I had to go to a vineyard for a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation function last week, which was fine even though I don’t drink and apparently asking for table grapes at a vineyard is essentially the same as taking a dump in a wine glass.

Anyway, the point of this is that on the way to the fancy part of Connecticut, I saw a carnival being set up. I love carnivals even if I don’t really get a chance to go to them anymore, but this one had a sign that had me ready to cancel all my weekend plans: Baked Potato and Roasted Corn Festival.

Absence is an unavoidable part of life and sometimes things leave a hole in your heart at a young age and you spend the rest of your life looking for some thing to bridge that gap. For me, there is a small hollow in my heart carved decades ago when the 1 Potato 2 left the local mall food court. In my childhood recollections I can see a row of microwaves and toppings as far as my eyes could see, stretching out over the horizon in a way that is probably more indicative of my height at the time rather than they way things actually were.

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Still, my life long love of the baked potato was born in that corner storefront and the arrival of a D’Angelos Sandwich Shop that served the only sandwich that made me shit halfway through eating it only served to lionize the dear departed potatoes in my mind.

For a brief second, reading the “Baked Potato and Roasted Corn Festival” sign made me feel young again, hope fluttering in my heart that while things my never be like they were, perhaps they can at least be different instead of dead.

I could not wait to get home and tell my wife about this glorious festival of potatoes with toppings undreamt of by us mere mortals and perfectly seasoned elote. I must be getting soft in my age, because I let myself have this dream for longer than I should have, before finally looking up the Baked Potato and Roasted Corn Festival on the internet.

Turns out the person putting the letters on the sign took a little artistic license. It was merely a Potato and Corn festival and even that moniker was more playful than descriptive. A tractor pull and some racing pigs got higher billing than any food. In fact, the only mention of food was a promise of a variety of food trucks, with nary a mention of sour cream or chives.

We briefly considered going, but I thought the hope was worth more than the disappointment, so the Baked Potato and Roasted Corn Festival lives only in my heart for now.

Armchair Diseasing

A lot of the process of having a disease in America is people dictating to you how you should feel about it. A lot of the process of growing up—or me, at least—is letting that go.

I’m not letting go out of kindness or politeness or anything other than self interest. As someone who has made a late life shift into constantly talking about the ways my body betrays me, I have had to make peace with the fact that some people will just never understand the way I see things. Which is fine, right up until the part where they start telling me how I’m doing it wrong.

The danger of saying “yeah, sure” instead of “what the fuck are you talking about?” is that the other party starts to see your problem as being “solved”, but since they weren’t really helping anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I’m lucky in that people think I’m kind of a prick anyway, so I get away with a fair amount of “that doesn’t work for me, brother” and it doesn’t matter if they don’t recognize the AQI as a valid measurement, they think I’m just delusional and surly, which is fine, because it’s not untrue.

I hate to use specific names here because this shouldn’t be an airing of grievances, so I’ll just refer to T., who has known me for my entire life. T. is of the opinion that my attitude towards cf used to be “bad”, but I got over it and now I should stand as a shining example to the younger generation about the power of perseverance. I fully understand how T. came to this realization, because to them my “problems” solved themselves. Which is fine, I understand I’m in charge of my own business, but it’s a little galling to hear things like “you should have said something, we could have figured it out” when 90% of the things I said from the ages of 18-25 were “something” and it didn’t seem to break any ground. Which I need to stress, is not anyone’s fault save for the people who go out of their way to make sure American healthcare never quite live up to it’s potential, but even at this mellow age, I still get a little twitch when we start re-litigating the past into a fantasy story.

But again, the airing of grievances is not the point and I will grant that T. was right on one thing and it’s that I should try to pass some of my knowledge on. So…

Some people are never going to get it and there’s nothing you can do about that. You will probably not have a phrase or password that unlocks the secret door in their mind that grants them the understanding you feel is just beyond their grasp. And that’s okay, they may feel the same way about you.

Look I’m not a baseball player, so it seems to me that the process of hitting a home run is essentially getting under the ball and putting it over the fence. Why doesn’t every just do that every time? Because it is one thing to observe it and another thing when the ball is coming over the plate at 90 mph. Sometimes just making contact is enough and then you run as hard as you can and you’re still out. You never know until you’re the one at the plate.

Things I Like

I probably mentioned the Arrow Films Years of Lead box set previously, but I’ve bought a lot of movie boxsets over the last few months and we’re working through them at various rates, so I’m bouncing around a lot.

I’ve grown a real taste for Italian Crime Films in the last few months and I have to give Colt 38 Special Squad a recommendation if you like shockingly brutal violence and what appear to be wildly irresponsible car chases. There’s harsh quality to the film—no heroes, no happiness—that I think you only get when your country is going through an era known as the “years of lead”. I think Il Boss is still my favorite movie intro, but Colt 38 Special Squad is up there.