One of my hobbies in these days of societal collapse—most of us in denial about how far the fungus of cultural disintegration has progressed—is watching trailers for recently made movies, American and foreign, and from…
Posts published by “Todd Walton”
The advertisement caught my attention because it was not one of the usual ads that play during every baseball game for the entire 162-game season. I listen to Giants games on a small silver radio that accompanies me to the garden for day games and stands nearby while I do dishes during night games. The ads rarely vary and the sponsors repeat their ads dozens of times per game: Chevron with Techron, Budweiser, Speedy Oil Change, Wells Fargo, Ford Motors, Bay Alarm, Dignity Health.
Years before the dawn of tweeting and texting, I ran a summer writing program for high school kids who wanted to become professional writers. The teachers I hired were accomplished, open-minded, inspiring writers who could clearly communicate their ideas about the craft of writing.
The Houston Rockets made the playoffs this year and I’m particularly interested in the Rockets because Jeremy Lin is on that team. I am fascinated by Lin’s career and what I think his experience reveals about professional basketball, cultural mediocrity, economic collapse and catastrophic climate change.
For my birthday last October my brother gave me the coolest warmest San Francisco Giants jacket, a stylish melding of orange and black fabric with a smallish team insignia on the chest directly over my heart, and a grandiose insignia on the back, centered under the word GIANTS writ in large white capital letters outlined in orange. Little did I suspect that this jacket would prove to be a magical loosener of the tongues of countless men and women who had previously looked upon me with suspicion or indifference.
The curse that shaped the life of my grandmother, the lives of my mother and her brother, the life of my brother, and my own life, has finally been lifted. My brother and his wife lifted the curse, and their daughter Olivia, my charming niece, is the prime beneficiary of their heroic reversal of our family pattern, though I feel gifted by that reversal, too.
I walk to town most every day rather than drive my truck for the same reason I decided in 1967 to create a life for myself independent of automobiles, something I’ve managed to do for most of the last forty-seven years.