Start now!
Okay, no matter where you are, and what time you think it is, while you’re reading this it’s Hammer Time.
No, not M.C. Hammer, - the guy with the harem pants who was secretly funded by the Ritalin Manufacturers of America, but instead, an actual hammer. A hammer with a wooden handle and a metal head to be gripped firmly and brought down like Thor’s Hammer on any and all clocks in the room, the house, the neighborhood.
In my personal time zone where I am writing this right now, the glass and plastic opaque faces of three alarm clocks are in pieces on the floor. In this region, 21 hands, representing seven analog timepieces – hours, minutes, seconds, have been broken off and piled like kindling in the fireplace. In each of three computers, the prying eyes of digital time have been banished from the screen.
I’ve had all I can take and I just can’t take it anymore.
While you’re reading this the moments that you are wasting cannot be catalogued under Eastern Standard or Rocky Mountain or Greenwich Mean or any government controlled time.
This is my time.
I’ve got all the time in the world.
This is my world.
And you are free now - while you read this, to count off the moments on your own. How long have you been reading this now? Sixty seconds? Are you beginning to feel a little skittish? Do you feel the pressure of Big Brother’s time, weighing on you?
Relax. If you are usually bound, which most of you usually are – like the White Rabbit by his Red Queen, know that here and now the Queen is dead.
If last Saturday night you dutifully switched all your clocks one hour forward or two hours back, or stood on your hands or your head, or barked at the moon because that’s what the weatherman said you should do, know that this is a duty free zone.
That sound you hear is not a bomb about to go off, or a race about to begin, or a life about to end. That sound is the ticking of your own heart. You can move to its beat, you know. You don’t need to jump up at the alarm, make a mad dash to fit the train schedule, eat your lunch within the time that other’s prescribe for you, or take your week’s vacation at the same time every year: is there even such a thing as the same time every year?
And God knows you don’t need to save any daylight.
The sad truth Chuckles, is that you can’t save any daylight: never could. It is a ruse, a game, a joke on you my friend. It was originally the Kaiser’s bright idea, don’t you know: a way for the Prussians to put one over on the French. They wanted a little extra time to blow each other into eternity (now that’s my idea of daylight savings time). Daylight Savings was and is an absurdity worthy of Dr. Seuss – like the Butter Battle game. And now, war or not, it is a joke played on you to demonstrate how gullible you are – and always will be.
They move the clock forward, they move the clock backward, and you go right along with it like the life-sized figures that dance under the Glockenspiel on the Munich Rathaus tower.
Today the Kaiser and his descendants are sitting up there in their Dirigible Pilots Men’s Club drawing room on the uppitiest floor of the emptiest building on Wall Street, clinking glasses and having a laugh at your expense.
And do you think for a moment that these Helium-voiced lords abide by the conventions of time that they have you dancing to? Of course not. They are floating on the ether, far above the clouds, eating bonbons and petit fours, drinking absinthe and peering out the window at the peons far below. The faster they make you run, the more time they have to kill.
But at least here, and now – within the white spaces between each word you are free to spend your time any way you choose. You don’t have to spend it all.
I personally prefer to use a stopwatch, letting out only as much time as I need for the things that I love.
My time is my own.
I will not, under any circumstances, bend my time to suit your schedule.
I will not rise a moment earlier or go to bed a moment later.
I refuse to save time, or Leap years, or celebrate any of their fabricated holidays.
I can spare only so much.
And guess what: your time is up.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Wampum's War
I’m not surprised that many residents of Plymouth are convinced that there is a cancer in our ‘body politick’, a malignancy that needs to rooted out, and that only a wholesale change in our form of government will do the trick.
Plymouth’s history is filled with instances of paranoia, of intolerance, and fear mongering.
Like most people who have, at one time or another, been treated unjustly because of how they looked, what language they spoke, or what religion they practiced, given the opportunity the original settlers of this community transitioned quickly from being oppressed, to repressing others.
For decades after the original landing in 1620, it was illegal to bring ‘outsiders’ to Plymouth, or for recently freed servants or even single people to build their own homes, without the knowledge and consent of the local government, and to do so could earn you a time in the stocks, a hefty fine, or even expulsion from the community.
In the latter part of the 17th century residents were forbidden to even ‘entertain’ Quakers, three of whom were actually hung in Boston at the peak of the anti-Friends hysteria.
And when the revolution against England began, there were numerous instances where otherwise upstanding citizens with long, respected histories of service and loyalty to the community, were tarred and feathered, hoisted to the tops of polls, beaten and otherwise abused for expressing the belief that the colonies should retain their allegiance to England.
And of course all this was in addition to the dismissive attitudes, disenfranchising ordinances, and outright injustices experienced by native peoples.
The paranoia and xenophobia of locals came to its dramatic, and somewhat comical climax on March 30, 1741, when Joseph Wampum – a native who then lived in what is now known as Manomet, told churchgoers gathered in Plymouth that day that he had been visited in his home the previous night by eight Spaniards.
He might as well have said that devils had descended from the sky. England was at the time, officially at war with Spain so – despite their philosophical and physical separation from the motherland; Wampum’s words became the spark that ignited the tinder of the community’s fears of all things foreign and unusual.
Bells were rung, and drums sounded to alert the populace, and the militia gathered in full regalia in the town square, awaiting instructions, ready for war. Don’t scratch your head and tickle your chin, trying to coax forth some lost elementary school lesson describing the carnage that followed, for your instincts are correct this time: there was no war.
Despite a century of, often-justified paranoia, the colonists were able to keep their ‘powder dry’. The hardships they had endured had done something more than filled them with fear: it had given them a deep respect for pragmatism and rationality.
They did not immediately launch their boats, or march off in search of a fight.
No one was strung up.
No one was taken off to Clark’s island for interrogation.
And the government and rules that had governed their lives for the last 120 years were not suddenly abandoned, and martial law put in its place.
They waited, watched and, when no confirmation of the Spanish Armada’s approach was received, no smoke seen on the horizon, and no sign of troops descending over the Pine Hills was detected – they unbuckled their swords and went back home and had something warm to eat.
The event itself was known from that day on as, ‘Wampum’s War’.
And that is how I choose to think of the decade of whining, personal attacks, and fear mongering that is coming to a climax now, in present day Plymouth, with the latest call to throw out our historic and – by objective standards, effective form of government.
This is just another Wampum’s War.
If the rumors and whispered innuendos – the alleged ‘talk of the town’ were true, an army of volunteers, board members, and town government employees should already have come screaming over Cole’s Hill, looking for our scalps.
If even a small portion of the dire predictions of the fear mongers had come to pass, Plymouth should already be a smoldering ruin.
And yet, even in these grim economic times, the schools remain intact, the lights are still on, and the Mayflower is still afloat in the harbor.
Still, maybe it is a good thing, this irrational fear. Maybe it is a natural phenomenon.
Perhaps we need to be brought to the brink of disaster every generation or so, so we can look out over the harbor, up into the Pine Hills, and over the State Forest and take note of… the absence of an enemy.
Perhaps Wampum was just giving the colonists what - though they didn’t realize it themselves, they most wanted in their lives – drama! There were many accounts during the first hundred years of the Plymouth colony, of the native inhabitants deliberately lying to locals for effect. Wampum’s warning may have been one of those. On another occasion natives informed the Pilgrims that Edward Winslow had died of fever, while on a mission to Connecticut. When he arrived in good health a few days later, the natives were surprised that the Pilgrims were angry with them for their ‘little lie’. After all, had not the Pilgrim’s joy at seeing Winslow alive, been all the more sweet for their sorrow at his supposed passing?
I believe that the natives realized that feelings like fear and sorrow were the kind of emotional seasoning favored by the ‘English’, and they knew that salty tears bring out the flavors of life that we often take for granted.
Certainly we can now see more clearly – as we consider this momentous change in our historic government, that Plymouth is a community that has been blessed in many ways.
Certainly now, with the cries of those who claim our community is in disarray still reverberating in our ears, we can see that few if any other towns can boast of so many recreational opportunities, so many natural wonders, so rich and authentic a history – and how few of us take advantage of all that this town has to offer.
And certainly now, we can grudgingly admit that despite their lack of perfection as both individuals and administrators, those who have served as members of elected boards and committees in the past 10, 20, even 100 years, have done a remarkable job of preserving our resources. Just look around, for comparison, at the untidy sprawl of the communities that we are supposed to emulate, Braintree, Weymouth, and Taunton.
But the alarm has been sounded, and sounded, and sounded again.
And certain militias have been assembled and waiting in the town square for nearly a decade.
We have to put someone in the stocks, don’t we? We have to burn a witch or two, right?
If, as we have been told time and time again, our demise is imminent and inescapable, we need to root out the infidels amongst us and institute a kind of permanent martial law: government by the fewest, for the loudest!
Then again, considering that there are really no devils on Lincoln Street, maybe we should just unbuckle our swords and go home.
Plymouth’s history is filled with instances of paranoia, of intolerance, and fear mongering.
Like most people who have, at one time or another, been treated unjustly because of how they looked, what language they spoke, or what religion they practiced, given the opportunity the original settlers of this community transitioned quickly from being oppressed, to repressing others.
For decades after the original landing in 1620, it was illegal to bring ‘outsiders’ to Plymouth, or for recently freed servants or even single people to build their own homes, without the knowledge and consent of the local government, and to do so could earn you a time in the stocks, a hefty fine, or even expulsion from the community.
In the latter part of the 17th century residents were forbidden to even ‘entertain’ Quakers, three of whom were actually hung in Boston at the peak of the anti-Friends hysteria.
And when the revolution against England began, there were numerous instances where otherwise upstanding citizens with long, respected histories of service and loyalty to the community, were tarred and feathered, hoisted to the tops of polls, beaten and otherwise abused for expressing the belief that the colonies should retain their allegiance to England.
And of course all this was in addition to the dismissive attitudes, disenfranchising ordinances, and outright injustices experienced by native peoples.
The paranoia and xenophobia of locals came to its dramatic, and somewhat comical climax on March 30, 1741, when Joseph Wampum – a native who then lived in what is now known as Manomet, told churchgoers gathered in Plymouth that day that he had been visited in his home the previous night by eight Spaniards.
He might as well have said that devils had descended from the sky. England was at the time, officially at war with Spain so – despite their philosophical and physical separation from the motherland; Wampum’s words became the spark that ignited the tinder of the community’s fears of all things foreign and unusual.
Bells were rung, and drums sounded to alert the populace, and the militia gathered in full regalia in the town square, awaiting instructions, ready for war. Don’t scratch your head and tickle your chin, trying to coax forth some lost elementary school lesson describing the carnage that followed, for your instincts are correct this time: there was no war.
Despite a century of, often-justified paranoia, the colonists were able to keep their ‘powder dry’. The hardships they had endured had done something more than filled them with fear: it had given them a deep respect for pragmatism and rationality.
They did not immediately launch their boats, or march off in search of a fight.
No one was strung up.
No one was taken off to Clark’s island for interrogation.
And the government and rules that had governed their lives for the last 120 years were not suddenly abandoned, and martial law put in its place.
They waited, watched and, when no confirmation of the Spanish Armada’s approach was received, no smoke seen on the horizon, and no sign of troops descending over the Pine Hills was detected – they unbuckled their swords and went back home and had something warm to eat.
The event itself was known from that day on as, ‘Wampum’s War’.
And that is how I choose to think of the decade of whining, personal attacks, and fear mongering that is coming to a climax now, in present day Plymouth, with the latest call to throw out our historic and – by objective standards, effective form of government.
This is just another Wampum’s War.
If the rumors and whispered innuendos – the alleged ‘talk of the town’ were true, an army of volunteers, board members, and town government employees should already have come screaming over Cole’s Hill, looking for our scalps.
If even a small portion of the dire predictions of the fear mongers had come to pass, Plymouth should already be a smoldering ruin.
And yet, even in these grim economic times, the schools remain intact, the lights are still on, and the Mayflower is still afloat in the harbor.
Still, maybe it is a good thing, this irrational fear. Maybe it is a natural phenomenon.
Perhaps we need to be brought to the brink of disaster every generation or so, so we can look out over the harbor, up into the Pine Hills, and over the State Forest and take note of… the absence of an enemy.
Perhaps Wampum was just giving the colonists what - though they didn’t realize it themselves, they most wanted in their lives – drama! There were many accounts during the first hundred years of the Plymouth colony, of the native inhabitants deliberately lying to locals for effect. Wampum’s warning may have been one of those. On another occasion natives informed the Pilgrims that Edward Winslow had died of fever, while on a mission to Connecticut. When he arrived in good health a few days later, the natives were surprised that the Pilgrims were angry with them for their ‘little lie’. After all, had not the Pilgrim’s joy at seeing Winslow alive, been all the more sweet for their sorrow at his supposed passing?
I believe that the natives realized that feelings like fear and sorrow were the kind of emotional seasoning favored by the ‘English’, and they knew that salty tears bring out the flavors of life that we often take for granted.
Certainly we can now see more clearly – as we consider this momentous change in our historic government, that Plymouth is a community that has been blessed in many ways.
Certainly now, with the cries of those who claim our community is in disarray still reverberating in our ears, we can see that few if any other towns can boast of so many recreational opportunities, so many natural wonders, so rich and authentic a history – and how few of us take advantage of all that this town has to offer.
And certainly now, we can grudgingly admit that despite their lack of perfection as both individuals and administrators, those who have served as members of elected boards and committees in the past 10, 20, even 100 years, have done a remarkable job of preserving our resources. Just look around, for comparison, at the untidy sprawl of the communities that we are supposed to emulate, Braintree, Weymouth, and Taunton.
But the alarm has been sounded, and sounded, and sounded again.
And certain militias have been assembled and waiting in the town square for nearly a decade.
We have to put someone in the stocks, don’t we? We have to burn a witch or two, right?
If, as we have been told time and time again, our demise is imminent and inescapable, we need to root out the infidels amongst us and institute a kind of permanent martial law: government by the fewest, for the loudest!
Then again, considering that there are really no devils on Lincoln Street, maybe we should just unbuckle our swords and go home.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Vocabulary Lesson
I made the mistake of loudly smacking my lips and licking my fingers as I devoured Cormac McCarthy’s devastating novel The Road, last spring.
I’ve always told friends and family ‘you can’t afford what I want’, when they query me on my Christmas wish list. So last year they were able to take a kind of revenge, confidently gifting me with almost everything written by that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
I am only now beginning to dig myself out of this self-imposed prison of words.
Most recently I finished McCarthy’s 1979 opus, Suttree, the story of a debauched, usually drunken, mystical apologist for the South-that-never-was.
It is not an easy read. The novel begins with a kind of bio-sociological incantation, and ends with an amusing near-death experience. In between there are drownings, murders, the accidental death of children, police beatings, bewitchments, a great deal of sewerage, and characters who if not fully etched, are completely wretched.
If pressed I would have to say I was disappointed: it was not as satisfying a read as The Road, written twenty years after Suttree.
But on another level, it was magnificent. I have never read a book that had more words that I didn’t understand or couldn’t immediately suss out from the context. It was two books in one: the novel and the vocabulary lesson.
Gout, from the archaic ‘gutta’, meaning drops but in modern usage specifically crystals: crystals of uric acid in the blood that lead to painful swelling of the extremities, the knees, the elbows. We hear ‘gout’ and we think of wigged men in satin knickers mincing about to baroque music while, unbeknownst to them, their hostess with the hair piled high has ducked out for a rendezvous with Errol Flynn.
In Suttree though, it is apparently gout in that first, archaic sense, of a drop, or a droplet, of a spray of rain and blood and other biological fluids and even – on page 27, spiked clumps of sawdust bursting through the torn stitches in the belly of a stuffed lynx.
Sere. Where withered might have done admirably, perhaps substituted by McCarthy because of its homonymic association with seer - someone who prophesies, foreshadowing Suttree’s failed attempts to establish any kind of life. He is a failed fisherman, husband, father, son, friend, lover, pimp, Catholic, and auto enthusiast. He fails at everything.
At first I failed as well, to find a ‘sere’ in my Oxford Annotated. But then I looked under ‘sear’ – to burn into, and found the archaic spelling and secondary definition that McCarthy uses to describe bones, claws, flowers, foliage, hopes, and lives, all withering or dead on the vine.
Knacker: a slaughterer of spent or sickly animals. A writer might be said to be a kind of knacker: a re-processor of useless ideas, unusual words. The Knoxville that McCarthy depicts is certainly a slaughterhouse, and the characters that McCarthy invents create what lives they have, out of the waste. Most have built their homes from flotsam and jetsam. There, along the river, under the bridges, in the caves, they sleep in abandoned vehicles, in cast off rail cars, in boats made of old signage. They are the wretched refuse, washed upon the shore. Suttree is a knacker’s dream: literally crammed with the abandoned, the maimed, the mad, and the delusional. On page 457, in the last fits and fantasies of a typhoid coma, Suttree’s alter ego reads from an imagined indictment in which he accuses himself of consorting with..
“thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spallpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots, and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes and other associated felonious debauchees.”
Tellurian. You and I, as it turns out, are Tellurians, which simply means ‘of the earth’. There is though, a hint in its root, which suggests that McCarthy meant to imply someone not simply of this earth, but bounded by it, restricted to it, even imprisoned within it. For the root word is ‘telo’, meaning flat. Flat earth?
The list – kept in my everyday journal, went on and on: Concatenate, talus, warfarined (poisoned by a water soluble rat poison), dishabille, sacerdotal (the Jesuit schooled boy must have slept late that morning), cataphracted, crepuscular, spalls (just chips), purlieu, quoits, ‘breeks of kingscord’ (corduroy pants!), and triturations.
At first I just wrote down these mysterious words. Then, when the definition was not immediately available, or did nothing to help me understand usage, I began to write down the page number. Then I included the sentence in which the word was found. In most cases I had to have my Oxford annotated open on my lap, the novel in my hand, and my notebook at the ready, before I was satisfied I had a reasonable understanding of what the author intended.
Soricine. In the context in which I found this word - within a description of a wizened black Geechee witch preparing and administering a potion, I assumed it was a variation on sorcerer, or sorceress. But still unsure, I noted it in my journal. That evening I quickly found that soricine simply meant ‘shrew-like’. I thought back to the many instances in which McCarthy describes the reliance of those living in and along the river – the lower reaches of Knoxville, on the animals and fishes at the lower end of the chain. They ate roots, rabbits, rodents, bats, pigeons, turtles, shellfish, and often resembled the same.
Spelaean. I dug deep for this one and came up – if not empty handed, unsure of what I may have grasped in the darkness. I came up with ‘spae’, a wonderful Scottish word with Norse roots, which may be the root of our own word ‘spy’. A spae-wife is, in Scottish, a sorceress, or fortune teller, and I suppose I wanted this to be the correct inference. The reference itself in the book is to a ‘spelaen darkness’ which could – in the context of this novel, fit. But in the light of day I saw the root I was digging for was not ‘spae’, but rather spelae. So down I went again, and after a while uncovered ‘spalax’, which is the Latin term for a mole rat. As the chapter concerned a certain rat-like character spelunking beneath Knoxville, this seemed a quite plausible solution.
Perhaps ‘spelaen’ might also describe the process of reading: that is, a burrowing through the darkness and a grasping for meaning.
I can’t think of a better way to spend these last drab days of winter, than burrowing through this spelaean darkness. But then, that’s just me.
I’ve always told friends and family ‘you can’t afford what I want’, when they query me on my Christmas wish list. So last year they were able to take a kind of revenge, confidently gifting me with almost everything written by that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
I am only now beginning to dig myself out of this self-imposed prison of words.
Most recently I finished McCarthy’s 1979 opus, Suttree, the story of a debauched, usually drunken, mystical apologist for the South-that-never-was.
It is not an easy read. The novel begins with a kind of bio-sociological incantation, and ends with an amusing near-death experience. In between there are drownings, murders, the accidental death of children, police beatings, bewitchments, a great deal of sewerage, and characters who if not fully etched, are completely wretched.
If pressed I would have to say I was disappointed: it was not as satisfying a read as The Road, written twenty years after Suttree.
But on another level, it was magnificent. I have never read a book that had more words that I didn’t understand or couldn’t immediately suss out from the context. It was two books in one: the novel and the vocabulary lesson.
Gout, from the archaic ‘gutta’, meaning drops but in modern usage specifically crystals: crystals of uric acid in the blood that lead to painful swelling of the extremities, the knees, the elbows. We hear ‘gout’ and we think of wigged men in satin knickers mincing about to baroque music while, unbeknownst to them, their hostess with the hair piled high has ducked out for a rendezvous with Errol Flynn.
In Suttree though, it is apparently gout in that first, archaic sense, of a drop, or a droplet, of a spray of rain and blood and other biological fluids and even – on page 27, spiked clumps of sawdust bursting through the torn stitches in the belly of a stuffed lynx.
Sere. Where withered might have done admirably, perhaps substituted by McCarthy because of its homonymic association with seer - someone who prophesies, foreshadowing Suttree’s failed attempts to establish any kind of life. He is a failed fisherman, husband, father, son, friend, lover, pimp, Catholic, and auto enthusiast. He fails at everything.
At first I failed as well, to find a ‘sere’ in my Oxford Annotated. But then I looked under ‘sear’ – to burn into, and found the archaic spelling and secondary definition that McCarthy uses to describe bones, claws, flowers, foliage, hopes, and lives, all withering or dead on the vine.
Knacker: a slaughterer of spent or sickly animals. A writer might be said to be a kind of knacker: a re-processor of useless ideas, unusual words. The Knoxville that McCarthy depicts is certainly a slaughterhouse, and the characters that McCarthy invents create what lives they have, out of the waste. Most have built their homes from flotsam and jetsam. There, along the river, under the bridges, in the caves, they sleep in abandoned vehicles, in cast off rail cars, in boats made of old signage. They are the wretched refuse, washed upon the shore. Suttree is a knacker’s dream: literally crammed with the abandoned, the maimed, the mad, and the delusional. On page 457, in the last fits and fantasies of a typhoid coma, Suttree’s alter ego reads from an imagined indictment in which he accuses himself of consorting with..
“thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spallpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots, and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes and other associated felonious debauchees.”
Tellurian. You and I, as it turns out, are Tellurians, which simply means ‘of the earth’. There is though, a hint in its root, which suggests that McCarthy meant to imply someone not simply of this earth, but bounded by it, restricted to it, even imprisoned within it. For the root word is ‘telo’, meaning flat. Flat earth?
The list – kept in my everyday journal, went on and on: Concatenate, talus, warfarined (poisoned by a water soluble rat poison), dishabille, sacerdotal (the Jesuit schooled boy must have slept late that morning), cataphracted, crepuscular, spalls (just chips), purlieu, quoits, ‘breeks of kingscord’ (corduroy pants!), and triturations.
At first I just wrote down these mysterious words. Then, when the definition was not immediately available, or did nothing to help me understand usage, I began to write down the page number. Then I included the sentence in which the word was found. In most cases I had to have my Oxford annotated open on my lap, the novel in my hand, and my notebook at the ready, before I was satisfied I had a reasonable understanding of what the author intended.
Soricine. In the context in which I found this word - within a description of a wizened black Geechee witch preparing and administering a potion, I assumed it was a variation on sorcerer, or sorceress. But still unsure, I noted it in my journal. That evening I quickly found that soricine simply meant ‘shrew-like’. I thought back to the many instances in which McCarthy describes the reliance of those living in and along the river – the lower reaches of Knoxville, on the animals and fishes at the lower end of the chain. They ate roots, rabbits, rodents, bats, pigeons, turtles, shellfish, and often resembled the same.
Spelaean. I dug deep for this one and came up – if not empty handed, unsure of what I may have grasped in the darkness. I came up with ‘spae’, a wonderful Scottish word with Norse roots, which may be the root of our own word ‘spy’. A spae-wife is, in Scottish, a sorceress, or fortune teller, and I suppose I wanted this to be the correct inference. The reference itself in the book is to a ‘spelaen darkness’ which could – in the context of this novel, fit. But in the light of day I saw the root I was digging for was not ‘spae’, but rather spelae. So down I went again, and after a while uncovered ‘spalax’, which is the Latin term for a mole rat. As the chapter concerned a certain rat-like character spelunking beneath Knoxville, this seemed a quite plausible solution.
Perhaps ‘spelaen’ might also describe the process of reading: that is, a burrowing through the darkness and a grasping for meaning.
I can’t think of a better way to spend these last drab days of winter, than burrowing through this spelaean darkness. But then, that’s just me.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Fry Baby
Lipstick is up.
Chewing gum is through the roof!
Whittling is making a comeback, especially now that chances are good that your local hospital has someone on staff that can reattach a finger or two.
When we can’t afford to waste our money on the supposed finer things, we return – like the Prodigal Son, to those tried and true, simple, straightforward pleasures of life: corn on the cob, a long walk through the woods or, in my case, the French fry.
To be honest, I’ve always thought that a good French fry was one of the finer things, but was hesitant to admit it. After all, its basic components are on the list of politically incorrect ingredients: oil, potato, salt!
Yes, there are alleged French fries that are made without one or more of those ingredients, but what they actually are is really anybody’s guess.
And now I am going to admit a belief that may remove what last remnant of respect you had for me:
The greatest French fry in the world is the McDonald’s French Fry!
That said, I should note that not even McDonald’s can make a great French fry on a consistent basis.
I actually remember my first McDonald’s fry. We had just returned from Berlin – where my father was stationed, and like a kid on Christmas morning ‘the Colonel’ scooted us around metropolitan Washington D.C. eager to show us all of the innovations we had missed living overseas. There were Mustang convertibles, Boeing 747s rising up over the Potomac from National Airport, and – on the Baltimore-Washington Expressway just south of Beltsville, an odd, rectangular glass building with ‘Golden Arches’.
There were no drive-thrus then, but neither were there long lines, and with its limited menu fast food could also mean hot food- including those remarkable fries.
Timing is everything. In the last 20 years I would estimate that - out of 2000 visits, I have tasted properly cooked and served McDonald’s French Fries at most three or four times. You see, to wring the perfect flavor out of those emaciated strips of pale yellow tuber everything has to be perfect. They have to be cooked in the hot oil for exactly the right amount of time: no more, no less. They have to be immediately removed from the oil and, after a cursory rapping of the metal basket to remove excess grease, scattered in a thin layer over the serving area. And they have to be quickly and thoroughly doused with salt so that the tiny crystals adhere to the remaining patina of oil.
And then of course – perhaps most importantly, you have to place your order just in time to have those perfectly prepared fries scooped up and served to you – as the old saying goes, ‘piping hot’.
You eat these fries with your teeth – not your mouth, breaking each tiny shaft open with a kind of Irish step dance: quick jabs with the heels of your incisors, releasing the captured steam, crunching the salt, savoring their ephemeral vinegary tartness, and noting the remarkable balance of flavor that is possible in a simple recipe.
You need to eat these miniature two-by-fours quickly too. They should always be the first item out of the bag, beginning before you have even left the parking area, using your fingers like chopsticks to clutch a half dozen or so at a time and shoveling them quickly into your open mouth.
It’s like walking on hot coals: a potentially spiritual experience but, he who hesitates is lost. If these fries cool they are better used to build a miniature yellow picket fence round the houses on your train set in the basement. Once cooled these fries are like the trilobite uncovered by an archaeologist: fossilized fodder for the scientist to examine and file away. Not food at all.
But don’t get all exited. As I said, chances are that they – the fries themselves, will never have a chance to devolve from a perfect state.
Everything is working against you.
If you are in a long line, or the fries have languished under their tanning lights for more than a moment, or they have lain a few seconds too long in the hot oil or – and this happens very frequently, the salt has either been niggardly applied or not at all, then perfection will never pass through your lips.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who – though regular customers of Mickey D’s, have never tasted these fries at the peak of their potential.
When they are good they are emblematic of the majesty of simplicity – in all things.
And when they are not, they are like most of life: disappointing.
Yes, there are other fries, some with highly desirable qualities.
I remember fries from the base PX in Berlin. They served them fresh from the fryolator, dripping with grease, dropped them right into a plastic bag and – after I first pumped a good portion of vinegary catsup right into the bag, I would ride my bike home in the dark, one eye on the road, the other in the bag with my cheek and mouth.
I remember as well, Thrashers, in Ocean City, Maryland. On the boardwalk there they serve only one item: Large, roughly cut, always freshly cooked French-fries in several sizes, with salt and vinegar the only available condiments.
Trashers' fries were – as I remember them, like the big brother of the McDonald’s Fry, though far more consistently produced, far more substantial. I think they were great fries, but I have to admit that my memory of their flavor is hopelessly entangled in the smell of the ocean, the creak of boardwalk, and the hormones of youth.
Still, you can’t help but be impressed by Thrasher’s dedication to the fry: despite 80 years of success, they have never added additional items to their menu: they have never had to ask, ‘you want fries with that?’
I think that if McDonalds wants to expand – in recognition of the power of their small fry and, acknowledging the need for simple, less costly diversions in this economic environment, they’d devise little kiosks for the beach, or the boardwalk, or along the popular streets of picturesque tourist towns, where a single, apron-ed huckster would serve only French fries: fresh, hot, always overflowing their paper holster whatever the serving size.
Simplicity is clarity.
Simplicity is honesty.
Simplicity can help us survive the tough times ahead. That, and a belly full of hot, salty fries!
Chewing gum is through the roof!
Whittling is making a comeback, especially now that chances are good that your local hospital has someone on staff that can reattach a finger or two.
When we can’t afford to waste our money on the supposed finer things, we return – like the Prodigal Son, to those tried and true, simple, straightforward pleasures of life: corn on the cob, a long walk through the woods or, in my case, the French fry.
To be honest, I’ve always thought that a good French fry was one of the finer things, but was hesitant to admit it. After all, its basic components are on the list of politically incorrect ingredients: oil, potato, salt!
Yes, there are alleged French fries that are made without one or more of those ingredients, but what they actually are is really anybody’s guess.
And now I am going to admit a belief that may remove what last remnant of respect you had for me:
The greatest French fry in the world is the McDonald’s French Fry!
That said, I should note that not even McDonald’s can make a great French fry on a consistent basis.
I actually remember my first McDonald’s fry. We had just returned from Berlin – where my father was stationed, and like a kid on Christmas morning ‘the Colonel’ scooted us around metropolitan Washington D.C. eager to show us all of the innovations we had missed living overseas. There were Mustang convertibles, Boeing 747s rising up over the Potomac from National Airport, and – on the Baltimore-Washington Expressway just south of Beltsville, an odd, rectangular glass building with ‘Golden Arches’.
There were no drive-thrus then, but neither were there long lines, and with its limited menu fast food could also mean hot food- including those remarkable fries.
Timing is everything. In the last 20 years I would estimate that - out of 2000 visits, I have tasted properly cooked and served McDonald’s French Fries at most three or four times. You see, to wring the perfect flavor out of those emaciated strips of pale yellow tuber everything has to be perfect. They have to be cooked in the hot oil for exactly the right amount of time: no more, no less. They have to be immediately removed from the oil and, after a cursory rapping of the metal basket to remove excess grease, scattered in a thin layer over the serving area. And they have to be quickly and thoroughly doused with salt so that the tiny crystals adhere to the remaining patina of oil.
And then of course – perhaps most importantly, you have to place your order just in time to have those perfectly prepared fries scooped up and served to you – as the old saying goes, ‘piping hot’.
You eat these fries with your teeth – not your mouth, breaking each tiny shaft open with a kind of Irish step dance: quick jabs with the heels of your incisors, releasing the captured steam, crunching the salt, savoring their ephemeral vinegary tartness, and noting the remarkable balance of flavor that is possible in a simple recipe.
You need to eat these miniature two-by-fours quickly too. They should always be the first item out of the bag, beginning before you have even left the parking area, using your fingers like chopsticks to clutch a half dozen or so at a time and shoveling them quickly into your open mouth.
It’s like walking on hot coals: a potentially spiritual experience but, he who hesitates is lost. If these fries cool they are better used to build a miniature yellow picket fence round the houses on your train set in the basement. Once cooled these fries are like the trilobite uncovered by an archaeologist: fossilized fodder for the scientist to examine and file away. Not food at all.
But don’t get all exited. As I said, chances are that they – the fries themselves, will never have a chance to devolve from a perfect state.
Everything is working against you.
If you are in a long line, or the fries have languished under their tanning lights for more than a moment, or they have lain a few seconds too long in the hot oil or – and this happens very frequently, the salt has either been niggardly applied or not at all, then perfection will never pass through your lips.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who – though regular customers of Mickey D’s, have never tasted these fries at the peak of their potential.
When they are good they are emblematic of the majesty of simplicity – in all things.
And when they are not, they are like most of life: disappointing.
Yes, there are other fries, some with highly desirable qualities.
I remember fries from the base PX in Berlin. They served them fresh from the fryolator, dripping with grease, dropped them right into a plastic bag and – after I first pumped a good portion of vinegary catsup right into the bag, I would ride my bike home in the dark, one eye on the road, the other in the bag with my cheek and mouth.
I remember as well, Thrashers, in Ocean City, Maryland. On the boardwalk there they serve only one item: Large, roughly cut, always freshly cooked French-fries in several sizes, with salt and vinegar the only available condiments.
Trashers' fries were – as I remember them, like the big brother of the McDonald’s Fry, though far more consistently produced, far more substantial. I think they were great fries, but I have to admit that my memory of their flavor is hopelessly entangled in the smell of the ocean, the creak of boardwalk, and the hormones of youth.
Still, you can’t help but be impressed by Thrasher’s dedication to the fry: despite 80 years of success, they have never added additional items to their menu: they have never had to ask, ‘you want fries with that?’
I think that if McDonalds wants to expand – in recognition of the power of their small fry and, acknowledging the need for simple, less costly diversions in this economic environment, they’d devise little kiosks for the beach, or the boardwalk, or along the popular streets of picturesque tourist towns, where a single, apron-ed huckster would serve only French fries: fresh, hot, always overflowing their paper holster whatever the serving size.
Simplicity is clarity.
Simplicity is honesty.
Simplicity can help us survive the tough times ahead. That, and a belly full of hot, salty fries!
Friday, February 13, 2009
Heave, Ho
It’s like the baby alien, bursting out of John Hurt’s abdomen – smiling for the cameras, then high-tailing it for the bowels of the Nostromo.
I’m talking about frost heaves.
Frost heaves are just the symptom though, of a deeper, and more disturbing phenomena.
No, I’m just kidding.
Frost heaves are actually alien cocoons, deposited by visitors from outer space billions of years ago, and timed to hatch just prior to their next visit: high-tech locusts, of sorts.
Nah, I’m just kidding again.
Frost heaves are really just the Earth’s version of adolescent acne. Our Earth is younger than it looks, and is actually going through puberty right now. Because of our recent economic woes, we can’t afford the eight billion dollars worth of Pro-Activ that it would take to be acne free.
Today, as I drove along Halfway Pond Road, rocking back and forth and up and down as if I was on a small ship on a stormy sea, I started to see ‘frost heaves’ in everything, from my personal life, to the universe.
There are scientists who believe that the universe began with a big frost heave: first there was nothingness, then the nothingness started to swell, and bubble, crack and distend and – in a blinding flash of light..
Others - with less education, believe that our universe was a kind of small car cruising down an alternative route in an alternative universe, when the pavement cracked open, and a pothole as big and deep as a black hole, swallowed that fuel-efficient universe entirely.
Certain religious fundamentalists hold that the world could have been created in six days, but frost heaves delayed the delivery of certain animals.
Still others believe that frost heaves are like Beano, held every Wednesday night in the basement of the French-American Club in Jay, Maine.
I actually met a guy named Jo, from Jay, who said he was the state record holder for heaving frosts. I think he might have meant heaving frosties, which is less impressive by far, but which proves (I think) that we have nothing to fear from frost heaves. If Jo from Jay in Maine – where they claim to have invented the Frost Heave, isn’t worried, why should we be?
Personally, I love the frost heave. It reminds me of, well me.
I was born in a little wooden shack, on a lake in northern Minnesota. My mother was an avid ice-fisherperson and, though she was in her eighth month, off she went to Lake Wherethehellarewe to get her weekly quota of Northern Pike. Overnight the weather changed, and when she woke up she was adrift on a large ice flow. Maybe it was the weather, but I was born that same day. My father used fishing line to yank me out. They were going to rescue us, but several days later the weather changed again and the lake was frozen over and - after a few more days of ice fishing, we drove the Winnebago home over some pretty rough roads.
Was that believable?
No? Well actually I was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, on land, on a seasonably warm late spring day. But I really do relate to frost heaves. My head is filled with bumps and cracks and evidence of unseasonable weather. My face was once pocked with pustules and now bears the tiny scars of a tumultuous teenage-hood. And I have that flushed, phlegmatic look that seems to portend future eruptions.
You too?
I think we all carry the seasons around with us: the warm and the cold, the wet and the dry, the confident and the neurotic, the plausible and the fantastic. I think we all recognize – even though we may not publicly admit it, that the seasons of our souls are not nearly as predictable, as consistent, as the seasons of the Earth – however much we’d like them to be. So to see the roads erupting – like an adolescent’s once unblemished skin, is comforting. To see the ground bubble and burst through the tar is to realize that our own neuroses and uneven-ness, are as natural and normal as the allegedly more predictable seasons we pass through.
The lesson of frost heaves might be that, no matter how hard we try to pave over it, the core of our being is defiantly irregular, consistently unpredictable.
We are all little baby aliens, chewing through the ice, pushing through the tar, anxious for the winter to end, so we can head to the beach and heave a few frosties.
I’m talking about frost heaves.
Frost heaves are just the symptom though, of a deeper, and more disturbing phenomena.
No, I’m just kidding.
Frost heaves are actually alien cocoons, deposited by visitors from outer space billions of years ago, and timed to hatch just prior to their next visit: high-tech locusts, of sorts.
Nah, I’m just kidding again.
Frost heaves are really just the Earth’s version of adolescent acne. Our Earth is younger than it looks, and is actually going through puberty right now. Because of our recent economic woes, we can’t afford the eight billion dollars worth of Pro-Activ that it would take to be acne free.
Today, as I drove along Halfway Pond Road, rocking back and forth and up and down as if I was on a small ship on a stormy sea, I started to see ‘frost heaves’ in everything, from my personal life, to the universe.
There are scientists who believe that the universe began with a big frost heave: first there was nothingness, then the nothingness started to swell, and bubble, crack and distend and – in a blinding flash of light..
Others - with less education, believe that our universe was a kind of small car cruising down an alternative route in an alternative universe, when the pavement cracked open, and a pothole as big and deep as a black hole, swallowed that fuel-efficient universe entirely.
Certain religious fundamentalists hold that the world could have been created in six days, but frost heaves delayed the delivery of certain animals.
Still others believe that frost heaves are like Beano, held every Wednesday night in the basement of the French-American Club in Jay, Maine.
I actually met a guy named Jo, from Jay, who said he was the state record holder for heaving frosts. I think he might have meant heaving frosties, which is less impressive by far, but which proves (I think) that we have nothing to fear from frost heaves. If Jo from Jay in Maine – where they claim to have invented the Frost Heave, isn’t worried, why should we be?
Personally, I love the frost heave. It reminds me of, well me.
I was born in a little wooden shack, on a lake in northern Minnesota. My mother was an avid ice-fisherperson and, though she was in her eighth month, off she went to Lake Wherethehellarewe to get her weekly quota of Northern Pike. Overnight the weather changed, and when she woke up she was adrift on a large ice flow. Maybe it was the weather, but I was born that same day. My father used fishing line to yank me out. They were going to rescue us, but several days later the weather changed again and the lake was frozen over and - after a few more days of ice fishing, we drove the Winnebago home over some pretty rough roads.
Was that believable?
No? Well actually I was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, on land, on a seasonably warm late spring day. But I really do relate to frost heaves. My head is filled with bumps and cracks and evidence of unseasonable weather. My face was once pocked with pustules and now bears the tiny scars of a tumultuous teenage-hood. And I have that flushed, phlegmatic look that seems to portend future eruptions.
You too?
I think we all carry the seasons around with us: the warm and the cold, the wet and the dry, the confident and the neurotic, the plausible and the fantastic. I think we all recognize – even though we may not publicly admit it, that the seasons of our souls are not nearly as predictable, as consistent, as the seasons of the Earth – however much we’d like them to be. So to see the roads erupting – like an adolescent’s once unblemished skin, is comforting. To see the ground bubble and burst through the tar is to realize that our own neuroses and uneven-ness, are as natural and normal as the allegedly more predictable seasons we pass through.
The lesson of frost heaves might be that, no matter how hard we try to pave over it, the core of our being is defiantly irregular, consistently unpredictable.
We are all little baby aliens, chewing through the ice, pushing through the tar, anxious for the winter to end, so we can head to the beach and heave a few frosties.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Mission Central
When did we become a fit meal for missionary zeal? I ask this now, having been visited this week by two handsome, respectful, earnest young Latter Day Saints.
I wondered, later, if it didn’t have something to do with my driveway?
I know what it’s like to have a mission, of sorts, a door-to-door mission, and to be confronted by what might be a ready excuse: a long, winding driveway that disappears into the woods before it reaches a visible destination; a barking dog, or worse, signs warning thereof; and the lack of any apparent point of entrance or exit.
To the pollster, the census taker or even for your average campaign worker these traditional impediments are sufficient rationale for moving on to the next number on the list.
But these two young men – Johnny Cashed all in black – might have unconsciously considered my Bering Strait of a driveway an easy way to confirm, to themselves, their zeal. That is, this is not Botswana or Turkmenistan. In general, the audience here is, relatively speaking, understanding of their purpose. It’s easy to knock on the doors of the houses on the street, with their short little driveways and their obvious front doors. But to walk through the woods, over the hill, across an ice-bound creek, up an overgrown path to a darkly shingled gray gambrel, well, that’s dedication, faith and youthfulness, or a combination thereof!
But I’ve already strayed from my original point, or question. Why us? That is, apart from the challenge of my driveway, why the challenge of my town, my state, our East Coast intellectual position on the theo-political map.
Are we so wayward?
Are we so out of the way-ward?
Are we in some not altogether obvious manner depraved, or deprived?
Is it a general malaise that they seek to address?
Is it simply a matter of sect? Is it our sectual proclivities: the likelihood that, left to our own pseudo-religious devices, we would in all probability end up in a traditional steepled structure, surrounded by traditionally steepled people (here is the church, here is the steeple)? Are we on the list to be saved simply because of our Catholic-ness, our Presbyterianism, our Unitarianosity?
Is that really it?
I raised this question, sort of, with the two nice young men who came to my door. Actually, I asked if their appearance was reflective of a change in the world that I was not aware of.
I remembered, I told them, that when I was a boy you didn’t see men-in-black bicycling about American suburbia. In my old neighborhood (Colesville, in the White Oak section of the city of Silver Spring, in the state of Maryland) there was a Mormon Temple with golden spires and a sizable selection of Latter Day-ers. But,when the young men from that Temple missionaried, they did so overseas.
They didn’t answer the question, not directly. I don’t think they knew, or cared. They had a live one on the hook, at least metaphysically speaking, and were intent on getting in their pitch (though I barely gave them enough time to clear their throats).
I came to the door a bit breathless, having just come in from my driveway moments before they arrived, having just moments before that been pulverizing the larger driveway bergs that blocked passage, with a 30-pound sledge. My pants were spattered with pongy driveway water, my hair a bit wilder than usual. I may have startled them by my openness, my frenetic manner, and by how close I came to them, moving out onto our small, porch-like wooden front steps, closing the door behind me and immediately breaking into a mad ramble about the driveway, poetry, my lapsed but intransigent Catholicity and then, as I said, indirectly asking why they had been posted to Pilgrim land, and not a more traditional den of heathenism.
And then I gave them my bible – John Berrymans’ 67 Dream Songs.
No, I didn’t. But now I think that I might, that I could, maybe even that I should. I could make up my own book, and a summary of that book, with questions and answers about the origins of my agnosticism, and have it ready to give it out when missionaries knock. Certainly there can be nothing wrong with proselytizing those who come to my door.
But I’m not looking for an argument. And when I am visited by such as these – be they Java Witnesses, Jack Conwayites, or Latter Day Country Western singers, I am almost always polite, deferential, complimentary.
God, they were nice young men: healthy and upright, well dressed and well spoken, and not at all zealous in their manner.
I couldn’t help but love their obvious goodness. I loved their idealism, too.
I felt a little like the witch living in the house made out of candy. They were so young and sincere and good that I, by comparison, felt a bit wicked, a bit dangerous (a bit envious, too).
I wished, for a moment, that I were so young and bright and energetic.
I wished, at that moment, that everyone should have a chance at their age, to work for some idealistic goal – perhaps not as lofty as the salvation of souls, but in that direction.
We need to have our growth directed at the earliest possible age toward the welfare of others so that, when the other tropisms we encounter begin to yank us in more selfish directions we will know, or feel, or have at least a vague remembrance that our roots were once grounded in concern for humanity.
Maybe the presence of these young men in our town is simply a sign of the abundance of idealism, still out there.
Perhaps Mormons are simply multiplying at a rate sufficient to have enough to go around, enough for each poor country abroad and for each of our isolated, suburban, sometimes soul-less little towns as well.
When I finally shut up they said what they needed to say and went on their way, though first gifting me with a densely worded book, and a pamphlet summarizing the book.
I told them their gospel was, perhaps, wasted on me, but they insisted I keep it, said they had plenty.
As they navigated their way out, I called out a friendly warning. Be careful, I said, many a missionary has come up my driveway and lost sight of the road. It has subtle twists and turns, and the branches from the encroaching trees are known to consume an occasional side-view mirror. And then there are the thorns, like tiny serrated teeth along lengths of tangled, wispy, evergreen vines, almost invisible, dangling from the trees, eager to nibble at the apple of a rosy cheek, or pluck the sleep from the folds of an unsuspecting eye.
I wondered, later, if it didn’t have something to do with my driveway?
I know what it’s like to have a mission, of sorts, a door-to-door mission, and to be confronted by what might be a ready excuse: a long, winding driveway that disappears into the woods before it reaches a visible destination; a barking dog, or worse, signs warning thereof; and the lack of any apparent point of entrance or exit.
To the pollster, the census taker or even for your average campaign worker these traditional impediments are sufficient rationale for moving on to the next number on the list.
But these two young men – Johnny Cashed all in black – might have unconsciously considered my Bering Strait of a driveway an easy way to confirm, to themselves, their zeal. That is, this is not Botswana or Turkmenistan. In general, the audience here is, relatively speaking, understanding of their purpose. It’s easy to knock on the doors of the houses on the street, with their short little driveways and their obvious front doors. But to walk through the woods, over the hill, across an ice-bound creek, up an overgrown path to a darkly shingled gray gambrel, well, that’s dedication, faith and youthfulness, or a combination thereof!
But I’ve already strayed from my original point, or question. Why us? That is, apart from the challenge of my driveway, why the challenge of my town, my state, our East Coast intellectual position on the theo-political map.
Are we so wayward?
Are we so out of the way-ward?
Are we in some not altogether obvious manner depraved, or deprived?
Is it a general malaise that they seek to address?
Is it simply a matter of sect? Is it our sectual proclivities: the likelihood that, left to our own pseudo-religious devices, we would in all probability end up in a traditional steepled structure, surrounded by traditionally steepled people (here is the church, here is the steeple)? Are we on the list to be saved simply because of our Catholic-ness, our Presbyterianism, our Unitarianosity?
Is that really it?
I raised this question, sort of, with the two nice young men who came to my door. Actually, I asked if their appearance was reflective of a change in the world that I was not aware of.
I remembered, I told them, that when I was a boy you didn’t see men-in-black bicycling about American suburbia. In my old neighborhood (Colesville, in the White Oak section of the city of Silver Spring, in the state of Maryland) there was a Mormon Temple with golden spires and a sizable selection of Latter Day-ers. But,when the young men from that Temple missionaried, they did so overseas.
They didn’t answer the question, not directly. I don’t think they knew, or cared. They had a live one on the hook, at least metaphysically speaking, and were intent on getting in their pitch (though I barely gave them enough time to clear their throats).
I came to the door a bit breathless, having just come in from my driveway moments before they arrived, having just moments before that been pulverizing the larger driveway bergs that blocked passage, with a 30-pound sledge. My pants were spattered with pongy driveway water, my hair a bit wilder than usual. I may have startled them by my openness, my frenetic manner, and by how close I came to them, moving out onto our small, porch-like wooden front steps, closing the door behind me and immediately breaking into a mad ramble about the driveway, poetry, my lapsed but intransigent Catholicity and then, as I said, indirectly asking why they had been posted to Pilgrim land, and not a more traditional den of heathenism.
And then I gave them my bible – John Berrymans’ 67 Dream Songs.
No, I didn’t. But now I think that I might, that I could, maybe even that I should. I could make up my own book, and a summary of that book, with questions and answers about the origins of my agnosticism, and have it ready to give it out when missionaries knock. Certainly there can be nothing wrong with proselytizing those who come to my door.
But I’m not looking for an argument. And when I am visited by such as these – be they Java Witnesses, Jack Conwayites, or Latter Day Country Western singers, I am almost always polite, deferential, complimentary.
God, they were nice young men: healthy and upright, well dressed and well spoken, and not at all zealous in their manner.
I couldn’t help but love their obvious goodness. I loved their idealism, too.
I felt a little like the witch living in the house made out of candy. They were so young and sincere and good that I, by comparison, felt a bit wicked, a bit dangerous (a bit envious, too).
I wished, for a moment, that I were so young and bright and energetic.
I wished, at that moment, that everyone should have a chance at their age, to work for some idealistic goal – perhaps not as lofty as the salvation of souls, but in that direction.
We need to have our growth directed at the earliest possible age toward the welfare of others so that, when the other tropisms we encounter begin to yank us in more selfish directions we will know, or feel, or have at least a vague remembrance that our roots were once grounded in concern for humanity.
Maybe the presence of these young men in our town is simply a sign of the abundance of idealism, still out there.
Perhaps Mormons are simply multiplying at a rate sufficient to have enough to go around, enough for each poor country abroad and for each of our isolated, suburban, sometimes soul-less little towns as well.
When I finally shut up they said what they needed to say and went on their way, though first gifting me with a densely worded book, and a pamphlet summarizing the book.
I told them their gospel was, perhaps, wasted on me, but they insisted I keep it, said they had plenty.
As they navigated their way out, I called out a friendly warning. Be careful, I said, many a missionary has come up my driveway and lost sight of the road. It has subtle twists and turns, and the branches from the encroaching trees are known to consume an occasional side-view mirror. And then there are the thorns, like tiny serrated teeth along lengths of tangled, wispy, evergreen vines, almost invisible, dangling from the trees, eager to nibble at the apple of a rosy cheek, or pluck the sleep from the folds of an unsuspecting eye.
Weather Tip: How Not to Go Arse Over Teakettle
Shoes. Don’t put them on. Stay inside. Look out the window and say, “Holy mudhead, mackerel, the whole finger-lickin’ world is one big sheet of ice!”
Downhill. Ice makes everything downhill, including uphill. With that in mind, if you really have to go outside walk with your legs spread preposterously wide, and lift and place one foot at a time like some tipsy Sumo wrestler.
Rails, bars, limbs, fence posts, parked cars… Find something, anything to hold onto (preferably things that are set permanently into the ground). Do not under any circumstances get into your car without a firm grasp of the car door, itself, so that when, inevitably, your feet come out from under you, you don’t end up wedged half-way underneath.
All fours, as in “down on all fours,” as in “you don’t see dogs slipping on the ice, do you?” But, actually, if you were foolish enough to take your dog out on the ice both Fido and you would soon be doing the Electric Slide. Consider, instead, getting down on all fours like a turtle. A turtle might not make much headway, but it isn’t likely to go arse over teakettle either.
Swimming. You might even consider “swimming” (on your belly on the ice, like a turtle without a shell) to the mailbox, or the shed, or to the aide of someone who has already fallen. It may be cold but your fall will be much shorter if you are already on the ground.
Pedestrians. Steer clear of them. If at all possible, don’t go out on the street, or onto a sidewalk, or anywhere outside when there are any other people in your vicinity. If you do, no matter how level your stance, how flat your feet, and how slowly you move, a less careful pedestrian is going to lose their balance and after pin-balling off a few parked cars, fire hydrants and other pedestrians, will find you and knock you down.
Crunch. The sound underfoot is a good indication of the degree of danger of slipping. You are safe if, when you walk, you hear a “ca-runch.” A slight “ca-rinkle” is indicative of a relatively high degree of traction. A “ca-rink” without the “ul” is potential trouble. A straightforward “reenk”, without an initial “ca” is the sound of a large amount of down insulation about to go airborne. A “reenk,” followed by a “yikes,” and ending with an “oof,” is the sound of someone with a large butt landing on same. A “reenk” followed by a sharp “crack” is generally followed by an ambulance.
Flight. Birds aren’t particularly bothered by ice. I’ve never heard of the air being slippery. So, if you can, get airborne until the neighborhood thaws out. Or, if you can afford it, have somebody carry you to your car, drive you to the airport, and fly you someplace that doesn’t have any ice, someplace where, coincidentally, you don’t need any shoes.
Downhill. Ice makes everything downhill, including uphill. With that in mind, if you really have to go outside walk with your legs spread preposterously wide, and lift and place one foot at a time like some tipsy Sumo wrestler.
Rails, bars, limbs, fence posts, parked cars… Find something, anything to hold onto (preferably things that are set permanently into the ground). Do not under any circumstances get into your car without a firm grasp of the car door, itself, so that when, inevitably, your feet come out from under you, you don’t end up wedged half-way underneath.
All fours, as in “down on all fours,” as in “you don’t see dogs slipping on the ice, do you?” But, actually, if you were foolish enough to take your dog out on the ice both Fido and you would soon be doing the Electric Slide. Consider, instead, getting down on all fours like a turtle. A turtle might not make much headway, but it isn’t likely to go arse over teakettle either.
Swimming. You might even consider “swimming” (on your belly on the ice, like a turtle without a shell) to the mailbox, or the shed, or to the aide of someone who has already fallen. It may be cold but your fall will be much shorter if you are already on the ground.
Pedestrians. Steer clear of them. If at all possible, don’t go out on the street, or onto a sidewalk, or anywhere outside when there are any other people in your vicinity. If you do, no matter how level your stance, how flat your feet, and how slowly you move, a less careful pedestrian is going to lose their balance and after pin-balling off a few parked cars, fire hydrants and other pedestrians, will find you and knock you down.
Crunch. The sound underfoot is a good indication of the degree of danger of slipping. You are safe if, when you walk, you hear a “ca-runch.” A slight “ca-rinkle” is indicative of a relatively high degree of traction. A “ca-rink” without the “ul” is potential trouble. A straightforward “reenk”, without an initial “ca” is the sound of a large amount of down insulation about to go airborne. A “reenk,” followed by a “yikes,” and ending with an “oof,” is the sound of someone with a large butt landing on same. A “reenk” followed by a sharp “crack” is generally followed by an ambulance.
Flight. Birds aren’t particularly bothered by ice. I’ve never heard of the air being slippery. So, if you can, get airborne until the neighborhood thaws out. Or, if you can afford it, have somebody carry you to your car, drive you to the airport, and fly you someplace that doesn’t have any ice, someplace where, coincidentally, you don’t need any shoes.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Kat Hair
I’m looking for Kat. I’m pretty confident she spells her name that way, though it could be spelled with a ‘C’. I called the place where she worked a week or so before Christmas, and they told me she no longer worked there. I asked, politely, if they could tell me where she had gone but they were – at least to my ear, less than friendly.
They don’t know and, it’s obvious, they don’t care.
My sense is that this is not unusual, in the salon business. Stylists are independent contractors, and if they get a better offer, off they go. Still, it was a shock to me. I’ve been getting my hair cut – off and on, for over 50 years, and Kat is the best I ever had. I foolishly thought she would be around, when I needed her.
Have you seen her?
I’ve reached a point in life when I can take or leave most things: including my hair. If I can’t have it cut by someone I trust, I just won’t have it cut at all. I’ll leave it to its own devices, which is a bit like knowing a hurricane is headed your way but refusing to evacuate.
It wasn’t always this way. There are pictures that suggest that for the first few years of my life my hair was tame, shiny, and – as the commercials say, ‘easy to manage’. And, like most two year olds, I could care less.
I remember though, when I first cared, or was aware, of my hair. Pants that year were bell-bottomed, belts were preposterously wide, the Stone’s “19th Nervous Breakdown” was echoing out from the youth center at Ramstein, and I wanted my hair just a little longer. Those details would place this epiphany somewhere around 1965. Unfortunately my father – the Colonel, and the barbers ‘on base’ had a secret pact to deny me even that small sign of independence.
Remember the old electric clippers – the way they hissed and popped like a snake in the grass?
Remember the look and smell of the old barbershops, with their shiny checkerboard tile floors, seats that came out of Dr. Frankenstein’s ‘Catalogue of Surgical Apparatus’, and the barbers themselves out of American International (the film studio responsible for wonderfully awful movie versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s more gruesome stories)?
Those barbers were circus lion tamers, going after every follicle with a whip and a chair, and a cap gun.
A good haircut then was the one you avoided.
Nothing much changed until the late sixties, early seventies when the crew cut prisoners were released and the barbershop morphed overnight into a unisex salon. Barbers didn’t do this willingly: they were forced by economic realities. Young men had learned to avoid them for months, even years. I had personally let “my freak flag fly” for over a year by the spring of 1970 but Holly – my girlfriend at the time, loved Rod Stewart and was doing everything she could to make me over in his image. Under her tutelage I acquired tall, lace-up black boots, a short suede jacket, and a variety of oddly colored corduroys. All that remained (besides plastic surgery) was to get the ‘shag’ haircut.
For Holly’s sake, and believing that stylists were different from barbers, I made an appointment; only to discover that the White-Smocked Meanies I had known as a child were still there – in disguise. They had longer hair themselves, but the same barely repressed anger. They served beer, had art on the walls, but they took a razor to your hair – often leaving it looking like something that should be on the floor, underfoot.
Gradually it became less and less about the style, and more and more about the stylist. When you’d first meet a new stylist they’d ask you a series of perfunctory questions - implying they were interested in your opinion, but when the smoke cleared, your hair looked suspiciously like theirs.
My favorite stylist of this period was Henny, as in ‘Henny color’ (an old Stooges joke).
Everything about Henny was on the cutting edge. His body was tattooed from head to toe, his face (and other regions) were liberally pierced, and his tri-color hair held about a pound and a half of ‘product’ - which actually made his head list a little to the left.
Henny - no surprise, thought I should try a little product too, and a little color, and have my upper lip stapled to my forehead. Over the course of a year, and perhaps seven or eight visits, I tried several variations on his theme and, well, let’s just say it never took. I wasn’t Henny, and Henny wasn’t actually himself. I needed a haircut that didn’t require product, or prep-work, or a bi-weekly visits for minor adjustments.
I needed a haircut that let my freak flag fly, without getting in my eyes or taking up too much time. That wasn’t much to ask, but still between 1966 and 2006 I probably had two haircuts I actually liked.
And then I met Kat.
Kat used to come into a cafe that I did some freelance marketing work for. I liked hanging out there: they let me make a few lattes for customers who couldn’t tell the difference, have my fill of espresso and - if they were busy, even work the register.
Kat came in to get their famous triple mocha lattes for the crew back at the salon, and let slip that she cut the hair of every one of the cafes’ workers too – except mine.
Why not, I thought: how bad could it be. Besides, at that point I had a lot of material to work with: I’d been avoiding scissors for over a year by then and my hair was halfway to the Cape.
So I let Kat at it.
I’m not exactly sure how she did it. I know she washed my hair, but that’s not unusual. I know she gave me a quick massage, fingering the back of my neck, the top of my spine: sort of the way that lobsters are hypnotized. After that it got kind of hazy. I know I must have gone from the shampoo station to her chair, and I do have vague recollections of a conversation, and of the monotonous sound of hairs being snipped. But that’s about all I can recall. All I really know is that, when I came back to full consciousness, it was me I saw in the mirror: not a mini-me version of the stylist, or a motif out of stylist school. Me.
. For over forty years I left the barbers’ chair hair feeling – at best, as if an uneasy calm had descended over a battleground, as if a truce had been declared between my hair and head, a temporary end to hostilities.
All that changed, with Kat.
And now she’s gone and I’m holding out again. Now my hair is headed south, again. Now Mary is threatening to send me to the lion tamers.
If you seek Kat, let her know I’m looking for her.
They don’t know and, it’s obvious, they don’t care.
My sense is that this is not unusual, in the salon business. Stylists are independent contractors, and if they get a better offer, off they go. Still, it was a shock to me. I’ve been getting my hair cut – off and on, for over 50 years, and Kat is the best I ever had. I foolishly thought she would be around, when I needed her.
Have you seen her?
I’ve reached a point in life when I can take or leave most things: including my hair. If I can’t have it cut by someone I trust, I just won’t have it cut at all. I’ll leave it to its own devices, which is a bit like knowing a hurricane is headed your way but refusing to evacuate.
It wasn’t always this way. There are pictures that suggest that for the first few years of my life my hair was tame, shiny, and – as the commercials say, ‘easy to manage’. And, like most two year olds, I could care less.
I remember though, when I first cared, or was aware, of my hair. Pants that year were bell-bottomed, belts were preposterously wide, the Stone’s “19th Nervous Breakdown” was echoing out from the youth center at Ramstein, and I wanted my hair just a little longer. Those details would place this epiphany somewhere around 1965. Unfortunately my father – the Colonel, and the barbers ‘on base’ had a secret pact to deny me even that small sign of independence.
Remember the old electric clippers – the way they hissed and popped like a snake in the grass?
Remember the look and smell of the old barbershops, with their shiny checkerboard tile floors, seats that came out of Dr. Frankenstein’s ‘Catalogue of Surgical Apparatus’, and the barbers themselves out of American International (the film studio responsible for wonderfully awful movie versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s more gruesome stories)?
Those barbers were circus lion tamers, going after every follicle with a whip and a chair, and a cap gun.
A good haircut then was the one you avoided.
Nothing much changed until the late sixties, early seventies when the crew cut prisoners were released and the barbershop morphed overnight into a unisex salon. Barbers didn’t do this willingly: they were forced by economic realities. Young men had learned to avoid them for months, even years. I had personally let “my freak flag fly” for over a year by the spring of 1970 but Holly – my girlfriend at the time, loved Rod Stewart and was doing everything she could to make me over in his image. Under her tutelage I acquired tall, lace-up black boots, a short suede jacket, and a variety of oddly colored corduroys. All that remained (besides plastic surgery) was to get the ‘shag’ haircut.
For Holly’s sake, and believing that stylists were different from barbers, I made an appointment; only to discover that the White-Smocked Meanies I had known as a child were still there – in disguise. They had longer hair themselves, but the same barely repressed anger. They served beer, had art on the walls, but they took a razor to your hair – often leaving it looking like something that should be on the floor, underfoot.
Gradually it became less and less about the style, and more and more about the stylist. When you’d first meet a new stylist they’d ask you a series of perfunctory questions - implying they were interested in your opinion, but when the smoke cleared, your hair looked suspiciously like theirs.
My favorite stylist of this period was Henny, as in ‘Henny color’ (an old Stooges joke).
Everything about Henny was on the cutting edge. His body was tattooed from head to toe, his face (and other regions) were liberally pierced, and his tri-color hair held about a pound and a half of ‘product’ - which actually made his head list a little to the left.
Henny - no surprise, thought I should try a little product too, and a little color, and have my upper lip stapled to my forehead. Over the course of a year, and perhaps seven or eight visits, I tried several variations on his theme and, well, let’s just say it never took. I wasn’t Henny, and Henny wasn’t actually himself. I needed a haircut that didn’t require product, or prep-work, or a bi-weekly visits for minor adjustments.
I needed a haircut that let my freak flag fly, without getting in my eyes or taking up too much time. That wasn’t much to ask, but still between 1966 and 2006 I probably had two haircuts I actually liked.
And then I met Kat.
Kat used to come into a cafe that I did some freelance marketing work for. I liked hanging out there: they let me make a few lattes for customers who couldn’t tell the difference, have my fill of espresso and - if they were busy, even work the register.
Kat came in to get their famous triple mocha lattes for the crew back at the salon, and let slip that she cut the hair of every one of the cafes’ workers too – except mine.
Why not, I thought: how bad could it be. Besides, at that point I had a lot of material to work with: I’d been avoiding scissors for over a year by then and my hair was halfway to the Cape.
So I let Kat at it.
I’m not exactly sure how she did it. I know she washed my hair, but that’s not unusual. I know she gave me a quick massage, fingering the back of my neck, the top of my spine: sort of the way that lobsters are hypnotized. After that it got kind of hazy. I know I must have gone from the shampoo station to her chair, and I do have vague recollections of a conversation, and of the monotonous sound of hairs being snipped. But that’s about all I can recall. All I really know is that, when I came back to full consciousness, it was me I saw in the mirror: not a mini-me version of the stylist, or a motif out of stylist school. Me.
. For over forty years I left the barbers’ chair hair feeling – at best, as if an uneasy calm had descended over a battleground, as if a truce had been declared between my hair and head, a temporary end to hostilities.
All that changed, with Kat.
And now she’s gone and I’m holding out again. Now my hair is headed south, again. Now Mary is threatening to send me to the lion tamers.
If you seek Kat, let her know I’m looking for her.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Parting Shot
It’s disgusting, but fitting, that in the last days of the Bush Administration, another Middle East country should be pre-emptively invaded.
It is surprising that Sarah Palin didn’t know how to accurately describe the so-called Bush Doctrine, because it can be summed up with the kind of bumper sticker wisdom that she loved: Sh-- Happens.
Don’t tell me that the U.S. had nothing to do with this latest misadventure. Don’t be so naïve as to believe that Israel didn’t act now, because otherwise they would have had to deal with a new administration, and a new President who may not have been so willing to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to another dose of ‘shock and awe’.
Neither am I so naïve as to believe that the soon-to-be Obama Administration isn’t relieved that they won’t have to take the blame for allowing this to happen on their watch. And I am not happy that President-elect Obama has not condemned this escalation of the Palestinian conflict: instead he has played the cynical political game of ‘deniability’.
But as ‘W’ goes out the door – looking much the worse for wear, let’s be clear: this invasion was another – hopefully the last, in a series of so-called policy decisions (never mind that it was yet another decision to do nothing) of the Decider, and an administration that almost always placed ideology above the welfare of the individual.
The people of Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the entire Muslim world – in the eyes of the Bush Administration, don’t deserve basic human rights.
The people of New Orleans – in the minds of the kinds of conservatives that ‘W’ placed in key roles in FEMA and in many other government agencies critical to the welfare of less fortunate Americans, got what they deserved.
The people of California lost billions of dollars to piratical entities like Enron, because the Bush Administration believed in letting the chips fall where they may (never mind that the game was played with your money).
Tens of millions of retirees saw their pensions destroyed in a matter of weeks, because the Bush administration believed that everyone should have an equal chance to be screwed by the corporation of their own choosing.
Exxon-Mobil and their cronies claimed they could do nothing to slow rising gas prices – asserting that it takes months for changes in production to affect costs. But did you notice that when the American people began to drive less, the price came down immediately?
The Bush Administration could have stopped the invasion of Gaza, but why would they? The invasion of Gaza is Iraq in miniature. Our intervention in Gaza is why Hamas took power there in the first place. It was the Bush administrations’ hypocritical embrace of ‘democracy’ that helped bring about the elections there. And then, when Hamas was the surprise winner of that election, Bush’ alleged love of democracy was unmasked as political cynicism, pure and simple, and the Bush Administration tried to starve Hamas into submission. When that didn’t work, ‘W’ turned to his second favorite foreign policy tactic: he put his head in the sand and hoped that when he next looked up the world would have changed. Instead, of course, without an ongoing, constructive effort on the part of America in the area, the situation deteriorated.
As the dust begins to clear in Iraq, we are looking at nearly a decade of conflict, hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi dead, over a trillion dollars spent, a more powerful Iran, and a Middle East as fragile as we found it.
When the bombs stop falling on Gaza there will be probably about a thousand more Palestinians (and a few dozen Israeli) dead, several thousand wounded and – much worse, a city of over a million already desperate people without electricity, water, homes, schools, medicine, food, and with even less hope for the future than they had one month ago.
In such an environment only radicalism can flourish. After such an episode, the prospects for peace will have been pushed back, once again.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Are the Israelis so stupid as to repeat both theirs, and our, recent history: believing they can conduct war on a timetable, believing their bombs are so smart they can pick and choose who they kill?
The Intifadah. The Insurgency. The Taliban. Ramallah, Fallujah, and soon, Kabul?
The only thing missing is George W. in a leather aviator jacket, standing on an aircraft carrier, with a giant banner proclaiming, “Oops, I did it again.”
Goodbye George, and good riddance
It is surprising that Sarah Palin didn’t know how to accurately describe the so-called Bush Doctrine, because it can be summed up with the kind of bumper sticker wisdom that she loved: Sh-- Happens.
Don’t tell me that the U.S. had nothing to do with this latest misadventure. Don’t be so naïve as to believe that Israel didn’t act now, because otherwise they would have had to deal with a new administration, and a new President who may not have been so willing to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to another dose of ‘shock and awe’.
Neither am I so naïve as to believe that the soon-to-be Obama Administration isn’t relieved that they won’t have to take the blame for allowing this to happen on their watch. And I am not happy that President-elect Obama has not condemned this escalation of the Palestinian conflict: instead he has played the cynical political game of ‘deniability’.
But as ‘W’ goes out the door – looking much the worse for wear, let’s be clear: this invasion was another – hopefully the last, in a series of so-called policy decisions (never mind that it was yet another decision to do nothing) of the Decider, and an administration that almost always placed ideology above the welfare of the individual.
The people of Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the entire Muslim world – in the eyes of the Bush Administration, don’t deserve basic human rights.
The people of New Orleans – in the minds of the kinds of conservatives that ‘W’ placed in key roles in FEMA and in many other government agencies critical to the welfare of less fortunate Americans, got what they deserved.
The people of California lost billions of dollars to piratical entities like Enron, because the Bush Administration believed in letting the chips fall where they may (never mind that the game was played with your money).
Tens of millions of retirees saw their pensions destroyed in a matter of weeks, because the Bush administration believed that everyone should have an equal chance to be screwed by the corporation of their own choosing.
Exxon-Mobil and their cronies claimed they could do nothing to slow rising gas prices – asserting that it takes months for changes in production to affect costs. But did you notice that when the American people began to drive less, the price came down immediately?
The Bush Administration could have stopped the invasion of Gaza, but why would they? The invasion of Gaza is Iraq in miniature. Our intervention in Gaza is why Hamas took power there in the first place. It was the Bush administrations’ hypocritical embrace of ‘democracy’ that helped bring about the elections there. And then, when Hamas was the surprise winner of that election, Bush’ alleged love of democracy was unmasked as political cynicism, pure and simple, and the Bush Administration tried to starve Hamas into submission. When that didn’t work, ‘W’ turned to his second favorite foreign policy tactic: he put his head in the sand and hoped that when he next looked up the world would have changed. Instead, of course, without an ongoing, constructive effort on the part of America in the area, the situation deteriorated.
As the dust begins to clear in Iraq, we are looking at nearly a decade of conflict, hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi dead, over a trillion dollars spent, a more powerful Iran, and a Middle East as fragile as we found it.
When the bombs stop falling on Gaza there will be probably about a thousand more Palestinians (and a few dozen Israeli) dead, several thousand wounded and – much worse, a city of over a million already desperate people without electricity, water, homes, schools, medicine, food, and with even less hope for the future than they had one month ago.
In such an environment only radicalism can flourish. After such an episode, the prospects for peace will have been pushed back, once again.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Are the Israelis so stupid as to repeat both theirs, and our, recent history: believing they can conduct war on a timetable, believing their bombs are so smart they can pick and choose who they kill?
The Intifadah. The Insurgency. The Taliban. Ramallah, Fallujah, and soon, Kabul?
The only thing missing is George W. in a leather aviator jacket, standing on an aircraft carrier, with a giant banner proclaiming, “Oops, I did it again.”
Goodbye George, and good riddance
Thursday, December 25, 2008
A Perfect Tree
I should have just kept last year’s tree.
What do you think?
If you took a ruler to this one, measured its height, its width, its weight, I’m sure I’m off by no more than an inch or two, an ounce or so.
Douglas Fir, Fraser, Blue Spruce?
I don’t know.
I’m not a Christmas tree snob.
I know what I like. I cut right to the chase. It’s a scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: I go right up to the first one that catches my eye, put my arms around it, give it a hug, lift it off the ground, (measuring, approximating, inhaling the aroma), and if it feels right I take it home with me.
And after all the lights and 30 years worth of ornaments have been applied, damn if it doesn’t look just like last year’s tree!
I’m not complaining, but it’s eerie. It’s like there is some kind of relationship, some kind of connection, some inner design I am working to. Has there been building in the cave of my brain all year – ever since we took the last one down, another perfect, platonic Christmas tree?
I don’t give it any thought, but I know it when I put my arms around it.
Of course, the tree has got to fit into a particular space, in a room with a specific ceiling height, allow just enough room for, at most, eight people who’ll sit around it on Christmas morning.
How does that tree feel, among all the other trees? Like the ugly girl, the awkward boy, sitting on folding chairs at the edge of the dance floor hoping for an invitation?
Or is it like Vertigo, to cite another favorite film of mine, when Jimmy Stewart dresses up Kim Novak to look like the woman he loved and lost, only it turns out he’s dressing Kim to look like Kim. The joke’s on him.
Is last year’s tree playing a joke on me?
Clearly, the intent is to make this year’s tree look like last year’s tree, and the one before, and the one before that. We have an idea, and everything we do is calculated to achieve that effect.
I guess I should feel a bit more empathy for the tree. We make a big show of the selection but, ironically, we don’t respect its individuality. Then again, is it really another, different tree? Is it the ghost of Christmas trees past? And what of the rejects cast to the side, too large or too small, too thick or too dry?
This, at least, is a better fate than theirs. This one, at least, was not cut from the soil and strapped to a truck and driven 500 miles for naught.
At least this tree was chosen.
Look at it now, standing there in the corner, all dressed up in tiny lights and handmade ornaments. It knows the truth, but it is content to allow us our illusion.
Our illusion?
What year is this?
1980?
1990?
If you’re not careful you can lose control, be sucked back a dozen years or more, forever trapped in a Christmas or Christmases past.
Christmas trees are time machines!
If I look carefully, I can tell the year, or come darn close. But usually you don’t look too closely at a Christmas tree. Usually, when the tree is done, you allow your eyes to go out of focus, allow your mind to drift.
But there, that ornament of a hockey player made from dough, I could swear we got that in1992, when Bobby was on his first traveling team. That February the parents and players went to Canada by bus. That was the first of several successive school vacations spent, for the most part, in a hockey rink.
And there, those faded blue and green balls, with the gold tracery, those were Mary’s parents’ ornaments, on their tree, and the year is 1949.
The shuttle craft? Press the top and Spock says “Live long and prosper”. That’s only, what, 20 years old or so? It’s amazing that it has lasted, and prospered, for so long.
Now I remember: We haven’t always had our tree in the same spot in the house. It used to be in front of the slider, before the desk went in there. Once it was in the other corner of this room, and there’s the hole from the screw we put in the wall – where we ran a wire to the trunk of the tree, to keep it from falling over again.
I guess there have been a few mistakes made, a few trees that were too tall, or too wide, or whose trunks were too thick to fit into the stand. But even if we choose poorly, we can always add an extra layer of ornaments, or turn the tree so that its bad side is facing the wall, or squint our eyes a little more tightly, fracture the light, bend the shadow, give ourselves up to the overwhelming urge to forget.
Right now, staring at this tree, I’m having a hard time remembering any bad sides, any bad decisions, any bad Christmases.
It seems that somehow, whatever is going on in the world or in our lives, we manage to make it to that place where by unanimous consent, everything’s just fine the way it is.
Maybe it is an illusion. Maybe underneath the lights and the bulbs is an ugly, twisted, corpse of a tree.
But maybe just this once, at this time of year, we just have to blink our eyes a few times and let it be.
So, how’d I do this year?
Isn’t it a perfect tree?
Thursday, December 18, 2008
$19.95
I’ve got this gift-giving thing down.
I’m getting my older brother, the Baconwave.
Just $19.95.
It makes perfect bacon, in the microwave.
It’s a joke, of sorts. Bob lives down in Florida, and has been on this health kick lately. He says he’s given up the Guinness, and the fried Ring Dings. He runs now, in the mornings – and pumps iron when he gets home from work. He looks ten years younger, says he feels great.
I guess I’m being mean.
For Dad, it’s the Forearm Forklift Strap Set, just $19.95.
Dad’s 85, in great shape – and with absolutely no interest, or need, for moving or mowing or doing much of anything, except traveling. I tell him not to, but he sends me his itineraries. I don’t care to know the exact time and location of the good times he is having. I think he does it to irk me.
Not that he ever will, but with the Forearm Forklift Strap Set now - if he wanted, he could move a dresser or a refrigerator all by himself.
Hell, he never likes what I get him anyway. He doesn’t really need anything. I guess it’s a kind of sarcastic gift – if gifts can be sarcastic.
I guess I just have the holiday spirit. Well, maybe not the holiday spirit, but one of the holiday spirits. Grumpy? Sneezy? Doc?
I’m getting Dave, down the street, the Weed Thrasher: mainly because I like the name. It sounds like something you beat the weeds up with: give those nasty dandelions a thrashing.
Just $19.95, too.
Dave has no lawn, or yard, to speak of. He’s got concrete, and mulch, and that faux granite tile that’s suppose to last a thousand years, around his in-ground pool. If a stray leaf wanders onto his property, he pays someone to immediately Hoover it off.
Do you sense a pattern here?
I like to give people useless gifts, especially if the price is right.
Maybe I’m angry because – as a child, I never really got what I wanted. My parents could never get it just right: it was always the wrong brand, or wrong color, or the wrong size. And when that happens you have to smile and, with a super-human effort, stop yourself from turning immediately back to your pile and frantically ripping into what’s left.
All these gifts that I’m considering giving, are items that I’ve seen on TV too: odd items from late night television that I considered buying for myself. Eventually though, I fought off the urge and, instead, bought them for friends and family.
I am also intrigued that everything is $19.95.
I think it’s a conspiracy of some kind.
I get the feeling that they (the same ‘they‘as always) have figured out that $19.95 is the perfect price. It sounds nice to say. It tricks your mouth into mimicking a smile. You can’t say ‘nineteen ninety-five’ without grinning: try it. It’s also a price just high enough to allow you believe that you have a chance of getting something that actually does what it is advertised to do, and just low enough not to care too much if it does not.
It’s the magic number. Repeat after me: just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Someone told me it’s the As Seen on TV Index.
When the economy is strong, the ASOT Index goes up. Just last Christmas it was at $24.95. Since then though, it’s dropped like a stone.
Whatever it is, it’s working.
If it’s $19.95 I go right for my credit card.
I’m seriously considering getting the Ding King for myself. It’s this little contraption with thumb screws and suction cups that you place over the little dings you get on your car, and just by tightening the thumb screws – the ding pops out.
Just $19.95.
Not that I have a car worth taking the time to make cosmetic repairs to: I mean, the old Camry could benefit from an extended Ding King session, if I could get the sap off it first. But why bother: we don’t have a garage, so if I clean the sap off the car it would soon be covered again. And in a year or two it will be completely encased in sap, like a bug in amber.
I’m thinking about getting Mary a Snuggie.
You guessed it: just $19.95.
It’s just a big blanket, with sleeves.
She’s worried about work, about the economy, about me – so when she gets home she usually just curls up into a ball, on the couch, and passes out until it’s time to go to sleep. With the Snuggie she can be transferred directly from the couch to the bed.
I might get Riddex Plus, too: just $19.95.
I think we have mice in the attic, or the eaves or somewhere in the walls. They sound like they’re skating: pushing a puck in front of them. You just plug in the little Riddex box in any outlet, and the ultrasonic sound waves – they promise, drive the mice away (or distract them long enough to keep them from scoring).
There’s so much more, so many odd, unusual inventions: so many labor saving devices for just $19.95. The Girl Crush Jewelry Maker. The Ultrasonic Jewelry Cleaner. The Blendy Pen. Ambervision. Mighty Putty. Save-A-Blade. The Big City Slider Station? The Auto Vent SPV. Doggy Steps for aged pets. The list just goes on and on.
I think they should offer a mystery gift, filled with a random assortment of five or six of these odd devices, for just $19.95.
Is that possible?
Sure, why not. They don’t really cost $19.95. That’s just the magic number. They could sell them for a buck, or twenty dollars, or $3.99. But they’ve figured out they’ll sell the most if they price them at the magic number.
I might just go down the list and buy everything they have for $19.95. Then, when everything arrives, cover everything up in the cheapest wrapping paper I can find, load it all into the Camry’s sap-encased trunk, and go around town passing out gifts, pretending I’m the As Seen on TV Santa.
It’s not the holiday spirit. But what do you want, for $19.95?
I’m getting my older brother, the Baconwave.
Just $19.95.
It makes perfect bacon, in the microwave.
It’s a joke, of sorts. Bob lives down in Florida, and has been on this health kick lately. He says he’s given up the Guinness, and the fried Ring Dings. He runs now, in the mornings – and pumps iron when he gets home from work. He looks ten years younger, says he feels great.
I guess I’m being mean.
For Dad, it’s the Forearm Forklift Strap Set, just $19.95.
Dad’s 85, in great shape – and with absolutely no interest, or need, for moving or mowing or doing much of anything, except traveling. I tell him not to, but he sends me his itineraries. I don’t care to know the exact time and location of the good times he is having. I think he does it to irk me.
Not that he ever will, but with the Forearm Forklift Strap Set now - if he wanted, he could move a dresser or a refrigerator all by himself.
Hell, he never likes what I get him anyway. He doesn’t really need anything. I guess it’s a kind of sarcastic gift – if gifts can be sarcastic.
I guess I just have the holiday spirit. Well, maybe not the holiday spirit, but one of the holiday spirits. Grumpy? Sneezy? Doc?
I’m getting Dave, down the street, the Weed Thrasher: mainly because I like the name. It sounds like something you beat the weeds up with: give those nasty dandelions a thrashing.
Just $19.95, too.
Dave has no lawn, or yard, to speak of. He’s got concrete, and mulch, and that faux granite tile that’s suppose to last a thousand years, around his in-ground pool. If a stray leaf wanders onto his property, he pays someone to immediately Hoover it off.
Do you sense a pattern here?
I like to give people useless gifts, especially if the price is right.
Maybe I’m angry because – as a child, I never really got what I wanted. My parents could never get it just right: it was always the wrong brand, or wrong color, or the wrong size. And when that happens you have to smile and, with a super-human effort, stop yourself from turning immediately back to your pile and frantically ripping into what’s left.
All these gifts that I’m considering giving, are items that I’ve seen on TV too: odd items from late night television that I considered buying for myself. Eventually though, I fought off the urge and, instead, bought them for friends and family.
I am also intrigued that everything is $19.95.
I think it’s a conspiracy of some kind.
I get the feeling that they (the same ‘they‘as always) have figured out that $19.95 is the perfect price. It sounds nice to say. It tricks your mouth into mimicking a smile. You can’t say ‘nineteen ninety-five’ without grinning: try it. It’s also a price just high enough to allow you believe that you have a chance of getting something that actually does what it is advertised to do, and just low enough not to care too much if it does not.
It’s the magic number. Repeat after me: just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Someone told me it’s the As Seen on TV Index.
When the economy is strong, the ASOT Index goes up. Just last Christmas it was at $24.95. Since then though, it’s dropped like a stone.
Whatever it is, it’s working.
If it’s $19.95 I go right for my credit card.
I’m seriously considering getting the Ding King for myself. It’s this little contraption with thumb screws and suction cups that you place over the little dings you get on your car, and just by tightening the thumb screws – the ding pops out.
Just $19.95.
Not that I have a car worth taking the time to make cosmetic repairs to: I mean, the old Camry could benefit from an extended Ding King session, if I could get the sap off it first. But why bother: we don’t have a garage, so if I clean the sap off the car it would soon be covered again. And in a year or two it will be completely encased in sap, like a bug in amber.
I’m thinking about getting Mary a Snuggie.
You guessed it: just $19.95.
It’s just a big blanket, with sleeves.
She’s worried about work, about the economy, about me – so when she gets home she usually just curls up into a ball, on the couch, and passes out until it’s time to go to sleep. With the Snuggie she can be transferred directly from the couch to the bed.
I might get Riddex Plus, too: just $19.95.
I think we have mice in the attic, or the eaves or somewhere in the walls. They sound like they’re skating: pushing a puck in front of them. You just plug in the little Riddex box in any outlet, and the ultrasonic sound waves – they promise, drive the mice away (or distract them long enough to keep them from scoring).
There’s so much more, so many odd, unusual inventions: so many labor saving devices for just $19.95. The Girl Crush Jewelry Maker. The Ultrasonic Jewelry Cleaner. The Blendy Pen. Ambervision. Mighty Putty. Save-A-Blade. The Big City Slider Station? The Auto Vent SPV. Doggy Steps for aged pets. The list just goes on and on.
I think they should offer a mystery gift, filled with a random assortment of five or six of these odd devices, for just $19.95.
Is that possible?
Sure, why not. They don’t really cost $19.95. That’s just the magic number. They could sell them for a buck, or twenty dollars, or $3.99. But they’ve figured out they’ll sell the most if they price them at the magic number.
I might just go down the list and buy everything they have for $19.95. Then, when everything arrives, cover everything up in the cheapest wrapping paper I can find, load it all into the Camry’s sap-encased trunk, and go around town passing out gifts, pretending I’m the As Seen on TV Santa.
It’s not the holiday spirit. But what do you want, for $19.95?
Thursday, December 11, 2008
I'm Not Counting
“Will the days fly by?” my youngest son asked me, early this morning.
Christmas, of course, was what was on his mind.
‘That depends’, I mumbled, trudging down the stairs. ‘That depends,’ I said, but it felt like a lie.
We certainly help create the illusion that the days are hurtling toward us, like snowflakes sucked into our high beams on the highway. But if we were to slow, then stop – get out of the car, turn our heads to the stars, we might find the flakes falling like, well, like snowflakes fall, so slowly to the ground.
I’m sure the single flake once it lands, looks back at the sky, and sighs.
‘I wish’, it probably says in a whisper, in that ever so low snowflake hushed tone, ‘I wish that I could feel what it’s like to fall through the sky, to float through the air, to have that feeling just one more time’.
It does no good to console the flake with references to the water cycle (but of course I make a pathetic try).
“It’s like the rain,” I say to my son over a hurried breakfast, “it falls to earth and then, fills the rivers, and then, well you know – ends up back in the sky.”
He gets what I am saying, smiles, and then to my magic ointment adds his fly.
“But what if I can’t wait, to evaporate?”
“You have no choice,” I say, impatiently, watching the minutes go by: “we are either too early, or too late”.
Even as I say that, though I won’t publicly admit it - I reject that fate.
I too hope for a moment eternal: in Christmas everyday, in Leap Year, and Un-Birthdays.
Everything I write I want to be poetry.
Every bite I take, I am hoping will taste of ecstasy.
Every breath I take.
Will the days fly by?
I suppose what I want to say – to live, is a life of days indistinguishable from one another. Not indistinguishable because they are so drab and gray and uneventful that they all blur into one groaning mass. But indistinguishable because each has a subtle, unique beauty, a beauty hiding, like a drop of rain in a swollen river.
I think what I mean to say, is that we do not need to speed up or slow down these days. We simply need to take the time – there is time, to consider, to touch, to remark on each one.
Today the sun was in my eyes as I drove my son to the Middle School.
The bearded traffic warden was his usual impatient self, frenetically conducting the cacophonous traffic: the yellow bus bassoons, the reedy SUVs, the breathless flutes of four-cylinder youth.
I merged into the traffic, split off from the high school stream, leaped over the confluence of high and middle schools, looped around the future movie studio lot, dropped off my snowflake and didn’t look back.
I know he will make it back home, this afternoon.
I know the day will fly by and he will once again drop down out of the sky, sigh, and say to me, “how many days before Christmas, Dad?”
And I will lie, and say “I’m not counting.”
Pilgrim Labor Crisis
The Plimoth Plantation, the nation’s leading producer of 17th Century Impersonators, announced this month that – in the face of dramatic drops in attendance and revenue at its ‘theme park’, and following on the announced layoffs of experienced staff members, that it is considering several dramatic new business strategies, up to and including changing centuries.
The following is a list – obtained from a former Lieutenant Governor of the Plymouth Colony who wishes to remain anachronistic, of the key strategies being considered by Plantation leadership.
The 20th Century:
Instead of Plymouth in its infancy (circa 1627), the Plantation is considering shifting its focus to the Plantation in its infancy – namely, the Plantation in the mid 20th Century (circa 1968), when it served the community as a kind of de-facto commune, getting the region’s long-hairs off the streets. (Ironically, ‘coole’ and ‘far oute’ were expressions used in both of these historic periods.)
1610
Ten years before the Pilgrim’s landed, the Wampanoag village of Pawtuxet flourished. A focus on that year would allow for the layoff of the entire impersonator staff, the refinancing of every unoccupied home on Leyden Street, the installation of basic utilities (specifically, flush toilets), and the addition to the town’s low income housing, of 11 desirable units.
Pilgrim FX
For this approach, the impersonators remain faithful to the historical record BUT, sophisticated digital technologies and effects are utilized to create horrifically realistic portrayals of the more bloody (and therefore crowd-pleasing) moments in the Pilgrim story, including:
§ The beheading of King Phillip.
§ The drowning of Dorothy Bradford.
§ The big splinter that John Billington had removed from his butt.
§ And the last big layoff (2001) of 17th Century Impersonators.
The Mayflower III Paddlewheel Plymouth Harbor Booze Cruise
Three times a day, five times on weekends, the Mayflower – equipped with it’s own working Paddlewheel, would offer mini-historic-booze-cruises of the harbor during which costumed impersonators - confined to cages on deck, could be taunted and teased by the paying customers.
The Haunting of Burial Hill House
Requiring no Pilgrim impersonators at all, the 17th Century Pilgrim Settlement would instead, be transformed into a first-rate haunted house
The Pilgrim Improv Troupe?
You buy a ticket and we make it up as we go.
Timeshare Anyone?
Imagine spending a week in your own 17th century home, eating gruel, fending off pesky savages, and – helping to keep the towns’ rapidly rising number of wild turkeys in check. For just $10,000 you could spend one week every year in one of the world’s most famous single family homes (the first to order will have their choice of the Bradford, Winslow, or Standish units) – or, exchange your unit for a fortnight in a 9thth Century British hovel (eating gruel, fending off pesky Vikings) or a long weekend in 3rd Century Rome (eating gruel, fending off pesky barbarians).
Seven Flags, Plymouth
You want rides? We got rides! Well, one at least. The Mayflower Experience: a sort of roller coaster with only one large car – in which up to a hundred ticket holders are forced together, doused with saltwater, subjected to nasty smells, tumbled like clothes in the dryer, blasted with pre-recorded religious aphorisms, then left to fend for themselves somewhere else.
Want to go again?
Alternative History?
What if?
What if little Johnny Billington had actually discovered the Pacific Ocean (and not the pond that now bears his name) settled in California, planted a vineyard, developed the famous ‘Pilgrim Pub & Grub’ chain, eventually moving their massive World headquarters (designed to look like a big glass hamburger) to Plymouth’s non-historic, honky-tonk waterfront?
What if?
What if the term ‘Pilgrim’ were synonymous with ‘party animal.’
What if?
What if Squanto’s plan was to wait until he had earned the confidence of the Pilgrims then, when they were all asleep...
Let The Inmates Run the Asylum!
What if, instead of cutting middle management and asking the indentured servants (impersonators) to do more with less, we get rid of ourselves (the high-priced upper management, museum types, Mayflower descendants, retailers) and instead, really, honestly, obsessively, focus on creating an actual working, 17th Century settlement.
Hire dozens of additional impersonators and have them actually on site, all the time.
Instead of giving into today’s economic realities, fully embrace the 17th Century’s realities. Live off the corn we grow, the livestock we raise, and the beer we brew. Have perhaps, two or three sets of impersonators for each historic personage.
Script an entire year – and give visitors a chance to travel back in time – to a specific day, happening in real time.
Now that would be exciting.
That would be a reality worth paying for.
Let the Pilgrims actually run Pilgrim Town!
What a concept!
The following is a list – obtained from a former Lieutenant Governor of the Plymouth Colony who wishes to remain anachronistic, of the key strategies being considered by Plantation leadership.
The 20th Century:
Instead of Plymouth in its infancy (circa 1627), the Plantation is considering shifting its focus to the Plantation in its infancy – namely, the Plantation in the mid 20th Century (circa 1968), when it served the community as a kind of de-facto commune, getting the region’s long-hairs off the streets. (Ironically, ‘coole’ and ‘far oute’ were expressions used in both of these historic periods.)
1610
Ten years before the Pilgrim’s landed, the Wampanoag village of Pawtuxet flourished. A focus on that year would allow for the layoff of the entire impersonator staff, the refinancing of every unoccupied home on Leyden Street, the installation of basic utilities (specifically, flush toilets), and the addition to the town’s low income housing, of 11 desirable units.
Pilgrim FX
For this approach, the impersonators remain faithful to the historical record BUT, sophisticated digital technologies and effects are utilized to create horrifically realistic portrayals of the more bloody (and therefore crowd-pleasing) moments in the Pilgrim story, including:
§ The beheading of King Phillip.
§ The drowning of Dorothy Bradford.
§ The big splinter that John Billington had removed from his butt.
§ And the last big layoff (2001) of 17th Century Impersonators.
The Mayflower III Paddlewheel Plymouth Harbor Booze Cruise
Three times a day, five times on weekends, the Mayflower – equipped with it’s own working Paddlewheel, would offer mini-historic-booze-cruises of the harbor during which costumed impersonators - confined to cages on deck, could be taunted and teased by the paying customers.
The Haunting of Burial Hill House
Requiring no Pilgrim impersonators at all, the 17th Century Pilgrim Settlement would instead, be transformed into a first-rate haunted house
The Pilgrim Improv Troupe?
You buy a ticket and we make it up as we go.
Timeshare Anyone?
Imagine spending a week in your own 17th century home, eating gruel, fending off pesky savages, and – helping to keep the towns’ rapidly rising number of wild turkeys in check. For just $10,000 you could spend one week every year in one of the world’s most famous single family homes (the first to order will have their choice of the Bradford, Winslow, or Standish units) – or, exchange your unit for a fortnight in a 9thth Century British hovel (eating gruel, fending off pesky Vikings) or a long weekend in 3rd Century Rome (eating gruel, fending off pesky barbarians).
Seven Flags, Plymouth
You want rides? We got rides! Well, one at least. The Mayflower Experience: a sort of roller coaster with only one large car – in which up to a hundred ticket holders are forced together, doused with saltwater, subjected to nasty smells, tumbled like clothes in the dryer, blasted with pre-recorded religious aphorisms, then left to fend for themselves somewhere else.
Want to go again?
Alternative History?
What if?
What if little Johnny Billington had actually discovered the Pacific Ocean (and not the pond that now bears his name) settled in California, planted a vineyard, developed the famous ‘Pilgrim Pub & Grub’ chain, eventually moving their massive World headquarters (designed to look like a big glass hamburger) to Plymouth’s non-historic, honky-tonk waterfront?
What if?
What if the term ‘Pilgrim’ were synonymous with ‘party animal.’
What if?
What if Squanto’s plan was to wait until he had earned the confidence of the Pilgrims then, when they were all asleep...
Let The Inmates Run the Asylum!
What if, instead of cutting middle management and asking the indentured servants (impersonators) to do more with less, we get rid of ourselves (the high-priced upper management, museum types, Mayflower descendants, retailers) and instead, really, honestly, obsessively, focus on creating an actual working, 17th Century settlement.
Hire dozens of additional impersonators and have them actually on site, all the time.
Instead of giving into today’s economic realities, fully embrace the 17th Century’s realities. Live off the corn we grow, the livestock we raise, and the beer we brew. Have perhaps, two or three sets of impersonators for each historic personage.
Script an entire year – and give visitors a chance to travel back in time – to a specific day, happening in real time.
Now that would be exciting.
That would be a reality worth paying for.
Let the Pilgrims actually run Pilgrim Town!
What a concept!
Monday, December 08, 2008
Ye Olde Story
There are quite a few places in Plymouth that proudly wear the “Ye’.
There are also a great many businesses and tourist attractions that claim to be olde, with the extra ‘e’, which is either an outright affectation, or an implication that the business in question is in part – or whole, really, really old. (An olde, but goode?)
There are also businesses that come right out and slap the word ‘Pilgrim’ onto their store front, the sides of delivery vans, brochures, business cards, web sites and the like – regardless of whether their buildings are olde, their ancestors came off the Mayflower, or they specialize in Pilgrim kitsch.
But there are only a handful of businesses in this historic community that can claim all three.
I call it, The Plyfecta!
And then there is my favorite Laundromat.
I probably shouldn’t say it’s my favorite, because that implies I’ve tried many and prefer one: actually I only recently visited this particular Laundromat, when our dryer kicked ye olde bucket.
But when I realized I had to find a Laundromat, I knew just where I would go.
Not only is the place where I chose to dry my delicates a certified Ye, and an olde but goode, and features ‘Pilgrim’ in its business name, but the wash and fold folks on Sandwich Street take it one big affectated step further - featuring a wishing well – one of America’s most endearing faux lawn decorations, in their name.
Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat!
If you’re looking for a Laundromat, how can you top that?
Well, how about with the words of Mary Elizabeth Dibley, the Plymouth colony’s first washerwoman, from her historic diary, entitled “Of Plimoth Laundree”.
“Being thus arrived in a good harbore and brought safe to lande, we felle upon our knees &, what do thee knowe, but founde we were knee deepe in a small brooke of pleasante waters and, the thoughte came to me – well, actuallethly, the smell came to me, and I remarked to Goodman Bradford that he was ripe in age and stench and that I would, for less than he might imagineth, undertake to wash his doublet right then and there. Blessed be ye God of heaven, who had brought us over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered us from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set our feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente and, despite all that, left both man and woman with an all too earthly odor and a chance to make a bucke”
Unbelievable!
Yeah, you’re right, it is unbelievable. Not the Laundromat – no, that exists, but Mary Dibley – ye olde Pilgrim Washer-woman: I made her up. I got carried away by the Ye, and the Olde, and the whole Pilgrim shtick. But can you blame me? Whether its trinkets or toiletries or auto parts, history is good for the bottom line. Heck, even the movie folks got into the act (rumor has it, that their first idea was to call their venture, Ye Olde Pilgrim Celluloid Companie).
On one hand, it’s silly. On the other hand, it associates your business with people who were adventurous, brave, hard working and – most importantly, successful.
At its worse, Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat is just that – a Laundromat.
At its best, washing your clothes in the waters of Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat might somehow imbue them with the spirit and vitality of our stalwart Pilgrim forbears.
Plymouth was the first town in America where someone casually remarked to someone else – (and someone else wrote it down) ‘there’s something in the water’. And if its ‘in the water’, the implication is clear, it could get ‘in the clothes’!
Its possible!
I should make it clear though that, the owners of Ye Olde Wash and Fold, are not making that kind of claim: not specifically, not outright. The only claim they make – as far I can tell, is that they are not responsible for lost or stolen items.
The attendants, I should inform you, do not wear traditional Pilgrim garb.
And the workers don’t look puzzled when you ask them where you might get an espresso while your doublet is drying.
Though directly across the street is the Jabez Howland home – an actual 1667 saltbox style, cedar shingled structure with leaded windows and tours available – the building that the Laundromat occupies seems to have had almost all vestiges of its past put through the rinse cycle.
Instead of the wide plank floors that tourists might envision, there are only the remnants of artificial floor coverings and, beneath that, what appears to be plywood.
Instead of traditional clapboard there is aluminum siding, and a giant flap on the southern side of the building that – when opened, allows the servicing of the washing machines from the outside of the building.
Inside pop music plays from a few small speakers, and two large ceiling fans turn counter-clockwise while several dozen washers and dryers roll monotonously forward.
It is definitely cleaner than your typical Pilgrim household.
It’s definitely warmer than your typical Pilgrim home.
But hey, whadda ya want: this is America!
We like to associate ourselves with the best of our past, but if the history actually shows through - if the old beams haven’t been plastered over and the wide plank floors haven’t been hidden under at least two coats of linoleum, something must be wrong.
Which is not to say that Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well can’t do the job.
If your clothes need washing but history bores you, rest assured – you won’t have to use a washboard: there is an abundance of late model Maytag machines.
Don’t be confused: the pilgrims did not come over on the Maytag – though if they had they would have arrived with brighter whites, and more vibrant colors.
Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well is, in the end, just a Laundromat.
If you’re planning a visit, bring something good to read.
Bring quarters too: the machines don’t take shillings, or pence, or Canadian coins.
Bring a basket or two of Ye and Olde, and maybe a pint of Olde Grand Dad. After an hour or so taking it all in, who knows how bright your whites might be?
There are also a great many businesses and tourist attractions that claim to be olde, with the extra ‘e’, which is either an outright affectation, or an implication that the business in question is in part – or whole, really, really old. (An olde, but goode?)
There are also businesses that come right out and slap the word ‘Pilgrim’ onto their store front, the sides of delivery vans, brochures, business cards, web sites and the like – regardless of whether their buildings are olde, their ancestors came off the Mayflower, or they specialize in Pilgrim kitsch.
But there are only a handful of businesses in this historic community that can claim all three.
I call it, The Plyfecta!
And then there is my favorite Laundromat.
I probably shouldn’t say it’s my favorite, because that implies I’ve tried many and prefer one: actually I only recently visited this particular Laundromat, when our dryer kicked ye olde bucket.
But when I realized I had to find a Laundromat, I knew just where I would go.
Not only is the place where I chose to dry my delicates a certified Ye, and an olde but goode, and features ‘Pilgrim’ in its business name, but the wash and fold folks on Sandwich Street take it one big affectated step further - featuring a wishing well – one of America’s most endearing faux lawn decorations, in their name.
Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat!
If you’re looking for a Laundromat, how can you top that?
Well, how about with the words of Mary Elizabeth Dibley, the Plymouth colony’s first washerwoman, from her historic diary, entitled “Of Plimoth Laundree”.
“Being thus arrived in a good harbore and brought safe to lande, we felle upon our knees &, what do thee knowe, but founde we were knee deepe in a small brooke of pleasante waters and, the thoughte came to me – well, actuallethly, the smell came to me, and I remarked to Goodman Bradford that he was ripe in age and stench and that I would, for less than he might imagineth, undertake to wash his doublet right then and there. Blessed be ye God of heaven, who had brought us over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered us from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set our feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente and, despite all that, left both man and woman with an all too earthly odor and a chance to make a bucke”
Unbelievable!
Yeah, you’re right, it is unbelievable. Not the Laundromat – no, that exists, but Mary Dibley – ye olde Pilgrim Washer-woman: I made her up. I got carried away by the Ye, and the Olde, and the whole Pilgrim shtick. But can you blame me? Whether its trinkets or toiletries or auto parts, history is good for the bottom line. Heck, even the movie folks got into the act (rumor has it, that their first idea was to call their venture, Ye Olde Pilgrim Celluloid Companie).
On one hand, it’s silly. On the other hand, it associates your business with people who were adventurous, brave, hard working and – most importantly, successful.
At its worse, Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat is just that – a Laundromat.
At its best, washing your clothes in the waters of Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat might somehow imbue them with the spirit and vitality of our stalwart Pilgrim forbears.
Plymouth was the first town in America where someone casually remarked to someone else – (and someone else wrote it down) ‘there’s something in the water’. And if its ‘in the water’, the implication is clear, it could get ‘in the clothes’!
Its possible!
I should make it clear though that, the owners of Ye Olde Wash and Fold, are not making that kind of claim: not specifically, not outright. The only claim they make – as far I can tell, is that they are not responsible for lost or stolen items.
The attendants, I should inform you, do not wear traditional Pilgrim garb.
And the workers don’t look puzzled when you ask them where you might get an espresso while your doublet is drying.
Though directly across the street is the Jabez Howland home – an actual 1667 saltbox style, cedar shingled structure with leaded windows and tours available – the building that the Laundromat occupies seems to have had almost all vestiges of its past put through the rinse cycle.
Instead of the wide plank floors that tourists might envision, there are only the remnants of artificial floor coverings and, beneath that, what appears to be plywood.
Instead of traditional clapboard there is aluminum siding, and a giant flap on the southern side of the building that – when opened, allows the servicing of the washing machines from the outside of the building.
Inside pop music plays from a few small speakers, and two large ceiling fans turn counter-clockwise while several dozen washers and dryers roll monotonously forward.
It is definitely cleaner than your typical Pilgrim household.
It’s definitely warmer than your typical Pilgrim home.
But hey, whadda ya want: this is America!
We like to associate ourselves with the best of our past, but if the history actually shows through - if the old beams haven’t been plastered over and the wide plank floors haven’t been hidden under at least two coats of linoleum, something must be wrong.
Which is not to say that Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well can’t do the job.
If your clothes need washing but history bores you, rest assured – you won’t have to use a washboard: there is an abundance of late model Maytag machines.
Don’t be confused: the pilgrims did not come over on the Maytag – though if they had they would have arrived with brighter whites, and more vibrant colors.
Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well is, in the end, just a Laundromat.
If you’re planning a visit, bring something good to read.
Bring quarters too: the machines don’t take shillings, or pence, or Canadian coins.
Bring a basket or two of Ye and Olde, and maybe a pint of Olde Grand Dad. After an hour or so taking it all in, who knows how bright your whites might be?
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Uncle Bob's
I must be getting old.
In fact, I know I’m getting old.
We’re all getting old – or at least older, and there’s nothing we can do about it – except give in.
I’m giving in, and the evidence of that is in the stuff I am willing to give out – or give away.
I’m letting the stuff go.
A sure sign of advanced years, I think, is the ability to let go of stuff – all kinds of stuff.
When you’re young, you like stuff, but you’re too busy testing out your own stuff (strutting your stuff) to worry about acquiring other stuff. Consequently, though you’re pretty fussy about the stuff you have – or want, relatively speaking you don’t have much stuff at all.
I used to drag around a trunk full of LPs (large pizza-size black platters on which music had been recorded – for those of you under 40), along with a suitcase with two pairs of jeans and 40 tee shirts, and I thought I was weighed down by my possessions. I had no clue how much stuff I would eventually be able to carry around on my back - like the giant tortoise primitive people believed carried the world on its shell.
The truth is, or was – that, 30 years ago I hardly had any stuff at all.
So where did it all come from?
When you reach a certain age, you don’t suddenly have a lot of stuff: stuff doesn’t start erupting from the floor like zits on your forehead.
It’s not that you have more zits as you get older, it’s that you have more forehead: more space for the stuff.
You get your first car and, you soon discover, a car is just space to put stuff.
You get your first apartment and – though you were hoping it would prove a ‘babe’ magnet, it turns out that it’s a stuff magnet.
Your first house? Oh my gosh, a house is like some Criss Angel ‘Mind-Freak’ magic trick in which – one moment you have all these empty rooms, shiny wooden floors, clean carpets and unblemished walls, and then Criss throws a blanket over it – tosses his carefully jelled unkempt hair back and – voila, the place is full of stuff: crammed with stuff; stuffed with stuff; choking on stuff.
Of course you could just get rid of the stuff, couldn’t you?
Hah, that’s a laugh. I still have that trunk full of LPs.
Have you ever seen Criss Angel’s basement? It’s crammed with old guillotines, elephants he teleported, lots and lots of mirrors, and case after case of hair gel.
Scientists will tell you that human beings are genetically linked to squirrels: no matter how many nuts we have, we’re going to keep cramming them down the trunk of our tree until it splits in half. Heck, I carry around a year’s worth of acorns in my mouth.
So what do you do?
Well, when you’re young, you think it’s simple: just get more space, for the stuff.
Maybe you start off storing stuff in the basement. Then you buy some of those closet organizers. Closet organizers are like accountants on a battlefield: useless, except to keep count of the carnage.
Did you ever go to a house and – seeing how neat and uncluttered it was, wonder where they were hiding all their stuff?
My friend Dan super-glued some of his stuff to the ceiling.
I have another friend who put those torpedo-shaped containers that you usually see on the roofs of SUVs – on the roof of his house: he keeps his LPs in them.
I myself have 3 ½ tool sheds, spread about the back yard – and my tools are still somewhere in the basement.
So I was somewhat taken aback, when my wife announced last week that there was going to be a new addition to our family. She wasn’t pregnant – she was just trying to tell me in the nicest way possible that she had agreed to take a few pieces of furniture from her father’s old apartment. It was her way of saying, you can either help me move his stuff in, or you can move yourself out.
I took it surprisingly well, I think. I do take up a lot of space that could otherwise be taken up by three boxes of old photographs, or an old KayPro computer, or one of those budget size 48-roll bundles of paper towels that you can get at Sam’s Club.
That’s another thing about all this stuff: we have so much of it that we spend half our lives moving it from one room to another, one house to another. Forget weddings and funerals: the only time the family ever gets together is when somebody is moving in or moving out. I found out my son had become a Zoroastrian during a conversation we had from opposite ends of a couch we were carrying up two flights of stairs to his new apartment…
So, anyway, I gave in, and paid a visit to Uncle Bob.
Did I tell you about Uncle Bob? He’s not really my Uncle, but I was attracted to the name, and there was a local franchise right down the street from our stuff, I mean, from our house.
Uncle Bob’s is what they call, a self-storage center.
Uncle Bob’s was a revelation, to me at least.
I’ve heard of doggie heaven, and cat heaven, and the like – the places that our pets go after they die. But I never knew there was a stuff heaven. That’s what Uncle Bob’s is: acres and acres of cute little metal houses where the stuff you never thought you could live without, spends its golden years.
Oh, so you’re not impressed. That’s because you’re still young. You still think that there will always be space for your stuff, right at home. You swear you will never give your stuff away or – heaven forbid, store it someplace.
Maybe you’re right. Or maybe you’re just young.
As you get older you don’t love your stuff any less, you just start to realize that not too far down the road, somebody’s going to have to figure out what to do with your stuff.
I’m not waiting. I’m taking a sofa bed and my old trunk of LPs, and moving into a 5x10 at Uncle Bob’s.
Forget the stuff. I need a place of my own.
In fact, I know I’m getting old.
We’re all getting old – or at least older, and there’s nothing we can do about it – except give in.
I’m giving in, and the evidence of that is in the stuff I am willing to give out – or give away.
I’m letting the stuff go.
A sure sign of advanced years, I think, is the ability to let go of stuff – all kinds of stuff.
When you’re young, you like stuff, but you’re too busy testing out your own stuff (strutting your stuff) to worry about acquiring other stuff. Consequently, though you’re pretty fussy about the stuff you have – or want, relatively speaking you don’t have much stuff at all.
I used to drag around a trunk full of LPs (large pizza-size black platters on which music had been recorded – for those of you under 40), along with a suitcase with two pairs of jeans and 40 tee shirts, and I thought I was weighed down by my possessions. I had no clue how much stuff I would eventually be able to carry around on my back - like the giant tortoise primitive people believed carried the world on its shell.
The truth is, or was – that, 30 years ago I hardly had any stuff at all.
So where did it all come from?
When you reach a certain age, you don’t suddenly have a lot of stuff: stuff doesn’t start erupting from the floor like zits on your forehead.
It’s not that you have more zits as you get older, it’s that you have more forehead: more space for the stuff.
You get your first car and, you soon discover, a car is just space to put stuff.
You get your first apartment and – though you were hoping it would prove a ‘babe’ magnet, it turns out that it’s a stuff magnet.
Your first house? Oh my gosh, a house is like some Criss Angel ‘Mind-Freak’ magic trick in which – one moment you have all these empty rooms, shiny wooden floors, clean carpets and unblemished walls, and then Criss throws a blanket over it – tosses his carefully jelled unkempt hair back and – voila, the place is full of stuff: crammed with stuff; stuffed with stuff; choking on stuff.
Of course you could just get rid of the stuff, couldn’t you?
Hah, that’s a laugh. I still have that trunk full of LPs.
Have you ever seen Criss Angel’s basement? It’s crammed with old guillotines, elephants he teleported, lots and lots of mirrors, and case after case of hair gel.
Scientists will tell you that human beings are genetically linked to squirrels: no matter how many nuts we have, we’re going to keep cramming them down the trunk of our tree until it splits in half. Heck, I carry around a year’s worth of acorns in my mouth.
So what do you do?
Well, when you’re young, you think it’s simple: just get more space, for the stuff.
Maybe you start off storing stuff in the basement. Then you buy some of those closet organizers. Closet organizers are like accountants on a battlefield: useless, except to keep count of the carnage.
Did you ever go to a house and – seeing how neat and uncluttered it was, wonder where they were hiding all their stuff?
My friend Dan super-glued some of his stuff to the ceiling.
I have another friend who put those torpedo-shaped containers that you usually see on the roofs of SUVs – on the roof of his house: he keeps his LPs in them.
I myself have 3 ½ tool sheds, spread about the back yard – and my tools are still somewhere in the basement.
So I was somewhat taken aback, when my wife announced last week that there was going to be a new addition to our family. She wasn’t pregnant – she was just trying to tell me in the nicest way possible that she had agreed to take a few pieces of furniture from her father’s old apartment. It was her way of saying, you can either help me move his stuff in, or you can move yourself out.
I took it surprisingly well, I think. I do take up a lot of space that could otherwise be taken up by three boxes of old photographs, or an old KayPro computer, or one of those budget size 48-roll bundles of paper towels that you can get at Sam’s Club.
That’s another thing about all this stuff: we have so much of it that we spend half our lives moving it from one room to another, one house to another. Forget weddings and funerals: the only time the family ever gets together is when somebody is moving in or moving out. I found out my son had become a Zoroastrian during a conversation we had from opposite ends of a couch we were carrying up two flights of stairs to his new apartment…
So, anyway, I gave in, and paid a visit to Uncle Bob.
Did I tell you about Uncle Bob? He’s not really my Uncle, but I was attracted to the name, and there was a local franchise right down the street from our stuff, I mean, from our house.
Uncle Bob’s is what they call, a self-storage center.
Uncle Bob’s was a revelation, to me at least.
I’ve heard of doggie heaven, and cat heaven, and the like – the places that our pets go after they die. But I never knew there was a stuff heaven. That’s what Uncle Bob’s is: acres and acres of cute little metal houses where the stuff you never thought you could live without, spends its golden years.
Oh, so you’re not impressed. That’s because you’re still young. You still think that there will always be space for your stuff, right at home. You swear you will never give your stuff away or – heaven forbid, store it someplace.
Maybe you’re right. Or maybe you’re just young.
As you get older you don’t love your stuff any less, you just start to realize that not too far down the road, somebody’s going to have to figure out what to do with your stuff.
I’m not waiting. I’m taking a sofa bed and my old trunk of LPs, and moving into a 5x10 at Uncle Bob’s.
Forget the stuff. I need a place of my own.
Time Travel, Rotaries, Convenience Stores..
The trouble with time travel – I have always argued, is that if we could actually travel through time, time wouldn’t be time, anymore.
I mean, time is predictable, inexorable (look it up), unyielding, and monotonous (not to mention, redundant): if it were not all those things, it would not be time.
Understand?
The same might be said for traffic (in fact, I just said it) – and historically, efforts to manage traffic have been as pathetic as the efforts to manage time. That is to say, the idea that we can manage traffic is, largely, science fiction – that is, except for the exploits our own Billington Brothers.
The Billington Brothers, in case you’re new to town – were Plymouth’s own time travelers. No, I’m sorry – I meant to say, Plymouth’s own traffic engineers. In fact, you might say that the Billington Brothers were America’s first traffic engineers.
Way back before there was traffic in America (a long, long time ago), the Billington Brothers were managing it.
Before there was a need to find a quick way to Middleboro – before Old 44 and way before the New 44, and actually before Middleboro itself, Francis Billington went looking for a short cut.
He actually found it – the short cut that is, but as there was no where to cut shortly to – save for the 3000 or so miles between here and the Pacific Ocean, Francis might still be headed west if he did not run smack dab into a Native American all-natural rotary. Some historians have cynically concluded that Francis was actually lost, but I think we have all seen our share of out-of-state drivers who knew right where they were, but could not extricate themselves from a rotary.
I could go on – making a kind of literary rotary out of this, but unlike those aforementioned drivers, I know that to get out of this. I simply need to use, what my first English teacher told me, was a transitional device.
300 years after Francis Billington got caught in that magic circle of bent birch trees, his descendant, Tiki Manoogian, is one of the regulars at the very popular collection of shops and automobile service operations on South Street, known as the Mayflower Convenience Store.
Actually, until I told him, Tiki didn’t even realize that his favorite store sits on the site of that prehistoric rotary.
Until I convinced him, Tiki didn’t even know that he was a descendant of Francis Billington.
But after experiencing the mystery and magic of the maze of roads and parking spaces that have been woven from the 100 square miles of pungent tar that encircles the Mayflower complex, Tiki was ready to let me put words in his mouth.
“I used to believe that there was no more confounding web of roadway in the world than the paths that bind the acres of our own Myles Standish State Forest together,” Tiki repeated for me, adding “To enter the Myles Standish without an experienced guide or a detailed map is to experience a true Hansel & Gretel moment.”
But the mystical power of the Mayflower Convenience stores much smaller footprint, may be derived from its very compactness. And it is far more frightening to become lost in the Mayflower’s parking lots, than it is to be lost in Myles Standish – because it just does not seem possible. One moment you are at the self-service gas pump, watching and waving to friends driving by, and the next you are banging on the window of their own Dunkin Donut franchise – desperately asking for directions.
Tiki swears he’s not benefiting from the confusion – though he understands the financial rewards of stranding motorists at that location. All credit Tiki says, is owed the Planning Board – which designed the traffic flow. And judging from some of their other work around town – the Planning Board’s involvement does seem likely.
No matter who gets credit, the Mayflower Convenience Store parking lot is a marvel of traffic flow dis-engineering.
When you leave the pumps, you can’t go left – though South Street is just a few feet away. The arrows – like bread crumbs left by a lost child, turn you to the right. If you thought then, to pick up a cruller and regular Joe to go, again you can’t go left and park in the spaces in front of DoubleD, but instead you’re directed right - along the front of the store.
Careful, the old dead-end that led to the cute little gingerbread ATM is still there, but different. The road now passes the ATM, and descends down a floodlit hill that you never knew existed, complete with speed bumps, traffic lights, past a grove of ancient, gnarled birch trees (the original Billington Rotary I’m told by local psychic historian Dee Jonson) before circling around the back of the compound.
By that point though, panic has set in, and you just want out. Brilliantly, you can’t ask directions at the take-out window of the Dunkin Donuts, unless you have previously ordered at the remote ordering pylon, which you have probably already passed. If you really want a donut, you’re going to have to go around again, and if you just want to get directions, you’re going to have to order first, after you go around again. If you give up, and want to go downtown - toward the waterfront, you are in luck – because you are now in line for a right turn only ramp. But if you give up and want to go west – toward Home Depot, you can’t take the obvious route to South Street - because that’s a right turn only. Instead, again, you’ll have to pass by the front of the convenience/deli/liquor store.
After doing this a few times, the subliminal low-frequency radio broadcasts emanating from the store take effect, and before you leave you will have purchased – at the very least, a lottery ticket, two donuts, coffee, a new oil filter, and a GPS unit. Or, you may become like Tiki, a permanent resident.
Yes, there are many other magical traffic experiences in Plymouth: the blind intersection of Long Pond and Ship Pond Roads; the mayhem that will ensue when the drive thru at the new Mary Lou's backs up onto Hedges Pond Road; the late afternoon sun that blinds you on Route 80; and the dead-ends, bridge-outs, frost-heaves and nameless ponds of Myles Standish, to name just a few. But I feel safe in predicting that – a thousand years from now, visitors from outer space will be bending time in order to experience the mind-altering, suspension-twisting, one-way, no way, wrong way weirdness of the Billington’s own Mayflower Convenience Store.
Ballast
Ode to a cheese curl.
Oh lovely, crunchy, neon orange waste of a dozen calories. When the day is done you are the only thing that remains with me: glowing from the tips of each finger like radioactive waste; gummed up along the crevices of my molars; stuck to my shirt like late spring snowflakes.
Whenever I become excessively pompous, whenever I go on too long about the symbolism of the Thunderbird in “Thelma & Louise”, nothing brings me down to earth faster than a handful of your hollow fingers.
Is there anything more normal, more everyday, more matter of fact than your obscenely inflated carbohydrates?
Is there anything more accessible, more available, more capable of inking over the aggravating details of existence, than your sold by volume not by weight insubstantiality?
Yeah, I guess there is.
A good hot dog, for one. The first juicy clamp down on a sugar-fed Double Bubble.
Hell, there are probably a hundred economical antidotes to my middle-age onset addiction to the pompous and/or unnecessarily complex.
Pardon me, but I’ve just come to the realization that along with my Silver Patron Tequila, and the anniversary edition of Mile’s Kind of Blue, the poetry of Russell Hoban, the blogs and the journals and the saxophone and a thousand other subtly intoxicating substances and services that I have become philosophically and/or physically addicted to, that I crave the everyday too: I need the average as well, as much, to be happy.
Those guys in the clown outfits that ride the tall unicycles while playing Yankee Doodle Dandy on the fife in the July 4th Parade – they aren’t still out there, are they?
No, I didn’t think so.
You can only balance on one wheel and play the fife and wear the clown makeup for so long – before you go arse over teakettle. Sooner, not later, you have to put the training wheels back on.
Even blimp pilots go on vacations.
And let me tell you, when a blimp pilot takes her vacation she sticks close to the ground: seventy-two percent of blimp pilots are avid spelunkers (I made that up.)
But seriously, what I am babbling about is balance. Not Yin and Yang – those are two sides of the same coin. No, the kind of balance that a ship needs to keep from floundering at sea – balance from ballast: from forty-thousand pounds of cobblestones in its belly (40,000 pounds of cheese curls would do too).
I remember an afternoon playing so-called touch football with some overgrown, underage hard-asses some twenty years ago, and getting carried away with the contact – with rushing the quarterback, with smacking into the oversized yoot left behind to block for the opposition and, though afterwards I could hardly walk, feeling almost high from the contact, the physicality, the total abandonment of intellect.
(I also remember the sound of my bones collapsing like cheese curls under the existential jaw of age).
Touch football is the cheese curl of athletic endeavors.
I love the relative mindless-ness of hiking in the White Mountains too, where, for most of the time, there are no sights at all to see, just branches to avoid, boulders to scale, slopes to scramble up and where – before you know it, your worries are far behind. I think it must be far more tiring to hike out west, where you are often moving across open glades with too much to see, too much time to think.
But then, of late, I haven’t had the time to hike at all.
This year my hikes have consisted of going from the phone, to the computer, to the phone, to the TV, to bed.
Lately life has been like a ride up old Route 1, from Peabody to Medford, with never a break between one oversized array of blinking lights to the next; no exits except those that just turn you around and send you back down the other side like a gerbil on the wheel.
Simply put, I am in need of simplicity.
I could use a bowl of Gram Tobin’s rice pudding.
I’d like to get my hands around one or two of those grenade-sized Rolling Rocks.
I could use a fast drive through the North Woods, with the windows down and the lights out.
I’m searching the dial for a static-free AM station.
This blimp pilot needs a vacation.
Another bowl of cheese curls, please.
(Photo courtesy of Cinemaben)
A War of Our Own
We deserve it and, finally, we’re going to get it.
In a little more than a year they’re going to start delivering the remains to us.
Credit where credit is due.
We went along with it, when it was first announced.
We re-elected Bush, even after it was clear that he didn’t know what he was doing.
And we’ve done everything we can to ignore what is going on, over there, for almost five years.
So now we can relax and enjoy the fruits of our inaction, while the war drags on and our poor excuse for a President limps into history.
Oh sure, there are those who want to give all the credit to Congress. In the beginning the Republicans gave us a new reason getting into the war every week, proclaimed victory ever few months, and devised a new winning strategy before every election. And when the Democrats took power they showed just as much imagination devising excuses as to why we can’t get out.
But it’s not up to them: never was.
They’re our representatives.
It’s our fault.
It’s amazing what you can accomplish, without trying.
We’re probably going to have a casino in Middleboro before we have all of our soldiers back from Iraq.
Over a billion ribbon decals have been sold.
We’ve probably spent more on cheap American flags than we have donated to the effort to end the war.
We support the troops in every way possible, except of course, by getting them out of harm’s way
What’s Iraq to us? Most of us don’t have anyone close, serving over there. And unless you’re in the National Guard, you don’t have to worry about being ‘called up’.
It’s an easy war to ignore.
Sure, there have been hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. So what.
We just don’t care. And we have plenty of company.
I remember the old poster – from the sixties, which was captioned, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”
Today we could say that about protests.
Most protests today, look like excursions from a senior citizen center. The average age of a war protester is about 60.
And even when there is a well-attended protest – the media doesn’t cover it. Why? Because they know we don’t care. Or rather, they know we’d rather watch celebrity mud wrestling.
They know they can get away with it.
Here’s a poster caption for this generation: “What if they spent a trillion dollars and nobody cared?”
Or, “What if they maimed twenty thousand soldiers and nobody noticed?”
Or, “Are we going to let this President get away with passing on this bloody stupid war to us? Or are we going to hold him accountable, end it now, and as a final act, kick his sorry ass out of Washington D.C.?”
Are we?
No we aren’t!
We’re going to let him take the Marine helicopter from the White House lawn, with what’s left of the NeoCons waiving goodbye.
Did you ever play that game with the toy bomb that you wind up and toss from person to person, to see who is left holding it when it goes off – bang! It’s just a toy, but it makes an aggravatingly loud noise. It’s just a game, but you still don’t want to be the last one holding it when the ticking stops.
Iraq is no toy. But don’t look now, George has that silly grin on his face and he’s about to drop the whole damn war right in our laps.
It’s just what we have been asking for.
It’s just what we deserve.
In a little more than a year they’re going to start delivering the remains to us.
Credit where credit is due.
We went along with it, when it was first announced.
We re-elected Bush, even after it was clear that he didn’t know what he was doing.
And we’ve done everything we can to ignore what is going on, over there, for almost five years.
So now we can relax and enjoy the fruits of our inaction, while the war drags on and our poor excuse for a President limps into history.
Oh sure, there are those who want to give all the credit to Congress. In the beginning the Republicans gave us a new reason getting into the war every week, proclaimed victory ever few months, and devised a new winning strategy before every election. And when the Democrats took power they showed just as much imagination devising excuses as to why we can’t get out.
But it’s not up to them: never was.
They’re our representatives.
It’s our fault.
It’s amazing what you can accomplish, without trying.
We’re probably going to have a casino in Middleboro before we have all of our soldiers back from Iraq.
Over a billion ribbon decals have been sold.
We’ve probably spent more on cheap American flags than we have donated to the effort to end the war.
We support the troops in every way possible, except of course, by getting them out of harm’s way
What’s Iraq to us? Most of us don’t have anyone close, serving over there. And unless you’re in the National Guard, you don’t have to worry about being ‘called up’.
It’s an easy war to ignore.
Sure, there have been hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. So what.
We just don’t care. And we have plenty of company.
I remember the old poster – from the sixties, which was captioned, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”
Today we could say that about protests.
Most protests today, look like excursions from a senior citizen center. The average age of a war protester is about 60.
And even when there is a well-attended protest – the media doesn’t cover it. Why? Because they know we don’t care. Or rather, they know we’d rather watch celebrity mud wrestling.
They know they can get away with it.
Here’s a poster caption for this generation: “What if they spent a trillion dollars and nobody cared?”
Or, “What if they maimed twenty thousand soldiers and nobody noticed?”
Or, “Are we going to let this President get away with passing on this bloody stupid war to us? Or are we going to hold him accountable, end it now, and as a final act, kick his sorry ass out of Washington D.C.?”
Are we?
No we aren’t!
We’re going to let him take the Marine helicopter from the White House lawn, with what’s left of the NeoCons waiving goodbye.
Did you ever play that game with the toy bomb that you wind up and toss from person to person, to see who is left holding it when it goes off – bang! It’s just a toy, but it makes an aggravatingly loud noise. It’s just a game, but you still don’t want to be the last one holding it when the ticking stops.
Iraq is no toy. But don’t look now, George has that silly grin on his face and he’s about to drop the whole damn war right in our laps.
It’s just what we have been asking for.
It’s just what we deserve.
Spider Surge
Like Fifth Columnists, tiny spiders are coming through the living room window, under cover of ladybugs.
There’s an untidy garden of flowers, a pear tree sapling, and a weed pretending to be a bush on the other side of that window, so we are used to seeing small dark, wing-ed specks come through the tattered mesh screen.
The baby spiders are just about the same size as the ladybugs so, in the corner of your eye they don’t arouse suspicion. Until that is, the mother ships arrive.
I’ve heard that this is Spider Season, whatever that means. I suppose that’s at least a hopeful designation, suggesting that most of these spiders are vacationing, or taking short-term leases – and should be headed back ‘home’ once the cooler weather gets a firm hold.
Still, some of these spiders are not as well-mannered as you might expect, of tourists.
There are the 101st Airborne Spiders (my designation for them, not an official scientific term), who drop down in front of the TV while you are watching, unconcerned that they are interrupting your show.
Then there are those Arachis who spin webs, overnight, in public places. On door knobs, or across hallways, or from bedpost to bedpost. Maybe I’m wrong, but I always thought that there were certain, semi-officially designated, acceptable places for house spiders to engineer their webs – and the spicket in the bathroom was never one of them.
It may be me, but I have the sense that spiders – as a species, are becoming more and more aggressive.
Even cockroaches show more sensitivity – coming out only under cover of darkness, and then scurrying for cover if the lights come on unexpectedly.
But the modern day house spider often insolently parades over the living room rug in the middle of the day, in the middle of Oprah for god’s sake – and only scurries for cover when you have a rolled magazine poised above them.
In the past I attributed the fat, swollen, itchy lumps that appeared on my arms and legs, between my toes, on the back of my neck and elsewhere at this time of year, to a wide variety of ointments, water treatments, ants, fleas, tics and such, which have in common a certain occult nature. But today I’m fairly certain that spiders are the cause.
I’ve counted seven varieties on our first floor alone.
Did you ever notice how everyone exaggerates the size of a spider? When you hear a description of a spider it is never less than an inch long, always hairy, and usually said to have strange stripes and spots and, I’ve also heard people say, speech impediments.
I saw one of those the other day – a big, hairy, spotted and striped spider with a pronounced lisp, in the family room, and before I could squash it with my foot, it leaped into the air, yelled out ‘thufferin thuccoatash”, and traveled about a yard before landing – purposefully I believe, smack dab in the middle of an oriental rug. (Did you ever notice how I use the phrase, ‘smack dab’ at least once in every column?)
Once on the Oriental it was effectively camouflaged – so I had to throw the whole rug away.
According to my research, it was actually either a Wolf Spider, or a Traveling Salesman Spider. It all happened very quickly, but I did think I got a glimpse of a small leather valise held by one of its eight hairy legs.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, that’s right: in the last three weeks I’ve recorded definitive sightings of eleven separate species of spider, on our first floor alone.
A Jumping Spider was easily identified, when it jumped into a cup of coffee that I had just put down on the little display table in the middle of the room. Jumping Spiders look like little fuzzy legged spiders carrying school rings but, as I discovered when I poured the coffee out onto a ball of wadded paper towels, that school ring is actually their colorful abdomen.
I also easily identified a Nursery Web Spider – which is also called a Fishing Spider, when I chased it out the house and into the neighbor’s yard where – faced with a choice of either a boot wielding madman or a dip in the neighbors pool, it jumped in and submerged itself.
I’m afraid of pool water, so I thought nothing of it until a week later when my neighbor had a pool party and I suddenly heard the scream of an arachnophobic woman who decided to take a late night dip.
By the way, isn’t the notion of arachnophobia silly? I mean, who isn’t afraid of spiders? Just like you can’t tell me that when you swim in the ocean – somewhere in the back of your mind you aren’t thinking, shark! People with phobias are supposedly mentally unstable, and unreasonably obsessive: but isn’t it stranger not to be afraid of spiders, or sharks, or clowns?
Anyway, after a brief conversation with my neighbor, I realized that I had correctly identified that speedy, three-inch, hairy-legged creature as a Pool Party Spider.
And speaking of clowns, I also identified another spider that had been lurking in the basement – based on the red nose, the large feet, and the tiny little car that it drove around in (and an abdomen shaped like a seltzer bottle), as a Clown Spider.
Anyway, you get my point – I think, that there is something odd going on, in terms of spiders, at least in my house.
I know it’s Spider Season, but I’m kind of worried that Labor Day has come and gone and these guys are still hanging around.
I’m thinking this is a Spider Surge and, if so, I’m going to have to get used to the idea of spiders in the house for years to come.
There’s an untidy garden of flowers, a pear tree sapling, and a weed pretending to be a bush on the other side of that window, so we are used to seeing small dark, wing-ed specks come through the tattered mesh screen.
The baby spiders are just about the same size as the ladybugs so, in the corner of your eye they don’t arouse suspicion. Until that is, the mother ships arrive.
I’ve heard that this is Spider Season, whatever that means. I suppose that’s at least a hopeful designation, suggesting that most of these spiders are vacationing, or taking short-term leases – and should be headed back ‘home’ once the cooler weather gets a firm hold.
Still, some of these spiders are not as well-mannered as you might expect, of tourists.
There are the 101st Airborne Spiders (my designation for them, not an official scientific term), who drop down in front of the TV while you are watching, unconcerned that they are interrupting your show.
Then there are those Arachis who spin webs, overnight, in public places. On door knobs, or across hallways, or from bedpost to bedpost. Maybe I’m wrong, but I always thought that there were certain, semi-officially designated, acceptable places for house spiders to engineer their webs – and the spicket in the bathroom was never one of them.
It may be me, but I have the sense that spiders – as a species, are becoming more and more aggressive.
Even cockroaches show more sensitivity – coming out only under cover of darkness, and then scurrying for cover if the lights come on unexpectedly.
But the modern day house spider often insolently parades over the living room rug in the middle of the day, in the middle of Oprah for god’s sake – and only scurries for cover when you have a rolled magazine poised above them.
In the past I attributed the fat, swollen, itchy lumps that appeared on my arms and legs, between my toes, on the back of my neck and elsewhere at this time of year, to a wide variety of ointments, water treatments, ants, fleas, tics and such, which have in common a certain occult nature. But today I’m fairly certain that spiders are the cause.
I’ve counted seven varieties on our first floor alone.
Did you ever notice how everyone exaggerates the size of a spider? When you hear a description of a spider it is never less than an inch long, always hairy, and usually said to have strange stripes and spots and, I’ve also heard people say, speech impediments.
I saw one of those the other day – a big, hairy, spotted and striped spider with a pronounced lisp, in the family room, and before I could squash it with my foot, it leaped into the air, yelled out ‘thufferin thuccoatash”, and traveled about a yard before landing – purposefully I believe, smack dab in the middle of an oriental rug. (Did you ever notice how I use the phrase, ‘smack dab’ at least once in every column?)
Once on the Oriental it was effectively camouflaged – so I had to throw the whole rug away.
According to my research, it was actually either a Wolf Spider, or a Traveling Salesman Spider. It all happened very quickly, but I did think I got a glimpse of a small leather valise held by one of its eight hairy legs.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, that’s right: in the last three weeks I’ve recorded definitive sightings of eleven separate species of spider, on our first floor alone.
A Jumping Spider was easily identified, when it jumped into a cup of coffee that I had just put down on the little display table in the middle of the room. Jumping Spiders look like little fuzzy legged spiders carrying school rings but, as I discovered when I poured the coffee out onto a ball of wadded paper towels, that school ring is actually their colorful abdomen.
I also easily identified a Nursery Web Spider – which is also called a Fishing Spider, when I chased it out the house and into the neighbor’s yard where – faced with a choice of either a boot wielding madman or a dip in the neighbors pool, it jumped in and submerged itself.
I’m afraid of pool water, so I thought nothing of it until a week later when my neighbor had a pool party and I suddenly heard the scream of an arachnophobic woman who decided to take a late night dip.
By the way, isn’t the notion of arachnophobia silly? I mean, who isn’t afraid of spiders? Just like you can’t tell me that when you swim in the ocean – somewhere in the back of your mind you aren’t thinking, shark! People with phobias are supposedly mentally unstable, and unreasonably obsessive: but isn’t it stranger not to be afraid of spiders, or sharks, or clowns?
Anyway, after a brief conversation with my neighbor, I realized that I had correctly identified that speedy, three-inch, hairy-legged creature as a Pool Party Spider.
And speaking of clowns, I also identified another spider that had been lurking in the basement – based on the red nose, the large feet, and the tiny little car that it drove around in (and an abdomen shaped like a seltzer bottle), as a Clown Spider.
Anyway, you get my point – I think, that there is something odd going on, in terms of spiders, at least in my house.
I know it’s Spider Season, but I’m kind of worried that Labor Day has come and gone and these guys are still hanging around.
I’m thinking this is a Spider Surge and, if so, I’m going to have to get used to the idea of spiders in the house for years to come.
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