HAPPY NED YEAR: Culling crumbs from the scrum of 2020

(Was the cocktail year 2020 not the perfect time for mixing metaphors?)

And, Happy 2021; our sense of optimism gives new meaning to the phrase “a new ring.”

It’s amazing: I Googled, and could not find, any play on the word toxin as “talk sin.” Not even from the lips of some super-spreader church pastor.

“You hear all the time about toxin? Well, brothers and sisters, let us now ‘talk sin.'”

At least not on the record. Well, anyway, you heard it here first. (Also, still no online sign of my phrase “Back Ages,” mentioned in the 2018 Ned Year.)

My back ages I collect and store like packages.

A good idea is a race against time.

Sometimes the things that happen by chance are the most complex.

I’m halfway there, sometimes.

This year I’ve written or collected aphorisms (“short pieces of wisdom”): Not quite the same as proverb, maxim or idiom.

Two of my favorites: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Hopelessness is the mother of originality,” and “Trifles make perfection and perfection is no trifle,” from Michelangelo.

2020 clippings:

Odd but highly disturbing: A couple of walkers on a Donegal, Ireland, beach, last month found a time capsule that had been buried just two years earlier in far-north ice 2,300 miles away. Arctic researchers who put it there in 2018 had figured it would be another 30-50 years before the ice melted to reveal the capsule.

Odd but mildly disturbing: Ford Motor Company has taken to calling itself “a family-led business with over 260,000 employees.”

Odd, but only slightly disturbing: Advent calendars went commercial in 2020. Seen were numerous ads and articles about Advent calendars for runners, or about sweets, jams and jellies, coffee, wine and beer.

Just noticed, over a mid-summer beer break: Volcanic Bottle Shoppe’s 10-year-old list of supporters’ names on the patio wall includes the intriguing “Generously Rowdy.”

Not sure who that is, but would love to meet them. (“Boisterously Cheap” left in a ruckus but did not had not left a tip.)

Cool words I learned this year: dzeggetai, a Mongolian wild ass; boyg, a formless or pervasive obstacle (how right is that for 2020?) and pitchblende, “an amorphous, black, pitchy crystalline mineral.” I am happy to report that pitchblende has been claimed as a beer name. Of course. The Pitchblende coffee porter is from Able Baker Brewing in Las Vegas.

Language folds and unfolds in ways we shall never fully explain, as long as the word stimulate rearranges to “I tame lust.”

Over easy: Dr. Oz suggested this year that we “do away with breakfast.” He calls it part of “America’s food addiction,” and that one should “eat when you’re truly hungry.”

Me? At 7 a.m. I’m truly hungry, Doc!

Seven up? Ironic, to me, given one new title, that local bookstores must put an in-store limit at any one time of six people: Who will be the one to buy “Seven Types of People You Find In A Bookstore”? (Shaun Bythell, Godine Books, 2020)

Movie and TV tropes I have come to love: After a battle or heroic fight, the (usually anti-) hero is shown to have a traumatic wound, usually hidden stoically beneath his long coat. A companion invariable says, “You’re bleeding” or “You’ve been hit.” (It’s as invariable as “Be careful,” and “Get some sleep” said by another character in a scene before the fatal wound is incurred.)

The trope plays out two ways: The wounded person has either tried to hide it or has been so busy in action that he only notices it when someone else points it out. (Accompanied each time by a short shot of blood on the floor, or on the boat deck, or close-up of the poor man’s bloody chest.)

2-point dewpoint: Proof of our society’s built-in obsolescence is that no one calls any new/revised thing “2.0” anymore ...

John Prine, we miss you. Best song lyric I heard all year? From “Come Back To Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard”:

“I gotta shake myself and wonder/Why she even bothers me/For if heartaches were commercials/We’d all be on TV.”

I also liked one from Greg Brown (did he and Prine ever do a gig together? Because that would have been amazing.)

“Why does the color of your skin or who you choose to love still lead to such anger and pain?” Brown asks in “The Poet Game.”

“Even if”: I’d love to hear one of those guys take on the phrase. It seems such a pointlessly spiral phrase: It’s actually “uneven” in that it contradicts and cancels itself.

Why not “odd if”?

Remember the maimed: Re-read some stories by my friend, the late Benedict Kiely, an Ulster novelist and journalist, and with Black Lives Matter and our country’s respirative new awareness, I found prophecy in Benedict’s line from the 1970s, starting, “The ballads may have to be rewritten.”

He added, prophetically, “Another sculptor in coming times may remember the maimed.” This is the year we began just that remembrance.

In the words of Primo Levi, writer and Auschwitz survivor, “Uprooting a prejudice is as painful as extracting a nerve.”

(It starts with a collective memory. Tough go in an era of “alternative facts.” Stephen Colbert concocted the concept of “truthiness” 10 years ago. We have truisms, why not “lie-isms?” We’re surrounded by them, we should name them.)

“The Garden of Heroes”: Donald Trump DID have at least one good idea — it was his shiny object of the week a few months ago, that of establishing a national garden of American heroes that will pay tribute to “the greatest Americans ever to live.” His list, was, of course, heavy on males, Caucasians and the dominant culture. He did include greats such as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King — who already have monuments in Washington, D.C.; Betsy Ross, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony were also there. And the Wright brothers, Jackie Robinson, and Amelia Earhart.

But we need to rewrite our ballads.

If such a national garden ever came to pass, my short list includes these 10 names:

Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Ella Fitzgerald, Sitting Bull, Muddy Waters, Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Hank Adams, Hood River’s own Minoru Yasui, and Wahunsenecawh — the first Powhatan chief to interact with the Jamestown settlers.

“Yesterday, today, and tomorrow ...” My son observed in May 2020 that “there are now only three days in the week.”

Repeatedly people have expressed the same time-out-of-mind state during this bewildering 2020. With that, a few observations on the equivocal, sideways commodity we call time.

2020 — it feels like time scrummed with the tide and came out dazed.

Twisted little dancer files: Culled from a year of musical listening, old movies, and collected aphorisms:

Truth is the daughter of time. Aulus Gellius, meet John Florio: Time is the father of truth, and experience is the mother of all things.

(Family issues to be worked out there, it seems.)

Philip Roth summed it up in “American Pastoral”: “The whole damn drift of everything called time.”

“There’s no time to bury all the time I’ve killed.” — Joey Burns, Calexico

“All the time I’ve wasted/If I could have it back/I’d do it again.” — Gang of Youths

“Time’s a twisted little dancer/you can’t tell her what to do” — from the band The The ... meet “and the days go by and time tells you what to do.” — Amy Rigby

Said best: “Age isn’t a matter of years, but of zest,” Bing Crosby said, in of all films, “High Time.”

”Isn’t every waking day a lifetime, and aren’t we reborn, every morning?”

•••

Editors' note: Ned McFeeny’s ruminations have appeared annually at year’s end since 2000 in the old Hood River News, and despite this year’s office move and name change, his manuscript showed up at the door once again.

However, we decline to publish his pointillist portraits of Benjamin Franklin as a cinnamon roll, despite the uncanny resemblance.