Perfection Redefined
It is a cloudy and mildly rainy day here on the Escondido hilltop. To begin with, what brings all of this to mind this Sunday morning is that I have been awaiting this rain day for over ten days now. I know that by March I will be wondering what I was thinking wishing for rain, but to the best of my recollection, it hasn’t really rained here since April. I know that’s not absolutely true, but even when I consult the precipitation records I see that May, June, July, August and September have been extraordinarily dry and a bit warmer than normal here. So, rain feels like a wonderful luxury and it is pouring outside at this very moment. In the past I would have been bemoaning that my planned motorcycle ride is being forestalled, but today I am smiling that my newly planted gardens and even my well-established cacti and succulents are all enjoying this natural watering in ways that my nightly watering cannot substitute. This all constitutes a personal redefinition of what perfect weather feels like. Some of that is just a need for change, but some of it is a change in my priorities. Change its good in both instances.
My awareness of my immediate surroundings have never been so acute. In the same way that Papillon, Edmund Dantes and Nelson Mandela gained perspective on their lives by being forced to concentrate on every square inch of their stone and dirt cells over many years of incarceration, I have come to know every area of my 2.5 acres with appreciation for each. This is a form of induced meditation and meditation brings about enlightenment. There is no comparison of a prison cell to this beautiful hillside in San Diego County. It is more like Dustin Hoffman on Devil’s Island where he can garden and raise livestock and live a life of beautiful solitude with both nearby and distant views of the beauty that the world has to offer. It is all intended as a prison in that we are more or less confined here, but confinement in early or mid life is a punishment that confinement to paradise in later life is not. It is more a blessing than a curse and the meditation of the confinement heightens the awareness of that resignation.
But then again let’s be honest, last I checked, Devil’s Island did not have electricity, indoor plumbing, the internet and satellite TV, a hot tub and Handy Brad. This confinement in this day and age is hardly a hardship in the least. Satisfying our family visitations with Zoom and FaceTime are not perfect, but it wasn’t so long ago that we dreamed of that capability. When we were planning our move here a year ago, my oldest son told me that he would have preferred if we were moving somewhere “normal” like Florida since we would be closer. I proceeded to tell him that the difference between a three hour plane ride and a five hour plane ride was not enough to worry about. Little did I know that getting on a plane would become foreign to us in 2020. Now if we want to see the kids, its a five-day roadtrip, but even that has to be on hold for the foreseeable future until Ms. COVID goes more into hiding that it appears to be now. In fact, Coronavirus is raging and new cases are reporting over 85,000 new cases on the most recent reporting day. That used to be horrible news, but with death rates subsiding due to better understanding on the part of the medical profession that is only really bad news, at least in statistical terms. For first responders, the news is still horrible as hospitalization rates remain very high and our medical units are severely overburdened and overworked all across the country. So much for resource shifting to meet outbreak peaks as previously discussed. Thank God for Zoom and FaceTime and modern technology in general. Even if our power goes out, we are set up to use all that sunshine via our 9.7kW solar array to use it and capture it in our two 13.7kW Tesla batteries. It isn’t enough for everything we want, but it gives us full electricity and all the modern conveniences that come with that for at least sixteen to eighteen hours of each day (until the sun stops shining, which we already established does not happen very often out here).
Speaking of the last debate and the upcoming election, I used my iPhone, which was charged overnight by my Tesla battery run off that solar array and all that San Diego sunshine yesterday, to watch the SNL Cold Open that I missed last night. I know we all thought that perfection was defined by Alec Baldwin portraying Donald J. Trump, but after almost five years of that riff, a gig which even Baldwin, a staunch Democrat, has said he has grown very tired and weary of, we have a new definition of caricature perfection. Yes, Kate McKinnon as a ghoulish and hand-in-pants lothario looking as creepy as could be, and a Maya Rudolph’s imitation of Kristen Welker, were good, but did you see Jim Carrey as Joe Biden? He has done it once before on SNL that I have seen, but he has apparently taken the time to hone it to perfection. While Joe has come out of his basement and started counter-punching the King of Counter-punching, Carrey has taken the time to practice making his naturally plastic facial features conform to the lines and implant-studded smile and hairline of Smokin’ Joe Biden as he rounds the clubhouse turn on this election with a four-length lead on Mr. Perfect. There are few caricaturists better at their craft than Jim Carrey and there are few people in the world who will need to be mimicked for SNL more over the next four to eight years than Joe Biden. I think that means that perfection is being redefined both politically and in terms of television comedy for the foreseeable future. No one deserves a good impersonation gig like this more than Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.