Culture

Pandemic Diary 3: With a Song in Our Heart

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Perhaps in a world in which we need our neighbors more than usual, in which a global drama plays out in our local grocery stores and on the streets where we live, the music and creative expression we turn to for rest, relief, entertainment, and even solace—that deepest of words—ought to be local as well.

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When all this is over, some of the things we used to take for granted will appear to us a novelties or great new ideas. My gosh, even the thought of something ever ending feels something like a novelty at this moment.
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3500 Days of Somehow

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I do not recall July 14, 2010, which was three-thousand five hundred and one days ago today. (Five hundred weeks! That number just jumped out at me.) What is more, I did not post or share anything on social media that day, so I do not even have a “Mark is feeling :-)” smileyness that I may have typed that morning on Facebook that could spark a memory.

Of course I looked. I looked just now with a grimace of anticipation on my face in the worry-slash-hope that I would find something I had written that day to someone about anything at all. Nope. No blue thumbs-up for any of my friends from me that day, either. (In fact, there is little that I typed before July 15, 2010, that I much enjoy any longer for reasons that I hope will become clear.) There is no journal entry, no blog post.
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Arlo Guthrie’s Thanksgiving Laugh at Fascism

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A personal reflection in tribute to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”

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A friend and I were chatting about our different Thanksgiving Day plans one recent Thanksgiving and he asked me if I had ever been to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City. (I almost marched in it one year, by accident of all things, but that is an anecdote for a different post.)

“Well, I just hope,” he said, “that no one tries any terrorism down there today, but if they do,” and here he looked like someone who perhaps hoped that “someone” would indeed “try terrorism down there” because he added, “If they do, I hope we go ahead and use our nuclear weapons the way they were meant to be used. Just go over there and flatten that whole place.”

Quietly infuriated, I found for myself something else to do somewhere else at our gathering. I hate that I do not ask the question, “Why would you think that?” of some of my acquaintances more often or at all, but I know that such a question is seen as confrontational more than a provocative expression of a hope that our nation uses nuclear weapons if and when it is attacked is seen as confrontational.
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