The Oppenheimer Report 1/18/21

Evie Miller R.I.P

To live in the Near North, in all its bucolic splendor, is truly a blessing. It is one that I take less and less for granted these days. This morning I woke up, and as I do almost every day, I sat and ate my raison bran, contemplating the stark peace and beauty of our empty frozen lake. I took a series of deep breaths and reminded myself to take in the moment;  to pay attention to what is surrounding me.

I was talking to one of my musician friends yesterday, who has been clean and sober now for over a year, and she spoke of the peaks and troughs. We compared notes on our respective roller coaster rides, and we agreed that it is a day by day challenge. Not long ago, when I had everything at my fingertips, and I wanted for nothing, I was restless. Now, alone with my thoughts with nowhere to go, I sometimes get a tiny glimpse of perspective.  Anxiousness and stress have so corroded my quality of life, and it has been my focus on “information” that facilitated the decline. It’s a struggle for me to avoid looking at a screen, any screen. I’m so hard-wired to plug myself in to the tragedy of the day, the latest abysmal failure of mankind to let love reign. My first inclination every morning is to check my email, or my text messages, or to see who acknowledged my latest brain fart on Facebook. I, like so many others, jones for that narcissistic shot of self-affirmation.  

I have been trying to wean myself from all of that, but especially in lockdown, it’s hard. Shauna tells me she wants to be informed, to be apprised of the latest air pocket plunge in the human condition, but everywhere my screens forbode disaster. Chicken Littles are crying from every soapbox. If it isn’t Wolf Blitzer or Tucker Carlson spinning from their opposing political corners, it’s reports of another setback in the vaccine rollout, or further evidence that Mother Nature will soon have the last laugh. Today on TECH 5, one of my favorite segments on Hunter Bay Radio, octogenarian host Ben Harrison read a humourous poem about isolation. While it might be hard to believe that the subject could be humourous, the crazier it gets out there, the more inclined I am to search for humour in the commonality of our experience. This whole crazy mess we’re all in is a mind game, and in those rare moments when I get that a glimmer of perspective, I pause long enough to wonder if this wasn’t some kind of cosmic payback for all the times I’ve taken normalcy for granted. Shame on me. 

Last Saturday, I got a call from Bob Miller, one of my oldest and dearest friends from Buffalo, to inform me that his mom Eveyln had passed. While this was no great surprise, she was well into her 90s and had been declining for some time, I was saddened to hear the news. Evie was a dear friend, and the last surviving parent from my old neighbourhood in Buffalo. Her passing was also a subtle reminder to me of how fast 60+ years have passed. Her brother was the famous playwright, A.R. Gurney, author of “The Dining Room”, and Pulitzer Prize nominated “Love Letters”. Evie was a voracious reader, an intellectual, a lover of art, a good storyteller, and like all the Chapin Parkway moms I admired, she had a great sense of humour. Like my father’s, her humour was high brow and dry. I’ve had a good life so far, but it hasn’t all been bunnies and gumdrops. Nobody gets out of this dumpster fire alive, but I take great solace in the people who have shared my history, my experience. Whether your life has been hard or easy, the only thing that gives it meaning is the people with whom you share it.

Today, after writing this report, I’m going to kiss my wife, play with my crazy puppy, and read a little more of Sanjay Gupta’s new book about brain health. One thing I’m going to avoid at all costs is any more talking head nonsense about right wing, nutball, wannabe mercenaries, marinated in their skewed information about the status quo. I can’t sort out all of this chaos, and I certainly can’t fix everything that is broken. Still, I take solace in all the souls that know me and have ridden the roller coaster with me. Evie Miller, may you rest in peace. You, along with dozens of other positive role models, have in your own special way mentored me in love. Your may be gone, but I will always remember you, and your lessons live on.

The Oppenheimer Report 1/11/21

 

I’ve never been an American football fan by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact I’ve lost interest in all professional sports in the past 30 years. I used to be an avid Buffalo Sabres fan, and my family held seasons tickets for the Sabres home games from the time the franchise was formed in 1970. I was  there in the early 70s when they lost their first Stanly Cup playoffs to the Broad Street Bullies of Philadelphia. During one of those playoff games at Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, I watched Sabres center Jim Lorentz swat a bat out of the air with his stick in a pea soup fog. Sadly for its fans, The City of Good Neighbors rarely (if ever) makes the headlines as the champions. I used to follow the Bills, just because I was shamed into it by my Bills fan friends, but the Bills always broke our hearts. The last time the Bills came close to a Superbowl ring was in ’91, when Scott Norwood notoriously kicked a field goal wide right at the very end of a nail biter, and the Bills lost to the NY Giants by one measly point. You could hear the entire city groan; it was like watching Bambi’s mother die. The morning after that heartbreaking Sunday, there was a cartoon circulating the fax network throughout Buffalo, depicting Scott Norwood standing at a urinal and peeing wide right. The Bills would go on to make it the Superbowl for the next three consecutive years, but that Giants game was as closest they ever came to victory.  My late brother-in-law Jordan used to tease me. If someone failed at something, Jordan would say, “They’re as useless as the Bills in January.” Jump ahead to 2021, and the Buffalo Bills are making a bit of a comeback. They just won their first home playoff game in 25 years. Of course, the year they get hot is the year the sky is falling in America. I doubt people are as focused on pro sports as they once were. I’m happy the team is having a good year, and I’d like to see them do well, because I love the city where I grew up. Buffalo fans are among the hardiest in the country, and as a former Buffalonian, I take great pride in hearing that one of our teams did well.

Regarding what happened last week in the United States, I am of course saddened, but hardly surprised. Shauna and I were watching the certification of the electoral votes last Wednesday when it all went south. House Republicans threw their collective hail Mary pass to deny reality, and never in my life had I been so ashamed of the government of my homeland. That is a very low bar to set, given the events of the past 4 years. Written when Pumpkinhead was elected, my song “New Constitution” now seems eerily prescient. An alarming number of Republicans drank the Kool-Aid, on board to defy the U.S. Constitution in a futile effort to overrule the will of the American people. They are acting like spoiled children who did not get their way. It was bad enough watching that nonsense, but then to see an angry mob of wannabe-Vikings storm the Capital building, egged on by the now Twitter-banned, hate-filled leader of the insurrection, was the final straw. Enough is enough. Please put that sociopathic demagogue out of my misery! He is a bad man, a traitor in fact. Impeach him, again, and may he one day know the corrosive humiliation of history’s unbridled scorn.

America was built on the foundation of hope. I fear that foundation is cracking, but it has not yet collapsed. I hope my country can find its soul, for everybody’s sake. History has proven that it can. Nobody knows the future for sure. As for the Bills, they may not make Superbowl this year, but as long as they keep playing the game, there is still a hope and a prayer they will get it right and win.

- Written by Jamie Oppenheimer ©2021 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 1/4/21

 

 

Our 2021 got off to a bumpy start. We are not big New Year’s Eve celebrators. Typically, we stay home, fix a good dinner, and watch the televised ball drop in NYC, half asleep on the couch. We used to watch Dick Clarke’s Rockin’ New Years Eve show, but when Ryan Seabreeze took over, I lost interest. Now we watch the CNN version. Essentially, that consists of 3 hours of vacuous banter by Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen. In case you missed it, they downed shots of tequila on the hour, then proceeded to giggle like kindergarten students making poopy jokes. Walter Cronkite must be turning over in his grave. I switched over to Seabreeze for a moment, when the schoolboys went to a commercial break, and was gobsmacked to hear what passes for pop music these days. Ugh. Finally, the ball dropped, and 2020 was officially over. We were proud of ourselves for having stayed awake for this momentous event.

 

Of course, the new year began with the traditional kiss with my wife. Immediately thereafter, we noticed that our little gremlin pup Sydney was acting strangely. She was chasing her tail, and, upon further investigation, we discovered that she had a “hanger” coming out of her butt. Of all the Miniature Schnauzers that have been a part of our family, Sydney is the worst for picking up and eating things she shouldn’t. When that item involves string or hair, we get hangers. In the past 7 months I’ve fished dozens of foreign objects out of our puppy’s mouth, including, but not limited to paper clips, rubber bands, pencils, slippers, socks, underwear, my guitar tuner; in short, anything that happens to drop on the floor. And she is fast. If I drop something and don’t snag it in less than 4 seconds, she’s got it and off she goes. She picks my pockets and is very fond of Kleenex. When she steals one, she then proudly scampers off, shaking it like it’s a dead animal. Short story long, after the first kiss of the year, 2021 began with me on my knees, fishing Kleenex out of our dog’s butt. It was like one of those never-ending scarf tricks that magicians perform. I have a friend whose Lab once swallowed an entire wiffle ball bat. She showed me the X-ray. How does a dog do that? I’d like to think Sydney will outgrow this Kleenex fixation, but I’m concerned. I know some people who live up here with a Newfoundland puppy, and the dog already weighs well over 100 Lbs. They have my sympathy. MUCH bigger hangers.

 

Anyhow, Happy New Year to my now thirteen loyal readers. There has been much speculation about what the future holds in store for all of us. If you consult one news source or another, you’ll get two completely different answers.  As I said in my last report of 2020, I made a habit of lampooning current events in my early years. Lately, I wouldn’t know where to start. The United States has become one big televised championship wrestling event.  When I began to write this report in 1992, I was cockier, and thought I knew right from wrong. I’m so turned around these days, and I’m just getting more and more confused.

 

While I am genuinely hopeful and confident that life will be better in the coming year, I know it all hinges on how we behave as human beings. A friend from Hunters Bay Radio once told me that he felt social media was the bane of mankind. The fact is, we don’t need to believe everything we read; that’s our choice. Somehow, social media has spawned a tornado of excrement so massive that no one knows how to break free. When someone points to an innocent man and publicly declares that the man is a child molester, it might be patently untrue, but the damage is done as soon as the accusation is made. We might think we don’t judge people unfairly, but it happens every day. The way “information” spreads these days, unfair judgment spreads like wildfire. Fear and hatred are as old as the hills, and right now, those two human characteristics are the enemy, not some self-absorbed, hamburger-hoovering troll with a combover.  

 

I think a lot of people expect 2021 to miraculously reverse the downward spiral of mankind, but I suspect it’s going to take more than a vaccine and a change of leadership. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions anymore. I take it day by day, but my ritual every morning is to down a shot of organic apple cider vinegar and make a toast to life, with the hope I can do more good than harm, to myself and others.  I do have an unselfish wish for mankind. Let’s get our act together, shall we? We are better than this.

 

Happy New Year everyone. May you feel less anxiety and maybe even some genuine contentment in the coming year. Sydney …NO! Don’t eat THAT!! Sorry, gotta go.

 

- Written by Jamie Oppenheimer ©2021 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED