I’ve been working in a hospital for the past couple of months. It’s one of the bigger systems here in in Massachusetts with many campuses. The one I work in has a big medical school and many buildings and departments. It’s a big, full service hospital.
So every morning I go there, I don’t always work on campus, I park in one of the many parking lots. It’s a good walk from where I park to where I go, a nice walk when the weather is nice, and since this has been a relatively warm and pretty much snow-free winter (I know I shouldn’t say that because it’s not over yet and I’d be willing to bet God has a good laugh in store for us) the walk has been nice and even pleasant most of the time. I like to walk. I was a mid-pack long-distance runner for many years, and I loved running too. Yes, I did run the NYC marathon twice.
Lots of people who are either students in the medical school or workers in the hospital get there about the time I do, so there are always lots of people walking from their cars to where they are going. Sometimes I see the med helicopter taking off from behind the building where I work. I work in the main hospital building on the campus. Each time I see this I think how my young daughter who is just crazy about such things would love to be seeing it rise up from behind the building and going on up into the sky and off to where it is headed. It’s a sight, for sure.
Much more often than seeing the helicopter, I see ambulances. Actually, and I know you all know this, I hear the ambulances long before I actually see them. Since I am familiar with the grounds and the area, I know what streets they are coming from and what direction they will be heading. Almost always they end up at the ER.
When I go into the building and up to the floor where the office I work in is, it’s small clinic, a very specialized one, I don’t get to see the ER. But I have seen it. My wife was in it once. Sometimes it is so crowded they don’t have beds inside the ER and the halls outside are lined with patients on gurneys. My God!
I do have a good walk inside the hospital too, so on the first floor walking to the elevators I need I pass clinics and treatment areas where I see patients who are sick and needing help or are being rolled in by the EMTs. I see lots of people in wheel chairs being pushed by a loved one, lots of older people like me.
So I think, and I especially think it when I hear those ambulances coming, which is almost every morning I go there, there but for the grace of God. I think how lucky I am to be up and walking and working and on the right side of the earth.
There but for the Grace of God.
This morning there were several ambulances and as I was walking from the parking lot, two police cruisers came up one of the streets on the wrong side of the street to block off traffic. Whatever it was, it was an especially bad one.
There but for the Grace of God.
By Peter Weiss
“Hey,” she said, when she saw Bill.
He said, “Hey.”
“Be done in a minute. This for Caesar. He didn’t like it the way it was.”
“He ask you that often?”
“Every now and then. But it’s not a big deal. Other people ask too. I do it when I can. It’s slow.” Millie turned full toward Bill. “Been working?”
“Doing banquet prep. No service. Nothing is going on until later and I’ll be in The Falstaff Room.”
“When you coming in tomorrow?”
“About nine. Banquet chef told me whenever I got here would be good. They have a small luncheon, little over a hundred. He wants me to do it with him and Victor.”
Millie went back to ironing. Bill stood there. He didn’t quite know what to do, whether to go or to stay. But after a few ironing strokes, she asked if he wanted clean clothes.
“Just a jacket,” he said.
“Well give me that one.” Millie stood the iron upright and went over to the rack she kept his uniforms on. She pulled a clean, starched jacket for him and brought it over to him.
Bill unbuttoned his chef’s jacket and slipped it off. He took the clean one straight from her hand without touching her in any way, left the soiled one, which was barely soiled at all, on the counter. Millie quickly scooped it up and tossed it into her dirty laundry.
“I didn’t really need to change,” he said. “Came by to see you.”
“Why?”
“Say hello. See if you’re still okay with me.”
“Why shouldn’t I be? You still okay with me?”
“You bet.”
“Want a return engagement?”
“What you offering?”
“Told you, anything you want, any time you want long as we can get to it. Now, never know when Caesar coming back, and he’s the only one, way I hear it, wants you eighty-sixed.”
“I’m cutting into his authority.”
“I hear you ain’t afraid of him.”
“Why should I be? I’ve already been told what my limits are, and he doesn’t play into it.”
“What’s your limits?”
“Why do I think you already know them?”
“I don’t know anything,” Millie said. “I know what I hear.”
“So what do you hear?”
“I hear they told you you can do what you want but not to get caught. I hear no stealing, no outrageous behavior, no harassing any of the females, etc. I hear they told you not to fight with Caesar, that they had your back so you could stand up to him appropriately, but no fighting with him out in the open.”
“You hear pretty good.”
Millie smiled. “I hear the banquet chef said you could mess with me and your waitresses over there, but not to be crazy about it. That right?”
Bill didn’t answer. Before he’d finished buttoning the clean jacket, Caesar came by for his tuxedo.
“Be ready in a minute,” she said to Caesar.
“It would be ready now if you weren’t busy flirting with him,” Caesar said.
“We were just talking,” Millie said.
“I’ll be letting your supervisor know you were making time instead of working,” Caesar said.
Millie didn’t say anything. She went like a little schoolgirl who’d been scolded back to finishing the ironing.
“See you later if I need another clean coat,” Bill said.
Millie didn’t say anything.
Bill went off and began making his rounds. First thing was to get hold of a truck, which he did easily since five of them were parked where the trucks were stored. He went quickly around getting all the cold items first and placing them securely on his truck. While he was making his rounds, he saw jimmy G come into the kitchen. Jimmy G told him he would make the Hollandaise sauce. Bill said he would take the first trip out to the room, which he did. He’d already decided he would have a big, cold liquid spill on his jacket. He’d already prepared the pretense for going back to see Millie.
By Peter Weiss
“Ya,” Jimmy G said. He sat down on the bench in front of their lockers and yawned.
Bill had walked with him to the locker room. It was almost time to start setting up for the night service in The Falstaff Room. He could see that Jimmy G was tired, and he would have said something if they’d known each other longer. It was too soon to start anything like offering to do the set up by himself so Jimmy could take a nap. As it was, and as he was about to find out, Jimmy had collected two hours’ pay without being there. Bill was also about to find out that the chef didn’t care all that much so long as his banquet chef didn’t abuse the privilege of taking care of his family. A few extra hours on the payroll here and there didn’t mean very much and was relatively insignificant when put up against the smooth running of a big kitchen operation.
The Sheraton On the Square had a big food operation. It didn’t seem like much if you looked at the one dinner dining room. That, The Falstaff Room, did only about a hundred covers a night on average, though they were doing close to two hundred since that ad had come out. But then there was room service, and it was a big hotel so that was substantial. Room service was open from early early morning until late late night. It had its own kitchen staff that Bill had not yet met. Room service also took care of breakfast and lunch which were served in one of the banquet dining rooms, a small dining room on the first floor of the hotel near to where the room service kitchen outlet was.
“Let me rest a minute,” Jimmy G said.
“Sure,” Bill said. “I’ll get us a cart and start loading things, slow and easy.”
“Ya,” Jimmy G. said again.
Bill did not need to change, not really. His uniform was clean enough to work in for the dinner service, clean enough for customers who wanted to come up to the open hearth to see him work to not notice anything.
Customers sometimes did that. Not often, but sometimes. It had happened at Suburban West and so far it had happened here at The Falstaff Room once. A family had put in an order, Rosie’s table, and they had two small kids who wanted to see the cooks work. So Rosie had led them up, holding their hands, to the waitress side of the open serving window, which was a big, long rectangle. She’d stayed with the kids a moment, Bill had spoken to them, and then the father had come up.
The father and his kids stood a moment watching. Then Bill asked him what their order was, and when the father told him, he told the father he had just put it on the grill and if he wanted to hold his kids up in his arms, he could show them the food that would be served to them.
Two hamburgers and two steaks, that was the order. One at a time the father held the kids up high enough so they could see into the broiler. Bill slid the drawer open for them and pointed with his tongs to their food.
The father was thankful and pleased. At the last minute, Bill picked up a basket of fries that was working and shook them free of oil. He plated a small order of fries on a side plate and slid the plate on the server shelf toward the father.
“For the kids,” he said. “They’re hot, so let them cool a minute.”
The father thanked Bill and led his kids away. Later, Rosie thanked Bill too. Apparently she’d gotten a great tip.
Although he didn’t have to change, so as not to get too far ahead of Jimmy G, Bill made a stop by the laundry. Millie had an ironing board out and was ironing a tuxedo.
By Peter Weiss
Last time I spoke about this, the amount was over a hundred million dollars. Then it went to two hundred million. Now it’s over four hundred million dollars just by Bloomberg alone. That’s a four with eight zeros, or, 400,000,000. And that’s just on advertising.
Last time I spoke about it, I quoted some other dollar figures. First, it would take about 650,000,000 to completely house the homeless in California the first year. After that it would take about 350,000,000 per year.
Or, Bloomberg will have spent more on advertising by the time he’s finished with whatever he’s doing for his presidential campaign than it would take to house the homeless in California.
There’s something obscene about that.
There’s something grossly wrong with that.
Is this what we’ve become and what we are?
Think about it.
I could talk about Bloomberg personally. I experienced his overhaul of the NYC school system. They say he raised the high school graduation level in NYC. That’s probably true to some extent, but I saw the inside of that, of what they did, the principals of the “small schools” he created, to doctor the graduation rates so that their schools would not be either put on probation or summarily closed.
Another scam. So many scams. So many lies.
Is this all we are?
So here’s the Bloomberg school overhaul model. One high school with 3000 students was turned into eight small schools. Those eight small schools each had a principal and two assistant principals. That’s eight principal salaries and sixteen assistant principal salaries for the building, same amount of students, if not less. The original school had one principal and fourteen assistant principals. Principals and assistant principals cost a lot more than teachers.
The Bloomberg paradigm was management heavy. They had to cut teachers because they had no money. Or the Bloomberg model is for the upper tier, not the workers.
That’s just a perfunctory comparison. It doesn’t begin to talk to the lack of student services, inability to handle intramural sports, etc.
But it looked good on paper.
About looking good: would you rather own a football team that wins the Super Bowl but doesn’t look so pretty doing it or a team that has great style and panache but can’t win?
Obama looked and talked great. He was pretty. Bush looked okay and talked like a president, whatever that means. So they were okay except for policy differences. Enmity and personal dislike were not real factors, not that they didn’t exist but…you get the point.
Trump talks different, is a bit more crass and crude, not all that different from LBJ, who was cruder and got a pass. But Trump, if you listen to the off-the-wall Democrats, is the end of the world as we know it.
So, for all our technological advances, is this all we are?
My God! The smarter we get and the more we know, the more stupid we become.
If you listen to today’s discourse, nearly every bit of rationality and factual verification is absent. Not many, if any, of our politicians are interested in logic or truth. They say the most outrageous things and expect us to go for it. They call us deplorable, say we’re too stupid to know what we want as a people and then they do what they want.
If you look at them and where we’re at, with as much money being spent by one person on mere advertising as it would take to completely fix the homeless problem in California, you just can’t help but wonder: is this it? Is this all we are, all we’ve come to? Is this all we’ll ever be?
By Peter Weiss
So he had a few boxes of carrots in one sink, a whole load of broccoli in another and some cauliflower in another. After the vegetables were defrosted enough to be separated, he would spread them in pans and stack the pans in the sink and let the water cascade down on them until they were completely defrosted.
He had seen this being done on his first tour through the kitchen his first day of work. Now he knew exactly how to calculate amount, number of boxes, and how to set it all up.
Lesson 3. Potatoes. Or rice. Depended upon the menu. Upcoming parties had potatoes, some of them baked potatoes, some pommes duchesse, some scalloped. Two of the parties had yellow rice. These could not be taught now because they had to be made on the day of the service, but Jimmy Banquet Chef told Bill he would make sure that he would set him up to learn each of them. Rice was no problem. They served that at Suburban and so Bill knew how to make it.
Today’s work was easy. Just two small parties, one for about a hundred and one for two hundred. The two hundred was simple, prime rib and baked potato with broccoli. Nothing much for Bill to learn except perfecting his use of the rotary oven. The broccoli was defrosting and the potatoes were being washed by one of the kitchen porters. Kalista was not doing the salad for either party, so she was coming in later. A different pantry woman was there, another Greek, young and quite stunning with deep dark hair and dark features.
Jimmy Banquet Chef led Bill over to her when she came into the kitchen.
“Adonia, meet Bill Wynn. He’s the new Falstaff Room cook and he’s going to be working as many banquets as he can.”
Bill reached out his hand to shake hands with her. “Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” Adonia said. She smiled at Bill, a soft, sweet smile that showed her dimples. Then she turned to the banquet chef and said something to him in Greek. He shot back at her in Greek real fast and that was that. Whatever she’d said, Jimmy Banquet Chef had come back at her with something curt and abrupt, something that ended the conversation where he wanted it to end.
Bill did not understand what was said, but he understood power in the kitchen and he understood body language. Adonia said a quick, “Nice to meet you,” did an about face and went to start taking care of the salads.
“Don’t tell me,” Bill said to Jimmy Banquet Chef, “another cousin.”
“My niece,” the banquet chef said. “She goes to school and only works here when she can. She’s my brother’s kid.”
“She’s a cute kid,” Bill said.
“No matter what, you stay away from her,” the banquet chef said. “No matter what she does. She can be rebellious and act out to get at her father and mother who try to keep a tight hold on her.”
“Hey,” Bill said, “I like my job. I like that you’re straight with me. So I’m all straight with you.”
“Good,” Jimmy Banquet Chef said.
Jimmy G came in then. He was yawning as he walked into the kitchen and still hadn’t buttoned his jacket. Victor was over with Adonia now. They were talking loudly in Greek and she was not happy, to say the least.
Family, Bill thought. To a point working with family was okay. But when discord set in, like with a rebellious kid, someone who was being, as Bill guessed it, held to their own cultural norms in a society where different and maybe more attractive social norms prevailed, well…
And so it goes. And so Bill and Victor and Jimmy G and the banquet chef went about panning up the prime ribs. Doing this was all quite routine for Bill except that instead of roasting one or two ribs they were roasting twenty.
By Peter Weiss
Well, not exactly back to the movies. Not really!
If you read my writing here, then you know or might have seen that I believe all the zombie stuff, very little of which I watch, is about us. I believe they are taking us on a ride, a trajectory, in a direction where they are the zombie masters, the zombie killers, and we the people are the zombies.
Oh my!
Of course this is all metaphorical. It’s about imagery, about pictures and the big picture.
I keep wondering why they are drawing such a gory, gruesome picture!
But that’s not the only gruesome picture. I talk all the time about The Hunger Games, about them leading us down the path to where there’s one gated city of privileged people and all the rest of us who have to work for them.
So maybe there’s going to be Washington DC, the center of it all, where the privileged live. It’s already the richest area, highest income zone, or one of them, and as it is now, the 50% of us who actually pay taxes work for them for almost four months of the year.
Then, if the Democrats get their way they’ll invite more and more poor to come here and that will make the 50% of us who do pay taxes pay more and more and more. Thus they, the already rich, will stay rich and we, the working poor and taking poor, will grow in number, become more convoluted, more divided and more poor. We will fight each other because things will become scarce and they in the gated city will be happy because it will make it easier for them to defend themselves against us. Divide and conquer.
They, the millionaire Despicable Dems, will become all-powerful and we will work for them. Actually, we already do. They live in luxury and if they implement their agenda, we will live in squalor. It’s kind of like that now actually.
It’s what their Hollywood pals are telling us, what they’ve been telling us forever (or at least since about 1979 when Mad Max came out.
Yes, The Road Warrior, another movie, movie series, is one of, if not the precursor to all this fantastic imagery of us destroying ourselves and being thrust into chaos where anything and everything goes.
In this genre, the one-man-saves-all genre, sometimes we don’t even see the rich and protected.
There are many of these movies and they get better and better with Hollywood getting more and more technically savvy.
The genre comes out of the cold war period where when I was a kid you could hear the slogan “I’d rather be dead than red.” Sometimes I wonder nowadays how many people even know of that slogan and then I wonder if any of the people who support the socialist Despicable Democrat agenda have heard of it.
Anyway, shoot forward, and we come out the other end, where we are now. Those wonderfully altruistic billionaires and the poor millionaires like Bernie have saved us although we have morphed into the zombies and they live in the protected places.
Maybe that’s because when they succeeded in getting power, those lefty Democrats took away our second amendment rights, made it so only the criminals among the regular people had guns and so they could easily prey upon the hard-working poor.
Well, seems to me like what they want. Seems like what they are pushing on us every chance they can. Seems like it’s always the rich candidates on the left who are hiding their riches (like the millionaire lefty Democrats, average net worth of the candidates is staggering, most of them being multimillionaires and of course Bloomberg being one of the richest people in the world) and trying to make us think they are regular people.
But really… In their world we are the zombies and they are the zombie masters, the zombie killers.
Make no mistake. It’s no mistake. Hollywood, Pravda USA media and the Despicable Dems all walk hand-in-hand. Make no mistake. There’s no room for you and me in their world except to work for them. We are but their slaves.
By Peter Weiss
He was in at eleven the next morning. When he got home, Bill found that his wife was asleep. Very often she was asleep when he got home and now that she was working and up early, she went to bed long before he got home even on an early night which was about one in the morning.
Jimmy Banquet Chef and Victor were waiting for him. Jimmy G was not in yet, but Bill would discover that later in the day that the banquet chef would sign his time card so that he was in at the same time as Bill.
Millie met Bill with a smile at the laundry. She didn’t say much and kept her distance because it was mid-morning and people were all around. Bill turned in his dirty uniform and didn’t take a clean one. He told Millie he already had three. She said she would keep him a nice supply off to the side. “The rack we were behind,” she said with a wink.
First thing, Bill took himself a mug of coffee. Room Service used mugs, so Bill got himself one. He also picked himself a light-colored croissant from off the tray set aside for breakfast customers in the hotel dining room. The dining room served breakfast and lunch out of the main kitchen. Jimmy Banquet Chef told Bill he would be learning their menus too but there was no hurry since the room service cooks did that service. Dinner in this hotel was exclusively in The Falstaff Room.
“Stocks today,” the banquet chef told Bill. He took Bill to a row of stoves that Bill had been at before. Inside two of the ovens were big, square roasting pans filled with beef bones.
“You get them at the butcher,” Jimmy Banquet Chef said. “Then you have a runner cart them up here and you roast them the way I’m roasting these. A little oil in the bottom of the pan, a high temperature, and you let them brown. Takes a good hour or so. No big deal.”
“Same thing for chicken stock,” the banquet chef said. “Just different procedure. You get a case of hens and you put them in water to boil. You add onions and celery cut large and some bay leaves. You never put anything in that will color the liquid, so no tomatoes, no carrots, etc. Lots of bay leaves and some garlic and seasoning. All that will get filtered out.”
He led Bill over to the room where the tilt-kettles were. One was filling with water. Inside already was a case of hens. Once the hens were cooked, the breasts would be used for chicken salad and then the bones would be put back into the stock pot to cook until, like whenever.
Cans of whole tomatoes, stewed tomatoes and all the scraps from the vegetable department and cold food stations were being thrown into the meat stock kettle. While that was happening, the kettle was being filled with water and the steam heat was turned on. The browned and seasoned bones would be put in there along with several roasting pans of mirepoix, onions, carrots and celery cut large and browned in seasoning, thyme, oregano and basil. Whole heads of garlic were thrown in too. The bones would be added and that liquid would be cooked forever too. As it cooked and stayed cooking, anyone making brown sauce would use this stock. Anyone making white sauce would use the chicken stock.
First lesson. That took an hour. Jimmy Banquet Chef and Bill didn’t have to do much, so while it was getting done, after Bill had seen what he needed to, he and the banquet chef went next to do vegetables.
The banquet chef had a clipboard with all the banquet and party menus on it. They sat a moment and read off the vegetables, figured how much of it—most actually—was broccoli. There was some asparagus, some cauliflower and some mixed vegetables too. So Jimmy Banquet Chef showed Bill how to calculate the number of boxes, and once Bill knew, he left it to Bill to figure out.
Lesson two.
By Peter Weiss
Rosie parked a bit down from a streetlight so that the car was not totally dark. It wasn’t light, was less than dim, but she could see Bill and Bill knew this because he could see her. They sat next to each other, not yet close, still with enough distance so that someone could have sat between them.
“Been here before?” Bill asked.
“No,” Rosie said. “I’ve seen it, passed by it. Haven’t been here in the way you’re asking.”
“How am I asking?” Bill asked.
“Like you want to know how many guys I’ve made out with here.”
“And?”
“You’re it. I’m not loose, you know. You might think so because I’m hot for you. But I don’t go with every Tom, Dick or Harry, never even been with a cook.”
“How’d I get so lucky?”
“Truth?”
“Nothing but.”
“You’re pretty.”
Bill saw Rosie look away after she said what she did. Then she turned back.
“I’m all red in the face,” she said. “If it were light in here, you’d see that.”
“It was hard to say, huh?”
“I feel naked.”
“You almost are,” Bill said.
“Well, you can hurt me,” Rosie said. “I mean, that’s it. I laid my feelings all out there. I see you and I get wet. I see you and I see a giant all-day sucker, the kind they sell at carnivals. Isn’t anything, and I mean anything, I wouldn’t do with you.”
Rosie moved herself closer to the driver’s door, away from him, almost hugged the door, looked out the window to the street.
“If you’re gonna reject me and hurt my feelings, do it now and we’ll be done with it. You don’t even have to say anything. You can just get out quietly. Entrance to the highway’s back where we turned. Make a right and a right and a right and you’ll be by it.”
Bill sat a moment. He looked at her, at what he could see of her in the dimness from the obscured streetlamp. She was sexy. She was gorgeous. She was willing and available. It should have been an easy decision. On one level it was a no-brainer. But then for him, for Bill Wynn, for who he was and where he’d been, it was a moment of angst, anxiety and guilt. It was a simple decision that had to be turned into an existential choice.
Not hearing him say anything and not hearing the door open, Rosie turned toward him a bit, not much, just a little.
“What?” she asked.
“Come here,” Bill said.
“What?” she said again.
“I said come here,” Bill repeated.
Rosie was tentative and when they were close he saw that her eyes were tearing and several teardrops were rolling down her cheeks. First thing, his first touch to her was to wipe away those tears. Then softly he kissed her cheeks where they’d been.
“I’m married,” he said. “Still pretty much a newlywed.”
“I’ll never get in the way of that,” Rosie said. “I swear.”
They kissed then. The first few kisses were soft and exploratory. Then they got more and more intimate. Then Bill discovered some of the things Rosie like most, the things that drove her to a different sort of tears, the tears every woman hopes someone will take her to.
Déjà vu. She straddled him in the front seat pretty much like Beverly had straddled him on the staircase earlier in the day. This time there was nothing between them and there was no going back. What was done was done.
“I’m fixed,” she said when it was over.
“Good thing,” Bill said. “If you weren’t it’d be too bad because I couldn’t contain myself. Anyway I only tried halfheartedly.”
Something inside Bill didn’t want him to contain himself. He had a pretty good idea what that was, maybe. Maybe not. Nevertheless, he made a mental note to start examining why he always went two steps forward and then two steps back. Sometimes it felt like more than two steps back.
By Peter Weiss
The walk to the employee exit, getting his time card, punching out and giving back his time card was all becoming routine and regular now. He did it same as always, said good night and stepped out into the fall night time.
It was still warm enough not to be needing a jacket or sweater, even in Cleveland, even at night in the early fall. As he approached his car, he saw a car parked next to his that was running. Rosie was inside.
After she’d opened the window she said, “get in.”
Bill heard music from the radio. He was surprised seeing her there, but he didn’t hesitate. He walked around to the passenger side, opened the door and slid in beside her.
Rosie had an old American car that didn’t have bucket seats. It had the old straight-across seat in both front and back. So when he slid in, Rosie was able to get close to him if she wanted, but she didn’t. She stayed behind the steering wheel.
“Edelgarde wanted to be here too,” Rosie said. “We wanted to thank you for doing such a good job.”
“No thanks necessary,” Bill said.
Rosie was wearing a mini skirt, but that was nothing new for Bill to see since he saw Rosie in one all night long every night. She was also wearing a tank top, low cut, and that was nothing new either.
“Well, we do have a deal, kind of,” Rosie said. “I tell you about Millie the other day and you tell me your in with the chefs.”
“You’d be disappointed,” Bill said.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t really have an in. They just want me to be in charge of the food operation for The Falstaff Room. They want Caesar out of that loop.”
“Really,” Rosie said.
“Yup. So that means if he gives you a hard time, I can intervene, not directly but through the up-aboves.”
“Good to know,” Rosie said. “What do I owe you?”
“Nothing. Just keep it to yourself.”
“Aw, and I thought you were gonna take advantage of me.”
“Want me to?”
“You bet I do. Like I said, anything and everything.”
“And I told you I’m married.”
“Well we’re not going to be going out or even having a love affair. All we’d be doing is having some fun.”
“Seems to me everyone’s having fun around here.”
“Seems to me no one’s been having any fun,” Rosie said. “Seems to me it’s about time I had some and Eddie too.”
“Well,” Bill said, “I got to be in in the morning.”
“How’s about you follow me a little ways where we can park for a few minutes and no one from here will have any chance of seeing us. Just for a few minutes.”
“It’s late.”
“Just a few minutes. Want me to beg?”
“Like a dog,” Bill said.
Rosie put her hands up like a dog begging and said “Please? Pretty please?”
“I was only kidding,” Bill said. “Really.”
“Come on,” Rosie said. It’s close by and on your way home too.”
“Okay,” Bill said.
He got out of Rosie’s car and went into his own. A moment later he was following her on what were the first few steps of his drive home. That drive included getting through the city streets and onto the highway that led up to where he had to go. Just before the highway entrance, about two blocks, Rosie made a right turn at a school and headed down the street. Past the school was a schoolyard with basketball courts and all the things a school’s schoolyard should have. Past that schoolyard was a park, not all that different from the park Alfreda had taken Bill to in the Suburban van down in Columbus.
Rosie parked. Bill parked right on her tail.
By Peter Weiss
So back to movies. From Here To Eternity and Here Comes Mr. Jordan are my two favorites. They both are in black and white although I know at least one of them was colorized. Black and white is better, was better back then. Contrast. Clarity. Technique. That’s why.
We’ve come into an era where every waking moment we are bombarded by stimuli. Statistics recording stimuli are staggering, more in one day than our ancestors one hundred-fifty years ago had in a month. Don’t quote me on that. I remember reading it and it’s probably outdated by now. It might have been more in one hour now than in a month then.
The point is that to get attention nowadays you have to be bigger and badder, louder and louder, more and more outrageous. You have to bang the public on the head and say: look at me.
Then: simplicity, clarity, contrast, technique.
Now: outrage, shock-factor, bigger and badder (with little consideration to better).
The next movie I mentioned was Passenger 57. It’s not a great movie, not even a great movie in its genre. It’s just a simple one-man-saves-the-world action movie. I find it of import because it sets a new limit, a higher one in the outrageousness of where we’ve come as a race of people regarding meaningless killing and narcissism.
Passenger 57 presents changes in our established moral code. We are asked to accept as part of our reality the wanton killing of a family man as the way we’ve come, the way we are evolving as a people.
And we do. Now, some years after 9/11, some time after the making of Passenger 57, we see things like this and it’s just another killing, another terrorist act, another day, ho-hum.
Next movie: Set It Off. Four black women rob banks to get money not because they are criminals but because the system will not give them a break, won’t let them make a living even though they try and won’t even let them simply be themselves. They are discriminated against because of their color and abused because they are women.
Of course robbing banks isn’t the answer, no matter what. But that said, they get caught, because they are not criminals, and they “fight it out.” One gets away and one detective sees her getting away and decides to let her go.
This one is a good movie. It’s groundbreaking in many ways. It’s of import (to me) in that it lays bare what the system is in real-life modern terms and questions the rightness and wrongness of the system. It has more in it too, lots more.
So nowadays there’s a real question about who we are and what we are. Nowadays, there are lots of questions most of which none of us ask. We are busy. We are inundated. We are bombarded by stimuli, most of them distracting, useless and negative. A lot of them are even false or falsified. So like that once-shocking-the-senses killing in Passenger 57, we’re numbed, stressed-out, beyond the limit, and consequently we don’t ask the questions we should be asking.
Believe me, there’s lots of questions.
Why movies?
We can learn from them. The old ones including my two favorites show a clear sense of our morality and sense of justice back then, and the new ones, who knows? Morality is convoluted. Justice is often not served.
Kind of what we’re like and where we are at nowadays, huh?
Don’t get me wrong. No better place to be than here in the USA. But our system, our government, is broken and breaking more and more. If you listen to Pravda USA media– you know who they are–they’ll tell you it’s President Trump who did it and is doing it. If you’re interested in truth and reality, you will look at what the Democrats have done from before Hillary lost until now. They’re already talking of another impeachment.
Nowadays in the movies we’re the zombies. The Democrats want us to be just that.
