We were sitting in the school lunchroom and a friend and I were having an argument. It wasn’t a serious argument because I don’t do serious arguments. It was more of a friendly debate about something arcane and he made a really superb point and I, stumped, just said, “Oh, fork you.” And we all laughed and went on with our conversation.
And then gradually I became aware of a voice behind me.
“Son, I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of language from you.”
It was Mr. Blankley, my algebra teacher, or, as I preferred to think of him, Human Valium. Mr. Blankley was in a perpetual state of slow motion: he moved slowly, he talked slowly. Algebra was my first class of the day and it was more than I could take as soon as he started talking.
“Studentsss, today we will have a quizzzzz on chapterssss ssssixxxxx and ssssseven.”
The one saving grace is he would use up twenty minutes of class time saying that that but I still couldn’t keep my eyes open, much less focus on getting any work done.
Mr. Blankley was also so clueless he had no idea I was one of his students, although I’d be transferred out shortly afterward because half the kids in his class were below average, half the kids were failing, and half couldn’t even grasp simple fractions, but that’s another story.
“I said ‘fork’” I said, holding one up for him.
He sighed for five minutes then said, “Ssson, I said I don’t want to hear any more of that language.”
Fortunately at that moment the end of lunch bell rang and my friends and I quietly gathered up our things and left, a series of actions which, from Mr. Blankley’s perspective, must have looked like hummingbirds around a feeder.
I’m sharing this story now because tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States—the Canadians do it six weeks earlier—and for many it’s a stressful time. For many it means getting together with family and that can lead to arguments ranging from the pointlessly political to the annoyingly personal. If things get too stressful for you just remember that Thanksgiving is a feast and if you feel like things are getting overheated in the kitchen or out, if somebody says something or insists on doing that one thing that gets under your skin…fork ‘em.
Phlegm is funny to me. There. I’ve said it. That’s a terrible confession but I’ve been battling a cold recently and I keep thinking about the joke about the guy who shows a doctor what he’s blown into a handkerchief and the doctor says, “This is normal. Did you think you’d blown your brains out?”
It’s not a great joke but I’ve found phlegm and mucous funny ever since I was a kid and first heard “You might think it’s a booger but it’s snot!” and laughed so hard I hurt myself.
Of course as I went into adulthood my humor became much more sophisticated. For instance there was the time I read something by Dave Barry in which he said the Flemish never had their own country because no one would live in a place called Flem and I laughed so hard I hurt myself.
In between was the time I was in a Mexican restaurant with some friends and I ordered flan and my friend Trav misheard me and started saying, “Did you just say phlegm? Are you ordering phlegm? Oh waiter, I’d like some phlegm!” Then he started making choking noises and added, “That’ll be $4.99, sir.” And I was laughing so hard I had to go out in the parking lot for several minutes. Then I came back in and had flan because I love any kind of custard even though it’s slimy and kind of mucousy, and if I’ve now turned you off crème brulee for life you can just pass it over to me, thank you very much.
Some time after that Trav and I sat next to each other in Latin class. And one day when we were supposed to be working quietly he whispered to me, “Chris, what’s the Latin word for ‘river’?”
Now I should have seen his coming. Trav was more than just a class clown. It’s no surprise that he now works as a professional actor with Dad’s Garage Theater. He had a joke for everything. In an earlier Latin class our teacher was telling us about Aeneas and his men fleeing Troy after their defeat and being attacked by birdlike creatures and Trav yelled out, “They weren’t wearing their Trojans so that’s why they got harpies!” And everybody, including the teacher, was laughing so hard that ended school for the day, but that’s another story.
Back to “Chris, what’s the Latin word for ‘river’?”
Now if you ever studied Latin you probably know it’s flumen and if you’ve been following the story you probably know what Trav said next.
“Flumen? FLUMEN?” He was shouting now and then he started making choking sounds. “Oh, I’m sorry! I have some flumen in my throat.”
It’s awful and disgusting and it still makes me laugh.
And I know I’m not the only one who has something like this. What completely inappropriate, disgusting thing makes you laugh?
When I was a kid I was fascinated by animation. How did they get drawings to move? It wasn’t like magic. It was magic. Luckily there were a few educational programs—although now I don’t remember specifically which ones—that showed animators at work, how they drew on transparent cels and then photographed those against backgrounds, and also how to create flip books. My father worked for a steel company that had paper pads with the company’s name on them because if there’s one thing people associate with steel it’s paper. Anyway I’d take one of those pads and make my own flip books, drawing out the adventures of various characters like Periscope Man who was a vaguely sinister, er, periscope with one eye and arms and legs. He had a lot of adventures mainly because he was easy to draw but that’s another story.
And then I read about this public artwork that would give subway riders a short animation show. It’s the same principle as the flip book but applied differently.
Although I never got to see the Masstransiscope in action the fun part of learning about it is I realized I could watch out the car window on long road trips and see the white lines along the pavement, or variations in the pavement itself, as strange, abstract animation.
Try it sometime—if you’re not the one driving.
Here’s a video of artist Bill Brand’s Masstransiscope restored in 2008 and a short video about the restoration.
I think a lot of graffiti is crude, even ugly, because it’s an expression of frustration. Someone’s pissed off at the world and can’t do anything about it so they deface something. Or they’re just bored and channel their energy into a scrawl, a scribble, into destroying something. The idea that destruction is a creative act goes back at least as far as Nietzsche’s ideas about Dionysus and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin who said, “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!” This was adopted by Picasso and Braque who created Cubism as a way of destroying and recreating the way art is visualized, but that’s another story.
I thought about all this when I was sitting in a laundromat and noticed something. It seemed like an expression of frustration and boredom, but I realized that such dark feelings can still produce something beautiful. Sometimes defacing isn’t destruction; it’s creation, it’s revelation. It takes an empty space and makes it better.
And on another note hail and farewell Leonard Cohen. Here’s his expression, I think, of some of the same feelings.
The winter holidays always meant a few days off from school, and that usually meant my friends and I had a lot of unstructured, unsupervised time, and that usually led to trouble, like the time I told my friend Jerry about sex.
Let me back up a bit.
Learning about sex was like learning there was no Santa Claus, but weirder and more uncomfortable. Supposedly my friend John, whose mother was a gynecological nurse, had explained the facts of life to my first grade class but all I remember was that he told us babies came out of women’s bodies. He didn’t go into specifics about how the babies got there. So I thought pregnancy happened randomly. At a certain point in each woman’s life, I thought, she’d just spontaneously get pregnant. For some it happened multiple times. I held onto this belief through a lot of my childhood. Based on others’ experiences it seems extremely bizarre that at ten years old I still didn’t know that it took two to make a baby.
I knew adults did naked stuff together, primarily from my next door neighbor Mr. Rick who was gone a lot and had boxes and boxes of Playboy and Penthouse magazines in his basement. I mean tons of them. This was the seventies and neither magazine had been around that long, but it seemed like his collection just went on forever. He kept his basement open all the time so his dogs could go in and out. My friend Troy loved going in there and looking at the magazines. I kind of liked it too, but didn’t entirely understand what the big deal was. They were mostly women and mostly naked, which seemed strangely fun, but I didn’t think of it as something that everybody did or that might have some purpose other than just being something to do.
At this time I believed we men were unnecessary. I didn’t think women would undertake wholesale slaughter of roughly half the population, but I also thought that men should treat women with respect and give them equal rights and pay. I was the only boy in my fourth grade class who supported the Equal Rights Amendment. I didn’t do this because I wanted to curry favor with the girls. The whole idea that girls and or boys had cooties and purposely stayed away from each other never seemed to be the case when I was in school. Most of my friends were fellow boys, but I had no problem hanging out with the girls as long as they weren’t playing with Barbies or doing something stupid like that.
To clarify: I no longer thing playing with Barbies is stupid. In fact it was a notion I got over pretty quickly. I was never big on playing with army men either, which are basically just tiny dolls with guns. I realized this when Star Wars came out. I became an insane collector of the action figures and I spent hours playing with them. And one day I heard my mother describe them as “dolls for boys”. Okay, I thought. I play with dolls. They just happen to be special science fiction dolls.
Eventually I’d figure out the basics of reproduction, mainly from what I read about animals. As a kid I had dreams of growing up to be a marine biologist like Jacques Cousteau, so I was always reading about ocean animals, especially octopuses. There was a book about octopuses I checked out from the public library so many times I had it memorized. It included an explanation of octopus sex. I took this information in stride, and even once explained octopus sex to my grandfather. The male develops a modified tentacle as it ages, I told him, and shoves it inside the female. He was silently impressed.
I knew that among octopuses, frogs, lizards, crabs, snakes, and all sorts of other animals that interested me the females would have eggs and the males would fertilize them. It just took me a long time to extrapolate that humans, being animals, must be the same way, that human males do have, to quote Navin Johnson, a “special purpose”. It took me a while because it’s not like nature is consistent. Hermaphroditism is rampant in the animal kingdom, and anyone who’s seen Jurassic Park knows certain reptiles and amphibians can self-fertilize or even change sex under duress. And humans don’t have sex solely for the purpose of reproduction. Neither do some other animals. It was confusing because it was complicated, and made even more complicated by how uncomfortable it makes some adults even when they try to talk to each other about it, never mind trying to explain it to children, and it doesn’t help that a lot of adults find it so uncomfortable that if human beings reproduced by spontaneous parthenogenesis it seems really unlikely we’d have ever developed stand-up comedy or even jokes, but that’s another story.
What finally settled it in my mind was an after-school cartoon I happened to stumble upon about the changes boys’ and girls’ bodies go through when they hit puberty. It showed an egg rolling down the fallopian tube and explained that the egg would dissolve unless it was fertilized by a male. I had no idea how the fertilization took place exactly, but from bits and pieces I’d picked up from other places I realized it would be sort of like how the octopus did it, except that human males are born with a modified tentacle between our legs.
I don’t know why but at eleven or twelve when I first realized all this I felt like it was something I shouldn’t know. I felt like I’d stumbled upon something that was supposed to be kept locked in a box until I was eighteen, or at least until my parents had The Talk with me. I knew about Talk from Very Special Sitcom Episodes that conveniently avoided including the actual talk but made it clear from the context what it was about. And I felt like I would be in serious trouble if my parents ever found out.
So naturally I talked about it. I did manage to keep my parents from knowing what I knew for three or four years, but then one day when we were out of school I talked to my friend Jerry about it. Jerry was a year younger but knew pretty much everything I knew about sex. He’d been in Mr. Rick’s basement too. He’d even torn pages from some of the magazines and kept a pretty big stash hidden in his room. But for some reason when his sister, who was two or three years older, heard me talking to Jerry about sex she was horrified. He was too young to know about that stuff! And she told my mom.
Deep down I like to think my parents were relieved they didn’t have to have The Talk with me in its entirety, that I knew enough that there wasn’t much left for them to fill in. The only bad part was my mother asking me what exactly I’d said to Jerry—his sister was sketchy on the details—and then telling me we’d have The Talk later on. Please, please, please I thought, let her forget about this. Let’s skip The Talk. Having been caught talking about it was punishment enough, I thought, without having to talk about it with my parents. And my mother did seem to forget about it for about a week until one night when I was about to go to bed and she started talking about it. I think it was a spur of the moment thing on her part. And fortunately my mother’s version of The Talk was very sparing on details. The most memorable part was her saying, “Your father and I aren’t embarrassed when we see each other naked because we love each other.” I could almost hear muscles popping in my father’s head as he strained to keep his eyes from rolling. I wish he’d just given in. It would have given both of us permission to acknowledge that I was fourteen, not four.
Fortunately that was the end of it, at least as far as my parents were concerned. I never wanted to talk to them about sex and, beyond that greatly modified version of The Talk, never would. And I wouldn’t become a marine biologist. I also didn’t really understand sex until I’d done it, so there at least I learned something every scientist knows: theoretical knowledge is worthless without fieldwork.
It was a typical Thursday night in my college dorm. I was studying–specifically reading A Streetcar Named Desire–and my roommate was cutting apart bed springs and twisting the bits into a chainmail shirt since he belonged to a medieval reenactment group, although I didn’t think it was entirely accurate to use stainless steel bedsprings, but that’s another story. Naturally we had our door open when Carol, who lived on the girls’ side of the dorm stopped outside our door and said, “Hey guys, would you help us celebrate Gary’s birthday party?”
My roommate had just finished a chainmail sleeve so he was at a stopping point and while normally it’s difficult to tear me away from Tennessee Williams I felt like I needed a break. I’m also kind of a fan of birthdays and try to have at least one a year myself. Carol explained that
she’d be back later because Gary’s birthday was actually the next day and the plan was to give him a surprise party. Well, it wouldn’t be a party actually–mostly it was just a surprise.
At two a.m. Carol came back by to get us. This was not a problem: my roommate and I were both insomniacs, and it gave him time to get started on another sleeve and I had moved on to The Glass Menagerie. Gary’s roommate assured us he was sound asleep and the door was unlocked when we all burst in, screaming at the top of our lungs. We surrounded Gary’s bed, someone used a tie to blindfold him, and we carried him out to a car. He was squeezed into the back and we set off for parts unknown, not screaming now but jabbering, making up nonsensical chants, and, once we got out onto the highway, throwing out random non sequiturs–”Cheese, that’ll really block you up”–and vague hints about where we were. “Did that sign say ‘Welcome to Canada’?” Of course even Gary knew we hadn’t been on the road long enough; southern Indiana is a long way from Canada. We contemplated driving Gary to Gary, Indiana, and we also pondered how far we were from Normal. In a metaphorical sense we were all a long way from Normal. I’ve told you about my roommate and his metalwork. I was sitting next to Carol who wrote a weekly column for the school paper called “Out Of My Mind”. I’m sure I was weird in my own way, as were the other three or four people in the car. In fact Gary was probably the most normal of the group, which made him pretty weird. He went along blithely, never bothering to remove his blindfold. When we got to the state line and posed him for several photographs under the “Welcome to Indiana” sign he just stood there with a lopsided grin.
That’s a strange thing about this whole experience. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect intimate friends to do to one of their own but neither my roommate nor I knew Gary–until we burst into his room I wasn’t even sure what he looked like and there was only a brief glimpse between the initial entrance and his blindfolding that gave me a chance to say, “Oh, that guy…”
We would, in fact, never really get to know each other and on occasion when I’d pass by Gary and say hello to him he’d say hi in return but there was a look on his face that told me he wasn’t entirely sure who I was. All he knew was that he could depend on the kindness of strangers.
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to meet artist Billy Martinez as he was working on a mural on Nashville’s Elliston Place. Martinez has an art career that goes back decades and started his own publishing company, Neko Press, in 1997.
While his work in comics and magazines, as well as his stand-alone paintings, are bold and dramatic, often featuring powerful women, this mural is subtler but still just as bold, just as intense. It’s dominated by a black skyline. Rather than deliberately painting the Nashville skyline—in fact there are parking signs up and down Elliston he could have used as sketches, ones with Nashville’s infamous “Batman Building”—he offered a more generic view. And instead of lights he put it in total darkness. The only color, the only light, comes from behind the unbroken row of buildings. This makes the two figures at the edge, where the sidewalk and parking lot next to Smack Clothing, intersect, even more striking.
And the figures themselves are a study in contrasts. Johnny Cash, born in Arkansas, made Tennessee his home for most of his life. As a major figure in country music he’ll always be associated with Nashville and its history. He emerged from the darkness of a rural background in search of the spotlight and found it, and yet, interestingly, in the mural he’s somber, contemplative, focused on his music.
Bettie Page, on the other hand, is fierce and direct, fixing passers-by with her gaze. Former Nashville Scene editor Jim Ridley wrote an appreciation of Page a few years before her death in 2008 and described her as someone who “who deflected the ravenous gaze of strokebook buyers with a look of defiant self-possession”.
Born in Nashville she, like Cash, sought the spotlight, but her career was shorter and she was an underground figure—a pinup girl and a Playboy playmate in the much more sexually conservative 1950’s. She retired from modeling and disappeared into obscurity. She would be “rediscovered” as a new cult following developed in the 1980’s. Although she would profit from her resurgence ater spending several years in poverty, unaware of her own fame, she herself still seemed to shun the spotlight.
It’s not available online but I remember she gave an interview for the Nashville Scene in 2005, when The Notorious Bettie Page hit theaters, but refused to be photographed. A picture that accompanied the interview showed only her hands.
All that makes this mural, seemingly so simple, and something most people will likely just walk by, an intersection of art and history.
Snooker is the hardest of all billiards games. I think. That’s been my experience anyway, having played many different billiards games except I’ve never tried that one with the weird bumpers. Snooker is extremely challenging not only because you have to hit the balls in a particular order–one of the fifteen red balls followed by any of the seven other colored balls. The red balls stay pocketed. The other balls get replaced until all the red balls have been pocketed. You then have to hit the colored balls in a specific order: yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and finally black. Red balls are worth a point each and the other balls range from two to seven points. Confused yet? It’s not only extremely challenging–you can block your opponent behind a ball they’re not supposed to hit and when this happens they’re “snookered”–but there’s a lot of math involved.
One of the best snooker players in the world is Karen Corr, whose birthday is today. Corr began entering tournaments at the age of fifteen and the day after her twenty-first birthday won the Women’s World Snooker Championship, which would be an incredible feat at any age.
Since then she’s also made a name for herself in the United States–her nickname is “The Irish Invader” and I first heard of her when I saw her in nine-ball matches where she often excelled. If she didn’t win she at least made it to the finals and she was inducted into the BCA Hall of Fame in 2012.
And she still works hard at her game. As it says on her website, “The one crowning glory left for her to achieve is the World 9-ball Championship; she has been runner-up 6 times.”
I can’t imagine what it’s like to come that close that many times but I believe she’ll achieve that goal. She’s an amazingly skilled player and her success in snooker means she must be pretty good at math.
All blogging software collects search terms. At least I assume this is the case because a lot of bloggers have written posts about odd and funny search terms they see when they’re working behind the scenes. I believe this was started by The Bloggess and others picked it up and it became very popular, I don’t know, back in the 1970’s or some time around then and I’m doing it now because I always like to follow the crowd but at a safe distance.
These are not the most recent search terms but a few of the more interesting ones I’ve pulled from the total history of this blog.
nashville mta routes map
Of the known search terms this one is the most popular. It’s also the one that I’m sure causes the most disappointment. Anyone who comes here looking for any route maps or, for that matter, instructions on how to get anywhere or do anything is going to be extremely disappointed.
vending machine room
I understand why this search term brings people here but, again, I’m very sorry that anyone looking for directions to the vending machine room won’t find them here. Given the subject of my post about the vending machine I’m disappointed that searches for “Tarzan” don’t seem to bring anyone here.
eavesdropping rude
Yes, I agree that it is, but it’s also inevitable sometimes, especially now that everyone carries their own personal phones everywhere. The other day I heard someone behind me say “Hello handsome!” I didn’t turn around because I knew whoever it was couldn’t possibly be talking to me but when you speak that loudly on a public sidewalk people are going to overhear you even if you follow the crowd at a safe distance.
needing adult diapers because of diuretic
This is a good reminder that I have absolutely no idea how the internet works. Why someone who typed this query into a search engine would be directed here is beyond me, although it does fit with the ongoing theme that I feel guilty for anyone who comes here expecting to find useful information.
wearing skirt stairs
I have no idea what skirt stairs are but they sound extremely uncomfortable. Okay, I admit that I’m not that naïve and in this case at least I’m glad that if this is one area in which anyone who comes here is going to be disappointed.
cary grant does not like elevators
This is proof that other peoples’ search terms are as educational as they are entertaining. I had no idea that Cary Grant didn’t like elevators. And I guess he kept those rugged good looks by using the stairs. Maybe if I take the stairs more often the next time someone says “Hello handsome!” they really will be talking to me.
smear peanut butter on tied naked person let dog loose
I write about a wide variety of subjects but this is one I don’t think I’ve ever considered, so, again, anyone who comes here looking for that sort of thing is going to be disappointed, but if the person and the dog both enjoy it and nobody gets hurt I’m not going to judge.
i hate peeps
So do I, anonymous stranger. Thank you for reassuring me I am not alone.
“idi amin” “late for dinner”
These two come up as a “single” search “term” but at least I know why it’s directing “people” here. There’s an apocryphal story that Idi Amin responded to charges of cannibalism by saying, “I would never eat human flesh. That’s barbaric. Besides it’s much too salty.” I find that funny, so you’d be justified in calling me sick, demented, twisted, and dark–but please don’t call me “late for dinner”.
read the story what is black and white and red all over
This was a final Jeopardy! clue. The correct response was, “What is a zebra in a blender?”
<i>leave grocery cart unattended in line</i>
Yes, this is a great idea. Please leave your grocery cart unattended in the checkout line. Hey, I forgot to get lettuce while I was shopping. I’ll just take yours.
imagine your daisy answer
Another great tip. All my answers are now going to be “daisy”. No matter what the question is I’m going to answer “daisy”. Or “dandelion”. Yeah, I think I’ll go with “dandelion”. I like them more than daisies.
Dylan Thomas was a regular at the Brown’s Hotel Pub in Laugharne. He was such a regular he gave the pub’s phone number as his. The anniversary of his November 9th, 1953 got me thinking about his resemblance to another bar regular and I thought how he might have greeted everyone as he came in each day.
Door opens.
Dylan: Good afternoon everyone.
Everyone: DYLAN!
Robert: How’s it going, Dylan?
Dylan: Cur is set upon cur and I am gartered with a mongrel’s dinner.
Door opens.
Dylan: Good afternoon everyone.
Everyone: DYLAN!
Robert: What are you up to, Dylan?
Dylan: Perfect proportions if I could stand eye-height with the Laugharne castle turret.
Door opens.
Dylan: Good afternoon everyone.
Everyone: DYLAN!
Robert: What’s shakin’, Dylan?
Dylan: My mortal flesh, stork-white and swollen as the tide that coaxes the cockles from their airy nest.
Door opens.
Dylan: Good afternoon everyone.
Everyone: DYLAN!
Rhys: How are you feeling, Mr. Thomas?
Dylan: Bitter.
Rhys: I’m sorry to hear that.
Dylan: No, a pint of bitter now!
Door opens.
Dylan: Good afternoon everyone.
Everyone: DYLAN!
Robert: I’ve drawn a pint for you, Dylan.
Dylan: I admire your skill with the stylus but would prefer a filled glass.
Door opens.
Dylan: Good afternoon everyone.
Everyone: DYLAN!
Robert: I have a pint ready for you Dylan.
Dylan: I shall partake then whatever it may be.
Robert: Looks like ale.
Dylan: A ray of sun breaks into this vale of tears.
Door opens.
Dylan: Good afternoon everyone.
Everyone: DYLAN!
Robert: How are we today, Dylan?
Dylan: Time, like a running grave, fans the flames of our bodily hearths.