Temptation

I ate my first salad in months last night.  I ordered takeout from a Greek place, chicken and a Greek salad. The Greek salad they serve isn't really a true Greek salad, though, which has only cucumbers, tomatoes, green peppers, red onions, and black olives.  Theirs has iceberg lettuce and potato salad along with the rest.  They would be fined if they were in Greece.  But it is a good salad nonetheless, and I ate with gusto.  

Now I wait. 

Part of the new fence at home is built.  The carpenter is making a wonderful fence, piecing and overlaying each board rather than using the cheap Home Depot fence sections.  The wood is thick enough to hold in cattle, I think.  

"That looks great!" I told him.  

"That will be standing long after we're dead," he replied.

"You're saying it will last another three or four year?"

That's one of the photos I took at the little sub shop.  The place is so small that I shot this through the window.  Classic diner decor--grimy floors, dirty counter, backbreaking stools with just enough room to squeeze in.  If you live in the New York corridor, you see such things all the time, but here in my own home state and especially in my own home town, this is an anomaly.  Everything here is new plastic, by and large, unless you travel in certain circles.  Most people are addicted to commercialism, though, and chain food is big money.  

So you'll have to give me this one.  It's not much of a photo, but I showed a small amount of chutzpah in taking it.  

"Where's Waldo?"

See if you can find me hidden in the picture here.  

I'm pretty certain you have an opinion on whether people should be allowed to kill their children or not.  What about Sydney Sweeney thing?  You know, the girl with the good jeans/genes?  Man, that has set the internet ablaze.  I find much of it ass backwards, though.  Some female athletes are "up in arms," as they say, about Sweeney.  They are struggling, they say, to be taken seriously as athletes. . . just like the hydralax woman.  You are, I imagine, familiar with her, too, at this point unless you take great pride in not keeping up with the times.  Here's a take on it all from yesterday's N.Y. Times.  In part:

Sometimes choosing story targets in journalism is about making calculations about what readers will actually click on. Case in point: Would you rather hear about an incredibly beautiful naked woman, or would you rather hear about a lady with poop running down her legs? 

Last year I went into a screening of “The Housemaid” not understanding why people were obsessed with her, and then there was a naked scene and I understood better than I have ever understood anything in my life. After the movie, three complete strangers and I bonded together over the brassiere lore that girls learn in junior high — the pencil test — and how it all suddenly made sense to us now, after seeing Sydney Sweeney take off her shirt.
This was a few months after Sweeney’s American Eagle ad campaign that some saw as racially coded (it was a pun on “genes” and “jeans”); we live in incredibly interesting times.
Actual female athletes hated the campaign. They’re out there fighting for the right to wear wedgie-free leotards or play beach handball in something other than Baywatch costumes, and Sydney Sweeney seemed to be encouraging the idea that the best protection for a female hockey goalie is a pair of tighty-whities. 

“idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like,” former NCAA gymnast Gracie Kramer wrote on social media, accompanying a supercut of herself flipping, running, boxing, and playing soccer and baseball.
Sweeney responded with her own Instagram story, which is no longer available for viewing but which apparently showed a compilation of professional athletes who have posed in the nude for editorial photo spreads. 

When we look at Sweeney, we think about how we feel. When we look at Wietrzyk, we think about how she must feel.

O.K.  I find this all sorts of silly fun.  It's just sex, as I like to say, but ideology, too.  They make a fiery combo.  But here's why I think it is kind of backwards.  I have yet to hear any criticism of gambling.  Sweeney's tits are the problem?  Gambling's the problem, I think, as is/are professional sports in general.  College students making millions of dollars to play football?  Have you ever looked at the graduation rates of those kids?  If you'd watch more little league baseball, those kids could be making money, too.  If nothing else is on, people will watch professional horse shoes, and bet on it, too.  But how many times has the fix been in?  Pro boxing is famous for it, but it infects team sports, as well.  Let's face it, it's really about the money, and Sweeney probably got paid more than all the women athletes criticizing her combined.  It is not about athletics.  It's about money.  Pro athletes are entertainers in a country that is entertaining itself to death.  We've elected an entertainer as president.  Not once, but twice.  And he's filled his cabinet with t.v. personalities.  

Yea, I think the whole thing is backwards.  I think athletics are fine.  Colleges have always promoted them.  Healthy body, healthy mind, and all that.  But now, the money is the thing.  Do you know how much a college football coach is paid?  Do you know how much more his salary is than the average professor at the same school?  

If women want to run around basketball courts naked, wearing shorts, wearing trousers, or wearing hijabs, whatever they want is fine with me.  But I find it weird that some female athlete whose name hardly anyone knows is taking pot shots at Sweeney instead of the whole money/entertainment deal.  Sweeney, just like the athlete, has only a little bit of time to stand in the sun.  Our bodies betray us quick enough.  Let everybody enjoy what those bodies will do while they can.  

There was a time when I couldn't wait to take off my clothes.  I was an o.k. athlete.  I never got paid for either thing, though I was offered money once to be a male stripper.  Oh, I was asked if I wanted to work in a porn movie, too, but I never gave them a chance to view the merchandise.  

I promise you, you wouldn't enjoy seeing me naked now.  

So kids, quit your squabbling.  If it weren't for the money, you'd all be playing sports and taking off your clothes for the fun of it, for free, and we would still be delighted.  And that, I think, is how it should be.

Thank you brothers and sisters of the congregation for your attention today.  I hope the lesson has landed well.  Greed is bad.  I think it is one of the ten commandments or one of the deadly sins--I'm not certain.  It could be both.  

Let's end with another bad photograph, the tall tattooed lady driving past me in her car, mugging the camera.  

Oh. . . this came up on my YouTube feed last night.  Everybody gets old. Here's Krall doing "Temptation" some years after the other version.  Stripped down.  Lower energy.  She has gotten bigger, fuller, slower, but she's still out there fighting for the title.  She's colored her hair.  I like it.  This is not exactly raging against the dying of the light, but it is something, and I love her version of this song.  I can resist everything but. . . .