Miz Shoes dedicates this post to The Rude Pundit, for obvious reasons.

So here’s the thing about Anthony Weiner that nobody is willing to talk about. It’s the elephant in the room, connected, if you will, to the trunk in Tony’s crotch shots. Miz Shoes is not going to offer an opinion about Tony being a pervert or a creeper, although, you know, if it sexts like a creeper and lies like a creeper and acts like a creeper, the odds are pretty good that it is, in fact, a creeper. No Miz Shoes doesn’t care about that. Miz Shoes says this as a woman with a history of fondness for men who are not, shall we say, classically handsome (see obsession with Bob Dylan). But LOOK at that man, people. LOOK long and hard. THAT is a man who has never gotten laid for free in his life. Really. Not even a mercy fuck for that monkey. How he scored his wife is a mystery, but the word “beard” comes to mind. He is just a pathetic little man who finally found a medium where he could “charm” with his “wit” and then get his rocks off via e-mail.

And now let him be gone from our national dialog.

As regular readers of this irregular journal are most likely aware, Bob Dylan sits at the top of my personal rock gods pantheon. Or, perhaps more accurately, he is the enlightened fool of the tarot deck. Either way, not a day goes by that there isn’t something from Dylan on my i-pod and thence into my head. I carry on my shoulder a (tattoo of a) Siamese cat. I dream about him more than I dream about the people who populate my waking life. Today is Mr. Dylan’s 70th birthday, and so pundits from the Rude to the New York Times are lauding him and retrospecting him and carrying on as though he’s just been discovered. This year I chose not to bake him a cake, as he never shows up at my house for a slice anyway, and my diet precludes random cake baking. Instead, it is my pleasure to reprint for you all, in its entirety, a little something from the Sept/Oct 1995 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR).

The Value of Love, Using the Dylan Model

Somewhere or another I read that the human body completely replaces itself on a cellular level every seven years. That means that today I am a completely different person than I was the day my father died, which was seven years ago this morning.

I suppose that’s true in a metaphysical way as well. I know that for the longest time I felt diminished, as though I was no longer the person I was when Daddy was alive. Getting my bookkeeping in order and my weight down were two steps towards getting back to who I was BMD (before Max died). Still, I’m not the same. I’m more melancholy (hard to believe, I know, especially considering I espouse putting Prozac in the city’s drinking water to improve the community at large).

I miss talking football with him. I miss talking baseball and basketball with him. I miss telling him stories about my dogs. I miss him every Sunday when he doesn’t call. I miss him sending me marshmallow Peeps at Easter time, and a weekly envelope full of newspaper clippings.

I miss his acerbic take on politics, and know that the Tea Party would have caused him to burst a blood vessel in his head. I find myself less tolerant of stupidity than ever, and remember the old man’s favorite saying: “I don’t mind ignorance, but I can’t stand stupidity.”

Not a day goes by that I don’t think “What Would Max Do?” and the answer guides my actions. And saying that, what Max would do about this sorrow and emptiness would be to suck it up and do the things that still need to get done. There is no going back, so there is no use in dwelling in the sorrow. Pick yourself up and live in the now, he would tell me, although not in those words.

Nope, Max would say this: you do the things that need to be done first, and then there will always be time to do what you want to do. So I’ll put one foot in front of the other, and wait until tonight, when I can light a candle for my father.

I got new ink on Saturday, much to the distress of some of my friends. “It’s your freakin’ ARM, not a t-shirt” was one of the comments, along with the suggestion that if I needed the reminder, then, well, that’s what the album is for.

And so it is. But this is more than just a reminder, it is my own personal pop-up timer. When the day arrives that I can no longer read it and understand what it means, that’s the day to put me down. I do not want to live out the end of my life like my mother: a delicate little eggshell whose mind is the yolk which has been blown out.

This was not an easy tat to acquire. The surrogate daughters and I made appointments with our regular guys up in Delray Beach. But then the RLA and I saw a guy at the local TJMaxx who had the most delicate, beautifully rendered lettering on his arm, and he told us about Calvin. We made a few recon visits. I loved Calvin’s vibe and his skills with typography. When a graphic designer wants a type tattoo, there is a lot of pressure on the tattooist to have mad skillz with hand lettering. It was obvious that Calvin has those skills. I made an appointment. The RLA and I dicked around with type. Calvin added swashes and flair.

The Number Two Surrogate called up north to cancel our other appointment. Oh, yeah, said the girl on the phone, Your mother wanted that Bon Jovi thing, right?

I… she said… wha… I…

Bon FUCKING Jovi? Are you kidding me? I’m not sure I can ever forgive the insult. JON FUCKING BON JOVI? What, next they’ll think I want a portrait of David Lee Roth on my ass? JON BON FUCKING JOVI? Do I LOOK like a refugee from a rehab house for 80s skanks? Bon Jovi? Please.

There is from New Jersey

and then there is from New Jersey. 

I am so undone by this, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to let Scott ink me again. Jon Bon Jovi. I weep. I mean I understand that Scott and his receptionist are eons younger than me and maybe all aging rockers look alike to them, but Springsteen is not Bon fucking Jovi. There is a world of difference between… Well, you know what? I can’t finish this sentence because the ONLY Bon Jovi song I could identify is Living on a Prayer, and that alone makes me blind with indignant rage that anyone would think that I, me, Miz Fucking Shoes, who has been up against the amps at a Ramones show, walked out on Frank Zappa for inordinate amounts of miscellaneous guitar ramblings, seen Bob Dylan, the Band, the Who, the Stones, Ike AND Tina Fucking Turner back in the day, ditto Johnny Cash, Dire Straits and Stevie Ray Vaughn, who has talked baseball backstage with George Thorogood (he’s a National League guy) would be so impressed with Bon Jovi that I’d want some of their insipid lyrics tattooed on my arm.

Jon Bon Jovi. Really?

Yeah. I don’t think so.

The lyrics in question.

Miz Shoes has been working on her family genealogy for years now, and has uncovered a missing relative or two, but nothing earth-shattering. As a clan, there have been some small re-connections. It’s been slow work, and done in fits and starts. There is one branch of the family, though, that seems to have been pruned from the tree of man. My mother was the only child of her mother, a lovely (based on the two photos we had of her) woman who died in the flu pandemic of 1918, when Mummy was merely 7 months old. I am named for her. I have visited her grave in Newport, Rhode Island, but there is no record of her death in the Rhode Island databases. Lillian was herself the only child of her father, but she had numerous half-siblings, all of whom had a different last name. I have found the immigration records for the siblings and their mother, but not for Lillian. I have found the marriage records for my grandfather and his second wife, but not for Lillian. I have seen my mother’s birth certificate, but there is nothing in the Rhode Island databases of her birth. I have found census records from 1910 when my grandfather was single, and from 1920, when he was already married to my grandmother.

In researching the Ellis Island database, I found Great Uncle Jake’s immigration papers. He was headed to New York to his relative, Morris Rube. Well, Rube was Lillian’s maiden name. I found in the Polish records the marriage of my Great Grandmother and her first husband, Rube, and there was some fuzzy oral history about Grandpa being a cousin somehow to Lillian. Morris Rube had to be the connection.

I found Morris Rube in the 1910 Census. He had a wife named Ida, and four children: Bessie, Jacob, Leo and David. I found a photo in my parent’s home of three young boys and on the back was written “Morris Rube’s sons”. And that is the end of the trail. The 1930 Census shows no children at home. There is only one WWI draft registration. I can’t find anything else. No marriages, no deaths, no WWII military records.

In the Jewish Genealogy websites, I can’t find anyone else looking for the Rubes. None of the extended cousins on my Grandfather’s side know of them. They are my personal lost tribe. I throw this out to the magic of search engines and the interwebz. Where are the descendants of Morris Rube of Yonkers, New York?

Today is day two of training for a new system for the office. It comes off the shelf as a way to manage IT projects. It was designed by a bunch of guys specifically for managing code writers. It has all sorts of vocabulary to learn, most of which come from sports or script writing, and none of which pertain in any way, shape or form to advertising. Everyone in the room is certain that this system will reveal the failures and incompetence of everyone else in the room.

I spent yesterday taking notes in a sketchbook. The notes were for a logo for The Coolest Person In the World, and not for the system, but who’s counting? Lunch was provided by the hotel, and if that spread was indicative of the meals they offer to guests, then I am amazed that anyone gets out alive, or at least not hungry. We had a choice of processed ham and American cheese on plain, soft commercial white bread, processed “turkey” and processed Swiss cheese on the same WonderLoaf, or a wet Caesar salad/chicken wrap. There was a sweet cream soup of indeterminate origin. Some thought it might have been squash. To round out the vegetable portions, there was wet, creamy cole slaw. Today I have packed a lunch.

I also forgot my sketchbook, which means I might have to pay more attention to the training.