Just Another Day in Paradise

(Version 2, Newer and Still Improving. Leading off now is the excellent Andrew Wyeth print, the title of his painting's bleak mid-winter scene duplicating this particular 24-hour period in the history of the world...)

Today is Thursday, the second day of February, in the leaping year of our acculturated lore 2012.

Happy Birthday, Stan Getz… 84 years on and sounding better than ever. Maybe we could hear a chorus or two of “Nature Boy”? Or “I Remember When” from Focus? Maybe “Blood Count” would be more in tune with this peculiar

era of vampires and zombies…

Happy Birthday, James Joyce. Your portrait of a young Dubliner in search of Ulysses… well, it still gets to me every time. Guess I’m just one of your gracehopers, still too jung and easily freudened. I’m thursday too, but there’ll be lots of Guiness stout fun at Finnegan’s wake.

Happy Birthday as well to that elusive Greek, old school epic poet Homer… if he ever existed, if “he” wasn’t actually “they,” a gaggle of Greeks reciting oral stories, linking on to one another’s twisted tales of the ornery war with Troy and the original

Odysseus, victim of petty gods and perilous wanderlust. I mention Homer because one older theory has the poet born on February 2, year wayback, in an across-the-harbor suburb of Smyrna (aka Izmir), Turkey, where I lived from 1956-58. (As another epic poet, Dylan by name, sang in de basement, “Open the door, Homer.”)

But none are so blind as those who will not close their eyes and wish. So birthday greetings also to Fritz Kreisler and James Blood Ulmer, James Dickey and--would I make this stuff up?--Ayn Rand. (Joyce and Rand locked in a room in Limbo… with

dialog by Samuel Beckett.)

A Merry Unbirthday and Happy Groundhog’s to Punxsutawney Phil, rousted and prodded on many a winter’s morn. And ditto to Bill Murray and the cast and crew of that best of all comedic worlds, the weather-or-not, trapped-in-a-timewarp, peace-love-and-good-manners miracle of wit and wisdom… yes, the droll flick craftily titled Groundhog Day, impaled in perpetual emotion.

And finally, a very Merry Groundhog’s and cheery day of birth to our host and yours, Mr. Blog-Poster-

Boy-Howdy, Eyes-Wide-Shut Ed--i.e., me--in the dawn of my 69th year to heaven, on earth, and at this particular time of continuing universal entropy and looming Mayan mayhem.

Those of us here mentioned have been to some degree accepted into cultural history--well, less than one minute of fame for yrs. truly--and for that we thank all who cared.

May you and I, we and they, all and each, survive to see more shadows on the walls of this illusive cave.

And have a Happy 'Hog.