Matching Tracksuits

fun in fours

ameryka

St. Petersburg Day 3: Busch Gardens

Monday 01 July 2024

Today was not actually a St. Petersburg day: we decided we'd do something un-Scott-like. We thought about this nature outing, we considered that nature outing, but in the end, we went full-on American and spent the day in Busch Gardens in Tampa, just across the bay from St. Petersburg.

K had never been on a single roller coaster in her life. Not one. Ever. So we were all excited to see how she'd like an amusement park with something like eight or ten coasters.

We arrived and went to the first coaster right out of the entrance, the Iron Gwazi. According to the park, it is

North America's tallest and world's fastest & steepest hybrid coaster. The award-winning Iron Gwazi takes thrills to new heights, plunging riders from a 206 foot-tall peak into a 91-degree drop and reaching top speeds of 76 miles per hour.

Having that as your coaster ever is like taking someone who has been a teetotaller who's interested in having his first taste of alcohol and giving him a shot of 70% sliwowica.

This is what it looks like:

Such a film fails to capture the excitement of that first drop. It's difficult to describe that first drop: you think it should be over because how long can you remain in a verticle (well, almost verticle: it's 91 degrees steep) drop?

As we were waiting in line, we got to talking to the folks standing in front of us, a man and his son or stepson (I couldn't tell--the language he used was a little ambiguous). He commented on K's bravery for picking the Gwazi as her first coaster ever.

"You've never been on one and you picked this as the first coaster of your life?

K's verdict at the end? "If I can do that, I can do any of these rides."

Destruction

Wednesday 07 December 2022

With Keri Lake taking Trump's example to heart and refusing to concede an obviously-lost election, I'm afraid we're seeing what will now be the typical Republican reaction to election loss: deny, deny, deny.

Trump did so much damage to our country, but this Republican denial of reality as a basic election operating principle is the most harmful. It tears at the very foundation of our democratic institutions, and it leads to previously-unthinkable insanities, like the ostensible leader of the party calling for the dissolution of the Constitution and the party saying nothing to condemn such dangerous rhetoric. Republicans have not rejected Trump even when he literally suggested destroying our country.

There is no hope for the Republican party. Just when I think it can't fall deeper, it does.

Spark

Tuesday 23 August 2022

Two images that came through my Twitter feed over the last few days. The first: a rather succinct overview of Trump supporters.

Then a graphic representation of the same idea.

American/Polish Ognisko

Saturday 28 May 2022

Religion and Politics

Thursday 06 January 2022

One year later, the breakdown still doesn’t shock.

Image

Thread of Democracy

Wednesday 06 January 2021

It could have been worse.

When Sen. James Lankford was speaking and an aide informed him that so-called protesters had entered the building, that announcement could have come in a flurry of gun shots. After all, it’s not hard to imagine that the majority of the rioters were armed.

If this many people had charged the capital with guns blazing, the capital police would not have stood a chance.

Once they’d achieved that, the insurrectionists’ plans seem fairly obvious:

They came with zip ties to do in DC what they could not do in Michigan. And once they zip-tied them, we all know they wouldn’t have been content with just this:

Or this.

Or even this.

No, they had different things in mind.

Everyone who incited this needs to face justice. We need to see Rudy Guiliani standing before a judge.

Josh Hawley needs to be removed from the senate.

And Donald Trump should be impeached and convicted immediately in order to prevent him from running for federal office again.

That anyone needs even to consider the validity of these last three statements — let alone the fact that millions would dispute them, and some violently — shows the hole into which America has fallen.

That anyone would ever consider voting Republican again shows the hole into which America has fallen.

That (to my knowledge) not a single person was arrested for this immediately shows the hole into which America has fallen.

That almost every single inhabitant in America is not out marching in the streets, shouting these things in a deafening roar, shows the hole into which American has fallen.

Our Country

Thursday 15 October 2020

His justification:

All this has been lurking just below the surface in our country for years, and it just took one man to bring it all out. There are historical parallels that are too awful to mention.

 

Larry

Saturday 28 May 2016

The smoke from my Saturday-evening cigar blurs the view of his picture that hangs over the fireplace in our basement, and I look down at the wad of burning leaves pressed between my fingers and realize that it's because of men like him, my uncle whom I never met and after whom I am named, that I can enjoy such a little pleasure. In the picture, he sits before a brick wall, his peaked cap pushed back to show a hint of his hairline, his forearms on his knees, fingers almost fidgeting, with an expression of tired sadness. I really have no idea when the picture was taken. Perhaps he was home from Vietnam on leave; maybe he hadn't even shipped out yet. In a way, it's not as important as the simple fact that the expression on his face mirrors my own when I really think about him, when I remember the odd bits and pieces I heard about him growing up, when I think of the simple but profound fact that, after my parents adopted me and decided that the name my short-term foster mother had been using for me fit me perfectly, they decided his name would make the perfect middle name. The uncle who, my mother more than once laughed, hated baths as much as I love them. The uncle I never met.

As a child, I remember seeing this picture hanging in my grandparents' home, smudged brown with the nicotine of thousands or even tens of thousands of cigarettes. It was the house in which they both died tragically, though ironically neither passed as a result of the stains that seemed to cover so many of their possessions of their house. Like so many in my family, they died not from what everyone in the family thought would kill them -- like my uncle. The picture -- one of only two I know of him as an adult, of only three I know of him in his short life -- is framed in a gold-painted rectangle that, after all these years, seems brighter than the picture itself. The mortar and the bricks behind him have faded into an almost indistinguishable hue that seems only a darker shade of his uniform, and the triangle of his white undershirt seems only a lighter shade still.

The other picture of him as an adult seems likely to have been taken at the same time, though perhaps earlier. The same brick wall seems to be over his left shoulder, but he hadn't yet pushed back his cap, and its brim hides his eyes in shadow. I think he would have liked it that way. Perhaps the tired expression in the second picture comes from being asked, badgered, to push his cap back a bit, "so we can see your eyes." Over his right shoulder is a tree, and in the triangle of his right arm he stands with his hands on his hips is is a dumpster with white letters stenciled in to instruct someone about something that must at all costs be "down." Or "town"?

He died on Thanksgiving, a fact that seems so fought with irony that it almost seems like it must be one of those made-up details that our memory seems sometimes to invent in order to add almost unconsciously to the most significant events. I heard this week that there are only two truly significant American holidays: Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. My uncle embodies them both.

I am much older than he, the baby boy of the family, was in the picture, and I have been blessed with what he likely dreamed of: a beautiful, loving wife, the mother of my two incredible children. A house with a room downstairs where I can smoke my cigars with offending my wife's nose, harming my children, or leaving a stain over picture frames that hold images of their lives. Two cars parked on a pad of concrete. A few tomato vines and zucchini plants in the backyard. All of which I have because of people like my uncle.

Nations

Friday 14 November 2014

Once, returning from a class field trip to Strasbourg to the small village in Poland where I taught, our bus sat at the border of Slovakia and Poland for some ridiculous amount of time — two or three hours — for some reason that I never determined other than the fact that something was out of order for someone. I could see the mountain at the base of our village, Babia Gora, rising above the forest, and I knew that I could easily cross the border on foot and walk there in probably a bit over an hour. Yet there we sat.

That was in 1998. Now there’s not even an official building of any significance in that location. Only a sign indicates that you’re crossing from one EU nation to another. All the stamps in my passport from crossing into Slovakia for a bike ride or crossing back into Poland after crossing into Slovakia at some other location, all those stamps are now all the more valuable because they will never be again, like old black and white pictures of the past.

Some things of course haven’t changed. Poland and Slovakia are still separate nations with separate governments and different currencies (with Slovakia moving to the Euro and Poland still using the zloty). And they issue different passports, both of which are different from the blue-covered passport I’ve always had. These different-colored, different-formatted little booklets made all the difference for K and me when we first came to the States, with her having to go wait in a different line and meet with various people when we first arrived. There were of course advantages: one could easily and quickly tell whose passport was whose. Insignificant of course but still. There were other differences. During election cycles, K could ask who I was voting for though I couldn’t ask her. Naturally we would have already known, and likely we would have voted for the same candidates, but still.

DSCF0812

As of today, though, K and I can both have those lovely blue booklets. We could even go vote together as she now holds dual citizenship.

It was something we could have done much earlier, but we needed a practical motivation, I suppose. Finally, time and circumstance provided so much potential inconvenience, with a soon-expiring Polish passport and an even-sooner-expiring Green Card, we decided it was time to go ahead and file the paperwork, take the exams, and raise that right hand to make the Oath of Allegiance.

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

The whole ceremony lasted only half an hour, and included a video of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American.”

DSCF0821

It’s a song I misunderstood in my youth. “How can I be proud of something I had nothing to do with?” I asked. “That I was born in America is little more than an accident, a bit of good fortune.” Pride was something you felt about your own accomplishments, I thought, not about who you are. It never really occurred to me, for some reason, that one could be embarrassed to be an American, be ashamed of being an American, feel hatred toward one’s own country. I encountered that soon enough, and I came to understand what Greenwood was trying to say with that song.

DSCF0825-001

And I came to see that there is quite a bit about America to feel some sort of embarrassment about, even shame. No country is perfect, and America, both overtly and covertly, has done some truly questionable things in the name of national interests. Yet there’s no questioning the almost-unimaginable nature of the nation’s founding principles: a group of people that governs itself, that is subject to the rule of law, that in theory if not always in fact presents a level field for all participants. That’s something to be proud of.

Polish Picnic 2013

Sunday 13 October 2013

Get a bunch of Poles together and three things will happen: speeches, dancing, and singing. Lots of singing. This year had two of the three, though at moments we could have come close to a three-of-three conclusion.