Balloonists of Renown

Nazca hierophants, c 200 AD (per Julian Nott)

Cyrano de Bergerac, philosopher, c 1640

Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, academician, c 1783

le marquis Francois d'Artlandes, c 1783 

James Tytler, esq., c. 1784

Letitia Ann Sage, actress, c 1786

 

Dr John Jeffries, physician, c 1786

 

Jean-Pierre Blanchard, inventor, c 1793

James Sadler, pastry chef, 1811

Sophie Blanchard, balloonist, 1819

Thomas Monck Mason, musician, c 1836

John Wise, balloonist, c 1859 

Gen Edward P Alexander, CSA, c 1862

Henry C Coxwell, aeronaut, 1862

Dr Samuel Fergusson, scholar, adventurer, 1863

Phileas Fogg, gentleman, 1873

Gaston Tissandier, meteorologist, c 1875

Salmon August Andrée, mechanical engineer, 1897

Oscar Z Diggs, salesman, regent, c 1900

Professor Fate, academician, c 1908

Baron Bomburst, autocrat, c 1910

 

Max Pruss, zepplin capt., 1937

Larry Walters, security guard, 1982

Michael Sanby, entrepreneur, 1989 

Falcon Heene, balloon boy (disputed), 2009

Joseph "Joe" Biden, politician, balloonist, c 1973 2023

J

Strings

It doesn't stop being complicated.  If my father were alive, well, I feel now that I should say thank you.

It's only in the past few years that I've understood that words like abuse and victim are accurate, in describing my childhood.  I wasn't raised to think in those terms.  He anticipated it, and got ahead of it, dad did.  Excused it with the self-aware trope, do as I say not as I do.  A trap.  He'd say, even the children of criminals can be successful.  He wasn't calling himself a criminal -- he was saying nothing he did was harmful enough to cause harm.  

In a context I've forgotten, today I imagined the kind of love someone might have for their rapist.  Then I thought, for their violator.  Then I thought, yes, if it happens early enough, young enough, and over time, some sort of love is even likely.  Being touched matters.

He only showed how damaged his soul was through his anger.  He wasn't aware that it was abusive, but, not being a monster, he felt guilt about it.  

I remember he traded his Martin 12-string guitar (something like this)

for a Yamaha motorcycle (something like this),

for me, for my 16th birthday.  I hadn't ever expressed a desire for a motorcycle, but that was nice. Today I was thinking that he must have thought about it a lot.  He would have thought it would be good for me, out in the air and sunshine, faggy indoor readerboy that he believed me to be.

Today I thought, again, that he did indeed value that guitar, and he sacrifice it, for me.  I thought maybe he didn't have the money, so he had to make the trade.  I've never forgotten this, and none of these thoughts are new -- trapped in stereotypical thinking as I am.  But I've never felt the need to, as it were, bring it up to him, and thank him.  

And for 3 years, from 13 to early 16, we lifted weights every evening in the garage gym, from 9 to 10.  We listened to the CBS Mystery Theatre on the radio.  Then I was 16, and I just stopped.  One evening he called down and asked if I was going to work out, and I said no.  He never asked again.  I think he saw it as rejection and betrayal.  I was just a moody teenager. 

It was probably that year, or the next, when he came into my room and ripped the shirt off my body.  Buttons flying everywhere.  I've written this before.  He was trying to make me ashamed, expose my scrawniness.  But I was muscular.  This is how he thought a father should act, motivate a son.  He will have been brooding about it, how I didn't work out with him.  But I was in gymnastics, in school -- too tall for it, but it was a thing to do.  

If he were alive, I would thank him for working out with me.  It was valuable, and good.  It's the best thing he ever did for me, generally speaking.  

My son calls about once a week. We talk for a few hours. We have wide-ranging conversations, share info from our specific knowledge bases, and cordially disagreeing, when we disagree.  I tell him stories that he would not remember, from when he was little.  Because I was watching -- the way a small, weak but benevolent god watches, to give blessings. 

When he was two he ran around naked in the house and he got outside, and it was just a very few minutes until I noticed but he was running around in the snow, laughing hysterically and gasping with cold, and blue.  I picked him up and put him inside my shirt and carried him in, and we laughed like idiots.  A good story.

But sometimes I'm very depressed indeed.  I try not to repeat myself, my same old stories.  I never never never used him when he was a child, for my own needs.  It was a pleasure to love him.  But now he's the only person I talk to about some of these various unresolved traumas -- my various untreated PTSDs.  I tell him now, because he's nearly 40.  Part of it is that, by showing more of myself, he will have greater insight into himself.  Dads are important, you know.  But I hear myself pouring things out, and of course it's from a need that I have.  

I've stopped doing that though.  He's heard all my sad stories, no doubt more than a few times.  It's what my father did, when I was in elementary school.  Not right.

Understanding is a skill -- or rather, communicating that you understand the core emotion.  My son is not really good at that skill.  Only a few times I've told him what I'm looking for, in my repetitions.  I want to feel understood.  It's Rogerian therapy.  Being heard, having the feeling validated.  Very powerful.  It's a skill I'd like him to have, but after these couple of years he doesn't need any more info about my past.  Any more, and I'd be using him in a way that is destructive to communication.  Eventually, to the relationship.

I'd like to find comfort in the memory that the last thing I did, when last I saw my father, was hug him.  I'm not a hugger, anymore.  And never with him.  My son was visiting and we went to see him. He did his usual thing, repeating his stories.  He sort of hobbled us to the door and we said goodbye and he stood on the porch and about 10 steps down I looked back and he had such a sad look on his face that I just groaned and came back up the stairs and hugged him.  He let out a sound like a little sob.  A moment, and then I said goodbye again, "Well, be seeing you," and off we went.  

But it's not meaningful.  Gestures are not meaningful.  You might say they are, and we'd disagree, cordially.  No one is more sentimental than a psychopath.  Or as superficial.  It isn't understanding that matters.  It's communicating your understanding. The forms matter, hello and goodbye and thank you and sorry.  And hugs.  These matter, the way a shirt makes a difference in a light wind.  

What matters is what we do for a long time.  Or sacrifices.  Or shared joy.  What matters is icy skin on hot skin, with laughter.  

J

Trapped

[Moved from Dec 17]

That fundamental inconsistency, contradiction, no, disharmony.  We fear and fight and grieve death, but it must come.  The Stoics thought this was the very meaning of life -- preparation for a good death.  Christians have it the worst, believe they're going to a better place, yet, generally, fighting so very hard against departing, and grieving so bitterly.

The other day I killed a rat.  It was caught in a trap but not dead.  Suffering, body smashed, paralyzed.  I didn't even know it had been caught, but I heard this strange wheezing.  What to do what to do.  Hard to think.  I don't like killing.  I got a bucket of water and dropped the rat in, head first, trap and all.  Should be quick.  But it wasn't paralyzed after all, and thrashed and twisted out of the trap and out of the bucket and lay on the ground, wheezing and dying.  Oh god.  And while I watched, it crawled, slowly, under a big pile of call it wood, inaccessible.  I got a flashlight and looked as best I could, but not good enough.  But it's dead by now.  This isn't the rat I killed.

It happened again.  I guess I bought a defective trap. 

This time I knew that I had to somehow hold it under the water.  It struggled, but I pressed the trap against the rat and the bucket, sort of pinning it.  Oh god oh god oh god. I'm sure I put way too much strength into it. It can have taken only a relatively few seconds.  But I'm not setting any more rat traps.  

I thought a lot about that.  It's about iron in the soul.  What has to be done has to be done.  You can't maim and just allow the suffering.  Life matters -- a rat fights valiantly, fiercely, futilely, ultimately, crawling away, dying of thirst or of its injury, minutes, hours, days later, hidden and then dead.  It didn't have a choice.  It chose suffering, because it had to choose life.  

That second time, I didn't have a choice.  You can't, cannot tolerate vermin -- human history proves this cyclically.  

Life matters, suffering matters.  Iron in the soul.  Stoics, Christians.  If not a meaningful, then at least a painless death.

Someone I've known since she was a teenager and have very benevolent feelings for is getting married today. ...  

[Restored edit:]

... I am deeply troubled.  Again, something about suffering, in this case, inevitable in the middle-distant future.  I tell myself, and others, and they tell me, that there's nothing to be done about it.  There's suffering you can't do anything about.  It's like she doesn't have a choice. 

I had always supposed she had more common sense.  But I never actually had a meaningful conversation with her.  

J

The Third Rail of ALM

 I still don't know, re Harris's favored DNA.  African, right? -- or not?  Person of color is sort of non-specific -- or, if you will, exclusive.

["***."  What, like Cherokee, like Elizabeth Warren?  "***!"  What do you mean, 'hate speech'. You're  kidding.  "***!  ***."  Then what about 'Indian Gaming' -- it's their own term for cripe sake.  "***.  ***."  That's ridiculous. "***!  ***."  So I suppose it's, Native South Asian?  "***.  ***."  And this is important to people?  "***!"  Yeah I get that.  But it goes both ways.  "***.  ***."  I think that demonstrates a lack of understanding and information, about history and about human nature.  "***!"  Yeah, well, whatever.  One of us is disagreeing with reality.  "***!  ***!  And I suppose...  "***!"]

My, that was unpleasant.  But moving on.  

Of course it's racism, picking a favorite, privileging it.  It's absurd even to call it "reverse racism".  That would be the reverse of racism -- not color-blind, not tolerance or acceptance, but indifference.  As of a trait that is simply insignificant and literally meaningless.  Like freckles or attached earlobes.  

Race is a meaningless word anyway.  We mean ethnicity or culture, as in the Rwandan genocide, with the black Hutu massacring the black Tutsi because of no reason at all.  Well, yes, racism, if we let that word mean vicious hatred of superficialities.  The way the English hated the Irish, long ago.  

So it's not that turnabout is fair play.  Cowardice and decadence are fair play.  Bullying and hypocrisy are fair play.  For everyone, always, everywhere.  Because that's how inevitability works.  Human nature is like this.  Ape nature is like this.  Primate brains are wired for fairness and for revenge.  

The lunatics are in charge of the asylum, but they were in charge in the slavery South.  Different lunatics, but same human nature.  Why do they do it?  Because they can.  It's a choice, like abortion.  It's equality, like making no effort but being entitled.

So now Disney, the angriest place on Earth, is teaching hatred to kids -- Disney plus, like lgbq whatever plus.  The Proud Family, snarling a vicious rap about how black racism is good -- repartitions equal empowerment.  Ungawament. (Before your time.)  If it were really children performing, well, they only know what they're taught.  It's adult black bigots and white lefties and sorry to all haters of other "colors" I'm leaving out -- I just don't feel like making that long a list. Is that offensive?

Black is beautiful, but not more beautiful, or less beautiful.  Sorry, I know that's like saying All Lives Matter.   Another sitcom -- N Lear presents, All in the Proud Modern American Family.  But take out the American -- too racist to be ironic.

Given our color-based theme, I suppose snowflake would not be the apt term for the critically racist theoreticians of color.  Something else, fragile and insubstantial but, gauchely, color coordinated.  Neopolitan cotton candy?  The -politan resonance works.  But, color isn't right either.  Critical Color Theory.  Honesty, I have to say it.  Ultra-neo-post-Marxism.  What color is Marxism?  Red of course and that doesn't work.  Rainbow then.  Except they don't have black in their flag.  

So, everybody.  A full spectrum, from an absolute absence of light, then a stirring of super-ultra violate I mean violet, right on through to infinite red.  But, yet, somehow, because this inclusiveness is so very divided into bands, it can never come together, united if you will, into the horror of unforgivable whiteness.  No vanilla, in our neopolitan.

That's what equality is, to the UNePoMers.  Compliance, and no disagreement allowed.  No preferences -- excepting the necessary correction, of a dispreference for what some are pleased to call white.  And do not stop apologizing, because it will never be accepted.

We prefer the term people with no color.  Tannables is allowed, but we don't like transparent. 

Regarding the Preferred -- because we've changed our minds about that, and agree that it's a good thing -- in Hillary's Bouquet of Preferables, would Jews count? -- or is it The Jews.  And, um, the Asians?  Only the non-achievers.  The affirming action of achievement is replaced by capitalized Affirmative Action, administered via the coercive power of Federal and State government, albeit not via the Constitution.  

And by the way, "a lack of understanding and information" is a polite way of saying stupid and ignorant.  

The many successive name-changings is, are understandable.  It's like pronouns -- generally, young people trying to set themselves apart and fit in.  I'm special.  Given the reality of racist oppression, a demand for self-assertion, for agency is a healthy stage of development.  And each generation does it -- anyone remember afro-american?  

My point re "non-achievers" is that, I would expect people with real self-respect and developed character to not latch onto a label of corporate helplessness, which inherently assumes victim status.  Once they've thought about it, achievers identify with cooperative individualism.  They are overcomers.  People of color is the most binary label there is.  All of us people, and you.  

And, hasn't that affirming clock just about run out?  LBJ had a dream.  Isn't our Society Great yet?  Something was wrong with his gigantic-government dream.  It should have focused on character, rather than entitlements.

Am I cutting too close to the bone?  It's just my unhappy childhood, abused as I was by being taught to believe in individualism.  This is a too-complex subject.  Not a subject at all.  Power, entitlement, ability, oppression -- the Romans had it as right as it could be.  Slaves could become senators, and emperors.  But there were slaves.  That's not right.  It's just universal.  

Let's be alphabetical.  Lives that Matter:

All ... no, Asian, and Black, and ... Caucasian, and, um, Drug-addict, Eskimo ...  hm, I suppose that's far enough.  Too far.  All I can think of is "fag".  That's not included in the alphabet identities, is it. LGBTTQQIAAP  Lives Matter.  L+LM.  But no F.  Is that offensive?  And why do the Lesbians get to be first?  Pushy much?  I said pushy.

If I were gay, I'd call myself a fag.  It would be my n-word -- I'd take it back.  

Do you think I wouldn't?  I grew up with it.  That, and individualism.

I don't know why I'm wasting my time writing these posts.  They don't show up on a search.  Even if you're there, I don't feel heard.  I'm like Lucifer shouting at God from a mountaintop in hell.

J

*CUSSOM

 YT

 

The violence and evil and intolerance of the MAGA Republicans will be destroyed.  We will exterminate everything the haters love.  They have no idea what's coming, yeah, see?  Never again, Maga.  

A new glorious new age is here at hand.  Let us rise together, waft majestically across this broad green, green and windpower land, from Alaska to Myrtle Beach!  Let us stride heroically forward onward into the glorious sunshine of the radiant future and the solar powered sun!  

Let's ... Create the United States Super Once More! CUSSOM!  We can rebuild it back better! We have the green technology! We can make it better than it was! Better, stronger, faster, um, newer!  Bigger!  Diversitier!  Possibly!  Come, yes, aha, be, with me, besides and ... CUSSOM! CUSSOM! CUSSOM!...  

-- JRB, Jr, on our 246 year as a nation on Earth 

He thinks he's funny.  That's been my problem too.   I think an exaggerated disgustingly vain persona is funny.  But I'm too old for it to work, now.  Like Jerry Lewis being his monkey, at age 60, or 70 or 80 or 90.  It just didn't work. Young and skinny worked.  I'm not sure why my know-it-all vanity-guy doesn't work.  It doesn't feel right -- I still use it, accidentally, an unthoughtful laziness or a very old habit.  But I immediately notice and regret it.  A minor regret.

Biden thinks he's funny.  The sotto voce whisper -- "I'm the President" -- "I'm the Commander in Chief".  Wow.  Just wow.  You know, absolutely know that he thinks he's funny.  That's why he so frequently informs us that he is NOT joking.  It usually seems to mean that he IS lying.  So, useful. 

There's a lot of silliness, pettiness, carping and picking at the other political side.  That's fine, people do it, and hopefully it's amusing for a bit. But it's just trivia, not really trying to convince or establish a point.  

President Ford was clumsy and said the Soviets did not dominate Eastern Europe.  President Carter was attacked by a rabbit and had been a peanut farmer.  Bush I was a wimp. Dukakis looked funny in a helmet in a tank.  clinton, well, all that was true.  Gore invented the internet.  Bush II looked like a chimp.  Kerry wore a bunny suit and said Jangus Khan.  Obama ... but we don't dare say anything about him.  Trump was a huckster, which was true, but not consequential.  

And now Biden.  Being old is fine.  But let this be a warning. A lifetime in high political office should have an expiration date -- after which, no presidency for you.  Forty-eight years, less four, is more than enough.  Make it a general rule, proven by Biden.  I expect to grow much older than Biden, and far healthier and more cogent.  So I may decide to be the exception, and if so I'll set the bar for myself at, say, 95.

For Biden, walking old and off in the wrong direction is just bad optics, nothing real.  Verbal gaffs and misreads are regrettable, but fair-mindedness looks for the substance and intended meaning of what people say.  It's just that there's something so unserious, so small about him.  So obvious, so insecure.  Partisan.  Petty.  

This isn't ad hominem.  It is about him, but politics is not my point.  The man himself.  The guy, the dude.  He doesn't have the discipline to stay on message, let alone on script.  He's so bad at the job -- yes, policies, but politics.  Repeating "MAGA Republicans" -- Putin's gas hike ... the name-calling and rejection of responsibility.  Really?  Putin decides what American prices will be?  Even if it's true, the president should not say it.  And the great number of Trump supporters are bad?  The hackness of it.  Joe Biden, president only of the ultra CUSSOM Democrats who agree with him. 

Honestly.  MAGA vs CUSSOM!  It's the clash of kaiju monster movies and the Lovecraft mythos: Mothra vs Chthulhu.  Or, make that Maguma.  Deep in the Stygian bowels of some oppressive magma chamber, the loathsome ichorous spawn of nameless chaos bestirs itself from a scathing torpor of roiling millennia and, hideously awokened, unutterably outraged, unreasonably triggered ... CUSSOM rises!!!  Meanwhile, freed from the frigid bonds of unnamable boreal ice in the melting frost-bound farthest climate-changing climes of the north, slavering noisomely in its bloated greed and squamous intolerance ... MAGUMA creeps forth!!!  And so on.  Adjectival doom awaits us to the utmost adverb.

I do play this game -- cf my frequent callbacks to pronouns -- but I'm not a serious person. If I had great responsibility, I would train myself to never, never do my big ego guy.  It doesn't work at my age, and it wouldn't work in a position of authority.  

Biden is using social tricks that he learned in the sixties.  They will have been how 50 years ago he got elected to the Senate.  Dramatic or humorous stories about how interesting and admirable he is.  Glad-handing and backslapping.  Somehow, they got him this far.  But now, completely inappropriate.  

Biden, find some other fake way to be.  You are the Commander in Chief.  Respect that.  A rookie officer has to learn command presence.  How much more, you.  You are President of the United States.  Have some gravitas.

J

Notice: CUSSOM hats are now available in aquamarine, gaslight, and stylish blue yonder!

Only $20.24 (plus 19.73 tax plus 49.99 shipping and handling, plus $246.42 cussoms duty -- other fees may apply)  at YeOldeWhiteHouseGiftShoppe. gov and the DisneyStoreOnline.  One size fits all.  Supply unlimited.  (Also available, Biden Balloons!  Guaranteed large enough to meet all your transcontinental needs.  Forgivable FHA loans available.)  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!!

The Mourning After

The dignity afforded to the President exists only because of the responsibility of the office.  Its honors and prestige are inseparable, because human beings of planet Earth have brains wired to think symbolically and magically.  Respect is owed to the office, and earned by the man. 

Sometimes a man rises to the demands of the Presidency. Coolidge, Truman -- overmatching lower expectations. But they had strong characters. The rise is not from some lowly status -- many presidents have come from humble childhoods.  None have come from meaningless careers ... well, community organizer.  

We'll even grant that having been a lawyer is meaningful.  There can be some integrity to it.  And talking your way into some political office of responsibility is an achievement.  Even being a backbencher of the Illinois assembly, then poodle-groomed into the US Senate is something ... and Obama was a fantastic speech-giver, with a beautiful smile.  

Andrew Johnson was a catastrophe.  He just never should have been VP -- albeit, horrifically, for only six weeks.  Lincoln's great tragedy was not his assassination, but his choice of vice president.  Johnson however did not seek the office -- bad judgement made him accept it, as Lincoln's bad judgment offered it.  People do seem to forget the actual reason the VP job exists -- death.  (The exception is Nixon's resignation -- Ford, selected, was VP for nine months.)

Of the inappropriate VPs, C Harris, S Agnew, A Johnson were/are superlatives.  Henry Wallace, one of FDR's VPs, was a Soviet-Stalin dupe-pawn.  So, never never never just balancing the ticket.  VPs are always political compromises etc, and many were virtual non-entities, but thankfully history allowed most to remain obscure.  

I hope to god that will be the case with Harris.  Just a blip -- in the history of high office, not a footnote but a paranthetical: first self-identified woman in the office.  Being as I am not woke but awake, I don't quite see how she's a woman of color.  I know, I'm too literal, and I don't want to offend or, unforgivably, trigger, but to me color does not mean race. She's the color of some tanned blonde on the beach.  Not a qualification for office.  Also not a qualification is whatever minority or majority of favored African DNA she might or does possess.  It is African, right? -- or not?  Whatever.  (People have been known to lie about it.  It used to be called "passing", except the other way.  This is progress of a sort.  Fair-mindedness and merit would be most preferred.) 

And while I'm about it, this morning's post-State of the Diversity Address spin, from Harris: "I think that age is more than a chronological fact," she says she thinks, re Biden.  She would mean, if her intention were to communicate meaning, that age is less than a chronological fact.  And "think" is also not the right word, given how vapid her statement is.  Then again, in historical order, she would say that she thinks that she means that life, and marriage, and gender, and now age are more or less than biologico-culturico-psychologico-chronologico-facts.  Facts, nowadays, are not stubborn things.

But back to it.  Of all the men elected to the Presidency, the most disgraceful would be Biden.  clinton was a disgrace, but he wasn't incompetent.  LBJ was a disaster for the Constitution, but he was deeply effective.  Etc.  

But Biden, Biden.  That's how he will be remembered.  Butt Biden.  An ass. During his Address, he actually argued, talked back to the audience.  Undignified.  Unpresidential.  But I haven't been paying attention.  Maybe that's what presidents are doing nowadays?  If I continue to pay attention, it's likely he will be demoted to biden.

I don't hate him, at all.  I'm embarrassed, for the United States.  I don't want to say for America -- America is like a dead mother, remembered, mourned, never in life actually the way you remember her, but precious. The United States is not a dream, but a great power of political reality -- not, sadly of realpolitik, which seeks to advance national goals (not bank accounts, egos, etc).  

So.  The Ant and the Grasshopper.  The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Chicken Little.  The Emperor's New Clothes.  Etc.  We did not pay sufficient attention to such tales, as children.  Or rather, as children we do not pay close enough attention.  But come, help me write a fable.  The Maggot and the Praying Mantis.  The USA will be the maggot, feeding off the corpse of its former virtue.  For the mantis, just pick anybody.  A scorpion would work as well.

We've had our Caesar Augustus, visionary.  We've had our Tiberius, diligent.  Next in line is of course Caligula -- hm, how to say it ... enjoying the power of High Office.  Decadence need not only be sexual.  Incompetence is also corrupt. 

Sometimes a man rises to the challenge.  Thus far, always a man, a self-identified man.  So there's time for Biden to rise, to wake up, unwoke, as from a fever dream or a coma, with a changed spirit ... but not with a head wound (not yet, too soon, I'm not ready for the Tribulation.  Biden had brain surgery in 1988.  It is generally supposed that his brain survived.).  Given the fact of his self-identified gender, I mean self-identified chronological age, there's not a lot of time -- but there's all the hope our magical thinking can conjure up.  

J