of a multi-sided exchange by means of the ubiquitous smart phone. Every customer seems to have one. Every customer seems to have recourse to its use one way or another during the course of their vigil attendant to the mending or possibly merely the preventative maintenance of their vehicle. Most engagements by phone seem to have nothing at all to do with the immediate mission at hand. In fact, the calls have nothing to do with the proximate reason—the only reason—the caller is conversing from this particular location at this particular time.

Rather, and this is immediately evident, as no conversation—none—is conducted discretely at the murmurous level called for by etiquette and even only a token amount of self-regard. Rather all and sundry in the waiting room are privy to any and all business that occurs ex tempore.

Those scattered about the room not engaged in a magazine, not staring blankly at a television screen, not volubly holding up their end of an inevitably and quite evidently wholly banal confabulation, one of doubtless millions being conducted at any daylight moment throughout the entire great nation of ours, and all through the miracle of a slab of silicon and other much rarer minerals, are using their phones as a personal amplification systems, conveying the soundtrack of what may be a visual display of live action or other animated programming, or perhaps merely providing musical accompaniment as a kind of anodyne relief from the montony of waiting for the mechanic to get done.

I may be alone in this, though it’s hard to tell from the front pages of the usual suspects of “major” media. They’re rife with headlines on the subject. I simply don’t care whom she picks. At best, the differences are like citing the differences in the best rosé wines from Provence, all of which boil down to the different effects, infinitesimally nuanced and subtle, brought about through terroir and craft. It’s the minute differences that determine that superiority. The perception of ascendancy ultimately resides in the senses and preferences of the taster.

What is clear is at least with rosé you should get a passably good drink, which you need never consume again. Plus it’s a pleasure to try it. The ultimate successful choice for Ms. Harris is who will fit that ideal of a balanced paradigm: repelling the fewest voters, while bolstering the number of votes where they are needed most – geo-electorally speaking. And there will not be another tasting. The avidity of the process of conjecture and analysis, some of it astute, all of it focused in its specificity, and deceptively thorough numbs the skeptic from perceiving other objectives. The object of conjecture is nowhere nearly as engaging as the exercise itself.

Inevitably, it will be a white man and he will not be significantly at odds politically with the core of what Harris herself declares as her agenda and values.

And I’ve already said more than I might otherwise care to on the subject, I’ll stop, vexed with myself for the time spent before getting to the buried lede. I also chastise myself if I spend too much time—too often reading more than the headline—reading the deep thoughts, though no more than a 1 on the Jack Handey scale, of the self-defined sachems of opinion. Their declarations and cocksure judgments (always cloaked as mere “opinion”) as to the wisest course of action clog the pages, virtual and pulp-based alike, this week and into next, until the matter wastes away, withered by the vaporizing power of public disinterest. Or, in this case, after Harris has made her choice—doomed to be a resounding anti-climax.

At which time, those words of wisdom will be as worthless, disposable and yet burdensome as a plastic water bottle. And the wordsmith will move on to the next subject. And the words will still be out there, with the enduring potential for causing trouble later. Too many times, and of course it will happen on this story cycle, the commentariat will take up the next story that shows any sign of trending (in the sense that word has today) as the next contextual frame for holding readers rapt by the news, and seeking only to be led to it with minimal effort.

The Buried Lede

Quite simply, what keeps my already overworked aging brain in full-time aerobics mode is not what is the answer to the “who for VP?” question, but the larger encompassing venerable question, “cui bono?”

The tricky bit is understanding that the investigatory energy applies not to who benefits from the final choice of candidate. It’s who benefits from the fuss—I mean the current fuss about this specific point to ponder—and the answer seems obvious. From the sheer volume of coverage, the beneficiaries are the usual suspects en masse, usually referred to these days in a perpetuation of intentional misdirection as, simply, “the media.”

And it ain’t what Marshall McLuhan meant by the term. Specifically it’s, if I may be permitted a now hackneyed usage, “Big Media.” Which is to say, it’s the swollen conglomerates that now encompass not only the major news media—not just the newsprint behemoths—the hoary “papers of record”—which have by now morphed into multi-media outlets of streaming information, but it’s the entire apparatus—even larger, way larger, in economic scope than the news media per se—that is subsumed by social media and its ancillary technical service providers: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Not only do they feed us “news,” that is matters of currency in politics, governance, economics, and the international order, but pretty much everything else from recipes to sports coverage of every athletic endeavour however tenuous its qualification, to what is more broadly called “culture,” with the magnanimity of designating any and all creative expression as art.

And why do they operate at full tilt? Not because there is any true desire to define the verities of existence, from mortality to the eternal—all of what defines philosophically and esthetically for each of us mindful of the need to define what makes life worth living. It’s because of the indiscriminate appetite we have collectively for anything, any bit of information (still called “news” but more accurately defined as mere text—when it isn’t images of every sort, from still to video to animation—resonant with the full sardonic sting of Capote’s alleged assessment of the work of Jack Kerouac: “that’s not writing, that’s typing.”). A current article in Scientific American describes us consumers of social media as a nation of “information foragers.” Incredibly, as an outlying datum, a June 2024 report by Pew Research Center states, “75% of users say they see information about breaking news in real time [on X];” the percentages are significantly less on the other major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, though significant shares of users of these sources report regularly getting news on them).

One must infer a convoluted relationship with actual publishers or broadcasters or webcasters of anything remotely resembling hard news of social media, who persist in repudiating any role, or responsibility, as actual disseminators of what the public perceives as news. Indeed, major players, like The New York Times and the Washington Post, as publishers of content costly to produce have long since entered a world of perpetual litigation concerning the use of that content by social media—if by provision to “subscribers” or “members” of de facto executive proxy—without emolument in any form to the originators. And that only applies to news, but increasingly news with a twist, and a tug, and a pull, and a push, anything to hold attention. Generally, in the course of the last 50 years (out of, let’s say, the two millennia of the current era), what used to be gospel (literally “good news,” generally of uplift for humanity, when not specifically of individual salvation) is now just bits, literally and figuratively, for which we have an insatiable hunger.

What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk?

The real big question, the one that doesn’t get answered, even when asked by someone with the spunk to ask, like the Senator from Massachusetts that Elon, one of the premier trolls of the Twitterverse, has taken gratuitously to calling “Senator Karen” and comparing her, disparagingly, to the ineffectual harpies of his childhood he remembers hectoring children for, according to him, no apparent reason, is what exactly justifies the tax code as it has now evolved.

Is it fair and equitable that people the stature of you and me, decidedly nowhere near that of Musk and his fellow billionaires – the preponderance of whom protect their grotesquely large fortunes by letting them sit in the form of holdings that, as long as they are not made liquid are not taxed… just like us with our picayune paper net worth – pay exactly the same taxes in terms of percentage of the proceeds of selling any equity that they do? Which is to say, though the gross sums are laughingly lopsided in comparison, and they do pay a large amount of money, whereas we pay enough to hurt a bit, but only a little, and yet, and yet… the sums they turn into filthy lucre, whether for house lots on Mars, or self-indulgence of some other form, are far in excess of what any individual can spend on oneself, in many multiples of what is necessary to keep oneself fit and healthy and safe and extremely well cared for, by whatever measure. And of course, the preponderance of any total amount of personal worth is left untouched, only to “grow” by virtue of laws governing other parts of the tax code, and almost all of the code affecting business practice. The laws do nothing, of course, to alter the lives and destinies of that percentage of the U.S. population (never mind the world’s) that still lives in poverty – however you measure it.

Or should the laws be adjusted so that the very rich – the concept of which has altered, perhaps irrevocably, since the days of the Robber Barons and altogether what came to be called, at the time, it was so blatant and distracting a phenomenon, the Gilded Age – pay an increasingly higher share of their gain in wealth, or pay a fixed percentage of the totality of their worth each year, or whatever other of a significant number of proposed adjustments to the tax code are churned out regularly by those interested in balancing what anyone conscious and cogent, beyond the earnestly, determinedly, and deliberately clueless observer, would call the inequities of wealth?

And that only touches on one question.

The others I have are questions regarding the uses of all that excessive wealth, which gets spent in growing amounts without diminishing. This happens with not quite miracles, but with the wonderfully ingenious mathematics that allow it, by enshrining that math into law, which never gets altered, all to buttress the fiscal immunity it affords the fraction of a percent of our population that holds nearly half our wealth as a nation.

It’s no doubt that for but a very few, Congress has long since been a manifestation of the principle of bought and paid for… And not a small amount of that because, again I’ll use the word, egregious amounts are spent by the likes of all classes of the obscenely rich, on the left and on the right, to ensure that legislators do nothing, by any calculus, to radically reduce poverty, to rectify inequities, to equalize risks, and to reduce the cost to the individual so that person’s wellbeing is not imperiled. And I’m not even talking about the inability of Congress to pass laws that protect the climate, the environment more broadly, the rights of individuals as citizens and as humans.

The struggle to ensure the means of “escaping” to Mars if need be (and yet, by whose determination?) is escapist and puerile, as far as I can see, seen in the larger scope of the real problems faced by the inhabitants of a planet that in less than 30 years is projected to number in excess of 10 billion souls. And I haven’t heard about Musk spending a plugged nickel to help ensure that laws that protect humanity and human rights stay in force and are reinforced. Now that would be a speculative fiction I’d like to see made real.

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[You have to know, but nothing stopping me from telling you, click on each image to see it in full frame as originally composed and posted—up to full screen if your viewing window is big enough].

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As one rereads the *Daybooks* and the biography under the weight of these impressions, one’s sense of Weston darkens; one gets the feeling that he didn’t enjoy himself very much. (What artist does?) He was happy at the start of a love affair (“The idea means more to me than the actuality,” he confessed, and pondered, “Is love like art—something always ahead, never quite attained?”); when intoxicated (or *borrachito,* as he liked to call it); when in the presence of beauty (“I received by mail from Cristel a box of lilacs, white and lavender, so exquisite that my eyes filled with tears”); when doing “my work,” in contradistinction to the portrait photography he did to earn his living. (It would be interesting to see examples of the commercial work and compare it to the portraits, done for art’s sake, of his friends and family.) But far more frequently than happiness, the *Daybooks* express the anxiety and loneliness and eccentricity that underlay and undermined the surface exuberance and gregariousness and conventional bohemianism. The entries written during the romantic trip to Mexico are pervaded by with worry about money, housing, equipment; with sorrow about the deadness of his feeling for Tina (which Weston was to feel toward all the women he loved); and with guilt about the three children he had left behind. (In a film based on the *Daybooks* that Robert Katz made for public television in 1965, there is a painfully moving scene in which Neil, the second-youngest son, talks of how he felt during his father’s desertion; the camera, focused on his face, reveals how much it still hurts.)

The *Daybooks* written on Weston’s return from Mexico continue to reflect the alienation from family, friends, and lovers, and from the cultural and political life of the time, that Weston felt—an alienation that seems to be one of the preconditions of producing art in this country. A small, but telling, detail is the repeated reference in the daybooks to the vegetarian meals Weston enjoyed (“supper: *aguacates,* almonds, persimmons, dates, and crisp fresh greens”)—always accompanied by references to the gross steaks or greasy pork chops that other people eat and that he had narrowly escaped from, as if his enjoyment of one depended on the repudiation of the other. A similar though less explicit polarity is set up between the lithe, ever-younger girl Weston fell in love with and the threatening “hog-fat” bourgeoise American woman, into which category his abandoned wife, Flora, apparently fell. (One is reminded of Humbert Humbert’s distaste for grown-up women, like Lolita’s mother, in comparison to nymphets.)

—Janet Malcolm, *Diana and Nikon,* (1980, original essay © 1975), pp. 25-26

It’s Yogi Berra, deja vu all over again, time. Even with an almost exclusively rational flow of information, from vetted sources, especially the newsletter of Your Local Epidemiologist, “written by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD— an epidemiologist, biostatistician, professor, researcher, wife, and mom of two little girls. During the day she has a research lab and teaches graduate-level courses,…

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Suddenly, as I read and heard (on the air) the prevailing stories centering on the persistent anti-vax movement in the news, I had two insights. I demur from calling them epiphanies, but they feel a little like that.

For one, it is clear that there is bipartisan approval of the proven and sometimes seemingly miraculous monoclonal antibody treatment as a desired clinical strategy for mitigating…

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The gymnasium at Montgomery County Community College set up as a vaccination center, winter 2021.
“[Yesterday, President] Biden announced that by April 19, more than 90% of Americans over the age of 16 will be eligible for a vaccine and will live within five miles of a vaccination site, including 40,000 pharmacies.” —Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 30 March 2021
This is great,…

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Greek icon, ca. 1700 of The Second Coming
As it will surprise no one who knows me, I am firmly of the camp that says when all is – to tap one of the larger clichés – said and done, all of what we spend so much time contemplating, analyzing, and sending one another alerts to heed (replete with links to videos, audios, articles, tweets, re-tweets, comments, and every permutation of the mechanisms…

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Lunch Rush
I just read the Jill Lepore essay in the January 18 issue of The New Yorker, “What’s Wrong with the Way We Work.” It’s yet another semi-sweeping assessment of the sort I get to see and choose to read periodically about what has decayed about the relationship of Americans – ordinary Americans, the 99% – to work. The conclusion I reach is always the same.
We are doomed. Increasingly,…

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It’s close to, but not quite, the time to press the start-button of the internal clock we’re all blessed with. It’s a memory timer, a special one. It doesn’t make it harder or easier to remember things. It’s a device that measures the time it takes for us to lose our sensory experience at the moment of an occurrence – be it a thought, a visceral reaction, or a conditioned response to some action…

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Detail from Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” at the Museo del Prado

The germ of this thought comes from listening to an interview on Fresh Air yesterday, Thursday, November 12, recorded the day before, which would have been Wednesday, a week and a day since the still officially unresolved electoin, and at least two news cycles previous. I point it out using this commonplace…

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Of course he won’t go quietly

I’m thinking as we all, in some corner of our consciousness, fidget and distract ourselves awaiting an outcome, suffer the condition of Tiresias in The Waste Land, not so much throbbing between two lives, as vibrating between, what I’ll call two civic states of being. Is it the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end?

The more that suddenly positivist…

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Mark Twain, 1909. By Photographer: A.F. Bradley in his studio. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Mark Twain wrote the following piece the year previous to the tumultuous and critical election year for President of 1880. Only 15 years after the Civil War had ended. The incumbent, Rutherford B. Hayes, had run in 1876 with the promise that he would not seek re-election – a promise he kept……

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With the long distance assistance of my bread-making friend turned temporary sensei (which included about 20g of his precious “goo” (sourdough starter), sent by mail) I’ve embarked on a bread making phase. This is after a hiatus of I’d guess about 40 years, the last time I tried baking my own, long before the days of the surge in sourdough seriousness (they’ve been serious about it in other…

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For far too much of my life so far, in far too many ways and moments, dealing with feelings has been no more and no less than an either/or proposition. Too often I have to decide consciously whether to let something pass by as simply as my teeming consciousness will allow, or do I allow myself to embroider intellectually along the same lines as some unbalanced intrusion of active thought about…

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I went out to shop for groceries. Our county has been declared the epicenter of Covid-19 contagion for all of Pennsylvania. Hence only stores that serve the public with vital household necessities are permitted to remain open: groceries, pharmacies, etc. Even the state liquor stores in Montgomery County must close their doors (online ordering for shipping to one’s home is still possible)…

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“Social distancing? Hey! No big deal. I never really liked you anyway.”

From the rear of the store, to the front, Bath Tissue and Facial Tissue (and, note, Paper Towel as well). Appropriately, Aisle 13. Friday the 13th, March 2020, 10 am. Giant Supermarket, Wynnewood PA

It’s mid-morning. About 10:30am. The store, a suburban Whole Foods Market, opens at 8. I exit the store with my two reusable…

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