April 1, 2002 7:06PM
Counterculture and counterweights

I returned to Pittsburgh in 1972, fresh from Denmark and New Experimental College, prior to that Berkeley CA from the Summer of Love onward. I had a daughter one and a half years old, a failed marriage and not much part of a dime in my pocket. My parents bailed me out and I lived with them. I was deep into alternative education and counter to culture and looking for something. One day I found it.

First:
I have been a devotee of the radio since the early days of my life. I remember having the essence scared out of me one night while my parents were out partying and my father's best friend Bettino Fragale, Bets, was babysitting. I was maybe six or seven and my brother was probably three or four. The program was Inner Sanctum, for some reason we were listening to it on the upstairs radio scary in itself because it was where my severe grandmother lived, and the story, as far as my inchoate impressionable brain could tell was about a guy that had fire in his head. I know, it sounds nuts and is probably wrong, but so strong is that image, that I can imagine ,now, a man with his head, lid open a stoked furnace blazing like the hearths of the steel mills a short distance away skirting the Mon River Valley. It still scares the bejeebers out of me. O! That image!

Eventually we got a TV and I was sunk watching Howdy Doody each day, Flub-a-dub and spaghetti and meatballs and the Gillette Friday night fights which really kind of bored me, except for the commercials and alas radio declined in the living room, as surely supplanted by the eye as the horror of a guy with fire in place of his brain turned to image fed with a visual spoon.

Came a revolution. All of this really great rockabilly, jump and jive music that throbbed, just made you feel alive with rhythm, connected. Even better pissed off, if not your parents then, every other adult you met. We had raging arguments, the tables pulled down like Murphy beds, from the walls of William Penn School Grade School, transforming the gymnasium into our lunch room, about the merits of Elvis. I contended that I had never heard a more poignant song than Heartbreak Hotel to my third grade confreres and the joy I felt at Hound Dog could hardly be spoken. And then, Chuck Berry, I was a goner. I couldn't get enough of the radio, early on, KQV and Al Noble became the station and DJ to listen to. On Saturday morning Al would play the top one hundred or so in order. It was, well it was boss or tough or whatever the hell we said. It was even cool for a while. Lee Andrews and the Hearts, Teardrops, is something that I can sing to this day. It's in my head now.

Science Fiction and Rock 'n Roll two guilty pleasures I have carried into my later years.

Sitting with my blue plastic Arvin transistor radio, AM only, there was no Frequency to Modulate on the front steps door stoop you would find me most temperate days reading Astounding Science Fiction, listening next to the rhododendron bushes and the pink flamingos that we had brought back from our I Love Lucy trip to Florida. Believe that trip has taken on mythic dimensions in my family.

Years turned I listened to soppy jazz and montavani strings, matured listened with ineffable joy to KPFA in Berkeley California, thank you Phil Elwood for my education in jazz on Sat and Sun morning, learned Scott Joplin and Django to Ornette Coleman.

I remember one frightful January snowy evening when I was alone in the farmhouse at Fosdalsgaard Danmark, ’67, with only the large vacuum tube international table top radio to DX the world. The red kitchen wooden table. I couldn't sleep well, the darkness outside, the wind blowing wickedly attacking at the thatched roof, the empty dark rooms, Jan was gone, Susan was gone, Sheldon and Betsy, Jake, Aage and Sara. I was stranded, alone in the world except the sound of Radio America and the BBC and whatever I could, distant station Brought to the red table and warm. Trying to keep as sane as possible in the dense dark cold Danish night the nearest neighbor miles away. Cold. Elvis, British Rock, Glenn Miller, snatches of foreign conversation. Alive.

So I returned to America to Pittsburgh and found this radio station. It was borrowing time from WDUQ the local NPR station in the afternoons, while struggling to get the funds to go on the air. WYEP-FM . They were asking for volunteers to help with mailing, licking envelopes etc. I called.

Eventually I became program director.

I remember the first unofficial night best. Larry called from the top of the cathedral, Klystron Tube hot and ready to broadcast. Man, I thought, the Klystron tube! There were only a few of us in the empty basement at four cable place and a small Shure mixer that we used eventually for remote radio broadcasts. Someone hooked it up. John got a twinkle in his eye. “Let’s go on the air!” he said. Just like that. I could feel the excitement that started in my stomach and buoyed me up. I was floating. We plugged in a microphone to the mixer. We were “on the air” John said some extemporaneous things, he handed the mic to me and I said something very inane. John picked up a book off a table. Alan Ginsburg’s Howl and started to read. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,…. It was a perfect start. We even got a phone call from some student in the Pitt dorms who was wondering what the hell he was hearing. Our first talk show.

Two days later the station officially launched, but the programming never matched that first peerless night.

3/30/02 Saturday 8:57 am
The journal, the journal!

In anticipation of viewing the DVD of Apocalypse Now Redux I reread Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.

I began to feel inadequate as I read (actually I "read" an audio book borrowed from the library). My experience with them tells me that, after the act of “reading”, I cannot distinguish having read the book with my inner voice from having listened with the narrator's voice. I, then, watched the movie. I decided taking the trip up river (Africa and Asia) that I could never meet a guy like Kurtz, let alone deal with him, because my life experience left me with a dearth of depth. The words of John Berrymen’s Dream Song Henry echo in my ears frequently, "I conclude now that I have no inner resources."

Yesterday morning I started to seriously structure a story that has been on my mind for some time (about Six Goddam Years, my superego, shouts unkindly. I figure that conscience stricken Joe is really the major perpetrator of the dense block that prevents the composition). I sat with writing software called Power Structure and my basement computer and worked things out with the characters and the story. The more I worked the more vapid the plot became. The more I drew the characters up, the more I was bored with them and then I thought about Conrad and Kurtz and Marlowe and the dark river and my personal situation and a glimpse of Marlon Brando's ivory billiard ball head.

The world that Conrad inhabited was different. Maybe, I divined; the world that all ingenious writers inhabit is different. I could not but wonder for the millionth time. Do I suffer enough? Which turned on, Why Don’t I suffer enough?

I remember a cartoon wherein some character meets a suffering artist (It was probably committed by Stan Freburg). The artist is a flurry of frenetic pencil line, his body as untidy as his hair which grows and flies everywhere. "Ohh!” says the character upon seeing the artist, "man, you suffer too much!"

It's not that I don't suffer. I do. I won’t bore you with my “plights and gripes” (back once again to dreaming Henry who is heavy bored). The question that comes to my mind is do I suffer enough to create? I live in a suburb in the east of Pittsburgh. The skies are blue the days they aren’t gray (Not much of a song there.) Bird’s, that don’t caw, whistle pretty ditties the long day. My neighbor does wake me on weekends with his riding mower. Sometimes the supermarket runs out of Mancini’s bread. The last war fought around here was when Braddock and Jumonville (both pretty inept as it turns out) got cut down by the French.

I grew up in Penn Hills, where I presently live. I left a couple times and broadened my horizons. I did not travel to a combat zone. I did not witness the burning of a Buddhist monk. The most traumatic time I spent in California was when two naked women and a naked dwarf walked down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. On the plus side (suffering that is) I had two bad mothers-in law and my relationships with women have been interestingly unsatisfactory. Okay this is getting close to a gripe so I’ll stop here. I was just making the point that when it comes to really good deep dark dripping miserable suffering, mine has been pretty prosaic.

Add to those facts; I just don’t make such a big deal out of things that many would treat as dire tragedy. Here I sit, after some analysis, in the ridiculous position of suffering because I don't suffer enough. Despairing because I don’t despair enough. It really does make me laugh, which adds to my minus suffer quotient.

I will never write the Heart of Darkness. But I have visited it. Of course, what else could be the reason for Conrad and Coppola's work?

Somewhere it is said, if you want the facts read non-fiction, if you want the truth read fiction. (I guess whoever said that never read Jacqueline Susann.) Finally I have decided to be seeker after the truth. The facts, unlike Joe Friday, merely interest me.

So, I sit, coffee in hand, in the very cold of my winter basement and in the sweated heat of my summer backyard and read works of varying depth. Once in awhile I steel myself for a voyage to some deep, clinging backwater. The only question that I have is how good am I am exploring my depth. Actually the question has become, Do I have a depth to explore?

Now comes the time to bear my dirty little secret. I journal, pretty much daily, and I do try to travel to the heart of my darkness. So far it is pretty bright, but I know how I work overtime to kid myself. When you look up at the night sky and see the universe of heavenly body wheeling over head, it is pretty hard to believe that all that is just for us. As I pass a tributary, a branch and I chose to explore the main course, I figure that there is more untapped in me than even I can imagine.

What was the horror that Kurtz was viewing as he drew his last breath?

3/27/2002 7:14:39 PM
Curdling Curmudgeon’s Incautious Comments

It’s hard not to love a curmudgeon and it’s even harder not to be irritated by one that is close to you. Not that I have anyone in mind. I am merely anticipating my golden years and the good time that I will have exasperating everyone I know. It won’t be that long a list because I have already alienated a whole class of people with my overweening humor and my “smarty pants” opinions.

First there is my mother who still says with a jot of irritation, “You think you know everything!”
“Not everything,” I remind her, “just the important stuff.” But we’ve had this conversation so many times that it has passed beyond cliché, become far more than stereotypical, moving, I swear, into the realm of the archetypical.

And there are my colleagues at work who steam when I forcefully expose my theories on social injustices and the ridiculous waste of all political thought. Which brings me to one of my favorite curmudgeons. This is where I got on this electronic band wagon to begin with.

My oldest friend is Phil, well he’s not that old really, I’m older, (only by a few months or maybe a year) but I have known him the longest; since 9th grade when we became fast friends sitting on the bleachers of Seneca Junior High where the Penn Hills Indians still played to glory on account of the new high school didn’t yet have a football field. And Phil had a grandfather, who, if still alive, would certainly qualify as the oldest person I know. His name was Ralph. He spoke English with an Italian accent and the sum total of all his commentary on our life and times went something like this: ”Shiiiiiiiish” a sibilant blast like a steam locomotive struggling to leave the station. He would raise his hands up in the air like a supplicant about to receive some manna from the multifarious gods of his personal mythology, then shake his head and look around the room in grave disbelief. And this subject under consideration was merely something about the weather the next day. The hiss would grow longer and louder, the look more daunting, his hands now fending off an invasion of Harpies when the TV anchor started describing the shenanigans of some politico or organization.

A scant few years later, I saw the Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers for the first time. Groucho (Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff) is the President of Huxley College. He explains to the trustees in song:
I don't know what they have to say.
It makes no difference anyway.
Whatever it is, I'm against it
I knew that I had not only heard the tuneful embodiment of Ralph’s hissing, found a new hero in Groucho, but a fruitful philosophy upon which to mature.
(Yes this is the movie with these lines that can only be attributed to SJ Perelman:
Secretary: (Entering again.) The Dean is furious! He's waxing wroth!
Wagstaff: Is Wroth out there too? Tell Wroth to wax the Dean for a while.)

When I was a growed man and somewhat down on my luck I had the immense misfortune to be employed at a place called Funland. It was in a mall on the NorseSide of Pittsburgh. It was full of pinball machines and video games, the newest of which was Breakout and the only video game on the market, very expensive, that you could play on your personal TV screen was Pong. Eventually after Sub Chaser a game was delivered that only a true Curmudgeon could enjoy. You drove a tin lizzy and tried to run over pedestrians. The gall of the designer was at least unmitigated. It was kinda fun running over those small scampering old ladies.

I wore a red jacket with Funland proclaimed across the back in bold white and baby sat inner city kids while they figured how to beat the pinball machines out of games. It was absolutely true. They exhibited genius. It would take me days to figure out their winning strategies. “What,” I used to think, “if these kids applied that kind of thinking to their math classes? Teachers would be horrified, new geometries and alien algebras would be born, the world would change, we would probably have a starship or two traveling faster than light down some local wormhole to confront Cygnus X1. Alas, they only succeeded in perplexing me and much worse Art, who was the day shift. A man of such curmudgeonly properties that Ralph, Groucho, Henry Morgan, Alexander King, Oscar Levant and I looked like small fried fish in comparison.

Art was retired from the Air Force and living quite nicely on that pension. He worked at Funland and proudly wore the red coat with the bold white writing to earn a little drinking money. He spent his time between the bar in a restaurant up the mall in the afternoon a short skip past the elevators, where my mother was manager (You didn’t think I could get such a prestigious job without knowing someone, did you?) and a couple restaurant lounges on and about 6th Street, downtown Pittsburgh in the evening.

My good friend Bill was bartender at Art’s afternoon mall abode. He knew and put up with Art long before I came and long after I left the extreme joy of Funland.

Art walks in to the bar after a tough shift down at the joint. The blinking lights, ringing bells and harsh buzzers could get to you after a while. He sits at the first stool, which was his place at the bar, upset he would be if some other mortal dared to challenge his ascendancy, and made a sound roughly like a steam locomotive that had hitherto been Phil’s grandfather’s trademark.
“What,” says Bill?
“Those damn kids!” says Art.
“Yes,” said Bill?
“They think its all fun and games down there!”

I have never been able to put it better myself. You’ve really got to admire the single minded misery that such thinking recommends. What is it that the bumper sticker says? ‘I only want to live long enough to make my children miserable.’ Well, it’s something like that anyway. God, old age is gonna be such fun.

3/25/2002 6:14 PM Monday
Hamsters into butter I churn.

I spent the first three days of last week in Kansas City, MO at a place called the Crown Center, which is an inner city mall that closes around 6 PM and is comprised of the Westin Crown Center Hotel and the Hyatt Regency, a court full with gushing fountains, the world headquarters for Hallmark Cards, three floors of middle to upscale shops and the Link. The yearly convention of the International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration. Me, gosh, a new member.

I pulled off exit 2Q from I-70 (I had spent about 850 miles on I-70 with a stop over in Columbia MO to visit my daughter and was glad for a brief moment to be at the end of the rainbow) about 4 PM on Sunday, March 17, 2002 and stared at a gaggle of police cruisers with twirling red lights directly in the path of the street that my map insisted was the key to my destination. ‘Oh, dear,’ I thought. I would have thought something a bit more crusty and salty but I was on my best behavior in a completely foreign city. I turned left, there seemed little choice.

You did notice that I carefully mentioned the date of my arrival. Even my feeble brain put together, exposed as it was to piles of green crepe being swept from the streets, and folks with silver and green plastic top hats sporting four leaf clovers, and leprechauns singin’ “Dee dee dee dee doo!”, the fact that I was facing the aftermath of the Kansas City Saint Patrick’s Day Parade.

A couple traffic lights and I saw a cop at one of the street blockades, rolled down the window and asked, meek as an Italian caught in the throes of the glory of Ireland, “Uh, excuse me, how do you get to Crown Center?” He looked daggers at me and then raised his eyebrows as if to say, “How can you be so stupid?” but said instead, “Crown Center, that’s all the way back there!” thumb pointing opposite my present travel. No doubt the direction I would have been heading had I not been cut off by parked and glowing and growling police cruisers. He added, “Go up to the corner, turn left at the light and then go a block and turn left again.” I added up two left turns, being no slouch in eighth grade geometry and figured that I would be heading 180°; directly opposite my current vector. I thanked him; cut across three lanes of traffic made the two turns and headed toward my new temporary residence.

Dumb luck and I found a handy parking space in the subterranean garage directly below the hotel. I checked in, got to my room, called the people I was to meet and immediately discovered that I had booked a room at the more inconvenient hotel. I had to travel two city blocks to get to the convention hall. And travel I did that two blocks every day at least three times, but I traveled the Link.

The Link connects the hotels and various buildings that make up the Crown Center via a two story above the ground walkway that looks like, well, that looks like those tubes that connect Hamster abodes to Hamster playgrounds. I spent three days and nights surprised that I did not find a large water bottle with stainless steel tube affixed. Regulated by a ball that would feed liquid as it was pushed mercilessly by my thirsting tongue. Something to quench my considerable thirst as I arrived at various destinations. Hot as it was in the link, I would have enjoyed dribbling the water down the front of my shirt as I vigorously, licked, sucked, gnawed and guzzled. And where the hell was the wheel? I so looked forward to cavorting and trying to climb the endless path afforded me by the Sisyphean Hamster Wheel. How different is it from the treadmill that engages, tortures me each morning at the health club? I believe that I did find pellets, but will say not one more word more about that!

The convention was a success and my trips hither and yon in the Link encouraged me to avoid the dastardly exercise devices on Floor Five. My exit from Kansas City was far more straightforward and gracious. 850 miles on I-70 East after a stop over in Columbia, MO and I was able to hit drive time traffic on the Parkway East. Not so many miles to go, but a good half hour before I could sleep.

Wednesday, March 06, 2002 7:30 PM
One from column A, a little schmaltz and more starch in that collar please.

It was 1969-1970 and I was working at a Cleaners and Tailors Supply Place on the corner of 12th and Franklin in Oakland Ca. One block off Broadway. The place was run by a brisk seventy-five year old man named Ben Rosenberg and I swear he was way healthier and younger than my twenty-four years. He was also a tough guy with a heart of gold. The place was populated by Jews who had been kept, in one case by the British in concentration camps and in the other by the Japanese in Singapore in concentration camps. They were not called concentration camps, but the effect was the much same. Later a kid without proper papers worked with us for a few months until the INS sent him back to Hungary. The two older women in accounting did not have so exotic a story as the others but they were upstanding members of the Oakland Jewish Community and Ben’s synagogue in particular.

So what the hell was a Larimer Avenue Dago doing there? Well, I loved everyone who worked there and fit in a very comfortable way. I am a pretty good worker and it was a plus that my wife Andrea was Jewish. We were Abbie’s Irish Rose in reverse. A negative Bridget Loves Bernie.

Trudy, a survivor of the hell camps in Singapore, she lost her family somewhere in Nazi Germany, taught me Yiddish. “What,” I asked one day after she disparaged a customer, “the hell, Trudy, is a schlimachel. “ She explained, “Just like a schlimazel only worse.”

Emil had graduated, at a later time, from the same high school in Linz, Austria that Adolf Hitler attended. Both Trudy and Emil had seen Hitler speak at rallies. Andre had been in Hungary when his countrymen were tossing Molotov Cocktails at Russian Tanks. It was an odd way to be touched by history, but it affected me.

Each morning I would have coffee and Danish at the Chicago Delicatessen. Then I would load up my VW bus with hangers, diatomaceous earth, bolts of cloth, and skeins of thread, make the drive across the Bay Bridge into San Fran and most definitely China Town. I knew my way around in those days. Would travel from the near orient of Rosenberg Bros. to the far orient above North Beach. It turns out, and should have been no surprise, that Chinese families involved in the laundry business in San Francisco/Oakland are all related. For some reason that must have to do with genes and chemical triggers, I was immediately liked and accepted by the families.

I would walk into a narrow store front perched in the middle of an impossibly steep street. The emergency brake on my dull green VW bus tightened to a frightening maximum. There was invariably an old man in a white shirt and black slacks, who looked like he had many of the kung-fu secrets to the world. He would point to a door that led to the back room.

Once I left that laundry façade, I entered a new world.

In the first of the many back rooms, there were always one or two women who were cooking some concoction that looked indistinguishable from the liquid that was in the swirling in the washing machines. The brew was always fragrant and often as not would smell enticing. I would smile at them as the old man pointed to another doorway. This one always led to a narrow passage guarded by a dog, who would growl and let me know just how happy I should be that he was tethered just a few inches short of me as I hurried passed. Then into another room that was full of oriental folk eating and chatting in Chinese. The corridors were endless. The building that looked so tiny from the street was as huge as the Cow Palace inside. And populated with more people than must exist on mainland China. Every place that I would deliver to, in Oakland, out in the Sunset District, in Chinatown, in Pittsburg, in Richmond, even in Contra Costa County would be the same.

I also to felt comfortable, at home with the “laundry” people. I didn’t understand all that they said, they didn’t understand much of what I said, but we did try and that was enough.

One day, in search of adventure, I asked one of the white shirted cloned keepers of the laundry, where I could find authentic Chinese Food. He told me that the best restaurant in the Bay Area was located on Broadway in Oakland at about 8th Street.

Andrea and I went along with Phil and Kay. Authentic it was. The name of the place is lost in the shards and fog of my memory, but it was a very understated place with booths on both side of the washed out lime walls. A couple thousand year eggs graced the front window, along with heavy Chinese cups and dishes full of food that looked a lot like my grandmother’s vegetable garden on Lenora Street in East Liberty.

I am probably imagining this, but as we walked up to the front of the restaurant to one of the few empty booths, I swore I saw an eyeball gaze up at me from a bowl of shark’s fin soup. I wish I could say that the food was great or horrible but I don’t remember. But I am sure it was “authentic”.

Next day at the Chicago Deli, I had a chopped liver with brown mustard on dark rye for lunch. I love schmalz!

Monday, March 04, 2002 6:57:32 PM
Perfect Pitch Relative to What?

I make no secret about it. I have a passion for the guitar. As I write I am listening to John Williams and the English Chamber Orchestra play Vivaldi. Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra in D Major. It is the D Major that will ultimately concern me in this six hundred to a thousand words.

I make it a little more of a secret how long I have been playing the guitar. It is a sordid, as are many tales of my achievements in the world, story. When I was in my early teens my parents thought that I should take music lessons. I always suspected that because we couldn't afford a piano that the guitar became the primary instrument for me. That and the fact that my Uncle Augie and Uncle Rab would do a mean Five Foot Two or Dark Town Strutters Ball on either the six-string guitar or the four-string ukulele at family get-togethers. Music, even then, held charm for me. One, Two, Three, I thought, Look at Mr. Lee. An instructor was employed and he would visit the house weekly, making clucking sounds and little marks on Mel Bey's Method for Guitar. I played them all with equal enthusiasm, Mary and her Little Lamb; I toiled with the Volga Boat Man, more marks in the lesson book and learned at least the first position play on all six strings. My talent was less obvious and it was a lot to ask to sit in my bedroom while everyone was playing whiffle ball outside. I was, after all is said and done, a failure. My teacher eventually suggested that I try another instrument and we actually rented an accordion. Lady of Spain was never my favorite piece of music and I still cringe when I hear Dick Contino at the Italian festival.

Let us now move forward to the years immediately following high school. In the days of my abortive attempt at a college education. I discovered Miles and Ornette and Charlie Parker, but I was intrigued by Wes Montgomery. Further my new college found friend Steve played a wonderful deep hued F-hole Sunburst Gibson pretty well in the jazz idiom. And then I heard Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and progressed beyond Brownie Maghee and Sonny Terry to a whole host of Texas and Mississippi and Loosiana Blues. When my school career ended abruptly, I picked up a Grey Painted F-Hole Silvertone Guitar from Sears donned a blue work shirt, jeans and played until my fingers bled on those thick steel strings. I was on my way to glory!

Somewhere along the line I heard Carlos Montoya. I did not understand the difference between Classic Guitar (It is the word that Aaron Scherer prefers to Classical) and Flamenco. Impressed by the fireworks, I promptly traded my jazz guitar for my first nylon string round holed guitar and I began to study. Vicariously, through his method, with Aaron Scherer. Four maybe six hours a day.


Fernando Sor, Mauro Guiliani, Matteo Carcassi. I discovered the difference between Segovia and Montoya and first heard via phonograph the man that Segovia called the Crown Prince of the Guitar, John Williams, he was and remains a marvel to me. I saw him perform in San Francisco and never really recovered from the experience.

Petty Music, Liberty Avenue, Downtown Pittsburgh, Spring of 1965 I bought a Guild Classical Guitar. Paid $300 bucks for it. It is at this moment in the repair shop because the bridge has lifted. That guitar traveled the world with me. I don't play it much any more, but imagine it is worth a lot of money because of inflation and age.

Here it is, what, thirty-five years later? I am a quirky guitarist at best. I still study from Volume Two of Aaron Scherer's method. I have some knowledge of the higher guitar positions and can fingerpick a Travis pattern (play Railroad Bill with the best of them). Mediocre, yet satisfied and certainly more pleased than I would have been playing the 'cordeen.

Lately it has been bothering me, as I also try to pick up some keyboard technique, that my musical knowledge or more properly my ear is so untrained. Enter David Lucas Burge.

If you read the mags, namely Guitar Player or Keyboard (and there is no good reason that you should) somewhere, usually near the end, there is a two page advertisement that is essentially a story about David Lucas Burge and how he discovered that everyone can have Perfect Pitch. You don't have to be born with it. The short of it, I bought his message and his course and although I can't yet say that it works, it has sufficient merit that I will continue through the lessons.

Of course, along with the course, came another advertisement for Relative Pitch, which works in concert with Perfect Pitch. Not the same thing at all. Perfect Pitch is of the heart and Relative Pitch is of the mind. Today, with the morning mail, came the Relative Pitch course. It is an attempt on my part to actually become a musician. At present I am merely a technician and not very inventive at that.

So, me re do. Solveggio and begorrah. I look forward to the day when I can say, after hearing the beginning chord of some rhapsody, IGod that there bit of harmony was was an Augmented 7th, Flatted 11th, Flatted 13th and Eb was in the root position. The smallest things please me!

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Wednesday, January 23, 2002 6:10:07 PM
The names have been changed to protect gl'innocenti.
The first house that I really remember was on Carver Street in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh. 33 Carver Street to be exact. Carver is a tributary to the great Italian American River, Larimer Avenue. I need only say, Kingsley House, Meadow Grill, Red Eagle, Italian Pastry, Sparky's Texaco, to bring memory and drool to my relatives and a dwindling group of old timers.
When Dennis Farina proclaims in the move Striking Distance, "I'm only a Larimer Avenue dago." My family cheered!
The house still stands, and in truth, doesn't look much different now than it did then, but you will no longer find my grandmother, stern woman in black with her white hair pulled back sharply on her head, inhabiting the second floor. Nor will you see and my brother and I stuffed up in the back window of our two door coupe as my mother drove us off to go shopping upstreet.
Upstreet was East Liberty and it was a pretty vibrant place in those days. Somewhere along the line urban planning intervened and this radiant city area was cut off completely. An island created, that left to its own devices, folded in on itself. Even though it has been opened to traffic again, it is still hard to enter and leave and is mostly bypassed. There were five movie theaters. I can name them. The Liberty, The Camerphone, The Sheridan Square, The Enright and The Regent. I spent summer days gnawing popcorn from the balconies, watching Errol Flynn, Don Ameche, John Payne, Robert Taylor, Tarzan in all his guises, Randolph Scott, John Wayne and numerous others save the free world and the western intellectual position.
I traveled upstreet with my group of Carver Street urchins. We were all within a year's age of each other. We all attended Dillworth School. We would make the sign of the cross when we passed Divine Providence. We all took catechism at Help A Christian Church. I can remember the unwashed smell of brown clothed monks as the passed us in the street. Some secret Holy Odor, no doubt.
On the way to school we traversed the Meadow Street Bridge. One of the older guys grabbed Charles' arms and hung him over the side of the bridge, his feet dangling over Negley Run far enough below that he would not survive the fall. It was great fun, and perhaps the reason that I have an unreasonable fear of heights.
For adventures, we would visit the haunted house. When we threw rocks and awakened Casper and his brood, we would run screaming down the hill, cross Negley Run and climb up the million or so steps to the safety of our neighborhood.
My father bought home a box turtle, which I let, roam in the slim strip of concrete that we called the side yard. My friends convinced themselves that it was a snapping turtle. And that snapping turtles could bite you fingers off, if they grabbed you, not to mention the horror of losing your nose. One afternoon I came out to the side yard and someone had smashed the turtle with a large rock. Ignorance. I sigh now, I cried then.
We returned from a movie trip to the Sheridan Square where we had all seen The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms. The dinosaur on the very screen before us had bitten a guy right in half. We sat in T's backyard which was damp from the rain and discussed the ramifications of large reptilian creatures devouring their way from Penn Avenue, squashing The Original Hot Dog and the Flamingo (a roller skating rink). As the creature approached we got more and more spooked. Then someone thought about fossil evidence that these Thunder Lizards had roamed Carver Street, munching second and third generation Italians as they stalked. And T showed us a wet leaf that was stuck to the concrete pad of his porch. Carefully he lifted the leaf and as he did the unmistakable outline of none other than old T-Rex was revealed. We took one thoughtful long communal look at the wet green imagined pattern and ran in terrified disarray from the yard. I am not sure that I ever returned.

Monday, January 21, 2002 6:43:11 PM
Tonight we are taking calls from Time Travelers Only!
In the good old days before my snappy broadband connections, after my glass of warm milk and depositing my slippers on the floor, I would turn on one of three radio talk show stations and sail off to slumber land with either a conservative talk show hack on one, a slick sports talk show guy on the other, or some dreadful combination of both on the third. Not really satisfactory, but it was better than counting sheep. Nowadays I tune into stations across the world and sleep to the morning traffic patter in Australia, or the hot late night subjects in London, or Wisconsin Public Radio which rebroadcasts its morning and afternoon shows, or WGN in Chicago. It is swell fare for a radio talkanatic like me. Sleep inducing eventually, but deeply satisfying nonetheless.
Regardless, or is that irregardless of the broad cast or band invariably, after four hours of sound sleep I awaken and listen for some hint of what portion of the universe has me. One evening, pre-broadband, I awoke to the Art Bell program. Art was saying, "Tonight we are taking calls from Time Travelers Only! My first sleepy thought was 'Oh, good, the Time Traveler (for so it will be convenient to think of him) would surely call. I came out of my stupor with an image of Rod Taylor dressed in Victorian splendor, followed quickly by one of Yvette Mimieux more casually clothed. Closer to fully awake I thought rationally, but, Art, we are all time travelers. Was anyone free to call? I fell back to sleep before any Time Traveler actually called. Alas!
I am a Time Travel addict. Stories of Time Travel have intrigued me since my earliest days. Jack Finney's wonderful and ironic Third Level stories and later novels, a few classics on The Twilight Zone, The Door into Summer, By His Bootstraps by Robert A. Heinlein, to be sure HG Wells and his Time Traveler, Movies: The Philadelphia Experiment, 12:01, even Groundhog Day which is based on 12:01, Back to the Future One and Two, The Time Machine, Late For Dinner, Time and Again.
It is the perfect literary device. Mailer's Time Machines in The Naked and the Dead, Proust's exquisite remembrances from his cork lined Parisian room. It is also a delicious fantasy. I have an image of me, present day, returning to the me sitting on my Maple Avenue porch, set between rhododendron bushes punctuated by beautiful Florida Cast Pink Flamingos, listening to Al Nobel, KQV, list the top songs of the week in order on my brandy new electric blue Arvin Transistor Radio. One Two Three Look At Mr. Lee. Damn! Anyhow, I go up to myself and hand me one of those Sony Watchmen or the like and leave with a smile on my face as a look of comprehension appears on my younger face. I have thought about a Pocket PC or a Laptop computer, but I'm not sure I would have figured them out so it complicates the fantasy. As a kid I was always waiting for someone from the future to rescue me, take me into deep and mysterious adventure. Why not me?
Tonight I am taking dreams from Time Travelers Only!

I haven't talked about the group, the Lackzoom Acidophilus for a while. What’s' so funny about that? I hear you sniggering in the back rows! There's not much gets passed me sharply pointed ears. Come to think about it there is a laughable problem: nothing funny here, at least not anything new that is funny. The Web Site, www.lackzoom.org, has not changed one iota (how much is an iota? just another damned foreign term creeping in to our pristine American language.) since its night of inception. But we have vowed to have a commencement date of April 1, 2002. Surely you see the significance! Hey, wait a minute May 1, 2002 is the celebration we were talking about. Wow, here is a gargantuan idea. I am stunned as I sit here thinking and chewing a cup of very black and tarry coffee left in the microwave about two weeks ago, that no one has really thought of this before. Hello, World, Joe is about to put forth one original idea. One to add to my plank when I run for president, although I think I have a winner already. I swear that if I become the president of the United States of America. I will run on one issue (anon I'll muck it up with another): I don't really care who decides, perhaps a lottery of immense proportion is in order, but that person, place or thing will decide and put to rest something that is holding the whole of construction in the world - namely - Philips or slotted! Do not mock me and talk to me about Torx or Roberston, they are and remain peculiar abominations, a hex on... hey what about hex? And those hermaphroditic Philips/Slotted combinations. Hmmm, this is definitely more complex than I thought. My plank is looser than I thought. Sirrah, hand me please, a screwdriver. What's that you say? Uhhh I guess a Philips....
Okay new plank in my platform. Let the beginning day of each month be named after some frivolous activity and create a new patron saint to make medals for the dashboards of our cars. Look I know this is mixing the state and religion, but I think the ACLU might give me a pass this once. I haven't got them all figured out now but a few have the ring of authenticity. November 1, National Nitpicking Day in honor of Saint Caspar Melchiortoast. or August 1, National Vacational Road kill Day in honor of Saint Peta the Beast, or one last effort March 1 National Act like a Lemming Day in honor of Saint Victoria of the Falls. Any suggestions?
Now for the invention that will yet make me a rich man. I'm sure you have had the problem of a stripped nut or bolt, the edges terrible rounded off. I have the solution! A closed end wrench that by virtue of being completely round fits perfectly over the troubled head of the bolt, nut or lag screw. This idea alone will revolutionize the world. How about, and I can't begin to tell you how thrilled I get just thinking about this, a solar powered flashlight. Yes, friends, it gets its power, for free, from the sun and like those solar calculators you know and love, it will also work without a worry in a lighted room. I have more but I am reluctant to write them in such a public place. Don't worry, you're gonna hear bigger and even better things from me!

Since I had my cardio logical tussle, I have been thinking about stress, which, of course, serves to enhance and aggravate the amount of stress that I am feeling. Hhmmm! I thought that pondering ideas was supposed to bring me to a deeper understanding and that this new understanding would in turn ameliorate the tension. No wonder the Greeks were walking around so much. This evening I will work on this potent subject until I WORK MYSELF UP IN TO A RAGGED FRAZZLE!
I remember back in the good old days when I stayed up late reading Understanding Media, that McLuhan often wrote about a guy named Hans Selye. (Anyone is free to correct me and my spelling, because I refuse to look all this up on the internet. I am high in my memory, working without a net.) who wrote a book called The Stress of Life. I believe that old Hans posited that life was stress. That we, without stress, would sit around like the Eloi on our clump of paradisiacal ground and quite possibly be eaten by the Morlocks. I know HG had a more political dialectic in mind, but I, in high memory and traveling freely in time, win this day.
Hans further pointed out that there were two kinds of stress. Dis stress. The bad stuff that wakes us in the middle of the night wondering who we killed and why we can't pay our bills and when is the Sheriff coming with his warrants and why we ate that extra piece of pizza with everything on it but the anchovies, no anchovies because Aunt Lucy was over and she thinks fish is something for her fourteen cats in the morning. And Eu stress ( a Eu is a sheep hence sheep stress, or was it good in Sanskrit or Old Icelandic? It was definitely good in some academically delight filled language. Greek it is! Because it is all Greek to me) which is the good stress that drives us forward in our lives and keeps the big fangs of the Morlocks away from our pantry.
I decide to look for good stress. And in truth I find eu and dis are very close to each other. For example, I want to write three times a week to this Blog. The thought pleases me. Eustress. Then it turns out that to write three times a week, I must actually sit down at a keyboard and compose this stuff in my head. Still eu but definitely heading toward dis. Then I am tired after a day of work and wouldn't it be great just to lay with only a tattered vestige of mind in front of the menu of myriad channels on cable TV and gawk at beautiful firm breasted women with hardly any facial hair who smile at me and just make me feel great. See where this eu is leading me, but dis on my other shoulder is saying. Remember you were going to write this evening. Now what was a very positive eu is becoming a very onerous dis. I finally decide that those women only like me as long as I pay my monthly bill to AT&T Broadband. So tonight diseustrss has won out and I am tacking away.
But I don't know whether this is an act of life or and act of desperation.
Now that I am winding down, I feel a sense of accomplishment I have just poured a nice glass of the same Chianti that I was drinking on Monday, eustress, it tastes fruity full of Sangiovese grapes, distress, because I opened the bottle two days ago and horrid oxygen has been eating away at the wonderful taste. But eustress to the rescue, I don't know that much about wines and my palette is definitely better for the varieties of diet colas. Non-knowledge (eu-know), and some alcohol, spreads the tension from my limbs. Hans baby, Marshall, baby, I hope you won't find it too maudlin if I tell you I love you both! Ciao!

Hey thatsa some plump tomata!
My Boss, his name is Tom, walks in one morning, announces "You know, Reynoldsburg Ohio, is the birth place of the tomato." and pretty much leaves. I, of course, keeper of the Mediterranean position on such important issues, am stunned. How could anyone claim that the birthplace of the tomato is in Ohio. The very thought of it made me laughed. I laughed!
I think about the fact that colonists in New England thought that the tomato was poisonous. Wasn't Plymouth Rock before Johnny Appleseed was a dream in his mother's core let alone marching through Ohio spewing his seed. Think about it? Birth place of the apple maybe! But how could Ohio be the birthplace of the tomato. Weren' t they putting a fine marinara on all that spaghetti that Marco Polo and his Uncles brought back from the Orient? That was Italy and a couple centuries short of Ohio!
But he, Tom, and his son tell me they have both seen the sign, Birthplace of the Tomato, that adorns the City of Reynoldsburg or is it a Corporation? A little geography please. Reynoldsburg is an eastern suburb of Columbus. And wasn't that city named after the glorious Italian Explorer Christopher Columbus who discovered India, okay so he was half a world away, but there was no AAA back in those days to provide a Triptych showing heavy construction delays around the Canary Islands. Nor did he have a GPS that could plot his location on the earth to within the skin of a that self-same tomato that concerns us here today.
Nor does he have a high speed cable internet connection at 1.5 Gbps download, sadly only 100 kbps upload to keep me from being a server. So I look up The History of the Tomato. It irks me! Tom is kinda right. I hang, as I'm sure you do, expectantly on "kinda".
The True Story of the Tomato. Here is what I remember. I'm not looking it up again.
The tomato a product originally of Spain was an ugly small football shaped orange thing with spines that ran the length of it. Looking a lot like a wrinkled plum tomato only not nearly so healthy. It was eaten and sauced in Spain, in France and in Italy. Remember Columbus and the really swell bunch of guys that followed him looking for El Dorado and killing whole populations of Yucatan and Mexico Indians. Well those Grandees brought this sick little tomato with them.
It took some time about three or four centuries but the sickly icky little tomato wended it's way north. Let's skip forward to about 1870 when a man named Alexander W. Livingston (Mr. Livingston, I presume) bred and horticultured our wild growing tomato into a variety he called Paragon and five years later he invented the Acme tomato. Why, I am thinking to myself at this moment, a glass of fine Chianti at the ready (at least, Ohio doesn't claim the grape), didn't they call him Alex Tomatoseed? History clearly needs some revision! I know I haven't made it manifestly clear, but old Livingston was the pride of Reynoldsburg Ohio. And if you go to the web site, (I could not resist) not only does a tomato flash fly around for a little, but Reynoldsburg is proclaimed the Birthplace of the Tomato. But subtle reader look under the address of the municipal building and read: and I copy and paste: Birthplace of the Domestic Tomato! Exclamation mine. For proof I give you the URL http://www.ci.reynoldsburg.oh.us/ and I rest my case. What was my case? I forget! But I like Joe Colombo who got shot down by the mob in New York City at a rally proclaiming that Italians are not, as apparently he, mobsters and second class citizens, will not be pushed around. As for Tom, well, I'll make him an offer!

Penna Turnpike 2 miles.
So I'm driving in Ohio because our company has more work to the West, and I see a sign that says Penna Turnpike 2 miles. For those of you familiar with I-80/I-76, that puts me about a mile past the last rest stop in Ohio, which has a McDonalds , a bathroom and a tourist center, and milling people with confused expressions on their faces. Then I see a sign that says Ohio Bids You Adieu! Okay, It doesn't really, but the point is that Ohio is spelled out in full. I finally cross no man's land, the Turnpike twilight zone, the Interstate DMZ and know I am back in PA Firma for two reasons, one is that my speed must by proper highway law drop precipitously, and two, a large sign that says, Welcome to Pennsylvania!
Once in my home state,thoughts began to rise and fill in my rather empty craw. PA Turnpike 2 miles would be acceptable, but why stint on letters. I mean what is wrong with Pennsylvania, the long spelling, and where is Penna anyway? I mulled over it the whole way home while I nipped at my moustache with my teeth, which I finally clipped the next morning, and went into a fitful sleep. Counting letters and never above five - P-E-N-N-A. Why not, my last thought, before my journey to Cloud Cuckoo Land and Aristophanes, P-E-N-N, at least it was the same length as O-H-I-O.
I awoke early and fit as a fiddle, after shower I played the hair of my mid-back with the towel as a bow, as I danced a jig and wrastled my teeth and yea! and verily took my new medications. When I walked into the office I was greeted with the ubiquitous office phone pink call memo from a customer saying, "Hey, tomorrow, would be a great time to meet with you." Of course, tomorrow was now today and his particular firm is in......, can't fool you reader....., Ohio, only not so far west as the previous day.
I make the trip. I make the meeting. Finally I turn my noble Taurus East, pat its snout, give it a light peck on the hood and head toward the sunrise. There, confronting me almost immediately, at the Tollbooth, are two signs, one says Penna Turnpike and East - Pittsburgh, the other Ohio Turnpike and West - Cleveland. I stifle the oblivious bad taste in my mouth that the Pittsburgh/Cleveland football team rivalry has nurtured over the years. Once took a guy to a Pittsburgh/Cleveland game (the outcome was glorious!) who had lived in the Allegheny County for almost seven years, a transplant from Cleveland, and he was digging great gouts with his fingernails out of the Three Rivers Stadium Seats. It is a deep seated and perhaps ugly prejudice, but it is all ours and both sides will kill you if you mess with it.
Where was I.... oh yes Pittsburgh was spelled out. Cleveland was spelled out. Ohio was spelled out. But BUt BUT Poor Pennsylvania was designated Penna!
Time, I think, to right wrongs, correct injustices, to strike back! How about What's Round On The Ends And High In The Middle Turnpike 2 miles, printed in large lavender letters as you approach Ohio from PA roads. Or spell it, Oiho, backwards or abbreviate Ohi Turnpike 2 miles!
I tell you I was muttering to myself all the way to the state line. Then I was very hungry and I had to eat dinner. I don't like to think what I would have done if food hadn't intervened, after a trip to the hardware for a couple cans of white and green spray paint.
Did you know that Reynoldsburg Ohio is the birth place of the tomato? I didn't think so!

Thursday, January 03, 2002 6:56:00 PM
Alright!
Don't be too hard on me. I was released from the hospital a few days ago. My birthday to be exact, December 31, 2001. At three o'clock pm just about the time I walked, short of breath from the cold and from my symptom into the emergency room a East Suburban Forbes Regional Center East, or whatever it is now called, three days prior. I thought it was pneumonia. It was something quite different.
See, I knew I was in trouble when I walked out of the Best Buy with my brand new Yamaha Sub Woofer and a couple of deep sounded DVDs. I could hardly carry the box to the car. I was winded like a hundred yard dash and I hadn't walked much more than fifty feet. I struggled, drove home and called the Doctors office. They said, Son, hie yourself up to an emergency room. Three hours in the waiting room and I was dragged back to the emergency floor, where began a series of punctures, pricks and pokes that lasted for a three day period. I admit it. I was optimistic. Thought I would end up going home with an antibiotic to stop the encroachment on my lungs. It is now about eight o'clock in the evening and the ER doctor is saying something about Congestive Heart Failure and I am definitely not going home.
Think about that name for a minute. I must first tell you that I know absolutely nothing about diseases and their names. I never watched ER and I was more interested in the quirkiness of St. Elsewhere. The doctor says, with a certain glibness, evidence of congestive heart failure, which makes my you-know-what that is as equally ignorant as my brain start pitter pattering more quickly. For those of you like me in the dark, Congestive Heart Failure does not exactly mean that your heart is failing. It means that the heart (your heart - my heart) is not pumping enough blood to your system. It is not a good thing, but couldn't they call it Congestive Heart Condition? So liquid builds up in various conduits to and from the heart, spills out into you system and finds itself in your lungs or legs or stomach. Mine was in my lungs and thus the shortness of breath. Pretty common symptoms it turns out. Classic!
So they start me on antibiotics, because the x-ray indicates some evidence of pneumonia and then they give me the devil's drug, I'll probably spell this wrong Lasix (Okay I looked it up) which makes you urinate frequently and long. Not really a social drug is it? So after a couple liters and more plunges and pulses I was admitted to a room around eleven PM. Worried, not at all tired, hooked to a pump that put nitroglycerin in my system at a specified drip rate. I now know how my computer feels after I have hooked up several peripherals. The nitro gave me massive and grand head aches. "Oh," said the nurses, "headaches are good!" I rolled my eyes and swallowed gratefully the Tylenol proffered.
Of course it wasn't pneumonia or a viral infection that enlarged my heart. After stress and cardiograms and irradiation it turns out that sometime in my life I had a "silent" heart attack which damaged my left ventricle. The chamber that pumps blood out to my body. My heart is weak and needs help. I also am diabetic, have high blood pressure and, although not terrible, high cholesterol. Healthy, eh?
The upshot is that I now face a life style change. Not really a problem. I was trying before by exercising and eating less. Low sugar, low salt (by the way all prepared food have salt) and low fat. But I think the thing that disturbs me the most is that I have become a "pill person" and those medicine names that sounded to me like the names of Arab terrorists are becoming all too familiar. Soon I will be exchanging tips with everyone about my secrets to beat my poor battered body into a healthy ruddiness. I think it goes with the territory. What next, yellow pants, green jersey and white shoes?

Sunday, December 23, 2001 8:36 AM

Family Christmas Party Prayer Dec, 24, 2001 Sometime in the evening.

I live, as we all do, in a myriad of intertwining worlds.
You can almost draw it out in a logical diagram.

Circles within circles intersecting circles.
Here is the circle of my beloved children, brother, sister-in-law, niece and mother and father, the expanding circle of Cousins, Aunts, Uncles, Second cousins, Third cousins, Nominal cousins, some living some passed on but all with us. Here is the office where I work, here are my long term friends, here my comedy group compatriots, and there receding like galaxies in the expanding universe are the circles of dear and scattered friends from college at Skyum Bjerge, Thy, Danmark, other offices other times, people who I shared in the Summer of Love in Berserkley California, a cluster of high school friends; ever farther out, grade school, and yes even the people from Larimar Avenue whose streets and names reverberate so deeply within me. But as these circles intersect and connect, shrink and grow, I look more closely at the universe that encompasses them. I discover something.
All of these worlds of mine sit, live and react on the deep field of family.

It is Family that nourishes and accepts and expects the best.
What a remarkable thing!

For I realize that there are lost souls in the world who are not nourished or accepted. And when the wind blows they blow with political and social movements that mimic the field of family and what is expected is not always the best. Quite the contrary!

This tradition that we all share tonight, which seems only a few years old, but which really was started by our parents and influenced by their parents and so on ad infinitum is the supreme representation of family. We meet here tonight and mix all of our circles and make them more rich, more complex and we breath in this night in this room the sustenance that keeps all the intricacies of the circles of our lives vibrant, glowing. We go from this room, this night, into the world and every one of the people that reside in our circles on the field of our family are carried and influenced by us and their circles in their turn influence and enrich us.
So are we all blessed!
Amen