Latest Posts

Big Yin, Big Yang.

Author: November 24, 2015 4 Comments

It’s hard to know where to start with Billy Connolly whose birthday is today. Maybe that’s kind of fitting. His biography, Billy, opens with him about to go on stage. He confesses to his wife that he has no idea what he’s going to say and she realizes “He’s not bluffing”. He’s said in at least one interview, “I don’t know the first thing about comedy. I’m just glad to be there when it happens.” This is a guy who started out as a folk singer and one night he confessed he couldn’t remember the tune he was going to sing so instead he told the story. That got huge laughs and launched the career of one of the world’s most amazing comedians. And I’ll just mention the biography Billy again which is by his wife Pamela Stephenson and it’s not, as I expected, a fluff piece that would be more about her than him. I didn’t realize she’s a trained psychologist and author, which is at least partly why her biography is a serious study tracing Connolly’s family origins back a few generations.

Maybe I should start with when I was in college. One night a friend of mine came to my room and said, “You’ve gotta see this guy.” He popped in a tape of Connolly’s HBO special and soon we were laughing so hard people from down the hall were coming in to tell us to be quiet. Then they stayed and the laughter got louder and eventually I had three hundred people packed into my room gathered around the television and every laugh sent ripples through the room like we were a giant blob of Jell-O. Bits from that became part of our daily conversations. Being college students getting drunk and throwing up was part of our regular routine and thanks to Connolly queries about diced carrots and tomato skins became an indispensable part of that routine.

Here’s part of that show.

Happy Birthday.

Know Your Driver.

Author: November 23, 2015 12 Comments

001As I was getting off the bus the driver said to me, “See you tomorrow.” And that’s when I realized she was the same driver I’d seen the same day every week. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the bus driver. When I board I’m only really concerned about getting to a seat before the bus lurches into motion and throws me to the floor. This particular day that was especially true because it looked like someone had dropped a burrito in the middle of the floor and someone else, or maybe the same person, had then stepped on it so there was a big squirt of refried frijoles and red sauce, or maybe blood, smeared along the floor.

Someone had lost their lunch and I’m just glad I mean that literally and not metaphorically. It didn’t smell like anything. It just looked awful.

When the driver said “See you tomorrow” I turned around and recognized her but also realized she’d changed her hair style. That made me feel even guiltier for not at least saying hello when I got on the bus instead of just thinking she was a different driver as I barely looked at her while boarding. I couldn’t tell you her name but I feel like I get to know certain drivers who stick with the route for a while, and who I see on a daily basis. And it always surprises me when they recognize me too. I figure bus drivers must see dozens, maybe even hundreds of different people every day. How could they pick a single guy out of the crowd?

I made a mental note to say something nice about her hair the next day, and I would have too if she hadn’t been wearing a hat. At least I said hello this time.

Adventures In Busing.

Down, Up.

Author: November 21, 2015 10 Comments

001A long time ago I learned an important lesson. I can’t change how other people think or act. I can only change how I respond to others. It’s a revelation that led me to try and always think about things from other people’s perspectives. Stopping to think about other people’s motives has made me, I think, a happier person and, I hope, a better person.

That’s what I thought about when I saw the giant DOWNER scrawled on a building. Graffiti makes some people angry, and I get that, but think about it from the perspective of the artist here. Maybe this was someone expressing frustration, asking for help. And they’re doing in purple, a color that, in literary symbolism, is traditionally associated with royalty and wealth but also spirituality and transformation.

Or maybe purple was all they could get their hands on and DOWNER was just something they thought would be fun to write.

Either way I’m not going to let it change how I feel about it.

American Graffiti.

In The Dark.

Author: November 20, 2015 10 Comments

Thanks for the words of encouragement, glasses!

Thanks for the words of encouragement, glasses!

It’s now dark when I get up in the mornings which doesn’t bother me because I usually get up so early I get up in the dark most of the year. About the only times it isn’t dark when I get up is midsummer when the days are at their longest and for a week or so after Daylight Saving Time ends and we fall back or spring forward and I wish we could just step sideways and avoid the whole thing because the name is just misleading. We didn’t save any daylight. If we did I could have kept some in a jar and carried it around with me and pulled it out when I need it, like when I’m coming home. And that’s what really bothers me: we’ve reached the time of year when I come home in the dark. It’s like that old joke some people make about how their job is to be a mushroom: they’re kept in the dark and fed shit. My job isn’t like that because there’s plenty of light to go around while I’m at work even if I don’t have time to get outside and enjoy it. And that’s inevitable. It would happen even without Daylight Saving Time because it’s just the time of year and we live at a latitude where the days inevitably get shorter and colder because our side of the planet is moving closer to the sun and if there’s one thing nature enjoys it’s being counterintuitive.

It just makes me wonder why we even need Daylight Saving Time anymore because it just seems like an unnecessary prodding of an already completely arbitrary system. Most of us have ten fingers and ten toes and base ten is almost universally accepted for arithmetic so naturally we have a way of measuring units of time that puts twenty four hours in a day with each hour consisting of sixty minutes, but at least each minute is sixty seconds, which is a little bit of consistency. And we accept it because it’s what we’re used to, even though that’s not necessarily a good reason for keeping around a system that was probably invented in ancient India thousands of years—and millions of years ago. On the other hand there’s no good reason for getting rid of it either which is why even in countries that have already accepted the metric system for weights and distances metric time was a huge flop. Those who were in favor of it couldn’t put up much of a fight because they never could show up for any meetings because they always ended up oversleeping by a few hundred millihours, but that’s another story. And I remember in first grade we spent at least a week learning how to read analog clocks, but I never could get it because it made no sense to me. It was bad enough that that it would be five o’clock at least twice a day and you couldn’t necessarily tell them apart except for those brief periods in fall and spring when one five o’clock would be dark and the other would be light, but then Daylight Saving Time would start or end and screw everything up. The hour hand was short and the minute hand was long even though an hour is long and a minute is short and the second hand was frequently the same length as the minute hand. My teacher pointed out that you could see the second hand going around but that didn’t help much either because I was bored and spent a lot of time fixedly watching the clock so I could see the minute hand moving too as it got closer and closer to when it was time to go outside for recess. And that was the one thing I had to look forward to because this was in the middle of winter and there wasn’t going to be a lot of daylight left when I got home so I had to take what I could get. Then as I got older everything went digital and learning to read an analog clock turned out to be almost as much of a waste of time as learning the quadratic formula. Sure it’s fun at parties but other than that it’s one of those things I’m just never going to use.

At least the days getting shorter is a temporary thing and we don’t live anywhere near either the north or south poles where there are days when the sun barely comes up over the horizon and the nights are really, really long. Although I think that would be kind of cool to experience. It makes me think of the summer I worked the night shift at a printing plant. I used to be a real night person, and I guess I still l am since I get up for work so early it pretty much is still night. It was a great job because the printing press broke down every two minutes and took two hours to repair so I had a lot of time to read. Then the sun would come up and that’s how I knew it was almost time to go home because the place only had an old analog clock. And when there was work to be done I did it even though I had no clue what I was doing. It was good because something about the night shift just jived with my circadian rhythms. As a kid I always thought the term was “cicadian rhythms”, because cicadas spend thirteen years underground sucking tree sap, and in that job that was an appropriate metaphor. I was in the dark and I’m pretty sure as an employee I sucked.

cicada

The Weekly Essay

Still A Bridesmaid.

Author: November 18, 2015 14 Comments

Rejection is a fact of life but that doesn’t make it any easier. In fact it makes it even harder because it means the chances of acceptance are slim, especially when I feel like I’m really wandering in the dark and when people enjoy and respond to what I write it’s a happy accident rather than something planned. In college all my friends and I were aspiring writers and we’d comfort each other by telling each other that you wouldn’t get your first acceptance letter until you’d been able to paper your room with rejections. I really think this supposedly comforting thought prevented us from submitting anything. Why would we want to subject ourselves to that much negativity?

And yet the urge is still there. So I wrote something that I thought was pretty funny and that maybe I should submit it. So I submitted it to, of all places, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. This was partly because I own the McSweeney’s humor anthology Created In Darkness By Troubled Americans and find a lot of it funny and felt what I’d written fit with what they were looking for. Being connected to the literary journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern it also seems like a pretty major publication, and I like to aim high.

You know the saying: aim for the moon. Even if you miss you’ll fall among the stars. Of course eventually you’ll run out of food and water, although your breathable air will be the first thing to go, and your corpse will forever float through the freezing blackness of space until it falls into a star and is incinerated or is gradually ripped apart by gravitational forces.

What I’m getting at is this is what happened:

rejectionYou’re probably wondering what I wrote, or at least I hope you are. Let’s just say it’s a story about public transportation written in the form of early computer text-based games like Planetfall and Colossal Cave Adventure that I spent way too much of my teenage years trying to solve. I won’t say anything more about it except that it’s helpful if you ever encounter a dwarf who wants you to play Hucka Bucka Beanstalk and please tell me I’m not the only one who finds that funny. Anyway the piece may appear here eventually but I feel like the rejection has inspired me to try again. There are a lot of other places out there. Rejection is a fact of life. So is acceptance.

Let the wallpapering commence.

 

Not Non-Fiction, Submitted For Your Approval.

My Favorite Curse Word? All Of Them.

Author: November 16, 2015 18 Comments

There are a lot of different paths I can take to the bus stop. That’s one of the advantages of being a pedestrian: I can cross parking lots, greenways, weave all over sidewalks, cut through parking garages, and even jaywalk if I want to. But there are also places where I’m hemmed in. Once I start down a particular path there are locked buildings, fences, walls. If I decide to go another way I have to go all the way back the way I came and then I’m gonna be late for the bus and I’m getting tired just writing this run-on sentence.

I don’t mind taking a detour if I have to but the other day this happened.

blockedIn case it’s not clear the whole sidewalk on the right side has been blocked off for about six months now for some kind of construction that the crew doesn’t seem to be in any great hurry to finish. And now there’s some kind of construction on the left side of the street.

There was no easy way around it. I had to backtrack several blocks and if you’d been with me on that detour and heard what I said you might have thought I was suffering from de Tourette’s.

Adventures In Busing.

Poetry In Motion.

Author: November 14, 2015 8 Comments

IMG_6965

Photo provided courtesy of Tripping On Air

This week’s graffiti is special in a lot of ways. First and most important it’s the first reader submission: this one comes courtesy of Tripping On Air which is a fun and inspiring blog.

And this is a fun and even inspiring piece of graffiti. The artist labels it a haiku. Technically it would be more appropriate to call it a senryu since haikus are traditionally about nature while senryus are about people. Except both haikus and senryus have that 5-7-5 syllable structure and this has more of a 6-4-6 structure. Here it is:

J’ai dormi dans des trains,

je t’y ai fait,

l’amour, comme dans un rêve

And here’s my translation:

In trains I have slept.

It was in them I loved you,

As though in a dream.

Yeah, I went with the 5-7-5 structure although technically senryus are also supposed to be humorous. I’ve never forgotten the first senryu I ever read even though I don’t remember where I read it: “As he feels her up/she has turned her attention/only to the cat.”

So anyway the graffiti is breaking all kinds of poetry rules but that’s okay. Poetry can be an unruly art form that has to break the rules and there’s nothing that breaks the rules like graffiti.

And this graffitied poem also makes me think of a longer poem about love on a train. Here’s Carolyn Forché’s For The Stranger from her book The Country Between Us. You can also go here to hear her read the poem.

Although you mention Venice
keeping it on your tongue like a fruit pit
and I say yes, perhaps Bucharest, neither of us
really knows. There is only this train
slipping through pastures of snow,
a sleigh reaching down
to touch its buried runners.
We meet on the shaking platform,
the wind’s broken teeth sinking into us.
You unwrap your dark bread
and share with me the coffee
sloshing into your gloves.
Telegraph posts chop the winter fields
into white blocks, in each window
the crude painting of a small farm.
We listen to mothers scolding
children in English as if
we do not understand a word of it–
sit still, sit still.

There are few clues as to where
we are: the baled wheat scattered
everywhere like missing coffins.
The distant yellow kitchen lights
wiped with oil.
Everywhere the black dipping wires
stretching messages from one side
of a country to the other.
The men who stand on every border
waving to us.

Wiping ovals of breath from the windows
in order to see ourselves, you touch
the glass tenderly wherever it holds my face.
Days later, you are showing me
photographs of a woman and children
smiling from the windows of your wallet.

Each time the train slows, a man
with our faces in the gold buttons
of his coat passes through the cars
muttering the name of a city. Each time
we lose people. Each time I find you
again between the cars, holding out
a scrap of bread for me, something
hot to drink, until there are
no more cities and you pull me
toward you, sliding your hands
into my coat, telling me
your name over and over, hurrying
your mouth into mine.
We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.

Seen any graffiti? Email your pics to freethinkers@nerosoft.com. Recent history has shown I’ll give you full credit.

American Graffiti.

This Middle-Aged House.

Author: November 13, 2015 13 Comments

A guy has to come and check something in our house. What it is is unimportant. It could be the plumbing, the wiring, the roof, the heat, the air conditioner. It doesn’t matter. It’s beyond my ken so we have to call in a guy who, hopefully, is an expert. At least this time it’s a guy we know and so I’m pretty confident he is an expert and isn’t going to try and rip us off which is something I always wonder about anytime we have to call in a strange guy but anytime we have to call someone in it makes me nervous. For one thing I’m always afraid of what they’re going to find, but it’s really worse if I’m the one waiting for the guy because the simple questions “What will he find and will he be able to fix it?” get crowded out by a million other questions. What time will he be here? Do I have time to take a shower? Why is there never anything good on daytime television? Does that even matter now that we have all forms of on-demand video? Do I have time to watch a movie? Is there anything I’ve forgotten? Do I have time to do any household chores? Shouldn’t I have thought of household chores before I started watching a movie? Is it true that the Chrysler Building weighs more than the Great Pyramid of Giza? Will he arrive in a truck or a van? Will he call first? Will he have all the equipment he needs? Should I set out a tray of cold cuts? Are they still “cold cuts” if they’ve been sitting out for a couple of hours? Would it be weird to put out some olives? Do we have any olives?

When The Guy arrives things don’t get any better. My brain keeps buzzing with questions but it’s a whole new set of questions. How long will he be here? Should I offer to help? Should I offer him a drink? Should I start a new pot of coffee in case he wants coffee? What if he wants tea? Do we have any decaf? Should I offer him a beer? Do I need to break out the Jack Daniel’s? Why do I think alcohol and power tools are a good combination? What’s wrong with me? What if he has to call in more guys? Do I have enough olives? Should I try and chat with him while he’s working?

That last question at least is easy. The answer is unequivocally, or at least it probably is, no. Any question I can think of to ask him is going to get me in trouble. So, did you see that big sports game last night? What do you think the problem is? How long do you think it’ll take to fix? See above. Are you ever concerned about the lack of gender equity in your field? Do you want me to go away and let you do your job?

Maybe I could try and show I’m not completely hopeless when it comes to home repair, or at least I could pretend I’m not.

“Hey, is that a Williams-Anderson 420-series ratcheting torque lever?”

“No, this is a hammer.”

And so I do my best to stay out of his way but even then I’m not sure what to do. Should I stay nearby? Would it be weird to read a book? Would it be even weirder to just stand in the middle of another part of the house paralyzed with terror? What if he has questions for me? Will IO be able to answer him without sounding like an idiot?

“Where’s the toilet?”

“Um, we don’t have one.”

As hard as it is I keep reminding myself that he’s a professional, that he does this sort of thing all the time, that he’s going to do his best to fix the problem and get on his way because he’s got other people to help. And repeating that to myself does help even though all I really want to do is crawl under the bed and pretend I’m all alone. And if I did that it would be just my luck that he’d have to cut a hole in the floor right underneath the bed and find me there curled up in a ball. Then I’d feel compelled to try and cover my embarrassment with an intelligent-sounding question.

“Hey, is that a binocular vertical coil suspension spall carriage?”

“No, this is a saw.”

And so I just do my best to stay out of his way and answer any questions he has as best I can and think about useful questions like, “Will we be able to turn on the lights and use the toaster at the same time now?” And I hope that the final question won’t be, “So is this the bill or a phone number?”

The Weekly Essay

Keep Looking Up.

Author: November 11, 2015 14 Comments

Source: Weather Underground

Source: Weather Underground

In spite of the end of daylight saving time I still get up before sunrise. I’m also still confused about daylight saving time and whether I should fall back and spring forward or spring back or fall forward and it doesn’t help that when someone tells me “We need to move the meeting time up an hour” they sometimes mean that the meeting scheduled for 2:00pm will now be at 3:00pm and sometimes they mean it will be at 1:00pm. And I would ask if we could stick to Greenwich Mean Time but I’ve been to Greenwich Village and time is a very fluid concept there, or at least it was in the days when bands played at The Electric Banana, but that’s another story.

For the past couple of months I’ve noticed Venus hanging in the East. Since it’s the third brightest object in the sky I always recognize it, but I had to consult Weather Underground’s Interactive Star Chart to confirm that the other two planets near it are Jupiter and Mars. As the fourth brightest object in the sky Jupiter should be obvious but I’m never sure unless I pull out my telescope and see the four Galilean moons.

This morning all three planets were in an almost straight line. Mars is dimmer than the other two but still stands out. My sleep schedule is still a little off from the time change but what greets me in the predawn hours makes it easier to get up.

Ramble With Me.

Pop Quiz!

Author: November 10, 2015 11 Comments

hat

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pop quiz: Hat or fruit?

  1. Guava
  2. Beret
  3. Sapote
  4. Pahlavi
  5. Homburg
  6. Prune
  7. Sombrero
  8. Kumquat
  9. Kepi
  10. Lychee
  11. Durian
  12. Capirote
  13. Tamarind
  14. Boater
  15. Quince
  16. Shako
  17. Rambutan
  18. Turban
  19. Sloe
  20. Cloche
  21. Rowan
  22. Mantilla
  23. Capote
  24. Pawpaw
  25. Yanggwan
  26. Persimmon
  27. Trilby
  28. Fedora
  29. Mangosteen
  30. Beanie

Each question is worth a completely arbitrary three points to put unreasonable pressure on you to do math after you’ve finished.

75-150 points: Your elegant and fashionable dinner parties are intricate and well-planned in a way that makes everyone else insecure and uncomfortable. Who even knows what a shrimp fork is anymore?

60-74 points: You watch a lot of those fashion and cooking competition shows, don’t you?

45-59 points: Excellent guesswork. You win and may take a prize from the treasure box on the desk at the front of the room.

27-44 points: Still within the ballpark. You may take a pencil from the shoebox next to the chalkboard at the back of the room.

8.5-26 points: You knew most of this stuff at one time but like the quadratic formula you knew you’d never use it so you forgot it. You may take two prizes from the treasure box on the desk at the front of the room.

3-8.4 points: Please hand in the pencil you took from the shoebox next to the chalkboard at the back of the room when you came in. You shouldn’t be allowed to have anything sharp.

key

Pop Quiz