The Humuhumunukunukuapua`a is the state fish of Hawaii, albeit unofficial.
How I came to know that rather curious fact is what I have decided to write about...Wait!...Strike that...how I have come to know a whole constellation of curious fact, arcane knowledge and just plain not common sense is what I want to write about.
I want to make it abundantly clear, which undoubtedly would happen after you read a few of my flawed statements in any case, that I am not a philosopher and that this is not in almost any way, shape or form, abstract, solid or constructed from some geometry of n-or-so dimensions to be construed as an essay in epistemology or my method, rigorous or casual, for how I, we all, come to know things. That is way beyond my scope or ability.
Whew, it was great to get that bit of mental flotsam off my chest.
Back to the fish also known as the Hawaiian Trigger Fish, I simply heard it one sunny Sunday morning on NPR. Now the question becomes why did NPR run such an audio article? Beats me! I have never been asked it in a game of Trivial Pursuit, but would ace the category, if the question came up.
One of my inventions, so don’t you bother to run out and copyright it, is the game of Consequential Pursuits. There are only five maybe ten cards. At the beginning of play everyone sits in the lotus position, comfortable on pillows, opposite one another. After a couple Om Mani Padme Hums the person who feels “the rightness of the moment” picks a card and displays the contents to the assembled initiates. The card thus picked in our tutorial round is “Love”. The participants then spend the next ten to twenty years in deep contemplation on the concept of “Love”. One of the conundrums that must be solved is how someone wins the game.
Look, I know a bunch of stuff. None of it can be considered as practical, germane, important or topical in the quotidian life that I lead. It is our habit at the company where I work to play a bastardized game of Trivial Pursuit. I read the entire card, we all guess and haw at the answer and then I turn to card over and spit up the knowledge tallied on the other side. No pies, no moves, no climbs up the Parcheesi like board, just the questions and the answers, ma’am. The kind of game Joe Friday would play.
One day I was off in the world and came back to a game in progress around the lunch table. “Go ahead ask him!” one co-worker nudged another. “He won’t know! He can’t know that!” said another. The implication was that if I did know the answer I was even a queerer duck than anyone thought. “Okay, “said the first person, clutching the card, “What Philosopher wrote the Blue and the Brown Books?”
Quicker than you can say Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I answered “Wittgenstein”
“You can’t know that!” said one. “First name?” questioned the other
“Ludwig” I said, “born Vienna, Austria.” Like a true Wisenheimer.
See, they never asked me what the books were about. And I don’t know why I remembered Ludwig very much. Once I owned a copy of all three books and can’t even pretend that I plumed their depths. Hell, I couldn’t even skim their surface.
A friend of mine, Dean to be exact, says the he stopped playing Trivial Pursuit when a woman combatant yelled at him as he answered some equally obscure bit of information, “You have no right to know that!”
I haven’t quit. I love knowing the stupid stuff that I know. It makes life a little more worthwhile. My latest tack is, when confronted with irate faces caused somehow by my answering an inconsequential questions is to say, “Well, why is it that you don’t know that?”
It’s the question I ask my self when someone exhibits knowledge unknown to me. In wonder, I think, “Why don’t I know that?”
Did you know that Marilyn Monroe was the model for Tinker Bell? I often go to sleep dreaming about that.
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
Wednesday, February 20, 2002
Tuesday, February 20, 2002 7:52 AM
I am no longer a Doctor because I don’t have the patience.
I am trying to learn patience. Trying and patience, right to the point! First, an explication, I live the life of a monk. Up at 4:30 AM, 1/2 hour of guitar position practice, then breakfast, 1/2 hour of piano practice, Blow the Man Down with it's Oom Pah Pah and tricky eighth notes on the odd beat is giving me quite a challenge. Does that tell you the level of my keyboard prowess? Then off to the Bally for about 40 or 45 minutes of torture on the cardio active treadmill and then pressures on my knee, abdomen and other portions of my muscles and organs, a shower and off to well, here I guess, which this morning is the Starbuck's on McKnight Road for my morning romp in my journal. I am fine, I am calm, I am together, I am fit as a fiddle until…..
I leave the Bally, actually, the last few minutes of dressing and paying attention to such galling and time consuming tasks as buttoning my shirt and tying my shoes, putting all my effects and clothing into the appropriate coat pockets and duffle bag sections, way to many zippers and flaps on that thing. I begin my bout with anxiety. I vow to keep it under control. I need only acknowledge the problem, repeat my mantra, and compose my cool self. Practice and monkly virtue. Then I get to the car. My goal, a soothing trip to the North Hills in about half an hour. Never quite happens!
If I put a pressure gauge on my anxiety, it would start to climb and then enter the caution zone at the corner of Coal Hollow and Verona Roads, cross the red line at the Fleming Bridge and ride high into the danger range by the time that I crest Cherry Hill only 20 minutes into my journeyand 20 minutes from my destination.
Anxiety and patience are indirectly proportional. As one rises the other falls. The first thing that causes a precipitous rise in anxiety and a correlated fall in patience is a school bus on the crest of a small hill after the turn on to Verona Road. Okay, I say, with some reason, kids, after all, have to get to school. It has a calming effect on me and I settle back to listen to the invective rage of a morning talk show. The kids get on the bus. We eventually move.
There is a man in a small nondescript automobile of an indistinguishable hue who must be employed at the Longvue Country Club for he mercifully turns in there. He is a slow driver. A VERY SLOW DRIVER! Six times out of ten on my morning trek, I am behind him, because I think the driving forces of the universe are out to teach me a lesson in not only patience but humility. It really doesn’t work! I am contrary. I begin a low throaty mumble which works its way to a scream. I begin calling him all sorts of names that would have been banned from books just a short half a century ago. I exercise my modern literary license frequently. Mercifully, as I have stated after about two miles he does a graceful five miles an hour turn into the country club. I blow my horn repeatedly in recognition of his role in my life. He is just an irritant in an otherwise spoiled and bilious morning. More frequently and fervently I repeat my mantra.
Then comes school bus number two and I am beginning to question educating the young and the talk show host is pointing out that liberal bias is ruining not only the western world but possibly causing a rip in the very fabric of time and space. I quickly punch the FM button and turn to NPR, which has a feature that is broadcast from the Peruvian Andes by a nature trail guide who believes that llama’s chips are the answer to the world food shortage. Definitely, I think, no useful reason for education of the young.
I am passed off to a truck from an appliance company that has a rule that if the truck goes under fifteen miles an hour a bomb will be armed and will go off if the vehicle again rises above that speed, spewing toasters and washing machines and coffee makers all over western PA. The truck finally blows up and I manage to get up to the Highland Park Bridge entrance to Washington Boulevard, where people cannot decide who has the right of way, so we stop to discuss the issue. After a heated debate with fifteen fully stopped adult motor vehicles, I travel on to the Fleming Bridge where an eighteen wheel truck has managed to run its rear wheels up a three foot high concrete sidewalk barrier. The driver, who had a rough evening, couldn’t quite make the turn. He is now scratching his head under a baseball cap that says, “Duh, which way did he go, George?”
Mind you, I am doing pretty well. I even manage to convince a whole passel of drivers at the end of the bridge that it is okay to actually go when there is no one else waiting at any of the three opposing stop signs. My horn makes an eloquent voice as the sun rises. It is school bus number three that has me muttering about birth control. What the hell good does school do them, anyway. They just all end up as stupid drivers.
From then on in I am lost. There is no reasoning with me. I am a total idiot taking out my wrath on all the internal control surfaces of my automobile. Pedestrians shouldn’t be allowed, I natter. And why the hell do we need traffic lights, turn left you @$@$*(&, I bluster. Oh, I must be a sorrowful sight!
I get to Starbucks and I sit and write on my brandy new Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC which it took four different trips back in drive time traffic to CompUSA before I got a proper and working keyboard. The decaf coffee of the day some Decaf Pigmy Mocha Bean from Malaysia mellows me out slightly. I climb back into the driver’s seat and manage to drive the rest of the way to work. Anxious, impatient and babbling irrationally, ready to scream. I need to practice my control a little more! Or maybe I should just become a talk show host.
I am no longer a Doctor because I don’t have the patience.
I am trying to learn patience. Trying and patience, right to the point! First, an explication, I live the life of a monk. Up at 4:30 AM, 1/2 hour of guitar position practice, then breakfast, 1/2 hour of piano practice, Blow the Man Down with it's Oom Pah Pah and tricky eighth notes on the odd beat is giving me quite a challenge. Does that tell you the level of my keyboard prowess? Then off to the Bally for about 40 or 45 minutes of torture on the cardio active treadmill and then pressures on my knee, abdomen and other portions of my muscles and organs, a shower and off to well, here I guess, which this morning is the Starbuck's on McKnight Road for my morning romp in my journal. I am fine, I am calm, I am together, I am fit as a fiddle until…..
I leave the Bally, actually, the last few minutes of dressing and paying attention to such galling and time consuming tasks as buttoning my shirt and tying my shoes, putting all my effects and clothing into the appropriate coat pockets and duffle bag sections, way to many zippers and flaps on that thing. I begin my bout with anxiety. I vow to keep it under control. I need only acknowledge the problem, repeat my mantra, and compose my cool self. Practice and monkly virtue. Then I get to the car. My goal, a soothing trip to the North Hills in about half an hour. Never quite happens!
If I put a pressure gauge on my anxiety, it would start to climb and then enter the caution zone at the corner of Coal Hollow and Verona Roads, cross the red line at the Fleming Bridge and ride high into the danger range by the time that I crest Cherry Hill only 20 minutes into my journeyand 20 minutes from my destination.
Anxiety and patience are indirectly proportional. As one rises the other falls. The first thing that causes a precipitous rise in anxiety and a correlated fall in patience is a school bus on the crest of a small hill after the turn on to Verona Road. Okay, I say, with some reason, kids, after all, have to get to school. It has a calming effect on me and I settle back to listen to the invective rage of a morning talk show. The kids get on the bus. We eventually move.
There is a man in a small nondescript automobile of an indistinguishable hue who must be employed at the Longvue Country Club for he mercifully turns in there. He is a slow driver. A VERY SLOW DRIVER! Six times out of ten on my morning trek, I am behind him, because I think the driving forces of the universe are out to teach me a lesson in not only patience but humility. It really doesn’t work! I am contrary. I begin a low throaty mumble which works its way to a scream. I begin calling him all sorts of names that would have been banned from books just a short half a century ago. I exercise my modern literary license frequently. Mercifully, as I have stated after about two miles he does a graceful five miles an hour turn into the country club. I blow my horn repeatedly in recognition of his role in my life. He is just an irritant in an otherwise spoiled and bilious morning. More frequently and fervently I repeat my mantra.
Then comes school bus number two and I am beginning to question educating the young and the talk show host is pointing out that liberal bias is ruining not only the western world but possibly causing a rip in the very fabric of time and space. I quickly punch the FM button and turn to NPR, which has a feature that is broadcast from the Peruvian Andes by a nature trail guide who believes that llama’s chips are the answer to the world food shortage. Definitely, I think, no useful reason for education of the young.
I am passed off to a truck from an appliance company that has a rule that if the truck goes under fifteen miles an hour a bomb will be armed and will go off if the vehicle again rises above that speed, spewing toasters and washing machines and coffee makers all over western PA. The truck finally blows up and I manage to get up to the Highland Park Bridge entrance to Washington Boulevard, where people cannot decide who has the right of way, so we stop to discuss the issue. After a heated debate with fifteen fully stopped adult motor vehicles, I travel on to the Fleming Bridge where an eighteen wheel truck has managed to run its rear wheels up a three foot high concrete sidewalk barrier. The driver, who had a rough evening, couldn’t quite make the turn. He is now scratching his head under a baseball cap that says, “Duh, which way did he go, George?”
Mind you, I am doing pretty well. I even manage to convince a whole passel of drivers at the end of the bridge that it is okay to actually go when there is no one else waiting at any of the three opposing stop signs. My horn makes an eloquent voice as the sun rises. It is school bus number three that has me muttering about birth control. What the hell good does school do them, anyway. They just all end up as stupid drivers.
From then on in I am lost. There is no reasoning with me. I am a total idiot taking out my wrath on all the internal control surfaces of my automobile. Pedestrians shouldn’t be allowed, I natter. And why the hell do we need traffic lights, turn left you @$@$*(&, I bluster. Oh, I must be a sorrowful sight!
I get to Starbucks and I sit and write on my brandy new Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC which it took four different trips back in drive time traffic to CompUSA before I got a proper and working keyboard. The decaf coffee of the day some Decaf Pigmy Mocha Bean from Malaysia mellows me out slightly. I climb back into the driver’s seat and manage to drive the rest of the way to work. Anxious, impatient and babbling irrationally, ready to scream. I need to practice my control a little more! Or maybe I should just become a talk show host.
Monday, February 18, 2002
Monday, February 18, 2002 6:38:12 PM
Ian, Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird
Yes, that person, a beret dapper and jaunty covering my head, driving down the hill past the Croatian Fraternal Union, the roads had a slight wet icy aspect that made me slide mightily passed the stop sign when I applied pressure to the brakes, good luck, no traffic, with a large lopsided smile on my face was me. I was smiling because I was hearing Ian Tyson. First his voice, “She drank Canadian whiskey, Pure blended whiskey, She drank it like wine" and later his lyric, "Never hit seventeen, When you play against the dealer...". Was it drinking and gambling that soared me into the timeless state between reverie and memory? No! And earlier still Sylvia Fricker's words, "When I got up this morning, You were on my mind." A very sweet memory caused by the purchase of a CD the morning before, played with gusto over the car speakers, called "Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful) by Nanci Griffith. Music almost more than anything is a temporal and spiritual transport.
It was 1968 perhaps 1969. The months before Andrea and I were married. Ian and Sylvia were coming to town and I had tickets. It was the most memorable concert that I have ever attended. The location was a building in East Liberty. It was a second story that had been converted into a performing hall, the ceilings were low, the acoustics were passable and I can't for the life of me remember the name of the place. It eventually became Jas. H. Matthews Company and for all I know still is. The Rape of East Liberty was passed, that vibrant neighborhood had become an inner city mall, and it was on its long downhill slide.
The front band was some local group that played loud and covered hits of the day. We got a seat, first row, a hand's reach away from the performers. Then Ian and Sylvia came on to the stage. They introduced the band. The group was called The Great Speckled Bird. A doff of the hat to Roy Acuff. I don't remember the Drummer or Bass Player but the guy on Banjo was Bill Keith annnddd the guitarist, he had a beat up smoke dirty cream yellow Fender Strat with the front chromed plates knocked off the pickups, was Amos Garrett! Amos is and was one of the best back-up guitarists of all times, it is his tasteful solo that you hear on Maria Muldaur’s Midnight at the Oasis (Bill Keith, Jeff and Maria Muldaur nee D'Amato were all alumni of Jim Kweskin's Jug Band)
It was thrilling, hearing and being there. The break came and Ian and Sylvia and the band, Andrea and I and several others from the audience, old enough to be served booze in PA, walked a block down the street to Walsh's, through the bar, down the steps into the smoky basement and sat, talked and listened to the music that was coming from the Bluegrass Band. It must have be Mac Martin and the Dixie Travelers, because they pretty much were always playing in SLiberty at Walsh's Bar in those years. Do I remember any of the conversation? Nope! But it was comfortable and felt right. The beer cold, the music hot. After two songs we all trundled back upstairs and strolled back to the concert.
Nothing was amiss that evening. Ian and Sylvia were magnificent, Amos Garrett was unbelievable and the Great Speckled Bird played a fine spell on into the evening.
Thirty-Some Years Later on a slippery road in Monroeville on my way for morning coffee and a bagel the rightness continues to put a smile on my face. Ian and Sylvia divorced. Ian Tyson is a country singer in Canada who puts out wonderful albums of Cowboy Songs. Sylvia Fricker, I believe, lives in Toronto writes music and records. Andrea and I divorced. Andrea passed away. One of my favorite songs has this lyric, "Some are dead and some are living, in my life I've loved them all." Thanks, John.
Ian, Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird
Yes, that person, a beret dapper and jaunty covering my head, driving down the hill past the Croatian Fraternal Union, the roads had a slight wet icy aspect that made me slide mightily passed the stop sign when I applied pressure to the brakes, good luck, no traffic, with a large lopsided smile on my face was me. I was smiling because I was hearing Ian Tyson. First his voice, “She drank Canadian whiskey, Pure blended whiskey, She drank it like wine" and later his lyric, "Never hit seventeen, When you play against the dealer...". Was it drinking and gambling that soared me into the timeless state between reverie and memory? No! And earlier still Sylvia Fricker's words, "When I got up this morning, You were on my mind." A very sweet memory caused by the purchase of a CD the morning before, played with gusto over the car speakers, called "Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful) by Nanci Griffith. Music almost more than anything is a temporal and spiritual transport.
It was 1968 perhaps 1969. The months before Andrea and I were married. Ian and Sylvia were coming to town and I had tickets. It was the most memorable concert that I have ever attended. The location was a building in East Liberty. It was a second story that had been converted into a performing hall, the ceilings were low, the acoustics were passable and I can't for the life of me remember the name of the place. It eventually became Jas. H. Matthews Company and for all I know still is. The Rape of East Liberty was passed, that vibrant neighborhood had become an inner city mall, and it was on its long downhill slide.
The front band was some local group that played loud and covered hits of the day. We got a seat, first row, a hand's reach away from the performers. Then Ian and Sylvia came on to the stage. They introduced the band. The group was called The Great Speckled Bird. A doff of the hat to Roy Acuff. I don't remember the Drummer or Bass Player but the guy on Banjo was Bill Keith annnddd the guitarist, he had a beat up smoke dirty cream yellow Fender Strat with the front chromed plates knocked off the pickups, was Amos Garrett! Amos is and was one of the best back-up guitarists of all times, it is his tasteful solo that you hear on Maria Muldaur’s Midnight at the Oasis (Bill Keith, Jeff and Maria Muldaur nee D'Amato were all alumni of Jim Kweskin's Jug Band)
It was thrilling, hearing and being there. The break came and Ian and Sylvia and the band, Andrea and I and several others from the audience, old enough to be served booze in PA, walked a block down the street to Walsh's, through the bar, down the steps into the smoky basement and sat, talked and listened to the music that was coming from the Bluegrass Band. It must have be Mac Martin and the Dixie Travelers, because they pretty much were always playing in SLiberty at Walsh's Bar in those years. Do I remember any of the conversation? Nope! But it was comfortable and felt right. The beer cold, the music hot. After two songs we all trundled back upstairs and strolled back to the concert.
Nothing was amiss that evening. Ian and Sylvia were magnificent, Amos Garrett was unbelievable and the Great Speckled Bird played a fine spell on into the evening.
Thirty-Some Years Later on a slippery road in Monroeville on my way for morning coffee and a bagel the rightness continues to put a smile on my face. Ian and Sylvia divorced. Ian Tyson is a country singer in Canada who puts out wonderful albums of Cowboy Songs. Sylvia Fricker, I believe, lives in Toronto writes music and records. Andrea and I divorced. Andrea passed away. One of my favorite songs has this lyric, "Some are dead and some are living, in my life I've loved them all." Thanks, John.
Monday, February 11, 2002
Monday, February 11, 2002 6:23:59 PM
Skaal! Riita and Vainamoinen!
In the autumn of 1965 I packed my belongings. My parents drove me to the airport. Greater Pittsburgh in the age of the 707, not too far removed from the Constellation and DC8. The fountains were gone from the entry drive even then. I remember them more from postcards. Stepped round concrete basins splashing water colored primary lights in the twilight. The invitation of the circular entry capped with a heavy concrete and steel portico. Inside the door an Alexander Calder mobile defining flight.
I checked in at the TWA counter. Flight to Kennedy International, transfer to Copenhagen. My first commercial flight. Age 20. I refused to take out an insurance policy at one of the machines that spat out policy that traded lucre for death. Bad juju. My father thought I was crazy.
I spent the week before drinking goodbye with my friends. Terry, Janet, David, David, Gary. I was in love with Riita. She was Finnish, and would whisper sweet songs to me about Väinämöinen, hero of the Kalevala, while I examined intimately her square face framed with shoulder length blond hair in the dim light. She embodied all I wanted to discover about Scandinavia. My passion, unrequited.
Air travel is a magic carpet ride.
I arrived at Kennedy and grabbed a shuttle to the TWA Terminal #5 designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. I thought of Scandinavia, Denmark the near future; Riita, my friends, the close past; this modern curved building, the present. I was shuffled through customs into the departure room. Quarantined, cut loose from America. A host of sophisticated people, men who wore tailored suits and dark winter overcoats, women smelling faintly of perfume and alcohol surrounded me. I had a sheepskin brown coat, a heavy plaid shirt and blue jeans. The odors, sights, murmurs of voices, evoked a feeling of weakness in me. I sat and read while the world around me buzzed brightly with purpose.
The flight around the world was both exciting and numbing. I joined the demimonde of dulled consciousness somewhere after the first hour. Through the side port window I raised the shade halfway and watched as we greeted the dawn somewhere mid Atlantic, which was water water everywhere. We landed in dreary drizzling Copenhagen.
My first discovery. They speak Danish in Denmark. The signs had words of possibly fourteen tortured syllables giving impossible instructions. The airport loudspeaker sounded guttural and full of glottal stop. There was French, German, Italian and English, but I was too stunned to understand any of it. I was an extraordinary distance from home with not one familiar face in sight. I have not forgotten the feeling, which is why I am kind to folks with strange accents, especially the ones that have the same confounded look on their face as I wore that day.
Customs. I sat in a tiny area. Presented my Passport to the man and the woman who sat across the desk from me. "What," they said, "is the purpose of your visit to Denmark?" I said, with a great deal of pride, "I am going to school."
"School?!," they said with some alarm in their voice. "Where is your visa?"
"Visa?!" I said with alarm in my voice and remembered the bit of advice written on my letter of acceptance. …at customs say that you are a tourist visiting Denmark. We will take care of any formality after you have arrived. All those hours on the plane, the adventure of my lifetime and I was about to be booted out of the country.
"What school?" They asked.
I said New Experimental College and pulled out a rumpled brochure that had ridden in my coat pocket. The customs official called the school. I breathed easier as I saw their threatening looks of concern turn benign. The conversation, in Danish, was a bit of magic to me. These people can actually understand this stuff, I unreasonably thought. Three years in French class and I never occurred to me that people used foreign language for communications. My passport stamped tourist. And then I was on the flight to Aalborg.
Skaal! Riita and Vainamoinen!
In the autumn of 1965 I packed my belongings. My parents drove me to the airport. Greater Pittsburgh in the age of the 707, not too far removed from the Constellation and DC8. The fountains were gone from the entry drive even then. I remember them more from postcards. Stepped round concrete basins splashing water colored primary lights in the twilight. The invitation of the circular entry capped with a heavy concrete and steel portico. Inside the door an Alexander Calder mobile defining flight.
I checked in at the TWA counter. Flight to Kennedy International, transfer to Copenhagen. My first commercial flight. Age 20. I refused to take out an insurance policy at one of the machines that spat out policy that traded lucre for death. Bad juju. My father thought I was crazy.
I spent the week before drinking goodbye with my friends. Terry, Janet, David, David, Gary. I was in love with Riita. She was Finnish, and would whisper sweet songs to me about Väinämöinen, hero of the Kalevala, while I examined intimately her square face framed with shoulder length blond hair in the dim light. She embodied all I wanted to discover about Scandinavia. My passion, unrequited.
Air travel is a magic carpet ride.
I arrived at Kennedy and grabbed a shuttle to the TWA Terminal #5 designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. I thought of Scandinavia, Denmark the near future; Riita, my friends, the close past; this modern curved building, the present. I was shuffled through customs into the departure room. Quarantined, cut loose from America. A host of sophisticated people, men who wore tailored suits and dark winter overcoats, women smelling faintly of perfume and alcohol surrounded me. I had a sheepskin brown coat, a heavy plaid shirt and blue jeans. The odors, sights, murmurs of voices, evoked a feeling of weakness in me. I sat and read while the world around me buzzed brightly with purpose.
The flight around the world was both exciting and numbing. I joined the demimonde of dulled consciousness somewhere after the first hour. Through the side port window I raised the shade halfway and watched as we greeted the dawn somewhere mid Atlantic, which was water water everywhere. We landed in dreary drizzling Copenhagen.
My first discovery. They speak Danish in Denmark. The signs had words of possibly fourteen tortured syllables giving impossible instructions. The airport loudspeaker sounded guttural and full of glottal stop. There was French, German, Italian and English, but I was too stunned to understand any of it. I was an extraordinary distance from home with not one familiar face in sight. I have not forgotten the feeling, which is why I am kind to folks with strange accents, especially the ones that have the same confounded look on their face as I wore that day.
Customs. I sat in a tiny area. Presented my Passport to the man and the woman who sat across the desk from me. "What," they said, "is the purpose of your visit to Denmark?" I said, with a great deal of pride, "I am going to school."
"School?!," they said with some alarm in their voice. "Where is your visa?"
"Visa?!" I said with alarm in my voice and remembered the bit of advice written on my letter of acceptance. …at customs say that you are a tourist visiting Denmark. We will take care of any formality after you have arrived. All those hours on the plane, the adventure of my lifetime and I was about to be booted out of the country.
"What school?" They asked.
I said New Experimental College and pulled out a rumpled brochure that had ridden in my coat pocket. The customs official called the school. I breathed easier as I saw their threatening looks of concern turn benign. The conversation, in Danish, was a bit of magic to me. These people can actually understand this stuff, I unreasonably thought. Three years in French class and I never occurred to me that people used foreign language for communications. My passport stamped tourist. And then I was on the flight to Aalborg.
Wednesday, February 06, 2002
Wednesday, February 06, 2002 6:38:34 PM
Hey, man, bop a roscoe or the hawk is gonna git you!
For reasons unbeknownst to me when I have traveled out of the city of Pittsburgh, three times out of four, I end up in Chicago. I have no particular love for the City with cold winds off the lake that take your breath away, nor do I feel any antipathy. I love Clarence Darrow and Carl Sandburg and Meyer Levin and Willard Motley (Read Knock on Any Door probably five times before I was sixteen - Live Fast, Die Young and Have A Good Looking Corpse!) I am tremendously fond of Second City and lately I tune more and more often via the internet to WGN Radio.
Which really got me thinking last night at about 2:30 in the morning when Johnnie and Steve were arguing about which was the best part of Chicago, the South or the North Side and I could not for the health or life of me get back to sleep.
Friday 11/22/1963 the day of the Kennedy Assassination, Steve, Phil, Jake and I left State College, PA for Chicago. It seemed like a thing to do. Steve got his car which was hidden in a garage (As I recall the drill, first term monkeys had to live on campus and were not supposed have a vehicle. God, the grand gentile repression demanded by education in the early sixties). And we tooled in a plush yet used V8 Mercury toward the west. It was late afternoon and we drove through Ohio into the evening and part of the way through Indiana; glanced at the gas gage which was registering minus five gallons.
We pulled off the Indiana turnpike at South Bend and burped our way to the only open gas station on the four lane highway that feeds into Notre Dame. Pulled to a stop in front of a pump with an attendant holding the gas nozzle in his hand at the ready. Great service! We hadn't yet learned our lesson, nothing is that great. Phil, who was riding shotgun, quickly rolled down the window letting the biting cold air into the car. He looked up at the attendant, who it was clear to us by now had a crazed glaze over his pin prick sized eye balls. The man stuck the gas nozzle in the window and said in his best Foster Brooks voice, "Fill 'er up?” which he proceeded to do. Phil got doused as did the floor mats, Steve quickly flicked his lighted cigarette out the driver's window and Jake an I did our best to get out of the back of the car to stop the maniac. By the time we got out on the apron the man had had his laugh and was duck walking out on to the super highway. The real gas attendant came out of his hidey hole and apologized and we filled up the proper container.
The strangest thing is that several years later I saw the gag on Laugh-in. Who knows maybe the drunk produced the show. A VW bug pulls up to a gas pump, the driver says, "Fill 'er up!" And the attendant sticks the nozzle in the front window and fills up the interior to the brim.
So we drive the rest of the way to Chicago with all the windows open on that very cold weekend and dared not smoke one cigarette. We arrive exhausted and decide to just park and sleep in the car. Somehow, cold, high octane fumes in my nose, I fall asleep with my head propped by the rear passenger window.
In the morning I awake and am staring at the very peculiar looking head of a flamingo whose eyes are focused on me as if I was some sort of prey. After a deep pinch on my arm, I notice that there are more birds behind a galvanized fence. Everyone else in the car is sleeping. Is this a dream, perhaps we are in some tropical environment, Florida? Brazil? Timbuktu? No, it is only a zoo somewhere in Chicago, the empty lot of which we managed to park last traumatic night in the dark.
We did a lot of things in Chicago that weekend, like drive around. Our guide, who we met the next day, I don't recall his name, was a Pittsburgh native but had the irritating habit when telling us to make a left or right turn to say things like Bop A Louie at the next corner or Shoot a Roscoe at the light. I have always assumed that this was Chicago talk. In a younger day I had a friend who ran away in protest from his parents to Chicago, leaving the burden on me, I was the only one to know where he was, when his parents sent the police around asking questions. I didn't crack under the hoses and back room lights. But Art returned when he ran out of money. After that, he would swoop down the street with his dark raincoat flying out behind him crying, "The Hawk Gonna Git You, The Hawk Gonna Git You!" He informed me that the Hawk was the frigid, stiff wind off Lake Michigan. In our sophomore year in high school he disappeared to New York City and didn’t return until ten years later. No police, no knowledge, no tears.
We slept at the YMCA on Wabash Avenue. The noise from the derelicts some seven stories down invaded me as I tried to sleep on my coat on the floor. The sounds of trash cans crashing, the musty dirty smell of the rug and the ache in my ribs from the hard floor put me in a light semi-sleep that lasted the whole long night.
We left Sunday, somewhere in Ohio at about seventy miles an hour; the left rear tire blew as the radio announced that Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald. We changed the tire and hobbled back to State College, PA. Eventually we all either were tossed out of school or had to leave because of atrocious grades. At one point none of us was allowed in the dormitory let alone the rooms of the others. These are stories for another time. I think in light of history that we must have known that Sam Giancana was involved in the Kennedy Assassination. And we were just seekers after the truth that weekend.
Hey, man, bop a roscoe or the hawk is gonna git you!
For reasons unbeknownst to me when I have traveled out of the city of Pittsburgh, three times out of four, I end up in Chicago. I have no particular love for the City with cold winds off the lake that take your breath away, nor do I feel any antipathy. I love Clarence Darrow and Carl Sandburg and Meyer Levin and Willard Motley (Read Knock on Any Door probably five times before I was sixteen - Live Fast, Die Young and Have A Good Looking Corpse!) I am tremendously fond of Second City and lately I tune more and more often via the internet to WGN Radio.
Which really got me thinking last night at about 2:30 in the morning when Johnnie and Steve were arguing about which was the best part of Chicago, the South or the North Side and I could not for the health or life of me get back to sleep.
Friday 11/22/1963 the day of the Kennedy Assassination, Steve, Phil, Jake and I left State College, PA for Chicago. It seemed like a thing to do. Steve got his car which was hidden in a garage (As I recall the drill, first term monkeys had to live on campus and were not supposed have a vehicle. God, the grand gentile repression demanded by education in the early sixties). And we tooled in a plush yet used V8 Mercury toward the west. It was late afternoon and we drove through Ohio into the evening and part of the way through Indiana; glanced at the gas gage which was registering minus five gallons.
We pulled off the Indiana turnpike at South Bend and burped our way to the only open gas station on the four lane highway that feeds into Notre Dame. Pulled to a stop in front of a pump with an attendant holding the gas nozzle in his hand at the ready. Great service! We hadn't yet learned our lesson, nothing is that great. Phil, who was riding shotgun, quickly rolled down the window letting the biting cold air into the car. He looked up at the attendant, who it was clear to us by now had a crazed glaze over his pin prick sized eye balls. The man stuck the gas nozzle in the window and said in his best Foster Brooks voice, "Fill 'er up?” which he proceeded to do. Phil got doused as did the floor mats, Steve quickly flicked his lighted cigarette out the driver's window and Jake an I did our best to get out of the back of the car to stop the maniac. By the time we got out on the apron the man had had his laugh and was duck walking out on to the super highway. The real gas attendant came out of his hidey hole and apologized and we filled up the proper container.
The strangest thing is that several years later I saw the gag on Laugh-in. Who knows maybe the drunk produced the show. A VW bug pulls up to a gas pump, the driver says, "Fill 'er up!" And the attendant sticks the nozzle in the front window and fills up the interior to the brim.
So we drive the rest of the way to Chicago with all the windows open on that very cold weekend and dared not smoke one cigarette. We arrive exhausted and decide to just park and sleep in the car. Somehow, cold, high octane fumes in my nose, I fall asleep with my head propped by the rear passenger window.
In the morning I awake and am staring at the very peculiar looking head of a flamingo whose eyes are focused on me as if I was some sort of prey. After a deep pinch on my arm, I notice that there are more birds behind a galvanized fence. Everyone else in the car is sleeping. Is this a dream, perhaps we are in some tropical environment, Florida? Brazil? Timbuktu? No, it is only a zoo somewhere in Chicago, the empty lot of which we managed to park last traumatic night in the dark.
We did a lot of things in Chicago that weekend, like drive around. Our guide, who we met the next day, I don't recall his name, was a Pittsburgh native but had the irritating habit when telling us to make a left or right turn to say things like Bop A Louie at the next corner or Shoot a Roscoe at the light. I have always assumed that this was Chicago talk. In a younger day I had a friend who ran away in protest from his parents to Chicago, leaving the burden on me, I was the only one to know where he was, when his parents sent the police around asking questions. I didn't crack under the hoses and back room lights. But Art returned when he ran out of money. After that, he would swoop down the street with his dark raincoat flying out behind him crying, "The Hawk Gonna Git You, The Hawk Gonna Git You!" He informed me that the Hawk was the frigid, stiff wind off Lake Michigan. In our sophomore year in high school he disappeared to New York City and didn’t return until ten years later. No police, no knowledge, no tears.
We slept at the YMCA on Wabash Avenue. The noise from the derelicts some seven stories down invaded me as I tried to sleep on my coat on the floor. The sounds of trash cans crashing, the musty dirty smell of the rug and the ache in my ribs from the hard floor put me in a light semi-sleep that lasted the whole long night.
We left Sunday, somewhere in Ohio at about seventy miles an hour; the left rear tire blew as the radio announced that Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald. We changed the tire and hobbled back to State College, PA. Eventually we all either were tossed out of school or had to leave because of atrocious grades. At one point none of us was allowed in the dormitory let alone the rooms of the others. These are stories for another time. I think in light of history that we must have known that Sam Giancana was involved in the Kennedy Assassination. And we were just seekers after the truth that weekend.
Monday, February 04, 2002
Monday, February 04, 2002 6:15:26 PM
Lackzoom - The Inner Feast
First of all we have designated April Fool's day as the launch day for the web site (www.laczkooom.org). Sitting here as I am, sated from my fine dinner of some white fish fillet, micro waved to a delectable crumble, metaphorically wiping my whiskers with the backs of my hands, and wishing for a postprandial sip of some delicately fermented Italian grape, not sure what it means. This launch, I mean. On April One Two Thousand Two.
I had a notion or two a month ago, but they have all fled to the nether regions of cyber thought. Somehow we, Lackzoom, should know what we want to do, but my mind, at least, is congenially confused. Okay! We have close to forty audio bits in various states of state. Some are even complete, just need that fretful upload, some merely need a sound effect or a bit of whimsical music, some need production from stem to stern. That, easy to conceive, is web worthy now, so I won't bother conceiving. Then there is the Blog, but, it, witness this very bit of writing, is happening. No stretch required.
I am tempted to go into the secret and exciting stuff that we are working on, but I won't. Let it be sufficient to say that it will be web worthy, hyper textually, multimedial, and just generally socko boffo as they said in earlier day to an exclusively print audience. I am shorn to secrecy, so I can't comment any more than I have already. How’s that for a bit of marketing sophistry?
I will put together in my head and for your pleasure the various places that Lackzoom exists willy-nilly on the Dub Dub Dub.
First and foremost, you must forgive me for my Freudian thinking, but my psychological development arrested sometime around the turn of the last century, is (www.lackzoom.org), which for lack of a better metaphor is the ego of our enterprise. It is here that will be revealed the artifact of our collective personality. And since you can't step into the same river once without getting wet, will remain the historic evidence that we have passed this way.
Then there is the Blog (http://lackzoom.blogspot.com) which for purposes most Freudian is the depth psychology analog of the id. Here all horrendous inner workings will be revealed, mythically, sexually, and prosaically. Here lies the schmaltz, the deep and abiding chicken fat that binds us all. God, I get sick just thinking about it!
And last and certainly newest are The Communities: MSN: (http://communities.msn.com/LackzoomAcidophilus) (Y’all c’mon over and join!) and soon to be a Yahoo Community when I get around to signing up. And these, gentle reader (you rough readers go charge San Juan Hill) come, in the metaphor of the man with whom the cigar is only synonymous, in the guise of Super Ego. Yes, a place where the people at large can excoriate and vilify the work that we daily produce. You are an ungrateful bunch aren't you? We work our collective arses to the nub and all we get is bad comment and invective. It makes my red blood turn black with rage! The people are indeed revolting.....
Sorry!
There you have it! The edifice upon which we build our universe. Not much there yet, but you just wait fellow fools, April One is just a short few weeks away. And that is merely the start of the wonder!
Lackzoom - The Inner Feast
First of all we have designated April Fool's day as the launch day for the web site (www.laczkooom.org). Sitting here as I am, sated from my fine dinner of some white fish fillet, micro waved to a delectable crumble, metaphorically wiping my whiskers with the backs of my hands, and wishing for a postprandial sip of some delicately fermented Italian grape, not sure what it means. This launch, I mean. On April One Two Thousand Two.
I had a notion or two a month ago, but they have all fled to the nether regions of cyber thought. Somehow we, Lackzoom, should know what we want to do, but my mind, at least, is congenially confused. Okay! We have close to forty audio bits in various states of state. Some are even complete, just need that fretful upload, some merely need a sound effect or a bit of whimsical music, some need production from stem to stern. That, easy to conceive, is web worthy now, so I won't bother conceiving. Then there is the Blog, but, it, witness this very bit of writing, is happening. No stretch required.
I am tempted to go into the secret and exciting stuff that we are working on, but I won't. Let it be sufficient to say that it will be web worthy, hyper textually, multimedial, and just generally socko boffo as they said in earlier day to an exclusively print audience. I am shorn to secrecy, so I can't comment any more than I have already. How’s that for a bit of marketing sophistry?
I will put together in my head and for your pleasure the various places that Lackzoom exists willy-nilly on the Dub Dub Dub.
First and foremost, you must forgive me for my Freudian thinking, but my psychological development arrested sometime around the turn of the last century, is (www.lackzoom.org), which for lack of a better metaphor is the ego of our enterprise. It is here that will be revealed the artifact of our collective personality. And since you can't step into the same river once without getting wet, will remain the historic evidence that we have passed this way.
Then there is the Blog (http://lackzoom.blogspot.com) which for purposes most Freudian is the depth psychology analog of the id. Here all horrendous inner workings will be revealed, mythically, sexually, and prosaically. Here lies the schmaltz, the deep and abiding chicken fat that binds us all. God, I get sick just thinking about it!
And last and certainly newest are The Communities: MSN: (http://communities.msn.com/LackzoomAcidophilus) (Y’all c’mon over and join!) and soon to be a Yahoo Community when I get around to signing up. And these, gentle reader (you rough readers go charge San Juan Hill) come, in the metaphor of the man with whom the cigar is only synonymous, in the guise of Super Ego. Yes, a place where the people at large can excoriate and vilify the work that we daily produce. You are an ungrateful bunch aren't you? We work our collective arses to the nub and all we get is bad comment and invective. It makes my red blood turn black with rage! The people are indeed revolting.....
Sorry!
There you have it! The edifice upon which we build our universe. Not much there yet, but you just wait fellow fools, April One is just a short few weeks away. And that is merely the start of the wonder!