10/31/06
Lighten the Flock Up
Happy Halloween! Sorry I didn't have time yesterday to get to the other thing I could use less of this time of year, which is the wearisome and obligatory warning from the local inerrantists that Halloween is not an innocent holiday. Our local weekly newspaper editor feels it necessary to run every letter she gets, and the other day there was one complaining about the Halloween parade. The letter writer noted that it was organized by a real witch. This happens to be true, as far as it goes. We have a witchcraft store in town, but to my eye it's pretty benign. "Witch" today often means "Wiccan," and Wiccans are regular folks who like the idea of worshiping nature, as far as I can tell. If they've withered anybody's crops lately, or made some farmer's milk cow go dry, I haven't heard about it. I saw a gathering of "pagans" once. The pagans had rented a pavilion in a state park, having filled out the proper forms, I'm sure. They included pasty-faced young men with prominent Adam's apples and blissed-out young women in peasant garb, and they didn't seem too malevolent. If they had Satanic powers, it didn't show; they didn't, frankly, seem to have the wherewithal to raise their voices to a stranger over a parking space or a canceled flight. And nothing scary's for sale at the witch store. It's mostly crystals and candles and New Agey bric-a-brac. I was in there one time and they had a book on Wiccan cooking, and I picked it up and flipped through it. It mentioned coffee, among other things. If you're a Wiccan and you know how, it seems that you can use coffee to promote alertness.
Anyway, the letter is written in that mock-formal style, and the writer says "I must voice my concern with shock and dismay" over the article about the planning of the parade. Evidently the parade organizer said she was "driven" to do so, and the writer quotes this and leaves us to work out the sinister implications: who drove her? (Hint: Satan.) An aggravating factor is then noted: the organizer was going to "bring in witches from other states to celebrate their holy day." I'm old enough to remember when Vietnam protests were attributed to "outside agitators," and I guess this is similar. At any rate, by the third paragraph, the writer has warmed up enough to say what's really bugging her. "Halloween is not the innocent holiday it appears to be," she says. "Its founders offered human sacrifices and used the help of the devil for their own purposes. These practices continue today. If you march in the parade, you will be walking alongside real pagans, real occultists, real Satanists, real witches and well-meaning parents with innocent kids just here for the candy. Yes, evil is real."
Well, she's right about the evil, I'll give her that. But I'm not sure about black magic, or the devil. Halloween is based on the Celtic holiday Samhain; the Celts regarded the end of summer as a time when the line between the world of the living and the world of the dead became blurred. The tradition was brought to the United States by Irish immigrants, and if they weren't good Christians then I just give up. I heard a guy on the radio once dismiss santeria, the Cuban expression of African religious practices transplanted to the Caribbean. It all sounds pretty sinister to us, but this guy pointed out that if there were anything to it, Castro would not have survived for nearly 50 years—a whole lot of Cubans have sacrificed chickens to bring evil fortune to him, but in all these decades Castro has flourished and the intended harm was absorbed pretty much completely by the chickens.
So I'm comfortable with witches, and I don't worry much about the devil. (I have some concern for any number of human beings who are running around loose, though. Drugged-out teens who worship Satan are among them, but I tend to let Satan off the hook in those situations.) And to be honest, if the letter writer really and truly thinks the devil is a) powerful and b) using Halloween to further his aims and goals, she seems pretty calm about it. She closes thus: "I hope my fellow residents will take a closer look at involvement in this unholy day celebration and decide for themselves. As for me and my house, we will not partake."
They will not partake! So there! This seems a little bloodless, a little dispassionate to me, given the stakes—your eternal soul! It sounds more like she's telling her mother, rather sniffily, that Chinese food has a lot more calories than you think and personally she's cut it out of her diet. You want to know what I think? I think her feeling about Halloween is more fussy disapproval than anything. I think, if you really want to know, that she's a bit of a killjoy and prig. I feel sorry for her kids, actually. And I hope she relents and lets them go out, and I get to give them a KitKat bar and send them on their way. I don't much worry about the witches and pagans and so forth in the community. I mostly worry about people who are so sure about things that they want to tell other people what to do. Those are the ones who scare me.
Continuing the theme of unscary witches, I was at the library the other day and wanted some total escapist fluff, so I rented Thunderball. Most disappointing: no tension in the story, and just flat all the way through. If you want something from the Sixties that's sexier (well, the female lead is, anyway) and frankly, more plausible, here's something to enjoy on the happy Halloween I again wish you:
10/30/06
Sighs of the Times
Busy busy busy today, and I'll be back later, but I just wanted to mention a couple of things that go on this time of year (some of them biennial) that I could actually live without. Election calls, for one thing. Yesterday I get a call, and it's a very poor connection. Some grumpy, harassed-sounding guy is asking me if I plan to vote. I'm way too polite to these people, so I say yes, I plan to vote. He starts telling me he's calling on behalf of Linda Winton, or some name like that. She's running for state rep but it's some special deal and I'll have to use a paper ballot to vote for her. She's committed to bringing more business to the Delta. The Delta? I ask. What Delta? (There's no Delta I've ever heard of around here. I'm wondering whether he's got a wrong number. There's the Mississippi Delta, but that's about a thousand miles from here.) "I'm just reading what's in front of me," he says. His tone suggests that we'd all be done sooner if I would just shut up and listen. Long story short, I don't think I'll make the special effort required. I don't know how things are in the Delta, but it's getting a little congested and built-up around here and if business stayed at its current levels that would be fine with me, and if her own people can't show some enthusiasm for her then I don't know why I should. Then the phone rang this morning, and I ran to answer it, because I'm expecting some calls. I didn't expect a call from Rudy Giuliani, but that's who it was. Like me, he's concerned about something or other, he was saying, but I didn't wait to hear what it was. I just hung up. If we agree about it, there's no need to discuss it further, is how I figure.
10/29/06
Keel the Pot
I went to a poetry reading last night. It's foolhardy to go to just any old poetry reading, but this was someone who'd helped form our writers' group a few years ago and at the time she was writing some good, solid, direct, clear stuff. And it was at her mom's house, a few blocks away, and the relatives and friends she usually invites are an amiable crowd. So all in all, it seemed like a reasonable idea.
But I was saddened to find that since the last reading I was at a couple of years ago, she'd decided to make herself and her work much, much more cerebral. She's young, and with youthful enthusiasm she's studying (on her own) Latin and philosophy and God knows what all. Her poetry now has flurries of big words fluttering through it like the big, floppy moths that circle the lights erratically on summer evenings and get tangled in your hair and fall in your drink and drive you off the patio.
Personally I think you should regard big words the way you do doctors or lawyers, and avoid them unless you really need them. Here's a really good poem that doesn't use any:
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick, the shepherd, blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who—a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
and coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who—a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
Pretty good, don't you think? Love's Labours Lost, Act V, scene ii. It captures the country winters of the playwright's youth in 12 scenes made of 107 words, none of them big. (Some of them aren't even words.) And Ben Jonson pointed out that he had "small Latin" but still, Jonson thought he was pretty good.
Here's another one:
Under the water
On the rocks resting,
The fallen leaves.
Joso, a disciple of haiku master Basho. No big words there either. I'm just sayin'. : )
10/28/06
At Play
The week flew by, and at its end I found myself at a new and palatial theater built by the University of Delaware. Evidently they have a nationally known theater education program, but although I worked in the same town for 14 years, it was news to me. I go to plays occasionally, almost always at someone else's suggestion, and they were opening this new space with, among other things, Cyrano de Bergerac. I'd read it and seen at least one film version, and it's fun, so I thought it would be interesting on stage. There's always one question I ask myself with live drama: Will that live-drama thing happen, or not? When it doesn't, you're often left just feeling bored, looking at your watch. Or else the actors are ranting away and even though you don't believe they really feel that way, even though you know they're just pretending, it makes you uncomfortable, like when a couple with problems get drunk and have a fight in the middle of a dinner party.
But when it does happen, it's pretty cool. It's more than suspension of disbelief, and maybe it's not that at all, really. I've only thought about it a little, but maybe you could think of it as a special and intense form of caring. Emotion gets expressed honestly for once, in a way it rarely is in so-called real life, and you're moved. In the play (spoiler alert!) Roxane comes through enemy lines to visit her handsome soldier husband Christian, unaware that the early wooing and continued letters that have moved her so much are really from Cyrano. She tells Christian, to his increasing dismay, that she once loved his face and form but now loves his eloquent soul far more, that he has helped her grow, that she would love him even if her were ugly. She's telling him, of course, that the man she really loves is Cyrano, who's been providing the eloquence. And Christian, shy and inarticulate with women but genuinely in love with her, begs her ever more despairingly to stop saying these things, and it was really pretty affecting, and something interesting happened, something I've seen before: There were titters through the audience. Both in movie theaters and at live drama, people don't seem comfortable with the occasional moment of pathos, and turn it into a laugh line. Subdued, nervous laughter, usually. It's the times, I suppose.
But! The performances were very solid all around, the guy who acted Cyrano was charismatic, which is a job requirement, and what especially got me off was the stagecraft. Often the actors posed themselves into visually interesting tableaus. Sometimes one group of actors would freeze and be cast into shadow as our attention was switched to another, then back to the first. A lot of planning and rehearsal went into this, and it worked well. In the last scene, as Cyrano's (spoiler!) life ebbs away, leaves float down occasionally, alighting delicately on Roxane's sewing table. And in the very beginning, set in a theater, there are two chandeliers on the ground, chandeliers of actual candles. The lighting is dim, and there's a hush, and the chandeliers are lit and glide up slowly, and the lights come up and the boisterous action begins. First a kind of sacramental hush, and then this bursting forth of light and activity, and maybe I'm a corny guy and easily impressed but it worked for me. The point is, when live drama works, it really works, and all the effort the company made, and the obvious millions the theater program put into this building are reminders of that, I suppose. At the end, the audience applauded vehemently, and when Cyrano came out they gave him a standing ovation. Personally I think standing ovations get handed out a little too readily nowadays, and although he was very, very good I didn't feel quite that carried away. But now I feel a little regret—I could have stood up for the general excellence and artistry of the production, and for the idea of people working hard and intelligently to put on a show that would move other people. I'd have stood up for that, if I had thought of it.
10/27/06
I Approved This Message
I was thinking about how depressing it can be, watching the kind of television campaign ads you see today. Sometimes the workings of democracy make me wonder if we ought to take another look at enlightened despotism. And then it came to me that the way they demonize each other was exactly what they did in the Monty Python sketch, probably some 35 years old now, about how election night treated the Silly Party and Sensible Party (since it was Britain, you also had the Slightly Silly and Very Silly parties). Here's an image that's glowed in my heart for all those years: the blissfully catatonic Silly Party candidate Tarquin Fim Tim Lim Bim Wim Bim Lim Bus Stop F'tang F'tang Olé Biscuitbarrel. There's a choppy version of the sketch on YouTube.
10/26/06
Few Costumes, Little Drama
As a dutiful chronicler, I went out to the town's Halloween parade last night. And as an unpaid chronicler, you get my honest assessment: phooey. I just assumed that the idea was for people, especially kids, to put on costumes and walk down the street, but it was really very light on that. The event was obviously organized by a person lacking in imagination or whimsy, a person who only thought to promote the various entities and constituencies that bulk large in small-town life—clubs, businesses, grownups. The mayor was there. In a car. Waving. Without a costume. I mean, why? It reminds me of an old joke. Q: What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants coming? A: He said, "Here come the elephants." But if Tarzan saw the mayor of a town of just over 5,000 driving along in a car in his regular clothes on a cool October evening, I don't think he'd say much at all. I didn't have a very strong reaction myself.
There were some motorcycles that rode down the street. A fire truck. Some rich folks in old cars. There were a few floats, actually, and a corps of percussionists who had dressed up. A few of the kids in the remarkably large crowd were dressed up a little. But it sure wasn't what some communities manage to do. I have higher hopes for the real Halloween. I don't ask for much from holidays, actually. I like a pumpkin pie for my birthday. A beer and a burger on the Fourth is nice. And at least a few good costumes on Halloween, so at the end of the evening you can say something like, "There weren't as many good ones as last year, but that rooster kid was amazing."
Times Have Changed: See, I was taught that if a dog bit a man, it wasn't news.
10/25/06
The Outer Man
Ugh, I need a good haircut, and feel like a mess generally. I need to buy some clothes, for one thing. The other night my sister gave me a belated birthday present, and it turned out to be a black-and-white plaid shirt. I'd never seen anything quite like it, but I thought it reminded me of something...
Freelancing is a factor in this, of course. It is literally ten steps from my bed to my office and desk. And there's no need to stop along the way to shower and shave. I've spent the early morning writing an overview of passenger rail improvements in the region. Then I got up, and looked in the bathroom mirror just to see what would look back. What looked back had a day's worth of beard, frowzy, unkempt hair, and a flannel shirt that looked slept in, and with good reason. I have a friend who used to run fishing trips, many of them into relatively wild places you camped in, and he told me that he always was careful to shave and wash while on such trips, for fear of letting himself go completely. (He's got a lot going on in his nature, and the savage king is one theme in the symphony. I could easily see him with a bear-claw necklace, drinking from a bowl fashioned from an enemy's skull.) At any rate, before the neighbors summon the police because they've seen a homeless man roaming around my house, watching DVDs and writing articles on my computer, I believe I'll try to pull up my socks a little. And maybe I'll see if the budget permits me to get some framing done and hang a little art in my underdecorated office, to create the impression that a civilized person lives here.
10/24/06
Marble-Hearted Fiend
I must say, those UNICEF people are ingrates. When I was little I carried the little orange box around at Halloween, collecting money for children less fortunate than myself. And how am I repaid? They send me the most fiendishly clever guilt-inducing direct mail package I believe I've ever seen. Usually they give you labels, or note cards, or some other little gift. But not UNICEF: They give you the means to save a child's life and dare you to put it in your own guilty, heartless, child-murdering pocket. I'm having a kind of staring match with the nickel right now. I do contribute to various charities, but almost never because of these direct-mail dealies. And if you're asking yourself, as I did, why they're sending the nickel to me if it could be saving a child's life right now, well, they've thought of that. They ask for $25, for $35, for $50, for $75, for $100, for $500, or for Other$____, and they ask for the nickel back too. "As a sign of support, please return this nickel with your contribution—it might be enough to save a child's life!" They say at the end of the letter that if you "can't make a donation today, please return the enclosed nickel as a sign of your support."
Well, I read the damned letter, and it's enough to make you writhe with guilt. Guilt for having food in the house, and for not having beri-beri or yaws. Guilt, quite literally, for being alive. So I looked up UNICEF through The Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance and they say it's pretty good—meets their 20 guidelines and so forth. Damn it! My self-esteem will cost me 25 bucks today. I also learned from that website that Charles Lyons is the president and chief executive officer of The United States Fund for UNICEF. He gets $456,069 in compensation. But he's worth it. Among other things, he's hired one bang-up direct mail writer.
10/23/06
YouTubin'
I often wake up in the middle of the night and wonder how I can make the world a better place. Mostly for me, but sometimes for other people too. And it occurred to me that I've been a dope. I've been wanting to have video on my websites, and develop others, without using up the limited space I've paid for. Then it came to me, last night, in a blinding flash—YouTube! They have huge servers and all kinds of fun technology to stream you short videos at no charge to your honored servant. So I happened to be at an event where the "flatland" form of extreme bicycling was being demonstrated. And that seemed like as good a test subject as any. Nome sayin'? So here it is...
10/22/06
Chores
I'm only slowly discovering the pleasures of chores around the house, because for a long time I didn't own a house and landlords usually don't want you do to your learning and make your mistakes on property you don't own yourself. I painted my apartment a few years ago, and found the greatest satisfaction in that you could imagine. Acres and acres of perfect, blemish-free cream-colored walls! I would just sit and gaze at them. I hated to put the place back together—I'd have lived happily with the bare walls. And although I hated the process of mowing my parents' suburban half-acre when I was a kid, I could see that it was nice to enjoy the product—that little vision of perfection imposed, for a week or so, on unruly Nature.
But today I have the distinct pleasure of having bought a new rake. They're ridiculously cheap, first of all, about the price of a beer. And you can choose plastic, or the more authoritative metal kind. I chose metal. Chores are a serious, grownup business. The rake is steel, OK? Fine swords are made out of steel. The mighty cannons of a battleship are made out of steel. My rake is made out of steel. And there you are.
I noticed to my further pleasure that the rake isn't quite done. There's a screw attached to a piece of cardboard, and you're supposed to screw it into a hole in the head of the rake to hold it on the handle. Perfect! That means I have occasion to get out my little-used power drill and do a starter hole. That's what you do, you know. So it goes in easily and the wood doesn't split. Then I can use the occasion to recharge the battery. More heavy metal stuff with electricity running through it lying casually on the counter. Very serious, very adult. Would a little kid be messing with that? No, sir. My brother in law expresses approval of me in some way maybe once every six or seven years, and the last time he did it was when I was moving, two years ago. I had the drill out, taking some shelves apart. "You have power tools?" he asked, impressed. He doesn't, not being very handy that way. He said something nice about an article I wrote in the late 1980s, and then nothing for a long time, and then the power drill observation. So you can see that I've really gotten some mileage out of this simple and rather inexpensive purchase.
But of course the perfectest part of this is that the actual raking won't take long at all. The area I need to rake is a little rowhouse front yard, smaller than many dining room tables I've seen. I could probably reach most of it from the porch. All that fun guy stuff and almost no actual boring manual labor! All of the pleasure, in other words, and very little of the attendant pain. How often can you say that?
10/21/06
One's Neighbors Loving
I was sleeping the sleep of the just last night when the neighbors woke me up again. It must be some sort of graveyard-shift deal, but every night at about 2:19 they go at it. Nothing fancy, just garden-variety rutting, the process as predictable as the timing. It's loud enough to wake a person up, obviously, but hardly provocative, any more than any other moderately noisy chore—popcorn popping, say, or old-fashioned eraser clapping. As I say, it woke me up, and I'm starting to realize that this happens often enough to be a factor in my alertness. Still, it was a chance to review the day, so that's what I did.
It was a busy and good one, with progress on all fronts. (But no checks, alas.) So by the end of the day, my most vexing problem was the ongoing one of the hair stylist's having abandoned me to return to her hometown. For the past week or two I've been mulling what to do. I want a good haircut, and the old guy-type place with the barber pole, the type of place I'd much prefer to go, just won't cut the gig. When I was little, I was fascinated with the barber shop my dad used to take me to. It had all the iconic stuff—butch wax, the ad for the unbreakable comb, all that. And it had, unbelievably, the enticingly disreputablePolice Gazette, which I never actually picked up because it seemed like it was created for a market composed exclusively of doddering perverted bums. At any rate, that's the kind of place I'd just as soon go, but if I want a decent haircut I need a "stylist," not a barber. I have curly hair, in a word. Once I was working over the summer in a factory, and this one employee took me around. One of the other people I was introduced to was African American, and he leaned in to my tour guide's ear and whispered something, grinning at me. "What was that all about?" I asked, as we walked away. "He said you've got the curliest hair he's ever seen on a white guy," I was told.
So. I need a stylist. Frankly, I need all the help I can get, because on my best day I look like a dentist. People say this to my face, as if it's not that bad a thing. About a year ago (as longtime readers may remember, so just skip ahead) an attractive young receptionist at my last place was giving me the approving sidelong look that says, "If I were twenty years older I'd give you a shot." But she floored me with her first comment. "Are you a dentist?" Still the approving look, as my heart sank. "No," I wittily replied. She brought the lash down again. "You look like a dentist," she said. I sagged. "I've often thought that myself," I said, "but never happily." She was unperturbed. "You know," she said relentlessly, still with the look, "like the well-groomed dentist type."
I know, I know, dear reader—I should have been happy and responded graciously from the first instant. Mea culpa, but maybe you don't know what it's like to look like a dentist. It's very claustrophobic for one's inner Errol Flynn. At any rate, I've pointed out that I look like a dentist on a good day. If I don't have a good haircut, if I get one of those stylists who try to make you look sort of swingy, I end up resembling a third-rate Mafioso. So I marry a good stylist, I always ask for her and stick with her through thick and thin—if I have to wait four days, I wait four days. There are worse things than looking like a well-groomed dentist. But it's always serial monogamy, they always move on, and you can see that most of my visits to hair-cutting emporia are fraught. Just part of being me.
So I've been eyeing this new place in town, right on the corner, "Salon Allure," which sounds like Garrison Keillor made it up. Yesterday I took the plunge and went in. They've got all the requisite fancy furnishings, and a receptionist comes out. She's somewhere between 11 and 19, skinny, flashily attired, with a sort of indeterminate ethnicity. Do they do men's hair? They do. Do I want an appointment? Yes, indeed. Every time she addresses me, she calls me "babe," the way old-fashioned waitresses call you "hon." It's a clipped, brisk thing, sounding like "beb." "Thursday OK for you, beb?" "There you go, beb." Like that. It threw me off—I thought I caught a distant whiff of the massage parlor, I suppose. I felt like I was in the wrong movie—miscast as a sad, lonely guy, trying to connect with people, adrift in the red-light district. That's not me at all. All I want is a decent haircut, and maybe to be told occasionally, by someone who means it and thinks it's a good thing, that I look like a well-groomed dentist. So anyway, I have an appointment Thursday—it was OK for me—with Monica. So I guess we'll see. Joy has left—that really was her name—but life, as it often does, goes on.
10/20/06
Off Color Story
Finally, after the better part of a year, I had to produce some hard copy for a client. I've been pretty much paperless at home, but the time had come, so off to the store I went to get the hideously expensive ink that inkjets use. One reason for going paperless is just that hideous expense, and another is that Epson all-in-one printers work beautifully when they work, but they're kind of neurotic and for a technical reason I'll spare you their print head nozzles clench shut hysterically if they sense the slightest neglect. You have to print often, or this happens. Attention must be paid! Having failed to respond to its neediness, I had allowed my printer to get clenched, but when I resupplied it with ink it actually worked fine right away.
Well, except for the yellow. The yellow sputtered and died. No yellow at all in the test patterns. So I asked myself: How important is yellow?
And immediately this quietly strange question reminded me of the passage from Catch-22 in which Yossarian attends education sessions that Clevinger organizes to explain the war effort:
Yossarian attended the education sessions because he wanted to find out why so many people were working so hard to kill him. A handful of other men were also interested, and the questions were many and good when Clevinger and the subversive corporal finished and made the mistake of asking if there were any.
"Who is Spain?"
"Why is Hitler?"
"When is right?"
"Where was that stooped and mealy-colored old man I used to call Poppa when the merry-go-round broke down?"
"How was trump at Munich?"
"Ho-ho beriberi."
and
"Balls!"
all rang out in rapid succession...
And just like poor bewildered Clevinger, I was brought to a standstill by my own question. Then this morning I tried the printer again. After one cleaning cycle, the yellow worked perfectly. I felt a little let down. Now I have to go back to asking myself really boring questions, like whether I should buy stamps today or wait until tomorrow. But if yellow should suddenly become important, I'm ready. I guess that's a good thing.
Progress Marches On: Things are not universally going to hell in a handbasket. A cold front came through today and the attendant winds blew a huge limb off the dead tree in front of my neighbor's yard, and the limb blocked half the road. Within no more than 20 minutes, the borough brought a woodchipper by and ground it to sawdust, then took themselves off. Rising tide of inefficiency? Not in my town, pal. And here I read this morning, with no fanfare at all, that scientists just achieved a big breakthrough in making things invisible. I mean, that cannot possibly have been an easy thing to do. There may be slackers and slouches about—the car-rental industry comes to mind—but those scientists are on it, man.
10/19/06
Ahead of My Time
It's so easy to be misunderstood. I'm busy again today, so in the interest of two goals, a) using time efficiently and b) smallifying my carbon footprint, I stepped outside and hung up some wash. Of course, I had just worked out, so I had gym shorts and shoes on and little else. I had just lathered my face upstairs, preparatory to shaving, and I was letting my whiskers soften for a little while. In that little while, I figured I'd have time to take the wet wash and hang it up. Very efficient, you must admit. But if you were in the alley, you'd see some loony, naked to the waist with lather on his face, emerge from the house and start obliviously hanging up wash, and the fact is you see all sorts of things but you almost never see lathered people puttering around outdoors. And if you had a digicam you could have gotten video, added a soundtrack—I'd suggest Sade's "Smooth Operator"—put it on YouTube, and by this evening people from Quito, Ecuador to Ulan Bator, Mongolia would be forwarding the Shaving Cream Guy video to each other and laughing their butts off. Can you imagine how it feels to actually be Shaving Cream Guy? Strangers coming up to you on the street and singing "Smooth Operator" and making shaving motions? Nothing funny about that, man!
Humph. Now I'm sort of fuming about it, even if it hasn't happened.
10/18/06
The Cruise of the Snark
Funny, but now that I don't work at the old office, the gossip and vitriol that once seemed so necessary to maintaining balance and sanity just seem sad. I used to take great glee in describing this one as a sniveling pickpocket, that one as a psycho control freak, the third as a pompous bullying mediocrity. But in a matter of days, that seems to be melting away. I've lost almost any interest in hearing gossip about the latest outrages. The cramped and nasty pleasure I might once have taken in describing certain people in unflattering terms is quickly fading. I can see that it served a purpose once, but there's no point now. They're just not my problem. And it feels much better, really, to be positive and kind about as many people as you can manage to feel that way toward. I spent the morning working, then I worked out, then I took a few pictures of flowers along people's porches here, and now I'm working again. There's a Haydn piano sonata playing in the background. Could be worse, you know. Could be worse. I'll continue to be a snarky person occasionally. I think if you did a complete snarkectomy on me, it would be like taking the mainspring out of a clock, I just wouldn't go any more. But being really angry at people who suddenly can't mess with you any more—well, it just seems like there are better ways to use that energy. Like making $$$, so bye for now. Nice flar, ain't it?
10/17/06
Buckling Down
Last week was my first week as a newly minted freelancer, and it took at least that much time to settle in. If you've ever gone to a new job, you know the routine. Somebody shows you where the bathroom, copier, and coffee machine are. You get the drill on the fax machine. They bring you around to meet everyone, which is a social Golgotha for all concerned. You're expected to make cheerful small talk with 87 people in a row, all of whom you have nothing in common with except that they work there. This is an accident of fate, and doesn't connect you with them. So there's nothing to talk about. There'll be more to talk about in the weeks to come, when you all get to know each other, but for now it's all forced smiles and forced talk, 87 times in a row. Some will be enemies, and some will be friends, and some could be so distant during your tenure that their lives could be the most amazing operatic melodramas at home and you'd never know. Friends and enemies don't always emerge during the first week, but other workplace species do. The total buttheads will make themselves known, certainly. Ask a simple question, offer half a sandwich, broach a conversational topic in the lunchroom—buttheadism wears itself on its own sleeve, so you'll know. You'll encounter the chatterboxes the first week, and the soreheads. A special species of sorehead is the one that sidles up, looks to one side and then the other, and starts giving you the business about who's a suckup to who and who's having an affair and who only has the job because they're related to the boss and so forth. And there's always the type who comes rushing up breathlessly to ask about some incredibly complicated situation. Do you know what the decision was on the X-2 framillator distribution network? Have they decided on the parameters of the paradigm yet, because Ms. So-and-So needs to put in the order by Thursday and they have to get the P.O. number and attach the blue copy of the redemption form? Do you? Do you? And of course you don't. You barely remember the way back to the bathroom. It's your first week, for Christ's sake.
But today is the second day of my second week. I haven't even dealt with any of that stuff on this new job, because it's just me and the cat. I know where the bathroom is, because it's the bathroom in my house. And if I don't want to irretrievably stamp myself in my own opinion as the office goof-off, I'd better get some things done today. But let's have a beer after work, OK?
10/16/06
Red in Tooth and Claw
Look, I know what people say about other people who take an interest in birds. Friends gave me a bird indentification book a long time ago, and I learned to know the common ones. In the course of hiking and fishing I've learned more. A few times a year I go out on excursions more or less centered around seeing birds. That's as far as it goes. I wouldn't say I'm an avid birder, or anything. I eat them avidly, certainly. I've considered hunting them, and gone out with friends to help train their hunting dogs. Some birds went along on that trip too, and in all frankness it wasn't a good day for a number of them. That was OK with me. I'm not the kind of person who gets all frantic with dismay over things like that. As I often say, it's not a Disney cartoon out there in the natural world.
But you know how it is—people think that an interest in birds means you can't deal with, you have a faint horror of, the realities of life. You're a wimp, a weiner, a pallid divinity student sort of person, all that. Supposedly you go into swooning raptures over these marvelously ephemeral, close-to-pure-spirit creatures because you're too bloodless to deal with the brawling, flesh-and-bone human world. One day the subject of my less-than-avid interest in birds came up, and a friend of mine who's a huge football fan—in particular, of the Eagles, funnily enough—gave me a look of amused contempt. "I think that speaks for itself," he said.
That's why the people who actually sit for hours at the lookout spots at a place called Hawk Mountain interest me. If they're bloodless and wimpy, it mostly doesn't show. Raptors, which include hawks and falcons (don't ask) migrate in the fall, and they fly along the ridges in the Appalachian Mountains, heading south. The prevailing winds strike these long ridges and blow upward, carrying the birds higher as they fly. On a good day in the fall, after a weather front passes through and kicks the wind up, several dozen people will sit on a rocky outcrop, looking north. The birds appear as tiny dots, and it's your job to spot those dots and call out where to look for them. There are highly experienced staff and volunteers there, with powerful spotting scopes, and they act as the high priests. They'll usually spot the bird first and identify it, which is a pretty good trick when it's still a dot. But the birds can appear anywhere, at any moment, and a sharp-eyed person who pays attention can spot one first, and tell everyone where to look for it in relation to long-established landmarks. "Two birds approaching, slope of 1, just above the horizon, moving into the broken clouds," someone will say. Everyone looks in that direction, and if you have binoculars or a camera with a powerful telephoto lens you use them. "Got 'em," someone else will say. "Sharpies." All the commonly seen birds have nicknames; "Sharpies" are sharp-shinned hawks. There were 217 sharpies that went past the lookouts yesterday. You sit for hours, looking northeast along the ridge, watching these animals come sliding along south. Sometimes they pass closely, and you get something between a good and a magnificent look at them. At other times they'll stay far enough away to still be dots as they fly. But it's impressive to see a natural process like this at work, and know it's something that happens on a global scale. Some of the birds we saw will spend the winter in Panama, at the southern end of the continent.
At one point, a bird folded its wings and dropped like a stone, and people gasped. That was the closest I heard people come to swooning or rapture—mostly they were just impressed. The bird was streaking down toward some inattentive member of a prey species. "At the moment of impact," says Charles Fergus in Wildlife of Pennsylvania and the Northeast, "a special bone-and-tendon arrangement causes the toes to clench, driving the talons deep into the prey's vitals. A snap from the stout, hooked bill can crush a prey animal's skull or break its spine." We all knew that. One staffer grinned. "Somebody's dinner," he said. The crowd chuckled. It's not a Disney cartoon out there.
Now, I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea. Some people would rather sit around a warm living room, drinking beer, eating chicken wings, and shouting "Kill him! Kill him!" as a muscular man wearing tights runs across a television screen. Occasionally one of those men will get banged up a little as the game is played. Sometimes they limp off the field. But usually they bounce up and get a friendly pat on their butts. Me, I think that speaks for itself. And spending a crisp fall afternoon in front of a television seems a little—how to say—bloodless, I guess, to me. But you have to be broadminded and understanding about this sort of thing, I suppose. Some types of birdwatching are actually fairly demanding, and let's face it—not everyone can cut it.
10/15/06
Outside This House
Sorry for just sort of saying hi today, but I have to get ready to go hiking here. Once on a Simpsons Halloween show, it turned out, after one of those typical vampire infestations we're all familiar with, that Marge was the head vampire. The family is thunderstruck, and Marge says, "I do have a life outside this house, you know." I want to be able to say the same thing occasionally, so I'm off—but I promise to bring back pictures. Not necessarily of hawks: Even on a good day, they're mostly barely visible dots. But the landscapes are nice, and it's interesting to look at people looking at hawks. Anyway, have fun, and we'll see you tomorrow. L8R!
10/14/06
Opinions Humble and Otherwise
Yesterday I went to a community fair held in a local school because I'm amassing film clips about such things for a project. In the process, I got sucked into judging some pastry, specifically chocolate cookies, brownies, and "bars" made with various kinds of Hershey's chocolate. (Even little community fairs have corporate sponsors these days.) This is more work than people who haven't done it will believe. You have about five or six variables to consider—appearance, consistency, texture, flavor, and so forth—and it's not the orgy you think. You take a bite of a cookie and try to think simultaneously, or at least in rapid succession, about whether it's soft but not too gooey, crumbly but not sandy, about whether the chocolate is rich but a little one-dimensional, about whether that little hint of salt offsets the chocolate and sugar or verges on intruding—it's more thought than cookie-eating usually entails. We each had some individual reactions but we reached a consensus, and I hasten to say that it wasn't all onerous labor. The eats were pretty good.
Then a woman of a certain age appeared in the room and pointed a camera at us. This was the entertainment columnist for the local weekly paper, and she's very entertaining in her own right. Like many of her ilk, it's a challenge for her to get two accurate statements in a row. A very talented artist and writer who lives in town had a play he'd written performed here a couple of years ago about his childhood, growing up on the prairie somewhere in the midwest. This columnist went to the play and reported back that the characters had talked about shooting at attacking Indians from the windows of their house in the 1930s. I hadn't gone to the play myself, but I was dubious. As far as I know, the hostilities between native Americans and settlers had settled down by the '30s. You were just as likely to be attacked by pirate ships or alien spacecraft, and—again, I haven't seen the play in question—I strongly suspected we were talking about either something from a decade long previous or some sort of childhood fantasy. The fact is that this whole newspaper is operated on a simple principle—you send a warm body somewhere, and you print verbatim whatever sort of copy and images the warm body produces when it gets back to the office. They're really not very fussy. They'd send a clam out in a bucket of water to cover things, if the clam could learn to type.
The clam wouldn't have to bother much with spelling, because the human reporters don't, so when this woman asked my name I said the letters as slowly and clearly as I could. Then we were all talking about the judging, and just to mess with the columnist I said it was a "gustatory phantasmagoria." She peered at me, and narrowed her eyes. "Exactly how much chocolate have you had?" she asked. I thought that was pretty good, actually.
10/13/06
The Good Old New Yorker
It was my birthday dinner last night, and my mom told me she'd gotten me a subscription to The New Yorker. Every writer should have one, she thinks. Well, see, I used to read it, and got a great deal from it. But the more I learned about journalism in general, the more clearly I saw the typical weaknesses, the more I read stuff that seemed like pointless posturing, the more the magazines I subscribed to began rising up in unread piles, like stalagmites. For years now, I've looked with a jaundiced eye at the journalistic world, high, low, and middle. How much of it is good? I think you know the answer to that one. Let's take a quick look at Slate, for instance. They're very high-level for a Web magazine. I think it was sort of useful of them to debunk the new Charles Frazier novel, for instance. It might be good, bad, or indifferent, but the last one was popular, this one will probably sell well too, and their criticisms seem plausible. You learn something. There's value there. But then they go and try to debunk pick-your-own ochards. This seems to me far more an exercise in overeducated yuppies being pointlessly snippy. "The apple-picking experience sheds light on some unflattering truths about the American economy." It becomes a habit of the high-level journalist to think that everything sheds light, to the discerning and highly paid eye of the author, on some unflattering truth or other. Dude, if you didn't enjoy your trip to the orchard, don't go again. But don't feel you have to write about it, OK? It happens I go to an orchard nearby every fall, because they have these huge Stayman apples. They're fresh, of course. The author doesn't mention this as a reason for an orchard visit, but it matters. And I like Staymans because they're firm and tart. Apples come in varieties. If you try a number of the popular ones, you'll probably pick some favorites. The author doesn't seem to have much patience for this. "If you thought comparing apples to oranges was a fruitless endeavor, try comparing apples to apples," he says. Well, I've done it. I really like Staymans. In the time it takes to read that article, you could try two or three apples. You could experience them directly. You could also pick a whole bunch of them, in that amount of time. It's kind of fun. Or not. It's fun for you if you think it is. And that's all that really needs to be said on the subject. I'll read The New Yorker when it comes, if I can find the time. But I always seem to find the time every fall to go buy those fresh Staymans. They make my world happier, for a few weeks. The New Yorker used to make my world better, too. Pauline Kael taught me to see more in films, and John McPhee taught me to see more in just about everything, and Calvin Trillin taught me how loudly I could laugh. If The New Yorker in its current incarnation isn't scolding me about unpleasant truths all the time, if it can add as much to my life as those Staymans, I'll be glad. We'll just have to see.
10/12/06
Happy Birthday to Me
The breeze just blew a score of leaves off the tree in my yard and sent them fluttering past the window. It's my birthday. I don't really plan any celebration. There are things I need to do today, and tonight I'm having dinner with my family. But I got myself one present: the DVD of the film Ikiru, by Akira Kurosawa. I heard about the film years ago, and was intrigued. An aging bureaucrat, dead inside for 30 years, learns he has stomach cancer and will be dead in fact in a matter of months. The film chronicles his quest for personal meaning. I rented it, years ago, and it's haunted me ever since. And this year, having decided that I, too, want to regain a sense of meaning and purpose, I bought it. I was watching it last night. There's a wonderful scene where the protagonist has an epiphany, where he realizes just what he needs to do with the rest of his life, and he goes rushing madly out of a restaurant, on fire to get on with his plan. Behind him, a party of young people are singing "Happy Birthday to You." They're singing to a friend who's coming up the stairs, of course. But of course it has become clear to our formerly dead-inside friend that you either live now or you don't live at all, and if you live now then you're reborn every moment. You really are. So happy birthday to me. And happy birthday to you too.
P.S. I'd hate to let a birthday go by without pointing out my very favorite version of the birthday song, the one that cracks me up like a little kid every time:
Happy birthday to you
You live in a zoo
You look like a monkey
And you smell like one too!
10/11/06
The Check Was in the Mail
Day 3 of the big freelancing adventure, and I'm working away. At least two good friends have suggested things I could do now that my time is free. What they don't know is that my mood is approximately that of a convict (innocent, of course) who's just escaped jail and is hiding in the brush as the searchlights go over his head. If someone were to come up to that convict, lean down, and genially say, "Now that your time is free, you might do such and so..." the convict might feel a sense of cognitive dissonance. Yes, my time is less structured. But food, shelter, medical care, fly-tying supplies, everything that costs money is suddenly in jeopardy. Not guaranteed. Standing on shaky ground. I'm good for a couple of months, beyond which the good Lord may or may not provide. I don't regret leaving the prison, but I don't feel like I have extra time for Chinese checkers or whatever. In fact, yesterday was pretty stressful. I have a number of projects getting critical and in the afternoon a guy called from a print shop to say that a newsletter I'd given them had some technical problems. That blew two hours. So I'm three days into it, and fully aware that this is real. I have to go out in the world and make money or I'll be broke. Not broke enough to resort to cannibalism, maybe, but broke enough that I'll have to do some very disadvantageous things with some tax-sheltered savings. Financial cannibalism, you might say.
But today, I went to the mailbox, and there was a check in it. A check for a job I billed two months ago. Not a huge check, mind you, but it would buy a whole bunch of groceries. I've gotten plenty of other freelancing checks, but I had a day job then. This check pushes the wolf back a little further from my door. I stood there, and thought to myself, "This is how it works. Cool." Not that I can relax now, or ever. My lance may be free, but my time isn't, not until the cash flow is very steady and has been for a while. And maybe not even then. A job isn't a guaranteed income, but it feels like it is. Freelancing isn't guaranteed, and you always know it. And right now I've got to finish something, so I'll say adios, muchachos y muchachas. Be careful out there!
10/10/06
Divorce is Always Hardest on the Hair
I mentioned that the woman who cuts my hair left me. We were happy together, things were working out, I got compliments volleyed at me from all directions after every haircut. But she and her husband decided that they weren't really happy in Delaware, and wanted to move back to western Pennsylvania. So there you are. But the thing is, in haircutting relationships, just as in romantic ones, it's an iron law that after someone you liked goes away, you have to deal with a series of freaks and losers before someone else acceptable comes along. But life doesn't wait, so you get on with it, and today I pick up the phone book and I recognize with a sigh that the series of freaks and losers in the haircut realm is leading off with, I swear to God, the "Outlandish Style Hair and Tanning Salon." Two locations, so if I don't have any luck with the OSHTS in Avondale I can try the OSHTS in Landenberg. My cup runneth over, it seems. I will, of course, follow the phone book's suggestion and also look in "Beauty Salons." It happens I have curly hair, and I need a specialist. But I also know I'll have to date some bad stylists, even some outlandish ones, before I find someone I can settle down with. But hair grows back with time, just the way heartaches ease. So it'll all work out.
10/9/06
Wading In
Today is the first day of my fabulous new freelancing career, and it's not even 10 o'clock yet and I've been up for hours (worked late last night too) and that was on Sunday, most of the day of which I worked during, much of the work unpaid, so I guess I really am a freelancer at that. Not a savvy one, mind you—savvy freelancers remember to ask for money. I've got a good bit of paying work too, of course, but I could sure use more. But now I have the time to look for it. I also have plenty of knotty problems to straighten out. I know it's not good form to call them problems. It's apparently considered good form to say "challenges," which are good things, or at least "issues," which is more neutral, but then again it's considered good form to say "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" during fraternity hazings. I say the devil with good form: A problem is a problem.
But don't get me wrong, on this first day of freelancing I'm actually pretty thrilled. I may live the life of a hunted animal financially, I may never again be complacently secure in my solvency, I may in fact never draw a truly relaxed breath for months or years to come, but I'm free free free and that counts for a lot. The cat is sitting in a patch of sunlight beside my desk. The window is open, and a dog is barking across the street. Car doors slam, an airplane drones overhead. Power tools, green grass. Years ago, in a previous freelancing phase, I did an article about new trends in office park design for a business magazine. I went to one place where the owner enthusiastically showed me the skylights in the high ceiling. "You're part of the world," he would cry, opening his arms. I thought of him right now because for the first time in a long while, I feel like I'm part of the world again. It's a good feeling, I find. And listen, tomorrow I have an author to suggest for you. See? Practical value to be found at this blog! Come again!
10/8/06
The Cobbler's Children
Ah, the wisdom of the folk. I often quote the expression, "The cobbler's children have no shoes" to point out life's little ironies. Like today, I barely was outside, despite the beautiful fall day that it was. I took a few sniffs of air on my porch, but most of the time I was working on a newsletter for a group I volunteer for. The group, actually, is the Sierra Club. A friend who called this evening asked if I was aware of the irony in not going out on a beautiful day because you're helping an organization devoted to the outdoors. I said—well, actually I kind of growled—that I was indeed aware of that.
You know what, though? I'll bet most cobbler's children actually had fine shoes. Why wouldn't they? I just saw in a biography of Hans Christian Andersen that his father, "the poor shoemaker Hans Andersen, owned books, among them the Bible, Holberg's comedies and The Arabian Nights." I've never personally been in a household that could provide its children with Holberg's comedies but couldn't provide them with shoes.
10/7/06
Pot of Rot
That's what potpourri means, and today it'll be particularly appropriate as I just add silly stuff now and then. But first, to start the day off right, bad album covers. Among my musings this morning: What do young people roll joints on, nowadays? If it's an ongoing problem, I'd recommend going on Ebay and getting a copy of "Eat a Peach." If I recall correctly, EAP was a double album with the sleeve made of non-glossy cardboard, and if you shook it just right the seeds would roll out of the pot and down to the hinge, where you could roll them right into an ashtray. Very convenient.
Well, the daylight hours have melted away. I made a huge pot of vegetable soup, and worked on calendar listings for the local Sierra Club newsletter. That's not much to do, in a day. I did a lot of other things that don't really rise to the level of things you could say you actually did. It was a perfect puttering day, drizzly and cool. So I guess that was OK. Rome isn't burning. It's Saturday. And my birthday is just a few days away, and I just made a major life change that takes some digesting. It's a perfect puttering day, after all, quiet and contemplative. Maybe Donald Trump charged around all day making artful deals, I don't know. Good for him, if he did.
Interim Update
It's still the 6th, but I just had to comment on how Slate, while a generally fine online publication, has an occasional tendency toward mindless snarkifying. Why in the world would you bother to debunk Harry Potter? Well, to sell a book to people who generally need to feel superior to mass culture, of course. But still, the boy is fiction. He doesn't exist. He's make-believe. I scanned the article for satire, for self-mockery, but no. The guy is seriously arguing that nobody should admire Harry Potter. Well, for that matter, when I was a little kid I noticed with some shock that Wimpy would always sell out Popeye to Bluto if bribed with a whole tray of hamburgers. It was OK that he liked hamburgers of course, but to betray Popeye on an important matter seemed unforgivable to me. I couldn't regard him as an amiable figure of fun, at least for a while, after he would do that. Plus he was fat. And I'd hate to be his cardiologist. And if Slate wants to pay me to go on in this vein for a while, they can reach me with that little green box at the top of the page. But maybe we should just lighten up on debunking fictional characters. Bunk is kind of what they are, by definition, when you think about it.
10/6/06
Depending
I woke up in the middle of the night, and it was raining. So I thought about the rain falling on the roofs and trees and cars and sidewalks, the water covering everything, like in the poem The Red Wheelbarrow. And then I thought about little kids, turning their gaping mouths to the rain to catch a few drops. I don't romanticize the world of the kid, as a rule, but there's something right about that.
Yesterday evening I did the last few tasks I had to do at my now-former job, and left the key on my now-former boss's desk. Which means that today is, as we used to be told back in the day by innumerable posters and buttons, the first day of the rest of my life. I'm a little groggy from lack of sleep, but happy. I was talking to a friend yesterday about various personages in the now-former workplace, and she asked me how long I thought I would be angry about it all. So I thought about it. And told her that I would stop being angry as soon as I was consistently doing good, meaningful work that made me proud. Well, gang, here I sit, it's 8:23 in the morning, I've had two cups of coffee, and my desk is relatively clear. Nobody can tell me what to do today but me. I just thought about Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, saying "I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars." I don't have to do anything I think is stupid or pointless. There's nothing holding me back from doing good, meaningful work that makes me proud, to the extent that I'm capable. I just have to begin. So if you'll excuse me, I will. Have a good day yourselves, you hear?
10/5/06
Now It Can Be Told
No big deal, really, happens all the time. A couple of years ago, a certain fellow who worked for an association newsletter was given a project to develop. His division director thought he was the guy for the job, and he was excited at the prospect. But before things could really get rolling, the director left. Somehow the certain fellow's boss ended up running the project and gaining the kudos flowing therefrom. The certain fellow confronted the boss, and said "I thought I was supposed to be running that." The boss coolly said, "What makes you think you aren't?" Because, see, the certain fellow had been given a role titled "primary responsibility for content" that meant he was supposed to do all the grunt work. The actual project, as newly conceived by the deeply uncreative conspirators plotting against our hero, was an insipid joke.
So our hero plotted himself—to leave for pastures new. He worked in his spare time to learn new skills. He studied the trends in communications. He developed new contacts. He did tons of freelance work. He spoke little of his plans, except cryptically, to his friends, like Catch-22's Orr.
And just recently he made his move, announcing at his latest performance evaluation that he would leave to be a freelancer. And just before he left, it turns out that the association newsletter, essentially run independently by the boss guy for more than 20 years, was suddenly given as a plaything to another director in the division. It turns out that the boss guy's efforts to curry favor were not as effective as he had thought. And he had no true friends or allies. He hadn't really made the newsletter something that was meaningful. He hadn't used his leadership to make something out of it, so there was really no argument to let him continue to be independent. (The new project was the same way; it was widely considered pointless.) The boss guy, while assiduous and dutiful, had never really cared much about the direction or purpose of his efforts. He rarely thought of the readers, and he tried only to please his masters to the point that they would leave him alone. He cared little for others, and never, never stuck out his neck to defend someone in a turf battle.
And in the end, he was pushed down in the mud by the bigger, meaner, smarter kids, and his bicycle was taken away. If he'd had some friends in the world, or if he'd been able to show that the newsletter would suffer without his leadership, things might have been different. Near the end of A Christmas Carol, the few people who had attended to the dead Scrooge meet in a dingy pawnbroker's shop. They've robbed him of his few last possessions, but they feel little guilt; if he hadn't driven everyone away in his life, someone who cared about him might have been there at the end, and the bedclothes and such wouldn't have been stolen. "It's a judgment on him," says his charwoman, Mrs. Dilber.
I don't know what a charwoman does, but I do know that I personally want to have some meaning in my life, and thus I want some meaning in my work. The aforegoing is a fable, by the way, and any resemblance to real persons living or dead is completely etc. etc. But just by coincidence, today or maybe tomorrow is in fact my last day at my old job. I'm going to freelance for a while and see how that goes.
10/4/06
A Grain of Salt
I believe there's a legal concept called "fair comment," in which you can criticize a person for, say, a poor job performance or lack of qualifications. But not being a lawyer, I'm unsure about whether I could say that a particular person is far less qualified for a particular position than a blind, senile, one-armed baboon (who is afflicted with mange to boot) who's nevertheless equipped with a plastic spinning arrow mounted on a piece of cardboard that's marked "Yes," "No," and "Give Banana Me" with the reasoning being that the baboon would be right occasionally by virtue of the laws of probability, assuming the baboon could be trained to spin the arrow. I don't have the legal understanding to say whether it is or isn't fair comment, and thus is or isn't libel, to say that a given person would be far less qualified than the baboon. So I won't.
Now I'm casting about for another topic for today. Ooh! I just remembered! You know that job I'm about to leave, the one in fact that I've only got hours left at? Well, suddenly there's a new boss above my own manager! Cool! Didn't people used to chirp "Change is good" not so many years ago? Well, this'll be a change, all right. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords!
One more thought, folks, as a kind of moral to my fable: If you think you're not being managed well, and the situation can't be improved, leave. Don't hang around. Don't even look back. Remember Satchel Paige's advice, "Don't look back, something may be gaining on you," and remember Lot's wife. Just leave. I can't give you better advice than that.
10/3/06
Over the River
Well, ducklings, I have to go visit relatives in Philadelphia tonight. I'm not looking forward to the trip. It's only about 30 miles, but it's taken close to three hours at times, because the traffic can get very bad very quickly. A whole lot of people live in and around Philadelphia. Why? No idea. I can't think of a reason you'd consider it better than any other place. But I certainly know a lot people who live there mostly because they know other people who live there. Which reminds me of the old vaudeville joke: "Why were you born in Kansas City?" "Because I wanted to be near my mother." In other words, people live in Philadelphia because other people live in Philadelphia.
The other factor in my lack of looking forward to this is that I'm fried with hay fever and antihistamines and fatigue. At times like this, the phrase "hospitalized for exhaustion" doesn't sound like a misfortune. It sounds relaxing and pleasant. They'd give you a private room, I suppose, and drinks in those adult sippy cups, and strong drugs, and they'd tiptoe around and everyone would tell you not to worry about anything, just rest up. I really don't see a downside.
10/2/06
Fine Print
I still have the flavor in my mouth of the fine chocolate a coworker brought back from Germany, which is the old country to her. She visits her mom, and brings back goodies for us. There were some white-chocolate hearts mit zarter, and I don't know much German so I had to wonder what zarter is. It could be pureéed sea snakes, for all I know, but if it was you should buy some if you get a chance, it's good. Generally you have to be careful eating foods that are described in a language that isn't yours and you can't translate every single word. I ordered rillettes once in France, without really knowing much about it. I had confused it with something else certainly, because I discovered it's essentially congealed fat with meat laced through it. And then once I saw a menu that said rognons de veau, and I thought I generally knew that it was veal, because that's what veau means. You might assume that rognons go with veal—a nice sauce, perhaps, or an ingredient in the sauce, some sort of piquant berry, perhaps. But I looked it up later, out of curiosity. Rognons are kidneys. Sort of changes the meaning. So I carry a dictionary when I travel. I got lucky with zarter, but nobody's luck lasts forever.
10/1/06
Alienation
Hi! Sorry I didn't blog yesterday, but I was busy doing a newsletter for the local Sierra Club and I just didn't really have much to say. But I decided to relax last night with a dopey film—a flick, to be precise—so that's what I did. I was at the library, and had my hand on The Seventh Seal, arguably the most serious film ever made, but really the only thing that appealed to me at the moment was its availability. So browsing the "S" films a bit more, I came to Stargate, and that's what I watched. The plot is thinly (very thinly) based on the idea that visits from extraterrestrials explain the incredible things about ancient Egypt—like, for instance, how incredibly humorless it was. It might sound funny, if you think about it, to describe the plot of any work of science fiction as "implausible," especially one from the Aliens Taught Us Everything school, so let's say it was negligible. You could neglect it, ignore it, eat a pork chop or pet a cat while it was on. Better storytelling, like in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," commands your attention. This stuff just commands your derision. Ebert didn't like it either, by the way. But while we're on the usually neglected by this blog subject of mass culture, let me protest in the most vehement terms the treatment of the new film Idiocracy. I'm a big Mike Judge fan, and he's made a film that strikes me as both potentially (I haven't seen it, because I can't, goddamnit) hilarious and truly satiric, as opposed to the sophomoric mockery that passes for satire most of the time. You know why we can't see this film, gang? Ya wanna know why? (Imagine me blinking and twitching with rage here.) Focus groups! Yeah, focus groups! Anytime you're blandly unoffended by something, blame a focus group. The next time you can't buy licorice, blame a focus group. The next time you see a film with a kajillion dollars' worth of special effects and a story that isn't worth a nickel, blame a focus group. I'll propose a new and necessary verb: to soccermomify, which denotes the process of incrementally rendering bland and inoffensive an entire culture. Every time you see something soccermomified, you'll know why, right?
This is the second weekend that I've had to stay in all day because of the Sierra Club. It's kind of ironic. I'd have gone fishing otherwise. What I've discovered is that the Sierra Club is very interested in the environment, but me, I'm mainly interested in the outdoors.
© Copyright 2005 by Matt Freeman. All Rights Reserved.
