Hail & Farewell.

Lest we forget.

Annual Report: 2023/2024.

Author: April 1, 2024 4 Comments

April 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous and to try and answer the question, What are we doing here? There are a lot of excellent blogs out there on a wide variety of topics that, thankfully, are still going while others, sadly, have dropped off. If anything makes Freethinkers Anonymous distinctive it’s longevity. What started as a random assortment of jokes emailed to a distribution list has grown into something resembling an internet landfill. It predated and survived the dot-com boom and, like those early internet companies, has never had a plan, purpose, or profit. On this note everyone cheered and went back to work.

May 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous before realizing we just did that, but since no one had gotten any work done in the last month everyone cheered and went back to work.

June 2023-Everyone remembered that every year there’s a vague plan to sample as many local milkshakes as possible to try and determine the best one. And every year an argument breaks out over what defines “local”. Or whether it should be limited to ice cream places since a lot of restaurants serve milkshakes. There was also a side discussion of how some years the plan is to sample every gyro to determine the best one in the area which would be a lot easier, and another side discussion of how to define “best” and a further side discussion of what the definition of “ersatz” is but no one could remember how that came up in the first place.

July 2023-Work was put on hold for the 4th of July. Also July 1st, since it’s Canada Day, and also the 2nd through 3rd of July, and everyone just called in sick from the 5th through 13th. Then everyone took off for Bastille Day, and planned to get back by July 20th, but that’s National Moon Walk Day, and the 21st is National Creme Brulee Day and of course everyone had to celebrate that, as well as the 26th which is National Coffee Milkshake Day, and finally everyone made a solemn vow to get back to work at the start of the next month.

August 2023-Toată lumea și-a amintit brusc că acum vreo douăzeci de ani ne-am propus să învățăm limba Romanian. Nimeni nu-și putea aminti de ce și, în loc să se întoarcă prin arhive, toată lumea a decis să se întoarcă la muncă.

September 2023-Side effects include swelling, brusing, pain or tenderness, itching, dizziness, fainting, blisters, lumps, hives, bee hives, drowsiness, headache, insomnia, autodidacticism, nocturnal cake baking, dehydration, foaming of the ears, hair growth on furniture, and spontaneous decomposition. Seek medical help immediately if you become ersatz.

October 2023-The staff Halloween party was such a great success it lasted the entire month. This year the theme was “Aposematism” and resulted in several people being hospitalized.

November 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to discuss whether “No Shave November” should be celebrated. Everyone agreed that it should but that staff would only grow sideburns. This led to a discussion of why they’re called “sideburns” since no one wants burns on their face, not even on the sides. Large sideburns are also called “muttonchops” but this was considered problematic for vegans and causing potential copyright warnings from the estate of Shari Lewis. Staff finally unanimously agreed that from now on sideburns should be called “earbrows”.

December 2023-The preponderance of holidays in the month of December meant no one got any work done.

January 2024-Recovering from the preponderance of holidays in the month of December meant no one got any work done.

February 2024-Staff assembled in the conference room to begin the disassembly of a jigsaw puzzle everyone had been working on for over a year. This proved surprisingly challenging as no one could decide whether we should start from the center or go out or from a corner and work inward, and if we did go in from a corner which one should be start with? Finally everyone decided the best solution was to just flip the table over.

March 2024-Staff assembled in the conference room as Freethinkers Anonymous prepared to start its 29th year. The team leader reminded everyone he’d read something once about how the average life of a blog is three years and the realization that we’d almost but not quite gone ten times that put everyone in a somber mood. All things must come to an end, even things without a plan or purpose. And yet it was decided unanimously that Freethinkers Anonymous would go on for another year. On that note everyone cheered and went back to work.

https://media3.giphy.com/media/AxVvk3UlCVPiPxtGLK/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b9527bfmkxwmt1t066j2so3jrrgcc0lssdr7b163qftp&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g

Adventures In Busing., American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell., Happy Birthday., Not Non-Fiction, Quick Takes., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault

Public And Private.

Author: February 10, 2024 2 Comments

I just took that picture of flowers attached to a lamppost a few days ago but it’s not the first time I’ve seen flowers in that same spot. It’s near where my dentist is so I’ve seen flowers there before. I have a previous picture I took a year ago although, at the time, the flowers were looking a little shabby. They were plastic but still the elements had taken their toll. Why were they there, though? And this time they’d been freshened with a new more elegant cord wrapped around the lamppost. Someone’s keeping them up but who? It makes me sad to think this is probably a memorial, that someone died in that spot, or nearby, and someone who cared for that person, who loved them, is putting these flowers there as a tribute, and a way of dealing with their own grief.

And I don’t want to know who that person is. They’ve never left any information, nothing that says what happened. I sometimes see homemade roadside markers where people have been killed in accidents, and many of them have names. This one doesn’t and I respect that the person who made this memorial wishes to remain anonymous.

It reminded me of the “Poe Toaster”, a mysterious figure who, every year on January 19th, would leave roses and a bottle of cognac at Edgar Allan Poe’s grave. The figure was first noticed in 1949, one hundred years after Poe’s death, and in 1999 a note left at the grave said the original person had passed away but that the tradition would continue.

The person, or persons, who took over, however, treated the tradition as a joke, making a Superbowl prediction in 2001 (which would be wrong) and a snide remark about the French in 2004 (Poe is more respected in France than the U.S., earning praise from none other than Charles Baudelaire, who’d also lead a turbulent and tragically short life). The Poe Toaster stopped appearing in 2010, which was a good thing. It was fitting–after all 2009 was the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth–but also the torch should never have been passed. The person(s) who took over didn’t take the responsibility seriously and never should have carried on.

The tradition was revived by the Maryland Historical Society which held “auditions” in 2015, and while I think it’s nice that it’s being carried on it started as something deeply personal, meaningful in ways we’ll never know—in ways I don’t really want to know. A memorial may be in a public place but the privacy should still be respected.

Here’s the earlier picture of flowers in the same spot:

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell.

Not Over, But Easy.

Author: December 23, 2023 6 Comments

Source: Pinterest

Every year on the day of Christmas Eve my wife has one wish: a dish of Eggs Benedict. It’s not named after either Benedict Arnold or the actor who played the Jeffersons’ British neighbor, although, in honor of the late and brilliant Norman Lear, I’ve been trying to think of one. It was on an episode of The Jeffersons that I first heard of Eggs Benedict—specifically “My Maid, Your Maid”, season eight, episode four. It just sounded very fancy and I was thrilled when I finally got to try it a few years later. That may be too tangential a connection, though. Eggs Benedict is allegedly named after a New Yorker named Lemuel Benedict who wandered into the Waldorf Hotel and asked for eggs, bacon, toast, and a shot of Hollandaise as a hangover cure.  Here’s the recipe I use for anyone who’d also like to give it a try. This recipe serves three, or six people if you’re serving it with a side dish, or one person if they’re really hungry and are trying to send their cholesterol level off the charts.

You will need:

  • About three billion eggs, or maybe only a dozen
  • A pound of butter (or two eight ounce sticks) at room temperature
  • Six tablespoons of lemon juice
  • Three English muffins (which are neither English nor muffins)
  • Canadian bacon (purely optional)
  • Wooden shoes

First halve and toast the English muffins. Classic Eggs Benedict calls for a slice of ham on the English muffin halves, but for some that may be too much. Tasty alternatives include slices of avocado or smoked salmon or nothing or whatever you want.

Poach six eggs. If you have an egg poacher you can use that. I’ve also poached the eggs by adding water and a small amount of vinegar to a shallow pan, but that’s tricky because you have to keep the water just below boiling. Place an egg on each of the English muffin halves.

You can now set this aside in a warm oven.

The Hollandaise sauce is the hard part, but it comes together quickly. Oh, wait, that’s why it’s hard. This ain’t a recipe you can walk away from. First separate the yolks from the whites or, to be more accurate, from the clears. It’s okay to leave some of the clear with the yolks. Since this version of Hollandaise sauce is basically a savory lemon custard–yes, you’re serving eggs over eggs–some albumen will help it hold together. 

Combine the egg yolks and the lemon juice in a pan over low heat.  

Add half the butter. Stir slowly.

Once the butter is melted continue stirring for about a minute then add the second half of the butter. Stir vigorously. At this point the eggs will start to cook and the sauce will thicken. This is when you have to work fast. Just after the butter is completely melted the sauce is culinary nitroglycerine. It won’t blow up but it is seriously unstable. Get it off the heat and evenly distribute it over the English muffin halves and poached eggs.

For some color sprinkle on a little paprika or some parsley or both for a seasonal red and green effect. In fact this is a recipe and those aren’t written in stone, so if you want to substitute actual muffins and Cadbury chocolate eggs go for it. Earlier this month I went out for brunch and had a version that substituted fried green tomatoes for the English muffins and skipped the Canadian bacon because it would have been too much. It was excellent, though.
Serve on hubcaps because there’s no plate like chrome for the Hollandaise.

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell.

What Remains.

Author: September 15, 2023 2 Comments

Source: Wikipedia. I’m sure I’ve got pictures of my own somewhere.

Along I-65, at the border of Tennessee and Alabama, there’s the small town of Ardmore. There’s a rest stop that’s a good place to stop and stretch your legs. Like most rest stops it has shady spots, a few covered picnic tables, a visitors’ center with moderately clean restrooms and pamphlets on where to see the world’s largest sweet potato, which is the official vegetable of the state of Alabama. And there’s also a Saturn 1B rocket, just a little over eighty-feet tall, that stands next to it.

Or did, anyway. The rocket has slowly been rusting—but at least it’s not orbiting the Earth where it would be space junk—and is now being dismantled with an eventual plan to replace it with a replica.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve passed by it. I’m sure when I was a kid we went by it on one of several trips to the U.S. Space And Rocket Center in Huntsville, although I usually fell asleep on those trips so I missed it as we went by. More recently my wife and I passed by it on our way to the beach. The symbolism there, even in my own head, seems less than subtle: the ocean and space are still considered the last two great unexplored frontiers. The ocean is closer and more limited but still remains more mysterious than space. More people have walked on the Moon than have been to the deepest part of the ocean. It’s funny to me too that before the first submarine descended to the Challenger Deep a lot of scientists assumed there couldn’t be anything alive down there, that the cold, extreme pressure, and lack of oxygen would make life impossible. Now we know that, sparse as they may be, there are starfish, sea cucumbers, isopods, and other things that feed on whatever floats down from above. As for space, well, it seems like humans have always had a sense that something’s out there—we just haven’t found it yet.

All that aside the rocket’s dismantling seems like a sad end. The space program used to be so exciting, so aspirational. The Moon was just a first step. Now it seems like we’ve taken a step back. Mostly, anyway. There are still plans to return to the Moon, and if we could establish a base there Mars is, well, it’s not close, but at least it would be easier to reach.

When I told a friend of mine about the Ardmore rocket being dismantled he said, “That reminds me of Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias.”

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Why do we want to go into space? There are a lot of noble and important-sounding reasons: exploration, a better understanding of ourselves and our place in this vast universe, even, possibly, to save ourselves. If we can make it on another planet we extend our chances of survival as a species.

I think it’s also because we want to know we’re not alone. If we can’t share who and what we are with other worlds then, really, why are we here? And if we destroy ourselves before we meet those others, or if we just fizzle out, unable to make that great leap beyond this little sphere we call home, maybe those others will find whatever it is we’ve left. Maybe they’ll despair over having missed us, but at least we’ll have left something that says, we were here.

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Having Writ, Moves On…

Author: August 25, 2023 5 Comments

When I heard Netflix was ending its DVD-by-mail service at the end of September 2023, meaning no more red envelopes, my first thought was, wait, they’re still doing that? And then I thought how it marked not just the end of an era for Netflix but also yet another change in how we relate to the things we watch: movies and TV shows, documentaries, even home recordings, although that last term itself seems anachronistic.

It feels strange to remember a time before VCRs, before even cable TV, a time when there were, for us at least, only four channels—maybe five if we had the local UHF station. And while I think I’ve always been conscious of the changes the time it really hit me just how much things had changed was one night when my wife and I were babysitting one of my nieces. The Wizard Of Oz happened to be on. I remembered when I was a kid there was usually an annual showing of The Wizard Of Oz on some channel, around Easter, maybe, or Thanksgiving, or maybe in the middle of summer. Some time when whatever network was showing it needed a boost. Anyway we turned on The Wizard Of Oz because we thought my niece, who was pretty young at the time, would enjoy it. It was on one of the cable channels—a basic channel, not one of the premium movie channels. And as we were watching the opening my niece asked, “Can we fast-forward through this part?”

No, we couldn’t. To be able to fast-forward we’d have to have it on videocassette—this was before DVDs—and we didn’t, and if I did I probably would have have had a version with “Dark Side Of The Moon” as its soundtrack, but that’s another story. And we couldn’t fast-forward through those pesky commercials either.

When DVDs came along they weren’t that much of a transition. We had to have new players but, hey, we’d already been through that with CDs, and we were able to buy a combination VCR/DVD player so we wouldn’t have to throw out all the videocassettes just yet. And you could use the media player in your desktop computer, or your laptop, if you had one, the player you used to burn CDs, to play your DVDs. I never tried but I suspect you could also use a CD player to play a DVD. There just wouldn’t be anything to see.

Speaking of CDs I remember what a revelation those were in terms of audio quality, but, like DVDs, they really didn’t change anything as far as how we owned and consumed music. I say the changes I’ve seen feel strange to me but then I think about the changes people just a couple of generations before me saw. In Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf the main character hates radio and the gramophone, which were still relatively new in 1927 when Hesse wrote the novel, because he feels they defile music. The technology of the time layered music with pops, hisses, and crackles, which was part of his frustration, but they also made music transportable. You could listen to a full orchestra alone in a room, or while eating, or making love, something most people wouldn’t want to do among a group of live musicians–not that there’s anything wrong with that.

It must have been extraordinary, a revolution I couldn’t imagine because I was born into a world where portable music, purchasable music, was everywhere, available to almost anyone.

And I was born just eight years after Herman Hesse died.

I’m not trying to sound like an old man yelling at clouds—a joke that’s only been around since 2002, and that’s only been a meme since, well, whenever memes became a popular form of internet communication, but I do wonder where the current changes are taking us. And they’re not necessarily bad. To go back to CDs, actually to go back all the way to gramophones, a recording for the first time allowed a person to, for lack of a better word, own a moment of time that would have otherwise been lost. A recording captured what had previous always been ephemeral. It also turned those moments into commodities—something that could be sold, but you could also keep it.

Now we’re moving, more and more, into a world where you don’t own a recording of a song or a TV show or a movie—you lease it, and your ability to watch it whenever you want depends on the company that holds it. Hey, sorry your favorite movie got pulled from the streaming service you’re paying for. On the bright side there’s a lot of other stuff you can watch.

Streaming only seems strange to me if I stop and think about how I used to have to go to a place to buy an album, a cassette, an eight-track, a CD, to rent or buy a movie on laser disc, Betamax, VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, and while I tell myself, hey, at least I owned those things, I also know they had a shelf life. Some of my older DVDs might as well be coasters.

I also think about a time that, for some reason, feels like the distant past but was really only eight or nine years ago, when someone said to me, “Libraries are like Netflix for books.” And I had to open up a card catalog of whoop-ass on them because libraries are so much more than that. Libraries look to the future because their interest is in preserving the past, curating it. If libraries make mistakes in what they preserve, or fail to preserve, at least the idea is to have a shared archive for both the individual and the community.

Also you can still get DVDs from the library.

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

The Secret Word.

Author: August 2, 2023 4 Comments

Source: Dutch Toast

In high school I was in the Latin club—the Junior Classical League to those in the know. Like other clubs it had conventions, mostly on college campuses, where we took part in Latin and classical-themed competitions, including comedy sketches. Here’s a fun fact I learned in JCL: the famous Roman orator Cicero was nicknamed “Chickpea”, cicer in Latin, by his friends. There was also a kid in JCL named Jonas who could do an absolutely spot-on impersonation of Pee-Wee Herman. This gave his entire Latin class to put on a sketch called Chickpea-Wee’s Big Adventure Or Cicero Goes To Rome.

You might already know where this is going and if you do the story will sound familiar: Cicero’s special sedan-chair, sella in Latin, is stolen. He consults a soothsayer who tells him it’s in the basement of the Coliseum. He sets off for Rome, meeting a lot of weird and funny characters along the way, and although it turns out there is no basement in the Coliseum he still manages to find his sella and everything ends happily.

I’ve never forgotten that—it was one of the highlights of my time in JCL, even better than the time I won a prize for dressing up as Caligula, but that’s another story.

When I heard that Paul Reubens had died and all the tributes started I realized something about that JCL sketch, or, more specifically, about Jonas. He was a small kid for a high schooler—he might have even skipped a grade, or three, and he didn’t just do a Pee-Wee Herman impersonation. He looked a bit like Paul Reubens: same dark hair, which he kept cut short, even the same complexion and dark eyes. Watching him walk around the stage in a tunic—at one point he passed a road sign with markers all labeled “ROME” and he said, “I guess it’s true—all roads do lead to Rome!” and did a classic Pee-Wee laugh—it seemed like he really was Paul Reubens.

As a small, kind of odd kid—admittedly we were all odd in JCL—he might have been picked on but impersonating Pee-Wee Herman was a way he could fit in, even outside of Latin class. It made him cool.

Something I don’t think has been said in all the tributes is how much of an antidote Pee-Wee Herman was to the crass commercialism of children’s entertainment in the ‘80’s. Sure, you could buy Pee-Wee’s Playhouse toys and figures, but unlike He-Man, Transformers, or The Care-Bears, which were created just to sell toys, Pee-Wee Herman started out as a character for adults, appealed to children because he was childlike, and spanned generations because he encouraged everyone to be imaginative. And he gave kids like Jonas and, I’ll just say it, me, too, a way out of a world that at times felt pretty dark and cynical. He’s one of those standouts of what seemed like an oppressive time who didn’t just say, it’s okay to be weird. He made being weird cool.

Hail and farewell, Paul Reubens, and Jonas, wherever you are, I hope you’re doing well too.

Hail & Farewell.

The Storyteller.

Author: July 14, 2023 5 Comments

When I heard that the novelist Milan Kundera had died the first thing I thought of was the time I met his wife. It was partly a chance encounter. I was in Paris and I’d gotten his home address from a writers’ directory. After a lot of wandering and checking the map—his street was short and narrow, almost an alley—I found his apartment building. There was an intercom next to the door and someone had just pressed the buzzer and gone in so I could see a courtyard, but I stood there, realizing I didn’t have any plan beyond just finding his home. After a few minutes a dark-haired woman came out and I said, “Pardon, je ne parle Francais. Parlez vous Anglais?” And she said, “Yes, I do.” We both laughed and I said, “I’m looking for Mr. Kundera. I’m a great fan of his work and I was hoping to meet him.” She softened a bit and said, “I’m so sorry. He’s out of the country right now. I’d invite you in but I have to go as well. Do you have a note or something I could give him?” She probably saw I was holding a copy of his novel Life Is Elsewhere, fitting, since he was elsewhere. I didn’t have anything but I said, “Could you please just tell him a young poet came to pay his respects?”

I realize now that she might have been politely saying, “My husband doesn’t get a lot of stalkers but I’m seriously thinking about calling the police.” But I still took the hint and, after saying it was nice to have met her, I went to explore the rest of Paris as it should be explored: without any plan.

At home I wrote him a letter saying I was that young poet and I was sorry to have missed him. I don’t think I apologized for showing up unannounced at his home, but I did say I’d read all his novels except his latest one, Immortality. About a month later I got a package from him: a copy of Immortality, inscribed to me with a message and a weird picture of a hand. Why a hand? In my edition of Life Is Elsewhere, translated from Czech, there was a forward by Kundera about how the translator had gone back and redone his original translation, making it better. Kundera said he was grateful and added, “I offer him my hand as a friend.” It was his own personal signature and he was offering me his hand as well. At least that’s how I interpret it.

Of course I sat down and read Immortality immediately, enjoying all its rambling strangeness. There’s a character in it named Mr. Kundera and he talks about how he’s writing a novel. Someone asks him what the title of his novel will be and he says, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” When the other person says, “I think someone’s already written that,” Mr. Kundera replies “I did! But it should be the title of the novel I’m writing now.”

I’d always approached Kundera as A Very Serious Writer, a preeminent example of postmodern fiction, who wove deep philosophy—Neitzsche, Heidegger, Sartre—into his work. But I’d never thought of him as funny until then. I went back and reread all his other books. I’d always understood that, as a postmodern author, he played with fiction and the power of stories to make anything happen. Stories can shape history, or even invent things that never happened, and everyone is a character. Parts of Immortality imagine what Goethe is up to in Heaven. I realized what I’d been missing when I reread The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting which includes a story about his own life when he was labelled a dissident in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. He had a set of astrology books that he kept on his desk where friends could see them and he even told them he’d been an assistant to a French astrologer—which wasn’t true. As a dissident he couldn’t get work as a writer but based on his “experience” an editor gave him a job writing an astrology column under a pseudonym. Then a high-ranking government official contacted the editor, discreetly, and asked if the astrologer could—just for fun, you understand, because it wasn’t something any rational person took seriously, you know—do some horoscopes for him. Kundera said he wondered how many government decisions his “horoscopes” influenced.

It’s a funny story but the first time around I was too busy trying to understand the meaning in the context of people who fly when they dance in a circle. What I realized the second time around—weight replaced by lightness–was that there was a deep vein of humor running through all his work. Hey, his first novel is called The Joke and while it’s not exactly funny he did understand the power—and danger—of satire. Life Is Elsewhere is a tragicomedy that pokes fun at the pretentiousness and naivete of young poets and as I write that now my twenty-year old self feels attacked. But also amused.

Back at college I was taking an Eighteenth Century Literature class and one day, sitting in the student lounge, one of my classmates and I got into a discussion of how much the novels of Henry Fielding, Swift, even Samuel Johnson, and especially Laurence Sterne, resembled postmodern novels, with rambling, sometimes bizarre plots, and asides where the authors directly address the reader.

“The difference,” my classmate said, “is postmodern novels just aren’t funny!”

I proceeded to open up a whole can of Kundera right there. Humor is subjective thing, but I pointed out several scenes from his books I thought were pretty funny, ending with the short story “Symposium” and a young doctor who sneaks out to the garden at night. He hears someone he thinks is a woman he thinks is in love with him. When he says, “I knew you’d come,” he’s greeted by the voice of an older male doctor who replies, “Yes, I prefer peeing outside.”

The classmate faded away into the wallpaper and I was sitting by myself when I heard a heavily accented voice say, “That was quite the speech.”

I looked over and immediately recognized the gray hair, the heavy brow, the strong chin from his author photos. It was Milan Kundera, sitting right across from me! He must have known I couldn’t speak Czech so he spoke French which I couldn’t speak either but understood anyway.

“You know,” he went on, “all these critics, they focus on my characters, their relationships, philosophy in my work. Sometimes I think I know how Kafka would have felt if he’d known Max Brod turned him into some kind of ascetic who suffered for his art, rather than a person who just loved telling stories.”

Completely stumped I came out with the most irrelevant question I could think of. “So what brought you here?”

“A plane. A smart young man like you should know you can’t drive to Indiana from France.”

Hail & Farewell., Not Non-Fiction, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval.

The Game Master.

Author: January 14, 2023 6 Comments

I have a painting that was made by three artists. All three signed it but I wish I had a fourth signature: that of the person responsible for making it happen. His name was Rembert Parker.

I’d been introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by my friend John and, early in our freshman year of high school, he invited me to go to a weekend D&D convention with him in Evansville. His father drove us and when we got to the hotel John introduced me to Rembert—an older guy who was just a little taller than me, with lanky hair, round glasses, and a friendly smile. John had met Rembert at a previous convention and they’d become friends but then, as I quickly realized, Rembert was friends with everybody. In the few minutes we chatted at least two dozen people said “Hey Rembert!” as they passed by. Rembert was also one of the organizers of the convention, so it wasn’t just because of his outgoing nature that everyone knew him.

Then John and I got invited to join a D&D game and we went off to a hotel room with a group of strangers. The game was part one of a module, called something like Road To Verangia, that would be played over the weekend. At the end of it everyone would vote for the top three players who’d then advance to part two. Those who didn’t advance could find another game.

The next morning all the attendees gathered in one of the hotel conference rooms. Those who’d advanced—including my friend John—went off to play Road To Verangia part two. Alone and unsure what to do with myself I sat down at a table and was soon joined by a friendly group of strangers. We chatted a bit and then a guy came over and said, “All right, looks like everybody’s here. I’ll be your Dungeon Master today. Let’s start the game.”

“What’s this one called?” someone asked.

“It’s called Certain Death To Your Characters” the Dungeon Master laughed.

Oh, thank goodness, I thought. For a moment I’d been afraid it was going to be a repeat of the previous night’s game.

Character sheets were passed around. I looked down at mine and realized I’d been given the same cleric I’d played the night before. I panicked and looked around, but the room was empty. Not knowing what else to do I just played dumb, and stayed dumb, not using my knowledge of what was to come to my or anyone else’s advantage.

Later that day I’d go to lunch with John and his father and they’d talk about a guy who’d been in the previous night’s game and who’d tried to sneak in to a repeat of part one and how terrible it was that some people just couldn’t obey the rules.

“I won’t be surprised if Rembert kicks him out,” said John’s father.

“And he’ll never come back to a convention where Rembert’s in charge,” added John.

I chewed my chicken sandwich glumly, certain that my own crime would be uncovered, wondering if I should throw myself on Rembert’s mercy immediately. But I decided to keep playing dumb instead. And, somehow, over the whole weekend, it went undiscovered—or no one said anything if they noticed.

I went to a lot of conventions after that, most of them organized by Rembert. He and John were still friends but I kind of avoided him. He was a good guy and fun to talk to but, silly as it seemed even at the time, I still carried a slight air of guilt. Over time I just assumed he forgot who I was. Everybody knew Rembert but he couldn’t be expected to keep track of everyone.

Every convention had an art room and on Saturday night there’d be an art auction. I liked a lot of the paintings and would usually bid on one or two. After losing a bid on one someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. It was Rembert.

“Hey Chris, I noticed you liked that painting. I’ll talk to the artist and see if he’ll do one for you.”

This was surprisingly generous and, because Rembert was involved, a couple of other artists got interested and all three of them collaborated on the painting. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten the names of all three artists, although they signed the back as well as putting their names on the front so I can always open the frame if I ever get it appraised.

I’ve never forgotten Rembert, though, so I was sad when John told me he’d passed away earlier this month.

I didn’t realize Rembert had a blog where he wrote mostly about old and mostly forgotten songs “that the radio seldom plays”. Here’s his last entry:

Sadly, I’ve been in the Hospital with Cancer for a few weeks.
I hope to return to daily posts within a few weeks!

Funny and optimistic to the end. When John and I talked I brought up the painting, and John, who still goes to gaming conventions regularly, said that the ones Rembert organized were small—at most there’d be about two hundred people, which made it easy for Rembert to know the artists, and everyone else, unlike modern gaming conventions that have thousands of attendees. There used to be a stereotype of D&D players as socially awkward loners, but the small conventions really showed how untrue that was. We all got to know each other, even if it was just in passing, although they were just big enough that some noob who’d never been to one before could accidentally play the same game twice and have their mistake be forgotten while they were remembered.

Hail and farewell, Rembert. You were, as Nat King Cole sang, unforgettable in every way.

American Graffiti., Fun With Cancer, Hail & Farewell.

Imagine That.

Author: October 14, 2022 6 Comments

The death of Tony Dow a few months ago reminded me that, for as much as I claim to be an Edgar Allan Poe fan, I’ve never read one of his most famous stories, The Murders In The Rue Morgue. If you’re wondering how those things are connected you don’t know me very well because anyone who knows me just takes it as a given that my mind makes these bizarre leaps—and maybe yours does too, if you think about it, especially if you think about making bizarre leaps. Anyway there’s a throwaway line from an episode of Leave It To Beaver where Wally tells his younger brother—and I’m paraphrasing from a distant memory—“I’m reading this story called The Murders In The Rue Morgue. It’s pretty good. It would be even better if I didn’t have to read it for school.” The line gets the standard canned laughter to let viewers at home know it was supposed to be funny, but a lot of kids still, I’m sure, hear that and think, Yep, he’s right. It stuck with me too at the time I saw it because on the show, I think, Wally was in junior high and so was I, and, like him, I was getting my first introductions to Poe in school, although for me it was a really creepy recording of The Tell-Tale Heart that the teacher played because it was close to Halloween, and, in class textbook, The Cask Of Amontillado, and I liked them both so much I went to the library and read half a dozen other Poe stories—the horror ones, although I kind of fell off after The Fall Of The House Of Usher left me cold, and not in a good way. I’ve learned to appreciate it much more since then.

Somehow, though, I never had as much interest in Poe’s mysteries, maybe because I started with The Gold Bug, a story that’s problematic to say the least. It’s strange because a whodunit should be a lot more interesting than the horror stories which are more often howIdunit and, in the case of Monsieur Montressor, howIgotawaywithit.

The Murders In The Rue Morgue is also kind of intimidating in its length. As much as I loved Poe’s stories as a young reader his archaic language could be kind of hard to muddle through, and even in an annotated edition that provides translations of Poe’s regular lapses into Latin and French and explanations and background for some of his allusions Murders is kind of a slog. His narrator, who is, as is the case in so many of his stories, nameless, starts off with a long, rambling introduction before getting to how he becomes friends with Monsieur Dupin and they move into his crumbling house together and spend most of their time staying up all night reading and having philosophical discussions.

It’s only by coincidence that their attention is caught by a newspaper report of two women being murdered in a house in the Rue Morgue. One of them is thrown out of a window, the other is stuffed in a chimney, but, in spite of a lot of jewelry lying around, there’s no sign of a robbery and how the killer got into a room that was locked from the inside is a mystery. When a bank clerk Dupin knows is charged with the crimes Dupin decides to investigate.

And this is the point where it becomes what it’s famous for: the first modern detective story with the narrator playing Watson to Dupin’s Holmes, which is an easy metaphor since Arthur Conan Doyle said Poe was his inspiration. It’s not surprising, then, that Dupin is supposed to have solved the crime using deductive reasoning. What is surprising is that what Dupin concludes is so ridiculous and the fact that he turns out to be right is just completely bonkers. He’s sure an orangutan did it. How he knew specifically what kind of ape was responsible isn’t explained, but he’s correct. An orangutan had been captured and brought to Paris by a sailor. When the orangutan put on shaving cream and picked up a razor to try and imitate the act of shaving the sailor pulled out a whip. The orangutan, terrified, ran out into the street and murdered the two women. It then threw one out the window and stuffed the other in the chimney to hide the evidence and when all that comes out the fact that the sailor knew what had happened and didn’t report it sooner, goes on his merry way is probably the most plausible part of the whole affair.

For a story that started with a brief essay of mental analysis, comparing and contrasting its use in chess and card games and giving us an example of how Dupin could seemingly read his friend’s mind, only to provide a detailed explanation of how observing the right clues led to his conclusion, I came out the other end wondering, what was Poe thinking? Maybe he meant it as a joke. Most modern readers don’t think of Poe as a funny guy but that’s mostly because his humor and satire pieces don’t hold up as well as the horror. Sometimes he altered or wholly invented the “quotations” that preface his stories, maybe to give them some credibility, maybe for his own amusement, or maybe both.

It wasn’t a story Poe thought was one of his best and I suspect it’s so long, with a lot of repetition and extraneous detail, because he was being paid by the word, and it’s also possible that Poe, having read accounts of captive apes attacking people, thought it was entirely believable that an orangutan would act the way it does in the story and that the whole thing would make a good yarn.

As for the writer who slipped it into an episode of Leave It To Beaver, there likely wasn’t much significance to it. Maybe the writer liked Poe’s stories and included this subtle nod as a tribute, and my generation was hardly the first to read Poe in school.

I know they’re a stretch but my mind leaps to some other—well, not connections, but similarities. Poe only got a reputation as a major American writer, especially a major horror writer, after his death. Leave It To Beaver, now a cultural touchstone that’s know for its idealization of postwar American life, had dismal ratings initially and changed networks after its first season. In spite of gaining more viewers it never cracked the top thirty. It only gained popularity in daily afternoon reruns.

Leave It To Beaver is also wholesome to the point of ridiculousness, a white bread suburban world where the stakes of every conflict couldn’t be lower, where no one smokes, drinks, swears, or even dies. So it was funny to have a little Poe thrown in—a writer whose characters smoke, drink, swear, and live in a world where death, especially murder, abounds.

Leave It To Beaver is a show where you know everything is going to turn out all right in the end. With Poe’s stories you also know that things are going to resolve—even if it’s resolution by death. It’s all escapism, and there’s nothing wrong with the occasional escape as long as it doesn’t end with murder.

Hail & Farewell., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Just A Poet.

Author: June 18, 2022 8 Comments

Cowboy poet Baxter Black, on the right, with Baxter the Dalmatian, at a Nashville bookstore.

Way back in 1999 my wife and I brought home a new puppy and were trying to decide what to name him. She wanted something with a poetry theme and, well, there was only one poet we could think of with a name that would fit a Dalmatian. We named him Baxter, after Baxter Black, the cowboy poet, whose occasional commentaries on NPR always brightened up our morning drives. He’d be introduced as a “former large animal veterinarian” and my wife would always ask, “What’s a former large animal?”

E-mail was still a fairly new thing back then and we didn’t have a digital camera yet but we did take pictures of Baxter. My wife scanned one, found Baxter Black’s e-mail address, and sent him the picture. He replied with, “Makes me wanna ride a fire truck!”

Not long after that he came to Nashville on a book tour for A Cowful of Cowboy Poetry, and, with a bookstore manager’s permission, we brought Baxter in to meet Baxter. They both seemed to enjoy it.

We lost our Baxter a few years later to cancer—much too soon, although there’s never enough time with any dog.

As for Baxter Black, while it’s been a while since I’ve heard him on the radio, I pull up some of his recordings occasionally if I want to chuckle—his poem “The Oyster” always makes me laugh.

And when I heard that he passed away I needed a laugh.

Hail and farewell, Baxter Black. I hope you enjoy meeting Baxter again.

 

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell.