Extending greetings

As regular readers know, I try to walk for an hour every morning when weather and circumstances permit. That leads to an average of five days a week, nine months of the year. December through February get iffy.

Other than for the sake of the exercise itself, one thing I try to do while walking is to greet everyone I meet. It's interesting that a simple 'good morning' can appear to make other folks smile. I can't tell you how many people approach where you can see they're keeping their heads down, unsure whether they should make contact. Then I say "Good Morning!" and they invariably smile and say it back. I like to think it's good for us both.

To be sure, some do not respond, or respond surly. Yet I try not to let that bother me. I don't know what's on their minds or how their lives have been lately, so why make a big deal of it? Even if they are surly by nature, my good morning certainly can't hurt.

It all actually makes my walks better. I've never been much on psychology but I can see that when we choose a good attitude we tend to develop one. With that in mind I say to all of you out there, Good Morning!

Or good afternoon if you don't see this until then.

Going by the Numbers

Did you know that in 1953, Joe Cosgriff Welding Machine rentals bought more new Hobart welders than anyone else in the country except Ford and Chrysler? Well, now you do. I'm not sure how many units that was, but it must have been a lot.

At its height I know me Grandpa had over 200 welders. In the 1970s, I remember them being numbered up to 210, the Shop number painted on the top with the prefix JC. That number, of course, does not include the total number of machines he ever owned. Things go bad; things get scrapped out or, horrors, stolen.

I'll tell what impressed me most, though: me Pops had every serial number memorized. If I asked him the 'Joe Cosgriff' number, say, JC-167, he'd rattle off the machine's factory assigned serial number. Right now kapow. I was awed by that when I was 10. I'm still awed by it. I mean, we're not talking simple little four or five digits with maybe a letter. We're talking number and letter combinations like 12CW5497 or 5DW68873. I remember the 5DW ones were 400 amp welders, so there was a code to it which could help memorization. But still, over 200 (likely closer to 300 counting machines out of use over time) committed to memory? Wow.

Now they're all gone. The last one we rented, fittingly enough, was the month Joe died, August 1991. The last ones we had we sold to a guy who shipped them to Nigeria. Yes, that sounds like a joke. But it's what the fella told the old man, and he paid cash. He could do whatever he wanted with them after that.

There. Now you're all set for when 'Cosgriff welders' is the Jeopardy category.

Spinning

Just when you think it's safe to go outside...

I was diagnosed with Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, or maybe Meniere's Disease, or something, about ten years ago. Call it what you will, what it means is that I get dizzy and they don't know why. 

I haven't had a major episode in several years. I had hoped it was in my past. I take vitamin D as recommended, and do the exercises, and hydrate, just like I'm supposed to. Then, around four in the morning today, I was sliding along the wall to get to the bathroom. Yes, I'm old too.

This is not fun.

Don't Cross or Blur the Lines

The Lindsay Clancy trial has brought about strong emotions, and understandably. There are serious and profound issues of justice involved, issues of basic right and wrong, and none are to be taken lightly. We must be able to speak out; we must be able to say things which need saying, even to be strident and emphatic. Justice requires that we draw a hard line.

But it does not require casual, flippant, mean-spirited comments. Indeed, justice condemns them. There are things you simply cannot say or do.

We must never, ever, under any circumstances, wish or presume Hell on anyone. Holy Mother Church has named many Saints. She has never proclaimed anyone to be in or deserving of Hell. Not even Judas Iscariot. If the Bride of Christ will not do it, neither may we. No matter what.

We must never, ever, under any circumstances, encourage violence against the person. We must not, for example, tell someone to kill themselves, no matter how heinous the acts they commit. It's just plain wrong.

Christian charity is required of all of us, at all times. This may be most necessary when the most important questions are at play. For while we may be, and perhaps ought to be, strident, we may never become subhuman. Or act as though others are.

Snorting Coke?

No, it isn't what you think. But what a hook, huh?

The traffic light caught me as I made a Michigan left on Telegraph Road in Taylor yesterday. As it happened, directly across from me as I waited I saw a family restaurant which used to be a Denny's. It was a Denny's when I was in high school back in the seventies (the NINETEEN seventies, just to clarify). My friends and I back then ate there with some modest regularity.

One such time, six of us stopped there on a Saturday night after a movie for a late dinner. We ordered food and pop. Of course, with six people there were orders for a few different types of pop: Coke, Dr. Pepper, and likely even a Diet Pepsi were in the mix. The waitress as was the norm brought our drinks first.

Only she had apparently forgotten who ordered what and what was what. She had too neglected to somehow mark them as some servers did even then, with two straws for the Coke, one for the Dr. Pepper, and so forth. So arriving at our booth, the young woman improvised. She stuck her nose almost into a pop, snorted loudly and, deciding the first was a Coke, handed it to one of us who ordered one. Then she snorted the next, another Coke, and set it before the next of us, then likewise determined which was the Dr. Pepper and handed it out.

Caught between silent snickering and uproarious laughter, we did what teenage boys would naturally do. We laughed uproariously. The girl looked at us as if we were insane and asked if everything was okay.

It more than was. In fact, her entertainment was better than the movie we had seen. It brought a whole new meaning to snorting coke.

Another 9/11

Twenty-five years have now passed since what may become the defining point of a generation. Sixteen years, almost to the minute as this is being written, terrorists attacked the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and were overcome by the passengers of an airplane over the hills of Pennsylvania. All that time, and we still cannot make any sense of it.

The trouble is that there is no sense to be made. To be sure, we can understand the reasons for even such terrible actions, in the same way that we can understand the reasons Hitler did what he did. Yet that is not the same as understanding.

How do we, how can we, come to actually understand rape or murder or thievery, mass murder or any any other evil which may be added to such a gruesome list, if we are to be decent human beings ourselves? It is only in a warped mind where such heinous acts may be justified. As such, reasonable people simply cannot understand them. It is beyond their ability; it is, to them, pure nonsense.

So the goal today should be to remember. Remember the victims and their families, remember the countless acts of heroism that day, remember even the perpetrators of such despicable carnage if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that such twisted souls do exist, seeking the ruin of those not in lockstep with them. But hopefully, remember even so that their redemption may be possible. If we are the good people we claim to be, even that shouldn't be so difficult of a task on so difficult of an anniversary.

About Lindsay

Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. David Berkowitz. Charles Manson. And yes, yes I am. I'm about to add Lindsay Clancy to this list.

I'll be blunt: you have to have at least a touch of insanity to commit gruesome murder. Every person on that list demonstrated a degree of it, at times to reprehensible proportions. Ted Bundy violated the corpses of his victims until they were too decomposed to be of any use for his wicked desires. Berkowitz thought, if we can take him at his word, a dog from Satan was ordering him to kill. Charles Manson? He clearly broke the code of the Beatles' White Album to gain instruction. You get the point.

Lindsay Clancy systematically executed her three small children. She clearly put a lot of thought into it. Was she insane? I'm not sure if or how much that matters. 

The men on this list were put to death, or, at least, institutionalized for life. Jurors created no excuses for them. Yet "He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children," said one Clancy juror, knocking the holdout juror who would not grant a not guilty verdict. That statement itself is insane. She couldn't hear the profound stupidity in what she was saying?

Another juror said the holdout couldn't point to one piece of evidence for a guilty verdict. Does Lindsay murdered her children not count? Again, an insane comment.

This type of dismissal of murder one worries me more about the future of humanity than the Iran War, Donald Trump or AOC, homelessness and many other societal ills. A segment of society is trying to defend murder based on mental health. Never mind that thousands of women who suffered post-partum depression did not kill their babies. Lindsay should not get excused for that. What kind of jury pool do we have when folks think that way? Are any of us safe when and if such an attitude towards very basic questions of justice permeates society?

Did you notice she wasn't quite so successful at killing herself? Yet she was a nurse. She surely knew how to accomplish that. If she actually meant to. Yes, I think her attempt at suicide a rather obvious subterfuge.

Bundy got the chair. Manson died in prison. Clancy should be in jail or confined to a mental institution. For life. An overwrought sympathy for her dilemma if, and that's a big if, she really was momentarily crazy, is a denial of justice to her children, and thoroughly despicable.