Monday, June 30, 2003 5:56:38 PM Joe Coluccio
"Just take three steps and throw the ball" Advice given me by my mother the month before she adopted a four step approach.
The guy was carrying two bowling pins. He wore a checkerboard shirt that would have made a NASCAR enthusiast glad and shorts that were cut off just above his hairy knees. He had dark gleaming hair and a look and style that would have been a lot less noticed in a Tex-Mex border town.
I was stopped ten automobiles and a delivery truck before the traffic light. The wooden pins, white lacquer gleaming with a red pheasant ring around the neck, looked like they were a part of his hands. "A bowling pin man." I thought and possibly said aloud over the din of a cassette tape of a mystery novel, strangely enough set in San Antonio and environs. I flashed on the Mariachis boisterous and joyous in the Mercado, spirit and odors that I had spent a mere couple hours exploring before touristing on to the Alamo and the River Walk. I know I shouldn't, but I take these sightings as signs or as some kind of omen, or at the very least some of God's peculiar sense of humor dealing with synchronicity and the universe that inhabits me.
By now my perverse organ of imagination was in full swing. 'What,' I wondered, 'was a this Latin Loner, his name very possibly, Jesus, doing carrying two perfect bowling pins down a street in Etna, Pennsylvania?' Could it be some sign of the apocalypse approaching? A flawed interpretation, I concluded, a herald of the apocalypse would at least include an elephant trumpeting and some of the glib glossed twisted tongue of Ernest Angely. People who are chaste and spiritually adept go around with bumper stickers that say 'When the rapture comes I will be transported straight to heaven.' Leaving me, I figure, right in the driverless path of their 1986 Crown Victoria. There is something sadly wrong with this apochrafilled Christian notion.
The light changed and the old bowling alley on the side street that leads to the Fleming Bridge came into view. Two old men were sitting at a card table in the front of the building. Playing cards, relaxing. The front door to the lanes was propped open. I suppose for easier access should someone want a souvenir of the seven-ten split that they just made. Aha! Here was another answer to this fine conundrum posited just a few minutes past. The inside of the building looked dark and cool. I imagined Don Diego, magnificent and masked, speaking Castilian Spanish with a proper lithsp, carrying ten pins, secreted in the palms of his hand two at a time to a building three short blocks away to distribute among the poor bowl deprived citizens of Etna. Tax Free!
I tried as I moved across the river to the south banks of the Allegheny to make some sense of it all. But as usual, my suspicious and synchronous God is silent. Sends a delicious image and then has me toting up all manner of interpretation until my head is spinning and my nerves are a tingle.
One late afternoon we were all sitting around the office with nothing better to do than to swap stories about the evening before. One of the younger members of the crew described the previous evening to us. He had been out at a bar and had begun a mild bender that he hoped would turn to a full and satisfying pain the next day. Soon everyone was buying everyone else drinks. The crowd grew and when it got to his turn, he explained, that the round after he clicked his soggy fingers in his spongy mind cost close to sixty dollars. One of the “revenge of the nerd’s” employees from a software company that inhabited the premises with us rounded the corner. He was moved to join us. "Wow," he said, a living monument to pocket protector and taped glasses, "Sixty Dollars!" We looked up at him. "To spend that kind of money you'd have to go bowling." He gave a twittering laugh and left.
Indeed!
Monday, June 30, 2003
Monday, June 16, 2003
Monday, June 16, 2003 7:02:28 PM Joe Coluccio
Con'd from last rock
Message from Barney to Fred on the Road to the Bronze Age.
One Thanksgiving Art and another friend took off. Live fast. Left the gripes of home and parent behind and grabbed a bus to Chicago, where a childhood friend of Art’s, Frankie, had moved the year before. I drove them to the bus stop and pledged Omerta! I would never reveal where they went to anyone for any reason.
It was cold, just a slight stick of snow on the windshield. We sat in the heat of the car with a bag of burgers between us, ten for a buck, bought at a shack mid Frankstown Road. Talked until our noses filled with the heavy smell of diesel and our ears filled with the swish of air brakes. They took a last bite, grabbed their bags out of the trunk. Left.
I lived up to that promise the next morning when the Art's father called and demanded that I tell him where his son was. "Do you know what he took with him?" Art helped himself to the stash of cash from the bottom of the dining room china closet. The roll looked round and rich, more than a few months worth of saving. "He took my gun!" Die young.
I held silence, through the onslaught dealt by my own parents who couldn’t really figure out what to make of the situation, and the glass tears of Art’s mother and the blazing indignity of Art’s father and the stern looks of the police who visited. You could see the real story in their authoritative eyes. ‘Two more juveniles we won’t have to hassle with.’
I felt that it was an unfair burden foisted on me by some imagined Italian code of honor made up from gangster novels and Mafia movies. Not only did I take the beating from all authority, but I lost my two closest friends.
Two week later they came home. One hating the other more than the other hated the other. It came out in drips in conversation in the following months. Art thought his former closest friend was a slob. “He picked up French fries that had fallen to the dirty greasy street and ate them,” in a voice that said clearly that such actions lacked dignity, honor, panache!
“We were starving!” Explained my other friend. Art and Frankie attempted armed robbery. Pleading, he stopped them from killing the victim. Somewhere along the line dreaming ideology met irrational practicality. Leopold and Loeb meet Holden Caulfield. And have a good looking corpse.
For the next year I was in one camp or the other. There would be no reconciliation. Then Art disappeared seriously. Left for New York City and did not reappear for five or more years.
We graduated from High School, failed miserably at Penn State, worked at too many poor jobs, restaurants, book stores, machinery shops, and traveled to Europe. Always gathered back in Pittsburgh.
Art reappeared as suddenly as he was gone. Relating stories of days of hustling in New York City. He had money. Taken from the suckers and the queers. As he talked I felt smaller and smaller. It was a part his hustle to grow large, laugh large, keep the world under his control. Until someone bigger and badder and one up comes along. Many people think this is a technique worth mastering. Mostly, I laugh at the foolish posturing, but catch me on a down day and you can bluster and become king of my world. For what its worth.
He finagled a position as salesmen in the phonograph record industry in the city of Pittsburgh. He got a me job with one of the many arcane companies and corporations that made up the business. I was hired to transship phonograph records, a slightly unethical practice with borders on illegal that was cross purposes with the Record Labels and Distributors. I learned how to strip shipping cartons of all but one destination label. Anonymous boxes delivered to the bus station three or four times a day. Art wore salesman well with thin ties and shining suits. He would grab me by the arm and laugh with his big laugh. 'We're still friends, Joe. We know what’s going on here' he seemed to say as he circled higher and higher with the buzzards. Flew with the mighty and high ones. I was grounded.
Winter came. I went to work at a place that made Rolling Mills for the Steel Industry.
Somewhere along the line we lost touch probably when I married and left for California. He was married with three children. Stunning beautiful wife and dissatisfied. Looking for more action. Cheating in open green pastures.
I saw his father maybe ten or fifteen years ago at a movie theatre with a pretty young woman. Said nothing.
In the night I can hear that big laugh.
Con'd from last rock
Message from Barney to Fred on the Road to the Bronze Age.
One Thanksgiving Art and another friend took off. Live fast. Left the gripes of home and parent behind and grabbed a bus to Chicago, where a childhood friend of Art’s, Frankie, had moved the year before. I drove them to the bus stop and pledged Omerta! I would never reveal where they went to anyone for any reason.
It was cold, just a slight stick of snow on the windshield. We sat in the heat of the car with a bag of burgers between us, ten for a buck, bought at a shack mid Frankstown Road. Talked until our noses filled with the heavy smell of diesel and our ears filled with the swish of air brakes. They took a last bite, grabbed their bags out of the trunk. Left.
I lived up to that promise the next morning when the Art's father called and demanded that I tell him where his son was. "Do you know what he took with him?" Art helped himself to the stash of cash from the bottom of the dining room china closet. The roll looked round and rich, more than a few months worth of saving. "He took my gun!" Die young.
I held silence, through the onslaught dealt by my own parents who couldn’t really figure out what to make of the situation, and the glass tears of Art’s mother and the blazing indignity of Art’s father and the stern looks of the police who visited. You could see the real story in their authoritative eyes. ‘Two more juveniles we won’t have to hassle with.’
I felt that it was an unfair burden foisted on me by some imagined Italian code of honor made up from gangster novels and Mafia movies. Not only did I take the beating from all authority, but I lost my two closest friends.
Two week later they came home. One hating the other more than the other hated the other. It came out in drips in conversation in the following months. Art thought his former closest friend was a slob. “He picked up French fries that had fallen to the dirty greasy street and ate them,” in a voice that said clearly that such actions lacked dignity, honor, panache!
“We were starving!” Explained my other friend. Art and Frankie attempted armed robbery. Pleading, he stopped them from killing the victim. Somewhere along the line dreaming ideology met irrational practicality. Leopold and Loeb meet Holden Caulfield. And have a good looking corpse.
For the next year I was in one camp or the other. There would be no reconciliation. Then Art disappeared seriously. Left for New York City and did not reappear for five or more years.
We graduated from High School, failed miserably at Penn State, worked at too many poor jobs, restaurants, book stores, machinery shops, and traveled to Europe. Always gathered back in Pittsburgh.
Art reappeared as suddenly as he was gone. Relating stories of days of hustling in New York City. He had money. Taken from the suckers and the queers. As he talked I felt smaller and smaller. It was a part his hustle to grow large, laugh large, keep the world under his control. Until someone bigger and badder and one up comes along. Many people think this is a technique worth mastering. Mostly, I laugh at the foolish posturing, but catch me on a down day and you can bluster and become king of my world. For what its worth.
He finagled a position as salesmen in the phonograph record industry in the city of Pittsburgh. He got a me job with one of the many arcane companies and corporations that made up the business. I was hired to transship phonograph records, a slightly unethical practice with borders on illegal that was cross purposes with the Record Labels and Distributors. I learned how to strip shipping cartons of all but one destination label. Anonymous boxes delivered to the bus station three or four times a day. Art wore salesman well with thin ties and shining suits. He would grab me by the arm and laugh with his big laugh. 'We're still friends, Joe. We know what’s going on here' he seemed to say as he circled higher and higher with the buzzards. Flew with the mighty and high ones. I was grounded.
Winter came. I went to work at a place that made Rolling Mills for the Steel Industry.
Somewhere along the line we lost touch probably when I married and left for California. He was married with three children. Stunning beautiful wife and dissatisfied. Looking for more action. Cheating in open green pastures.
I saw his father maybe ten or fifteen years ago at a movie theatre with a pretty young woman. Said nothing.
In the night I can hear that big laugh.
Monday, June 09, 2003
Sunday, June 08, 2003 8:19:15 AM Joe Coluccio
Wait for me, Wild Bill!
Art and I were friends all the years and summers that I struggled for my PA State Driver's License. I went to the State Police Barracks at Washington Boulevard twice. Crushed by my first defeat, I managed the loops and backwards logic of parallel parking on the follow-up test a few weeks later. Freedom! As long as I could manage to talk the keys of the car out of my old man's hands.
By the tenth grade Art was gone. A runaway to New York City, heartache to his parents and sociopath to the rest of us. Live fast, we thought, die young, we fantasized and have a good looking corpse. Art came the closest to emulating Nick Romano.
He was a good looking guy, a clone of his father, his mother a clone of Barbara Billingsly caring for the Beaver, perfectly coifed, sexually repressed and suburban dressed. She tolerated me but despised the bulk of his other friends. It was a house where you left the assumption of your dirty shoes on the rug at the back door and walked in uncomfortable socks over splendid carpet that carried immaculate furniture poised on plastic leg coasters. He had a sister who was dark and voluptuous but too budding young to pay close attention.
Art's black hair swept back heavy was glued to the side of his head with the grease that passed for gel in that time. When he didn't carry it as a carrier top in the summer, it waved casually to his forehead so that he could push it back with his fat flat fingers. His nose was small straight and his lips were heavy, slightly feminine. He had a big laugh that never failed to lead us to trouble. He would start with a twisted grin, grab my arm, open his mouth and work his way up to a maniacal breaking decibel. That laugh was meant to draw me into a friendly intimacy as if to say we know, wink, a lot better than this Joe. Don’t we? Eh?
He loved to run with what passed for the rough crowd. It was in the rarefied air of Sturm und Drang and desperate scholarship that our friendship flourished. We were rebellious, outlaws, and disdained the notions of a morality being foisted upon us by the school district, the church, our parents and the President of the United States.
We imagined ourselves as a river boat gamblers, wise in the hard intentions of the world but initiates in the truly great dimensions of literate culture. He knew and quoted Annabelle Lee at the drop of a scanned meter. Was more intimidating playing pool than good. Gave hard looks at all night poker marathons and lost poorly. Our heroes were all the bad guys. But we loved the border character the best. The one that could turn terrible bad in an instant and leave all goody two shoes posturing in the dust.
Girls flocked to him with an ease that left me breathless and jealous. I drove. He made out loudly in the front passenger seat, the girl pushing passion against my legs and arms making the vehicle a lethal weapon in my inexperienced hands. Occasionally there was a double date, but the girl I was with really wanted Art and was probably as put off as I was by the loud sexual sounds that issued from often as not her sister in the rear of the car. I never made the moves. So I guess I'll never know.
One Thanksgiving Art and another friend left home. For good. This was episode one.
I remember feeling a peculiar bleakness as we walked through the cold past glowing Christmas decorations and gift displays at the then prospering East Hills Shopping Center. My friends talked of Chicago like it was the grand salvation of all their miserable existence. Come along, they said. But I never felt that I had it that bad. I would miss the warmth of my family, close and extended, during the coming vacation. The rebellion that I felt had nothing to do with the world around me. It was a heat that I carried in the center of my being that makes allowances for the imperfection of situations. I never really lost it. Carry it to this day. And I knew that Chicago could do nothing to make it better.
One night I drove them to the bus stop. Watched as they checked a bag each with the driver and stepped up on to the bus heading west dark into America. I went home, listened to the radio until I fell asleep.
Con'd on the next blog post.
Wait for me, Wild Bill!
Art and I were friends all the years and summers that I struggled for my PA State Driver's License. I went to the State Police Barracks at Washington Boulevard twice. Crushed by my first defeat, I managed the loops and backwards logic of parallel parking on the follow-up test a few weeks later. Freedom! As long as I could manage to talk the keys of the car out of my old man's hands.
By the tenth grade Art was gone. A runaway to New York City, heartache to his parents and sociopath to the rest of us. Live fast, we thought, die young, we fantasized and have a good looking corpse. Art came the closest to emulating Nick Romano.
He was a good looking guy, a clone of his father, his mother a clone of Barbara Billingsly caring for the Beaver, perfectly coifed, sexually repressed and suburban dressed. She tolerated me but despised the bulk of his other friends. It was a house where you left the assumption of your dirty shoes on the rug at the back door and walked in uncomfortable socks over splendid carpet that carried immaculate furniture poised on plastic leg coasters. He had a sister who was dark and voluptuous but too budding young to pay close attention.
Art's black hair swept back heavy was glued to the side of his head with the grease that passed for gel in that time. When he didn't carry it as a carrier top in the summer, it waved casually to his forehead so that he could push it back with his fat flat fingers. His nose was small straight and his lips were heavy, slightly feminine. He had a big laugh that never failed to lead us to trouble. He would start with a twisted grin, grab my arm, open his mouth and work his way up to a maniacal breaking decibel. That laugh was meant to draw me into a friendly intimacy as if to say we know, wink, a lot better than this Joe. Don’t we? Eh?
He loved to run with what passed for the rough crowd. It was in the rarefied air of Sturm und Drang and desperate scholarship that our friendship flourished. We were rebellious, outlaws, and disdained the notions of a morality being foisted upon us by the school district, the church, our parents and the President of the United States.
We imagined ourselves as a river boat gamblers, wise in the hard intentions of the world but initiates in the truly great dimensions of literate culture. He knew and quoted Annabelle Lee at the drop of a scanned meter. Was more intimidating playing pool than good. Gave hard looks at all night poker marathons and lost poorly. Our heroes were all the bad guys. But we loved the border character the best. The one that could turn terrible bad in an instant and leave all goody two shoes posturing in the dust.
Girls flocked to him with an ease that left me breathless and jealous. I drove. He made out loudly in the front passenger seat, the girl pushing passion against my legs and arms making the vehicle a lethal weapon in my inexperienced hands. Occasionally there was a double date, but the girl I was with really wanted Art and was probably as put off as I was by the loud sexual sounds that issued from often as not her sister in the rear of the car. I never made the moves. So I guess I'll never know.
One Thanksgiving Art and another friend left home. For good. This was episode one.
I remember feeling a peculiar bleakness as we walked through the cold past glowing Christmas decorations and gift displays at the then prospering East Hills Shopping Center. My friends talked of Chicago like it was the grand salvation of all their miserable existence. Come along, they said. But I never felt that I had it that bad. I would miss the warmth of my family, close and extended, during the coming vacation. The rebellion that I felt had nothing to do with the world around me. It was a heat that I carried in the center of my being that makes allowances for the imperfection of situations. I never really lost it. Carry it to this day. And I knew that Chicago could do nothing to make it better.
One night I drove them to the bus stop. Watched as they checked a bag each with the driver and stepped up on to the bus heading west dark into America. I went home, listened to the radio until I fell asleep.
Con'd on the next blog post.
Monday, June 02, 2003
Sunday, June 01, 2003 9:22:07 AM Joe Coluccio
The internet is high contact not high content.
A paraphrase of something that I heard via KQED's on air streaming internet feed. I dislike curt statements of this type that with subtle manipulations by the author create a whole all encompassing worldview that solves everything well into the next millennium, but I have to admit, often as not, there is something to them.
There is something high contact about the internet.
And content, which is, without doubt, lacking, may turn to be quite different than any we can imagine.
Web Logs (Blogs) are a cross between an internet home page and an autobiography or diary. They have grown from just a few five or so years ago to upwards of half a million. A lot of disparate souls desperate for communications in the electronic wilderness. I admit freely that I am one of them. And the contact over the couple years that I have been bloging is interesting.
I have come to be “in touch" with:
Two lost school friends, one from high school and one who lived two doors away from me in the "Larimar Avenue" section of Pittsburgh when we were in Kindergarten through the 2nd Grade. A school mate who I don't recall meeting other than passing in the hallways of Penn Senior High School (I've looked in the year book) but who was apparently touched enough by my writing to email me. My ninth grade English teacher who I wrote about in an earlier entry. One of the authors of a book about Shakespeare that I mentioned in another entry. The daughter of a friend who wondered some about her father's early years. And several more that that I will not mention here because I have not become reacquainted via this "blogging" effort, but are equally delightful to me and directly related to contact by means of the internet.
I cannot express in words and images satisfying enough the ecstasy of that high contact and what it has meant to me. What was it called in the dopey sixties and seventies, "a contact high"? Breathing in the new bytefilled "smoke" of the world wide web.
In earlier blog entries I have stated (as well as to anyone who would sit long enough to listen) that the primary use a computer is to amplify intelligence. I tackle tasks now that I would have found impossibly daunting precomputer. And have pointed out that at present I have little interest in artificial intelligence. Some AI could be a species dangling anew on the chain of survival. Our next rival for the new world order may be an enhanced wide slice bagel toaster. When it comes time to be sensitive to the cycles of, say, my washing machine, I will be there, as always, with waves of empathy, but for now I discount appliances and modes of transportation as places to spend my psychic tokens. There are those who would take issue with me and would also point out that the use of AI should not be limited to utility. I never claimed I was Nostradamus. The only seering I do is in a frying pan and I like the surprise that comes from discovery not fortune telling.
Therefore
I was taken completely unaware by the kind of linking that I would find via the world vast internetwork. As I sit here and think it takes my breath away. I get up in the morning go to work. Spend my day at something diverting that hopefully has some meaning beside earning the "greenbacka dollah". Struggle home in the funk of high drive traffic, write (in the backyard when the weather allows), drink a glass or two of some wine that was on sale at the State Store, read, and often as not am in bed by 9 or 9:30 PM. I see my extended family on holidays. Lackzoom meets once a week. I seldom see my children (except for my son who lives with me; come to think of it, I seldom see him either). It is the life of a monk, a hermit, a recluse. A Boo Radley kind of existence. Yet I feel close to all you. This blog contains the objects that I leave in the knot of the tree and the nearness I feel is a direct result of the "high contact" of the internet.
I always thought a great name for a drink would be a Tequila Mockingbird. Absinthe, wormwood and moonflowers? Contact!
The internet is high contact not high content.
A paraphrase of something that I heard via KQED's on air streaming internet feed. I dislike curt statements of this type that with subtle manipulations by the author create a whole all encompassing worldview that solves everything well into the next millennium, but I have to admit, often as not, there is something to them.
There is something high contact about the internet.
And content, which is, without doubt, lacking, may turn to be quite different than any we can imagine.
Web Logs (Blogs) are a cross between an internet home page and an autobiography or diary. They have grown from just a few five or so years ago to upwards of half a million. A lot of disparate souls desperate for communications in the electronic wilderness. I admit freely that I am one of them. And the contact over the couple years that I have been bloging is interesting.
I have come to be “in touch" with:
Two lost school friends, one from high school and one who lived two doors away from me in the "Larimar Avenue" section of Pittsburgh when we were in Kindergarten through the 2nd Grade. A school mate who I don't recall meeting other than passing in the hallways of Penn Senior High School (I've looked in the year book) but who was apparently touched enough by my writing to email me. My ninth grade English teacher who I wrote about in an earlier entry. One of the authors of a book about Shakespeare that I mentioned in another entry. The daughter of a friend who wondered some about her father's early years. And several more that that I will not mention here because I have not become reacquainted via this "blogging" effort, but are equally delightful to me and directly related to contact by means of the internet.
I cannot express in words and images satisfying enough the ecstasy of that high contact and what it has meant to me. What was it called in the dopey sixties and seventies, "a contact high"? Breathing in the new bytefilled "smoke" of the world wide web.
In earlier blog entries I have stated (as well as to anyone who would sit long enough to listen) that the primary use a computer is to amplify intelligence. I tackle tasks now that I would have found impossibly daunting precomputer. And have pointed out that at present I have little interest in artificial intelligence. Some AI could be a species dangling anew on the chain of survival. Our next rival for the new world order may be an enhanced wide slice bagel toaster. When it comes time to be sensitive to the cycles of, say, my washing machine, I will be there, as always, with waves of empathy, but for now I discount appliances and modes of transportation as places to spend my psychic tokens. There are those who would take issue with me and would also point out that the use of AI should not be limited to utility. I never claimed I was Nostradamus. The only seering I do is in a frying pan and I like the surprise that comes from discovery not fortune telling.
Therefore
I was taken completely unaware by the kind of linking that I would find via the world vast internetwork. As I sit here and think it takes my breath away. I get up in the morning go to work. Spend my day at something diverting that hopefully has some meaning beside earning the "greenbacka dollah". Struggle home in the funk of high drive traffic, write (in the backyard when the weather allows), drink a glass or two of some wine that was on sale at the State Store, read, and often as not am in bed by 9 or 9:30 PM. I see my extended family on holidays. Lackzoom meets once a week. I seldom see my children (except for my son who lives with me; come to think of it, I seldom see him either). It is the life of a monk, a hermit, a recluse. A Boo Radley kind of existence. Yet I feel close to all you. This blog contains the objects that I leave in the knot of the tree and the nearness I feel is a direct result of the "high contact" of the internet.
I always thought a great name for a drink would be a Tequila Mockingbird. Absinthe, wormwood and moonflowers? Contact!