A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Stephen Crane

Saturday, July 28, 2007

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.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

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.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

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

Saturday, July 14, 2007

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.

Monday, July 2, 2007

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.