“Homer’s the kind of guy you just want to git for something,” the sheriff said. But I see a different man…

Until you have ridden shotgun with my 98-year-old friend Homer on the drive he makes each New Year from the southwestern lip of West Virginia down into central Tennessee, you haven't lived.

The man dislikes freeways, and having grown up in these parts, he knows the back roads well and sticks to them, barreling through the mountains like a NASCAR driver on speed. 

There's no particular timetable for these excursions, which is part of their charm. Homer being a night person, though, the proceedings never seem to get underway until around four o'clock in the afternoon.

While there's still daylight, the scene outside the smudged passenger window of Homer's '52 cherry red F-Series Ford pickup truck never fails to delight: Furrowed fields asleep for the winter; swaths of woodland punctuated by rusty double-wides and the occasional log cabin; mountain churches with thin white spires and no perceivable means of access save a footpath through the trees.

Homer has lived alone since his wife, Pearlie, died in 1976, and a lot of people find him hard to take. So when he has a captive audience he really lets loose. Undeterred by a fact-based universe, Homer can hold forth on just about any subject. Currently trending:

• The ice in the arctic is melting because of coal mining in West Virginia.
• All of the media in the United States is controlled by three people, whose names we don't know. Brian Williams may be one of them.
• Bill Gates is an unhappy man who feels he hasn't accomplished anything. This is a true fact.
• The agenda for Obama's second term (though we pray to G*d that there won't be one) will include appointing an all-Muslim Supreme Court.
• Most people mispronounce the name of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche; it's Nitsky. (Nitsky’s poetry, by the way, is bitchin'.)

Some people think that Homer courts disaster, like the time he drove through three dry counties with a trunkful of liquor and a loose trunk latch that -- tripped by the Bible in Homer's glove compartment that slid on a sharp curve into the glove-box latch-control lever -- popped open the boot just as a state trooper pulled onto State Route 7 behind him.

Others say Homer doesn't need to court disaster because disaster always knows where to find him. The sheriff of our county told me once, "Homer's the kind of guy you take one look at and you just want to git 'im for something."

But these people don't see what I see. When you look past the rough edges and the hard talk, Homer is a softie whose hard-won wisdom about life and love could -- and come to think of it probably should -- fill a book. He looks up to his elders, of whom there still are a few. He believes in a higher power and trusts that if we do the next right thing, and then the next right thing, the day will turn out just fine.

Homer believes in redemption -- in this world and the next. He is a cultivator of faith and hope who, like Saint Exupery's Little Prince, has learned that "[W]hat makes the desert beautiful...is that somewhere it hides a well."

Stick around Homer for any length of time and you'll find out the one true thing about life: What is essential is invisible to the eye. It is only with the heart that one can see.

Nightmare on Main Street

I had a dream the other night that the country was being run not by our current leader – I want to be clear about that – but by a nameless, faceless body of otherwise ordinary women and men whose collective shenanigans in the political arena managed to combine the sly cruelty of a Karl Rove, the scarifying amorality of a Dick Cheney, and the sad smallness of mind that right now seems to have taken possession of a very large portion of the American public.

It was never quite clear who my protagonists were. One thing I do know for sure is that the figures in my dream were all born in the good old US of A. But I digress.

As in any nightmare worthy of the name, there was a lot that didn't make sense. I would catch a few spoken words – half-thoughts is all they were really, nothing to be afraid of. And anyway, they were quickly gone and I assigned them no importance.

A scene or two later came the muted sound (for now I seemed to be underwater) of new voices. They spoke too fast and in odd, dissociated sentences whose fragments, with an innocence that belied their intent, drifted away before I could parse their meanings.

There was more. Small, seemingly random events occurred. People who, judging by outward appearance, could not possibly have any connection with one another, came and went. (Addressing the remarkable fact of judgment being present in a dream I will save for another day.)

Then came the denouement – and none too soon, as my Blackberry's alarm had already gone off once.

It turns out that the people who'd been coming and going had formed an unexpected – one could say unholy – alliance, and that when all the half-baked snippets and unsupported declarations were strung together, they actually sounded pretty good.

Without pesky facts to get in the way, things took on a life of their own. Cunningly infused with false substance by the creepy aforementioned coalition, words and ideas were assembled into paragraphs and then into whole speeches which, unimpeded, spread across the land and were soon to be found sullying the pages of even reputable print media; disrupting what could have been informed discourse at town halls; and falling hatefully, gleefully out of Glenn Beck's mouth.

The crowd, now totally pumped by the inexplicable aura of legitimacy it had taken on, was getting out of control.

Thankfully, this is where I woke up. With eyes half closed and fingers still clumsy from sleep I fed the dog and made my first cup of coffee. Peet's French Roast, extra strong, extra hot. Next – before the dream was lost to me entirely – I sat down to replay its highs and lows.

Only then – you'll be familiar with this device from network television dramas whose writers are trying to stretch a thin plot or whose lead has suddenly dumped the series and made a beeline for Hollywood – did I realize that it hadn't been a dream after all. I'd been awake the whole entire time. Worse, the elusive dreamtalk of the night before had morphed into sleekly packaged utterances that were now coming at me in the light of day straight from my Panasonic hi-def flat-screen TV.

Talk about your nightmares.

Opposites Day

All last week I was gripped by the unsettling feeling that I’d somehow been dropped into some weird parallel universe.

This suspicion was especially acute whenever I saw John McCain’s face on television, and peaked if, by accident, I actually heard him speak.

There seemed to be some sort of intellectual E. coli at work. People who were speaking for John McCain—or even those who were simply speaking of him—would suddenly fall victim to the same malady that so often afflicts the candidate himself, and find themselves saying things to television cameras that, a short time later, would be likely to turn their stomachs, especially if they happened to see themselves in playback.

On Friday afternoon, in the networks’ televised run-up to the debate that night, we saw an urbane and confident Barack Obama deplaning in Jackson. A voice-over presenter—I don’t remember who—was narrating the arrival in a perfectly normal way when, all of a sudden, apropos of pretty much nothing, he observed of Obama, “Doesn’t he seem just a little too proud of his own bearing?” And, after the obligatory remark about Obama’s elitist [sic] education, “Doesn’t he seem just a little too cool?”

That’s when I realized I’d landed in John McCain’s own personal universe, where every day is Opposites Day.

Proud is something to be ashamed of! Taking advantage of the educational opportunities that come your way puts you out of touch with average men and women everywhere! Cool is the new loser!

Oh, John, I am so on board now.

At last, I understand what is driving your incomprehensible presidential campaign.

Like, a few weeks ago you said of Sarah Palin on Fox News Sunday, "She's a partner and a soul-mate," even though you'd met the woman exactly once before tapping her as the other half of the Republican ticket. But now I understand that you were simply saying, in the nicest possible way, that you have no clue who this woman is or what she stands for and hope to h**l that if the two of you actually manage to win this election she'll keep herself busy in ways that don't involve many visits to the Oval Office.

Oh, and during your trip Birmingham [Michigan] on August 13th, you called Russia out for its military action against Georgia, saying that "In the 21st century nations don't invade other nations." To some, this comment might have seemed a teensy bit disingenuous, coming as it did from a man whose homeland has a penchant for launching unilateral military excursions into other people's countries and pressuring its allies to go along for the ride. But I get you—I seriously do. To me you were saying, plain as day, that John McCain's America will pretty much continue to do as she pleases when it comes to intensifying miseries in other parts of the world.

I'm really happy that I've figured this whole "opposites" thing out.

I am confused about one thing, though. In John McCain's universe, am I cool? And if so, should I be proud?

Spackle Camshaft? You betcha'...

I've always kind of liked the name my mother gave me at birth, Juliette. It's a family name, for one thing, going back several generations.

Plus, it has a nice old-fashioned air about it.

But I've never felt it had much power. It's a soft name. If you're named Juliette, you are going to grow up to be creative, compassionate, and a fabulous listener who also has great taste in clothes. But you are never, ever going to be an astrophysicist; an Olympic triathlete; the head of an oil company; or, for that matter, the "hot" mayor of a small cold town in Alaska.

Once I briefly changed my first name to Sidney. I felt it was a name that would take me places, but the new places turned out to be pretty much like the old places, so I switched back.

But now blogger David Harrington has rekindled my interest in power names, and today I tried out his Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator.

The name given me by The Generator was "Spackle Camshaft" -- a moniker that just reeks with inexplicable authority. Power-wise, compared to my birth name it's no contest.

My mother is not going to be at all happy about my new name, but I think you'll agree that now, at last, I have a shot at greatness.

Rhymes with Pain

So is this lucky or what? The very day that I decide to indulge myself by starting a blog to share my random hits (entirely personal and unashamedly subjective) about what's going on in the universe, or at least what's happening on my block, the Republican candidate for President of these United States makes a move I didn't see coming.

As you know by now, in a statement released at 8:30 a.m. ET this morning, the McCain/Palin campaign, entirely without irony, announced that the man who as late as last Monday was still saying the economy was fundamentally sound; the senator who before the doo-doo hit the fan was one of the unrepentant deregulators whose unshackling (read: anything goes) of mortgage and other financial institutions eight years ago helped start us down this road in the first place; the myopic politician who wrote in a magazine article published a week ago that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation" (one presumes that, as noted wryly by the Toronto Globe and Mail, "the piece was submitted before Lehman Brothers went belly up") was...still with me?...suspending his campaign to return to Washington to help address America's economic meltdown.

If you've got the stomach for it, you can link to a video of the candidate's announcement right this very minute at http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/Speeches/Read.aspx?guid=3f8dec5a-52e2-44bf-b665-ebac609433a4

Not long after the McCain (rhymes with pain) Wednesday surprise, Barack Obama, at a news conference in Clearwater, Florida, said that while he agreed "There are times for politics and there are times to rise above politics and do what's right," he saw no need to cancel the debate, scheduled for Friday night at the University of Mississippi.

“This is exactly the time when people need to hear from the candidates,” he said, adding that “Part of the president’s job is to deal with more than one thing at once...".

And part of a senator's job too, Mr. McCain. But we can save the importance of multi-tasking for another day.