Some news first, then a screed
News
I’ve joined forces with author and PR/marketing guru Tristra Newyear to put out a weekly events podcast called Do One Thing. She’ll be handling the public end of operations and I’ll take care of production. The two of us will drop our thing on the information highway (Hah! Remember when people wanted to call the internet that?) every Wednesday morning. We’ll each present one thing to do over the coming week that looks compelling, interesting, fun, fulfilling, informative, entertaining, or just distracting enough to get us all through another seven days on this bizarre planet.
I’m telling you, Tristra and I are dynamite together. We may not be Mike Nichols and Elaine May, or Stiller and Meara, and it is to be hoped we’ll last longer together than Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett (a reference dating back to the days of the information highway). BTW, don’t sweat that the two of us are entangled in ways other than in innocent business. Tristra’s been a guest on Big Talk several times and we hit it off so fabulously that, one day last summer, I posed the question: Why in the hell aren’t we doing something together?
Not missing a beat, Tristra said she had an idea for an events podcast that’d be fun and quick. Most community events calendars, she’d found, are so comprehensive and so long that people just don’t want to slog through them to find out what they can do on, say, a Saturday night. I thought, Shoot, why not?
We tossed around possible formats and produced several test episodes, tweaking the idea until we came up with a product we felt confident enough to air. In fact, we fully expect to continue tweaking (not twerking — remember that term?) as time goes on.
We’re having a hell of a lot of fun and we hope you will, too. We hope, as well, to spotlight some good things this town and the whole of South Central Indiana have to offer. For instance, our first two episodes, January 8th and 15th, featured us gabbing about the Kingston Trio (Phew! Now that‘s a Stone Age reference) appearing at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater and the Cicada Cinema pop up presentation of the film, “Nocturnes” (from the film’s website: “In the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas, moths are whispering something to us.”) They were our featured rec’s in Episode 1.
The next week we balloon-juiced about Dolly Parton’s Birthday Bash at the Back Door and the 10th Anniversary Dance Party for the Soul Kitchen at Harmony School (Soul Kitchen is the Brother William Morris DJ’d show on WFIU.)
I mean, these are the kinds of things you might miss if not for us. That is, if you’re one of the many who roll your eyes at the idea of scrolling through the bazillions of events on our region’s best community calendars. Hell, let us do it!
So, yeah, we’ve got next week’s Episode 3 in the can. We record at Hopscotch Coffee and Kitchen on Dodds Street at the B-Line Trail (thanks to big boss Jeff Grant for putting up with us.)
Listen up, then go out and have some fun. Or at least be distracted enough to get through the next seven days on this bizarre planet.
Screed
Speaking of this bizarre planet, Monday, January 20th’ll be the damnedest day a lot of us will have to endure.
As I rule, I take Martin Luther King Day as my first landmark for getting through the odium of winter. The holidays are over, football’s winding down (thank the god I don’t believe in), baseball’s Spring Training is only a month off, and it’s beginning to stay lighter later and later in the day. It’s my annual tradition to watch the documentary, “King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis” on this day. MLK’s birthday is really the 15th but the feds want us to celebrate it on the most convenient Monday, so there.
And so Monday ought to be a happy-ish day, celebrating a hero and getting through the first third of the worst season of the year. But this Monday also will be a dreaded day. The foulest human being since the days when slaveholders did it to hold the office of President of the United States will again take the Oath of Office.
The last time this sad day occurred, January 20th, 2017, I was unconscious, thankfully, grooving on anesthetic and memory-erasing drugs as a surgeon sliced the chemotherapy drug port out of my upper chest. Because of that, I can truthfully say I got one good thing out of cancer.
Honestly, the second inauguration of 45/47 will itself be a landmark in our history. Let’s face it: he and his billionaire cronies and crazies are set to remake this holy land. We’ve been easing into a Corporate Oligarchy and, after Monday under the new president’s watch, we’ll be slipping and sliding even faster toward that ugly fate.
I recall being baffled by the ascent of That Man the first time he took office. This time, not so much. Everybody in the nation agrees it’s all FUBAR here. Where we disagree is who’s responsible for the fucked-up-ness. It’s natural for a people to seek a strong man, even a dictator, when they think the world’s crashing down around them.
Well, we’ve got our strongman and, worst case scenario, our dictator. People complained he was a leader without a policy the first time he took the throne. That ain’t the case this time — his policy will be twofold: vengeance and making the rest of us even more compliant, malleable, and obedient consumers than we already are.
Monday, January 20, 2025. Now that’s what I call FUBAR.