Thanks and gravy.

Around the country, people are gathering to eat, share stories, watch football (or perhaps basketball, or even hockey; it’s an eclectic nation), to argue over everything from how long to cook the turkey to how to make the cranberry compote stretch to eight people rather than six, to why Elmer or Pablo or Rasheed brought that girl home from college, doesn’t she have a family of her own?!? And to give thanks.

We live in a world of wonders, so many created by man, so many that they have become humdrum. We live longer, live better than any generation before us. We seek always the new, always the novel, the improved, the fashionable, and it’s all really cool. And we come home one day a year to our families and sit and share and love. And we give thanks for it, and laugh and pass the mashed potatoes, and yet we miss the most wonderful thing.

The still, quiet, immense voice of God uttering a simple phrase.

“You’re welcome.”

Winning One for the Guppie.

I had a win today.

After months of searching for the solution to a problem with our catalog purchasing system, I suddenly had an idea. Not a revelation, not some epiphany, just…an idea. I tried something I hadn’t tried before, and I found the root of the problem, in a place I hadn’t looked before. Three minutes later, I had the errant coding corrected, and the problem was solved.

I could have kicked myself for taking so long to figure it all out, as I often do. I did take a long time in putting one piece of advice, one hint, one clue next to another, adding 2 and 2 and getting the requisite 4. Sure, I could have kicked myself for tardiness, but today, for once, I took the win for a win and called it a day.

Jim Morrison is credited with the pithy observation that “No one gets out of here alive.” I’m not at all sure that’s original to the Sixties rocker; a young man named Siddartha figured that out some 23 hundred-some-odd years ago, and made a rather pretty religion out of the idea. But what Morrison’s phrase teaches you, to use a more scientific turn of phrase, is that entropy is a bitch. Jesus of Nazareth died. Siddartha died. Socrates asked questions, taught philosophy, drank hemlock and died. We all die. So what’s the point?

The point is that every win, every little victory,says life matters. In the cold dark universe, even a tiny light is something other than darkness, and even if it’s snuffed out, even if it’s overwhelmed by the emptiness, its loss doesn’t matter nearly as much as its once tiny, brilliant, perfect light. It is for a moment, was for a moment, not dark in the universe.

So celebrate the days you solve a problem; the days you pay your bills; the days you make someone smile; the days you hold someone’s hand when they cry on your shoulder; the days when someone holds your hand when every breath is an ache. It doesn’t matter that there is pain in the world. It doesn’t matter even that the universe is a cold, heartless bitch of a creation, and that nobody gets out alive. It matters that you are, that you feel, that you love, that sometimes you laugh.

The light needs no justification.

Strange things are happening.

If anything can teach you that human expectations are a comedy of errors, it is this year’s college football season.

The teams everyone expected to win have lost. The teams that triumphed over the teams that everyone expected to win, have lost.

I thought to opine on how my own Alabama Crimson Tide had been humiliated by a second-tier team Saturday. After a few tries at it, though, I thought better of it. There is more chaos in the world today than football can exhibit. Why should I limit my writing to the merely perplexing, when I can tackle the completely inexplicable?

Consider that after six years of the “War on Terror”, our leaders have managed to keep us from being attacked on our own soil…while tying up most of our military resources in what at best is a Pyrrhic victory in Iraq. And now there are rumblings of war with Iran and worry over the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

Consider that after months of a premature Presidential campaign, we have seen candidates cozening the canny hayseeds of Iowa, with even Rudy Giuliani kissing pigs. This morning on the George Stephanopolous show I even heard intelligent, reasoning human beings saying Ron Paul, the finest political mind of the 1920s, may actually have a chance in Iowa. Is this the process to find the person to solve the major crises of our time: the War on Terror, the Health Care Crisis, Global Warming … Paris Hilton’s pregnancy?

Why do I spend so much time worrying about my college football team? Maybe because I’d rather see twenty-year-olds lose football games they shouldn’t, than watch twenty-year-olds lose lives they shouldn’t, in a country that, if it weren’t for chaos, they shouldn’t be in. Maybe because I like to hope that next year, my team will win the games they’re supposed to. I hope that next year the kids who may be winning this war we’re in, will get to come home from overseas and win their own football games.

I doubt it, but…stranger things have happened.

Blog envy.

My friends are doing it, so what the hell. I figure I’ll write maybe one page worth, and then I’ll have it out of my system.

What will become of this manifestation of my latent megalomania? Nothing much. I won’t be releasing it to anyone, or if I do, very few. I am a modest man, as Churchill once said of a fellow parliamentarian, with a great deal to feel modest about.

I make no promises. This weblog will be at times sententious, overlong, and pompous in the extreme. But, if nothing else, it will allow me to see myself for what I am. Which is rare enough; I usually only see my own delusion of myself: capable, noble, effective, worthwhile. What any reader will see is something less complimentary, I’m sure.

But enough. This is a start. Clupeiforum has begun. Hopefully the smell won’t get too bad once the fish start to rot.