Christopher Donahue

These frigid January mornings, Venus is shining magnificently in the East before dawn. I see it when I get up for my morning run. It’s a nice reward for dragging myself out of bed and braving the extraordinary polar vortex cold.

It’s also particularly dark these pre-dawn mornings because the moon isn’t up. The stars look fantastic without the moon glare. All the classic constellations stand right out.

But the cold.

It is so cold it feels like the cold is from outer space. Interplanetary cold. Deep space cold.

I quicken my pace and opt for a shorter run.

Freeze my asteroid off cold!

copyright 2014 Magnus Incognito

Winter is really off to a fine start this New Year.

January was only two days old before we had 18 inches of snow dumped on us. It was quite a Nor’easter. I got up several times in the night to see how bad it was coming down. But there certainly wasn’t anything I could do before morning. I wasn’t going to start snow blowing 3 AM.

I got up early and looked outside. The kitchen window had a circle of frost on it. As I peered outside, I could see a lonely, little bird with his feathers all puffed up, sitting on one or the perches of our empty birdfeeder. The wind was howling around him and whipping snow all over. The bird was waiting for some food to somehow appear in that empty feeder.  I put my ski pants, jacket, boots, gloves and hat on and  went outside to the  to rescue my buddy.

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them…

The little bird flew off as I waded through the thigh-deep snow drift to do the Lord’s work. When my buddy came back for breakfast he brought a bunch of friends with him.

I proceeded to snow blow the driveway and sidewalk .  The snow was beautifully light and fluffy making the cleanup really easy . The sun was out.  My only regret was that I was behind a snow blower and not in the lift line. Still it was fun.

Then I thought about how many times I have done this great snowstorm ritual: The exciting anticipation of the impending storm. The fun of being hunkered down all nice and cozy and weathering the Nor’easter. And the fun  getting up and out  in of dealing with the aftermath.

It is always fun in January. Desperation doesn’t set in until March.

copyright 2014 Magnus Incognito

Christmas comes each year, and each year it is hard to focus on the meaning of the Season.

I was riding on the subway, packed in with the crowd on a cold, dark night. The worries of family and work, money and health, and just the plain lousy world in general blocked out any Yuletide spirit. The train got to the end of the line, and we all trudged up the dirty, slushy stairs to go out into the dank and dark.

But as I trudged upward, I could her people singing. And as I got closer to the top of the stairs, realized that some crazy,  wonderful people were Christmas caroling!

O,  Little Town of Bethlehem!

It was just what I needed.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito

It’s Thanksgiving, and again I am thankful for many things. I am writing this on Thanksgiving Eve.

First and foremost, I am thankful I am not in a traffic jam.  Last night there was a thirty mile back up on the Massachusetts Turnpike. A THIRTY MILE BACK-UP! Sounds like I missed a good time. Apparently, everyone who got stuck in last year’s thirty-mile-long Turkey Day Eve back-up all left together a day early this year.

On a more serious note, this year I am giving special thanks for friends who are no longer with us. Three friends in particular.

A little over a month ago, I got the really sad news a dear friend and colleague took his own life. Earlier this week, I got the news another colleague had died. She had been suddenly diagnosed with stomach cancer and died two weeks later. And two nights ago, I learned a young man in his thirties from the neighborhood died of an overdose. He was a nice guy.

I am thankful that I knew each one of those three. And their deaths make me all the more thankful for the friends and family I have. I think will make an extra effort to reach out and contact as many friends and family I can to wish them a happy Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. We all have so much to be thankful for.

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito

Halloween, the time of year I make a special effort to stay off the Borgo Pass!

Stay off the Borgo Pass!

For the uninitiated, the Borgo Pass is high in the Carpathian mountains and basically down the street from Castle Dracula. Only bad things can happen if you continue on the Borgo Pass this time of year. I know. I saw on TV what happened to people who didn’t heed the warning.

As a kid, I used to love staying up and watching old, classic horror movies on late night Saturday  television. Each week there was a double feature starting at 11PM. Often, I would have a friend stay over night, or else brave watching those terrifying black and white flicks alone. Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, etc…There was no cable TV in those ever more distant days, so the reception was a little grainy, which added to the creepiness. The first movie of the  Saturday night double-feature started at 11PM and ran to one in the morning. The second movie started at one and finished at three.  In between, we would drink root beer, eat pretzels, make crank telephone calls and be otherwise scared. My parents would be fast asleep. It was a lot of fun.

But,  if there was anything I learned from this experience it was simply this:

Stay off the Borgo Pass!

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito

We are celebrating the one year anniversary of this blog here at MagnusIncognito.com.

I, Magnus Incognito, of alleged sound mind and body, wish to share with you some of my rambling thoughts on this subject. It seems like just a mere 365 days or so ago I took the leap and decided to start blogging.

Initially, I was against the concept. I thought blogging was nothing more than a virtual vanity press for the wannabe writer. Then, as I matured as a person, I realized I, myself, was a wannabe writer. And the only thing that stopped me was that I was a cheap and didn’t want to pay to have something published by a vanity press. Of course, the internet has made blogging so inexpensive, if not downright free, that everybody could afford to blog. Which gets me to the next problem.

I also looked down on blogging because everybody was doing it. I didn’t want to be like everybody else. After all, the whole cool part about being a writer is that you are a good writer, or a great writer, .  Everybody who dreams of being a writer dreams of being a talented writer. Someone special. Not just some schmoe

Then I matured as a person and said, really, who gives a sh*& about all this pretentious hoohah?

So, I got myself a real down to earth nom de plume, and here I am.

Thanks for reading this!

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito

Here we are on the eve of yet another Federal Government shutdown.

It  was only nine months ago  we  worried about going off the Fiscal Cliff. And despite predictions of the end of the world as we knew it, we went over the cliff and didn’t seem to be worse off for the wear and tear.  And actually, the economy got better.

And in fact, the Federal Government shut down in the 1990s and the world didn’t come to an end then either.

I just can’t get whipped up by the financial apocalypse hysteria, yet again.  Brinkmanship is certainly no way to govern a country. I am shutting down myself.

Wake me up when this latest BS crisis is over.

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito

I saw a little girl the other day who reminded me of my cat.  She was with her mother outside the Forest Hills subway station in Jamaica  Plain. It was a gorgeous late summer twilight and I was sitting across the walkway from them, waiting to meet my wife after work.

Like my cat, the little girl couldn’t speak English, or any language for that matter. She was busily picking up leaves and examining them, tottering around and otherwise making happy squeaking noises. Except for the picking up leaves part, she was just like Felix* my orange cat.  I like to watch Felix making noises and “talking”  to himself as he chases bugs or watches the birds outside the window. The little girl was with her mother and another woman. The mother was in her twenties and heavy-set. The other woman was older and scrawny looking. Both were wearing tank tops and jeans. From the look of things, neither looked to be living an easy life.

Then the little girl’s mother got pissed off. She started swearing at the girl and telling her to stop running around. When the little girl kept running around, the mother got up in a hail of obscenities, and roughly picked the girl up. Then, the mother thrust the little girl onto the park bench with such force the little girl’s head snapped back and hit the back of the bench. I could hear the “thunk” where I was sitting across the walkway. The little girl was bawling and the mother was still swearing.

I waited a moment. Then I casually grabbed my things and strolled into the subway station, looking for a police officer. A very nice MBTA station attendant called the transit police for me. The transit police arrived, one male one female. They asked me to discreetly point out the woman and child, and I did. They thanked me. I thanked them. They went to talk to the mother and I loitered around a bit, out of sight of whatever was transpiring, waiting for my wife.

If that mother had consoled the little girl I would never have gotten involved.

Later that night, I thought of the little girl.

I hoped she got a good night’s sleep, and dreamed of orange cats.

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito

* Felix (left) has an orange colored brother, Quiet Rustle (right) who was not involved in the making of this blog post.

There used to be an old saying that wars start in August. At least World War I and World War II did. The theory behind the saying was that most European governments took August off  for vacation and, well, shit happens!

This August, the United States is poised to launch a military strike against Syria. The reason for the attack is the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons on it’s own people in the currently raging Syrian civil war.

Last Sunday, I took a nap on a warm sunny afternoon. My two orange cats, Felix and Quiet Rustle,  came over and joined me on the bed.  The sun was streaming in, a cool was breeze gently blowing, and the three of us snoozed away.

When I woke, the scene was so peaceful, it made me think of all the suffering and death, human and animal, that was going on around the world at that very moment. Without a doubt, somewhere in the world at that instant, some innocent person, or child, or animal was suffering and being killed.

We carry on of course because we don’t think about all the bad things that are happening beyond the circle of our own experience.

We do things like go on vacation in August.

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito

Summertime.

It’s that time of year you wish people would buy socks.

I would like to walk around Boston handing out socks to all the people with nasty, ugly feet who insist on wearing flip-flops.  They are many. They are legion. Someone should go around handing out socks. Should there be an activist group that goes around covering up ugly feet? Yes there should be. It would be a great public service.

The number of ugly, nasty feet that are out and about on any given summer day in Beantown is staggering. There are feet I see around town that would make a foot fetishist turn away is disgust. Horrifying.

There are ugly, nasty man feet.  Some idiot guy thinks he’ s doing the sexy-casual thing but instead he looks like some cro-magnon ding-bat out on the town. As you can tell, I feel strongly about this. Australopithecus be gone!

But women can have nasty feet too.

Nothing is worse than a pair of ugly women’s feet, in a flashy pair of flips-flops, done up with bright, neon toe-nail polish. The effect being that the toes look like writhing little grubs, with bright shells on their backs.

Philosophers have argued about the aesthetic for thousand’s of years.  What is beauty? It’s hard to define but as the old saying goes…You kinda know it when you see it. But as for ugliness, just come to flip-flop city in the Summertime.

And you’ll see it.

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito