November 1, 2007 Issue

All righty then. My mind is going 90 to nothing and swirling with a variety of thoughts I can’t seem to shake. When it starts interfering with my normal sleeping patterns, I gotta get rid of it one way or another. This is one way. Put it on paper and then let it go. So if you don’t want to be privy to my messy gray matter, move on to another part of the paper now.

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Through the magic of Netflix, I recently watched the last nine episodes of The Sopranos, which the rest of the world saw some months ago. At the time the series concluded on HBO, there was a bunch of grumbling because the series wasn’t tied up with a neat little bow. It ended with some drama and tenseness, but Tony Soprano did not get whacked, even though most of his top soldiers didn’t live to see the finale. It makes perfect sense to me. The producers didn’t want to slam the door on the possible resurrection of America’s favorite crime family sometime in the future with a lot of new thugs under his thumb.

Actually I was stunned by my own addiction to this series, because normally I eschew films with a lot of violence. Somehow, even with high body counts, I loved this series and I can’t explain it. The depth of near-hatred and the language used by family members to each other made me cringe, the violence often made me gasp; yet I was hooked.

In one of the last episodes though, there was a great scene. The bad guy gets out of his van and is approached and shot in the head. His wife is behind the wheel and his two grandchildren in car seats in the back. The wife jumps from the car leaving it in park and goes around to the other side to attend to her husband. The car starts to move and the doors are locked. This is what comes from letting the car makers do our thinking for us. Who says we want to lock all the doors as soon as we start moving? Probably a good thing to do, but let me decide that.

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On the subject of language, some poor woman in Pennsylvania has been charged with disorderly conduct for swearing at her overflowing toilet with a window open. Her uptight neighbor, instead of being neighborly, called the law. In the absence of a bullhorn being used, I’d say the houses are too close together, but what kind of person would do this? This woman faces 90 days in jail and a $300 fine for doing what about 99 percent of the population would do when confronted with overflowing nastiness. If the profanity police are on patrol in Pennsylvania, they need go no further than the local mall or a corner bar. There they can contract carpal tunnel syndrome writing up the populace for unseemly language.

You can’t go anywhere without hearing foul language these days. People talking on cell phones seem to not care that others can hear them and use whatever language they choose, often not suitable for universal hearing. In reality, people impose few boundaries on themselves these days. It’s as if no one teaches them right from wrong, private from public any more. Chewing the fat with your buddies in the backyard and knocking back a few brewskis, doesn’t give you license to say whatever pops in your head. Chances are your neighbor’s yard is nearby and maybe some small children are playing in it. Censorship should be self imposed when in public.

Hey, I feel better already. Society is not going to change overnight and I certainly can’t impose common sense on the populace, but maybe I will sleep more soundly tonight.

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