Barry's Life in Napa Blog

Forgive me, readers, for I have slacked. It has been almost six months since my last post. I'm not Catholic but I heard those lines in a movie or something. This blog has lain fallow for awhile. I've had no internet since I moved from Cozy Cottage to Rancho de le Dorma  back around the 4th of July, but today I achieved connectivity with the interwebs again so, good God, let me blog! For the world has been deprived of my bloviations, and how has it survived, anyway? There's been a lot of spilt milk under the bridge in the half-a-year of my bloglessness, lots of events worthy of insightful commentary. Like the Arab Spring, for example, and also the....um...the Occupy stuff movement.. and...did you hear we got Bin Laden? Some old dude predicted the rapture twice. Sarah Palin passed the Torch of Inarticulateness to Rick Perry. And my beloved Cardinals won the World Series. And so here we are. Throughout this blog famine of mine, twos and threes of people have asked "...

A third of my hometown was blasted to splinters. In real life, tornadoes don't give you a bump on the head and send you off to Oz. They drive you to hide and cower and scream, and you hear the sounds of things flying that aren't meant to fly, and your ears pop and your skin crawls and sky is the deepest bruised black and the house blows out from around you. If you're lucky the tornado passes near you but not through you. It runs through farmland and not through the town. If you're unlucky the tornado sucks down to the ground and chews its way through your house, your neighborhood, or, in the case of Joplin, a third of the city. A day later they had counted more than a hundred dead. Tornadoes are to May in Missouri as wildfires are to California in October. In May in Missouri, any evening the thunderheads may build up and the air begins to change and you glance at the sky and wonder. Thirty years removed, I still feel the thunder and the unexpected hanging in the air...

The evangelist on TV was working up a lather, all about the book of Revelation. Smoothly building with interpretations, suspending the climactic resolution. I watched his gestures and his face, and listened to his rhythm. For the last couple of months, I had spent time watching those evangelists on TV, seeking others out on YouTube. A good actor works at his craft, and I am about to play Jim Jones, one of the most charismatic evangelists known. I'm doing my homework. Suddenly he says something that makes me want to listen more than examine. "Adam and Eve," he says, "were failures. So we are the descendants of failures." He leaves this tangent and resumes his Revelation sermon. Failures, I thought. The pulpit vernacular would call for "fall from grace" or "original sin" - not "failure." It's all about the choice of words, I thought. It's always about choices. A certain friend, if present, would remind me that actors a...

I know there are millions of people suffering somewhere, and I'm sorry about that, but look, I have problems of my own, ok? For example, basic cable. Basic cable is my lack of clean water. Basic cable is my cholera. It oppresses me. Recent attempts at viewing basic cable led me to this list of THINGS I DON'T WATCH TO WATCH 1. Any show with an acronym in the title. 2. Any show with Gary Busey in it, unless it's "The Buddy Holly Story" because that one was ok. 3. Country Music awards shows 4. Any show with an autopsy in it. (See number one above.) 5. Ads for remedies for toenail fungus. Is the need for relief from radical toenail fungus such a widespread problem it requires a comprehensive national ad campaign? Never mind, don't answer that. 6. News stories about airplane fuselages that just pop open all of a sudden. 7.Any show that displays a dead body within the first two minutes. (See numbers 4 and 1 above.) 8. Telenovelas on the Mexican channel....

In the beginning, God was mean. Right from the get go it was all about punishment. Adam and Eve, evicted, with shame as their lovely parting gift. Frogs and boils and rivers of blood were doled out to the Pharoah. And let's not forget that petulant moment when God drowned just about everyone in the world. Man, was he pissed that time. Then there's Job, and Abraham, and others who weren't so much punished as they were "tested" - if "tested" and "tortured" have the same meaning. Early God would have used waterboarding and never engaged in a morality debate. Just plain mean, that Guy. Probably was the first to say "I brought you into this world, I can take you out," and Cosby was just plagiarizing. But God mellowed with age, his heart softened by bouncing the baby Jesus on his knee, and a new paradigm of love and forgiveness was developed and announced through a series of press releases and sophisticated manipulation of social media. Jes...

There was a revolution while I was on vacation. The protests in Cairo started January 25. I was in London, five days into my ramble and paying not much attention to the news. Won't last long, I thought, when I heard about it. Mubarak won't let it last long. While I went here and there amusing myself, frustrated Egyptians held out for change and 18 days later the strongman was gone. It was February 11 and I was making the return loop. It all looked the same in London, but the world had changed. Unlike the Irish girl who quizzed me on Obama's re-election chances or the Belgian man who couldn't really believe we don't have a national heath care system, Americans don't give two shits about international news unless it affects their business interests or their family - with the exception of American Jews, who pay close attention to goings on in Israel. But word of people in the streets in middle eastern countries is a different animal. We see ghosts of Tehran 1979 an...

Last night a tight modern jazz quartet played on a houseboat on the Vltava river; sax, Gibson guitar, six-string bass and a drummer whose fast hands made his sticks look like the wings of a hummingbird. Between songs the front man chatted in Czech but now and then a phrase in English dropped in - "you know what women do to men" or "we've all been on that road before" - but the music was sexy and urgent, then sly and comic, and language was unnecessary for all of us listening. Later at U Mahello Glena, a duo was starting up just as I walked down into the basement bar. One silent Czech, one talkative Brit, two guitars, in a room for about 20 people. The Brit was the lead, about 50, and had a raspy voice shades of Joe Cocker. Between songs he went on excitedly about a reunion show with old bandmates coming up this weekend in Putney. The local crowd didn't care much about his memories - the music was the story they wanted to hear. Music cuts across all boundarie...