Latest Posts

January 24, 2013

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

As cold as a well digger’s ass in January.

As cold as a witch’s tit in a brass brassiere.

It’s so cold lawyers have got their hands in their own pockets.

It’s so cold squirrels have got frost on their nuts.

It’s so cold polar bears at the Florida zoo are saying, “For this I could have stayed home.”

It’s so cold dogs are freezing to the fire hydrants.

It’s so cold Frosty the Snowman has been asking to come inside.

It’s so cold a clock was rubbing its hands together.

It’s so cold nudists have been handing out pictures of themselves.

It’s so cold it killed plastic flowers.

It’s so cold mice are playing hockey in the bathtub.

It’s so cold we had to dig a hole to be able to read the thermometer.

It’s so cold the Statue of Liberty has been keeping the torch under her dress.

It’s so cold optometrists are giving away ice scrapers with each pair of glasses.

It’s so cold we had to kick a hole in the air just to get outside.

It’s so cold the cops are tasering themselves.

It’s so cold someone dumped hot coffee in my lap and I said “Thank you.”

It’s so cold I can’t pay my bills because my account is frozen.

It’s so cold I can only start my car in frost gear.

It’s so cold Mars is laughing at us.

It’s so cold I couldn’t pull over because the highway was giving me the cold shoulder.

It’s so cold cows are giving ice cream.

January 18, 2013

So the United States Treasury has seriously been contemplating forging a $1 trillion platinum coin as a way to pay off some debts. I’m not sure exactly how this works, although I’ve read that it’s something to do with the Treasury’s ability to make commemorative coins, so maybe they’re going to call up the Prime Minister of Sweden’s grandmother and convince her to buy it for her grandson, which she’ll probably do, but then she’ll forget to give it to him and in twenty years he’ll find it while cleaning out her closet and take it to that cash-for-platinum place on the corner. Or maybe this idea will join those other failed attempts at fixing the U.S. monetary system: getting rid of the penny and using dollar coins instead of dollar bills. I know in an era when penny candy is surprisingly expensive it seems strange to hang on to the penny, but I think enough people are already too hard up to go rounding every amount up to the nearest round number, plus retailers really like being able to trick us into thinking that $4.99 is so much cheaper than $5.00.

The dollar coin, on the other hand, is an idea I really do wish we’d go with. It would make getting stuff out of vending machines so much easier. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent twenty minutes trying to get a vending machine to take a dollar bill that is absolutely perfect in every way except for one tiny crease on one corner. And then the bag of pretzels I want gets stuck halfway, and I’m faced with the choice of either spending another dollar to possibly get two bags of chips when I really only want one or tipping the machine over, which they always say you’re not supposed to do, because if the machine ends up face down there’s no way you’re ever going to get those pretzels. And it was bad enough when most of the food in vending machines went up to a dollar, but now I’m seeing more and more where that same bag of pretzels that’s been there for three years is now $1.25, so if all I have is dollar bills I’m doing to end up with seventy-five cents in change. At least if there were dollar coins I’d already have a bunch of coins in my pocket, and even though I’d still get back seventy-five cents in change I’m penny foolish enough that I probably wouldn’t feel as ripped off changing one group of coins for another. Or maybe I’d just do what I’d do now and decide that the bag of pretzels isn’t worth $1.25 and go on which, you’d think, would make the price go back down, but it seems like there are enough other people who’re willing to spend the extra quarter that they keep driving up the price of pretzels. And I guess it works for them as long as they feel that’s what it’s worth.

After all that’s how the price of everything is determined. Everything is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. Although there’s also inflation, which I really don’t understand either. I once visited a recreation of a British Victorian farming town. There was a pub there where you could get a pint for eight pence, although the trick was you had to use the local money, which you could buy. So that eight pence cost me £1.87, which seemed reasonable, at least until it got stuck in the vending machine. And if I’d been willing to spend £48 in my money I could have gotten £1 in Victorian money, although I probably would have gotten it in change, so I’d get two crowns, three shillings, six pence, a thrupenny, nine bob, and a handful of pins. Prior to 1971 the British used a monetary system designed by a chancellor of the exchequer in the tertiary stages of syphilis, but that’s another story.

Anyway there are some things for which people are prepared to pay absolutely ridiculous prices. Remember Beanie Babies? It’s bad enough that people would rush to the closest fast food place to buy whatever Beanie Baby they were giving away with cheeseburgers. There were also rare Beanie Babies that people were willing to pay thousands of dollars for, or that at least were priced at thousands of dollars. During the height of the Beanie Baby craze there was a sale at a local mall, and there were Beanie Babies that were already selling for thousands of dollars, but were predicted to go even higher. Then the market collapsed when banks stopped accepting Beanie Babies as legal tender, although Pancho the Pangolin did continue to be a cosigner on several home mortgage loans, and currently operates a real estate agency in San Diego. Something similar happened with comic books, which I collected when I was a teenager. With most comics, but especially the independent ones, you had to buy an issue as soon as it came out. Wait a week and that issue of Fish Police #14 you’d meant to buy earlier would have doubled in price. Then the market collapsed because people started realizing that the only really valuable comics were the ones that guys left under their beds while they went to fight World War II and that had been used by their moms to line birdcages. And even the value of those comics was completely arbitrary and determined by the law of supply and demand, a law which, I think, has a great effect on inflation because people keep demanding money and treasuries keep supplying it, which makes the amounts go up while the values mostly stay the same.

This is because the value of money itself, like Beanie Babies and comic books or your grandmother’s organs, is completely arbitrary. In 1994 Brazil was suffering an inflation crisis, and economists came up with a crazy plan to fix it: replace the old currency with a new currency. They replaced the old cruzeiro with a new currency called the real. I think this name was picked for marketing purposes—people would think of the new currency as real money. And thanks to a slow transition that got people used to the new currency and made them start trusting it the plan worked. It worked even though this was basically the equivalent of the entire Brazilian population clapping their hands and saying “I do believe in fairies!” Not that I’m mocking the Brazilians because, hey, it worked, and also because this is how money works everywhere. Money has value because we believe in it, even though for centuries it’s really just been little pieces of metal and paper and is increasingly made of electrons. This is why anybody who stops and thinks about it realizes how crazy the recent gold rush, with all those cash-for-gold places popping up like roaches, is. Gold is valuable now because the suckers who are willing to pay a lot for it can find even bigger suckers who’ll pay more. And gold has a nice history of being used for money because it’s a metal that doesn’t look like most other metals. And because it doesn’t react with a lot of things it’s also really easy to get out, even when it’s bound up in mineral form. Some gold-bearing rocks will literally ooze gold if placed in a regular fire, which a bunch of Australian prospectors discovered in a spot in the outback in the 1890’s, near what’s now Kalgoorlie. Before long people who’d set up residence in the area were tearing apart the houses they’d built with local rocks to get the gold out. And gold is relatively scarce, although scarcity isn’t always a factor. Aluminum is really common, but it used to be really valuable because it was hard to process. When the Washington monument was built it was capped with aluminum as a show of U.S. wealth and power, but now that same aluminum cap isn’t worth the twelve-pack of beer cans you could make from it. If the world economy really does ever collapse, as some doomsayers think it will, the price of gold will probably evaporate just like the price of everything else, because you can’t eat gold. Well, you can, but not for long. Gold, like all forms of money, is only valuable because people assign it a value and accept it as a token of exchange, but I’m not saying that money is worthless. Although if I have made you think money is worthless I’ll be happy to take yours off your hands. For free.

January 11, 2013

So I’ve been seeing commercials for a foundation that preserves to aim physical education, or what we used to call P.E. or just gym, in schools. I had no idea gym classes were in danger, but it says something if budget cuts have gotten that bad. I feel compelled to speak up in defense of gym even though it was the class I tried hardest to get out of. And that’s in spite of the fact that it was always an easy A. Even when I was flunking math I could count on gym to pull up my average. All you had to do in gym was show up and put on your uniform. Well, in my school it would be exaggerating to call it a “uniform”. It was a school t-shirt and a pair of nylon shorts. In the winter if we wanted we could wear sweatpants as long as they were one of the school colors. That was gym: show up and change clothes. Physical activity wasn’t even necessarily required, but everyone had to change clothes.

A friend of mine had a back injury that prevented him from putting his arms over his head for several months, so he couldn’t do a lot of physical activity or change his shirt. But the coach insisted he put on the nylon shorts, so he mostly sat in the bleachers wearing the shorts and a regular shirt reading a book while I did half-assed jumping jacks and sit-ups and devised elaborate schemes to get a back injury. I’d like to say it was the creepy proto-military quality of gym that bothered me. After all every TV show and movie I’d ever seen about the military, from Gomer Pyle to Full Metal Jacket, had at least one montage of a bunch of guys dressed alike doing jumping jacks, sit-ups, and running through a bunch of old tires. It looked just like gym class, except they were more coordinated and had real uniforms. The truth is, though, that I hated gym because I just wasn’t that into exercise, a quality I shared with junior high school gym teacher. He weighed five hundred pounds and I think they made him the gym teacher to warn all of us what would happen if we didn’t exercise regularly.

I realize part of the purpose of gym was to make us well-rounded, but he was the most well-rounded teacher in the school and it didn’t exactly seem appealing. So I guess gym wasn’t really anything like the military, because the gym teacher was no drill sergeant. He didn’t march up and down and scream in anyone’s face because that much physical activity would have killed him. Mostly he just sat in a chair and told us to go run through some tires while he read the paper. Anyway it still surprises me that gym is in any danger of being cut from school budgets. My high school had very clear priorities: football, basketball, baseball, and if any money was left over it could be used for incidentals like English or science. Even people who think public education is a communist plot are in favor of high school football, and where would that be without gym class? For at least a couple of decades now I’ve been hearing pleas to save music and art instruction in schools, and although I think these things can be preserved as well it seems like mos of those who control the purse strings think school money should be directed away from such frou-frou pursuits and instead used for important things, like new helmets. Schools that offer Beethoven and basketball don’t just create well-rounded students, they foster well-rounded communities. This is why it irks me whenever I hear someone without children say their taxes shouldn’t have to pay for schools since they don’t have kids to send to school. We all benefit from public education, including the people without children who say their taxes shouldn’t have to pay for schools, even though they’re adults who’re stuck with a preschool mentality. What I’m getting at is that our schools have been cut enough and need more funding and better budgeting. And if they have to cut something it should be something unimportant that nobody uses, like math.

January 4, 2013

At the end of every year various media outlets produce a list of noteworthy people who died during the year. Usually they also had a story about each person at the time their death occurred. Once when a celebrity died and extensive obituaries were everywhere I said to a friend how amazing it was that they could produce them so quickly. And my friend told me that most media outlets keep a "death file", so that when a famous person dies they can put something together and release it in a hurry, sometimes in as little as a few minutes after the person croaked. Maybe it’s practicality, or maybe they got the idea from P.T. Barnum, who asked newspapers to print his obituary while he was still alive so he could read it. With impeccable timing he made his great egress a week later.

But I wonder who has to keep the death file. It must be pretty depressing to have the job of updating information on someone, knowing you’re only going to use it when that person dies. It must be even more depressing when it’s someone who’s been out of the limelight for a long time. In 1964, before he retired from show business, Tom Lehrer remarked, "It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." If it was a sobering thought then it must be even more sobering that it’s a joke that has to be updated annually, and that on April 9, 2013, Lehrer will have outlived Mozart by half a century. But I hope Mr. Lehrer doesn’t dwell on it, although for anybody who’s ever been in the spotlight it must be in the back of their mind that their death will probably make the news even if they haven’t in decades. Not to get morbid, but famous people must be reminded of their impending demise on a regular basis. We all know Mark Twain’s famous quote about rumors of his death, but in the back of his mind he must have known there’d come a time when they weren’t just rumors.

And in the mid-1980’s MTV had a game show called Remote Control, with a category "Dead Or Alive". Contestants would be given the name of a famous person and they’d have to answer whether the person was dead or alive. Jon Bon Jovi once came up, and the contestant said, "He’s dead." In fact he was sitting in the audience, and, I assume, very much alive, since he still is. Still I hope no one dwells on the fact that they’ll have to cash in their chips at some point and instead leaves it to whoever’s keeping his death file. And keeping those files has got to be such a depressing job I assume it has to go to whoever’s lowest in the office hierarchy. At newspapers I guess it goes to those who used to be called "cub reporters", who are now called "interns". There was a time when cub reporters were assigned to write obituaries, because newspaper editors were always smart enough to trust a sensitive subject like death with someone who had no idea what they were doing. I once heard a story about a cub reporter whose first obituary ran to more than a thousand words. His editor told him to cut it. He cut it down to five hundred words. The editor asked him to cut it again. He cut it to two-hundred and fifty words. The editor told him to cut it again, so he wrote, "Mr. Jones looked up the elevator shaft to see if the elevator was coming. It was. He was forty-two." It’s a funny story, and I wouldn’t mind having an obituary like that, even though the only thing the reporter considered newsworthy was the man’s death. Even if he didn’t do anything worth reporting before that he still lived, and all the focus shouldn’t be put on death since it’s merely the period at the end of our life sentence. Actually a story I like better is one of Oscar Wilde’s last words. The story of his last words is a reminder that Wilde was a very smart, very funny writer who today is more famous for what he wrote than for a terrible scandal that ended his career and probably shortened his life, unlike today when most people begin their careers with terrible scandals. Anyway, the story goes that Wilde lay dying in a Paris hospital where he’d been complaining about the wallpaper for hours. Finally he said, "Either the wallpaper goes or I do."

December 20, 2012

Some people think the world will end on December 21st, 2012. More people, I think, don’t think it will end, and I’m inclined to go with the majority, partly because I don’t know what the end of the world would even look like. I’ve heard it will involve dogs and cats living together and mass hysteria, which doesn’t sound different from any other day. People who think the world will end are also basing their predictions on the end of the Mayan long count calendar, and aside from the fact that the Mayans didn’t expect the world to end and intended to replace their old calendar with one featuring kittens they didn’t know everything. The Mayans were, as a group, pretty smart people who built fantastic cities, had brilliant astronomers and a complex culture, but when things got bad they threw their jewelry in a giant sunken lake. And when things got really bad they threw each other in, which didn’t help anything and only hurt jewelry sales. What I don’t understand is why some people want the world to end, even though I think I understand the source of the impulse. We’ve all had fleeting moments when we’ve felt like we just can’t go on, when we want whatever we’re going through to end, and sometimes these feelings can be so overwhelming it seems like it would be better if everything ended. If you’ve experienced these feelings and they’re more than fleeting, by the way, if you’re dwelling on them and even making plans based on them please stop reading and talk to someone now. I promise I’ll still be here when you get back.

Anyway, I also realize predictions of the end of the world don’t always come out of suicidal tendencies. They can also come from our desire to be in control, which comes from a desire for order, a desire to understand our world. Without order, without control, without rules the universe is chaos, and chaos is terrifying, even if you’re Maxwell Smart. Well, chaos isn’t not always terrifying. I was once in a lecture on Greek mythology and the speaker kept talking about the early universe being full of “chowse”, and none of us knew what “chowse” was, until someone a few seats down from me whispered “He means ‘chaos’” and then we couldn’t stop laughing, but that’s another story. The knowledge that we live in a chaotic universe is terrifying, so we look for order. We name the constellations, we track the movements of the stars. We know that every December we’ll see shooting stars from or near the constellation Gemini. The Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun said that when he saw shooting stars he’d think, “What, was that a world in convulsions? A world disintegrating before my very eyes? And to think that I, in my life, have been granted the spectacle of a shooting star.” It’s a lovely thought, but it easily leads to wondering whether we are standing on a world in convulsions, or maybe even whether we ourselves are shooting stars. It takes on special significance given that for almost seventy years now we’ve had the technological capability of ending our world with the same process that creates real stars, that keeps our sun burning. And that, I understand, is what terrifies people. No matter how rational we may be it’s still disconcerting that we may be nothing more than exceptionally complicated machines that only need to eat, shit, reproduce, and die. It may be that we’re not privileged, and not special except for large neocortexes that have made our lives infinitely more complicated than they need to be. Evolution has made us smart, but it hasn’t made us wise. We may destroy ourselves or we may be destroyed. Extinction is a fact of life and a constant threat in a fallible and chaotic universe. I keep saying “may” not because I’m hedging my bets, but because I really don’t know. Maybe we are special, maybe we are more than the sum of our parts. Maybe it doesn’t matter. The one thing I’m certain of is that I want to survive, I want all of us to survive, and for that we need each other.

December 14, 2012

I know it doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone anymore that most of what we consider traditional Christmas symbols-wreaths of holly, boughs of mistletoe, spiking grandma’s egg nog-are actually appropriated from pagan traditions. It’s even no accident that Christmas is celebrated pretty close to the Solstice, both of which fall close to New Year’s Day. They’re all celebrations of renewal, of the old passing away and ushering in a new world, although I kind of wonder why Christmas is celebrated in the winter while Easter-also borrowing from pagan tradition–is celebrated in the spring. Maybe whoever decided when the Christian celebrations should be held just flipped a coin, because it seems like they could just as easily be the other way around, although winter is bleak and dark enough as it is, so I suppose reminding everyone of the crucifixion right in the middle of it would be too depressing even if Jesus does make a triumphant comeback in the final reel.

The one tradition I don’t understand, though, is the Christmas tree. Don’t get me wrong-I love Christmas trees, and have fond memories of putting one up. I even had a few relatives who would send me an ornament as a Christmas gift, which I would open and immediately put in a box for a year, so it was a nice way to acknowledge that we each thought of each other once a year. And I always loved the ornaments. When I was young I especially loved those metallic red and blue and silver balls, but after a few years when we’d accumulated a sizeable collection of reindeers, snowmen, lace stars, little tiny Santas, and brass cutouts with "Cihrs-1983" engraved on it my mother wouldn’t let me put those on the tree anymore. She said they were tacky, but I think the truth is that whenever they fall-and there would always be fifteen or twenty that fell every year-they’d break into a million pointy shards, and no amount of vacuuming would pick them all up, so you’d always fine at least one in the summer whenever you walked across the floor barefoot. And I remember how I begged my parents to get bubble lights, and then we did, and I would watch them intently, in spite of being told that a watched bubble light never bubbles.

Anyway, at first glance a Christmas tree seems like an appropriate seasonal symbol. Christmas trees are traditionally evergreens, after all, so they’re symbolic of surviving through the winter, and somehow chopping down a leafless or dead tree and bringing it inside just wouldn’t be that festive, no matter how many bubble lights you put on it. But as I said Christmas and the Solstice are celebrations of renewal, of rebirth even, or at the very least of survival, so it seems contrary to the spirit of the season to celebrate by killing a tree. Pine trees are also, according to some British folklore, unlucky, and it’s especially bad to fall asleep under one, which leads to the tradition of older siblings encouraging the youngest ones to sleep under the Christmas tree. And we don’t just kill the tree. We chop it down and bring it inside and decorate it while it slowly dies and dries out, and since that’s not already enough of a fire hazard we decorate it with frayed strings of electric lights that have been scrunched up and stored in the attic for more than eleven months. And some people still like to go for that air of authenticity and use candles, because nothing celebrates the holiday spirit like setting a giant tree on fire right in the middle of your living room.

Actually the equally old, equally pagan tradition of the yule log makes more sense for a celebration, especially since there is a tradition of placing small gifts for children under each end of the yule log, because nothing celebrates the holiday spirit like getting your children gifts and then burning them. And I don’t have any childhood memories of a yule log, at least in part, I think, because for most of my childhood we didn’t have a fireplace. I never thought of this as a problem for Santa, though-I figured he just picked the lock. In fact I was a teenager before I first heard about the tradition of a yule log, and my first thought was, "I’ll what?" For a couple more years I thought it had something to do with "The King And I" always being on television around this time of year, but that’s another story. Although, speaking of Santa, I guess the Christmas tree is more festive than a big sign that says "LEAVE PRESENTS HERE". You know the guy’s so hopped up on milk and cookies, not to mention wind chill and reindeer farts, that if there weren’t an obvious place for him to drop the presents there’s no telling where he’d put them. So having a Christmas tree can be a nice thing, although I think symbolically and ecologically it’s still better to have a fake one. And aesthetically, since you don’t have to worry about sticking it in the corner right next to the heating vent to cover up the bald patch. But I still prefer the ones that actually look like trees. My grandparents had one of those solid white monstrosities that looked like it was made out of twisted garbage bags. The only fond memories I have of it is the time I tried to set it on fire, and it wouldn’t even burn. It just melted.

December 7, 2012

According to a scientific study I heard about third-hand people will spend more money in stores that have certain scents in the air. Vanilla and orange seem to be the smells most likely to make people fork over their cash, so if you ever get home and wonder why you bought a digital banana extruder think back and see if you noticed the store was unusually citrusy, or smelled like they were baking cakes under the cash registers. I don’t know when exactly this study was conducted, and they may have even tried to keep the findings under wraps. I remember several years ago when there was a minor panic over subliminal messages being used as advertising. People thought it was mind control, although, technically, that’s all advertising is. It’s a very sophisticated form of mind control.

Or maybe it’s not that sophisticated. Sometimes advertisers seem to come up with exceptionally bad ideas, like putting ads for candy bars on fuel pumps, because there’s nothing like the smell of gasoline to give you a craving for chocolate and caramel. It’s no accident, though, that when psychology was still a nascent field advertisers took an interest. The psychologist B.F. Skinner worked contributed to the advertising industry, although the psychologist who’s had the most lasting impact is definitely Freud. No matter what the ad is selling a cigar is never just a cigar, but that’s another story. And it’s not just advertising. Stores will also employ elaborate tricks, although I guess that’s also a kind of advertising since it’s all about selling. And we’ve been so brainwashed into thinking a sale means we’re getting a good deal people will buy almost anything that’s marked down. I had an aunt who bought an escalator.

Then there’s the whole array of impulse buys at the cash register, which was a brilliant idea. Stores took the one place where we want to spend the smallest amount of time-the checkout line-and have turned it into a mini shopping area all its own. There have been too many times when I’ve been waiting for the person ahead of me to check out and have taken the opportunity to get a self-tattooing kit, a dry ice maker, and a TV screen repair kit. And I’ve bought some stupid things too. What I never can figure out is why every store in the universe now has to have a selection of miniature gourmet chocolates right at the checkout. Stores that don’t even sell anything even remotely close to food will still have a wide variety of chocolates. And who buys these? I see them in the big hardware stores, and I wonder if some construction foreman ever comes in and says, "I need two square miles of plywood, a quarter inch of drywall, and, ooh! Raspberry truffles! The boys down at the job site love those."

I also find it interesting that grocery stores sell little recipe books at the checkout. It seems like they’re missing a real opportunity there, and they should be selling recipe books at the entrance. I know I’ve bought one of those little recipe books, thinking, hey, that asparagus-artichoke-aardvark torta looks pretty good and easy, only to get home and realize that I didn’t buy anything I need to make it, so I throw it away, thinking, yeah, I’ll never cook that crap anyway. If they sold the recipe books at the entrance customers would spend more money buying all the ingredients they need before going home and throwing it all away because, really, no one’s gonna cook that crap anyway. Although selling magazines at the checkout does make sense. It gives you something to read while you’re waiting for the ninety-eight year old woman in line in front of you to bag her own groceries because she has a special way of doing it, and then you get so engrossed in the article about what life is like in exotic and remote places like Kansas that you feel you have to buy the magazine. And it’s interesting seeing what magazines people buy. I’ve seen men in business suits buying issues of Cosmopolitan, maybe because they think their wife really will read that article about three-hundred new ways to dutifully serve her husband without laughing, or maybe they’re just too embarrassed to buy real porn. And I’ve seen harried women with litters of children pick up issues of The Economist, maybe because they’re desperate for news from the adult world.

And yet I’ve never seen anyone buy an Archie comic. I’ve never even known anyone who has ever been given an Archie comic that someone else has purchased for them. Why do they even keep making them? Aren’t our landfills overstuffed enough without every single issue of every single Archie comic being packed up and dropped into them every week? Okay, I might actually buy the new issue with George Takei in it, but it would be the first and only one, which raises the question of how Archie comics have managed to live this long and prosper. Anyway, what I intended to say was that I think it’s absurd to believe that the smell of orange or vanilla makes people more willing to purchase things, although the more I think about it the more willing I am to buy it. Hey, is that a cake baking?

November 30, 2012

When I was sixteen I showed my mother a poem I’d written, and she said, "That sounds like Dylan Thomas." I’d never heard of him, but she went to the library and checked out his Collected Poems and brought it home for me. In the front was a picture of Thomas, and I thought he was the saddest looking man I’d ever seen. It kind of put me off of his poetry, so I didn’t read it for a while, but I kept his name in mind and just before I went to college and bought a copy of his Selected Poems. And I read a brief biography of him in a reference book and learned about his heavy drinking and early death.

Before I read his poetry I was intrigued by his life. He was a rock star of poetry: he drank heavily, acted outrageously at parties and in hotels, and beat up his wife. (She hit back, but that doesn’t make it right.) From some of the stories people tell about him it’s a wonder Thomas survived as long as he did. But I wasn’t just interested in his biography. He was the first poet whose work I read seriously and deeply, and I thought I wanted to be a poet like him. Well, not exactly like him. I hoped to live to be older than he did, and so far at least I’ve achieved that. Shortly after his thirty-ninth birthday, supposedly after downing eighteen whiskies, he collapsed.

One night, in a British pub, I foolishly decided I wanted to live like Dylan Thomas, and drank most of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Fortunately I had friends who made sure I woke up the next morning. That was a couple of weeks after I’d I’d made a special pilgrimage across England and into Wales to visit his home. I knew he was born and spent his early years in Swansea, then moved around and finally settled in a little Welsh town called Laugharne. I set out from Grantham, England, home of Sir Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher. Find Grantham and Laugharne on a map and you’ll see I was cutting diagonally across most of Britain, from northeast to southwest. Although you might not find Laugharne on a map. I couldn’t. At least it wasn’t on any train schedule I could find, so I set out for Swansea. And then what? Look for Mumbles Road and Mermaid Park, I thought, and let the rest take care of itself. I figured in Dylan Thomas was the Welsh Elvis, so I thought Swansea would be like Memphis, just with different accents, and everyone would know how to get to Dylan’s equivalent of Graceland. I settled into my seat on the train and watched the green English countryside and little brown shacks in the middle of nowhere.

Stepping off the train in Swansea I started to realize that I had no clue what I was doing there. There were no signs, no posters, no Dylan Thomas impersonators in wool jackets belting out "In The White Giant’s Thigh". So I did what any sensible person would do: I set off in a random direction, walking around Swansea late in a winter afternoon. I went by about two dozen pubs, wondering if I should go in. On his first trip to America Thomas came over on a plane. He seemed to be a friendly guy who liked talking to people, but he was scared to talk to any of his fellow passengers. As I walked down a Swansea street I tried to ignore the cold and wind and growing dark. Finally I stepped into a travel agency thinking I might ask someone where I should go, but I was scared to speak to anyone and instead looked at a wall of brochures where, of all things, one advertising the Dylan Thomas Boat House And Museum jumped out at me. I checked the map on the back, and there was Laugharne, just a short way from Carmarthen, which was just a short way from Swansea. It looked like I could almost walk the distance. Maps on the back of brochures, by the way, can be extremely misleading.

I headed back to the train station thinking the Welsh train system must go to Laugharne, and if it didn’t, well, maybe there was a bus, and if there wasn’t maybe I’d catch a lift with some complete stranger with a hook for a hand and an eyepatch and a scar. Laugharne still wasn’t on the train station map, so I decided to go for the next best thing and go to Carmarthen and maybe meet up with the hook-handed, one-eyed stranger, or possibly a bus, there. The train to Carmarthen was smaller than the other trains I’d ridden, and rickety. It was night by this time and sometime before I got to Carmarthen a heavy rain had started. I stepped out and realized it was the end of the line, and I’d just ridden the last train. There’d be no return trip that night, so whether I wanted to or not I was going to be spending the night in Carmarthen. As a young man out of school Thomas worked briefly as a reporter. His work, based on the notes he kept, mostly consisted of wandering around town and having an occasional pint. I’m pretty sure I spent at least an hour walking around Carmarthen. I passed at least a dozen very inviting pubs, but they were always either too crowded or too empty.

For a while I wondered if I should find a comfortable ditch to sleep in. Finally I got up the nerve to ask a couple of guys coming out of a pub if there was a place I could get a room. They were very friendly and tickled that an American was visiting Carmarthen and directed me to a place I never did find, mainly because I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying. I spent the night in a place called the Old Priory Guest House, in a room in the very back of the building, at the end of a dark hallway. When I woke up in the morning I was a little disturbed to look out the window and see a graveyard. The next day was Sunday. I left the Guest House early and skipped the complimentary breakfast. I’d gotten a bus schedule at the train station the night before and had confirmed absolutely that there was a bus that went to Laugharne. What the schedule didn’t tell me was that Wales completely shut down on Sunday. It listed the times for the buses, but not the days, I guess because everybody just knew the buses don’t run on Sundays. The train back to Swansea didn’t leave until after one o’clock.

So I spent a lot of time walking up and down the banks of the River Towy, and finally got back to school in Grantham very late that night, having to make the last leg from Nottingham in a taxi. I’d spent the night in the Nottingham train station once before and didn’t want to repeat the experience. In the middle of his life Thomas moved to London, and almost completely gave up writing poetry. He wrote a few film scripts, but almost nothing of any lasting value. He wouldn’t start writing poetry again seriously until he and his family moved to Laugharne, where he produced his best and his best-known works. The trip, and my one-night bout with Jack, still left me feeling unsatisfied. I felt like Dylan Thomas and I still had unresolved business, so I did what any sensible person would do: I went again. The second time I was better equipped: I had the train schedule figured out, I had the bus schedule, and I knew how to find the Old Priory Guest House, and I was going to ask for a room facing the street. I also wasn’t going to spend any time wandering around Swansea. This time I was on a mission, and headed straight to Laugharne. It was late afternoon when I stepped off the bus in Laugharne, and the first thing I saw was a sign that said, "Dylan’s Walk" Ah, I thought, they knew I was coming.

I set off down Dylan’s walk which led me around to a steep cliff, past a cemetery, past the little blue shed where he wrote "Fern Hill" and "Do No Go Gentle Into That Good Night". Thomas was known for being late for every appointment he ever made. He was never on time for anything. There’s a Broadway play based on his tours of America. In it someone asks him, "Will you be telling jokes at your own funeral? He replies, "Of course not. I’ll be late for it." I went right up to the door of the Dylan Thomas Boat House And Museum. And it was closed. For the weekend. It had closed half an hour before I arrived. I had a few hours in Laugharne before the last bus to Carmarthen, which I made sure to catch. I’d return to Carmarthen in time to attend the lighting of the city Christmas tree. Unsure where else to go or what to do in Laugharne I wandered around and stopped in at a small convenience store across from the Brown’s Hotel Pub-the place where Thomas spent a lot of his days. I bought a copy of A Child’s Christmas In Wales. The man behind the convenience store counter, somehow guessing that I was a Dylan Thomas fan, insisted that I had to have a pint in Dylan’s old pub. I told him I was scared to go in. Dylan’s wife Caitlin described Laugharne as a rough, dangerous place. "Someone was even shot here once," she said. Still the convenience store owner assured me that it would be all right. Outside the pub I could hear what sounded like a pretty raucous, Friday night crowd, which reassured me. I thought I’d slip in unnoticed, have a pint and leave. I opened the door and stepped into dead silence. I’m pretty sure every person in Laugharne except the guy who worked in the convenience store was in that pub, and since they knew I wasn’t him they knew as soon as I opened the door that there was a stranger among them.

I walked across the room to the bar with everyone staring at me, a short, long-haired guy in a hat and long coat with a backpack. Only the bartender, a bald, round-faced man who looked like he just might be old enough to have known Dylan Thomas, who probably even played cards with him back in the day, smiled at me and asked me what I wanted. I asked for a pint of Guinness. I needed the familiar, heavy stout. He poured one and I walked over to the only empty corner in the room. I sat down and pulled out my copy of Dylan Thomas’s Selected Poems. And it was as though I’d flipped a switch. Everyone in the room turned away from me and started talking again, apparently picking up their conversations right where they’d left off. I looked out the window, then looked at the wall to my right. There was a picture of Dylan and Caitlin on the wall. The wallpaper had changed, but, without realizing it I’d sat in his chair. After finishing my pint I set off for one last walk, this time with a clear destination in mind. I climbed a hill, passed through a gate, and walked in total darkness, lighting a match as I went and finding that there was nothing around me. Then I turned and came into the dim light of the town below and walked up to Dylan himself. A simple wooden cross marks the spot. I sat down in front of it. I looked out over the lights of Laugharne and then talked to Dylan for a while.

November 16, 2012

"I’ll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon." -Steve Martin

A coffee shop in Britain has changed its menu to use simpler terms. Instead of offering latte they offer "Really really milky coffee". If you want a mocha you need to order "Chocolate flavoured coffee", and they don’t serve espresso, but you can get "A shot of strong coffee". And this inevitably raises the question: why? Yes, we’ve all stood in the line at the coffee shop trying to decide between the double chip mocha affogato and the skinny ristretto latte (over ice). And as much as it annoys us when someone else does it I’m pretty sure we’ve all held up the line still trying to make up our minds because most coffee shops have so many options you need binoculars to read the menu even up close, especially when it’s hand-written on a chalkboard in twenty-seven different colors. And even though fancy coffee drinks have been around for at least a couple of decades now I think it’s still a really good idea to add explanatory notes to coffee menus, because, in spite of having drunk enough of them to fill Lake Michigan, I’m still not entirely sure what a frappe is. But if I go up to the coffee shop counter it’s going to take me a lot longer to give the long version to the guy taking my order than it would to just say I want "a frappe", although it’s really not the time factor that concerns me. After all if they include explanations of their drinks it’s probably going to take even longer for people to decide what they want because they’ll be standing there slack-jawed and saying, "So that’s what a doppio is" before they order one and then, ten minutes after drinking it, head off to fill Lake Michigan.

Having detailed explanations would at least solve the problem I sometimes have in coffee shops of asking the guy behind the counter, "What’s the difference between the Sumatran sallow and the Belizean blonde?" and having him say, "Uh, one’s made from beans…" which makes me want to punch him in the cash register. At the other end of the spectrum, of course, is the guy who knows way too much about the coffee. As long as I’m not holding up the line I really don’t mind a long explanation, although usually somewhere between being told that the Chiapas blend has hints of cherry, chicory, and charcoal and that it’s harvested by attractive mountain people who are paid a decent wage and have a dental plan I want to say, "Okay, I’ll take a large, Captain Soulpatch, you can talk and pour at the same time." No, my real problem with the simplified coffee menu is that it’s a dumbing down of the language. Instead of asking people to learn and use new, well, relatively new, and interesting words it’s going backward. Language is supposed to evolve, and, since language shapes how we think, adding new words to our vocabulary expands our mental range. At the very least new words add subtle gradations to our speech. Think about the difference between telling someone your house is painted green and telling them it’s painted sage.

Any attempt to simplify language reminds me of no less a person than George Orwell suggesting English writers should, as much as possible, restrict themselves to Anglo-Saxon words rather than using Greek and Latin derivatives. That kind of attack makes me wonder if Orwell ever read a novel called 1984, written by an English author whose name escapes me at the moment. Although I also think that as long as we’re importing new words into our language the least we can do is get them right. Specifically I mean the Italian word "espresso". Look carefully at that word and you’ll notice there’s no X in it. It’s not an expresso. Expresso is a brand of stationary bike that you get on to burn off the calories from that large double caramel mocha you had this morning. It’s fantastic that Americans have imported espresso and rebranded it as our own so we can sell it back to Europeans at greatly inflated prices, but I think as a matter of courtesy we should at least pronounce it correctly. If you go to a coffee shop and ask for an "expresso" you should be given really really milky milk. With a shot of milk. And a twist of lemon.

November 9, 2012

Several liquor stores in my area have begun selling something they call "moonshine". I hate it when people play fast and loose with the language like that. If it’s produced, bottled, and distributed by legitimate businesses it’s not moonshine. Moonshine is made in hollers and gulleys by men missing fingers and eyes because their stills occasionally blow up. If it’s got a fancy label and is sold in broad daylight in a legitimate establishment it’s not moonshine. At best it’s a distilled alcohol product that hasn’t been subjected to a traditional aging process. If that’s too much of a mouthful then just call it really, really expensive turpentine.

Moonshine is sold in jelly jars and clay pots with XXX on the side, or at least it was before XXX was appropriated by the porn industry, but moonshine remains much more dangerous. Moonshine might make you go blind, whereas some porn will simply make you wish you were blind. Running moonshine was, supposedly, how NASCAR originated, but I find that highly questionable. I think all automobile racing originated with the invention of the automobile because even if you give two guys two completely identical cars the first thing they’re both going to think is, "Let’s find out which one is faster." And it gets worse. There are now also so-called reality shows about moonshiners. I say "so-called" not merely because, as we all know, there’s very little reality in reality television, but because shows about moonshiners must be fiction because the production of moonshine is illegal. If the reality shows are really about real moonshiners they’re making it a lot easier for ATF agents who will no longer have to wander through hollers and gullies looking for illicit stills but can just follow the film crews.

I believe these reality shows must be no more real than Otis on The Andy Griffith Show disappearing into the woods to tie one on, presumably because Mayberry was in a dry county, otherwise he would have been able to hang out in the local bar or buy a bottle of gin at the liquor store before ambling to the sheriff’s office to lock himself in his favorite jail cell. I realize the bottling and reality shows are an attempt to give moonshine a whiff of respectability, but, open-minded as I am, I don’t think moonshine should be made respectable. I’m an open-minded guy and think there are a lot of things society has kept on the fringes that should be embraced, but is moonshine one of them? Several years ago I took a friend to visit the Jack Daniel’s Distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee. I’ve toured the distillery at least a dozen times since I was very young because my parents would often take visiting guests down there-a tradition I’m proud to have continued. Most of those times that I went Moore County, where Lynchburg is located, was a completely dry county.

For the British and other aliens I’d like to take a moment here to explain that a "dry county" is one where alcohol can’t be sold. That was part of the charm of the Jack Daniel’s Distillery: they could make it there, but they couldn’t sell it. You had to drive to a neighboring county to buy it. Except the last time I was there they had a three-foot by three-foot square in the distillery itself where you could buy a special bottle. And I felt like a small part of my childhood was gone, which, in itself, isn’t an argument for keeping things the way they were, but I haven’t really got an argument, so bear with me. Recently efforts have been made to make Moore County, well, for lack of a better term, wet, allowing the sale of liquor, including Jack Daniel’s whiskey, which would deprive the distillery of that "You can look, but can’t touch" element that makes it special. One thing that hadn’t changed, though, was the distillery’s tour guides. A side effect of visiting the distillery so many times is I became a connoisseur of its tour guides, the same way some people become connoisseurs of fine scotch, although my hobby is significantly cheaper. The first time I ever visited the distillery our tour guide was funny and outgoing. He was like Willy Wonka but looked like Jim Varney. In fact he may have even been Jim Varney. The last time I went our tour guide was at the opposite end of the spectrum, but equally superb. He was approximately a hundred and three, wore overalls and a conductor’s cap, and was perpetually hunched over. The first thing he said to us was, "Y’all git on along now." His face was contorted into a perpetual snarl, although he did smile just once when someone asked him if he got free whiskey for working at the distillery. He quietly said, "No, but they pay me enough that I kin buy it."

The rest of the time, though, he was straightforward, matter-of-fact, and very thorough in explaining the process by which Jack Daniel’s is crafted. He was clearly not a man who suffered fools, particularly when a guy with a Midwestern accent asked, "So what do they do with the bad whiskey?" It was the only time the man looked at any of us directly. He fixed the questioner with a steely glare and said, "There ain’t no bad whiskey here." They do have a term for bad whiskey in Moore County, though. They call it moonshine.