The Weekly Essay

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

–Genesis 2:19 (King James Version)

God: Hey Adam, come over here. I’ve got a job for you.

Adam: What is it?

God: I thought it would be fun if you named the animals.

Adam: Sure. There aren’t a lot of them, are there?

God: No, this’ll be easy. Shouldn’t take more than…well, anyway, let’s get started with this little guy.

Adam: Let me think. I guess I’ll call it a ‘mouse’.

God: I like that. Here’s another one.

Adam: Well that looks just like a bigger mouse.

God: No, totally different animals, trust me.

Adam: Fine. I’ll call that a ‘rat’.

God: And here’s the next one.

Adam: Wait, are you messing with me here? That’s just a rat with a bushy tail.

God: No, really, no joke, this is a whole other animal.

Adam: Fine. Let’s just call it a ‘squirrel’.

God: Great. Let’s keep going. Here’s something  a little different.

Adam: Interesting. I guess ‘lizard’.

God: Cool. And how about this one?

Adam: That’s just a lizard without legs.

God: No it’s not!

Adam: Yes it is! Fine, you want a name for it? I’ll call it a ‘snake’ since I guess ‘we need a lizard without legs for some reason’ is too long.

God: Yeah, not one of my better ideas.

Snake: (muttering) I’ll get you for that.

Adam: I’ll call that next thing a ‘bird’.

God: Are you sure you want to be so general?

Adam: What do you mean?

God: Well, what are you going to call this thing?

Adam: Well, I guess that’s also a bird.

God: Yeah, but don’t you think you should give them different names, to sort of tell them apart?

Adam: I don’t know. How many are there?

God: (thoughtfully) Yeah, Darwin kinda has that same question. Leads to all kinds of stuff.

Adam: What?

God: Sorry, getting ahead of myself here. Let’s keep going.

[Several hours later]

Adam: I thought you said there weren’t going to be that many.

God: Well from my perspective it doesn’t seem like all that many. I mean, consider yourself lucky you’re just dealing with one planet.

Adam: One what?

God: Never mind. Let’s switch gears a little bit and I’ll bring up some aquatic life. Here, here’s something you’ll like.

Adam: Okay, well, I guess I’ll call that a ‘fish’.

God: That’s a good general term…

Adam: Are you kidding me? Is this birds all over again?

God: Well…we can come back to that. Here’s something really different.

Adam: GOD! WHAT IS THAT?

God: Hey, hey, hey, watch how you’re using my name. Don’t make me lay down some ground rules.

Adam: It’s just that’s…that’s not like anything I’ve seen so far. It’s…how am I even going to get along with that?

God: Good point. You know what? You’re probably not gonna run into any of these. So just give it a nice quick name and we’ll move on.

Adam: Sure, okay. Wow. A nice quick name. I guess I’ll call it a ‘squid’.

God: Great. Okay, let’s get back to land animals. Let’s look at some that might be useful to you.

Adam: Great, I could use some help around here.

God: What about that thing you called ‘dog’?

Adam: Well, it’s nice and all, but what I could really use is an extra pair of hands.

God: Oh, we’ll get to that. Here’s a nifty little number I think you’ll like.

Adam: Well I wouldn’t call it ‘little’. It makes an interesting noise. I guess I’ll call it a ‘cow’. Hey, what are the dangly things around its hind legs?

God: Oh, those dispense a high-protein beverage called ‘milk’.

Adam: Doesn’t sound particularly appetizing.

God: Your kids are gonna love it.

Adam: My what?

God: Anyhoo, here’s another.

Adam: That looks like a fat hairless dog someone punched in the face.

God: Come on, lighten up. You’re gonna love this creature.

Adam: Yeah? What does it do?

God: Um, well, it eats a lot and spends a lot of time rolling around in its own filth.

Adam: Yeah, great job there. A dirty, disgusting animal. It deserves a blunt, brutal name, something like ‘pig’.

God: That’s it. You don’t like it? Fine. I forbid you to eat bacon.

Adam: What’s that?

God: Your kids are gonna love it. Or grandkids. Somewhere down the line. Speaking of that I think it’s about time we got you some help around here. And I have a sudden craving for ribs.

Gentrification is rapidly changing Nashville. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on where you stand, and it may be something you have no strong feelings about one way or the other. Or you may be like me–I can’t decide whether I’m ambivalent or not. Really it all depends on where I stand, and if I stand on a stretch of Charlotte Avenue I see some changes that are fine, like some new restaurants and a rock climbing gym, but I worry about some of the older, hipper businesses potentially being driven out. There are the thrift shops and Bobbie’s Dairy Dip, an old-fashioned ice cream and burger place that I’m afraid may be driven out by development even though on summer afternoons and evenings you can drive by and there are people lined up down the block for one of their milkshakes. In the winter if you drive by they may be closed up with the sign, “Closed for the season. Reason? Freezin’!” but that’s another story.

I also worry about the future of Headquarters Coffee Shop, which is the greatest coffee shop ever in spite of–or because–it’s the size of a large walk-in closet.

And the area has also been a hot spot for graffiti. There’s a currently abandoned building that’s got some amazing graffiti, including this particular piece. I can’t make out what exactly the name is but that doesn’t matter. It’s the aesthetics that really get me. The different shades of blue really give depth to the highly stylized skull. It appears to have been painted over another work which is a little disappointing–the touches of mauve in the background make me wonder what the earlier work looked like. And is there no honor among taggers? Maybe the previous work was by the same artist who decided a revision was needed.

What’s striking too is the placement. As you can see the building stands next to railroad tracks. On the other side a new apartment complex is going up. It isn’t just a single neighborhood or even one area of Nashville that’s changing. It’s the whole city. A friend of mine said an estimated 80 to 100 people are moving to the city every day. They need places to live which is why the biggest development seems to be in new apartments. But the old giving way to the new is just a reminder of how much is ephemeral. The people who move into the apartments facing the tracks, for now at least, will also face this work of art–a memento mori.

Seen any graffiti that makes you think of death or change or that just looks really cool? Send your pics to freethinkers@nerosoft.com.

I liked beer because I thought it was a grownup thing to drink. This was when I was four or five and before that causes any alarm let me assure you I was only allowed to try an occasional sip of beer, and the only time I might have even come close to drinking more than that was once when my father was changing the car’s oil and had a beer resting on the hood. Or at least he thought I did until he found me sitting under a tree in the backyard holding it. And I doubt I drank very much of it because, like I said, I liked it because I thought it was a grownup thing to drink, which is my way of saying I really didn’t like it. And truthfully I still don’t like the taste of the stuff my father drank. I can’t remember what it was specifically but it was one of the major brands of watered-down swill that’s passed off as pilsner, a misnomer so egregious the one thing both Czechs and Slovaks still agree on is that it’s like trying to pass off a sow’s ear as a Prada purse. Holding a beer was an image thing. Holding a can of beer, I thought, made me look cool and mature, like an adult, maybe even like Victor Mature, when the reality is I just looked like I had delinquent parents. I thought being an adult, being a grownup, life must be much easier. Grownups were free of all the responsibilities of being a kid. At the moment I’m having trouble figuring out what the responsibilities of being a kid were, other than homework, which I’ve since learned is a plague that affects young and old alike and when you’re an adult it doesn’t even stop when school’s out for summer, but that’s another story.

As I got older and tried beer again I thought it tasted terrible and I quit even thinking about drinking it. Yeah, I was that guy at high school parties. Lance, who had a different Mötley Crüe t-shirt for every day of the week, would crack open a can of Pittsburgh’s Pride—at 57 cents a case I think the mini-marts only sold it to underage buyers because there was no way any human being could hold down enough of it to actually get drunk.  He’d hold it out to me and say, “Dude, come on.” And I’d say no. I wasn’t trying to harsh anyone’s mellow. I just didn’t like the taste of the stuff and couldn’t see the fun of drinking something that didn’t taste good because of a misguided belief that it made us look older.

Of course I’m also a child of the ‘80’s so I remember when wine coolers were all the rage. Wine coolers, if you don’t remember, were a combination of wine and fruit juice and had tropically-themed names like Beach Splash and Island Sweat, or slightly more obscure names like Davis & Thermidor or Mötley Crüet. They were an easy way for the beverage industry to make a lot of cheap, terrible wine palatable, although the innovation fizzled out once the industry realized that a lot of people will drink cheap, terrible wine no matter what it tastes like. At least that’s what I think. I’m not the most reliable source on this since I don’t like wine, although I was allowed an occasional sip of wine cooler–or to sneak off with one when the adults got together, and nobody seemed to mind, probably because the alcohol content was so low and the fruit juice guaranteed it would go through the system so quickly there was no way any human could consume enough to get drunk.

I could be conflating the origins of wine coolers with the origins of cocktails which were originally invented during Prohibition in the US to mask the terrible taste of bathtub gin. And then after Prohibition ended cocktails were kept around and even raised to a high art form, often visually pleasing because nobody was going blind from bathtub gin anymore and nobody wanted to throw the bathtub gin out with the baby, and also because it makes you look cool and mature to hold a colorful drink in a tall glass with pineapple and cherries on a plastic sword skewer and one of those little paper umbrellas.

At least that’s what I thought when I would go to a fancy restaurant with my parents and order a “virgin” version of a cocktail–a pina colada or a mai tai without the added alcohol, since those drinks were only invented to make cheap, terrible rum. Once I made the mistake of ordering a virgin martini which was just a couple of olives on a toothpick served in a long-stemmed glass.

Anyway I’ve come to like beer. Actually I’ve come to love beer, although anymore that’s not saying much because there are so many microbreweries and so much diversity there’s a beer out there for almost anyone. There’s even non-alcoholic beer for people who don’t really want the alcohol but would like an occasional beer. Or who just don’t want the side effects, which I understand. In fact I think the beverage industry hasn’t worked hard enough to perfect non-alcoholic beer. Think how many more people would drink beer if it had the same taste and none of the alcohol. Maybe not that many more, but think how much more beer people who currently drink beer could go through if they didn’t have to worry about getting drunk. Not to mention all the associated problems, but I don’t want to focus on those at the moment because this whole idea is making me feel really good and I don’t want to harsh my own mellow. Instead I’m thinking the industry should focus on making alcohol-free versions of other beverages. Imagine the market potential for alcohol free rum–good rum, that is, not the kind that needs a ton of fruit juice and coconut to hide the taste, or good scotch. And there wouldn’t be any concern about the kids drinking it because there’d be no alcohol in it. In fact I think kids would be the ideal market. And then we adults would pick it up because the way to look cool when you’re an adult is to look like a kid.

School’s out for the summer which means all the school library books have been returned. At least all of mine have been returned. I know this because I’m very careful about library books. Maybe I would always have been that way. I’m a big fan of books in general but I also know one of the major downsides of a library book is only one person can check it out at a time, although two people can read it if they’re willing to share, and two people can even read it simultaneously if one of them is that creepy guy who stares over my shoulder on the bus. Anyway humiliation instilled an early sense of respect for library books in me. Maybe things have changed but it seems that when I was a kid humiliation was a favorite topic of adults who wanted to get kids to do something, or stop doing something, usually finding ways to turn the pre-adolescent herd on one of its own, which is ironic considering how much adults would lecture us about the dangers of giving in to peer pressure once we became adolescents, but that’s another story.

I distinctly remember checking out Daniel Pinkwater’s Lizard Music from the school library for a number of reasons. First of all it was featured on a PBS show about books that was required viewing for all of my fourth grade class. Not that getting a bunch of kids to watch television, especially in the middle of the school day, is all that hard. And what I heard intrigued me because, while most of the books we were given were pretty straightforward, Lizard Music sounded weird. This would turn out to not be true—Lizard Music wasn’t weird. It was very weird. Extremely and hilariously weird. Also it was about lizards which was enough to get me interested. That’s the other reason I remember checking it out. And being so weird it was a little hard for me to get into at first. Even though I would come to love it I started slowly so I may have kept it a little longer than I was supposed to. Once a week we were taken to the school library and would have to turn in whatever book we’d checked out the previous week. I ended up hanging on to Lizard Music a couple of extra weeks and that was fine because no one else wanted to check it out. Then I finished it and although I couldn’t remember when exactly I knew I’d returned it.

Most libraries have a policy of keeping patron records secret. They respect the privacy of what books people check out, and some have even gone to court to keep this information secret. And even after seeing the movie Se7en I have a hard time believing any crimes have ever been solved or useful evidence gathered based on what anybody’s checked out from a library. Or maybe I just have this knee-jerk reaction about protecting the privacy of what people read because each week the school librarian would read out to the entire class who’d checked out what book. And at first this wasn’t so bad. It was an early and low-tech version of “Here are your recommendations based on what your friends are reading…”

Then it became a weekly torture. “Chris Waldrop,” the school librarian would say each week, “you still have Lizard Music checked out.” No, I insisted, I’d returned it. I checked the shelves in vain which wasn’t that hard because the school library was about the size of a large closet. And then I went home and went through every book I owned. No sign of it. I was sure I’d returned it. And we’d go through this each week. The school librarian would glare at me over her half-moon spectacles. I swear she wore those and the same gray cardigan well into May. And the kids around me all started snickering each week when we went through our inevitable exchange and pretty soon it felt like the entire school knew I’d stolen a library book.

At the end of the school year my mother had to pay for the book even though I kept protesting my innocence. But at least that was the end of it. I went on into summer and forgot about it until the next year when Lizard Music was back on the shelf in the school library.

It seems some bonehead had returned it and a bunch of other books to the public library. They couldn’t tell who’d slipped it in even though at that point I thought everybody knew I’d committed grand theft fiction so they just mailed it to the school library.

I kind of wish they’d just called the school librarian. She would have been happy to point the finger at me.

When I first heard that the National Spelling Bee being broadcast on ESPN it bothered me for vague reasons I really couldn’t define. It’s turning a kids’ event into a major spectacle complete with sponsors and graphics and fanfare, but then I have a hard time figuring out what’s wrong with that. By next year the finalists will be wearing STP stickers on their backs and the year after that there will be allegations of doping and the year after that there will be a special bonus round where the kids spell in cuneiform but that’s the way all these things go regardless of whether the participants are nine or nineteen or ninety, although it’s going to be pretty hard to catch anyone in a doping scandal at ninety because everybody’s on medication at that point so there’s no way of knowing who has an edge in the nonagenarian triathlon (bicycling, swimming, telling those damn kids to get off your lawn).

Several years ago a friend asked me, “When you see a child what do you think?” And I said I think about how many changes I’ve seen in my lifetime, not to mention the changes my parents and grandparents saw and I wonder what changes that child will see. It’s a sobering fact that the twentieth century alone saw more dramatic changes in technology than any of the previous centuries combined, even though humans themselves have remained the same. This does not make me afraid of the future. It makes me terrified of the future, but then I take a breath and settle down and remember that fear is sometimes rational and sometimes it isn’t and I shouldn’t worry about not being able to tell the difference, but that’s another story.

The pressure kids are put under when they participate in an internationally broadcast spelling bee may seem like an odd thing for me to fret about since my wife and I don’t have any kids in the spelling bee since our kids all have four legs and don’t compete in spelling bees. Although they have academic talents, including remarkable spelling abilities when it comes to words like “supper” or “cookie” their major achievements are athletic, but that’s another story. And I do have a vested interest in other peoples’ kids because they’re the ones who will program the robots that manage my nursing home.

The only potential downside to a kids’ spelling bee being treated as a really big deal I can think of is that kids will feel they’ve peaked early, that one day when they see their peers competing in the nonagenarian triathlon they’ll look back on the spelling bee and think of that as the highlight of their life with the intervening decades being one steady decline. And while there are child prodigies who burned out early there are others who went on to lead happy, productive lives outside of the spotlight. Adults can put an unfair amount of pressure on kids but it would be just as unfair to deny a kid with the talent and the desire the chance to excel at something because of the mere possibility that they might someday wish they’d had a “normal” childhood. And while all the kids who’ve competed in the spelling bee, or anything else, deserve credit for trying at least broadcasting the event will give the finalists—all the finalists and not just the winner—a chance in the spotlight. They’ll all be recognized for exceptionally hard work, and that recognition has the potential to inspire other kids to try amazing things which alleviates my fears about the future somewhat.

If nothing else the kids programming the robots that manage my nursing home will know how to spell.

There’s a story here. Really, I know there’s a story here somewhere if I could just find it. I’m almost certain I left the house with it this morning. I don’t remember taking it anywhere else where I might have left it although I’ve been carrying it around for a while. But I know I had it last night and, like I said, I’m pretty positive I had it with me this morning. Fairly sure at the very least. I’m convinced enough that I’d give myself pretty good odds if someone were to bet me that I had it.

I could start asking around but then I’d have to deal with some annoying and ridiculous questions and suggestions like:

Have you tried retracing your steps?

Yes, half a dozen times now. I even tried a couple of alternate routes because, you know, I don’t always go the same way every morning and while I believe I remember the way I came I wouldn’t absolutely swear that I didn’t take another path. I wasn’t fully awake and it was kind of foggy out which distracted me a little bit.

Where was the last place you had it?

If I knew that I’d know where to start looking jackass.

Is it in the place where you usually keep it?

I already told you I’ve been carrying it around with me. What do you think? That it’s somewhere on my body and I don’t realize it? Hey, that might actually work. Let me check. Nope, not anywhere here. I even did that trick where I hold up a mirror to a mirror and, wait, is that really what my head looks like from the back? Weird.

Have you tried hypnosis?

Does that even really work? Let’s just say that it did. Where am I going to find a hypnotist?

Remember: you always find something in the last place you look.

Oh, thanks a lot, this from the same jackass who asked “Where was the last place you had it?”

What does it look like?

Now that’s a good question. For starters it’s chock full of metaphors. Or similes. I always get those mixed up. I had an English teacher who told us we could always remember similes because they make things similar to each other. I asked how we could remember metaphors and she didn’t have an answer for that. The kid next to me said “Well, they’re meta for…” and then he mumbled that he’d get back to me with the rest of it. He never did. Who knows what “meta” is anyway? Maybe he was thinking about synecdoches.

What else can I say about what it looks like? It’s got a surprising twist near the end. That should help. I mean it’s pretty distinctive because it’s not something you’d see coming. It’s gripping, compelling, and impossible to turn away from which should make it really obvious because there should be a bunch of people gathered around staring at it, at least if I dropped it somewhere really public. If it’s in the bushes or something then I’m done for.

I could also say it’s about yay high, but who knows how high a yay is?

It’s got a strong, character-driven plot and an overarching theme. That should help. Really it should. I was using the theme as a handle.

That reminds me. I think I stopped somewhere to tie my shoe. I must have set it down when I did that but I don’t remember where I stopped. I’ve got these new shoes and I need to get some different laces for them because, really, I can’t walk ten feet without one of them getting untied.

The specific genre might help too but I’m kind of lost there because it’s really a stream of consciousness narrative based on an urban legend that was actually derived from a work of historical fiction. I think there was also some romance and a bit of mystery and since it was pretty recent it had to have something about vampires.

Also it’s covered in gravy.

It’s graduation season which makes me think back on my high school graduation, or at least what I remember of it, which is almost nothing of the ceremony itself. It’s strange. I remember other peoples’ graduation ceremonies I’ve attended better than my own. Everything from the moment I stepped through the auditorium doors is a blank, maybe because it wasn’t that important to me. Finishing high school was important. The ceremony itself—the cap and gown, the tassel, walking across a stage to get a diploma when my name was called—wasn’t. In first through sixth grade my school had Field Day in late May, marking the beginning of the end of the school year. It was a day-long P.E., mostly races, which I hated because I was a lousy runner and always coming in last or close to it or even somewhere in the middle but nowhere near the winners just seemed to remind me of that. And there were tug-o-war competitions between classes which I kind of liked because they were my one chance to win something even if all we ever won was a lousy little ribbon: blue for first place, red for second, yellow for third. There was no ceremony of any kind. After the event a grownup just handed you your ribbon, and they weren’t always paying much attention so I got a couple of blue ribbons by saying, “Yeah, I just won the, uh, the six decibel caterwaul over there,” but that’s another story. And there was also at least one adult wandering around with a handful of green ribbons for participation. If you just showed up, if you weren’t sick that day, you got a green ribbon. And that’s what my high school diploma felt like: a green ribbon for just showing up.

What I do remember of the ceremony is getting to the arena downtown wearing my suit and tie, and getting there early enough that I wandered around the arena by myself for a while. I was there with my parents and I guess they were getting their seats while I was supposed to go downstairs and line up with my classmates, but all of my classmates were wandering around talking to each other and seeing if they could stick their arms far enough up into the machines to get a free Coke so I did that too. The school gym, which was normally used for pep rallies and basketball games and the Christmas talent show, wasn’t good enough for graduation ceremonies so the administrators rented the dilapidated downtown arena which was normally used for hockey games and wrestling events and a hideout for junkies. It’s since been demolished. When the time for the ceremony itself got close enough we all dutifully headed downstairs and were lined up. At some point we must have put on our caps and gowns. You’d think wearing a gown for two hours is something I’d remember but, no, still drawing a blank. I was placed somewhere in the middle, so I guess we were lined up by class ranking. I wasn’t valedictorian or salutatorian or stentorian. I didn’t even have perfect attendance. I was exceptionally average.

I was standing next to Sally, a girl I knew so barely I was kind of surprised to learn we were both in the same grade, and for some reason they made us go in as pairs. As we stepped up to the doors Sally grabbed my hand and said, “Oh God, this is it. Please tell me it’s going to be all right.”

I hope I told her it was going to be all right but I have no memory of any of it because we stepped through the doors and my last thought was, Well, let’s get this shit over with. No, that’s not entirely true. I remember thinking, wow, for Sally this is really a big deal, and I envied her feeling that way. Intellectually I knew this was a big deal. We’d spent more than a third of our lives in school. There’d been a lot of changes along the way. Some kids moved away and as I’d gotten older and moved through different schools my circle of classmates had gotten bigger, some had dropped out, and a few hadn’t made it, but I was still graduating with a handful of kids I’d started kindergarten with were in that auditorium graduating with me. This was a special event. I just couldn’t feel the specialness of it.

It’s strange what we remember and what we don’t. I remember being outside the auditorium after everything was over, still wearing my cap and down, and laughing with a friend of mine. One of my teachers came over and told me I looked happier at that moment than she’d ever seen me. Without thinking I grinned and said, “I wonder why that is,” and then laughed even more because I felt like I’d unintentionally insulted her even though she was one of the best teachers I’d had. And then we left. It’s not surprising to me that I don’t remember the car ride home because riding in the car was something I did regularly, but I think even then I was aware that I could barely remember anything from the previous two hours.

When we got home some of my friends showed up and dragged me away to one of their houses. We spent the night watching movies and playing games and eating and being stupid and whatever else we did to have a good time. We consumed every food item in the house. Around 4:30 am we were mixing flour and generic brand soda and we all finally went home well after dawn, still strangely wide awake in spite of being up the entire night. It wasn’t that different from a lot of other weekend nights we’d spent together and yet I remember every minute of it.