Splish, splash . . .

On "Today in Literature" they have a nice little article about H. L. Mencken, who I think I would have liked. Give it a look. I found it somehow disturbing and comforting to see how little things have changed.

吸い取り紙が字を吸ひとらぬやおになった

The blotting paper/Won't blot/Any more.

                                                      -Hoosai

It's a lesson too late for the learning . . .

My mother-in-law passed away last night.

It was quite sudden, and we were not prepared. I came home from my Japanese class and my wife was not quite frantically phoning her sisters. The sister that still lives in Michigan had called to tell her that their mother had been admitted to the hospital, and that the doctors had said she most likely only had a few hours left.

My father-in-law had taken her to the doctor that morning because she wasn't feeling well, and he had put her in the hospital immediately. She had pneumonia, and then things became terrible. My wife called the hospital. She talked to her father. She called an aunt and told her what was happening, and asked that she go to the hospital and support her dad. She searched online for a flight to Detroit, and kept calling the hospital and her sisters. And somewhere around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, her father called her.

Thank you falettinme be mice elf...

Today's entry on the OUPblog has some interesting things to say about the mythology of Thanksgiving day. I have always found it interesting that even in this article we are told the primary reason for the Pilgrim's coming to the new world was their search for religious freedom.

That's not exactly how I see it.

There is no doubt they were looking for a place where they would be free to practice their religion as they saw fit; but they in no way felt compelled to grant this freedom to others. Once they got here they were as intolerant of other beliefs and practices as Ferdinand and Isabella. Several years ago I spent quite a bit of time looking up the family history—or least those bits i could find. I'm pretty sure a couple of my great grand-fathers were either in witness protection programs, or aliens. But I stray from the topic. If I remember correctly, one of my ancestors that took advantage of the fact that the local tribes had a rather undeveloped Homeland Security Agency was expelled from the town in disgrace because he dared to differ on matters of scripture. Apparently he was free to practice his religion as long as it was exactly the way they said to. Seems oddly familiar.

Anyway, even though it's a holiday based on rampant, if not total, untruths, my wife and I still spend the day enjoying each other's company, and giving thanks that we are blessed with family and friends we probably don't deserve. May you also give thanks for the love in your life.

大根を煮た夕飯の子供達の中にいる
Boiled daikon for supper/Sitting among the children.

Hit that jive, Jack...

I have never been comfortable with slang, and cannot stand jargon in almost all of its forms.

When I was in high school I could not describe something as "fab" or "boss" with the proper élan; and a few years before that I was sure "daddy-0" was a term whose only real function was to make Maynard G Krebs sound funny. Was that cool cat "hip" or "hep"? If I was square was the kid ridiculing me triangular or circular? As far as I could tell the only purpose the words served was to make the speaker sound silly. It was as if they were trying too hard to make a distinction between their generation and their parents' generation.

It only got worse in college. Everything became far out and right on and groovy, unless, of course, it was really heavy or deep. Did I have a jones, or was the man keeping me down? What really happened at a happening, and could you have a be in outside? If I rapped with some freaks and we got into some heavy shit should I take a bath? And, finally, if you had some really righteous weed was it possible to get some that was blasphemous?

I became convinced that with the proper chemical enhancements the purpose of language ceased to be communication, and mutated into something that only needed to sound impressive. The goal was to sound amazingly metaphysical without actually imparting any information, "There is nothing you can do that can't be done," being a prime example. About the best that can be said is that my generation's slang prepared it for such marketing fact-vacuums as "professional grade."

As I see it, the purpose of slang like 'daddy-o' or 'groovy' is to make a distinction between the speaker's group and the rest of the world, and to convey the excitement and joy of being part of that group. We are young. We are inventive. We have broken free of the staleness of You. Our generation is more aware/expressive/happening than the last. This, of course, is nothing new. Just as Socrates complained about the lawless ignorance of the next generation, the youth of Athens probably thought he was two iambs short of a pentameter. As far as I can tell it has been going on ever since our 573,286th great grandparents grunted their parents were really dull sticks.

Jargon's purpose, on the other finger (the difference is small so it's on the same hand), is primarily to exclude. Whatever the group, be it Sherlock Holmes aficionados or stock brokers, they develop an argot that serves to separate Us (those who are in the know and part of the group) from Everyone Else.

Usually it starts as a form of shorthand. A way for textbook buyers, for example, to talk about the number of books they are going to acquire for a particular class. In this case they can say "QTC" instead of "quantity to cover", which is itself shorthand for "the number of books required to fulfill the needs of a particular class." The problem is that approximately thirty seconds after its first use this shorthand becomes a code that tells me if you are also a textbook buyer or just another student or faculty member spouting off.

A second, subtly different, use for jargon is to make the outsider feel small, stupid, impotent, unqualified or all of the above. "How dare you tell me how to do my job when you don't even know what a QTC is," being the typical attitude. The field of medicine has traditionally been the prime example of this behavior, but every group, no matter how small—or perhaps I should say, especially if it is small—is guilty to some extent. I'm sure that the three or four of you who are still reading this have, at some time or another, left a discussion with the IT department or an auto mechanic feeling slightly humiliated and very much enraged because you had just been made to feel like a mentally challenged three year old.

Is there a solution, or is one even needed? The answer to both is probably not. Slang will continue to be invented by those striving to express the excitement, joy, awe or fear they feel in discovering the universe and their place in it; and jargon will always be needed for a group to conduct their business, and will always be twisted to protect the group and exclude outsiders. My answer has been to avoid both as much as possible, but that has led to my having speech and writing styles that tend to make me sound like a fussy, old man.

Perhaps the real answer is, as they say, just to keep on keepin' on.

***********************
A couple footnotes:

My inability to use the adjective "boss" in the mid-sixties without a fair amount of irony might have had some self-evident causes, but I would have had the same problem with "smith" or "carmichael".

Maynard G Krebs was a character on "The Many Loves of Dobby Gillis" played by Bob Denver before he became Gilligan.

何か言いつつ車押し行く夫婦なり
A married couple/Pushing a hand-cart/Saying something to each other.
—Ittou

Then it's the blue ones who can't accept the green ones...

To continue the thought I started in my last post:

I used to believe I was a fairly laid back, easy going sort of person who pretty much accepted everyone on their own terms. Sure, there were those I didn't care for or didn't want to be around, but it was always individuals who repelled me. I was not prejudiced against any group. My parents had taught me acceptance and tolerance, and to always base my judgments on an individual's actions and not some group stereotype. I loved everybody, dammit!

I was full of it.

Right to the top.

I'm surprised my hair could turn gray.

I am about as full of baseless prejudices and bigoted opinions as a man can get and not start a religion. I'm not talking about perfectly healthy phobias like the fear of snakes or heights or chainsaws. Those are survival mechanisms designed to keep us from doing something stupid. I'm talking about uncontrollable disgust based on nothing more than an accent, religious belief, or music choice.

First, in no particular order, is the drivers of pick-up trucks. I suppose I picked them first because a couple of my previous posts involved pick-ups. Whenever I see a pick-up truck, especially the over sized types like an F350, Titan or Avalanche, I know the driver is an alcoholic, racist bully overcompensating for secret doubts about his manhood, possibly a Klan member.

The fact that 99%, or more, of these pick-up truck drivers are either family members I care for very much or very nice, considerate people who struggle daily to lead ethical, compassionate lives just doesn't enter into it.

Next there's county music. To me it is the music of choice for the klu klux klan, alcoholics, unaligned bigots, and wife beating illiterates. At its worst it is a neo-Nazi, jingoistic, hate spewing form of pseudo-patriotism that has, for me, no redeeming value.

Again, the fact that I quite like Lyle Lovett, Kathy Mattea, Nickel Creek, Emmy Lou Harris, Willie Nelson and Rosanne Cash is beside the point. Just because the albums "American IV" and "American V" by Johnny Cash have a haunting, devastating beauty is no reason to reconsider my prejudice in the least.

And then there's Southern accents. They are, to me, the verbal proof of illiteracy, probable racism, and sloth. The use of ya'll (yawl—a boat with its mizzen mast set aft of the rudder post) as a second-person pronoun can be all that's needed to make me want to leave the discussion or change the channel on the television.

Okay, so Jimmy Carter has a Southern accent and just happens to be one of the men I admire most. What of it? And just because the last Operations Manager I worked with had an accent that would make Paula Dean ask him to tone it down a little; and was one of the best managers I ever worked with makes no difference.

The point is: even though I am morally and ethically opposed to bigotry I have still managed to develop a fair number of senseless prejudices. Recognizing them, and being able to point out the infinite "exceptions" to my hypocritical dislikes does nothing obviate them. I don't believe this is unique to me, but just because everyone has a secret load of prejudices does nothing to excuse mine. The best I can do is recognize my bigotries, and do my best to allow individuals the chance to either win me over in spite of them, or piss me off for some other reason. It's not the Ideal my parents tried to instill in me, but I like to think that at some level I am applying the lesson and becoming, a little bit at a time, a person they could be proud of.

人をそしる心をすて豆の皮むく
Discarding my wish/To revile someone/I shell peas.
—Housai

We got to live together...

There's something about insomnia that makes me thoughtful—or irritable. Sometimes they're hard to tell apart.

My father was probably one of the most intelligent and compassionate men I have ever known. To most of the world he hid his hunger for knowledge and very suspect beliefs in equality, and presented a Depression-Era-Prairie-Farmer/Laborer persona that kept him unnoticed by social thugs like Joseph McCarthy. It was, after all the 1950s when truly believing in such unAmerican ideals like freedom of religion or the equality of Man and other Pinko/Socialist concepts could lose you your job, or worse.

At home, however, he read everything he could find; loved poetry and music almost as much as he loved my mother; and, with two notable exceptions, did not talk much about religious or racial tolerance/brotherhood, but demonstrated those ideals in the way he lived his life.

One day during the 1964 presidential campaign we were talking about Goldwater and Johnson and Kennedy (both John and Robert) and the Freedom Marches and, almost as an aside he said, "Never follow or even turn your back on a fanatic. Even if he's on your team. A fanatic will kill you and everyone you love without blinking an eye. He'll even kill everyone he loves."

Another time, when I was in college and, like Mark Twain, beginning to discover just how much that little, old man had learned since I was fourteen, he made the observation that all political systems became alike when taken to their extremes. To him there was no difference between Stalin and Hitler. Now that he's been gone for five years, I wonder if he would see the same similarities I see between our current president and Hitler in the 1930s.

But I digress. Sort of.

The first time I can remember my father becoming forcefully vocal about race was when I was about eight, and my younger brother was five. We were at The Pit (an old gravel pit turned into a swimming hole, but with a beach and life guards) and my brother was playing with one of his friends. At some point they did the "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe" chant to decide who would get the pail or something, but instead of "catch a tiger by its toe" they used the 'n' word.

Time, very literally, stopped.

My father did not explode, but his anger tore holes in space and time, and made the Big Bang seem like a faint echo in the distance. It was all the more terrible because it was so contained. He did not yell or throw things or hit. (Dad never hit, or spanked, us). He became so rigid with anger he vibrated. At some level beyond hearing he was emitting a sound that caused dogs for blocks around to howl with fear; and made people fifty feet away who had no idea what was going on back away and looked for shelter. He picked my brother up and held him so they were face to face and said, almost in a whisper—a whisper that made you wish for a quick death and the comparative comforts of Hell—"You will never say that word again."

He put my brother down, and walked away.

Time let a few tentative seconds pass. Eventually Light and Sound found their way back into the universe.

That evening at supper Dad explained why he got so angry. He told us there were words that were only used to hurt other people and make them feel bad, and that word was one of them. That the people who used it were bullies and cowards who hurt other people to make themselves feel important and powerful, but they were really scared and weak and usually not very smart.

I'm sure that if we had been a bit older he would have a lot more to say, but at that time we didn't know about things like Nazis or lynchings or hatreds based on nothing more than skin color. The quiet sadness in his voice was, however, enough to make his words stay with both of us for the rest of our lives.

That was in 1954. Several years later we began hearing and reading reports of people demanding to be served lunch at a Dime Store lunch counter; or sit where they damn well please on a bus; or go to a somewhat more decent school. Then television learned how to make far away problems real and immediate, and on the evening news we watched terrified young girls walk down sidewalks lined with hate into a schoolhouse filled with hate; and people who's only crime was to want to vote or live in equality get beaten down by fire hoses and truncheons and attacked by dogs.

At that time we were attending the Methodist Church in town. My family had a fairly complex relationship with the concepts of god and organized religion, but during those periods we and theology were tentatively reconciled my mother's default religion was Methodist. Dad had had a slightly more adventurous experience with religion that included a stint as a Seventh Day Adventist elder responsible for converting twenty-six souls to the faith. For which he was certain he was doomed to Hell. Basically he felt all priests and preachers were either misguided or criminal. If you were lucky they would do you no real harm, and steal only a little bit of your stuff. So when we would begin one of our periodic stabs at conventional sanctity, we would end up going to a Methodist Church because it was Mom's favorite and Dad didn't care.

One of the town's Methodist Church's trademarks was a cross on the front of the steeple made out of movie marque lights. There were 57 lights in the cross, and at any given time a fair number of them would be burned out. For some reason getting all of the lights working at the same time seemed to be so important that it took up amazing amounts of discussion time during the membership meetings. But very little, bordering on none, overt action came out of those discussions. "It was a sacrilege." "It was disrespectful." "It was blasphemous." "It presented a poor image of the congregation." It was everything, and more, except important enough for someone to actually do something.

After we had joined the church one spring I heard Dad talking to Mom about the lights. He got home from his night shift at The Products a little after 7:00am, and he usually left to roof houses at 8:00am. He'd come home at 4:00pm, eat supper and spend time with us until about 7:00, when he'd go to sleep until 10:00 and then get up and go to work at 11:00pm. Sometimes, when the weather was bad or he didn't have a roofing job, he would nap for an hour or two before my brother and I got home from school. He worked these fourteen to sixteen hour days almost forty years.

Anyway, he figured on his way to that day's job he could throw the extension ladder up against the steeple, change the bulbs, and be on his way in about ten minutes. Mom was against it because Dad was none to steady on a ladder, and the fewer times he went up one the better. She hated his roofing work and was always happiest when it rained and in the winter.

It was, as they say, a moot point.

The next Sunday, in amongst the planning for Easter, some one wondered what the congregation should do, "if, you know, a ni...a Negro family moved into town and, you know, wanted to join our church." All of a sudden all kinds of hitherto unknown regulations started coming out of the woodwork. Services were for members of the congregation only and their guests. To be a member you had to reside in the town, or whatever you call a Methodist Church's jurisdiction, for two years; bring a letter of introduction from your former pastor; be sponsored by two elders; have donated $2000 to the building fund; and for all I know cured polio and solved the problem of going faster than light.

Dad finally got a chance to speak, and I knew it was going to be good because Mom started gathering up our hats and jackets and stuff for a quick getaway. "What the hell do you mean, "what are we going to do?" If you were a man, and a Christian, you'd introduce yourself, shake their hand, and make room so they could sit down. For weeks now I've listened to a lot of crap about a stupid cross having lights burned out. Instead of getting out there and helping some old couple or widow take down their storm windows and put up screens, or helping some family down on its luck put in a kitchen garden you're all in here whining about some fucking light bulbs, and now you have the gaul to wonder whether or not some decent, hard working people can join your church. As far as I'm concerned they have more right to it than you do. And before you say another word or get off your fat asses to change even one of those God damned lights, try reading that Bible you're always carrying around."

With that we left. Mom and Dad lived in that town another forty years, and never once set foot in that church again. The next time Mom decided they needed to go to church (I was in college.) they drove to the church in the next town over. And for those of you who might be wondering—yes. He did say "fucking light bulbs." It was the only time that I know of that he used the word in his ninety-three years.

大とこの糞ひりおわす枯れのかな
The archbishop/Evacuates the honorable bowels/On the withered moor.
—Buson

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .5番

One of the more interesting inventions humans came up with over the two thousand years we have been talking about was printing. It seems that for most of the long, mostly forgotten history of humankind either you or your mate actually had to remember everything you needed to know to survive. I mean everything. Stuff like:

• How to find and catch dinner without doing too much damage to yourself.
• How to keep the neighborhood lion from feeding her family with yours.
• What the exact procedures were when someone had coveted your ass (or worse yet, your wife’s ass).
• How to build a shelter, a fire and a baby carrier.
• Which mushrooms were safe to eat, which ones would cause you to see strange things, and which ones would kill you
• Where it was safe to cross the river, and where to suggest strangers cross it when they came by trying to sell you some kind of god.
• How to keep the kids amused in the evening.

And that’s just for starters.

Proud to be an . . .

It's an old F150.

The driver, 100 pounds overweight, in an old sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off. His left arm straight, wrist draped over the stirring wheel with rolls of flesh under a pale, sweaty armpit. He thinks he looks like the father on "American Chopper." His right arm is stretched out across the seat back as if practicing for the day a woman might actually be drunk enough to ride there. A spit cup dangling loosely from his fingers.

Long hair combed back in honor of The King, but not a bit of movement in the wind. A four day growth of stubble forms a patchwork on his cheeks and chin.

He's doing sixty in a forty mile an hour zone, and runs a red light thinking, "shit, it was just pink." If a car gets in front of him he rides their bumper until they get out of the way, and he gives them the finger as he passes. "Get off the road, bitch. If you were my woman you'd learn to get out of the way."

On each side of his back window is a Confederate flag, and in the middle a sticker of Calvin pissing on a Chevrolet emblem. And on each side of his bumper is a decal of the American flag and the slogan, "Proud to be an American."

Is America proud he is?

いわし雲記憶は遠きことに馳せ
The mackerel sky I think of the world Of long ago.
—Kyouhou

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .4番

Now Thomas—please try to keep T.D.M. in mind. He is, after all, one of the central elements of this story, if not, as some would have it, life itself. As I was saying, Thomas was under the weather, and on this particular day it was not weather he particularly wanted to be under. It was one of those marrow freezing, soul draining early spring rains you get in the Mid-West who's only redeeming feature is that it makes the first line of "The Wasteland" seem like an understatement. When the local PBS station broadcast a work by Mahler that afternoon the suicide hotline had to bring in extra help. The world was cold, wet and gray, and not only was Thomas being rained on, he felt like hell.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .3番

Now Thomas is an average man. This, of course, means that his life is as totally devoid of meaning as anything can be and not be the subject of a Sylvester Stallon movie. To most of the universe this is exactly as it should be. “Let humans and other spoiled little twits worry about things like existential angst. I’ve got better things to do,” is pretty much the general attitude. But to Humans, alone among all the different forms of living things in the universe, this lack of Meaning is an outrage. It is clearly a case of incompetence, questionable management, or at the very least it is very, very impolite on somebody’s part; and this indignation has led, given the nature of the species, to the creation of the world’s oldest profession.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .2番

This particular story starts about two thousand years after a small proportion of the world’s population believes a nice Jewish boy got himself nailed up on a rather shabby cross, and concerns, or at least occasionally mentions a certain Thomas D. Milton III. How and why he came by this rather awkward name has been chronicled elsewhere, and frankly I don’t feel like retyping thirty odd, and one or two downright strange, pages just to bring you up to date. Sure I could dig out the old manuscripts, and now that I use a computer I wouldn’t really have to retype them because I could just tell it to print, and there they’d be all ready for another shot at the big time; but there’s only so much rejection one man can go through. I mean why are you even dredging all this up again.

I read the news today . . .

I hope whichever one of you that has pulled the short straw and is reading this this week will forgive me. There are a couple things I feel like ranting about, and my wife isn't in the mood this year to listen to me carry on about trivial stuff.


Rant the First:

I grew up in southeast Michigan about sixty miles west of Detroit. We subscribed to two newspapers. The weekly (there was a joke about it couldn't get any weaker) Tecumseh Herald, and (since my parents were Democrats) the Detroit Free Press. (If you were Republican you got the Detroit News.) The Herald doesn't figure in this since it usually only had one or two sections filled mostly with articles about someone's sister's niece's friend visiting from Windblown, North Dakota and expected to stay until Sunday afternoon; but the Free Press, like most major papers, had several sections. It was put in the tube on our mailbox post every morning in a neatly rolled bundle, and when you unrolled it (and here's the important part) it was in order. Starting with the front section of national, international and important local news; then the editorial section; then local news; followed by lifestyle and then the want ads; and finally sports with the comics taking up the last three pages. And if there were inserts they were placed in the inner fold of the paper so that when you opened it you could remove them easily. No muss, no fuss. If you wanted to read a particular section you knew just where to go.

Now I live in Scottsdale, Arizona, and we subscribe to the Arizona Republic because it's pretty much the only choice. Every morning, or at least most mornings, it is thrown into an area within about thirty feet from our door. Since our front yard has desert landscaping it can be very uncomfortable walking across the stones in bare feet, or even slippers, if for some reason it didn't land within reach of the sidewalk.

Then, when you get it inside you never know what you're going to find. The only thing you can be sure of is that eventually you will find most of what you want to read. Maybe. The local section (called the Scottsdale Republic here—I don't know if there's a Mesa Republic or Glendale Republic or whatever—I'm sure our current president thinks they are political parties) is printed, for variety's sake I guess, tabloid fashion; and folded inside it you are apt to find various inserts or perhaps the Living section. It will be jammed inside a twenty page car parts advertisement where you can only find it if you happen to drop the paper and it spills out. The other sections are assembled in random order with advertising inserts weaving in and out of them with enough abandon to make you wonder if there's a tree left standing in Oregon.

It takes a good five minutes to sort out the stuff that's important enough or interesting enough to read from the intellectual outpourings of several marketing departments, in other words crap. Then you are left with one very small pile of useful material, and one very large pile of wasted ink. Sunday's are even worse, which leads me to:

Rant the Second:

When my wife and I were first together our incomes were less than substantial, and in an effort to make our food budget go a bit further I would dutifully cut out all the grocery coupons I could find. Every couple weeks one of the television stations would broadcast a story about some housewife who would buy six full shopping carts of stuff for $6.31 by craftily using her coupons, and I was determined to cash in on this gold mine. The best I ever did was to reduce our bill by about $3.50.

Eventually it dawned on me that I would never reap the fantastic rewards those TV segments promised because my wife and I insisted on eating real food. I also wasn't going to waste time and gas driving to seven different supermarkets to take advantage of loss leaders of dubious value. The siren song of canned fatback for 20¢ at Store A, and hamster diapers—twenty for a dollar—at Store B never captured my soul. The truth, as I see it, is: almost all coupons are for things that a sound diet just doesn't include or for cleaning supplies so full of perfumes as to be unusable. That woman with her six carts usually bought tons of stuff like Sugar High Flakes, powdered Almost Coffee, lemon/asparagus scented detergent, and I Can't Believe It's Not Toxic. Sometimes they would make a big deal about how she also got the meat her family would eat that week, but it seemed to lean heavily toward the 60/40 ground beef and the fattiest (and therefore cheapest) pork cutlets.

The way I see it, if the manufacturer (what an awful word for someone preparing food products) can afford to issue a 25¢ off coupon for their macaroni and orange sludge mix then they should be able to just lower the price a few cents and save all the people they are poisoning a little money. Which leads me to:

Rant the Third:

In a country as rich and well supplied with food as the United States is supposed to be how come so much of our population is forced to eat the garbage mentioned above because they cannot afford fresh, or even frozen, fruits and vegetables, decent meat and fish, and untampered-with staples? Even something as simple as bread! If you are at the lower end of the economic ladder you are forced to buy the soft, nutrition via chemicals stuff that is so airy that a one pound loaf is about sixteen inches long and can be wadded up into something about the size of a tennis ball. Good, nutritious bread made with organic flours and actually having flavor is too expensive to be a part of a poor family's diet. That kind of bread is found at little boutique bakeries that cater to the BMW/Mercedes-Benz crowd. And you can just forget about fresh fruit and vegetables. Except for bananas and potatoes the average working class family can't afford them. And juice? Get real. A sixteen pack of Bud Lite is cheaper than a gallon of fruit juice, and has the added value of helping you forget, or at least become numb to, the hopelessness you feel. Kool-Ade, for those who don't want to take refuge in alcohol, can still give you a good sugar bang for your buck and is as choke full of nutrients as an eggplant. (For those confused by that last statement, eggplants have practically no nutritional value at all. They are almost completely empty calories. Which is why I don't eat them.)

When I was in high school, and even college, many of the farmers around my hometown were being paid not to grow crops. All they had to do was keep their fields free of weeds, and they would be paid about what they would have made if they really grew something. How about we pay them half of what we normally would to maintain fallow fields, and then have them grow nutritious produce that was sold at prices even the poorest families could afford? I know, I know. That would be dangerously close to being a welfare state. We can't go around subsidizing poor people because then they might demand things like adequate health care and decent educations. No, we have to subsidize unproductive farmers who then demand larger subsidies to maintain their lifestyle, but at least they can be counted on to vote against education and health care and all that other sissy liberal stuff.

Rant the Last:

For the last three plus weeks I have had a professional grade case of insomnia. If I am lucky I get about an hour and a half of sleep in the early morning. If I'm not so lucky I don't sleep at all. About once every week or so I get so exhausted I crash for about six hours and then start all over again. I finally got so tired of it (I think there's a pun there, but I'll let you decide) that I went to my doctor today. He gave me some samples that with luck will break this cycle. I'll know in the morning. What really gets to me though, and was the spur to finally get some medical help, is that I am so tired I found myself watching a "reality" show.

I have never watched any of the "Survivor" incarnations, or "American Idol" or any show that involved the weekly "voting off" of one of the contestants, but there I was watching "Who's Going to be the Next Food Network Star," or whatever it's called. I watch the Food Network a lot because I love to cook and its shows usually don't consist of meanness and emotional cruelty like shows like "Everybody Loves Raymond." I have, however, avoided this "Next Food Network Star" show specifically because it makes a big deal out of the weekly removal of one of the players. I knew this because of the dozens of advertisements I had seen.

The basic concept of the show has the potential to make a very entertaining half hour. Bring in half a dozen celebrity chef wanna be's and each week present them with a challenge. After everyone has presented their segment they are evaluated by that weeks judges. So far, so good.

Then there's a five or ten minute build up to the elimination of one of the contestants. Actually, the build up takes place all during the show because they are constantly being reminded that at the end of the episode, "one of you will be going home." After the ax has fallen we get to spend a few minutes watching the ex-contestant deal with the humiliation and disappointment. And that is the whole point of the show.

The "contest" means nothing, or at least very little. What's important is watching the players suffer. (The Romans had a very similar entertainment concept.) Most of the show is devoted to examining the anxiety of the various individuals, and watching as they try to deal with their fear of failure. Then the producers make sure that we get a close up of the devastation caused by the loss of their hopes and dreams. These people want very, very much, for various reasons, to be a cook on television. They are not there for a lark. They are there because this is the fulfillment of everything they have dreamed of, and by God we are going to watch them get every one of their dreams crushed. Up close, and one at a time so we can savor their fall.

Instead of dwelling on the misery why not let them all compete for the entire series, and then at the end revel in the joy of the winner and letting the others deal with their pain, and perhaps anger, in relative private?


物音せしにほのと火が燃えて消えたり
It makes a sound Flares up And goes out.
—Hokuroo

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .１番

If you ever go in the kind of bookstore that has a coffee bar and someone playing jazz harp you will notice that near the door, right next to the remainder tables, is the magazine section. The front, most visible shelving is, of course, reserved for the better selling serious news journals. “People,” “US,” “Cosmopolitan” and other purveyors of Truth the American Way. But farther back, usually near the cooking and gardening section, you will find those pricey, little periodicals with names like “Humping Turtle Review” and “Nebraskan Zen Poetry Semi-Quarterly” that are filled with the meaningless stories currently fashionable among the graduates of the more exclusive writing workshops.

Ba Ba Loo . . .

Portions of these little exercises have been lifted from a work I add to every once in a while instead of paying a psychiatrist a couple hundred dollars for a fifty minute hour. Much cheaper and just as effective. Whenever the universe becomes a little too absurd for me to deal with I put my frustrations into a few paragraphs, and usually things come back into some kind of perspective. Or at least I've vented enough to appear reasonably sane again. The title of the book was Adventures in TDM, but since TDM are the initials of the main character it seemed a bit pornographic, or at least scatological, and I changed it. Now I call it The Man Who Hated Chocolate Chip Cookies which, while being perhaps a bit too autobiographical and having nothing to do with the story line, is the perfect title in my opinion.

Actually, I have no idea if Thomas (the character's full name is Thomas D Milton III) likes or dislikes chocolate chip cookies because it hasn't come up yet in the story, and probably never will, but I don't like them and that's enough for me. Now, hating chocolate chip cookies is not something you admit to to most people. (That's why I'm confessing it here where it will only be seen by four or five friends or relatives—if that many.) It is tantamount to blurting out you wear slippers made of kitten fur. People just can't conceive of such abnormal, probably blasphemous, behavior, and usually begin edging quietly toward the door.

The fact is I am one of those people that chocolate just doesn't excite. It's pleasant enough, and in small amounts can be enjoyable, but you will never hear me say, in that obnoxiously rapturous voice, "I'm a chocoholic," and the cookies quite frankly bore me spitless. The chips are cloyingly sweet, and the cookie part is next to tasteless. To me it's like eating little chocolate bombs in a bit of stale bread except without the flavor.

As is so often the case, my mother made a variation of the cookie which I quite liked. It was a banana chocolate chip cookie that was quite nice when it was fresh and you could pick the ones with just two or three chips. The cookie part was close to banana nut bread in texture and flavor, but without the nuts. Day old were best because then the chips had solidified making them easier to eat around, but the cookie was still soft.

Anyway, to me chocolate chip cookies are the Lucille Ball of food. Everyone loves both the cookie and Lucy, and I can't stand either one of them. When I was in grade school and had to stay home from school because of a hemorrhage I would have to watch the TV shows my mother watched. Jack Lelane was okay and there was always the chance the dogs would turn on him, and Liberace was weirdly fascinating like a car wreck. The soap operas were mostly only fifteen minutes long and had the virtue of being over quickly. But "Queen for a Day" and "I love Lucy" were more painful than the hemorrhage.

"Queen for a Day" had three women telling just how awful their life was, and the one with the most tragic story won something like a new washer. As if that would suddenly make up for her husband getting run over by a runaway rickshaw on the same day their fourteenth child was born and the oldest was diagnosed as chronically slovenly and marginally intelligent. I never could figure out why anyone watched it. It was, however, better than "I Love Lucy." Not by much, but at least it didn't make me want to gnaw my own arm off so I would be distracted.

Even as a seven year old I found the plots insultingly stupid: Ricky has a new show (when did he not have a new show—didn't any of them last?); Lucy (surprise, surprise) wants to be in it, and enlists Fred and Ethel to help her trick Ricky into putting her in it; hilarious antics ensue. Or not. Usually, if memory serves, it would involve Lucy pretending to be someone else, and the highlight of the show would be her dressing up as a Gypsy or something and grinning into the camera like she had just pee'd her pants.

Ricky was the only regular on the show that had any hope of functioning in the world without supervision, but you still have to wonder how intelligent he really was. After all, he married Lucy. As for Lucy, the best that can be said is that she should have been wearing a helmet and had a team of care givers supervising her twenty-four hours a day. Fred and Ethel? I'm surprised they could dress themselves.

The show was not only painful, it was embarrassing. It's idea of comedy was to have people doing things that were so outrageously stupid you would look away and pray to God the poor person was under professional care if it happened in real life. How could anyone find it funny? I will never know. I only know that when yet another survey proclaims "I Love Lucy" America's best loved show of all time; they did not ask me.

I think the reason Lucy has attained such a strong position in the American psyche is because she had no real competition. "Mr Peepers", "My Little Margie" and the other shows of the time were quieter, gentler, albeit wittier works (and Gale Storm was hot) that entertained you for thirty minutes and then politely excused themselves. They were the kind of guests that your mother hoped you would be when you went to someone's house.

Lucy, on the other hand, was The Three Stooges in drag and a red wig. She was loud (her voice alone could fuse a spine), obnoxious and stupid. Milton Berle was her male counterpart, but he did a variety show not a sit-com. For some reason America loves loud, obnoxious and stupid. It's as much a part of our national character as smoking is for the French. How else can you explain the current fascination with Paris Hilton?

薮陰やたった一人の田植え唄
In the shadow of the copse A solitary woman Singing the rice-planting song.

Baby, you can light my fire . . .

The 9 June 2007 posting on the Kenyon Review's blog had a link to a story in The Seattle Times about a man burning books as a protest. My expectation, while waiting for the computer to load the page, was a story about an overly zealous supporter of some fringe religious or political movement. To my surprise the man turned out to be the owner of a used-book store who was attempting to cull his inventory, and make a statement about "society's diminishing support for the printed word" at the same time. Instead of a wild eyed fanatic throwing the printed poison of Satan (or the Far Left or Far Right or Near Middle) into the cleansing flames, there was a young man tending what appeared to be a few books in an over-sized, concrete Weber grill.

My expectation was based on my, perhaps misguided, presumption that for most Americans book burning is quintessentially evil. It is an act that is so embedded in our psyche as a symbol of tyranny and oppression that many people cannot conceive of ever, for any reason, condoning it. In fact it generates such strong reactions that those of us who make our livings selling books often have a difficult time disposing of unsellable product. I'm not sure that burning a few books was an effective way of protesting our society's disdain of books and reading. We have, in my opinion, been a nation that from our founding idolizes stupidity, and finds intelligence suspicious at best. (My dad once told me, when I was in elementary school, that Adlai Stevenson could not possibly win the presidential election because he was too smart.) I do, however, understand the gentleman's frustration with being unable to rid himself of useless inventory and finally just putting a match to it.

When I was involved in the college textbook business one of the most difficult, if not The Most Difficult, things I had to do was get rid of dead books. Dead books are those books that for one reason or another are not being used by the faculty for their classes anymore, and cannot be returned to the publisher or sold or returned to a wholesale distributor. They might be out of print, or have come out in a new edition, or they might be from a foreign publisher or a small domestic publishing house that does not accept returns. For whatever reason they are books that we could not sell.

Over the years we tried marking them down to 50¢ or $1.00, and they would just sit there semester after semester. Sometimes we would discover a church group that would take the books to give to prisons or distribute overseas, and for a few brief months the stockroom would be clean. After a semester or two the person responsible for organizing the church's committee would move or retire or die and no one else would step forward to take over. I literally spent days trying to find an agency who would take three or ten cartons of books off my hands. The one thing I could never, ever do was throw them away.

If I threw them away it was a certainty that they would be discovered, and before you could change into a clean shirt there would be a picture on the front page of the student paper along with a story on how the bookstore was destroying perfectly good books to drive the price even higher. (I will at some point discuss the cost of textbooks, why they are as expensive as they are and perhaps some ways to make them a bit more affordable, but today is not the day.) College bookstores are generally considered as ethical as an Enron executive, and having a few dozen old texts photographed in a dumpster, no matter how out of date or useless, does nothing to help the image. And if I had burned them? I doubt if I would be here writing rambling little essays that seem to go nowhere.

焚火こうこう燃え立ちて人らだまりたり
The bonfire burns busily; Around it the people are silent.

They say it's your birthday . . .

I really don’t remember the ride to the hospital. In fact the whole episode might easily have become one of those sharp but separate scenes that make up, as if from a previous life, the memories of my early youth; but it’s where my life takes on a certain continuity of thought and memory that gives it structure, or more to the point, it’s where I begin. I consider it my birth.

There's something happening here . . .

One of my majors at EMU (Eastern Michigan University, about six miles and, at that time at least, several cultural light years, east of the University of Michigan) was philosophy. I hadn’t made a conscious decision to major in philosophy, and I certainly didn’t have any kind of existential or metaphysical ax to grind, I just kind of noticed one day that I had accumulated enough credits to make it a second major. As I recall, that was something of a relief because I had been struggling to create a course of study the school would recognize with a degree. The mish mash of classes I had taken over the last several years did not readily fulfill any of the curricula in the catalogue, and making philosophy a major was just what I needed. It wasn’t that I was in any real hurry to graduate, but my wife was hinting that for the sake of the children I might want to wrap things up and move on.

I actually enjoyed the philosophy classes quite a bit which is why I would happily opt for a course on aesthetics or situational ethics instead of another god-awful math or science requirement. Learning to read carefully, connect unrelated concepts, defend my position and probe for weaknesses in the logic of an argument were all as much fun for me as many people say downhill skiing is for them. Except not so cold, you didn’t have to wear those silly boots and you broke fewer bones. There was, however, one debate I could never get very enthusiastic about, and that was the ever popular: What is Reality.

The way I see it the problem was started by Plato, perhaps one of the most evil men in the history of mankind, or womankind for that matter. Guys like Attila the Hun might come through the village raping, burning and killing you (in any random order), but after an afternoon of plundering and pillaging they left you pretty much alone. Plato, though, was not so benevolent. He comes along and the first thing he does is separate your soul and your body.

Before Plato separating your soul from your body had been one of the side effects of a visit by someone like Attila, or an executioner; but Plato yanks them apart with no regard at all as to how they might feel about it, and sends them off to spend the rest of time wondering why they feel so incomplete. Then he sticks your body in a cave with your back to the door. At least Attila left your remains in familiar surroundings. Reality he says, if I remember correctly, is outside the cave having a good time in the sunshine and all you can experience is the shadows you see on the wall, and we all know how accurate shadows are.

Then Descartes comes along and adds to the confusion by insisting you can never be sure what’s going on because your senses lie and dreams can seem real and yada yada yada. Scrooge makes pretty much the same argument while trying to tell Marley’s Ghost he doesn’t exist. He (Descartes not Scrooge) finally decides that the only really consistent things he can discover are these thoughts that keep wandering around inside what may or may not be his head. Naturally he finally gets around to deciding that since those thoughts are real (I’ve never been quite clear on how that was proved), and those thoughts have to be thought by something it must therefore prove that he exists. From there it’s just a hop, skip and jump to proving God exists and all’s right with the world. But what that world is….

For some reason this inability to know Reality makes some kind of direct connection inside the brain of the average college student. Or at least it did in the mid to late Sixties. Perhaps it was a side effect of the frequent chemical meddling of our perceptions some of us were apt to indulge in, or perhaps my university had particularly metaphysically contentious students. “If I see a tree, how do I know it’s really there?” They could debate it for weeks. Months, if you’d let them. Eventually I would get tired of all this pointless metaphysical doubt. “If,” I would say, “you see a tree and want to know if it’s really there. Put your head down and try to run through it.”

“No!” they would say. “You’re missing the point. Even if you run really hard and crack your head open, it doesn’t prove the tree is there it just proves that your hallucinations are consistent with your expectations of what would happen if you tried to run through a tree that was really there.”

I would then try to explain what I meant. It doesn't matter if the tree is really there or not. That tree, and the universe we think it is in could very well be the One, True Reality; or it could be the demented imaginings of a warthog on a particularly hot day. It doesn’t matter. Either way we have to conduct our lives as if there is a tree in that particular spot. Some smartass would always counter with, “Yeah, but what if you’ve just done some LSD, man, and everything is like some big hallucination and you have these giant bat wings growing out of you and you think it’s okay to jump off the building? What about that, man?”

My usual answer would point out that that person would soon cease to be a bother to me. Anyway, drug induced hallucinations are temporary states as are dreams, and at some point they will end and your perception of reality will once again come close to matching that of the other people around you. There is no consistency to hallucinations, but Reality, whatever it is, is constant. You see the tree today, and unless it is physically removed you will see it there tomorrow. Trying to run through it today will be as painful as it was yesterday.

Then I had an endoscopic exam.

For those who have not had the pleasure, I will try to briefly describe what happens. (For a nice video on the procedure and its history go here, and then scroll down to "At the Forefront of Endoscopy.") I was having a series of abdominal hemorrhages, and the doctors would use this test to pinpoint what was going on. The endoscope is basically a tube with a diameter about the same as my index finger with a camera on the end along with some little tools they can do things like take a biopsy or cauterize a bleeding blood vessel. You have to swallow this tube, and since you never really get to swallow it all, it plays hell with your gag reflex when they move it back and forth. To keep you from biting into it they put this block in your mouth that the tube goes through. To get you into the proper mental state they pump you full of valium, and maybe other drugs, which puts you in a place where you can think, “Okay, they’re going to stick this tube down my throat and I’m going to choke and gag on it for ten or twenty minutes until they’re done. Cool.”

Now here is the fiendish part. On top of the tranquilizers they give you something—I really don’t know what it is—that makes you forget something has happened the instant it happens. You are completely conscious, but you don’t know anything is happening to you because as soon as it happens you have forgotten that it happened. The only memory I have of any of the four or six exams I have had is of a brief second where they must of eased off on the mystery drug. For one or two seconds I’m choking on the tube, and then I hear a voice say something like, “Oh, you’d better increase the…” That’s it. Otherwise, nothing ever happened.

What is the Reality?

To my wife, who was there for a couple of the exams, and the doctors and nurses that performed them, the examinations were real. They lived through them. For me they never happened. I know intellectually that I had these tests, but except for the one or two seconds I mentioned they didn’t happen to me. It’s not like not remembering surgery. After surgery there is always the perception of time having passed similar to waking up from a particularly sound sleep. After the endoscope exams no time has passed.

So now, if someone says to me, “If I see a tree how do I know it’s really there?” I will still say, “Put your head down, and try to run through it,” and then I’ll say, “if you remember bouncing off of it, it’s really there.”

日ごと葉おとす木を見上げては通ふなり
Looking up at the tree As I pass Each day leaves fall.

Doumo arigatou . . .

Several years ago the community college I was working at began offering a conversational Japanese language class. According to the department secretary the school had a successful Japanese program several years before, but the instructor had quit and they had never been able to replace her. (My own opinion is that the department chair at the time just didn't want to have anything to do with any language that didn't have Latin as a parent.) I had for some time been reading a lot of Japanese fiction, and had often wondered how much the original differed from the translations I was reading. I was also vaguely bored. The upshot of all this was that at the tender age of fifty-seven I enrolled in JPN 115 meeting on Monday and Wednesday evenings.



When friends and co-workers found out what I was doing their reaction was fairly uniform. "Wow, that's great," followed by an awkward pause of a second or two, and then, "Um, why?" Many told me I should take Spanish. It would be much easier than Japanese to learn, and much more useful. They are probably right. The thing is I wasn't looking for usefulness. Anyway, to answer their question I would give them one of three answers. Some were told that I had decided to have a mid-life crisis but was too old and fat, and poor, to attract a young, blond mistress, or buy the roadster of my dreams. Other people were told that I was getting prepared in case the company I worked for ever decided to expand into Japan. And a few people, in a moment of weakness, were told the truth, which was, and still is: I don't really know. (Actually the first two explanations are also true in some strange theoretical way—they're just not very accurate.)

There certainly was a strong desire to read Ibuse's Black Rain and Kawabata's Palm of the Hand Stories, among others, in their true voices. Especially Black Rain. It is such a brutally honest account of the horrors of that day in August, and how it affected the lives of those who survived and continued to cause misery and suffering for years afterward; but there is also an over-riding, gentle optimism that touches me in a very profound way. There are scenes that are extremely moving in English, and even though I would not understand most of the subtleties I would like to experience them in their true voice.

But, perhaps more importantly, there was a real feeling of stagnation in my life, and a need to rattle the bars just a bit. Work, while almost always abusive and often frustrating, was also very routine and held few real challenges aside from the usual campus and corporate machinations. This isn't to say I disliked my job. Oddly enough, when I was allowed to do it with out interference from management and faculty it was quite enjoyable. But there is a very fundamental reason "Dilbert" strikes a nerve in almost every corporate worker in the United States, and it is that we all work for that pointy haired boss, and our Human Resources departments are, for all intents and purposes, run by the evil Catbert. And my old email signature of "Why are campus politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so small." is only funny because it's a fundamental truth.

Anyway, one Monday evening that August I entered the classroom about ten minutes late (one of the ironies of working in a college bookstore was that my management could never understand why I needed time off to take a college course), and began a very rewarding journey. It's been a kind of bumpy journey. I have had to drop out some semesters because of hemorrhages, or having to have a knee joint replaced a couple times, and sometimes work interfered more than it should have; but I have had two excellent instructors that have been patient, understanding, and amazingly enough have actually been able to teach this petrified brain a few things. I think it was possible because, while they are very different personalities, they both care very deeply about their culture, and wish to share the beauty of their language. アンソン晶子先生と豊田茂子先生、どうもありがとうございます。(Professors Akiko Anson and Shigeko Toyota, thank you very much.) I can never really thank you enough.

電気がつくとかえってゆく子供らに水平がある
Electric lights Schoolboys returning home The sea-line beyond.

Happiness is a warm . . .

The other day while stopped at a red light I noticed that the SUV in front of me had a decal on its rear window that said, "I belong to the NRA/And I vote." My first reaction was, "Big, bleeding whoop." Then I tried to figure out the driver's intent when he placed the decal in his window. Was this person (In my mind's eye I pictured an overweight male with a none too clean 1973 hair cut, wearing Wrangler's that fit only because he wears them very, very low—fastening his belt somewhere in the vicinity of his scrotum. (I always want to remind these guys that belt buckles are not supposed to be horizontal.) He finds stock car racing extremely interesting, and its strategy fascinating), was this person trying to make a patriotic declaration, or was it a threat?


I suppose one could make the argument that he was telling The World, or at least the traffic stuck behind him, that he was an American who takes the electoral process and his rights under the Constitution seriously, and is willing to defend them both vigorously. On the other hand, one could read those words and come to the conclusion that he was saying something like, "One way or another I'm going to force you to do things my way."

Now, I will never know which interpretation was closest to that driver's true beliefs, or if, indeed, he had even thought the statement through and actually formed an opinion. For all I know, the decal was there when he bought the vehicle, or perhaps it was in the envelope of stuff that came after he paid his dues (along with his Official NRA Membership Card—to be carried at all times) and he just stuck it on the window because it looked cool. But I am positive that the image formed by that giant SUV and that decal is one of the major reasons we Americans are so reviled by much of the world's population. The grossly oversized SUV or pickup truck is all too often the vehicle of the road bully. The driver's intent is to intimidate those around him, and force them to give way and acknowledge his power, both physical and economic. He cares nothing about your rights, or safety, and the decal is there to make sure you get the point. Not an image to generate real respect or friendship.

I'll admit that I don't really understand why so many, especially Muslims, hate us so vehemently, but when I see a black Suburban or Tahoe or Escalade or Ford 350 with an NRA sticker I begin to see why just a bit.

人をそしる心をすて豆の皮むく
Discarding my wish To revile someone I shell peas.

Please allow me to introduce myself . . .

I am, I regret to say, not a man of either wealth or fame. I am a middle-aged, edging toward elderly, vaguely retired, over weight man who has decided to try and explain himself to the world. Not that the world has been particularly interested, or confused, about who or what I am, but if I were the kind of person who let a lack of interest deter him I would have had very few second dates in my younger years. The hope is: if I can come close to explaining this jumble of opinions, prejudices and desires clamoring for space inside my head to any of the people who are, most likely, ignoring this exercise in vanity; then I just might have a fighting chance of understanding what's going on in there. We will see.

As far as the easily explained stuff is concerned, I was born in Idaho, grew up in Michigan and currently live in Arizona. After high school I went to Eastern Michigan University (they might try to deny it, but I have proof) where I majored in literature and philosophy. As you might expect, with an educational background like that most of my working life was spent in the transcendental world of retail. For the last twenty-two years I worked in college bookstores, primarily as the textbook buyer. Some months ago I arrived at a place where I could no longer tolerate the campus intrigues and politics, corporate demands, and the general hostility inherent in that occupation and I quit. I will probably be looking for a job in the very near future (I have grown oddly fond of having a home and food to eat), but for now I am retired.

Currently my interests are cooking, literature, music, learning to speak and read Japanese and writing self-indulgent essays about myself. My family means more to me than most people suspect, and is one of the main focal points of my life, but since they have strong opinions about their privacy I will try to avoid dragging them into these little exercises. Suffice it to say that there are current and former wives, two sons and a daughter, a grandson, mother and a couple of siblings et al, and on a good day several of them might be willing to admit we are related. On a really good day a few of the 'et al' will remember; but since I have not yet attained that state that guarantees a huge, loving family (i.e., I haven't won the lottery) I try to leave them in peace, and they show their gratitude by returning the favor.

If you have stumbled onto these pages, or I have badgered you into linking to them and am pacing back and forth behind you waiting to see your reaction, and are still reading—thank you. I hope you will find future episodes witty, humorous, perhaps even interesting. I will, however, in keeping with current communication standards, do my best not to be thought provoking. I have big plans for the future, which is to say I've thought of a topic of another installment. After that it all starts getting rather vague, but then, life gets boring if there is too much certainty.

草萌ゆやくゆるこころのすなほなる
Grasses are sprouting: My repentance is mild.