Out & About

Normally I share photos like these on Facebook and Instagram, but today, lucky you, they’re just for Paul’s Thing readers. Where’s Mister B? Not to worry, he’s fine, though no longer interested in daily walks with his housemates. These photos are from this morning. It was still in the 40s and I was starting to regret wearing shorts.

Now for odds and ends, hot takes and memories, the real subject matter of today’s post:

You’ve heard of Ozempic face and Ozempic butt. So far I’m not seeing signs of either, but apparently I have Ozempic wrist. My once seven and a quarter-inch wrist is now a svelte seven inches, and wristwatches with metal bracelets, like the one in the photo, want to slide off my arm. Resizing metal bracelets is a job I can do at home — at the risk of sending a springbar or two flying across the room, never to be found again — but I think I’ll gather them up instead and visit the garrulous owner of my favorite watch repair shop, always a treat. And here we have yet another argument in favor of simple leather or silicone straps with regular old buckles, which, like belts, can always be snugged up another notch.

Al Fayed, father of Dodi Fayed (who in 1997 died with Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris) was a major character in the final season of Netflix’s The Crown. Not once during the series was there a hint the old bastard was a serial rapist and sexual assaulter, yet it’s clear from the news that everyone, including the royal family, knew this about him all along. My impression, watching the series, was that the producers walked on eggshells with royal scandals, but surely there was no reason to extend that courtesy to a grasping social climber like Al Fayed. Maybe they did because they were trying to be true to the times: in the 90s, did anyone really give a shit about what rich men got up to? Heck, they barely do now.

My book club picked a science fiction classic, Frank Herbert’s Dune, for our November read and discussion. Dune was published in 1965 and I read it a year or two later. I didn’t like it, but everyone was reading it and I felt that as a science fiction junkie I owed it to the zeitgeist. What I didn’t like, perhaps because 1960s drug culture was at its peak and everywhere you looked, was spice. At the first mention of spice I formed the impression the novel was about drugs. I know that’s not fair. I know that’s not what Frank Herbert had in mind. But that’s how I took it, and when I picked up Dune again last week, those memories came back, scored to a mental soundtrack of Jim Morrison and The Doors … atonal, droning, soporific, full of itself, tuned in and dropped out. I wasn’t into that shit then and I’m not into it now. Sorry, I can’t bring myself to re-read Dune. So I compromised. I knew there had been a couple of Dune movies, so I decided to watch the one critics say is the best, the 2021 version with Timothée Chalamet, which is streaming on HBO. Two and a half bloody hours long, it is, but I was able to sit through it and even liked parts of it. At least now I won’t be at a total loss during our November discussion.

From 1968 to 1970, Donna and I (and our little boy Gregory and our good dog Duke) rented a little bungalow on a street not far from Sacramento State College. A lot of young marrieds our age, on the waiting list for student housing, lived in the neighborhood. The couple two houses down, Jim Harrison and his wife, were really into the culture (damn, here comes the soundtrack again, this time People Are Strange). Jim especially. He was convinced Donna and I, along with our circle of hippie-adjacent friends, were plugged into the underground and was always asking us to teach him the secret handshake or whatever. Another friend from those days texted me recently to say Jim had died, that he’d grown up to be a prominent Sacramento bankruptcy attorney. Not sure what that says about anything.

These days I’m not sure what anything says about anything.

Have you voted? Our early ballots, delayed in the mail (you can’t tell me Louis DeJoy didn’t have something to do with that) finally arrived, less than three weeks before election day. We’ve filled them out and I’ll take them to the nearest ballot drop box later this morning.

If you’re in Arizona, I’ll save you hours of online research: vote no on every proposition except the one that writes abortion rights into the state constitution. Easy peasy. If you’re in Pima County, here’s another helpful earful: some 30-40 judges are on the ballot and you get to vote on whether each one gets a new term or not. These guys and gals are elected, depending on the type of judgeship, to terms lasting four to seven years. They’ve got a lot of power over people, and I figure the four to seven years they’ve already had has been more than enough to corrupt them. I always vote for a clean sweep when it comes to judges: no on every one of ’em (to my two judge friends, Molly and Al, my apologies).

There. Always here to help. Who loves ya, baby?