Conscious Uncoupling

My wife and I drive up the coast to spend a couple of days in Cambria. The recent rains have breathed new life into the hillsides, rangeland, and vineyards along the 101; everything looks verdant. Cattle fatten themselves on fresh grass. Get it now because in a few months time the grass will be brown. Like almost every other place in California, Cambria is experiencing a severe drought that impacts the tourist trade – Cambria’s bread and butter -- in several ways. The restaurants we ate in served water by the bottle rather than the glass, charging patrons a nominal fee. Public restrooms are closed, chained off, replaced by porta-potties. There was a card in our room at the Cambria Pines Lodge urging us to be water-wise by taking short showers and reusing our towels.  

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Before leaving on our sojourn the media was buzzing about Gwyneth Paltrow’s split from her husband, Chris Martin, member of the band Coldplay. “Conscious uncoupling,” the couple’s reps called it, a term that must have emerged from a Beverly Hills shrink’s office. Paltrow is known to consider herself enlightened, in a Deepak Chopra-Dalai Lama sort of way, and by consciously uncoupling rather than muddling through the agony of a messy divorce, she and her ex are protecting their children from serious psychological damage. Most people who decide to put the well being of their offspring first call it just that instead of debasing the English language. I hope one of Gwyneth’s less enlightened friends will sit the children down and say, “Kids, your mommy and daddy may pretend to like each other, and tell you that nothing is going to change, and that you will still visit Disneyland together as a happy family, but the fact is, they are calling it quits, throwing in the towel, and you will need to adapt to this reality. When your little playmates ask why your mommy and daddy aren’t living with you anymore, you can be a nerd and say your parents have ‘consciously uncoupled,’ or you can meet the matter straight on and say, ‘they’re divorced.’ That’s what a court of law is going to call it – even in Beverly Hills.”

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I am deluged daily with e-mail solicitations from Democrats asking for money to help this or that incumbent stave off a mid-year election challenge from a well-heeled Republican opponent or Super PAC. Apparently, the Democrats are running scared that the GOP will increase its majority in the House and also seize control of the Senate, which will spell certain doom for our nation, because, as I must certainly grasp, only reasonable Democrats can keep the barbaric Republicans at bay. These e-mail pleas rarely say what the Democrats intend to do if they win re-election; no policy ideas are advanced because the Democrats don’t have any to offer, and haven’t for the past five years. If Democrats have no ideas to offer to help average Americans live better lives, I have no money to spare.

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Finally, in football news, Liverpool Football Club sits atop the English Premier League table, having earned three points by beating Tottenham 4-nil. The other contenders, Arsenal and Manchester City, played one another to a 1-1 draw, and my favorite club, Chelsea, played a lackluster match against a gritty Crystal Palace squad and fell 1-nil. Chelsea have lost its last two league matches away from Stamford Bridge, and I’m certain that not taking points from these fixtures has cost us the title this season. Our performance against Palace was one of the worst I’ve seen this year.