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Something In The Air.

Spring is in the air which means it’s allergy season. Lately I’ve been hit with paroxysms of coughing, and while “paroxysm” is a great Scrabble word it’s not a fun thing to have coming up out of my lungs. For most of my life I was happy I didn’t seem to be allergic to anything. And I really mean anything. I once fell in a patch of poison ivy, not deliberately, and rolled over, because I didn’t realize it was poison ivy and if I had I would have done my best to get vertical without any superfluous motion, but I came out of the experience literally without a scratch. Before I got cancer it was easy to fill out medical forms, at least when I got to the question, “Are you allergic to anything?” I could always dash off a quick “No” and move on. Now I hesitate over the question but there isn’t a check-box for “I don’t know and I’m terrified of finding out!”

I know it’s an allergy to, well, something because other than the coughing and the occasional sneeze I feel fine. Colds, the flu, and other actual diseases would have other symptoms. I’d at least feel tired and achy. In fact I’m lucky that my reaction whatever I’m allergic to that’s in the air right now isn’t that bad. I think of allergies as our bodies overreacting to something that’s basically harmless—that might even be beneficial. Peanuts and shrimp are good for most of us but I also have friends for whom peanuts and shrimp are lethal, which is why when we go out to eat I skip the pad thai.

Then it occurred to me that my wife and I have been doing some spring cleaning. Mostly I’ve been trying to reduce my book collection to a manageable size. Well, more manageable. Well, I’ve stopped trying to pack half the Library of Congress into our house. Librarians call it “weeding”–pulling duplicates and other books that, for whatever reason, are no longer necessary. It’s prompted some hard decisions. Obviously I don’t need two identical translations of Sir Gawain & The Green Knight–but do I need two? Well, one is a verse translation and the other is prose…In addition to the hard questions it’s also brought out some dust and that could be what’s caused the coughing. 

I also remembered that I used to have a coworker who coughed all day every day. It wasn’t loud—just a steady drumbeat of low level expectoration. And it wasn’t hard to guess that her cubicle being right under a perpetually dusty air vent might have had something to do with it. Office changes have put me not quite under it but close to it. Which may be why the one thing that seems to stop the coughing is going outside—ironically the one thing that triggers allergies in a lot of other people.

 

It’s A Living.

There was a feature in an issue of MAD Magazine I read when I was eleven or twelve that was called something like “Jobs Someone Must Have”. I think everything I read in MAD was memorable to me because my mother wouldn’t buy it for me so whenever I saw an issue at a friend’s house I went straight to it. But this feature was memorable to because it was funny but also thought-provoking. It was jobs like “the person who paints the black dots on dice” and the only other one I can remember was “manhole cover designer”. Painting dots on dice is probably automated but designing sewer line covers is a real job. I wish I could remember the others because, even if it was tongue-in-cheek, there are a lot of jobs most of us don’t even realize are being done. And if I hadn’t already gotten the idea from MAD the summer I worked for a temp agency really made me think about it even more. Maybe you’ve walked by the end cap displays in a grocery store without thinking about them. I spent three weeks putting those together and moving them across a warehouse into trucks to be delivered across the country.

Manhole covers are just one example but they’re a distinctive one. Japan is famous for their unique designs, and because most I’ve seen are plain—at least the ones I happen to notice since I’m usually not looking down—it’s nice to see a distinctive one. Most large cities probably have some. Here’s just one list of some really incredible ones around the world.

The cover I photographed isn’t for a sewer line, of course, but is similar enough, and also someone had to design it. It happens to be outside the Blair School of Music. If you go into the library there you’ll see this. It’s not someone’s job to decorate the bust of Beethoven but I’m glad someone does. Anything that adds a little art to our lives is welcome.

Inspired.

It’s been seven years now since I took that picture. I keep returning to it because it’s the first picture of graffiti I took, and while I’ve seen a lot that’s definitely better there is something special about it. I have no idea what the story behind it is. Maybe someone was practicing, warming up, or just bored and felt an urge to do something pointless. That’s just speculation. When I saw it I thought there was something funny about the way it just trailed off with a series of wave shapes. That made me think about how fickle inspiration can be. There have been times when I’ve been suddenly energized, feeling like I can do anything. Then, as soon as I sit down to write I come up with…nothing.

The conventional wisdom about inspiration is that you can’t force it. In classical literature poets often began by invoking one of the Muses, asking for help. At the beginning of The Amores Ovid acts annoyed that he planned to write a serious epic but Cupid interfered so he’s stuck writing love poems instead. Hey, take whatever you can get.

Anyway, while inspiration can’t be forced, sometimes it can be coaxed out. Several years ago I got a job writing about local art. My first assignment was to write about an exhibit by a visiting artist named Margo Kren. I wasn’t able to get in touch with her and there’d never been a formal opening so all I had to work with was the pictures themselves and a small pamphlet with a biographical blurb. I sat and looked at the pictures for a long time, unsure what to say about them. And I also thought a lot about the term deadline. I’d asked for the job, had been prepared to beg for it, and now I was faced with the terrible possibility that I’d miss my first, and possibly only, assignment. Unsure of what else to do I started describing the paintings. Though it happened slowly—I might even say painfully—I suddenly hit a nerve. Or an artery. I had pages and pages, but my hand couldn’t keep up with my head. In the end I had to cut it down significantly, and while I would use the same technique to write two more articles the magazine folded before they could be published. It was still a valuable lesson, though, and when it comes to writing I’ll take whatever I can get.