Catcher in the Wry.

I heard the news last night oh boy, that J D Salinger had died. Although the news was rather sad, I never was a big fan of Catcher. But I got to thinking once again. I enrolled at LB City College seven years after graduating from high school. It was the summer of love, 1967. When I went into the Navy, I never had any plans of attending college. It just wasn't part of the game plan. Fast forward seven years. I was nearing my eight year Navy stint and had attended Guided Missile A School, Terrier BT3 surface-to-air missile C School and Missile Technician advanced B School. Add in two tours over to Viet Nam and I was a very different hombre from the hopeless kid who left Cleveland. I figured that if I could pass College English, I could probably get through college. I not only passed, I got an A. The instructor, he never taught or actually instructed, would have us write for an hour at every "class". Near the end of the term, we were to write a term paper on a literary work subject to his approval. I wanted to do Catch Twenty Two. He would have no part of it. It wasn't worthy enough and didn't have enough source material available. What bullshit. He assigned me Catcher In The Rye. So write I did, on Catcher. Because of that incident, I've always have borne an ill-logical resentment to both Catcher and JD. Well now he's gone so I guess that I'll just have to get over it.

In reading about JD, how he only wrote one work of fiction and was a recluse for most of his life, I got to wondering if JD wasn't the model for Sean Connery's role in Finding Forrester. The movie is one of my favorites and I think it is very well written.

Come to think of it, Joseph Heller the writer of Catch 22 didn't crank out all that much verbiage either and I don't recall seeing his picture on the cover of People Magazine.

Donny shrugged.

I get a lot of emails these days whining about NWO and other conspiracies making references to Atlas Shrugged. I read the book about fifty years ago and thought that maybe it was time for a re-read so I looked on Amazon and Ebay for a used copy. I found an Ebook on Ebay for only $1.99 and thought, what the hay, maybe I should try residing in the twenty first century. So I bought a copy. It was cheap, and so am I. And I was able to download the 8 Meg .pdf file within five minutes of paying for it on Paypal. So far, so good. Also, I am up to my armpits in books and eating up 8 Megs of hard disk is a nice way to keep a library when physical space in very limited. That's the good news. The bad? Reading an ebook, for me, is a pain in the ass. I may have to retrain myself to read a "book" on a laptop screen instead of having a real book in my hand. OK, but how do you bookmark the thing? The book is 900 pages long. I have never read 900 pages at one sitting and probably never will. I haven't figured out yet how to stick a business card, toothpick or toenail clipping where I leave off so I can get right back.

Sigh.

Epilogue

Since I wrote the first part of this, I went to the used bookstore and bought a paperback copy for $3.95. I found about 450 places to stick an impromptu bookmark. For now, I think I'll stick with Gutenberg.

OK, I'm done.

It's been raining, more or less, steadily since Sunday. OK, I know that it's mid-January and here I am in So. Cal. and I'm bitching about some rain. I could be freezing my ass off in Cleveland or riding on a can in Avalon Harbor like George and Malinda. But here I am in Alamitos Bay Marina with a fire going in my fireplace and I'm nicely hooked up to shore power and I'm whining.

I do have to go outside and pump out the Whaler now and then and we did have a waterspout come ashore about a mile south in Sunset Beach on Tuesday and tear a few roofs off and flip an Explorer.

Flip around some dingies at Peter's Landing.

And pickup a few catamarans 100' in the air and toss them across the channel at

Huntington Harbor.

No Oaky trailer park stuff, but still a wakeup call.

We got five inches of rain yesterday here in Long Beach and the mayer is asking all of the residents to not do any un-essential travel. The underpasses by and on the freeways are flooded and clogged with flotsam consisting mainly of Toyotas, Mazdas and Fiats. It's a good time to have a BRT. A Big Red full-size Dodge pickup Truck.

I have a bit of water running down the mast, what else is new, and an annoying drip from the hatch over the galley. That's about it. But I'm starting to get a bit of cabin fever.

The storm is so big that the kids were surfing off of the peninsula in LB, inside of the breakwater which I never heard of before. Check it out for yourself.

http://welovelb.org/2010/01/video-we-love-long-beach-surf-january-19th-2010/ .

It's still blowing like hell out there and the rain is slanting in, but as far as I know we haven't lost any boats, ships or oil platforms.

Yet.

A tribute to the Arts.

The two biggest influences in my life were both named Art.

My dad was named Art and so was my first wife's father.

I never met anyone who didn't like my dad. When people would learn that I was Art Koch's son, I invariably got a big smile from the other person and an almost automatic reaction of what a great guy he is, was. I could go on and on about my dad.

Art Havens, my first wife's father, was also like my dad in as much as he was also much liked and admired. In addition, Art Havens was a successful businessman. Art owned a refractory, firebrick, business. Art and his company sold and constructed boiler settings and industrial furnaces. In Cleveland, in the 1950s, that was pretty big business with all of the steel mills and foundry s etc. Art was born in Canada of American parents so in 1939 went off into the RCAF. In 1942 when the USA got into Roosevelt's War, he was transfered into the US Army Air Corps as a gunner in a B17. He was stationed in England and came back as one major Anglophile. Art loved everything English. It seems he also loved a lot of English girls while on his tour in the UK.

The reason I bring this up is last night I prepared a traditional Christmas feast for my two sons and their wives. It consisted of a prime rib roasted in a Weber barbecue with lots of Mesquite smoke. We also had creamed spinach, glazed carrots, and lots of gravy to pour over the Yorkshire pudding. Art introduced me to Yorkshire or batter puddin'. He showed me how it was made in Merry Old England, and as he explained he would don his Cockney accent. It was a riot. To this day, I can't make batter puddin and not hear Art's voice in the back of my head. Whisking away and talking up a storm.

Last night, as I was raising my Claret to my lips, I was silently toasting the two Arts. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you both. They are probably both together in some old guy's club in Heaven checking out the action. Hoorah!!!

A New Day and a New Deal

Today has a palindromic date. Think of it 01022010.

Read it backwards, and it becomes 01022010. Simply amazing.

Well hopefully we all survived 2009, the second crappiest year from my vantage point.

Maybe I should make some New Year's resolutions. That's always fun to see how long that they last. Should the time base be in months? Naw. Weeks? Nyet. Days? That would be pushing the envelope. Let's get real and think in hours or milliseconds.

OK.

In 2010 I resolve to be a better person. OK, that's nice and vague.

I won't drink any more. But I will also will not drink any less. Whew.

Seriously I would like to get under 200 pounds. Depending on which scale I wish to believe, that can be only five pounds. So far, so good. I would also like to resume my music practice. Just about the time I was starting to get comfortable once again with the treble clef, I got lazy once again.

Did someone say sailing? Gee. I'd like to do more of that. I put that brand new Yanmar diesel engine in about a year ago and I still don't have 100 hours on it yet. Let's see. Kids are coming for Dad's belated Christmas feast tomorrow. Prime Rib with Yorkshire puddin. Lots of Dad's gravy to ladle over the beef and pudding. Creamed spinach and lots of Claret to warsh it all down with. A simple desert and ta da, I will have done it once again. But I digress.

I took the Christmas lights down off the boat today and the decks are literally cleared for action. Next Sunday, at noon, we'll get under way. Head out towards the oil platforms and once we clear the shelf, they will be a waitin'. The whales, they be right out thar. The California Grays. Migrating down to Baja for some whale sex under Del Sol, that nice warm Mexican sun.

Perhaps DOD should endeavor to get some sex himself under that same warm sun.

Now all I have to do is replenish my bank account and the rest should take care of itself.