just this regular guy

Let a smile be your umbrella . . .

2010-06-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

Somewhere around fifteen years ago, maybe a bit longer, I was in a meeting with some Apple Computer representatives, and one of them pointed out that in email, still at the time a fairly new form of communication, the reader didn't have facial expression and tone of voice to cue him or her. This meant that something written in jest could be misunderstood, and cause the reader to take offense. Since then I have heard and read the same thing over and over and over. Be careful! No one can tell if you're joking!

As a result of this writing paranoia two equally obnoxious phenomena have developed.

One is the emoticon. That collection of punctuation marks that are supposed to represent a face seen lying on its side, which I just discovered I didn't know how to do. They are supposed to show that the statement you just made:

is a joke :-)
was just kidding ;-)
made you sad :-(
was amazing :-0

and so on. They seem to be limited only by the writer's imagination and keyboard skills. One problem with emoticons—I'll get to the graver, more serious issue in a moment—is that the writer will sometimes say very inappropriate or hurtful things, and then excuse them with an emoticon. "God, you're fat! ;-)"

The second obnoxious phenomenon are those little collections of letters—I am stodgy enough that I hesitate to call them acronyms—that seem to follow some writers every sentence. You've seen them, or are guilty of using them. lol for laughing out loud; rotfl for rolling on the floor laughing; etc, etc, etc. These seem to get used for no logical reason at all. "I went to the store today. lol" Going to the store is so funny you laughed out loud? Going to the mall must make you laugh hysterically.

Some will say that the pseudo-acronyms are needed because it takes too much time to type all those letters, or because Twitter and its ilk only allow 140 characters. The answer to these is don't be so damn lazy, and do your communicating in a medium that actually allows you to communicate.

The really serious aspect of both phenomena is that assumes the reader has limited abilities, and allows the writer to be equally inept. You don't have to read anything carefully, because the emoticon will tell you if something was humorous. You don't have to write carefully because you can throw a :-) or a lol in at any time to excuse the clumsiness.

As a writer you have an obligation to choose your words and construct your sentences in such a way that your meaning is clear. If the intent or mood of your writing isn't clear then it is your responsibility to rewrite it until it is. And as a reader you have the obligation to actually read what is there, and to interpret what you are reading. It is not a passive activity. You have to put some effort into it. You can't sit there and say, "Well, how was I supposed to know that story by Poe was scary? I couldn't hear his voice or see his face."

It makes you wonder how a modern transcript of Twain or Swift would look with smileys all over them to let people know they had just said something humorous or satirical. Then again, maybe Swift really thought the Irish could be bred for food.

A polka dot shirt, and man, oh man . . .

2010-02-20T11:53:00.001-07:00

This happened a little over thirty years ago. It was the early mid-Seventies, when disco was not yet a joke, or at least not an over-whelmingly embarrassing one. The Seventies, as a decade, have so much to answer for—from elephant bell-bottoms, to afros on Midwestern farm kids of obviously Germanic ancestry, to lime green leisure suits—that disco sometimes seems to be the least of its sins. At any rate, I was working at the time as an optician, and managed an optical shop in the largest mall in the area. I think the mall has fallen on some hard times recently, but at that time it was the place to shop for three or four counties.

The store was just off the center courtyard-like area, and unlike many of its neighbors, had no rear access to the service corridors. This meant that every morning I walked about two blocks through the mall from an end entrance to the front gate of my store. Most mornings I would see the same people as they all made their way to their respective jobs. Sometimes the place we would pass each other would shift a bit because they had changed jobs. This was especially true of the younger men and women who worked in the clothing stores.

There was one young lady in particular—isn't there always—who seemed to have worked in at least four or five stores by the time the incident I'm working up to occurred. She was physically very attractive, and depending which employer she had at the time her look had varied from the round-heeled girl next door, to disco queen in CFM shoes, to stylish hooker with a heart of ice. She always had a warm, almost eager, greeting for any of the men she passed as she made her way to her current job. Except me. Me she passed not only without a smile or greeting, but with not even the slightest acknowledgment I existed.

I'm pretty sure it was not because of something I had said, because aside from an occasional "hello" or "good morning" the first few weeks I worked there, I had never spoken to her in either of our lives. I would almost be willing to believe it was my looks, but I think the evidence was actually slightly in my favor: I showered daily, my clothes were clean and well pressed, and while I had never impressed anyone with my rugged good looks, they had never caused anyone to run screaming into the night either. On the other hand, some of the males she did greet with unabashed enthusiasm were obviously the kind of guys who had been voted most likely to spread VD in prison by their high school class, so it didn't seem to be my life-style, or sense of style, that was the cause of this shunning.

I was nonplussed, not to mention puzzled. I was as comfortable as one can get with the idea that sometimes people just don't like you, but my ego demanded a cause. Now my ego has accepted, with reservations, the concept that many things happen it will not like for no knowable reason; but I was young then and if you were going to reject my existence with that kind of totality, my ego demanded a reason.

Anyway, enough, as they say, with the prologue.

I had bought a new suit. Now most of my suits at that time tended toward the conservatively stylish end of the spectrum. My wardrobe contained, among other things, the usual pale blue leisure suit, and tan, dark brown, medium blue, and gray business suits of a somewhat conservative cut. Man made fibers were featured more prominently in the weaves than I was comfortable with, but the less expensive cloth actually fit into my budget. One very seldom got much beyond the bargain racks on an optician's salary.

There came a time, however, when I bought this suit. It was an off-white that I think the maker called vanilla. Please keep in mind that this was the Seventies. We had not yet started snickering at the scene where John Travolta is walking that walk up the street in his white suit pants and vest, paint can securely held in each hand. My suit was made of a very soft wool with an extremely subtle herringbone weave that kept it from looking like flannel. I secretly imagined it gave me something of a Tom Wolfe look, and I bought two shirts to wear with it. One was rust orange, and the other was a deep, chocolate brown.

The tie that went with the orange shirt had a lime green background, and bubble-like things of various colors. It actually placed in the top two or three of a Land's End ugly tie contest several years ago. It was not a good decade for neckties. Not only were they wide enough to qualify as bibs, they were, for the most part, a thick, stiff polyester, which could not be tied in a knot smaller than a pineapple. As an added bonus the patterns were often a bit busy in much the same way a Liberace arpeggio was. As I remember it, the tie that went with the brown shirt was a complicated pattern of tans and browns that seemed to say they had been going for a striped design when they happened to stumble on this totally hideous variation.

Now, the truly depraved part of all this is that we all thought we looked good. We were hot. Women, for reasons that have never been adequately explained, actually approved of men dressed that way. The point is, despite our revisionist attitudes, that at that time my suit, shirt and tie were exactly right.

One Monday morning, he said finally getting around to his story, I put on my new suit to wear to work for the first time. I decided that morning to wear the brown shirt. After getting dressed and putting the final touches on my hair and beard, I looked in the bathroom mirror. I looked marvelous. I was so far beyond cool Swanson could have used me to store TV dinners.

When I got to the mall I walked into the mall with a bit more bravado than was normal and held my head up smiling at one and all. I looked good, and felt as good as I looked. People smiled at me from across the courtyard, and a couple pointed me out to a companion. To top it off, that girl actually had a big smile for me as we passed. It was amazing.

I let myself into the store, and saw that not only was my zipper open (I know you saw that coming), but the tail of my shirt was hanging out of my fly looking for all the world like a horse's—well, like a horse that may or may not have been excited. I spent the rest of the day in the spare exam room.

Sweet land of . . .

2010-01-08T22:43:00.001-07:00

My friends have always run the full length of the cultural/political spectrum. I have known, and liked, conservative Mormons, gay Jews for Christ, Republicans and Democrats of every gradation, middle of the road Independents, born again Christians, Islamic fundamentalists, card carrying Socialists, left-wing Buddhists, right-wing Buddhists, even further right-wing atheists and everything else in between except, perhaps, an asexual, cross-dressing nihilist. The only really non-negotiable requirements I have had have been honesty and tolerance. As long as a person was truthful about their beliefs and willing to at least try to understand that my beliefs were just as honestly held as theirs, we could be friends.

Then there are the Libertarians.

At first glance the tenets of the Libertarians seem pretty basic to what most of us consider the American Ideals. They claim, in the grand tradition of Jefferson, to feel that government should not/cannot constitutionally enact any law that would infringe on an individual's personal liberties. What these personal liberties are is, in the long run, a concept that is perhaps purposely not fully defined. The tenets of the Second Amendment are the usual frontline demands. It seems that Libertarians I have known feel naked, if not emasculated, without a firearm within reach.

Now, I have been alive now for sixty-three years. At various times I have lived in and/or prowled the more, shall we say, active neighborhoods of Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and New York at all hours of the night, or morning if you want to be pedantic about it, and for 99.9999% of the time felt completely and totally safe. The times I have been most concerned about my survival have almost all been in small, backwater villages where my not driving an over sized pick-up truck with at least two rifles in the back window was an indication that I was probably some kind of liberal, Commie queer hell bent on making off with their women. The fact that I can write sentences like the last one only confirmed their suspicions. Besides having several guns handy, real men speak in three word sentences like, "You a queer?"

There are "real men" that do speak in sentences somewhat longer that three words, but they are usually trying very hard to convince you of the dastardly way the Zionists, Socialists, Liberals, Federalists. Globalists, the Catholic Church, the music business, al Qæda, Shriners, the Federal Bank and the computer programmers have all banded together and striped the country of its fundamental values.

They can concoct a conspiracy theory around something as simple as a book being available in the public library.

It is complete and total rubbish. The only purpose any of these conspiracy theories have is to provide an excuse for the person's failure as a person. He can't get a job because the Zionists control the construction trade. He is poor because the Federal Reserve has ruined money. He can't take classes because Globalists control education. He won't send his kids to school because they are dens of liberal Godlessness, and health care is an unconstitutional plot to destroy America. They feel that if you do not have the pluck and the skill to heal yourself, you should die. The resources of the country are not here to be wasted by making people healthy.

If only they were allowed to carry as many guns of the types they want, then you would see us liberal Pinko's slinking back into the woodwork. "An armed society is a polite society" is their creed. One hastens to point out little doctrinal problems like Sierra Leone, Somalia, the Taliban and the United States. These are all highly armed societies, and none of them fit the description of polite. Unless by polite you of course mean abject fear. Their only concern is the protection of their personal liberties, and your personal liberties are not a consideration. If they were you would have a bigger gun.

I have, as it happens, had guns drawn on me four times. Three of the times were by the police. I was walking down the wrong streets at the wrong time, and looked a little like the wrong person. And once I was robbed while hitch-hiking between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. (The odd thing about the guys who robbed me, beside the fact that they gave me change back for my $20, was that they were fine, upstanding members of the NRA, at least according to the decal on their back window. But I digress.)

I truly think that the reason these self-proclaimed Libertarians are so adamant about carrying guns is that they are by and large pretty ineffectual at dealing with life, if not, like most bullies, complete cowards. The gun gives them the backbone to spout their dreams of returning to 1845, and we can return to those original American Ideals of bigotry; slavery; disenfranchised women; short, desease riddle lives; illiteracy; superstition; and most of all, that dearest attribute of the paranoid, complete cow-eyed stupidity.

Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind . . .

2009-11-06T23:52:00.000-07:00

It was, I believe, in sixth grade that the class took a daylong trip to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. This was the biggest field trip we had ever taken and it required signed permission slips and packed lunches. It was also, if memory serves, the first time I ever actually rode a school bus. I was a town kid, and had always walked to school or had been driven by Mom in our third-hand Plymouth the half mile or so when something was bleeding.

In a minor way I was intrigued by the school buses, and the seeming comradeship of the kids who rode them. They seemed to have a unity that those of us who walked home alone or with one, maybe two friends never got to form. Plus, when a rain storm had turned the back roads to mud, or a heavy snow storm had blanketed the area, the farm kids would come straggling in at 9:30 or 10:00 or even 11:00, and then they would get to leave correspondingly early for the long slog home. We town kids had to be there on time, and stay until the regular last bell because we could walk to school. I thought it was highly unfair.

But after our trip to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village I didn't find their life quite so romantic. The buses were drafty, noisy and uncomfortable. The seats seemed to have been designed especially to cause the rider to slide off in random directions at the slightest bump, change of direction or variation of speed. The rest of the time you were being thrown against your seatmate who always seemed to be the kid in the class with the most suspect hygiene.

When we finally got to the museum complex, probably just a bit over an hour's drive, we spent the rest of the morning touring the the museum proper. Even now, fifty some years later, I cannot describe its impact. The closest I can come is that it was the most godawful, boring place I have been in to this day.

I have no doubt that its collection is an important history of transportation, and American life in general during the industrial revolution, but the excitement and drama is of the kind that only dedicated researchers and scholars would appreciate. For a sixth grade boy it was one dusty buggy or steam tractor or icebox after another, taken out of context and kept enough out of reach to render close inspection impossible. Couple that with a tomblike silence completely unnatural in a building that size, and lighting you might expect to find in a crypt on a day of mourning and you begin to see how completely it failed to engender any enthusiasm.

There were no exciting, little dioramas like in the Natural History Museum in Ann Arbor. There, in glass cases or behind windows, were little displays showing cavemen bringing down a mammoth and how a spear thrower worked; or what an Iroquois village looked like and how the women used grinding stones to make their flour. At the Henry Ford Museum, not a thing. Nothing to show us how this bit of dirty wood and metal functioned, and perhaps played a vital part in farming the prairies, or in the Wright Brothers' experiments. Just a placard with the device's name, perhaps a small, very cryptic description of its presumed function, and most predominately, the donor's name. Never before or since have I looked forward so much to just sitting outside and eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The afternoon spent in Greenfield Village was much better.

First, we were outside in the sunshine when walking from one building to the next. That did wonders to dispel the gloom of the dark, Victorian interiors. The buildings we could go into had the shadows, odors, and feel of an ancient great-aunt's house where one never spoke too loudly, moved too quickly or felt too deeply about anything; and if you were very, very good you were allowed to sit on the front porch looking through an ancient stereoscope at faded scenes of a tourists version of Egypt. You were always warned that this rickety stereoscope had, indeed, been your great-aunt's absolute favorite toy when she was a little girl, so please no rough-housing while it was a three county area.

Second, there were occasionally people doing what would have been done when the building was really where it was supposed to be. What they were doing wasn't always crystal clear to us, but they were doing...things. More importantly, they were talking to us. Telling stories of apprentices having to get up at 4:30 in the morning to make sure the office would be ship shape at 7:00. I didn't always understand the story, I was usually on the outskirts of the group where the sound was thin and didn't carry, but I got enough to know that nobody in their right mind would want to live like that again.

My one favorite place was a quasi-blacksmith's shop or farrier. Given the title, it really didn't seem to have much to do with horses. What it really had to do with was making as much money as possible selling blacksmith and farrier related items and still steering clear of horses as much as possible. In this case it was making rings out of horseshoe nails. We were buying them up by the cartload, and the really cool part was they were all rumored to turn your finger a quite satisfying greenish-black when you wore them for very long.

After being awarded our custom made genuine horseshoe nail ring we then made our way over to the Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop and Edison's Menlo Park Lab. I found these to be terribly sad buildings. Great drama and genius had performed within their walls, but that was in other places with other spirits. These buildings belonged somewhere else. The air that had filled them when they were filled with the excitement of discovery was Ohio and New Jersey air, and while they could have had very useful lives in Dearborn they had been taken apart, shipped hundreds of miles, and then reassembled. To the casual observer they were the same buildings, but deep in their framework they were different.

You cannot move a place. Perhaps it is cheaper and more efficient to care for those buildings, and the others around them, in one place; but once you have dismantled them, taken them away from the places they were built for, and had other, newer strangers rebuild them they are only the shadows of what you were trying to preserve. They may look the same, and the be built of the same boards and bricks, but they are no longer the same.

About fifty years later the comedian Steven Wright would say: "I have the original hatchet Washington used to cut down the cherry tree. Of course I've had to replace the handle . . . . and the blade, but it takes up the same space." These poor buildings don't even take up the same space. They have become stage props instead of historic places.

No colors anymore . . .

2009-10-15T14:11:00.000-07:00

What does practically every rock 'n roll performer; whiny, little emo-brat; anime otaku; younger comedian; self-declared "sexy" woman; "dangerous" (again, a self-declared state) cowboy; neo-Nazi; acutely sensitive poet; "serious" writer, businessperson, baby-sitter, etc, etc have in common?

They all think wearing black makes a statement other than, "I'm boring."

I'm not talking about those people who occasionally wear a black shirt or pair of pants along with other colors. I'm talking about those people whose entire wardrobe consists of nothing but varying values of black, with an occasional white shirt to accentuate the blackness of everything else and perhaps a dark maroon piece for festive occasions.

For years I have tried to figure out what the allure of the all black wardrobe could be. What, exactly, do people think it says about them, and why would you want to say that? Here's what I've managed to come up with:

I'm dangerous. Everybody from the Nazi SS to wanna-be ninjas* have used black to instill fear in others. We equate darkness, black, with death and danger. I'm no psychologist, but my guess would be it is because night time was for many eons a dangerous time for us humans. Our eyes don't see that well in the dark, and you never knew when a lion or panther would suddenly be jumping out of it.
I'm serious. I don't have time, or energy (or the imagination) to play. This is a serious world with serious problems, and doing something like wearing bright, non-depressing colors would just get in the way of all the serious things I have to do.
I'm sensitive. As far back as you want to go there have been hyper-sensitive, totally self-absorbed, overly dramatic little twits who could only show how hyper-sensitive, totally self-absorbed, and overly dramatic they were by dressing all in black to show how sad the world really was and how sensitive to it they were.
I'm mysterious. Oooo, I'm the man/woman in black. You don't know me. You can't figure me out. I'm a complete mystery because I always wear black. Ooooo! (And other ghostlike sounds.)
I'm classic. I am the time honored sexy woman in the little black dress/handsome man in the Italian black suit. Or it could be they just don't have the imagination, or the nerve, to do something other than what some lazy, hack writer in a fashion magazine stole from an article written forty years ago that had been stolen from an another article written forty years before that and so on, and so on.

What, in my opinion, really happens is that the person, regardless of the reason, disappears and loses, or attempts to lose, their identity as an individual. They become part of an amorphous, faceless group of things in black. They have lost their uniqueness. Their personality. And like all monochromatic states, are, in the end, simply boring.

Fight on fiercely, Harvard, fight, fight, fight . . .

2009-09-08T22:37:00.003-07:00

At the top of the stairs going down to the Athletic Field on the nights we had a home game, one of the local farmers would sell cartons of freshly pressed apple cider. Rumor had it that occasionally some of the cartons would be left-overs from the last home game, and had turned hard in the interim. That none of the cider ever was hard did nothing to diminish the feeling that perhaps this carton was the one. Hard or not, the taste of fresh apple cider on a crisp autumn evening was unforgettable.

At that time football was, for me, a few classmates in uniforms and helmets throwing themselves against other uniforms and helmets under some garish lights on an Friday evening. More important to me was the taste of that cider, the warmth of my band uniform, and the way my date's hand felt in a wool mitten. Otherwise it was just a game whose objective made very little sense to me. I had spent a lot of time in hospitals, and purposefully doing things that could very easily put you, or the other guy, in the hospital was, in my opinion, not the hallmarks of a reasonable, or even fun, sport.

In the forty-some years between those fall evenings and now my attitude toward football has changed very little. I still consider it a pointless exercise, and surprisingly boring. NASCAR, that other hallmark of America's ability to make a mountain out of a very small molehill, at least has fairly continuous actions—granted it's action I can pretty much see if I look out my window toward Indian School Road, but at least it's something—football doesn't even have that. Still and all, I have come to the conclusion that it is perhaps the ultimate expression of what many believe it means to be an American.

First, what is supposed to be sixty minutes of exciting athletics is, in reality, actually several hours of inactivity. In the average professional football game, which might take three and a half hours to complete, there is less than fifteen minutes of actual play. We are not going sit and watch demonstrations of stamina involving men continually running, that is for wimpy Europeans, we want the kind of explosive, steroid powered violence that can only be maintained for three or four seconds.

Then we want two or three minutes of walking back and forth, substituting players, huddling, talking to the coach and other amazingly exciting stuff. Of course this gives you a chance to get another $8 hotdog and $6 beer, or go take a piss because you've already spent $24 dollars on beer, and still not miss the next two and a half seconds of action.

Secondly, we must have a goal of inflated value. We will not sit still for a measly point, we must have six. That is called a 'touchdown.' You score a touchdown by actually carrying the ball into the goal area. Then, being Americans who by divine right deserve everything, we insist upon being given another point for merely kicking the ball through the goal posts. If football was scored like any other sport you would get one point for taking the ball into the goal area. One point. Period. But we cannot have that. That would mean that instead of an excitingly high scoring game of 28 to 21 you would merely have a boring, low scoring game of 4 to 3.

Four to three is for elitist snobs who watch soccer, not Americans. We must have more. And we must be rewarded for coming sort of close, but not actually achieving a goal. So we must have field goals and extra points and safeties, because we wanted to make a touchdown, but weren't quite able to and it's not our fault so we should get some points anyway; and if we do make a touchdown then we should get even more points because we're special.

Third (thirdly?), we insist there be needless violence. How can it be a game worthy of America unless there is the constant expectation that someone might get their neck snapped on the next play. Those men have spent years, and taken countless drugs, developing their bodies into the animal incarnation of a F-350. They are built to intimidate. To harm. The least we can ask them to do is to permanently destroy the knees of the opposing players. Or perhaps their hips. Or spine. Of course this will also lead to the permanent destruction of their own body, but hey, that's what football and America are all about.

So there you have it. American Football in all its glory. A game of 12 or 13 minutes of action safely spread over three to four hours to allow us ample time to get even more disgustingly fat and drunk, while watching a group of men struggling mightily against another group of men struggling just as mightily to score meaningless goals that are vastly overvalued in the most senselessly brutal and aggressive manner possible and doing serious long term damage to each other even if they don't get to kill each other. And on top of that you get to sit in seats that would be comfortable if you were 3'6" tall and weighed 42 pounds; but then you wouldn't be able to consume the quantities if beer and pork products required to support the team like a true fan.

It must be heaven.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . . 11番

2009-08-01T10:56:00.002-07:00

One of the more popular plot lines in science fiction involves the hero going back in time, and preventing something from happening so that in the future they came from some, even more terrible, thing will not happen. For some reason, probably one best explored while watching the currents created by the ice melting in a glass of scotch, the even more terrible thing very often is the birth of some individual. The argument goes something like this: the world, as we know it, is crap. The reason it is crap can be traced directly back to this exact person. Therefore, if that exact person is never born then, ipso facto, the world will not be crap.

Now, if you were to take a poll you would most likely discover that in the private thoughts of most people, the person usually blamed for causing this scatological condition of the world is either a family member, or, more frequently, middle management. These, of course, are the people most capable of making one’s life a living hell, and the most likely reason one would be sitting in a gloomy bar on a Thursday afternoon watching ice melt in some amber colored liquid. We understand the anger, and the need to stop these people before they can do their harm; but for time travel to be involved in a novel or a movie the person has to be doing some serious, global, genocidal crap making. They have to be a Hitler or Pohl Pot or Stalin or someone equally evil like the guy who invented conference calls. Otherwise it’s just a family squabble or workplace grievance.

The only thing wrong is that it can’t happen.

The reason it can’t happen is: the past is fixed. You can’t change it because if you did then it wouldn’t be the past. That is, whatever you did to change the past already happened to make the past you are trying to change the past that it is. Now to balance things out the future is always a crapshoot. Any conceivable variation of an event that could possibly happen has, at any moment right up until the moment happens, a more than fighting chance of occurring and you cannot be sure of what will actually happen until it has. But once it has happened it is frozen, and the only thing that can change is how it’s remembered.

Now, you pick a date—preferably one you wish had come out just a bit different. For Thomas he, or we, could very likely pick 24 August 1981. That was one of the days he got married. In the next several years he spent a great many nights watching ice melt, and thinking. Thinking he could have gotten a flat tire. A cop could have stopped him for speeding, and then locked him up for having an expired registration. A plane could have crashed into the wedding hall. The psychology student who had started dating the girl with improbably auburn hair and the…smile could have tracked him down and beaten him unconscious for no really valid reason. Maybe he could go back to 4 October 1979 and say, “I don’t think so,” instead of “Sure, why not?” Or perhaps he could go back to that meeting with her family on 17 April 1981 and set them straight about just what kind of nameless hell he was willing to put up with. Or on that 24^th of August he could have driven to the airport instead of the wedding hall, flown to Zanzibar, and gotten arrested for being drunk and disorderly. So many things could have happened. In his blacker moments, when he remembers some of the finer agonies, he tends to daydream about fiddling with the brakes on her maternal great aunt’s car. If only he had a way of getting back to, say March of 1965, and spending five minutes in her garage, life would have been so much nicer.

But like I keep saying, even if you can go back, you can’t change what happened. You can have twenty, thirty, a hundred time travelers all doing their best to prevent something, but the culmination of their efforts will still result in the event that will make the world crap in their future.

I will try to explain it a bit more cogently.

Somewhere around 20 April 1889, Adolf Hitler was born. A great many people quite rightly would like to see that not happen. So, in the year 2030 an intrepid hero volunteers to take on the job of stopping this birth. He’s seen all the old “Terminator” films, and has worked out assiduously to make sure he looks good during the nude scene. He is sent back to July, 1888, and begins making sure Herr und Frau Hitler never get a moment together to do some canoodling. But 20 April 1889 only happens once, in this dimension at least, and baby Adolf was certainly born, which means that for one night, or afternoon, or coffee break, our intrepid hero was asleep, so to speak, at the switch.

The truth is that if you are a time traveler from the future, you have to go back to a time that has already happened; and you were there when it happened even though you came from a date perhaps hundreds of years in the future because, in our dimension at least, time only happens once. (I said that already just a couple sentences back, but it bears repeating.) So, no matter how many time travelers go back to July (or August) of 1888, Adolf Hitler’s mother and father will still manage to have that one, all important connubial moment because you can’t undo what’s done.

“What,” I can imagine you asking, “does any of this have to do with Thomas? And can I have the last five minutes of my life back?”

The answers are: a lot and no.

I love to get a chance to play—and sing it . . .

2009-07-08T23:02:00.002-07:00

This has been bouncing around the inside of my head—the relatively uncluttered area I hear most people use to hold a functioning brain—like the lyrics of a song you hate for sometime now, and I'm hoping that by putting it into actual words it will do what most of my thoughts do when I try to formalize them into a coherent bit of writing, and evaporate into nothingness. When I worked I would often have this problem. For hours, or days and far too many nights, I would have a thought or image hovering in my consciousness just in front of the stuff I really needed or wanted to think about. Back then these interloping thoughts were usually snatches of conversations some secret part of me wished to have with either faculty—especially department chairs—or upper management or both.

Granted the current recurring thought has nothing to do with most faculties' lack of awareness of how modern business must, by necessity, operate or how books are actually printed and distributed. ("Yes, I imagine that book would be perfect for your class. But it is published by a small monastery in Tibet that only has contact with the outside one day a week and demands unblemished, black goats for payment. I can assure you we won't be able to have it here next week for the first day of class.") Nor does have to do with being given two completely contradictory, mutually inoperable directives within the space of two sentences. ("Um, let me get this right. You want me to hire three more people, and lower my payroll by 15%. Are you even aware of what you are saying?" "I didn't say it would be easy.")

That is the most maddening thing about this current recurring thought. It has nothing to do with anything that actually matters. Not that upper management actually mattered all that much—you could usually distract them with something shiny and using a new 'power' phrase that would keep them occupied for a day or two. Something like 'making a lateral realignment of our sales growth' or 'drill down into the numbers to find the most advantagous cost/return ratio title.' It's total grip is based on the fact that it is of no importance to anything, anywhere.

It began a few weeks ago when iTunes cycled "But Not For You" done by Chet Baker into my evening's listening. What first struck me was that while he was a fairly decent trumpet player, he completely sucked as a singer. What made him think he could do it? What makes jazz trumpet players in general think they not only could, but should sing? Saxophone players by and large, don't usually break into a couple choruses of "Take Five" and clarinet players are a fairly vocally quiet bunch. Piano and guitar players will often sing, but those instruments are for accompaniment, and tend to make the singer sound better if played well, and not so bad if played poorly. But the trumpet is a solo instrument, it takes the song by the cajones and makes it a better thing or destroys it in the trying, and the other instruments can damn well wait their turn.

I don't know about W C Handy, but the list of famous trumpeters that also sing, or sang, that I can think of is quite long. There's Louis Armstrong, naturally, Louis Prima, Dizzy Gellespie sang at least in his early days, Hugh Masakela, Clark Terry, the aforementioned Chet Baker, and Doc Severnson to name a few. I have a gut feeling Wynton Marseilles breaks out into a couple of verses of some of those old tunes he seems to favor, but could very well be wrong. The only trumpet player I can think of that never seemed tempted to vocalize was Miles Davis. That, however, would have taken his music out of the abstract and made it something that would connect directly with the audience. Something I don't think he wanted or could accept. I once saw him do a long number during his fusion/free period standing in a rear corner of the stage facing the curtains. He was there for the music and the audience was just a sadly necessary, but unwanted distraction.

Anyway, I still don't know what there is about playing the trumpet that leads one to start singing at the first opportunity, and probably never will, but perhaps now that question will stop popping up at every moment.

Great. Now I have "Basketball Jones" echoing around up there.

There's always free cheddar in a mousetrap, baby . . .

2009-06-19T14:18:00.002-07:00

Several years ago my assistant and I were talking during a slow afternoon at work. I have completely forgotten whatever it was we were discussing, and it's totally irrelevant anyway, but I remember saying at one point something like, "Well, that's why I'm a Pagan."

She kind of smiled and said, "You don't believe in enough to be a Pagan."

She was right, of course.

The bald truth is I do not believe in a God or gods. Nor do I believe in sprites, faeries, angels, devils, spirits, ghosts or an eternal soul. Lucifer and Gabriel, and all the rest, are, to me, fictions created to help keep unruly children, or congregations, in line. In fact, in my opinion, all of the entities I named, and all their angelic and demonic brethren, were invented by someone to either help explain natural phenomenon or legitimize, and/or enforce, their right to control or exploit others, or all of the above.

By the same token, I do not believe in any form of afterlife. If there is no undying part of me (soul), then there can be no heaven or hell in which it will spend eternity. At the moment of my death my being, what is usually called my soul, will begin to dissipate. All the various biological systems will bring their duties to a conclusion, and when, finally, the last few synapses deep in my brain have fired for the last time (perhaps flashing a scent or sound or scene across the dissolving fragments of me) the memory image will fade, and then I will completely and utterly cease to exist. And when the last person dies that had any memory of me, I will, for all intents and purposes, have never existed.

The one or two times I have tried to explain my vision of reality, the usual comment has been something along the lines of, "Oh, but that must be so frightening. So lonely." Let me assure you, it is not in the least frightening. Granted, there is a certain amount of a longing for a grand finalé, with all the loose ends firmly tied, and music by Leonard Bernstein, but it just isn't in the cards, so to speak. On the other hand, I know that when I finally do approach death as a short term goal, I will not, like so many millions of poor exploited souls, be terrified of having to spend eternity being tortured beyond the limits of reason. There will be no damnation. No decent into Hell. It will be a great disappointment to Sister Rose, and a couple others. One of which I might have married.

But on yet another hand, there will also not be any joyful reunions with my father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins or any others who died long before we had figured out what we really meant to each other and why. I have been near death a few times, and while I had very intensely real seeming dreams at the time, I did not see me as they worked on me and there was definitely no light to go to. Once I was intensely working with a group of people trying to solve a problem at work, and once the dream had to do with sailing and I remember I didn't like the boat.

The usual explanation of my non-conforming dreams has been, " well, you weren't near enough." Let me assure you, if I had been any nearer this post would be that long sought after link to the afterlife and screwing up my belief system. When a bleeding ulcer I had decided to kick into high gear my hemoglobin and hematocrit was 4 and 14 when I was admitted. The usual ranges for men are 13.8 to 17.2 and 40.7 to 50.3 respectively. They told me in ICU that my numbers were incompatible with life. After six units of blood that night I climbed all the way to almost 8 and twenty something.

I tend to think that the people who have had those out-of-body, near death dreams are the ones who because of cultural training, religious belief, and desire expect to have exactly those kind of dreams, and in that moment of extreme crisis something triggers the dream that will most likely help them through the moment. Since I do not have those expectations, my brain sends me sailing.

Perhaps it's just as well that there isn't an afterlife, because if the Home Owner's Association Types who seem to think they are in charge of how the place will be run are in fact right, well then I would probably not want to be there anyway. I'm certain they would outlaw several of the activities I consider essential to paradise. Not to mention the fully stocked drinks cabinet.

I first started developing this view of the universe when I was nine years old. Coincidentally, that is the same age the ironically named Christopher Hitchens (author of god is not Great) says he first saw the flaws in conventional religious thought. It was, also coincidentally, his teacher who first brought his doubts into focus. Perhaps not as coincidentally, it is also when I attended St Elizabeth's.

For Mr Hitchens it was his teacher's insistence that the Beauty of Nature was God's gift to mankind, and his realization that mankind considered certain beneficial aspects of nature as beautiful that caused an awakening, as it were. Somehow he realized that the universe had not been created to fit us, we had evolved to fit the universe. That is, of course, an enormous simplification of his observation, but it is true to the essential argument in its way. For him the dichotomy between the two views, along with many others, eventually caused him to realize that God was a construct of man, and not as he had been taught, the ultimate reality.

For me it was the emptiness. I began to notice that during the service when my family went to our church, during the Mass at the beginning of the school day at St Elizabeth's, and during my youthful attempts at prayer there was a hollowness, an emptiness to them. The closest I can come to describing the sensation is it was like talking to a dead person. No matter what you say or how hard you try to communicate and perhaps say what they meant to your life, there is nothing. No response. No twitch to indicate they heard. No glimmer of even a past awareness. It is like trying to connect with a brick. There is not only no reply, there is no one listening. For me God had that same, complete nothingness.

Over the next few years my upbringing, and beliefs, were fairly typical for a boy in a little, rustbelt farm town, but slowly, incrementally things started not adding up. Again, like Mr Hitchens I started trying to make connections that refused to even come close to connecting. If God was omniscient why did I have to pray to tell him how I felt? If He was all loving and made us in His image why did I have hemophilia, and more importantly, why did Bobby get his face blown off? If He was omnipotent why was there a Devil? If He made everything, what made Him? If He was omnipresent, why didn't I feel His presence? And most puzzling of all to me was why was I a sinner and damned because of something Adam and Eve did? My parents didn't punish me for the things my brother did, so why was I being punished by God for things done by people so long ago not even my great grandfather had known them?

Those, and a thousand others, were the rather simplistic questions that came to me. Now I know that they are fairly standard almost to the point of being clichés, but they are also questions that have never been satisfactorily answered. As a boy I was told that it was all part of God's Will and unknowable to mortals, and one must just have faith. It was one thing to believe a knee hemorrhage would eventually stop and I would get better, and quite another to believe that all the suffering and senseless death I saw on the news and in the hospital was part of some kind of divine plan. In the first place, we knew, 'believed' if you insist, that my knee bleed was the result of some weak vessel walls and an inherited chemical malfunction; and even though the science of the time couldn't explain it, it would eventually be figured out. That is a far cry from saying it was just the malicious whim of some omnipotent being that couldn't be bothered with explaining itself, and I was supposed to be eternally grateful it hadn't done something even worse.

Anyway, one Scout Sunday when my troop was piously arranged in the first several rows of pews of one of the local churches it crystalized. This was all meaningless. There was no God. All of this was just an attempt to explain the universe, and justify the rules we lived by. The only immediate effect of this cathartic moment was that I stopped saying 'under God' during the Pledge of Allegiance. For the 1950s that was, however, a pretty risky move. I felt pretty safe though because I had found out that President Eisenhower had added the phrase just recently, and up until then we had been able to pledge our allegiance in a purely secular way.

Where Mr Hitchens and I part company is our attitude toward (please notice the absence of an 's') those who believe and the beliefs. He cannot resist making a snide or snarky comment, or showing his contempt for those who believe, and while I have little respect for priests and preachers and the like, I understand why people need or hope for a god to make sense of it all. We want to have a purpose. We need a reason for our existence. In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams wrote that the most fiendish, most terrible, soul destroying punishment that had ever been devised was the Total Perspective Vortex. All it did was show you for an instant just exactly where you stood in relation to the universe. We can't handle that, and what better way of avoiding having to acknowledge our true importance than by believing we live in a universe that has been especially created for us.

For the next twenty some years I studied different religions as I became aware of them. I read their holy books, and tried to understand the theology, but there always came a point when the teachings contradicted the overwhelming reality we are presented with. This universe was made for me, or I was made for the universe. Either way the universe should be explained by the theology. Saying that was because I was caught up in the profane world, and the teachings were about the sacred is for me just another way of saying you must believe in spite of reality. I cannot do that. I can only believe because of the reality.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . . 10番

2009-06-16T22:28:00.002-07:00

The afternoon had been even less fun than Thomas had anticipated, and after a lifetime spent in the madcap world of academic administration his standards were pretty low. As a reward to himself for having endured two rather accurate samplings of hell he skipped the buffet and dance being held that evening, and was walking along the edge of the beach watching the surf and an occasional surfer. He brushed the sand off a bit of the wall that separated the beach from the man made parts of town, and sat down staring out at the waves, but naturally what he was really looking at was his seemingly empty past and an equally meaningless future as it seemed to be shaping up at the moment.

There is something about a fluid in motion—it could be water or methane or lava or whatever it is that spills and splashes on your world—that makes any species that can remember its past and understands its mortality ponder its place, and lack of ultimate importance, in time and space if they watch it for very long. It can be the surf rolling in, or the swells as they pass your boat out at sea, a river or the minute currents surrounding the ice as it melts into your scotch. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s a fluid and it’s in motion.

If, for example, you sit at the edge of the edge of Niagara Falls (preferably on the Canadian side—it’s usually cleaner) you can see the lip of the rock ledge through the water as it flows endlessly over. Eventually you start wondering where all of that water is coming from. How can it just keep pouring past without end? Then you start thinking of it as Time. An unending flow that as soon as you see it, it’s gone, never to be again. And then a fish will flit by and go over the edge, and you realize that’s you. A flash, a brief memory, then gone and nothing to indicate you were ever there. This is why all of the really good, old fashioned, get a drink on a slightly depressed Thursday afternoon and stare into the mirror with your thoughts kind of bars always face inland.

“Thomas?”

It took a few seconds for the sound of his name to shoulder its way through the several layers of self-pity he had built up by then, and when it did finally arrive at a bit of consciousness that would pay attention he started, and said, “Wha?”

“Thomas Milton, is that you?”

“I thought so, but perhaps I should check.” Thomas looked up to see who was challenging his existence this time, but instead of some nearly perfect, complete stranger it was a woman who at one time had been a classmate with improbably auburn hair that had ended up rejecting Thomas because of his lack of commitment. Thomas always had to sleep on things before committing himself, and she had absolutely refused to participate in his decision making process.

Right about now I can hear, or imagine I would hear, one or two of the more careful readers saying something like, “Hey, a couple pages back you said he was doing things with this girl that would displease Sister Rose.” My answer is, of course: yeah, so what’s your point. What I intimated is that in my universe he might be doing things which might cause Sister Rose to become distressed and wish to remind him of the proper way to conduct himself with a young lady, no matter how bloody improbable her hair is, by beating him senseless with a wooden ruler. That doesn’t mean it happened. Reality is a tricky thing, and it’s best make sure you have a steady viewpoint before making any rash pronouncements. It’s also at this point that I would like to tell Microsoft’s grammar Nazi to take a flying leap.

She was wearing an unbleached linen, sleeveless peasant dress that hung in nearly graceful folds a few inches below her knees. That is the hem hung a few inches below her knees. The dress hung from her shoulders in a close approximation to the usual way. When the sun was behind her, which was rather more frequently than Thomas was comfortable with, the dress seemed to disappear revealing the almost, but not quite youthful curves of her organically fed body. She was still an extremely attractive woman, but her…smile was perhaps a bit more softly comforting than perky. Her hair, which was now more nearly improbably white than auburn, was done up in two frizzy pigtails, and her complexion had that over-scrubbed, slightly broken-out look so dear to vegetarians.

“Clarissa?”

They went through the usual “Is that you? It’s been so long I hardly recognize you! You haven’t changed a bit!” absurdities such occasions require, and then spent the rest of the evening catching up on each other’s lives, or at least the portions they would tell someone who may or may not have become a stranger, over a couple of bracing glasses of organically grown, and squeezed (a process it is better to imagine than observe), carrot juice. Locally grown, of course.

Dear old Golden Rule days . . .

2009-05-25T22:53:00.002-07:00

The school I went to when I was in first and second grade, Central, was built a little before World War I, and the architects had certainly never heard of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Probably because it hadn't been passed yet.) To get into the thing you had to go up six or seven steps, my classroom was on the second floor, and the restrooms were, of course, in the basement. The steps in the stairwells were made of some kind of stone that had been rounded by fifty some years of use. They were also slick as ice whenever there was the least bit of moisture on them.

Because my crutches would often just slide out from under me on those steps the principal, Mr Green, would carry me up to my classroom in the morning whenever I had a knee hemorrhage, and then back down at the end of the day. At lunch time he would carry me down to the lunch room and then back up to the classroom, and if I needed to go #1 or #2 Mr Green would carry me down the three floors to the restroom. All this being lugged about like an infant was just a bit humiliating for me, and didn't do Mr Green's bad heart much good either, so I often didn't go to school when I had a knee bleed.

When I was in second grade Tecumseh's Catholic church began building a school. It was completely modern which meant it was ugly as hell, but more importantly it was all on one floor. My parents thought if I could go to St Elizabeth's (I have never known why it was in the possessive) I wouldn't have to miss so many school days because of knee bleeds. So after many discussions and a couple meetings with the school's administration they scraped up the tuition charged for the children of non-Catholic pagans—about three weeks worth of Dad's wages—and bought me three pairs of wool slacks, some white shirts and an assortment of clip-on bow ties. Since a uniform had not been decided on yet boys were to wear dress slacks, white shirts and a tie. Girls had to wear a dark skirt and white blouse.

The first day of third grade I jumped out of the car a little excited, and a little apprehensive about this new school and these strange teachers dressed in about forty pounds of black robes. Without even trying I immediately began establishing the lack of harmony and total absence of good will that would exemplify my time at St Elizabeth's by pissing off a stern, older woman in black robes, and getting into an argument with another lady that had all white robes and turned out to be my teacher. All before I got into the building.

The lady in black turned out to be the school's principal, and in the fullness of time I learned that we were to supposed to address her as 'Mother Superior.' That first day all I knew was that she was a stern, angry for no particular reason lady who told me to stop running and walk like a gentleman. The lady in white stopped me at the door and said, "What class are you in, young man?"

"Um, third grade, ma'am."

"Sister."

"Huh?"

"Do not grunt like an animal. You say 'Sister.'"

"Why, ma'am?"

"You do not address me as 'Ma'am,' you say 'Sister.'"

"But you're not my sister. She's in Oregon."

"My name is Sister Rose. I am a nun. You can tell I'm a nun by the habit I wear. You address me and all the other nun's that dress like me as 'Sister.' Do you understand?"

No, I didn't understand her. I thought a habit was something you had, and you wore clothes, but this didn't seem like the right time to argue.

"Yes, Ma'a…," her left eyebrow went up so high it almost disappeared behind the white band that went across her forehead, "Sister!"

"Very good. Now, what class are you in again?"

"I'm in third grade, Ma…Sister, but it's for the first time."

"Your room is the second door on the left. Now go in and take a seat."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"SISTER!"

From there on things seem to go steadily downhill, no matter how hard I tried to follow the several million rules that seemed to govern everything from how we dressed to what we said to how we walked out to recess (single file, looking at the head of the kid in front of us) I would somehow manage to mess it up. I got in trouble for giggling when Sister Rose explained that even though she wore a flowing, white habit we should not think she was an angel. When asked to explain why I had giggled I got into even more trouble. (I said it was obvious they weren't angels because we could see their underwear on the clothesline behind the convent, and everybody knew that angels didn't wear underwear.) I got in trouble when she said she wore a wedding ring because she, and all of the other nuns, were the bride of Christ, and I said I thought it was against the law to have more than one wife. I got into trouble because I would forget to stand when called upon by Sister Rose, and for a few hundred other minor lapses in thought or action; but perhaps my major failing was wearing a tie, or to be more precise, failing to wear a tie.

At least three , and very often four or five, days a week I would forget to wear my tie. My mother even began keeping a couple in the car for the days I left home without one, and I would still manage to arrive at my desk sans tie. Sister Rose would call me up to her desk, and would pin a bow tie made of folded notebook paper to my shirt. As she pinned it on she would quietly list all of the reasons I would be going to Hell, and the punishments she personally would inflict before I went.

One Monday morning Sister Rose told me to stand and explain why I did not have a tie on. (We always had to stand when speaking.) I said that in all probability I forgot it.

"Step up to the desk, please." I made my usual morning walk up to her desk and stood beside it waiting for my notebook paper tie. "We will see if this will help you remember in the future." I braced myself for a smacking, but instead she took out of a drawer a huge, bright yellow bow tie made out of poster board. It was wider than I was, and in large, black letters it said "Guy's Tie!"

I'm not sure what reaction she was looking for, but I know for a fact that the one she got wasn't it. This was great. This was even better than the one Soupy Sales wore. I took it from her and said, "Wow! Can I put some polka dots on it?"

The other major problem I had with the rules, and I think it was the one that eventually led to all parties agreeing that I would perhaps be happier in the public school, was that rule about standing when speaking. If you dropped, say, your pencil you could not just reach down and pick it up. You had to stand up next to your desk until Sister Rose recognized you. Then you had to say, "Excuse me, Sister. Excuse me, Class. I dropped my pencil." Sister Rose would then give you permission to pick it up. After retrieving the run away pencil you would sit down again.

Somewhere around the fourth or fifth week of school I had my first knee bleed of the school year. After the first few, really painful days Mom decided that I should begin taking advantage of St Elizabeth's one story floor plan. When I sat down at my desk I got my first indication that this might not be as easy as had been hoped. The desks were the kind that had the seat attached to the desk portion on the right side, which meant you had to get in on the left side. When I sat down I automatically put my crutches down along the left side of the desk. Sister Rose immediately objected. I had to put them on the right side.

I tried to point out that I needed them on the left side, and putting them down on the right side was difficult because I had to lift them over the desk while not hitting the kid in front of me, and the connection between the seat and the desk made it difficult to reach the floor. That was not important. I would put them on the right side of my desk.

Then I dropped my pencil.

At first I tried what I though was the logical thing to do. I raised my hand. After holding my hand up for five minutes or so Sister Rose finally said, "Guy, you know the rules."

"You mean I have to stand?"

"That is the rule."

I leaned down and got my crutches. I carefully lifted them over to the left side missing the kid in front of me by a couple inches. I turned in my seat so I could stand up. When I stood the change in pressure made my knee throb with pain. Then I turned to face the front of the room.

After a couple of minutes to show that there would be no pampering me just because of a hemorrhage, Sister Rose said, "Yes, Guy?"

"Excuse me, Sister. Excuse me, Class. I dropped my pencil."

"You may retrieve it."

The pencil had rolled a few feet away. I used one crutch to pull it to me, then bent down to pick it up. This was trickier than it sounds. My left leg was the one that was bleeding, and the swelling had made the joint contract and it would neither bend nor straighten. I couldn't just bend at the waist because that caused the muscles in the back of my thigh to stretch and was very painful. So I had to balance on my right foot, and lift my left leg behind me as I bent over while holding on to both crutches with my right hand and using them to keep from falling on my face. Then I grabbed the pencil. After straightening up I got my crutches back under my arms and turned so I could sit down. I sat down and then turned to face the front again. Then I had to lift the crutches back over the desk and put them down on the floor. All in all it took up about ten minutes of class time from the initial drop to putting my crutches back down.

The other kids were doing their best not to giggle, and my knee was throbbing. The whole thing was stupid, and it was at that point that something in my nine year old brain snapped. I decided that if this was how we were going to play the game I would play it to the limit, and we'd see who gave in first. From then on at least once each morning and once each afternoon I would accidently drop something. Sometimes twice. On my best day I lost two pencils in the morning and an eraser, pencil and ruler in the afternoon.

Each time I would laboriously pick the crutches up and lift them across the desk. I stopped worrying about the kid in front of me and he eventually became pretty adept at ducking. I would slowly turn in my seat and struggle to my feet, and then slowly, painfully (even when it didn't hurt) turn and wait. Sister Rose would stand there in silent rage. She would hiss, "Yes, Guy," and I would do my little sing-song apology. Except for being as clumsy as a carp, which I was pretty sure wasn't a sin, I was doing nothing wrong and I was following the rules to the letter. She would tell me to pick whatever it was up, and be quick about it. That never happened.

During Christmas vacation Mom, Sister Rose and the Mother Superior had a meeting. When school started up again in January I was back at Central. Life was good.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .9番

2009-05-03T23:09:00.002-07:00

At the window stood a young girl. Well, actually, she wasn’t exactly a young girl as we know them, but we’ll get to that in a moment. She had her back to the room and the lights were out because it is much easier to sulk petulantly that way. The day had been simply awful.

First, the sky had been that wonderfully bright shade of crimson that announces, perhaps almost too forcefully, that Spring is well and truly sprung; and the delicate perfumes of the spring flowers with their almost painfully pure shades of orange and yellow had been unbearably sweet and delicious. On the far side of the meadow our young nearly girl was glowering at was a stream clear and cold with the bright green snow melt from the Crystal Mountains gamboling its way to the sea.

As the evening advanced the sky had darkened gradually through shades of wine to a black with dark red highlights that stirred the soul of anything more animate than a granite paper weight to thoughts that kept the fathers of this particular young sort of girl at levels of alert just short of, but not excluding, a preemptive strike. They knew exactly what those roving, unaligned paternal teams wanted. They had been a young, unmarried squad once themselves, and they were damned if their little girl was going to get caught in one of those committee meetings.

The wisps of dark, forest green clouds had been highlighted by the sinking suns to emerald along their edges, and the way they drifted lazily by certainly didn’t help the fathers’ mood or efforts either, and it had become difficult for a platinum feathered dreamdove to find a bush to roost in that had not been occupied by couples or groups, depending on species, who had already stared too long at the sky and breathed too deeply of the spring flowers.

Now there was just enough light from a distant moon to allow you see those clouds against the black and deep red sky as they drifted over the Crystal Mountains. The Crystal Mountains were, of course, lighted from within by the fires raging deep within the planet, and the spires and columns glowed with a shade of blue that . . .

There is no word for it. Suffice it to say that in one or two dimensions only a hallucination or so removed from this one, that shade of blue is worshiped as a god by a fairly intelligent race with prismatic eyes. In our universe it has only been approached once or twice by the light show for some of the pricier rock concerts, and even then the likeness was that of a guppy to a whale. Or more properly, a Jerry Falwell or Osama bin Laden to a kind and benevolent God. A hint of the glimmerings of the concept was there, but they truly and utterly failed to get a grip of any kind on the reality.

Still, if you had been to, say, a Genesis concert when their version of the blue came up you would have dropped your arms, and possibly your lower jaw, which is very painful for most species, and just stood there for a few seconds struggling mightily with seven years of college and an honors degree in language to come up with the only possible description of the intensity of the color and your primal response to it, and finally succeed in describing it to you companion with, “that’s really blue”. Then the lights melt into a black with dark red that gives you a mere smattering of a hint of what those poor fathers so far away were up against.

Between the impossibly blue Crystal Mountains and the wall with the window our petulantly sulking young lady is looking out, were the scattered sapphire and not-quite-ultraviolet flashes of the night blooming glow flowers as they expelled puffs of the perfumes that would soon bring the skysnakes. The skysnakes, which nested in the dark orange groves at the base of the Crystal Mountains, would do their sinuous aerial dances as they made their way from flower to flower. These dances are difficult to describe, but suffice it to say that they are the reason their snakey counterparts on many planets have been the symbol of seduction.

Kimberly—the cause is as unknown as the phenomenon, but on all the planets in all the galaxies in all the universes in all the dimensions that have petulant, sulking young girls or their equivalent, a fair number of them are named Kimberly—let out the three thousand four hundred fifty-third exasperated sigh for the day and declared, “This has got to be the ugliest, most boring place ever!” and dreamed of a world where everything was beige.

But, again I digress. Try to take comfort in the belief that it will all make sense later. That’s what I’m doing.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .8番

2009-05-03T22:55:00.002-07:00

There was a time when traveling by plane was an event. You dressed for it, and were given a seat that was both comfortable and spacious. Even if you were traveling ‘Student Stand By’ everyone treated you with respect, and you expected to arrive at your destination within a few minutes of the moment indicated on the ticket. These are not those times.

Even though they had boarded the plane only forty-five minutes late they hadn’t actually taken off until twenty minutes after the scheduled arrival time. They had spent those fun filled hours sitting off to the side of the taxiway while other planes went around them and the flight attendants walked briskly up and down the aisle. Occasionally they would fuss with a small door to a compartment that wouldn’t close completely, and then make heated calls on a phone near the door.

After an hour or so Thomas got the attention of one of the flight attendants and asked her, “I was just wondering. We aren't by any chance waiting for a supply of small, lemon soaked napkins are we?”

The flight attendant lifted her left eyebrow a quarter of an inch higher than you would normally think possible, or prudent, and replied in a tone of voice that had all the warmth of the dark side of Mercury, “No, sir. A compartment door won’t close completely creating an unsafe condition in the case of an emergency.”

“Um, just a thought, you know, and speaking as a layman with just a vague understanding of the consequences of falling out of the sky from a few thousand feet; but if—and this is strictly hypothetical, I’m not suggesting in any way we might actually do this—but just on the off chance we were to crash I would think the collateral damage, as it were, would be of sufficient severity to occupy most, if not all of my efforts. I don’t think bumping my elbow on a small closet door would be especially high on my list of concerns.”

She thanked him for his feedback, and indicated that if he had any more concerns or suggestions Security would be happy to take him off the plane and discuss them for several hours. She could assure him that this was just the kind of smart assed remark that would allow them to release a lot of pent up hostility they had been saving for just such an occasion. Eventually the door was kept closed by wedging a folded napkin next to the latch. From there on the flight went as well as one has come to expect. The flight attendant, however, very pointedly gave Thomas only one packet of complimentary pretzel. (After a protracted trial the Airline agreed to cease using the plural as it was found to be misleading.)

Later there was a bit of a scene with an unfortunate man who, when they finally landed, could not get his sport coat back because the little closet it had been hung in was wedged shut with some folded napkin. Hardly anybody noticed however because Airport Security had him trussed up and taken to a holding cell in less time than it took the woman blocking the aisle at row seven to take everything out of her purse; remember she had put her phone in her overnight bag, and empty it out; make a phone call to Rupert and tell him to get the trapeze ready; and repack everything. The man later sued the airline for the cost of the sport coat and the emotional damage its loss had caused, but the airline refused to pay on the grounds that it was not a very attractive coat, and was completely wrong for that shirt and tie.

On a subsequent flight the door unexpectedly sprang open during boarding when the folded napkin fell out and gave a passenger a rather nasty crack across the knuckles. That is, the door gave the passenger a rather nasty crack across the knuckles, not the napkin. The napkin just fell quietly to the floor and tried to disassociate itself from the scene that followed. The pretrial motions are currently entering their third year.

On the second day of the conference Thomas sent Spenser an email regretting his presence in San Diego during their meeting, and praising what he knew had been a productive exchange and the many excellent proposals he was sure Spenser would have made. He then promised to set up a follow up
meeting to discuss the details as soon as he was sure of his travel schedule.

That afternoon was a busy one for Thomas.

From 1:30 to 3:00 he was attending a presentation explaining the fiscal benefits of what was being called the ‘Walmart Model.’ It was becoming popular in many smaller universities and in the increasingly cutthroat world of the community colleges, especially those who included profit among their educational goals. You continually reminded staff (Here the old fashioned distinction between staff and faculty must be discarded because they are all, after all, simply employees.) that they are your most valuable asset. Then, to ensure the financial success of the institution you keep every one that hasn't been unionized on semester to semester contracts, teaching just under a full load and paying at a rate that has been carefully calculated to be $20 dollars a unit lower than insulting. You then end every budgeting, scheduling, and curriculum meeting; or any other meeting where someone inquires about something like health insurance or a livable salary you point out that payroll is your greatest, but most easily controlled, liability.

From 3:30 to 5:30 he was chairing a seminar exploring the reasons for the growing trend of faculty, especially adjunct, to have little or no loyalty to the schools that employed them. He had privately worked out a theory that staff’s loyalty to their employer was intrinsically bound up with, and proportional to, their employer’s loyalty to them, but university and community college administrators are very touchy about things like their bottom lines and bonuses and do not take kindly to that sort of seditious talk. In fact they are much more comfortable with you making a quite thorough examination of their spouses bottom and its lines than casually glancing at their school’s bottom line. It’s one thing to spread, and perhaps crumple, a couple sheets; it’s quite another to tinker with one’s spreadsheet.

Roger, draft dodger, sneakin' out the cellar door . . .

2009-03-23T21:35:00.002-07:00

In October of 1964 I turned eighteen. Eighteen was that magical semi-step into adulthood for young men that meant that you were still far too young to drink alcohol, except in the state of New York, and still could not vote, but you were now mature enough to spend a few years in the Army. Several weeks before my birthday I received a large envelope in the mail from the Selective Service with a nine or ten page form I was to fill out and return before said birthday. I really don't remember much about the form except for thinking, "I haven't lived long enough to have answers for this many questions." Or something like that. That is at least the gist of my reaction which was a very complex mixture of thoughts, emotions and panic which at the time got edited down to something which probably sounded more like, "Damn!"

After answering questions about every aspect of my life up to and almost including dreams I may or may not have occasionally had about a certain nurse that worked the 4:00 to Midnight shift, I got to the section concerning my health, and any physical conditions that might make me unfit for fulfilling my duty to God, Country, and, most importantly, the Army. I dutifully checked the box next to "Hemophilia," and supplied the names, addresses and phone numbers of my doctors and the hospitals I had been in, along with release forms for records. I also did my best to summarize, in the space provided and on a plain, letter sized sheet of white paper attached to the back of the form, the nearly two hundred hospitalizations I had had and the uncounted hemorrhages that had not been deemed severe enough to warrant treatment. The next day I mailed the completed form off fully confident I would be getting an automatic 4-F, and got back to the really important business of applying to colleges.

A few days after my eighteenth birthday a somewhat smaller envelope arrived from the Selective Service, and I discovered that contrary to my expectations, my country felt I was qualified for the manly classification of 1-A. 1-A meant that in their humble opinion I was just the kind of young buck they were looking for, and at that time the odds were highly in favor of me being in uniform on my nineteenth birthday. The documents that accompanied the card were written in Officialese and for the most part did not make much sense, but in amongst the admonitions, orders and a couple outright threats we found a paragraph that said I had ten days from the date of the letter to appeal the classification. Said appeal to be made in person at the local Draft Board office during normal business hours. Since the Post Office had operated with unusual efficiency that meant I still had six days.

The next morning, Friday, I skipped school for the first time in my life, borrowed the family car and drove the twenty miles to the county seat. The Draft Board, being a federal agency, was no where near the county courthouse, or any of the other buildings with county and state offices, and I finally found it in a storefront two doors down from the JC Penny's. The door was locked. A notice next to the door said that the office's normal hours of operation were:

Tuesday and Thursday
Only
7:00am to 11:30am.

I remember thinking these were definitely not normal business hours.

The next Tuesday I skipped school for the second time in my life (the Army was turning me into a regular truant), and at 7:00 o'clock in the morning, I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Draft Board office wishing I had worn a heavier sweater. At 7:03am, according to my watch, the door was unlocked and I was allowed in.

First, it wasn't really a lobby or reception area, but a short, thoroughly dingy and dimly lighted hallway. There were no benches or chairs, and no effort had been spared to make you feel uninvited and unwelcome. It smelled of fear and resignation, with a slight memory of Pine-Sol. At the far end was a single window with a very small ledge for filling out papers. The window had a very stoutly built metal grating over it that had clearly been designed to keep anything smaller and less determined than an angry African war elephant on the outside. On the counter on the other side of the grating was a bell to ring if you wanted service. Years of dealing with the bitter bureaucrats and angry civil servants at the hospital had trained me not to touch the bell even if I could have reached it.

After a few minutes of standing patiently and humming quietly to myself in a way that said please take no notice of me, I'm just remembering a song I like and am not in any way trying to draw attention to myself or interrupt your vitally important work, an elderly woman came to the window and politely snarled, "What do you want?" It was clear that I was being singled out of an infinite number of irritations and interruptions that were vying for her attention on the off chance they could piss her off further.

"Yes, Ma'am. I need to appeal my draft classification, please."

"Why?"

"Well, you see, I was classified 1-A, but I have hemophilia and...."

"You need to fill out form 74Y-mumble-mumble."

"Yes, that's the one. If I could just have one, please, I could fill it out for you right now."

"I don't feel like looking for it," and she walked away.

Now, I will admit that certain details have been given a somewhat dramatic description to heighten whatever the effect is that I'm attempting to create. By that I mean I might have described the entrance a bit gloomier than it was—there might have been a light on—and the lady might not have snarled so much as hissed, but this whole unlikely episode happened essentially just as I am telling it, taking into account an occasional bit of hyperbole; and I swear that those were her exact words. She knew that I needed form 74Y-mumble mumble to file my appeal. She knew I had the right to file that appeal. She didn't see what that had to do with her, and wasn't going to interrupt her coffee break to look for some damn form for some whiny kid who didn't want to do his duty. I was 1-A, and I was going to stay 1-A. Petty details like hemophilia were not going to change things.

The really ironic thing, to me at least, was that I had actually talked to the Coast Guard and Navy to see if there was some way I could enlist in a non running, jumping, fighting capacity, and had been turned down. The way I saw it, even on an aircraft carrier someone has to type or decorate cakes. The Coast Guard and Navy, however, have very firm beliefs that even the cake decorators have to be able to run, jump and fight when need be, and as soon as the word 'hemophilia' found its way into the discussion they immediately showed me the door and made sure I made it through without bumping into either jamb.

The next fall when I registered for classes at EMU, one of the punch cards in my packet was for applying for a student deferment. I filled it out, and in a few weeks received a new draft card showing I had been given the temporary classification of 2-S. After my freshman year I decided to confront things head on, and did not try to renew my 2-S classification.

Now we are finally getting to what I wanted to tell you about.

After once again being 1-A for a few months I received orders to report to my Draft Board office at 5:00am on a certain date for a physical examination. A week later I received another order canceling the first one. A few weeks later I received another order to report for a physical, and another cancelation. The third time was the charm.

At 5:00am one sunny, early spring morning I was once again standing on the sidewalk in front of the Draft Board office. This time, however, I had not had to skip school, and I was accompanied by about twenty other guys. We were put on an old school bus, and started the hour drive to Fort Wayne. Actually, I'm not really sure if that was its name or not. I'm pretty sure it was in that area south of Detroit that always confused me, and know for certain it was a bit over an hour's bus ride from the Draft Board office. In my pocket was a letter from my doctor stating I had a severe form of hemophilia and really wasn't what the Army was looking for. After my initial 1-A classification my doctor had had a copy of my entire hospital record sent to the Selective Service, but I took a letter from him to the physical on the off chance no one had noticed the three very large cartons kicking around the office filled with papers detailing my medical history since 1958.

The first morning was devoted to psychological tests. About 150 guys from all over southeast Michigan sitting at school desks in a room with nice, large windows overlooking a broad lawn. On each desk were two #2 pencils, nicely sharpened, and a rather thick booklet with a front cover that was blank except for the statement: Do not open until ordered. When the hands on the clock snapped to 7:00, a Sergeant at the front of the room began talking. He was speaking in the overly loud monotone they always show military men using, and for a few seconds I was amused by how cartoon like it was. Then I dawned on me that he was giving us the directions for the test and I hadn't a clue to what he had said.

Fortunately, when he got to the end and shouted, "Are there any questions?" someone near the front had the courage to raise his hand. The instructions were shouted again, and by concentrating I was able to pick out the more important points. Staring intently at his watch, he counted off the seconds and told us to begin.

There were sections that asked us to pick the most moral choice between what were often very bizarre situations. You were given choices like was it better have an affair with your wife's best friend, or preach sermons for a religion you knew was false. There were sections that asked us to indicate which of three things we would rather do. Sometimes this was easy because it would be things you could relate to like: "Would you rather a) Read a book, b) Go to a concert, c) Sail a boat." Sometimes, however, you would get something like: "Would you rather a) Learn Swedish, b) Sit in room temperature aspic, c) Get a tattoo." There were sections that dissected our family relations, hopes, dreams and brought to light whole forests of unresolved conflicts we didn't know we were denying. By the time we were done they knew pretty much everything about us including if, unknown to you, you had a latent tendency to look at apple pies in a disturbing way.

After that, and a cigarette break, (which some of the guys really seemed to need) we went back in to examine the limits of our loyalty to God, country, and the American way of life. There were questions much like before, but this time aimed at discovering whether or not we could be trusted with secrets, or would be apt to blab to the first Red Agent that came our way the correct way to pack a footlocker. There were also questions that explored what your priorities might be. Things like, if your hometown was invaded would you obey the orders of your Boy Scout Troop Leader, or stay at home to protect your mother. We also listed all the organizations we had ever joined. I put down the Boy Scouts, Explorers, Future Teachers of America, Science Club and the Lone Ranger's Secret Posse. We listed all the organizations we had attended meetings for but had not officially joined. I dutifully listed Students for a Democratic Society, the Methodist Church, and the high school Chess Club. Then there was about three pages of names of organizations in very small type, and we were to check off the ones we had ever, in any way, been involved with and forgot to list before.

Finally, after having finally confessed having admiration for Adlai Stevenson and a deep distrust of Republicans, they said we had had finished the psychological part of the examination. A few names were called out, and those guys were told to remain in their seats. The rest of us were told to follow a Corporal. I noticed that several of the guys who stayed behind had been the ones most disturbingly in need of cigarette after the ethics quiz. The Corporal took us to a very large locker room and told us to undress down to our underpants and shoes, no socks, and put any valuables in the paper lunch bag provided along with the key to the locker. Then we were to line up at the far door.

When we had all gotten into line we were taken outside and across the lawn to another building. Here and there, usually under a tree, were picnic tables and at most of the tables people were eating their lunch—a large percentage of them were women. From the way they overwhelmingly failed to take notice made me suspect that the sight of a hundred or so young men going from building to building in nothing but their Y-fronts (there were a few boxers also and one or two what we called French bikinis) had lost a lot of its novelty.

In the next building things got down to business.The rooms, and sometimes different area within a room were labeled with large numbers, and we were to make our way from Station 1 onward and upward. We were weighed, blood was drawn, hearts listened to, vision and hearing checked, blood pressure checked, lungs listened to, and urine collected (one enterprising young man was charging a $1 to fill the cup of those who couldn't). In one room with a row of cubicles we, one by one, stepped up and turned our heads and coughed. I noticed that the doctors (?) had plexiglass shields between them and us they had to reach under. Every time I came across some one with clothes on I would show them my letter, and they always responded "Station 26."

They looked at our feet quite carefully, and how we walked, and we had to verify which was our dominant hand. Finally we came to a very large room with five long rows of squares marked out with tape on the floor. As we came in we were lined up in the last row of squares and told to drop our drawers, take our shoes off and set our bag of valuables down next to our right foot. There we stood carefully concentrating of the back of the head of the guy in front of us, while the guys in the front row went through a few calisthenics that ended with them turning to face us, and bending over while this old man walked down the line.

As soon as the front row was done they put their underpants and shoes back on and left. Then each row would move up one square pushing their shorts, shoes and paper bag along with their feet, and a new bunch would come in the fill the last row. Why we had to get naked as soon as we came in, and why they had to have us all in there waiting for our turn was never explained. Perhaps we needed a cooling off period.

Eventually it was my row's turn at the front. We were told to touch our toes, do a couple jumping jacks (not an exercise made for nude execution), and then we were told to do three deep knee bends. I tried to raise an objection because my knees, the left one especially, were not really strong enough for deep knee bends. I was given the choice of bucking up like a man and doing the squats, or I could stay overnight for further examinations. Trying the squats sounded like the better alternative. The first one went pretty well, but it wasn't deep enough for the guy in charge, so on the second and third ones I went as far down as I could. Meanwhile, a black kid two spaces to my right kept mumbling about banging his 'thang' on the cold floor. During my third squat there was a pain in my left knee, and I had a little trouble getting up. I knew this was not going to end well, but it was made very clear that it was not the Army's problem.

Then came the finalé. We were told to turn around, bend over, and spread 'em. Just bending over three feet away from another nude man has, all on its own, a few aspects that are, well, awkward, but having to spread your butt cheeks at the same time while an old man examines you like you were a beagle in a dog show just adds layers of absurdity and humiliation that took my mind completely off my knee.

Pulling up our underpants and slipping on our shoes we made our way out the exit to the next station which happened to be the locker room which, you will remember, was in a building on the other side of the parade grounds. Now, our first trip across the grounds had been as a large group; and just as a wildebeest finds comfort in having a few thousand fellow wildebeest around him to divert the attention of the local lions, I felt much more naked and exposed walking across the lawn with this smaller group that I had that morning. When we got to the locker room we were told to get dressed, and then walk across to another building for our final stations.

This was Station 26, and I got my letter out and smoothed some of the wrinkles out of it. This Station was a large room with several desks for different letters of the alphabet. I waited my turn at the desk for 'A-B' and looked around. At one end of the room was a smaller room with just one desk, and it was labeled 'Station 29.' The unique aspect of Station 29 was the person running it. She was beautiful. Except for the clerks at the distant picnic tables when we made our nearly naked migrations across the lawn, everyone we had met that day had been male, definitely passed middle-aged, and usually in a less than pleasant mood. And they usually had that rumpled look that spoke of failed expectations and easy access to whisky. Station 29, however, was young and gorgeous, and was wearing a rather short skirt, and had very long, very dark red hair.

My thoughts were interrupted by being called up the chair next to the 'A-B' desk. I showed this doctor my letter, and he looked at it briefly and then took a long, hard look at the results of the various tests and measurements performed that day. He asked me if the hammer toe on my left foot ever bothered me, and a couple other questions, and then asked me if I had any questions. I asked him how you got to Station 29. He kind of smiled, and said you have to have been convicted of a sex crime like rape.

From there we were put back on our bus and taken back to the sidewalk in front of the Draft Board Office we had started from about ten hours previously. By the time we got there my leg had started swelling, and by the time my parents picked me up it was bad enough we just drove straight to Ann Arbor so I could start getting some treatment. That hemorrhage took three weeks to get under control, and it was close to four weeks before I could go home. My father tried very hard to sue the Selective Service, but it was, at that time at least, one of those departments that had to give you permission to sue them before you could sue them; and for some reason that permission just wasn't forthcoming.

Several weeks after I got home I got my new draft card, and found out I was I-Y. It was that hammer toe on my left foot. While not quite good enough for the peacetime army, it could keep me from marching for long distances, I could, and would, be called up if war was finally declared. The Draft Board Clerk for our county just could not give out a 4-F, but because of the findings of the physical she had to give me some kind of deferment so she licked her wounds by giving me the 1-Y. The years passed and in due course I turned 26. That week I received another card listing me as 5-W, I think. I was now too old to be drafted. Three months later another Draft Card came in the mail. I was 4-F.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .7番

2009-01-13T13:05:00.002-07:00

This being the Twenty-first Century, the one that the Mickey Mouse Club had said he, and some others, would lead, Thomas had bought his tickets to San Diego online. Whenever Thomas thought about it being the Twenty-first Century he was always slightly let down. As the picture of Mickey had flashed across the screen along with pictures of the Mouseketeers tap dancing and jumping around in pantomime horses for Wild West Day, the announcer had been so emphatic. This show was for the leaders of the Twenty-first Century. Now that he was actually mired in the bloody thing he was finding out that he was anything but a leader. At least not a leader of centuries. He did lead several committees, but the thrill of ruling mimeographed handouts no longer approved for graduate classes soon wears off. Still, one committee was getting him three days at Pacific Beach, and that was ample compensation for whatever the topic of the conference was.

Why he needed more than one ticket was something he could never adequately explain. Perhaps it was a typographical error.

The next Monday at 4:30 in the morning Thomas was standing on the sidewalk. He could have driven to the airport, but then he would have been waiting out in the hinterlands of the economy parking lot at 4:50 in the morning for the shuttle to the terminal instead of in front of his home waiting for the Quick Shuttle. This way, at least, he could use a bathroom if he needed, and might actually be a bit closer to the airport. It was at times like this he wished he smoked because it would give him something to do.

After about ten minutes a van turned the corner onto his street and parked. A slightly overweight blonde woman jumped out of the passenger door and ran half way down the next block. At the same time a paunchy man jumped out of the driver’s side and ran down the other side of the street. Then they turned around and started trotting back toward Thomas throwing newspapers in the general direction of various front doors. The blonde woman had a fairly strong arm and Thomas had to duck the paper she threw at him as she passed. The man had fewer papers to get rid of and jumped in the van when he got back to it and then drove to the next corner where he picked up the blonde woman.

Thomas’s first plane trip had, in ways totally unlike this morning, also involved quite a bit of waiting. It was in the mid 60s after his freshman year. A young lady he had met in a freshman literature class with improbably auburn hair had sent him a note suggesting he come visit for a few days. Having a New Jersey postmark that was less than an hour from Manhattan made the note a done deal. Her improbably auburn hair and pert, perky…smile that made you think…things had nothing to do with it. His intentions were completely honorable. Completely. His hopes were an entirely different matter.

Early the next Friday morning one of Thomas’s roommates, having been subjected to techniques Thomas had learned from an older sister, found himself parking his car at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and helping Thomas carry his suitcase into the terminal. Once inside they scanned the boards and found the next flight to Newark, New Jersey, that being the airport most easily accessed by the young lady and her…smile. Stepping briskly up to the ticket counter Thomas purchased a one-way, student standby ticket to Newark for the princely sum of $20, and said good-bye to his suitcase. In later years, when in a nostalgic mood, he often spoke fondly of that suitcase and the fairly new Rooster tie that had been in it. He was, however, less kind to the argyle socks, and seemed to hold them partly responsible.

The plane took off exactly on time, leaving Thomas inside the terminal watching it. He had been bumped off the flight by a couple of servicemen. Thomas’s roommate had stuck around to watch the planes (this was the mid-60s and people still did that kind of thing), and after Thomas found out that his ticket was good on any flight to Newark on any airline, and his luggage, which had made the cut, would be waiting for him when he got there, they (Thomas and his roommate, not the airlines or luggage) got some coffee and a roll and waited for the next flight.

Now-a-days, of course, if you tried to use your United ticket to get on a Southwest flight they would look at you with much the same expression used when looking at a rabid mongoose; and then they would have airport security interview you for a few hours while they tried to guess how many Arabic words you recognized. This, however, was, as I keep saying, the mid-60s and the airlines had not yet been deregulated which meant that they had to charge the same amount for tickets going to the same place. This meant they didn’t give a wet mongoose, rabid or not, whose ticket you had because more than likely someone else was riding on your original airline with some other airline’s ticket and the bookkeepers would sort it all out later. It also meant that the airlines had to compete by giving excellent service and being on time, which I’m sure you’ll agree is no way to run a business. It would be years before they were deregulated and could more efficiently and economically charge seventeen different prices for the same overbooked flights that would be delayed because the pilot wanted to linger over his coffee.

It seems that three sailors and an off duty stewardess also had reasons to go to Newark, and Thomas and his roommate watched that plane climb into the sky from the relative comfort of the terminal. The next flight from Metro to Newark was at 7:20 that evening. There were, however, several (meaning, according to the dictionary, at least three) flights leaving that afternoon from Willow Run Airport, and in those amazingly inefficient, regulated days his ticket was equally good there. Thomas’s roommate obligingly drove him the thirty-some miles to Willow Run, and then suddenly discovered he had other things in life he needed to do and left Thomas wondering why there was such a run on Newark, New Jersey. He had just heard of the place when the young lady with the improbably auburn hair and pert…smile told him to fly there, and now suddenly everyone and his/her sister had to go to Newark for a fun filled summer holiday. (When he finally got to Newark he decided ‘fun filled summer holiday’ was probably not on their list of reasons.)

He almost got onto the first of the Willow Run flights, but just as he was about to make the phone call signaling he was taking off, a pilot who needed to get to Newark so he could fly back to Detroit got the seat. Finally, after three hours at Detroit Metro and another four hours hanging about the Red and Blue Concourses at Willow Run Thomas was able to place a person to person collect phone call to himself which was the signal that barring accident, or an invasion by a tardy Marine, he would be landing in Newark in a little over an hour which would give his friend ample time to get there and be waiting eagerly at the gate. It had taken seven hours but he had saved twenty dollars, which was about half a week’s wages at his job in the Recreation Department of the university’s hospital.

The first thing that struck him about air travel was that the atmosphere was just a bit thick. He had been seated in the smoking section, which was separated from the non-smoking section by ten inches of empty space and a wall of moral outrage. The second thing that struck him was a piece of make-up that had flaked off of the stewardess. The airline’s management had heard the phrases ‘equality of the sexes’ and ‘respect for women’ and thought them a pretty bad punch line. This was the middle of the Twentieth Century and they were damn well going to keep their female employees looking like the tart next door and serving refreshments.

Thomas fastened his seat belt, sat back and looked around. This was going to be good. He was going to an exciting place to meet up with an exciting young lady and his intentions were to do exciting things in an honorable way. You could break him on the wheel and roast his joints over a mound of blazing coals and that would be his story. As usual his hopes kept their own council and divulged their own plans to no one—especially Thomas.

Back in the present, which will be the past when you read this but still hasn’t happened to Thomas, or at least it will have just happened when you read this but until then it hasn’t occurred in the universe you or he know. In the universe I know Thomas and a young lady with improbably auburn hair are doing things guaranteed to get a stern lecture from Sister Rose; but I’m not going to tell you about that, and as far as Thomas knows it is just a very interesting, recurring dream. Anyway, meanwhile back on the sidewalk, Thomas checked his watch and tried to look nonchalant as a police car slowly cruised passed.

The police car turned the corner at the end of the block and stopped. Perhaps because he had been raised in a small town where everybody knew what everybody else was doing at every moment, and where the Puritan ethic made you permanently Guilty by virtue of having existed, Thomas always got nervous in the presence of the police. And at the moment he was sure they were calling in his description to find out if there had been any reports of a middle-aged man in a business suit doing something he shouldn’t have. In reality, if not actuality, that police car stopped at that corner every morning about this time because the young lady in number 18 of the apartment building around the corner did not close her blinds.

Finally, much to Thomas’s relief, the Quick Shuttle turned the corner, stopped in front of him, backed up about thirty feet, came back to Thomas, stopped briefly and then drove halfway up the block, stopped and honked its horn. Thomas had dragged his bag to the rear door of the van when it started to pull away. He yelled and just managed to pound on the door before it got out of range. Then he had to jump out of the way as it backed up suddenly.

The driver waved at Thomas and got out of the van. Thomas waited until he was actually behind the van before stepping off the curb again.

“There you are. I was just about to call you in as a no show.”

Judging that logic and reason would never win this argument Thomas just replied, “Sorry about that. I was probably pretty hard to see under that street light,” and got into the van trying to avoid something suspiciously sticky on the edge of the seat.

Yes, we have no bananas . . .

2009-01-12T00:59:00.001-07:00

It seems that one of the hottest trends in food right now is being a localvore. As far as I can tell this means you will not eat anything grown more than 100 to 300 miles from where you are located. As far as I know there is no agreed upon distance that comprises "local," and I have heard chefs use a variety of distances. If you do a Google search for “localvore” the majority of hits come from a group in Vermont, and they seem to lean toward 100 miles; but at the moment the definition is apparently based on the individual's conception of the term, and the variety of produce available in a given area. At one time you could assume anything that could arrive within twenty-four hours of harvesting was local, but that isn’t the case anymore. This being the early days of the Twenty-first Century we first generation Mousekateers were told we would be leading, just about anything within a two hour mule ride of some kind of airport can be delivered anywhere else in twenty-four hours.

The other major component of the localvore concept is that the methods used to grow the crops must be sustainable. Again there is a certain amount of wiggle room in the definition of sustainable, and to be honest I don’t really know what is meant by the term. I take it to mean that the materials and methods used must not do harm to the environment, and that the crops must be, if not indigenous, at least native to the same type of environment. The aim, as I understand it, is to produce crops that can be grown year after year without depleting the land or resorting to chemical augmentation. But I could be wrong.

At the first several glances the concept has much to recommend it. If the food you eat is grown locally you stand a better chance it will be fresh, ripe, and nutritious because it doesn't have to withstand the rigors of being shipped halfway around the world. You support the small farmers in your area therefore helping to maintain a traditional form of life. You are forced to become aware of the changing seasons and celebrate the shifting bounty of each. And, most importantly in my opinion, you help keep alive the wonderful, unique varieties (both vegetable and animal) that grow best, or perhaps only in your locale.

What's not to like?

With the concept, nothing. It's reality where things start getting messy.

First, all of the chefs I've seen or heard talk about only using local products lived in places where the climate and geology allowed for a tremendously wide variety of crops for most of the year. As you might expect, the chefs living in the more challenging areas had the largest definition for "local." So what is local? Is it ten miles or two hundred? An hour's flight by plane, a five hour drive by truck, or a ten hour sail by boat? Are the distances the same for Wainwright, Alaska; Scottsdale, Arizona; Portland, Oregon; Kansas City, Kansas; Tecumseh, Michigan; Batesville, Mississippi; Ozona, Texas; and Key West, Florida?

Even if we set the limit at 350 miles the people in Wainwright will once again have a diet almost entirely consisting of meat (fish, whale, walrus and seal, birds, perhaps elk) with brief seasonal infusions of birds' eggs. I don't know what plants will grow there, if any, but it would have to be something very fast growing like lettuce. When the ice pack recedes in the summer
they could probably harvest some forms of seaweed and perhaps some shellfish. The only people getting rice in my list of towns would be in Batesville, and just possibly Key West. The people living in Portland, Tecumseh and Kansas City would have the most diverse diets, but they would have to rediscover the joys of canning and pickling to get them through the winter.

Here in Scottsdale we'd get some vegetation, especially in winter, but mostly we'd be eating beans, squash and corn along with a bit of mutton and some beef and poultry. The only fish we'd ever eat would be whatever still survives in the Colorado River, and game fish from the streams in the high country.

Our food industry has a myriad of problems, and like the fiction, movie and music industries' descent into artistic whoredom these problems have almost all been caused by the business having been taken over by accountants.

And they call it puppy love . . .

2008-12-08T23:17:00.000-07:00

Tommy, can you hear me . . .

2008-10-29T22:46:00.001-07:00

Today I was eavesdropping on a conversation in which one person was talking about their fears about the future. The other person listened gravely, and then said, "I hear you."

I assume the person was trying to be sympathetic and supportive, but I hate that phrase. When I am pouring my heart and soul out to you, for Crandell's sake don't go and say "you hear me." My cats hear me. Birds hear me. On some level insects hear me. I don't want someone to hear me. What I want is someone to understand me, or at least try to.

The problem with the statement, "I hear you," is that it effectively ends the conversation. There is really nothing to say in response. They heard your original statement and the implication is that anything further would be a waste of the listener's time. Perhaps it is indicative of how uncaring people have really become. They no longer feel the need to even pretend they care enough to try and understand your problems, but consider having heard your cry of anguish to be sufficient. "Yes, yes. I heard you say you're afraid of losing your job, now consider yourself loved. I usually don't even listen."

And while we're at it:

Don't say you want to share something with me, and then tell me about it. If you describe to me the wonderful flavors of the perfectly-normal-beast sandwich you had the other day you are not sharing it with me. Sharing means you give me a portion of the sandwich. Then we can share the experience. If you tell me about it the best I can do is empathize with you. So if you want to share with me the sunset over the Inland Sea you bloody well better have airline tickets and a hotel reservation, otherwise you're just going to describe it to me.

But then I'm old and stodgy enough to still think 'gay' means lively or bright.

Doctor, Doctor! Mr M D . . .

2008-10-24T00:57:00.002-07:00

Todai hospital also turned new mom away : National : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily Yomiuri)

I have always known that Japan was more hide bound about following the rules than the Chairwoman of a Methodist Church flower committee. Everyone in a school or corporation dresses alike, and they all change from winter uniforms to summer uniforms on the same day, and damn the weather. But this article about a woman dying because hospitals seemed to think that the number of beds their policy manual states they will have is more important than the number of people who are actually in critical need really takes the cake.

When a desperately ill person arrives at your emergency room, it's not something you can handle by using your best imitation of Eddie Izzard imitating James Mason while blocking the patients entrance. "Dreadfully sorry and all that, but you see we can only take nine patients, and I'm afraid we've reached our quota. Trauma surgeon's already complaining about having to work five and six hours at a stretch. But look, I'm not really supposed to tell you this but, just between you and me, Yamaguchi doesn't look good. If you can hang about for a few hours chances are an opening will appear. What do you have? Massive brain hemorrhage? That could be dicey. Yamaguchi's got a bum heart, and they never seem to move along when you need them to. Anyway, good luck.

What do these so called hospitals do when there is a train wreck or a building collapse? Hold a raffle? "Okay, there's fourteen of you in critical condition and twenty-three that are merely serious. Well, the staff took a vote and they decided they would take three criticals and four serious. So what we're going to do is give each of you one of these carnival tickets and put its mate in this bedpan here. Then we'll do a drawing. Remember! Just three critical and four serious. As for the rest of you, well, it is a lovely day."

Sorry about this, but I feel the need to shout. THESE ARE HOSPITALS DAMMIT!

They don't decide they'll do a spot of healing today, and then maybe take a long weekend. They take what comes to them. If they have nine beds for neonatal emergencies, and nature thoughtlessly presents them with a tenth—THEY TAKE IT. Bassinets are moved a bit, maybe a laundry cart is put in the hall. You make room. Then the staff figures out how to divide up the load. What you don't ever do. Never, ever do is condemn people to death just because it's inconvenient, doesn't follow the official guidelines, or you would have to go to all the bother of finding a space. You are in the business of saving lives. That's your priority. Only that.

So if the Second Assistant Floor Director comes around throwing a stink about how there seem to be ten beds here and the Guidelines clearly state the room was built for nine. Invite him to take it up with the third bridge from the North, and offer to write a press release clearly stating he was the person who decided the critically injured woman expecting her first child had to die because treating her would have clearly deviated from the Holy Official Guidelines, which seem to be more precious than any mere life

I like bread and butter . . .

2008-10-19T23:01:00.001-07:00

The sister-in-law, Kim, who lives up in Washington (and is a writer of some accomplishment—her last book is Ruby's Imagine) posted a tentative first chapter the other day for The Cookie Club. Reading it got me to thinking about my father, and working with him in the bakery.

My father was a baker, my two older brothers were bakers and I discovered that my great grandfather, my father's paternal grandfather, was also a baker before he enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War. When I was in high school I would work with Dad in the summer when his assistant didn't show up which seemed to be at least twice a week.

The phone would ring at about 10:15 and I knew I wouldn't be getting any sleep that night. Dad would pick me up, and when we got back to the shop it would be about 10:30 and we would have to hustle because we'd already lost a half hour. A few minutes before 7:00am the two ladies who ran the front would come in, and about a half hour later we'd go home. I would be exhausted.

Baking, especially then, was hard, physical work. Lifting a fifty pound batch of bread onto the table was, for me, almost impossible—the bowl alone weighed close to thirty pounds add that to the fifty pounds of dough and you were getting within thirty pounds of my own weight at the time. Then you had to chop it into one pound chunks (no more than half an ounce under or one over) with one hand while your other hand rolled the dough into a smooth ball. You got to do that four times each night. Two batches of white, one of whole wheat, and one of the days specialty bread. Monday was Rye. I will never forget that Wednesday was Cheesebread. It's smell while it was proofing was absolutely disgusting. Friday was cinnamon bread, and meant the weekend. For the life of me I can't remember what Tuesday and Thursday were.

When the breads were proofing you'd start on the breakfast rolls, and then pies, working on them as the rhythm of the bread's chopping and proofing and kneading allowed. Cakes and doughnuts were usually started last because they took the least time.

But I digress.

In Kim's story the young lady is trying to rediscover her mother's recipe for gingerbread, and cannot quite capture it. This reminded me of a mystery in my family. My brothers and I have been trying for about thirty years to recreate Dad's cinnamon knots. They were similar to what are now generally called sticky rolls, but were baked separately in muffin tins and had a much lighter, less bready taste.

The formula is in his book. A three inch thick 6"X 9" binder which is filled to overflowing with the formulas for dark rye and light rye, pecan rolls, and everything else you would need to know to run a bakery. I got a look at it a couple times, and most of the formulas start with "50lb bread flour" or something similar. I didn't think at the time to find the cinnamon knot formula; but my older brother, who owns the book now that Dad has passed on, has told me that that formula is missing two or three vital ingredients or steps. It took a while, but we are fairly sure that one of the ingredients he 'forgot' to include was potato buds, but the exact proportions are still unclear.

I've been talking about formulas because that was the way I was taught. For my dad cooking was, or could be, an art. It's highly intuitive and you can freely modify a recipe without compromising the quality. Cooks use recipes. Baking was a science. Changing ratios or adding new ingredients or changing the proportions and timing are all short cuts to useless product, or worse. Bakers use formulas.

But I'm still digressing. Sort of.

What started all this was cookies. I don't remember us ever making cookies. If the bakery sold them the day crew made them along with decorating the special order cakes. Our primary job was bread, pies and doughnuts. We also did sweet rolls, and early in the morning when I was cleaning up Dad would make some sheet cakes and cake layers, but he didn't really like doing cakes; and I never once saw him, at the shop or at home, make a cookie.

I've been trying to figure out why. I think it was partly because cookies were still considered a home/family product. Bread, even pies and sweet rolls take a lot of time and manual labor, but cookies are a relatively quick product and easily done in the home. There may have also been a little sexism involved, but I think it was more of a professional snobbery kind of thing. Dad considered himself an artisan, a craftsman. He made a product, and he made it well.

Cookies were edging into that territory governed by pastry chefs. Pastry chefs were temperamental artistes who made petit fours, and he often warned me not to turn my back on one.

I would like to apologize for my friend here . . .

2008-10-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

Aside from the sister-in-law who lives in Michigan, it seems that the majority of the people wandering onto this blog are algebra students. At least I think they are algebra students. The reason I am not a retired architect instead of a retired bookseller is that my math abilities are comparable to my ability to fly. That is, largely a matter for my dreams. They could be physics or chemistry students for all I know, but the phrasing of their searches leads me to believe they are struggling with a math problem; and since algebra is the branch of mathematics I understand least, I assume that's the kind of math.

Anyway, these poor souls are doing Google searches for "missing factor" or some similar phrase, and Google obligingly directs them here. I imagine it can be quite frustrating to be desperately searching for the answer to a homework problem or help preparing for a test and suddenly find yourself looking at the ramblings of some old geezer.

For this I sincerely apologize. I hope the exam goes well, and that you do find an answer to your missing factor problem

If it is any help, the missing factor in my life has always been 9.

Tan shoes and pink shoelaces . . .

2008-09-16T23:49:00.002-07:00

When a person reaches my age it is not too unusual for them to start talking about how great things were in some semi-mythical period in the past. For me it would be the 1950s. There are, however, very few things I want to resurrect. Don't get me wrong, I have lots of great memories of my youth—like the magic of slow-dancing with a girl to "Harlem Nocturne"—it's just that I also remember the not so pleasant things. We may be going to hell in a hand basket now, but we were headed that way then too. The basket is just a different style now.

Having said that, the one thing I do miss from the 50s is the uniforms hospital workers wore. When I go to the hospital now everyone is either wearing scrubs, those bizarrely patterned polyester tunic outfits, or a lab coat. You don't know if the person coming into your room is a nurse, doctor, therapist, HMO spy or from housekeeping. The only thing you have to identify them, besides their word, is their name tag and the females usually wear theirs backwards so you can't see them. I guess to keep the wrong people from learning their name.

It weren't that way in my day.

Everybody had a uniform, and you knew immediately what that person was allowed to do to you by how they were dressed. That can be very comforting to a young kid.

At the University of Michigan Hospitals they were:

Housekeeping: Males had a tan V-necked shirt and tan pants.
Housekeeping: Females wore a yellow dress.
Porters: (They took things, including patients, places.) A green V-necked shirt and tan pants. They were always male.
Orderlies: (Kind of a male nurse's or therapist's aide except they did more lifting.) Blue V-necked shirt and tan pants.
Nurse's Aide: A bright yellow dress.
Practical Nurse: (LPN) White uniform (dress), stockings and shoes. Her cap had a gray stripe.
Student Nurse: A blue and white pin-striped uniform (dress) with white stockings and shoes. I don't know what a male student would have worn. I never saw one until after the uniforms were abolished. Their cap told you what year student they were. Sophomores' caps were plain white; juniors' had a thin black stripe; and seniors' had a wide black stripe.
RNs: Male (Until the late 60s I only knew of one in the whole hospital. He mostly worked on the male orthopedic surgery ward.) White uniform shirt, pants, belt and shoes.
RNs: Females wore a white uniform with white cap, stockings and shoes. I know they were unhygienic as hell, but I loved the caps. Each nursing school had its own cap design and the only things they had in common were that they were white and had some kind of black ribbon. It was a bit like bird watching. (The pun was unintended, but I'll accept it.) I got pretty good at being able to identify most of the schools in the Michigan, Ohio, Indiana regions, and even knew a few Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania schools.
3rd Year Med Students: They wore dress clothes (dress shirt, tie, slacks for men; comparable dress or skirt and blouse for women) with a white sport coat styled jacket. They were also pretty adept at keeping a stethoscope, and anything else medical they could find, draped around their neck.
Interns: White shirt, white pants, white shoes along with the white sport coat. They could however pick out their own tie. One, a Dr Reinarz by name, opted for the Ben Casey Tunic, complete with top three buttons undone, but he had other issues too. Women, of course, wore a white skirt, but they could also wear a regular blouse under the jacket, and natural colored stockings.
1st Year Residents: (Not to be confused with the glorified interns they call 1st year residents these days.) Back to street dress clothes, but with a three quarter length lab coat, and less insistence on the casually draped stethoscope.
2nd and 3rd Year Residents: Basically the same, except less insistence on the casually draped stethoscope. The coat could also get a tad longer as long as it clearly wasn't knee length.
House Doctors: They wore the knee length lab coats.
Department Head: Their coat went to about mid-calf.

There you have it. A University of Michigan Hospitals survival guide for 1950 to 1965 or thereabouts. Just one word of warning. If you meet up with an elderly gentleman with a lab coat that just about trailed along the floor: politely step aside; speak only if spoken to (it can be a high honor—or the end of your career); bowing is no longer mandatory but some of the really old guys still feel it lends a touch of respect to the proceedings.

He sings out a song which is soft but it's clear . . .

2008-08-14T22:15:00.002-07:00

The other night (2 August 2008 to be exact) we went to the Dodge Theater for a James Taylor concert. I will be honest and admit that I was almost more excited about seeing Steve Gadd play live than I was about seeing Mr Taylor. Far back in the pre-dawn mists of my youth I was a fairly mediocre drummer, and forty-five years later I still fall into an almost Zen like state when listening to a master play the drums. Men like Joe Morello, Carl Palmer, Mitch Mitchel, Art Blakey were my gods. Later on I discovered Kodo and Babatunde Olatunji and the wonderfully joyful, mysterious, playful sexy Latin rhythyms of men like Kevin Ricard and Tony Shogren of Sambaguru. I may not have the talent to perform at those levels, but I know the craft well enough to be able to be truly awed by those who do. And Steve Gadd is, to me, perhaps the finest drummer working today, and I really wanted to see him work.

To be brutally honest, I did not expect much. We had been to the Crosby, Stills & Nash concert several weeks before, and while it had been an enjoyable evening it still had an almost mechanical/prerecorded feeling to it. It felt like they were just going through the motions of another night of letting a hall full of baby-boomers relive their youth. I don't remember them doing any really new material, and the arrangements were almost exactly what you would hear on KOOL FM. Perhaps the best way I can describe it is: When you are driving along the twisty roads in the Black Hills near Mt Rushmore there are often views of the sculpture that are marvelous and beg to be photographed. The problem is that when you actually look at the mountain the best you can say for it is that it looks just like its postcard. That was the best you could say about Crosby, Stills & Nash—They sounded just like their records.

Luckily, I was completely wrong about Mr Taylor.

As we made our way to our seats there was some subtle hints that this might not be the tired rehashing of the past I was half expecting. Each performers place had a personalized sign with their name on it. These were not nameless minions picked up in front of the musical equivalent of Home Depot for the night. These people were a real part of the show. The stage had some plexiglass facings separating the multiple levels and curtains that caused a clear and distinct echo of concerts and music halls that may or may not have actually occurred somewhere in your memory. They were lighted with, and became, colors so pure they could have been the Platonic Ideals, which seemed, as the evening progressed, to both ground the songs in the very here and now, and also give them a mystical, elemental feel.

The songs were a blend of covers, some new/some old, and a few of his classic hits. Unlike CS&N most of Mr Taylor's classics had new arrangements. Songs, like people, can evolve and mature and a true artist will, in my opinion, evolve and mature with them. They were also performed with energy and joy. You could see Mr Taylor loved what he was doing and would do it for free if necessary. As a result you were drawn into the music with him. He also spent the entire break between sets sitting on the edge of the stage talking to members of the audience and signing autographs instead of disappearing to a dressing room.

One of the criticisms I often see about Mr Taylor is that he is no longer writing the soul baring songs he did in the early 70s, and seems to be content to sing the works of other writers. My first reaction is, so bloody what? He takes those songs and imbues them with his personal view of the universe—reflecting his own history of love, pain, joy, sorrow, and awe. No on considers Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett a sell out because they sang 'covers'. They were considered geniuses because they gave those songs their own stamp, and Mr Taylor does the same. I found, for example, his rendition of "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" from "Oklahoma" amazing—almost haunting—and up until then I have always found that song almost sickeningly saccharine.

As for Mr Gadd. He too was amazing. His solos and fills for "Country Road" elevated the ballad almost to the status of an anthem with their power. And he did good on all the other songs too. I have seen Steve Gadd, Segovia, and the Modern Jazz Quartet play live. What more could I ask for?

And CS&N, you should either rediscover the joy of music or retire. I already have your records.

踊りうた我世の事ぞうたわるゝ
Bon-dance song/It speaks/Of things of our world.

How sweet thou art . . .

2008-08-07T23:08:00.002-07:00

Over at the Neglected Books Page there is a very good article about The Right to Heresy by Stephan Zweig. From what I see in the article, life under Protestant zealots was very similar to life in our more reactionary Islamic countries today, or Catholic countries during the Inquisition, or even the United States if guys like Jerry Falwell had their way. It just goes to show that, as my father often warned, all ideologies, political or religious, taken to their extreme are alike. I am definitely going to have to track down a copy.

You know it's gonna be . . .

2008-08-03T23:02:00.001-07:00

In today's Arizona Republic's Viewpoint section there was an interesting article by Richard Nilsen titled Reaction to world is fulcrum of politics. His analysis of the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals, while perhaps over simplified, is very astute, but I think it missed one vital aspect. While I agree that the actions and reactions of conservatives and liberals are governed to a greater or lesser extent by their fear or acceptance of change, I think an even more fundamental catalyst is the differing concepts of family.

I would argue that most people have an instinctual drive to protect and provide for themselves, and then their family. The concepts of tribe or nation are, to me, just extensions of family. The other members of the tribe or nation are third or fourth cousins kind of thing. Whether or not a person's concept of family is derived through nurture or nature is for other, much brighter people to decide, but I would not be surprised if it was a combination of the two.

Anyway, it has been my experience that conservatives have very restrictive concepts of family. Things like universal health care and education are an anathema to them because they are busy providing for their family, and don't have time to worry about outsiders. The more conservative the person is the smaller, more strictly defined their family, and by extension tribe. To me this is why Hitler was unable to form deep, lasting relationships. As perhaps the most conservative person to ever live his family was limited to him, and his tribe to a mythical race of supermen he would create. He would be a god, and gods are always conservative. It is interesting to note that Hitler was trying to recreate. He was not trying to change but to strip away the thousands of years of corruptive changes that had debased the perfect beings of the past.

Conversely, liberals seem to have a rather more inclusive concept of family, which is why they are usually more willing to devote personal or national assets to providing things like health care, or less restricted entry into the country. The liberal must protect and provide for his brothers, his family; and he has a very large family.

You shake your head, and said it's a shame . . .

2008-07-31T00:03:00.001-07:00

Looking back over my posts I am struck by the fact that they are sporadic at best. Not that the teeming world of blog readers is waiting breathlessly for my next installment, but when I started this thing I had hoped to post something at least several times a week. The problem is that as soon as I sit down in the desk chair and face the computer my mind goes completely blank. If you were to hook me up to an EEG you would probably decide it was time to donate the organs.

I had the same problem in the Seventies when I was working in Ann Arbor and living in Tecumseh. It was a forty-five mile drive along two lane country roads and, especially at night, incredible poems or stories would unfold in my head like I was reading from a page. I would repeat them over and over to myself to try to fix them in my memory so I could write them down later. As I slowly drove down the last couple blocks to my house I would go over the poem or story one last time, and smile with the joy that I had it. It was good.

Then after greeting the dogs, going to the bathroom, and giving my wife a kiss I would go sit down at the typewriter, put in a clean sheet of paper, and stare at it. My fingers would rest lightly on the keyboard while my mind slowly groped around among words that could only recreate my masterpiece by defining exactly what it wasn't. Eventually I would hesitantly type out "Something about bricks . . . and stuff." Which would take approximately half an hour.

During the Eighties and Nineties my writing was pretty much confined to corporate blather, which is actually much easier to do if you don't think about it, and my ongoing therapy book The Man Who Hated Chocolate Chip Cookies. (I have only posted six installments here, but some of the others will be along when they have had some of their more psychotic sections tidied up a bit; and the targets of a couple of the more libelous sections have found a suitable disguise.) Occasionally something would occur to me, and I would think it would make a good story; but the corporate life never seemed to leave enough energy or will power or desire to follow up on them.

Then I quit my job. At first I had no clear plan, but I knew that whatever I ended up doing it would involve writing. I had not struggled for years working my way up through The New Yorker's several layers of form rejection slips just to give up when I had finally started getting handwritten rejection slips from actual people—sometimes with guarded praise. Well, actually I did. It had been over twenty years since I had submitted a story, but now I had the time and I was no longer trying to figure out if management ever actually listened to itself. I would start again.

A lot had changed since the late Seventies and early Eighties when I was sending stories off to The New Yorker or Paris Review. Now there was these blog things. Instead of waiting three, four or five weeks to find out that a story didn't fit current editorial needs, I could put my rambling thoughts out in cyberspace and find out immediately that no one was interested.

And then it started again. These amazing ideas would float across my mind, or an image or line would grow like a crystal, but never when I could record them. They would come to me during my shower, or when I was cooking a kind-of complicated dinner for friends, or drving in traffic that's been made just a shade more interesting by having rival gangs weaving in and out and obviously flashing signs and complicated finger codes to each other that I am pretty sure did not translate to, "Yo. Do you have any Grey Poupon?"

Needless to say some of these lost works are beyond great. They would have ended war. They would put an end to the heartbreak of psoriasis. One or two might have even been bought by an editor. Others were too beautiful to look at straight on. Men would weep. Women would offer themselves to me just to experience a small shadow of the power. There would be reports of a teenager in Nebraska reading one of my posts and then having the courage to chat up the entire field hockey team of St Mary's Church of Redemption in the Fen. He would be quoted as saying that, "Yeah, for the most part they were really nice, and it hardly bothered them that I was a boy. But there were a couple who like really seemed to like me, and wanted me to come help them practice tackles."

Those are the kinds of things that come to me when there is no possibility of being able to write it down. I have tried to train my mind to retain these fleeting pictures, but as soon as I sit down in this chair and turn to face the keyboard they vanish in a cloud of misleading phrases from pieces I did write and have come to regret.

I have to get a new chair.

小鳥この頃音もさせずに來て居りぬ
Recently/Small birds/Come noiselessly.

He likes toast and jam . . .

2008-07-15T21:53:00.001-07:00

Each semester during the first Japanese language class it is customary for each student to introduce themselves, and briefly tell why he or she is studying Japanese. Sometimes it is because a spouse or partner is Japanese. (As one man put it, "I want to know what my mother-in-law (義理のお母さん—giri no okaasan) is saying about me.") Sometimes it is because they are (二世—nisei) second or (三世—sansei) third generation Japanese-American, and they want to connect to that part of their heritage. And very often, especially with the younger students, it is because they are おたく (otaku—obsessive fans, usually of anime or manga). Whatever the primary reason is they very often finish the 自己紹介 (jikoshoukai—self-introduction) with, "and I love everything about Japan—especially sushi."

It always comes as a shock to them when I explain that my major goal is to be able to read some of the great works of Japanese literature. Works that often have very little, if any, swordplay; and pretty much never feature main characters with neon colored hair, or overly cute, unidentifiable creatures. Inevitably, someone will ask, 「日本料理が好きですか。」(Nihon ryouri ga suki desu ka—do you like Japanese cooking?) There is always a long, awkward silence after I answer.

How can you not love everything about Japan?

My wife and I have been together for twenty-eight years. She is an amazing person, and the perfect partner for me. I truly cannot imagine life without her. But, he said looking over his shoulder, she has one or two habits that are just short of endearing. By the same token, I have frequently been told quite explicitly that I have a few (dozen) traits that occasionally, in her opinion, are less than pleasing. This, however, does not mean that we are going to hire lawyers tomorrow to help decide which one of us takes their sorry butt elsewhere. What it does mean is that we have learned that what we love is the whole person, which just may include a tendency to keep the thermostat set ten degrees too high. We will also be there when the other person needs a hand overcoming a personal demon, or getting through one of the less than fun things Fate throws at you.

There are many things about Japan I like. The Japanese have a long, but still vibrant literary tradition. They still understand the power and beauty of the short story. Their aesthetic sense is, in my opinion, perhaps the most finely tuned of any culture. Their dedication to excellence and constant striving for perfection at all levels is amazing. I even like the formality and the differing layers of language that lets everyone know just where they fit into the scheme of things.

There is, however, also a rigidity of thought that won't allow for alternative methods of accomplishing something. Kanji, for example, must always be written in a certain stroke order, and the strokes must always be drawn in a specified direction. I have a friend who, when she saw me write a character, would claim not to be able to read it because, being left-handed, I would sometimes make horizontal strokes from right to left instead of the required left to right.

As for 和食 (washoku—Japanese cuisine), you can have mine. Please. I'll pay you.

くらきよりくらきに入るや猫の恋
Out of the dark/Into the dark/Cat's love

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign . . .

2008-06-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

Sometimes Arizona is a very strange place.

Sink placement is always an adventure.

When I think of buying a new Lexus, I think giant sumo.

テｨクンシー

2008-06-23T22:50:00.001-07:00

私はアイダホーのヘイリーに生まれたのに、ミシガンのテｨクンシーが出身だと思います。テｨクンシーはとても小さい田舎町一時間ぐらい車でテトロイトの西にあります。その町はほんの四千人が住んでいました。協会が五つあて、バーが四つあって、信号が三つあって、レストランが二つありました。しかし、ドライブインがありませんでした。高校生の時は、映画の後でハンバーガーを食べるために、となりの町のブッミーズ・ドライブインに行けなければなりません。

テｨクンシーの南部にはザ・ピットという名の大きい池がありました。私は二年間の夏にそこで救助員していました。北部の町は川でした。町の近くにはたくさん湖と川でした。夏にカヌーをしたり、泳いだり、船で行ったりしました。そして、冬に自殺の丘にそりをしたりしました。

しかし、私の一番好きな季節は秋でした。大気はきれいで寒くてからっとしました。木の葉は赤と黄色とオレンジ色になりまた。男の子の時は、ハロウイーンに未亡人とほかのおばあさんはカップケーキやポップコーンバルズやブラウニーズを作りました。弟はポップコーンバーズが好きではありませんでした。そして、弟に私のハーシーバーズをあげて、弟からポップコーンバルズをくれました。

テｨクンシーは小さかったですが、育つためにすばらしい所でした。メーベリーよりよかったですね。

ありがとうございました。

To me he was . . .

2008-05-18T20:40:00.002-07:00

I was talking to my mother on the phone tonight. After the usual questions about her current health and happiness she said:

I was thinking just the other day about all the things your father and I did in the 57 years we were together.

"You guys did have a busy life together." My father passed away in 2002 just three weeks before their 58th anniversary.

I was always so proud of him. No matter what, he made sure we paid our bills. Even the hospital bills for you and your brother.

The health insurance my dad got through his job was almost totally useless, and my parents paid almost all of our hospital bills themselves. "I know he worked hard, but what I remember most is that we always seemed to have fun."

He worked like a dog. But he never complained.

"No, he never did. And like I said, we always had fun."

Don't take money to have fun.

She was quiet for a couple seconds while we both remembered.

God, I miss him.

"Me too, Mom."

In a world that often treated my brother and me as something less than real men because we had hemophilia (and often didn't mind telling us quite bluntly), he never had anything but love and pride for us. When other fathers were abandoning their family or ignoring a son's existence because he was 'defective', my father was taking on another job so he could be sure we had the care we needed. When the world was telling my brother and me that we would never be anything but cripples and a drain on society, our father was teaching us how to work a short order grill, do rough carpentry, and run a bakery so we would always be able to make our own way.

In my last post I talked about how the gene for hemophilia can stay hidden for several generations. In our family it is just the opposite. My grandfather was a hemophiliac, two cousins, my brother and I, and now my grandson. I know my life has been infinitely easier than my grandfather's, and I am confident that my grandson's will be infinitely easier than mine. I just hope that he never has to hear some girl's father tell him not to come around anymore because Janice/Rosa/Sharon can't be wasting her time on a cripple; but if he does I hope he has someone like I did who will remind him that "your bleeds can be stopped, and you'll get better, but there isn't any cure for being a stupid jackass."

父ありてあけぼの見たし青田原

With my father/I would watch the dawn/Over the green fields.

Spammity spam. . .

2008-05-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was looking through the 11 August 1945 issue of The New Yorker. I was reading that particular issue to see if they had made any comments relating to the bombing of Hiroshima. They did not, but in the 'Talk of the Town' section they did have an article about Jay Hormel. In it there was the following passage:

In his office at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, he keeps what he calls his Scurrilous File, in which he dumps the letters of abuse that are sent to him by soldiers everywhere in the world. "If they think Spam is terrible," Mr Hormel told us, "they ought to have eaten the bully beef we had in the last war. Maybe that's where the verb 'to beef' came from. Maybe the verb 'to spam' will come out of this war. Nothing would surprise me any more." He blinked his eyes. "The language people use!"

If he only knew.

二つ三つ星みいだすや啼く蛙

I can see/Two or three stars/Frogs are croaking.

サンタいません

2008-04-24T19:01:00.000-07:00

私の紙と髭は白いで、あなかは太っていますから、小さい子供で「サンタ」
と言います。私がサンタいません！名前はガイ•ボスです。ヘーリー•アイダホ
で住まれましたけれども、出身はミシガンだと思います。とても小さな町の
　テｨークムセで成長しました。

大学の時にはたくさんアルバイトを含めて、共助員やトーリシト•ガイドや
フォーク•ミュージックの喫茶店のMCでした。大学の後ではペンキ屋や
大学の職員や作家でした。それから、教科書の経営者が二十三年間ありました。
今退職したです。

私の家はスコッツデルのオールド•タウンの近くにです。私たちの猫はそこに
住んでもいいです。何人かはそこか古くて小さいだと思います。しかし、私たち
はとても気持ちいがいいと思います。

私はたくさん趣味あります。文学を読んで、音楽を聞くが一番好きな二つです。
マルック•チワエン、ドゴラス•アダムザ、村上春樹などの作家は読みたい。音楽
はジャズとクラシックが特にすきです。私は本当にギターとドラムをするが
楽しんでいますから、あまり上手がありません。

どうぞよろしく。

And so we elect them again and again . . .

2008-04-13T14:29:00.001-07:00

Several months ago the Democratic Party of Arizona sent me an email asking what I would like to see in the Democratic Platform for this election.

My short answer was: A backbone.

I would like to see our nation's leader have the strength of character to stand up to the Religious Right and tell them it is none of their business who or what someone believes in, if at all. Furthermore, they are free to practice their religion only so long as it does not conflict with the freedom and welfare of others. Just as freedom of speech does not include the freedom to yell "fire" in a crowded building, freedom of religion does not include the freedom to exploit or abuse others, or to force others to follow the dictates of their beliefs.

I would like to see them take the firm stance that marriage is a civil contract. It is a public declaration that two people have formed a partnership to deal with the day to day issues of survival, give assistance to each other during times of hardship, and share the responsibilities of raising any children that may result. As such it doesn't matter if the partners are a man and a woman, two men, two women or any combination of the above. As long as both, or all, partners have entered the agreement freely and knowingly without being coerced or forced to do so then they are married. If you wish to bring religion into it that is your and your partner's decision, and those complications are of your own devising and have nothing to do with me.

I would like to see the Democrats finally have the courage to declare that in a nation as rich as the United States there is no justifiable reason every man, woman and child is not provided with the best medical treatment in existence. For a fraction of what we have spent getting our youth killed in Iraq we could have given every citizen, or alien, state of the art medical aide. (In the long run it would have even saved the nation billions of dollars by preventing hundreds of thousands of conditions from becoming even worse, and therefore more costly, or perhaps even occurring at all.)

I would like to see the Democrats finally state publicly and without apology that all of the hysteria over illegal aliens is nothing more than disgustingly shameful bigotry and racism. Unless you are 100% Native American or First Nation you or your family probably got here without a visa. Whenever the immigration authorities, or our publicity addicted sheriff, make a sweep rounding up the 'illegals' they are caught working in restaurants, construction sites or doing some other bottom rung job no 'citizen' would take. They are working. The drug dealers and thieves responsible for our high crime rate are our own, home grown product. The woman with six children from six different fathers draining our welfare system is a citizen and not one of those filthy wetbacks.

There's more. So much more.

秋風や石積んだ馬の動かざる

Autumn wind/A horse loaded with stones/Doesn't move

I Don't Want Your Botheration . . .

2008-04-12T10:31:00.001-07:00

My horoscope this morning said I wasn't grouchy, I was just in a bad mood. The difference between 'grouchy' and 'bad mood' is too much of an exercise in Talmudic hairsplitting for me at the moment, so let's just agree that this probably isn't the day to be pointing out that my socks don't match. If I was to be totally honest this irritability is probably a reaction to staring into the darkness last night wondering if I would ever do anything even slightly above mediocre before I died; but this is an election year and total honesty has been exiled until it has learned to behave itself. Therefore, I will do what every good American would do in my situation, and place the blame squarely on 'Them.'

'Them's antecedent is, of course, purely situational; but, as always, includes everyone who is not me or someone I care about.

第一 Them:

Yesterday I was returning home on the 101. Since I was only doing 70 in a 55 MPH zone I was in the far right lane. When I passed the sign that warned the lane was ending at the next exit I put my turn signal on indicating I wanted to move one lane to the left. That, of course, caused the guy who was in that lane about thirty feet behind me to move up and block me. He had cruised along for five miles always staying just a bit behind me. Now he had to move up next to me. I couldn't speed up because of the traffic in front of me, so I slowed down a bit. He slowed down. I slowed down even more causing the cars behind me to use their brakes. Finally I was able to move over behind him.

THEN he puts his right turn signal on and moves into the lane I had been in to take the exit.

Naturally he was driving a pickup truck.

第に Them:

You see them in airports, bus stops, college campuses, Department of Motor Vehicles, 4th of July fireworks displays—anywhere large numbers of people have to wait for extended periods with limited seating. Women sitting in the middle of a large bench, or row of seats, with their purse on one side and their coat or some other parcel on the other so that no one else can sit down.

第三 Them:

After having stripped down to my boxers and a t-shirt (small children and young women have nightmares for days after I go through airport security), and being groped by some overweight security guard (I have enough metal in me that my funeral will be more of a smelting than a cremation), I finally get on the plane looking for seat 16F when some guy stands in the aisle around row 6 trying to stuff a bag into the overhead compartment. The bloody bag is big enough it would rent for ¥5,000 a night in Tokyo, but as the Marketing Representative for the South Central Region (not including Phoenix or El Paso) of Amalgamated Paper Clips & Shoe Horns, his time is much too valuable to wait at baggage claim. After ten minutes and defying one or two of the laws of physics (not to mention courtesy) he manages to get most of the bag into the compartment, and then goes back to his seat in row 23.

第四 Them:

I'm in my Honda Accord leaving a parking lot, and pull up to the stop sign at the street in the right hand lane with my right turn signal on wanting to go south. Traffic is moderately heavy. Ten seconds later a Suburban pulls up in the left hand lane wanting to turn left and go north. The person in the Suburban can easily see over my Accord, but they still pull far enough forward to completely block my view of the south bound lanes. I try moving forward just a bit. They move forward. The northbound traffic is much heavier than southbound, and I miss two or three opportunities to go on my way because I can't see the gaps in the approaching traffic.

暗く暑く大群衆と花火待つ

Dark and hot/A great multitude/Waiting for fireworks.

Green Light . . .

2008-04-07T00:06:00.001-07:00

You’ve seen me. You won’t remember it, but if you ever visited the University you saw me as I made my way across the campus—or perhaps you caught a glimpse of me sitting in the safety of my office.

Maybe you were here to visit a son or daughter or sweetheart and, pointing me out to your companion, you asked him or her, “What does that fellow do?”

Perhaps they told you, in a manner suggesting they had a profound understanding of the inner workings of the University, that I was probably a professor of this or that subject; or, in a way that implied they had deeper more important truths to worry about, waved their hand in dismissal saying, “Him? Who knows? Probably nothing.”

It’s an attitude we understand.

There are, of course, those of us with easily recognized functions like the cooks and janitors, but for the majority of us it is not quite so straightforward. We are like the blood cells in the veins of some huge beast. We circulate the bits and pieces that keep the monster going without it becoming aware of how—or why—we do it. Or to be more precise, we are like the books and buildings you saw here and there around the campus. No longer used or even useful, but hoarded and preserved because we were, like embryonic gill slits, once necessary.

Like most of the staff my favorite time of year was Summer Term. If you came here then you may have noticed the town had a faraway feel to it; a calm, daydreaming quality as it relaxed after the bursting exhilaration of Spring Term’s graduations. When the weather was clear I would walk to work and enjoy the quiet solitude of the morning. Occasionally I would pass one or two students as they wandered blinking and yawning to class or library or coffee. It was hard for me to believe that in Fall and Winter Terms they would be part of the frantic herds you’d see racing about in a headlong, almost suicidal frenzy.

When I left the Central Campus and started up the long, few blocks leading to the Medical School traffic would pick up a little. On the right side of the street a cemetery glided by in shades of green and shadow, and on the left the dorms marched passed, empty for the summer and lifeless. Meanwhile, at the end of the street, the Main Hospital dominated everything and grew as I approached it until, like a giant termite hill, it towered over the workers flowing in and out of its base. And across the street the Old Observatory sat on its hill brooding and blind.

It was hard for me to walk quickly and it wasn’t too unusual for the traffic light to turn against me as I crossed the street. When this happened there was always some youngster who would honk or shout or both. Perhaps it’s just their youth that makes them so impatient, but eventually they learn. They would only be rushing to another stop light waiting to turn green.

My office was in the Medical Library which, like many of the smaller departments, seems to have grown like a fungus on and into the side of one of the major research buildings that radiate from the Main Hospital. Most of my days were spent making phone calls, running an occasional errand, and sitting in the stacks reading. That was not my job description—I’m not really sure I had one. It’s what I did.

When I first transferred to the Medical Library I dutifully filled out forms listing the issues of various journals the library had not received. One copy of the form was for our files, two copies were sent to my counterpart in the Graduate Library to be, in theory, acted upon, and the remaining copies—I think there were two—were thrown away. None of the issues I reported missing were ever replaced, and after a few years I started using the time for other, more rewarding pursuits.

No one seemed to notice.

One or two mornings each month I would gather up some of the completed volumes of a few journals and send them over to the bindery to be bound. When they came back they would be put in their asigned place in the stacks. Most likely they would sit there until, decades later, some bored staff member might happen to pick them up and flip through the pages.

Anyway, after a few years my routine had settled down to a comfortable, unhurried pattern. After two or three cups of coffee and perhaps throwing out some of the older papers on my desk, I would go back into the stacks and read. The Medical Library’s four levels of stacks extended into the adjoining research building and, regardless of which level you were on, had the subterranean feel you would expect to find in some long forgotten crypt. The air was cool and musty, and the dim light was almost seductive; and I would spend the hours happily following an argument concerning some minor, unremembered crisis across the years.

Sometimes as I sat turning the brittle pages of some old journal, I would feel I had been removed from the current world and isolated in another, more private universe. This feeling would grow as I sat there in the almost total silence, and, for reasons I could never explain, only be enhanced by the distant, muffled sound of a footstep or the disembodied voice of the public address system when it announced the Green Light was on.

Once in a while I would get bored with the passed excitement of those forgotten debates and run an errand. Every month or so one department or another would decide it was time to clean its offices, and, rather than disposing of its detritus completely, would donate several years worth of some journal to the library, and I had made it my job to go and get them. Occasionally one or two issues would fill in one of our incomplete volumes; but more often than not we had more than enough of that particular journal and it was simply stacked in the Duplicate Room. There it would set year after year in forgotten piles just off the lowest level of the stacks; its usefulness taken over by the younger issues upstairs, and yet, like the old observatory, not allowed to crumble completely away.

For the first several years I worked at the Medical Library I enjoyed going after these donations. By taking various tunnels, passageways, and halls you could walk to any room in over a dozen buildings without once stepping outside. In a way it was like a small, but very active city and I looked forward to the chance to do some exploring. Learning my around had taken some time, but had really not been all that difficult because each building had its own look and feel; and I soon learned to recognize one by its cold, clean undamaged lines, others by their beat up walls and stains, and still others by the way they smelled as surely as you would recognize the different streets of your hometown.

In the center of everything, and sometimes almost blending into the other buildings, sat the Main Hospital. It was a confusing maze of corridors, rooms, and wards jammed with a flowing, swirling stream of workers, patients, and visitors. Everywhere you looked you saw the signs of newly started or not quite finished repairs and remodeling projects. They tell me that right up to its destruction they were repainting some of the wards.

I cannot speak to that. For me, and some others, it is still the center of a thriving city.

Whatever its current state, its most distinctive feature was the lights.

In the ceiling of each intersection of the crowded, tunnel-like hallways was a row of colored lights blinking on and off in various combinations. Each color or group of colors was the code for a particular department, service, or individual and the Hospital used them as a paging device. On my way to and from the other buildings I would stop and watch the lights and try to figure out what the different combinations meant; but I was never able to break the code—except, of course, for the Green Light. To the Hospital the Green Light was the signal that an autopsy was being performed. I imagine that to the deceased’s family it meant the loss of a loved one, but to us in the Medical Library it was simply a procedure. An event to be announced so students could fulfill certain course requirements.

I used to enjoy watching the lights.

One morning during a recent Summer Term I let myself in through a little known door connecting the first level of stacks with a service corridor in the basement of an adjoining building. In any large, overly complex structure you will find these unseen little remnants of previous lifestyles or fashion. Often they have been added, used for a time, and then, as new memories and needs come to be, they vanish into the archives of passed generations. This door was, I think, originally installed as a fire exit, but I had gotten into the habit of using it to come and go unnoticed.

I made my way up to the third floor and found the offices were deserted. I wondered if I could have possibly misread my bedside clock and left for work an hour or two early. For some reason it didn’t occur to me to check a clock in one of the offices, and, shaking my head, I went to make the coffee. It had, over the years, somehow become one of my duties to take care of the large coffee pot that sat in an alcove next to my office. In fact, if I were ill or on vacation the rest of the staff would often forget to make it, and would spend half the morning wondering why it had not been done.

To my surprise the pot was already hissing and grumbling. Several mugs were missing or setting on the counter with the remains of that day’s first or second cup in them, and, even more disturbing, there was, up in the cabinet, a new container of coffee of a brand I would never buy. It was, I remembered, one that the new reference librarian had asked if we could try, and thinking they must have come in early to finish an important project, I called out, “Hello . . HELLO! Where are you?”

No one answered.

The lilac scent of the senior librarian’s perfume drifted through the alcove, but when I turned to greet her I only saw her teacup setting on a file cabinet. The pot’s rumbling was echoing strangely in the empty room and for a moment I considered turning it off. But the noise, however strange, seemed preferable to the tomb-like quiet it was interrupting and I left it alone.

In the Reading Room books and papers were scattered about the tables, and Dr. D.’s briefcase sat next to his usual chair. Walking over to his table I could see that the latest issue of JAMA was lying open on his reading stand. He often left his things overnight and there wasn’t a shelver alive foolish enough to disturb the books and journals on his table, but I didn’t understand why the night crew hadn’t picked up the rest of the room. I imagined it was a sign the new shelving supervisor had lost control of his department.

It had started raining since I had arrived and I watched the storm for a while through the large windows that lined three sides of the Reading Room. It was odd because I seemed to remember the morning as being bright and sunny. The water came down with an unhurried steadiness that seemed to imply it could go on forever if it were necessary. The buildings across the street were hidden by the storm, and the one or two cars that passed were nothing more than indistinct shapes gliding through the gray.

As I stood there watching the rain I kept feeling as if someone was walking up behind me. This feeling and the storm outside reminded of me of my grandfather’s death. It had rained all through the old man’s funeral and after the ceremony I had gone out to his workshop behind the garage. The saws and drills stood in their assigned positions and sawdust covered the floor where it had fallen several weeks before. As I walked around the room looking at the piles of wood and into drawers filled with carefully sorted screws and nails I got the feeling that if only I could turn around quickly enough I would see him hunched over his workbench softly whistling to himself as he worked.

I was remembering a soapbox racer he once helped me build when I noticed the Green Light was on. For a second or two its color reminded me I had wanted to paint the racer green, but he had overruled the idea by saying it wasn’t a proper color for a young man’s car. Then I realized there had been no announcement. No one had called to warn us. They always called first to give us time to make the announcement, that way even the students in the stacks would know when it came on. I went back to my office wondering why they hadn’t called.

As I approached my desk the phone did in fact begin to ring, but when I tried to answer it all I could hear was the faint voices you sometimes have to talk over when you get a bad connection. Sitting down I had the distinct feeling something was wrong, but the cause eluded me. Then I realized that my desk was clean. All of the papers and folders that usually cluttered its surface and made it look as if I was overwhelmed with work were gone. Even the coffee mug I had inherited from my predecessor was missing. The only thing on it was a slip of paper with a room number on it, and putting in my pocket I tried to remember which department was located there.

The total solitude made it feel as if it were still quite early, but I was sure that it must have been late enough for someone to be stirring. I looked up at the large clock that was mounted high on the wall to my left. Something was in my eye, however, and I couldn’t make the clock face come into focus. By squinting I was able to guess that the minute hand was pointing at the eight, but I still had no idea what the hour was. I rubbed my eyes and wiped the tears the rubbing had caused away. I looked up at the clock again and once again was unable to see it clearly.

I went to the reference librarians’ office and tried to read their clock. Then the one over the Circulation Desk. Then the one in the shelvers’ room. Then the one in the Reading Room.

All of them were blurs.

Finally I went in the Director’s office. Mounting a wall clock would have spoiled the oak paneling of his walls, and he had an ornate clock on the credenza behind his desk. Nothing. Every time I tried to look at it my eyes teared and the face became a meaningless blur. I picked it up and held it up in front of my face and strained to see the Roman numerals I knew were there.

I could not see the time.

Defeated I put the clock down and tried to make sense of what was happening. Nothing made sense and I did what I always did when my life had ceased to make sense. I went down into the stacks to read. The faintly musty air and deeply shadowed alcoves would, I hoped, somehow be more comforting than the brightly lighted offices and reading room. To my surprise, however, a feeling of restless urgency seemed to grow in me as I walked along the silent, dusty shelves, and I decided it was perhaps time for me to get out of the library for a while.

Out of habit I took one of the wooden book carts I used to pick up donations and let myself out through the door I had come in earlier. I always took a cart when I went wandering through the hospital complex. A middle aged man walking aimlessly through the halls for no reason would eventually attract notice, but a middle aged man pushing a cart through the halls was obviously part of the staff and became invisible. I didn’t bother to leave a note for the librarians because, if they even noticed I was gone, they would soon figure out where I had gone.

The building between the library and the Main Hospital always stinks. After you have been through it a time or two you can tell which floor you are on by the way it smells. As I walked along the basement hallway I could almost feel the cloying mixture of rat dung and cedar chips pressing against me, and I told myself to be thankful it wasn’t one of the other floors. Many of the doors to the small, anonymous labs I passed were open, but I didn’t see any of the young, almost interchangable research assistants that could sometimes be found working in them. It wasn’t too unusual, however, for that part of the building to be deserted, and I hardly noticed it as I hurried along toward fresher air.

In the short connecting passageway between buildings I slowed down again and took two or three deep breaths to rid my lungs of the smell of rats. As I passed the Radiation Lab I was surprised to see that it was empty. There was always four or five cancer patients sitting in the small lobby reading magazines or talking quietly to a loved one as they waited for their treatments. The lights were on and the door was propped open to let in a breeze, but the room was empty.

Just as I was about to leave the lab behind me I thought I saw a person out of the corner of my eye. The image had, however, seemed much clearer that it should have so close to the limits of my field of vision, and I backed up a step or two to take a closer look. The waiting room was still empty. But as I continued toward the hospital I kept remembering the shadowy form, like a reflection on a pane of glass, of an old woman sitting patiently.

Entering the Main Hospital I had to weave my cart through the stacks of bottles and cartons that are always cluttering up that section of the hall. As I approached the Pharmacy I decided to stop and see and old friend. We had worked together at the beginning of our careers, and had kept in touch as time and transfers had taken us through various departments. It had become a standing joke between us that our funerals would turn out to be just another transfer.

I parked my cart next to the door and went in. He could usually be found at his desk near the back, and it wasn’t until I got to the counter that I saw that the room was empty. After waiting a few minutes for someone to come out of the back I called his name once or twice.

No one answered.

Just as I was turning to leave the silence was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. It stopped in the middle of the third ring, but I could not see whoever had answered it.

While I had been in the Pharmacy someone had moved some cartons against my cart, and I had to clear a path before I could get it out. I cursed, and looked around but whoever had done was gone. Pulling my cart free I headed toward the elevators with my footsteps echoing in the lifeless quiet of the Hospital’s basement. I turned the corner into the elevator alcove just as the green arrow over the center elevator came on, and I congratulated myself for good timing. I got on and pushed the button for the main floor.

The main level of the hospital was always bustling with an almost frantic energy, and as the elevator slowed to a stop I got ready to quickly push my way out before the crowd could surge in and block my exit.

I left the car and looked both ways.

No one.

Once, a few months before this, I had to bring a friend to the Emergency Room in the middle of the night. Even at four o’clock in the morning there had been at least two dozen people sitting in the lobby lost in thought or reading a magazine or sleeping as the janitors joked loudly among themselves as they emptied waste baskets and mopped the floor. But now, in the middle of the day, there was no one.

I parked my cart against the wall, and went into the cafeteria. Inside I got the same feeling I had had in the reading room earlier that morning. The feeling of being in the middle of a crowd, but for some reason always looking in the one direction no one was standing. The several serving lines, and the hundreds of tables were all deserted. Scattered here and there on the tables were the remains of partially eaten meals, and in an ashtray not too far away a cigarette was burning itself out. At times I thought I could hear voices. They were like the ones you sometimes hear on the radio late at night. You can’t quite tune them out, but you can never make them clear enough to understand.

It was when I went back out into the hallway that I finally noticed the lights.

Instead of switching from one code to another like they usually did, only the green one was on. It burned with a steady reptilian coldness that seemed to hold me spellbound. In all the years I had been watching the lights they had never really meant anything to me. I knew, of course, that they had meanings, but even when I had announced in the library that the Green Light was on it had been an impersonal event. Perhaps a bit like being on vaction far from home and seeing a funeral procession go by. It may sadden you, but only in a distant, abstract way, and you quickly forget about it as you go about your life. Now, in a way I wasn’t sure I liked, it was different.

When I resumed my journey I left the cart where I had parked it.

I made my way over to one of the classroom buildings, and walked along occasionally looking into this room or that. Turning a corner I came across Dr C. He had made quite a name for himself in the Twenties, and along with Dr D had been a fixture in the library when I first transferred there. He nodded a greeting, and I said ‘Hello, Sir.’ I watched him enter the lecture hall and take his position behind the lecturn, and wondered why he was in this old building instead of the new one they had named for him.

I was beginning to tire by the time I got to the crossover to the next building, and I sat down on a bench next to a window. The rain had been replaced by a dense fog, and I couldn’t see anything passed the window sill. Here and there I could almost see a vague halo that might have been the lights from a classroom in a neighboring building. It was somehow comforting not to have to see the frenetic world out there.

I don’t know how long I sat there, but eventually I became aware of the sound of someone typing in one of the offices down the hall. At first I didn’t care who could be, in all likelyhood, filling out some form that may or may not ever be needed or seen again; but after a while the rhythmic clattering began to pull at me much like I imagine a light in the darkness pulls at a moth.

I got up and walk down the hall of that old building until I came to the office the typing was coming from. I took the paper that had been on my desk out of my pocket. This was the right room.

The door was ajar, and pushing it open another inch or two I could see the clerk as she removed a form from an ancient manual typewriter. She looked to be about twenty years younger than me, and her blouse or dress had that straight line shapelessness I have always associated with flappers and the Charleston. The movement of the door caught her eye, and she looked up sharply.

“Yes?” I stammered an apology and her reply had that edge you can hear in any University office. It spoke of unending routine being interrupted by what is just another, perhaps less appealing, aspect of the routine. “Please, come in and sit down. There is some paperwork that must be done when transferring.”

My routine hasn’t really changed. I spend most of my time in the stacks or in the Duplicate Room among the older volumes slowly turning their forgotten pages. Once in a while Dr C will ask me to find a him a book or a particular issue of some journal; and recently Dr D has started coming to the reading room. Occasionally I’ll remember my old friend in the Pharmacy, and think about going to see if he’s around, but the time isn’t right yet. It won’t be long though. Just a little while after you hear, “The Green Light is on.”

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .6番

2008-03-19T14:28:00.002-07:00

Thomas’s ankle was quite sore, and each time he took a step a little white-hot flash of pain would shoot through it so he decided he would stop and have a cup of tea and rest a bit. It turned out that this was one of the three times this century it has been verified that a Starbucks was not the closest place to Thomas’s current location. The first time was on a trip he took to Murdo, South Dakota. When asked why he had gone to Murdo all he will say is he had already seen the corn palace. The other time was when he had to spend the night in Orem, Utah. He refuses to say anything about that night, but his analyst grins uncontrollably whenever he hears the city's name. Orem passed a law banning the sales of mango-coconut gelatin and feather dusters soon afterward, but no one really knows why.

Looking around, he considered his options.

CJ’s was too far away, and anyway Thomas very seldom went there. Its frequent problems with health department inspectors was only part of the reason. He had learned when he was an undergrad that there were very few restaurant kitchens you wanted to look into too closely, if at all. The real reason he avoided CJ’s was that he never really enjoyed their famous loose meat sandwiches. “You just never developed a taste for horse,” had been one friend’s explanation.

The Division Street Diner was also too far away. The cooks at the Division Street Diner all had doctorates in some obscure field, usually their father’s south forty, and if they didn’t agree with your interpretation of Vladolov’s Third Theory of Interdependent Apathy they were apt to over cook your eggs. The wait staff, on the other hand, were usually practitioners of lifestyles as yet undiscovered by either Oprah or Dr Phil, or even the Bravo Network or HBO.

That left Gander’s.

Now, ever since Socrates dusted off a few steps along one side of the forum, and began giving lectures on the knowledge of geometry in the servant classes every school vaguely worth its tuition has had at least one place like Gander’s somewhere along the borders of its campus. It might be famous for its hamburgers or its pizza or its breakfasts or its liver, blue cheese and cantaloupe sandwiches (the rye bread is what really brings out the flavor), but it is a certified Campus Institution. Every visitor to the school is taken there to experience a true bit of [insert university name here] life, and to enjoy the wonders of whatever it is they make. Gander’s claim to fame is its ice cream.

At one time the ice cream was made in the basement, but rising labor costs and some pesky laws concerning how food was handled had put an end to that a couple of generations ago. Of course everyone still raves about how wonderful their ice cream is, and how nothing else compares to it; but if it has a creamier texture and richer taste it is because you paid at least ten times more for it than you would have at the supermarket.

The waitresses’ uniforms had thin, lime green stripes, and had been designed when women’s stockings still came in actual pairs. The ages of the waitresses ranged from forty-something to Neolithic, and as Thomas eased himself onto a stool he wondered if this was the same waitress that had served Truman when he had made his famous stop at the campus. There was a picture above the malt mixers of “Give ‘em hell, Harry” sitting at the counter grinning like he just got a refund on his daughter’s piano lessons as he dug into a dish of ice cream. Thomas decided this was not the same waitress because, even though her back was to the camera, the woman in the picture was obviously far too young to be the same woman facing him now.

Thomas ordered a cup of tea, and watched for signs the rain was letting up. Just as the waitress brought his tea Thomas saw Geoffrey Spenser duck under Gander’s awning. He quickly turned his back to the window, but had not quite been quick enough. Spenser waved and then came in shaking his umbrella.

“There you are, Milton, old man!” Spenser had a way of saying things that gave them several connotations which were almost always incorrect. For example, “old man” might have been an attempt to sound vaguely British, or he might have been using it as a euphemism for “old fart.” The true interpretation was, of course, the one that gave him the political advantage at the moment. He was also famous for never quite listening to anything said to him, and giving answers unrelated to anything you might have asked. Naturally, he taught communication.

“Yes, here I am. I’m not too sure about other places, but I’m pretty sure I am here.”

“What?” Spenser was never quite sure if Thomas was being humorous, deeply profound or just obtuse. “Um, yeah. Anyway, I tried to call you earlier, but it just went straight to voicemail. So, when you get my message tomorrow you can just ignore it.”

Thomas was just about to say that he would certainly ignore any message he got from Spenser when Spenser plunged on.

“Tried to leave Twila—do you know Twila in the Art Department? Tried to leave her a message the other day, but couldn’t. Her mailbox was completely full. Can you believe it? Completely full. Had to send an email, and…”

“Yes, I know Twila. I had lunch with her just the other day.” Thomas neglected to add that Twila spent an afternoon every few weeks making sure her voicemail box was full by playing music into it. She had also had her son create a program that automatically deleted all email from addresses that were not on a very short list. If you wanted to speak to Twila your best bet was to go to her office. “What was it you wanted, Geoffrey?”

“Oh, coffee would be fine.”

“Not quite what I meant. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“When?”

“When you left me the voicemail message this afternoon.”

“Oh, you got it? Great! So tell me, what do you think?”

I think you’re a flaming twit was the unspoken portion of Thomas's answer. “I didn’t get your message. You just told me you left me a message. Now I am asking you what you wanted to know when you left the message this afternoon that I haven’t listened to yet.”

Again it took Spenser a few seconds to work that out. “Um, yeah. Well, you see, I have an idea for a new class, but I’m not sure it would be in my department’s domain, so to speak.” He looked expectantly at Thomas like a small puppy looking at a person who might be holding something good to eat. The image was spoiled, however, when the waitress startled him by setting a cup of coffee in front of him.

Against his better judgment, Thomas pressed on. “And this new class is?”

“I got the idea the other day when I was clearing out some of Ed’s old books and things. Do you ever wonder where kids get all that shit? I mean there’s probably a kid over in China or Uganda or something that’s just got a stick and couple of small rocks and he’s having a hell of a good time. My kid’s got enough crap to stock a fair sized toy store, and he’s whining about being bored.”

Twenty-some years of departmental meetings had given Thomas the necessary skills to deal with situations like this. “And this new class is?”

“What new class?”

“Geoffrey, today is not the day for this. I am under some particularly shitty weather today. I just twisted my ankle while getting shoved off the sidewalk by some semi-perfect stranger, and I spent the morning in a meeting whose main topic was whether or not a grade of “Incomplete” might be damaging to a students self-worth.” Spenser looked at Thomas with an expression of total incomprehension. “So why don’t you come to my office next week, and we’ll talk about your proposal?”

“Um, sure. Sorry about your ankle. Twisted my elbow once—hurt like hell for a week. How’s Tuesday sound?”

“Tuesday would be perfect. I’m in San Diego on Tuesday.”

Wonder this time where she's gone . . .

2008-01-25T23:05:00.001-07:00

What was she like?

I don't know.

No, I'm not being evasive, it's just...it's just the truth. Nothing more.

What?

Yeah, okay. I'll try.

Once, about five years ago we went for a trip. Just a tour around the state. You know, drive along the coast, do some camping, maybe rent a cabin somewhere. And I remember that for the first two or three days she never said a word.

Who knows why? Sometimes it would be something I said or did, and sometimes it would be something I didn't say or do; and sometimes it didn't have anything to do with anything—at least anything in the world you and I might know. Who knows for her?

It was like she had just left—or I had. Yeah, that's it. It was like everyone in the world had stopped being real except her. See, she wasn't really ignoring me—that would have been too personal. You have to let a person be a part of your life to ignore them, and that was something she would never allow.

It used to drive me crazy.

When we were first together I would really flip out sometimes. After a day or two I'd start shouting and throwing things just to get her attention, and a couple times I slapped her. She wouldn't scream or cry or anything. Hell, she wouldn't even say anything. She'd just look out at this secret world of hers with those empty eyes.

God, what a look.

Anyway, we'd been on this trip for about four days, and she'd been off inside her head wherever it was she went for the whole time. We were walking through these woods and she was ahead of me.

It was beautiful.

It was one of those days they try to capture for travel posters or those greeting cards that are blank on the inside. There was a stream off to the right and the sunlight was that soft gold color that just drips down around the leaves. I remember sitting down on a log and just watching her. Her hair was loose and flowing down her back—you know, the way she wore it sometimes.

No, I guess you don't.

Pity.

How can I describe it? It was that dark brown color that sunlight can make the most beautiful thing you have ever seen, and as she moved gold and deep wine highlights would float through it like the colors themselves were alive.

I'm sorry. That's the best I can do. I can't really describe her in a way that comes anywhere close to what she was.

I have a photograph of her in my wallet that I took on that same trip. It's the closest thing I have to what she really looked like. We were on the coast and she's sitting on this big piece of driftwood looking out at the ocean, and you would swear she's remembering a world somewhere you will never see, but would give your life to know.

Do you think you could get that photo for me? They wouldn't let me keep it when they took my wallet and belt and stuff.

It seems like a mighty long time . . .

2008-01-09T22:34:00.001-07:00

It was in 1965. I'm pretty sure it was on a Sunday morning, but I can't remember if it was in late April or early May. Early in the morning my mother dropped me off in the circle drive in front of the main entrance of the high school. She took my suitcase out of the trunk for me, and put it on the side walk next to those of my classmates. She asked me one last time if I was sure I would be all right, and then got back in the car and drove home.

I stood there in the early chill with a couple of my buddies, and we tried to appear cool and nonchalant while I secretly wondered if the doors to the school were unlocked because I was so excited I was about to pee my pants. Most of the senior class of 1965 was there gathered into little clumps. We had spent the last couple years selling magazine subscriptions, washing cars and running the refreshment stand at football games to earn the money for this trip, and now it was actually happening.

After a few minutes Mr Hart, the principal, and his wife and Mr Gross, our class advisor, and his wife lined us up and we took our luggage to the side of one of the Greyhound busses waiting for us. One of my friends had to carry my suitcase. Eventually the luggage was stowed and they had us on the busses, and we were pulling out of the drive. We were on our way to New York.

Now, I probably should explain that my mother was not by nature over protective, and my friends did not normally perform menial tasks for me. With the kind of timing I had come to expect from the universe my left knee had started bleeding the day before; and Mom was just obliquely asking me if it was a regular knee bleed or did I need to go the hospital, and my friend carried my bag because I was on crutches. Mom and Dad knew that I would have gone through just about anything to go on this trip, but they also knew I wouldn't risk going to a strange hospital so if I said I'd be okay, I probably would be. In the mid-Sixties many of what we considered routine hemorrhages just weren't treated—mostly because the treatments weren't really all that effective. My friends just knew that on any given day I might be using crutches.

When my brother or I was in the hospital my mother would make the forty-five mile drive every day to see us, but because of his work schedule Dad could only come on Saturday and Sunday. When we were in grade school he would bring us a few comic books on his Saturday visit. I always looked forward to Saturday because he brought better comics (Green Arrow, Batman, Green Lantern) than Mom (Little Nancy, Donald Duck, Archie).

When I was in seventh grade he started bringing "The New Yorker" every Saturday. He didn't know about 'children's literature' or 'young adult literature' so he brought us the books he liked. I can remember plowing my way through Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way and The Roman Way when I was in fifth and sixth grade along with the Iliad and Odyssey. And it was years before I fully understood some passages of The Don Flows Home to the Sea and Tortilla Flat. When a family friend told him "The New Yorker" was publishing some of the best short fiction around, that clinched it. It became a regular arrival on Saturdays.

My brother never really cared that much about reading—he was more of an 'action bleeder' and was into flannel shirts and hunting and fishing. Ernest Hemingway without the war wound. I, on the other hand—probably the left one, was more of an 'executive bleeder' and was into cool jazz and Brooks Brothers and droll witticisms. (Well, as droll as you can be at fourteen with acne and a voice that would shift three octaves mid-syllable without warning.) Eventually Dad went back to just taking my brother comic books, but he brought me "The New Yorker" every Saturday visit until I got married.

There was only one movie theater in my hometown and for several years I lived just half a block from it, but I almost never knew what was playing there until I bought the tickets for me and my date. What I could tell you though was what movies were playing in Manhattan, what plays had opened or closed that week and who was playing at the Village Vanguard, the Bitter End and half a dozen other bars in the Village.

"The Talk of the Town" was like a conversation with friends for me; the little column fillers were gems to be searched for and collected; the advertisements were like Gatsby's light to me. I read every story, poem and article and posted what I considered relevant cartoons on the foot of my bed.

I was obsessed.

The only thing that would have prevented me from taking that trip was death, and even that might have been iffy unless quickly followed by cremation.

The busses rolled through Ohio and Pennsylvania. We stopped somewhere for lunch, and somewhere else for dinner. The vibration of the bus aggravated the hemorrhage, and the afternoon and early evening were an agony. I had a few Darvon pills (a kind of glorified aspirin), but they didn't really help and I spent a lot of time trying to concentrate on the scenery to take my mind off the pain. Finally the scenery became definitely urban, and then, after what I was prepared to swear was at least two geological eras, we were there.

We went down blocks filled with real New Yorkers doing the exciting things real New Yorkers did. Awesome things like go to work or home or to a cafe for dinner. I tried to look at everything, but I could never see enough. My face was pressed up against the glass so hard I'm surprised I didn't break my nose. I would have hung out of the window if I could have figured out how to open the bloody thing.

The busses pulled up to our hotel, and we stumbled out onto the sidewalk. After so many hours of sitting it felt strange to be standing. There was a sanitation workers strike going on, and some of the odors drifting by made a freshly manured field seem like a delightful alternative. The change from sitting to standing also caused a shift in pressures that made my knee a fresh explosion of pain on top of the steady agony it had become.

Somehow we got our bags, and were checked in and given rooms (boys on the sixth floor and girls on the eighth, and a pair of chaperons on each to make sure we didn't get confused). My buddy carried our suitcases up to the room we would be sharing with two other guys, and we figured out which cot was whose. This was long before every hotel room had a television, but there was a radio and one of the guys turned it on and hunted for a rock and roll station. He found one playing a Beatles tune, and we took turns looking out the window at our view of New York. It was mostly loading docks in the alley behind the hotel. We had opened the window, and I had my hands on the sill so I could lean out and see a little more. After about ten seconds a giant pigeon dropping landed squarely on the back of my right hand with an audible "splat".

I washed my hands a couple times in the sink and then laid down on my cot, and a song came on the radio we had never heard before. It had a kind of slow swing to it—jazzy, with just an organ, bass and drums. The backup singers were singing "Shoo-bop-shi-bop, my baby" and then the lead singer's voice came in, "Hello, stranger...." I forgot about my knee. I was in New York listening to one of the coolest songs I had ever heard after being crapped on by a pigeon. Life was perfect.

Splish, splash . . .

2007-12-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2007-12-07T23:13:00.001-07:00

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.

In amongst the packing and trying to plan for all the little things that would need to be done in the next few days along with the all too obvious big things, we talked. At one point she said a part of her hurt because she hadn't been able to get there in time to say good-bye; and she asked if it didn't help me a bit that I was able to be with my father for his last couple days.

It did at the time, but . . .

I had to tell her that now, whenever I think of my father I don't see the active, loving, fiercely alive man who had raised me; but an empty shell who's only sign of life was his almost mechanical breathing. For three days he laid there. Never moving. Not even twitching except for that barely visible movement of his chest. At ninety-three his body had quit. That is the image that haunts my memories of him.

I told her that while there is always that yearning to have one more chance to tell a loved one how much they mean to you; when I think of her mother now what I'll be able to remember is that wry smile and quietly wicked sense of humor.

We sometimes did not quite see eye to eye, but I cared very much for her. For one thing, it is because of her, and her husband, that my life has been complete for the last twenty-seven years.

冬枯れの道二筋に分かれけれ

The desolation of winter/The road through/Divides into two.

Thank you falettinme be mice elf...

2007-11-21T09:50:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-11-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-11-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-10-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-19T10:43:00.001-07:00

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.

Some villages had old people (thirty-five, maybe even forty years old) whose job it was to remember stuff. Stuff like:

It was the winter the wolves killed Pluug One Hand’s white bull that Ragnar took Brindula for a wife.
Lief Wind Blown is the son of Lief the elder, son of Herb who was Ragnar’s brother, son of Smelt who was the son of Quail Bushbane.
Briknal, Brindula’s oldest brother, was given the hovel of Blister, his father, and the field of muck next to the fen the same year Klink died.

Then when someone came along and claimed Briknal was living in a hovel that was really theirs the village elders would get together, and one of them would say, “It was the winter Klink died, which was just two winters after Ragnar took Brindula for a wife, when Blister, Briknal and Brindula’s father, gave Briknal that hovel along with the field of muck next to the fen,” and the case would be thrown out.

Then someone figured out that marks left on a convenient rock or leaf or piece of skin (a real breakthrough was made when someone thought of using the side without the hair) could be used to represent things like the number of goats the family had that morning, or how many days had passed since the river flooded, or the number of days since the sun was exactly over the big oak tree; and all of a sudden a person didn't need to remember all those pesky little facts anymore. Now they could look up that morning’s goat inventory whenever someone like a tax collector came around asking. This eventually led to people using these marks to represent other things—like the color blue and how it made them feel.

Taking the quite unheard of step of accepting an advancement in knowledge the Church decided this new writing thing was just what they needed to help spread the Word, as it were. Eventually quite an industry of transcribing the Holy Word developed. Well, actually lots of Holy Words—there wasn’t just The One. God was quite old even then and had begun repeating himself with embarrassing regularity, and He had this maddening habit of mixing the details up just a bit each time He told the story. Did He create animals first and then Man, or did Man come first? That kind of thing. It was a muddle, and each time it got written down it got a little more muddled. You would almost think the whole thing was being made up as it went along.

The one thing He never wavered on, however, was that The Word came first. He was sometimes a little iffy about which Word it was, but it was definitely a Word. Actually, I have it on good authority that the Word was Kumquat. No particular reason—He just liked it.

And so generations of monks went blind copying sacred texts for the greater glory of God. Day after day they would sit next to an unglazed window sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter so they could have enough light to work. This was long before those fancy monasteries of the Thirteen and Fourteenth Centuries were built. We’re talking little wattle and daub hovels with a dirt floor, and if you’re lucky a bit of hay and a blanket to sleep on.

Of course every now and again the Vikings would come calling in that amusing little way they had—usually on the first day it was warm enough you weren’t freezing those bits of your body the Church had told you not to touch. They would spend the afternoon pillaging and slaughtering. Eventually, perhaps after a picnic and a friendly round of target practice with your second cousin, now permanently removed, they would leave and the survivors would make sure the bits of you they could find got a decent burial. Then someone else would move into what was left of your hut and take up where you had left off.

Writing still, however, had the disadvantage of being just a tad bit slow at reproducing the longer attempts at describing the color blue, and when your publishing house is cranking out a single copy of the Omnibus Edition of Aristotle every four months or so, you tend to charge just a bit more than the average serf has at hand. For this reason writing, and reading, became specialized knowledge that was reserved for a few unfortunate monks busy dodging Vikings; and some quite well fed scribes keeping track of the king’s stuff and all of the decrees kings are apt to make. This way when you were caught wearing the exact wrong shade of blue they could point to a piece of parchment that neither you nor the king could read and declare that you must give up your estate, or head, for the heinous crime of wearing the Azure Royale.

Eventually, someone figured out that you could carve a picture of, say, a Saint into a piece of wood or soft stone, smear some ink on it and then press it against a piece of parchment or vellum, and you could have as many pictures of that Saint as you wanted. Stumble forward several generations, and finally someone figures out movable type. (Meanwhile the Chinese are wondering what took us so long.) At last, printing was getting cheap enough that pretty much everything you needed to know could be looked up in a book. As printing became less and less expensive and more and more stuff could be looked up, people naturally began remembering less and less about their world until a fair number of them couldn’t find the Atlantic Ocean from a Miami Beach hotel without two maps and a fairly lucky guess as to direction.

Proud to be an . . .

2007-08-17T20:02:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-06T17:14:00.001-07:00

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.

His umbrella seemed especially designed to direct the maximum amount of water down the back of his neck, and as he walked along the reflection that kept pace with him in the shop windows was a lot pudgier than he remembered it being. He had remarked to a friend just the other day that he was sure shopkeepers were using a new type of magnifying glass in their windows that made him look like a fat, old man.

“You’re a twit,” had been her thoughtful reply. “You’ll be wearing tinfoil in your hats next.”

Thomas’s umbrella chose that particular moment in his reverie to dump about a quart of water it had been saving down the back of his neck. His breath came out all in a rush, “Whoa!” and he kind of danced/skipped a couple of steps. “Bloody designer probably graduated from here,” he muttered. A woman walking toward him wondered when the state would start providing decent care for those unfortunate people and decided to cross the street.

“The problem,” he muttered, “is life. It’s a concept that needs a bit more thinking through before being shoved off on someone with no training.”

The way people were edging away from him reminded him that he was muttering again and he clamped his teeth firmly shut. Unfortunately, his left cheek was not paying attention and he bit into it, which caused him to exclaim, “Shit!” with enough force to cause people to edge even further away from him. This irritated him because he was, by all accounts, a fairly nice guy—he was just under some particularly ugly weather at the moment—and he glared at them for edging away. Which, of course, made them edge even further away.

“At least the sidewalk’s not crowded,” he muttered.

It was at this precise moment that a very large, and seemingly perfect stranger managed to run into him knocking Thomas off the sidewalk into the gutter. The man had just jumped out of the blue, or perhaps a hat shop—Thomas was a bit confused by the blow—and the passersby who had looked out from under their umbrellas, there are always one or two, could never agree if the stranger had come out of the blue, a hat shop or a Starbucks. (The individual who had voted for Starbucks later confessed he had only done so because he hadn't passed a Starbucks for at least the last thirty feet and figured there had to be one nearby.) When Thomas had recovered his breath he stammered a quiet, and totally insincere, “Pardon me,” while in his mind he screamed questions that, if taken literally, would have gotten him arrested—or an Emmy winning series on HBO—or both.

“What!” the stranger demanded, “Are you doing here?”

By this time Thomas had collected himself sufficiently to observe that while the man was, thankfully, a total stranger and not missing any obvious parts, he was not quite a perfect stranger. For one thing he seemed prone to knocking people into rain-swollen gutters. He made a stab at a couple of answers, missed, and tried a couple more, one of which he wounded; but they had trouble convincing him let alone strangers out of the blue—or a hat shop.

"I'm not sure."

"You're not sure?" The stranger's voice was dripping with scorn; or, since he didn't have an umbrella, it could have just been the rain.

"No." Desperately Thomas groped for the wounded answer, but it escaped by hiding under some dirty linen in one of the darker corners of his mind. "Should I be?"

"Christ. You're even dumber than a wildebeest," and the stranger jumped back into the blue, knocking two Stetsons off a shelf in the process.

Now this exchange hurt Thomas very much. Partly because he had twisted his ankle when he fell off the curb, and partly because his ego wasn't quite up to unfair comparisons to wildebeests at the moment.

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

2007-07-28T17:51:00.001-07:00

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 is a popular belief, fostered primarily by less that sympathetic wives and one or two Biblical references, that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. This is not quite true. Even if you include the subcategory of politics, prostitution is a relatively recent, albeit climactic, specialization within the oldest profession which over the centuries has gone by the various titles of witchcraft, psychology, philosophy, religion, astrology, and, more recently, channeling and psychic hot-line host. For when faced with the yawning reply of “So what?” to the proudly primal scream of “I exist!” mankind, with the full co-operation if not insistence of womankind, promptly set about creating the business of inventing a Meaning for Life; and from the beginning there have been countless individuals more than willing to make a rather indecent living, usually tax free, by selling any of the One, True Answers.

The second, unrecorded inventing of a One, True Answer took place several eons ago while our ancestors were still hanging about the savanna wondering why the baboons got all the breaks. Baboons could run really, really fast; they had really big sharp, pointy teeth that would come in handy when the neighborhood lion was acting out her hunger; and on top of it all, they had those really cool blue and red rumps. All the poor almost-humans had was the vague beginnings of a forehead and a sort of chin; and if they needed anything sharp and pointy they had to find the right kind of stick and rub it on a rock.

Then one day Snoog, who up to that time had somehow managed to never contribute anything to the tribe’s well being, came to the leaders of the tribe with a truly amazing offer. He would, he said, personally intervene with The Great and Terrible Hhragch on the tribe’s behalf. This, he said, would guarantee good hunting and co-operative wives and warmer nights. All the tribe had to do was give The Great and Terrible Hhragch, through his agent Snoog, a small, almost unnoticeable portion of everything the tribe ever owned—say ten per cent—and follow a few hundred simple rules The Great and Terrible Hhragch would occasionally issue—again through his agent Snoog.

The tribe mulled it over and said it was a swell offer and thanks awfully, but they’d just as soon give it a miss. Nothing against The Great and Terrible Hhragch — they were sure he was a great guy and all, pity about the name though, and a nifty whatever it was Snoog was going on about—but they preferred to make their bargains with beings they could see, hear, talk to directly and—and this was the vitally important part—poke sharp sticks into if need be. They also, after reflecting on Snoog’s past contribution to the tribe—none—and the way clay was always falling off his mate’s face and injuring the young and how Snoog spent an awful lot of time eating those over-ripe berries that made the bears act so funny, decided that Snoog might like trying to introduce The Great and Terrible Hhragch to some of the other tribes on the savanna.

A few of the more likely directions he could try were pointed out to him with some of the sharper sticks the tribe had at the moment, and Snoog became the Earth’s second itinerate preacher. The Earth’s first itinerate preacher made the mistake of starting with grazing animals and a herd of wildebeest stampeded over him before he could finish explaining how the Really Neat Thloydd would lead them to grass that had never been shit on if they would only make a few tiny, little sacrifices.

It should be pointed out that while One, True Answers have usually had a market value of anywhere between a dime a dozen and your entire life savings as a love offering; Questions, especially those having to do with the validity of the currently fashionable One, True Answer, have almost always gone for something a bit over prime rate. Being tied to a soon to be burning stake being the norm.

This is why if you ask a passing wildebeest, “What is your purpose in the universe?” he, or she, will snort the wildebeest equivalent to “Push off,” and get back to the truly relevant business of eating grass and dodging lions. If you persist in badgering the poor animal to justify its existence he, or she, will eventually call the authorities and have you removed, or stampede the herd over you. Having several thousand wildebeest stomp you into the savanna is a fairly effective way of ending pointless debates which is why you rarely see Jehovah Witnesses bothering wildebeest.

If, however, you asked the next human being that comes your way, “Why are you here,” that person will try his or her hardest to come up with a answer. After all, they are so amazingly wonderful there must be a pretty damned good reason, and if they can’t come up with a reason right away they’ll tell you there is one, and it’s a really good one, but with aerobics, breaking in the new secretary, and other pressing matters they seem to have forgotten it. The reader should remember, however, that if you ask this question late at night in a major metropolitan alley or side street you stand a very good chance of finding out that your interviewee’s reason for being is, “To relieve fecal-cephalics,” or words to that effect, “of all their money.”

Other, even more dangerous types will tell you it’s the other way ‘round, and their existence gives meaning to the universe; but they soon go into life-style consulting, advertising, politics, or fashion design and cease to be of any real concern to anyone slightly brighter than a flatworm. Those with truly swollen egos become dictators in emerging third world countries, or join the faculty at the local community college.

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

2007-07-22T23:09:00.001-07:00

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.

Sorry.

Anyway, it should be noted, that Thomas had dropped the old family name of Wordsworth on the grounds that the first three initials said it all and the Wordsworth was just a tautology. Where the “III” came from was always a mystery to Thomas, but his mother would get this wistful look in her eyes and fidget awkwardly with her handkerchief for a few seconds, and then change the subject whenever he asked her about it.

Over the course of these two millennia the Earth had had a few volcanoes—the geologic equivalent of a mild case of acne—and made a few rather minor adjustments in the position of its continents. Lately, however, it had begun to notice that some of the life infesting its surface had started blowing stuff up with things that did rather more damage than was really necessary. Normally a planet will barely notice the tiny things scuttling around on it in much the same way you don’t notice the mites living in your eyebrows, but this latest development was downright bothersome. Granted it wasn’t as bad as having a major asteroid run into you, but it did leave visible scars and was causing some rather hurtful speculation about the Earth’s personal hygiene.

Otherwise the ages plodded on pretty much as usual.

Humans, on the other hand, were strutting around feeling pretty damned important, thank you. They had, as far as they were concerned, invented some really amazing things, including bombs that did rather more damage than was really necessary along with pick-up trucks, grain futures, country music, French cooking, conference calls and telemarketing. That all of these things had been invented and discarded as useless, if not criminal, by the life forms on countless other planets didn’t bother humans in the least because they didn’t know about those other planets and wouldn't believe you if you told them.

This doesn’t mean that humans think they are alone in the Universe. Quite the contrary. The human ego demands that there must be other beings in the Universe if only to look in awe at what they, humans that is, have accomplished. Currently the theories concerning the population of the universe breaks down to:

There are those who believe there are simply oodles of civilizations zipping around the galaxy, but space is just so huge that we haven’t bumped into each other yet.
Those who think that we are being visited all the time, but aliens are just so shy they can only work up the nerve to land in front of one or two people at a time and so far have been unable to catch any of the world’s leaders in an Arkansas swamp (although they had a really good chance in the 1990s).
Those who think we are the frogs in some sort of galactic pond and every once in a while the junior high students come around to collect a few of us to have a try at dissection.

The other consideration, which humans never think of because it doesn’t fit in with their view of their own cleverness, is that the other life forms living on this side of the galaxy know we’re here, but avoid us in much the same way you avoid that cousin who thinks professional wrestling is for real and has those disturbing stains on his pants.

Now Thomas—you do remember Thomas don’t you? Middle-aged, tending toward a paunch, the kind of hair that has made Germanic types throughout history envy corn silk for its body. Anyway, Thomas was in a bit of a funk. It wasn’t anything you would really be likely to notice like your rainy day, curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea and the occasional heavy sigh kind of funk. It was more of a less than friendly attitude that seemed to say, “I’m really pissed off and I think you are the reason.”

That was on the surface. If you were to delve just a little deeper you would come to those murky little layers of psyche that enable so many psychologists, priests, and other forms of witch-doctor to live so comfortably. Here you would find that what we are talking about is the full blown hang ‘em first and then maybe slap their maiden aunt kind of funk that caused the guy who wanted to be called Ishmael to go out whale hunting.

To find the cause of Thomas’s irritation would require delving deeper into his mind than he, or any vaguely sane person, would wish to go. If, however, you were to have enough courage, and maybe the psychiatric department of a major hospital to back you up, you might decide, like a sewer worker counting the days until his retirement, to take the plunge. Down passed the current dreams involving the various ways a certain department chair becomes suddenly unemployed among other, more messy accidents. Then you would have to wade through some rather lurid fantasies about a certain red headed young lady, some of them involving whipped cream and a feather duster. After a quick shower and a change of clothes you would come to all of the adolescent fantasies of super-powers and daring-do that no male ever really gives up. (Your average one hundred twelve year old man will, on his death bed, be daydreaming in some hidden corner of his mind, about how he saves the nurse from the clutches of that smug orderly with a few simple, but amazingly powerful punches and she then decides to show her gratitude in a way that just might utilize whipped cream—and perhaps a feather duster.)

Finally, after several dead ends and one or two tantalizing but completely misleading paths that left you checking the bottom of your shoes, you would come to that place where primal screams are considered unnecessarily wordy. Looking about you would decide that this was where things start getting truly nasty, and Thomas was definitely out of sorts. In fact it would probably be more accurate to say he was as pissed off as a man can get without involving the government.

The cause of these deeply hidden levels of rage, indeed they are so deep and so hidden that Thomas is only sometimes vaguely aware that they exist, are many and complex but mostly have to do with the fact that he was middle aged and still didn’t have a clue as to why he was here or what he was supposed to be doing. It is the kind of despair that affects most males around the ages of fourteen and forty, (and, interestingly enough, is often cured at both ages by the acquisition of a red sports car and a not too bright playmate—usually blond) and while it can cause a person to spend many nights staring into the darkness, Thomas had to admit it was not as existentially disconcerting as his friend Garrideb’s conviction he was the product of a joke being played by some guy in Illinois.

I read the news today . . .

2007-07-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-14T17:17:00.001-07:00

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.

You know the type of story I’m talking about. They take place in some quaint (i.e., paint peeling off the walls and no plumbing) locale name Rue d’Elitist or Via Pretencion; dwell for pages on the film left in the basin after she washed her underarms; take three hours and two cups of very strong coffee to read; and in the end leave you screaming, “So bloody what!” and wanting to slap the main character, the author, and the next person you happen to meet. Of course, to cover up for the fact that you wasted eight dollars on an occasional quarterly printed on paper more at home in former Eastern Bloc restrooms you tell everyone it was a powerfully minimalist portrayal of neo-urban sexual tension reminiscent of Kafka if he had written that way instead of the way he did.

The readership of these journals is pretty much limited to a few graduate students trying to suck up to the chair of their doctoral committee by reading his or her latest seventy-three line ode to crossing the street; and a few seriously intellectual types given to wearing pieces of metal in body parts most of us don't even like to touch all that often.

Over the years several, if not the majority, of the stories published by these journals have tried, with wildly varying degrees of failure, to describe the mind. Not the contents mind you (those are usually too bizarre for words, at least in polite company, and even Poe avoided talking about most of them); nor how the contents fit together (that, by long-standing tradition has been the stomping grounds of psychologists, mothers (sometimes in-law), and other club footed busybodies); but the actual space all this other junk is thrown into.

At various times, corrected to and uninvaded by E.S.T., this space has been described as a room, corridor, series of closets, file cabinet, movie reel, filthy stinking cesspool, and the only place in the known universe to contain a true vacuum. (The last two were expressed during the rather passionate divorce trial of the couple formerly known as Mr and Mrs Avery Bodet. As it turns out they were both right, but not for what you might consider the obvious reasons since the two qualities in question tend to be more universal than we have been led to believe.)

Needless to say, but if you are paid by the word you tend to say more than is really necessary, a condition known technically as Clavellism, all of these attempts have somehow failed.

The reasons for their failure are almost as varied as the actual attempts, but are mostly concerned with the fact that the few individuals actually out of their minds far enough to be able to make a disinterested description are usually too full of chemicals to hold a pencil.

Philosophers, unwilling to let any debate go unmuddled, especially one so patently pending no final solution, have tried to measure the dimensions of this troublesome area, but when they find their results getting dangerously close to agreeing they sidestep the question by arguing about the proper length of the ruler (usually somewhere between that of Lady Jane Grey and Louis XIV); seeking new philosophical positions with one of their more attractive, and reasonable, students; or diverting public attention by blaming the whole mess on some poor innocent by-stander like God.

In other words, they also failed. They just covered up their failings a little more cleverly than the rest of us by being so condescending that we were convinced we had asked the wrong question, or were too stupid to appreciate the more than obvious answer. (The French have used a similar technique to convince the world they know how to cook.) Kant, on the other hand, used the more direct approach of simply being incomprehensible.

They failed primarily because they fell victim to that old wives' tale (which for some reason is usually supported by old men) that if Truth, Beauty, and Reality aren’t actually the same thing they have enough in common to make no difference. This insidious concept was given a big publicity boost by Plato, the third most evil man in the history of the world. Attila the Hun might rape, burn and kill you (in any random order), but afterward he left you pretty much alone. Plato, on the other hand, not only separated your body from your soul—which up until then had been the job of an executioner—he then shoved you in a cave with your back to the door. At least Attila left your remains in familiar surroundings.

The first and second most evil men in the history of the world are, of course, the composer Richard Wagner and the man who invented conference calls.

The truth, as any poet could tell you if he or she wasn’t too busy with poetry slams and other forms of verbal mediocrity, is that it can’t be done.

Ba Ba Loo . . .

2007-07-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2007-06-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2007-06-09T11:18:00.001-07:00

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.

It start’s as my mother and I are walking through the lobby from my dentist’s office to my doctor’s office. Dr. Phillips, the dentist, had decided a tooth I had somehow cracked had to come out, but I have hemophilia and that tends to complicate things a little. I had already waited for over an hour while the two doctors discussed the various options, and this little trip over to Dr. Coltin’s side of the building seemed like just one more way to delay things. I had a feeling they were building up their courage like when I would stand on the edge of the diving platform trying to get my legs to jump. I wished Dad was there to tell them to do it or come down, one or the other.

It was around two in the afternoon and the Venetian blinds were throwing dark and bright stripes across the carpet. Leaving the lobby we went down a hallway to one of the examining rooms. The room smelled like the hall: a combination of alcohol and floor wax with just a dash of vitamin. It wasn’t an added on smell like perfume, and as I got up on the table I wondered how you nailed a smell into a wall.

Dr. Coltin came in and, while he was talking to my mother, took off his long, white coat and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He continued talking while he prepared an injection, and, as always, his voice was soft, confident, and confidential. I liked listening to his voice. It reminded me of Dad using sandpaper very carefully on an old chair.

He made jokes about having teeth pulled and asked me who my teacher was that year. His voice was so much like a background noise that it was hard for me to follow him, and I didn’t hear some of his questions. I guess he thought I was scared because he stopped what he was
doing and came over to stand next to me. “Now, don’t worry, Jim, this won’t take long, and you won’t feel a thing when Dr. Phillips pulls that tooth.”

I said I knew, and he said I was a brave young man and went back to his syringes. I had had the medicine he was preparing once before and I knew that I didn’t have to worry about the shot, but I also knew that when a doctor told you something wouldn’t hurt he meant it wouldn’t hurt as much if you didn’t fuss. For a second or two I wondered what it would feel like when the tooth was pulled; and then I watched two squirrels arguing outside the window while I waited for the shot.

Mom said something about my grandfather and how he would bleed for three weeks or more when he had a tooth pulled. The doctor would move into their house and Grandpa would sit in a kitchen chair with newspapers over him. Every once in a while the doctor would take blood from Mom or one of her brothers or sisters and inject it right in the empty socket; and sometimes they would put a plug of chewing tobacco in it. Dr. Coltin listened to her as he put a tourniquet around my arm and patted the inside of my elbow.

“Well, let’s hope this new Anti-Hemophiliac Globulin will be a little more effective. I’ll give Jim a dose now, we’ll wait a few minutes to give it time to be distributed, and then Dr. Phillips can pull the tooth. After that we’ll keep Jim in Dr. Phillips’s office for an hour or so to make sure—a little stick now—to make sure he’s not going to hemorrhage. If he does we can give him another dose of AHG. There! That should take care of things. Don’t worry, Jimbo, we’ll have you home before your brother gets home from school.”

I looked up at Mom and she looked concerned, but she didn’t have that look she got when things were really bad so I decided I didn’t have to worry yet. I looked at Dr. Coltin and watched while he changed syringes and blood came out of the needle. Mom and the doctor talked about something else while he finished up, and finally he was pressing a cotton ball over the hole in my arm.

“Now, Mrs. Fowler, if you would just press on this while I get some tape.”

“Like this?”

“That’s fine.” He put the tape on, and I sat up on the edge of the table. “Okay, young man, let’s go see Dr. Phillips.”

We went back to Dr. Phillips’s side of the building, and I sat in the chair watching the drill hover over me while the two doctors and my mother whispered in the corner. They were arguing about giving me a shot of Novocain. Dr. Phillips was afraid I’d bleed even more from the holes the needle made, and Dr. Coltin felt the AHG would prevent any extra bleeding. Mom was torn between making the whole thing as painless as possible, and making more places to bleed; but, in general, she felt the needle holes would be minor compared to the one the tooth would leave. I was too young to say anything that would effect the outcome, but I wished they would get it over with. I don’t remember who won.

The tooth was pulled at 2:30. That evening at 7:30 there was another conference in the corner. This time Dad was there, and I remember starting to be afraid. Dad worked as a handyman around town during the day and then worked the night shift at the Products. Except for holidays and when he was laid off he always slept from just after supper until ten. If he was skipping his sleep time things must not have been going as well as Dr Coltin had promised. The whispers were too soft for me to hear any words, but there was a tenseness that hadn’t been there before.

Dr. Coltin had just given me a third shot of AHG, his last dose, about an hour before, but it hadn’t seemed to do much. I spent my time biting down on pieces of some bad tasting gauze that was supposed to help stop the bleeding, and spitting blood into the basin next to the chair. I wondered if they should try putting some chewing tobacco in it, and I remember being glad the basin had a drain.

They made their decision and everybody left. I was beginning to think I was going to spend the night in the dentist’s chair when Mom came back in.

“Your dad’s gone to get gas in the car and make sure Frank can stay overnight at Uncle Fred’s. When he gets back we’re going to take you to a hospital in Ann Arbor where they can stop your bleeding.”

“What about dinner?” The words came out soggy from around the cotton.

“You can’t be hungry.”

I said I was.

“Well, if you can think of something you can eat we’ll pick it up on the way.”

I was still trying to think of something that would taste good with blood, and wouldn’t required any chewing when Dr. Coltin came in and handed Mom an envelope.

“You’re to go straight to the University Hospital emergency room. Drive into Ann Arbor on Main Street. When you get to Ann Street turn right and just go straight. You can’t miss it. I’ll call ahead and tell them your on your way, and this will explain what’s happened so far.”

“Is there anything else we’ll need? Something from Dr. Phillips?”

“He’s included a note with mine, and our home phone numbers are there in case they have any questions.” He left the room and Mom began fussing around getting ready to leave. I remember she borrowed a funny shaped bowl for me to spit in on the way.

Like I said before, I really don’t remember the ride to the hospital. All that I have now is a few images of dark streets and buildings that were much larger than any of the ones in the little town we lived in. The time we must have spent in the emergency room has also faded away. I do remember riding on a stretcher through long dark halls with the sound of Mom’s shoes on the granite floors echoing in the silence. I hoped Mom and Dad would call Dr. Coltin when they got home and tell him he was wrong. I wasn’t home by bedtime.

After riding in an elevator we went through some doors and I guessed this was the hallway that had the kids’ rooms. On either side were rooms with four or five cribs in them. At least they looked like cribs. Some of them were and some were regular beds with side rails. You could see into the rooms because the walls were glass from about the level of the stretcher up to the ceiling. All the kids I saw were sleeping, but I could hear someone crying and every few seconds someone shouted for a nurse. The dim lighting made the glass reflect like see through mirrors, and made it hard to tell what was really in the rooms. As we went along I watched myself roll by the beds on my stretcher, and then we came to the one that still had its lights on. There was only one bed in the room, and it was a real bed not a crib.

“Oh, my God.”

That was Dad talking and he said it flat and tight, the way he talked the time I accidentally kicked him in the stomach when I was swinging. He had seen her too.

In the bed was a girl and she had been burned. Except for a couple places about the size of my dad’s hand she looked like a hot-dog you’ve cooked until it’s hard and black and has cracked open to show red in places. Her face wasn’t burned, but that only made it worse, because where you wanted to see contortions there was nothing. I guess the pain had passed the point where screaming was even possible.

Later Mom and Dad left and I was alone listening to the night sounds of the hospital. I was vaguely angry because the side rails made the bed seem like a crib; and still hungry, but the doctors said I couldn’t eat until my mouth stopped bleeding. Someone was still crying, and someone was still yelling for a nurse. Its rhythm reminded me of the foghorns they sometimes had in television shows and was to become one of the constants of my life. In later years the crying would sometimes be replaced with swearing or snoring, but the wave like pattern remained.

Across the hall was the burned girl’s room. The nurses went into her room a lot to take her pulse and do things with the tubes taped to her arms. Eventually I went to sleep.

Some time later I woke up. I don’t know if it was the strangeness of the place or if a noise woke me or I simply had to go to the bathroom. They had taped my arm to a board so I couldn’t bend it and break the needle, and I was surprised by how hard it was to move around because of it. My mouth had bled while I was asleep and the right side of my face was stuck to the pillow. My blood might not clot, but it is still a liquid and will evaporate. The drying blood then forms a very tenacious glue, and for the next several years, as I lost my baby teeth, I was to wake up many times with my face dried fast to my pillow.

This, however, was my first experience. Before I could finally sit up I had to pull the pillow off with my left hand while using the armboard on my right arm as a lever to push myself up. After several attempts I finally succeeded.

Once I was sitting up it felt like someone had smeared pudding all over the right side of my head. For a while I sat there looking out the window at the street in front of the hospital. It was the first time I remember being awake that late at night and the world looked calm and cool. A police car drove slowly down the street below, and after a while a man walked up the street and turned the corner. I tried to imagine what it was like to be out there when the rest of the world was sleeping. Across the street an old observatory had opened its dome, and the telescope pointed up into the night like a giant cannon. I wondered if it was a secret weapon to protect us from the Reds. As I sat there I could feel the blood drying on my face.

One of the nurses noticed I was sitting up and came in to see if I was all right. When I turned to face her I heard her gasp and then she got very businesslike and started cleaning me up. A lady in a yellow dress came in to help her (later on I found out that the yellow dress meant she was a nurse’s aide), and they talked about how my blood wasn’t supposed to clot, and the nurse saying she didn’t think it had. It had just dried up. It took them almost an hour to wash me and change the sheets and find me a pillow that had a rubber cover under the pillowcase.

Just when I was beginning to get real sleepy again one of the other nurses ran out of the girl’s room, made a phone call, and ran back. A little bit later a bunch of doctors ran in and did a lot of things that I couldn’t figure out. When they left the girl looked the same as she did before except for her face. Now it was relaxed.

Just before I finally went to sleep some men took a stretcher into her room. I don’t know why, but when they brought her out I waved good-bye. She couldn’t see me though because now she was all covered up. Even her face.

Eventually my mouth stopped bleeding and I could eat, and a few days later they said I could go home. I remember being a little proud, in a strange kind of way, because I had beat Grandpa’s three weeks by several days. Like I said, for me that’s where everything starts. I was seven.

長き夜も旅草臥れに寝られけり
However long the night Weary with the journey I sleep through it all.

There's something happening here . . .

2007-06-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2007-05-31T18:57:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2007-05-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2007-05-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

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.