The Bain of His Existence

The source image was created by Michael Hayes, to whom I doff my hedge fund in tribute.


It's far too soon for us to be doing victory laps, but I sense a box being built around the Mormchurian Candidate, and I further predict that he will find its dimensions increasingly cramped between now and November.


A clubfoot, a tin ear and a glass jaw: These are the attributes I like in a GOP candidate.

Goldman Sachs: Fool me once…

I recall an account of the lead-up to the 1929 crash mentioning that Goldman Sachs had created layers of shell companies whose notional values were calculated according to their vast inventories of one anothers’ worthless shares. Goldman Sachs was also a major player in the 2008 clusterfuck. Makes me think that, like Diebold, they ought to start marketing flaws as features. Here I imagine that, like MetLife, GS licenses the beloved “Peanuts” characters from the estate of the late Charles M. Schultz.

Decline and Fall

Every now and then I assign myself one of the larger white whales in the western canon. Five or six years ago it was The Anatomy of Melancholy. This year it’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Burton's Melancholy, stylistically almost impenetrable at the outset, was a hoot. Gibbon's Decline and Fall is nowhere near as forbidding: on the contrary, the prose is buttery, seductive. The author contrives to make long, complex sentences seem perfectly effortless. Although I’m generally familiar with the material from other authors ancient and modern, I’ve never enjoyed the telling quite this much. Very highly recommended indeed—but you didn’t need me to tell you that.

Further to Der Alte

At birthday celebration on Saturday, with youngest great-granddaughter.

First dream

This is the first I remember, probably from 1955 or 1956.

My mother takes my brother and me to a restaurant/cocktail lounge. She is dressed in a tweed suit (jacket and skirt) of a sort of blue-purple with yellow and black highlights., with a matching hat—more a beret, really. This is apparently during one of my mother’s blonde phases. The suit existed, BTW.

As children, we are not permitted in the bar/lounge. We are required to wait outside. Before we are removed from the premises I glance inside and see my mother at the bar sipping a drink from a straw in her distinctive tweed suit.

Richard and I (in the dream I seem much closer in age and ability to Richard) wait outside the tavern seated on the ground against a wooden packing crate painted in yellow. The crate in turn abuts the building. It is mid-day. We fall asleep.

We wake up. It is now late in the afternoon, and the sun is very low. We are still seated against the packing crate, but whereas this had formerly been up against the wall of the tavern, it is now ten feet away. We somehow never registered that movement.

I peer into the restaurant. Where formerly it had been bustling with patrons, the space is empty save for cobwebs. No one has been in this room for many years. There is no sign of our mother. Behind the bar—o, sweet Jesus!—an animate skeleton is mixing drinks, and at this point I wake up wailing and my parents depart the party-in-progress to quiet me down.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

(Just at the moment, in the “Delta Club” at SFO)

Richard Careaga and I go back fifty-nine years. I was not paying complete attention for about the first thirty-six or forty months of this period, but from that time forward, and until he quit what remained of the ancestral hearth in September 1965, I studied him closely and attempted energetically if erratically to model my life on his. I was already on a skewed trajectory destined to bury the point in wilderness far removed from my intended target, but everything I am today is informed by the slavish adoration and emulation with which I regarded him from the earliest months during which my initial impressions coalesced into my first memories.

He would have been eight and change and I three and change. I was aware of my parents, but these then appeared vast, gigantic conditions of nature rather than actors within it. Richard loomed large enough to my toddler vantage, but still of sufficiently human scale to command my devotion rather than my uncomprehending love and awe. As I gradually developed a more nuanced comprehension of my family, Richard was my reliable guide and intermediary, explaining, intervening, protecting. He did all this even as he extended his own social circle to his peers. I vividly remember him cycling away from me in 1957 to join his friends. I was more than prepared to be party to that conversation; they, likely not so much. “Rich!” I screeched, “R-i-i-i-ch!” —and the bicycle with its rider disappeared at the western end of Index Street faster than my stubby little legs could carry me.

He’s always been the overachiever of the family (although he’d feel uncomfortable to hear himself so described) and his younger sibs stand in awe of him: spare us, Richard, the “impostor syndrome” bullshit. Noted and dismissed. He stayed here at the Crumbling Manse™ the past two evenings and even though his flight back to Florida does not leave until curfew this evening elected to head off to SFO in mid-afternoon. This seemed loopy to Lina, but I understood: it is better to be five hours early for a flight than one minute late. This is the Careaga Way, and I salute my bro (ensconced, I trust, in the fabulous premium appurtenances of the “Delta Club” from this moment until the boarding call) on his way back east.

Der Alte...

Turns ninety today. Our relations have been, oh my, fraught for almost sixty years, but he is a survivor, an irascible survivor, and I pay tribute to my onlie living true begettor. He’s been one of life’s hungry men since his childhood: hungry for adventure, hungry for advancement, hungry for information, hungry for knowledge. The picture above was taken when he was about twenty, shortly after he joined the merchant marine to see the world. A few weeks later there was a dust-up at Pearl Harbor, and just a day before transfers out of the merchant marine were frozen for the duration he jumped to the Marine Corps, and stormed across the South Pacific from Guadalcanal until he very nearly perished in the course of the Guam landings in July 1944 (interestingly, among the Navy physicians waiting offshore was James V. McNulty, who was the attending OB/GYN in Los Angeles as I spilled into the world a little over eight years later).

Along with my mother, my dad passed along to all his children a love of reading that stood us in good stead as many of our cohort were hypnotized by TV. Because the 1950s middle class strove to improve itself (rather than racing, as the remains of that class appear to me in my own late middle age, to conform to a lewd, violent and vulgar popular culture), he subscribed to a series of classical music “great performances,” delivered by mail on LPs, and these formed, together with the Broadway musicals for which I’ve never lost a taste, and the “American songbook” standards I came subsequently to rediscover, the basis for my own musical re-education beginning in about 1972.

Our relations have been intermittently difficult over the years, and it is quite certain that neither of us will live long enough for a meeting of minds regarding the President (I’m fer; he’s agin) or half-term Governor Palin (he thinks she’s swell; I think she’s, well...). That doesn’t matter. I wish I’d understood years earlier the importance he places on his opinions eliciting respect (not necessarily actual agreement) from his children because they’re his opinions. I would not have persisted so loudly or so long in dissenting.

So, happy birthday, Dad. You’ve outlasted the rest of your initial family by decades, and I hope that you continue with all due vigor past the C-mark. You have passed on your insatiable intellectual curiosity demonstrably down two and likely three generations. Your sons and daughter will all gather this weekend at Sis’ house to lavish tribute upon you.