Wednesday, October 02, 2002 6:53 PM
Hari Selden is Dune but not forgotten
It is my habit to read several books at a time. Which leads to interesting discussions, remember the time that old Flem Snopes (quite a name, Bill) caught Hans Castorp crossing the River Styx?
I am reading three, count ‘em, three science fiction classics in various guises and under varied posthumous authorship. At a large retail book shop this weekend I weakened. Purchased for 30% off the cover price the latest web of Dune, The Butlerian Jihad. The beginnings of all, the Bene Gesserit, The Guild, Arrakis, the Harkonnens, the Atriedes.
Last summer I read, with growing dismay and more and more pain Frank Herbert’s entire saga. After the first and magnificent Dune, it is definitely a downhill romp traveling an ever steeper uphill path. The story line passes strange into the plain unpleasant. I picked up the Prelude to Dune novels, Brian Herbert (the son) and Kevin Anderson, breezed through House Atreides with some interest, but stopped dead after a chapter or two of House Harkonnen (not really a fault of the book, jes’ little ole me) and have House Corinno sitting on the shelf along with the raucous jeers of many a neglected volume as I move from room to room in the middle of the night. I have read with some interest the first 50 or 60 pages of this new so-called legends (Butlerian Jihad – Volume 1) trilogy.
Never satisfied with a subject that reveals way too much I moved on to the Prelude to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series. Strangely called by the then older and mutton chopped Doctor, Prelude to Foundation, an intimate portrait of Hari Selden in the years that he formulated “psychohistory” The three Foundation novels did not leave me panting for more on my initial perusal. My second reading was only slightly more friendly. (An aside: I was recently pleased by some of Asimov’s musings in his Guide to Shakespeare; the good Doc actually gave me some interesting information and insight). On I will to Foundation’s Edge, I think. The whole series chronology is mucked up because Isaac insists on including his Robot novels in the timeline. The three B’s of science fiction have added to the confusion, Greg Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin, each contributing a volume in the Second Foundation Trilogy, unless of course another B wants to join in for a fourth. Oh no maybe they will continue in alphabetical order..A for Asimov, B for etc…)
This strange call for synthesis in the last days of writing also affected Robert A. Heinlein, who decided to include everyone and every fiction in his last (and mostly unreadable) novels. The Beast of the Apocalypse becomes 666 to the 666th power parallel universes. Sherlock Holmes, Julius Caesar, Flem Snopes, D’Artagnan, Winston Churchill, and Isabel Archer meet Michael Valentine Smith, Lorenzo Smythe and Lazarus Long. (River World (Philip Jose Farmer) another trilogy that has swelled to five or more, was a river along whose banks everyone who ever lived resided, Mark Twain and Mussolini some of the heroes) (Is this just a science fiction trend or does it reside in Yoknapatawpha County as well?) Perhaps this is why I have enjoyed reading such a constant mélange of genre and form. Am I longing for my end synthesis?
I start my four or fifth re-reading of Stranger in a Strange Land. My first in 9th grade French class buried under the Allons Mes Amis textbook (or was that Dune?). Poor Heinlein, libertarian and gracious soul, was plagued by long haired sixties Manson looking gurus who showed up at his Colorado Springs home looking to grok and share water. Must have been a trial!
At least Stranger has no prequel or sequel although the uncut edition has been released. However by working within his later synthetic ideal, he has made the longest series of all. His “future history” is not only the bulk of all his work, but all human endeavor. I will be a long time on this reading trail.
I have all but abandoned TV. (Watch Tech TV and schmaltz romance movies on the weekends and sometimes fall asleep like a puppy dog satisfied with the ersatz ticking of his mother’s heart). I look in the weekly entertainment magazine of the newspaper longing for a movie. After I darken my seeking finger with newspaper ink pressing passionately down the list of theaters and times, I usually shrug and decide to stay home. Hollywood has been taken over by screenwriters who believe that foreshadow, special effect and subtext pass for visual and story. Misguided. Stage plays and live music cost more than my disposable income can bear. I write, but le bon dieu and I know how much satisfaction that affords.
In the third century of the greater galactic era Joe warped off to Andromeda Galaxy. He said he went out after a bag of chocolate flavored rice cakes….
Wednesday, October 02, 2002
Monday, September 30, 2002
September 30, 2002 6:42 PM
The fires are damped; the smoke has thinned, clear sailing ahead. Look yonder! Freedom when we pass the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis.
I cleaned my basement this weekend. A small corner with deep piles of unnecessary books and accumulated papers (now stacked up near the street for tomorrow’s trash pick-up). Deep behind a bookshelf that leans like it belongs to German expressionist set, tables stacked with appliances, cups, glasses and utensils, a wine rack, there now lies a clear desk in the midst of a secret garden for wrapping myself, when several inches of blizzard snow are berating us from the west, and writing. It is autumn and soon the chill will chase me from the patio or my handy dandy summer made picnic table down near the woods where the West Nile Virus breeds.
I cleaned with a terrible crick in my back which has developed into creak enough to make me writhe in protest when I sit too long this way, or that. Post prandially I applied myself to this dark corner, popped a Martin Denny cassette into the player and now I sit as Quiet Village takes me, macaws and other jungle birds, down the river. My stomach, not unlike Charlie Olnutt's gurgles from the mounds of tomatoes that I piled into my salad. I hope that I don’t have to pass the Queen through a swampy mass of leeches. Why? You may well ask, Martin Denny? Some may even ask, who Martin Denny? Well it is terribly tacky, and although I don’t have any tiki lamps or bamboo evident in my décor (not a single purple mottled green delighted drink with an umbrella stir, not a saried maiden to relieve the tension of the day (I guess maybe such a maiden might well increase my blood pressure, negating the effects of all those lovely drugs that I take in the morning), but I do have Martin and his band of cawing musicians, with piccolo skratchers, chop blocks, triangles, tambourines, tambale bells and crashers filling my ears with the exotic strains of Hawaiian music (Aloha Oy!) and flattening my alpha rhythms to a dream like enough state that I can write irreverent and irrelevant forever.
Lackzoom (less Foley who was oozing from an attack of poison ivy) met last Friday at the Squirrel Cage. We, Marc, Dean, Phil and I, tossed down a couple pitchers and ate in the modified Lackzoom style that a couple heart attacks and delicate stomachs can now allow. We asked the waitress for a sampling of fine snack that adorned the back wall of the bar. We look too mature, too sedate, not a tattoo or piercing adorning us, the poor young thing took us seriously. So we guided her through a menu of gently baked not fried pretzels, sour cream and dazzle chips, we stopped short at the Pork Rinds. Times and physiologies just ain’t what they used to be. Let me explain.
IN THE OLD DAYS, After a performance we would unwind up at this Squirrel Hill Bistro. I can now state with great objectivity that you would never find anyone sitting close to us because our heritage would show, the guardedness of a Greek after hours club, the secret bitter sweetness of a Jewish religious ceremony, the raucous rambling of an Irish wake and the obstinate enrollment rites of Cosa Nostra. In short, we managed through the entire snobbery of our family camaraderie to be an almost totally unbearable group. Tolerable only to ourselves. We would laugh! Talk about the show and before the owners decided that they had enough and would toss us on to Forbes Avenue we would manage to eat Lackzoom style!
One of every snack from behind the counter, opened and poured on the table, mingled with the puddles of booze, beer, plastic bag and cigarette ashes in a frightful volcanic mound. In we would dive. Grabbing handfuls of the most redolent prepared snacks ever created by our western intellectual tradition. Yelling above the incessant beat of the juke box, talking over the mutters of neighboring tables, joking freely, discussing the universe of comedy discourse, making a bubbling boiling world, oblivious to the secondary world of our dulling senses. Sometimes the waitress got it, some times she didn’t. That was part of the grand blast! The other customers steered a course around us to the balcony seats or the rest rooms in the rear next to the pin ball machines, which still smell of the same urinal cakes.
By these tasty chips we are in hock to Senor Wences once again.
The fires are damped; the smoke has thinned, clear sailing ahead. Look yonder! Freedom when we pass the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis.
I cleaned my basement this weekend. A small corner with deep piles of unnecessary books and accumulated papers (now stacked up near the street for tomorrow’s trash pick-up). Deep behind a bookshelf that leans like it belongs to German expressionist set, tables stacked with appliances, cups, glasses and utensils, a wine rack, there now lies a clear desk in the midst of a secret garden for wrapping myself, when several inches of blizzard snow are berating us from the west, and writing. It is autumn and soon the chill will chase me from the patio or my handy dandy summer made picnic table down near the woods where the West Nile Virus breeds.
I cleaned with a terrible crick in my back which has developed into creak enough to make me writhe in protest when I sit too long this way, or that. Post prandially I applied myself to this dark corner, popped a Martin Denny cassette into the player and now I sit as Quiet Village takes me, macaws and other jungle birds, down the river. My stomach, not unlike Charlie Olnutt's gurgles from the mounds of tomatoes that I piled into my salad. I hope that I don’t have to pass the Queen through a swampy mass of leeches. Why? You may well ask, Martin Denny? Some may even ask, who Martin Denny? Well it is terribly tacky, and although I don’t have any tiki lamps or bamboo evident in my décor (not a single purple mottled green delighted drink with an umbrella stir, not a saried maiden to relieve the tension of the day (I guess maybe such a maiden might well increase my blood pressure, negating the effects of all those lovely drugs that I take in the morning), but I do have Martin and his band of cawing musicians, with piccolo skratchers, chop blocks, triangles, tambourines, tambale bells and crashers filling my ears with the exotic strains of Hawaiian music (Aloha Oy!) and flattening my alpha rhythms to a dream like enough state that I can write irreverent and irrelevant forever.
Lackzoom (less Foley who was oozing from an attack of poison ivy) met last Friday at the Squirrel Cage. We, Marc, Dean, Phil and I, tossed down a couple pitchers and ate in the modified Lackzoom style that a couple heart attacks and delicate stomachs can now allow. We asked the waitress for a sampling of fine snack that adorned the back wall of the bar. We look too mature, too sedate, not a tattoo or piercing adorning us, the poor young thing took us seriously. So we guided her through a menu of gently baked not fried pretzels, sour cream and dazzle chips, we stopped short at the Pork Rinds. Times and physiologies just ain’t what they used to be. Let me explain.
IN THE OLD DAYS, After a performance we would unwind up at this Squirrel Hill Bistro. I can now state with great objectivity that you would never find anyone sitting close to us because our heritage would show, the guardedness of a Greek after hours club, the secret bitter sweetness of a Jewish religious ceremony, the raucous rambling of an Irish wake and the obstinate enrollment rites of Cosa Nostra. In short, we managed through the entire snobbery of our family camaraderie to be an almost totally unbearable group. Tolerable only to ourselves. We would laugh! Talk about the show and before the owners decided that they had enough and would toss us on to Forbes Avenue we would manage to eat Lackzoom style!
One of every snack from behind the counter, opened and poured on the table, mingled with the puddles of booze, beer, plastic bag and cigarette ashes in a frightful volcanic mound. In we would dive. Grabbing handfuls of the most redolent prepared snacks ever created by our western intellectual tradition. Yelling above the incessant beat of the juke box, talking over the mutters of neighboring tables, joking freely, discussing the universe of comedy discourse, making a bubbling boiling world, oblivious to the secondary world of our dulling senses. Sometimes the waitress got it, some times she didn’t. That was part of the grand blast! The other customers steered a course around us to the balcony seats or the rest rooms in the rear next to the pin ball machines, which still smell of the same urinal cakes.
By these tasty chips we are in hock to Senor Wences once again.
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Wednesday, September 18, 2002 6:20 PM
Doohan, Meany, Please beam me up!
On the way up and on the way back, in the car, from Cleveland and to my various suburban destinations I listened via audio cassette tape, the middle button on the convoluted display of my automobile radio set, between Tuner and CD, to Star Trek Movie Memories. William Shatner.
So my recent entertainment and education wafts between the History Plays of Shakespeare and Star Trek the Original Generation. Surprisingly both complement the other. Both bring a new intellectual and personal outlook to a medium and an age. Although the Enterprise crew is relatively virtuous and stalwart some of the villains on Star Trek exhibit a humanity not seen on TV. Richard III and Kahn. Mudd and Falstaff. Lovable Bastards All.
I am of an age that says, yes, I watched and enjoyed the series on its first run (Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and even Truman Bradley on Science Fiction Theater past normal bedtime on Friday nights.) I recall the episode with Michael J Pollard and the one with Frank Gorshin and so on. The reason you can’t really call me a Trekker (Oh man this name and identification stuff will make you nuts, Can’t say Frisco to San Francisco, can’t call it sci-fi to a science fiction fan, can’t, for goddon sure say Trekkie to a Trekker.) because I can’t categorize, name or much remember any of the details of the episodes. My wife and I sat circa 69-70 in our Berkeley CA kitchen and watched the “reruns” at 6 o’clock as we ate dinner. I have, yes seen every episode at least once. AND I
don’t lead my life per the precepts of Kirk et al. It was, after all a television program with more depth than most, but not nearly as astonishing as the Science Fiction I read and adored in a younger day. Or the misery found in Dostoevsky, or the warmth found in Steinbeck or the play and intellect found in Joyce, the image found in Eliot etc etc etc.
I find myself coming to Star Trek once in a while. Watching now, for example, the First Series of the Next Generation on DVD as I chew a garden of green and purple food at dinner. And the movies, in order of appearance, on the weekends. I have not yet become a fan of Deep Space Nine or Voyager and don’t even know when the new series appears on TV or for that matter its name. I am irritated by the glut of Star Trek Books that stand next to a equal glut of Star Wars books which stand between a mess of X Files, Babble On Five (Unviewable as I remember) and whatever other media blitz including made for novels about Video Games at the local book stores.
I listen to Shatner’s story about the making of the movies. It is amusingly light and fine for traveling down the superhighways of America or even the side streets on my way to work and life. It is good for dreaming. (Perhaps, not so great for cruising the highways) Good for putting a pretty thought or two in my head. Good for recapturing some of the wonder that used to ride high in my life each and every day. Some of that wonder that gets buried amidst problems that don’t have as much meaning as they seem to at the time they occur. I dream a cosmology as the wide world buzzes me. I twirl off the rotating planet and hang breathless in black velvet surrounded by the blazing blinding colored jewels of the lights of the universe, somewhere midway between here and the beginning, infinite and bounded, look into the mysterious creation and the true face of God.
Taped to the faux wood cabinet over my desk is Walt Whitman’s wonderful poem about the Learn’d Astronomer.
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.
Doohan, Meany, Please beam me up!
On the way up and on the way back, in the car, from Cleveland and to my various suburban destinations I listened via audio cassette tape, the middle button on the convoluted display of my automobile radio set, between Tuner and CD, to Star Trek Movie Memories. William Shatner.
So my recent entertainment and education wafts between the History Plays of Shakespeare and Star Trek the Original Generation. Surprisingly both complement the other. Both bring a new intellectual and personal outlook to a medium and an age. Although the Enterprise crew is relatively virtuous and stalwart some of the villains on Star Trek exhibit a humanity not seen on TV. Richard III and Kahn. Mudd and Falstaff. Lovable Bastards All.
I am of an age that says, yes, I watched and enjoyed the series on its first run (Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and even Truman Bradley on Science Fiction Theater past normal bedtime on Friday nights.) I recall the episode with Michael J Pollard and the one with Frank Gorshin and so on. The reason you can’t really call me a Trekker (Oh man this name and identification stuff will make you nuts, Can’t say Frisco to San Francisco, can’t call it sci-fi to a science fiction fan, can’t, for goddon sure say Trekkie to a Trekker.) because I can’t categorize, name or much remember any of the details of the episodes. My wife and I sat circa 69-70 in our Berkeley CA kitchen and watched the “reruns” at 6 o’clock as we ate dinner. I have, yes seen every episode at least once. AND I
don’t lead my life per the precepts of Kirk et al. It was, after all a television program with more depth than most, but not nearly as astonishing as the Science Fiction I read and adored in a younger day. Or the misery found in Dostoevsky, or the warmth found in Steinbeck or the play and intellect found in Joyce, the image found in Eliot etc etc etc.
I find myself coming to Star Trek once in a while. Watching now, for example, the First Series of the Next Generation on DVD as I chew a garden of green and purple food at dinner. And the movies, in order of appearance, on the weekends. I have not yet become a fan of Deep Space Nine or Voyager and don’t even know when the new series appears on TV or for that matter its name. I am irritated by the glut of Star Trek Books that stand next to a equal glut of Star Wars books which stand between a mess of X Files, Babble On Five (Unviewable as I remember) and whatever other media blitz including made for novels about Video Games at the local book stores.
I listen to Shatner’s story about the making of the movies. It is amusingly light and fine for traveling down the superhighways of America or even the side streets on my way to work and life. It is good for dreaming. (Perhaps, not so great for cruising the highways) Good for putting a pretty thought or two in my head. Good for recapturing some of the wonder that used to ride high in my life each and every day. Some of that wonder that gets buried amidst problems that don’t have as much meaning as they seem to at the time they occur. I dream a cosmology as the wide world buzzes me. I twirl off the rotating planet and hang breathless in black velvet surrounded by the blazing blinding colored jewels of the lights of the universe, somewhere midway between here and the beginning, infinite and bounded, look into the mysterious creation and the true face of God.
Taped to the faux wood cabinet over my desk is Walt Whitman’s wonderful poem about the Learn’d Astronomer.
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.
Monday, September 16, 2002
Monday, September 16, 2002 7:44 PM
Well Shiver Me Timbers – Bobbing along somewhere in America
Here is it that I yam where I yam -
½ mile off US North 271 on the borderline twixt Beachwood and Pepper Pike some miles east of Shaker Heights, suburban playgrounds all of Cleveland Ohio. For a short stay in an Extended Stay America.
I have just washed some clothes in the coin-op and finished a fine feast of fairly foppish foods. And am feeling tired dejected and out of round.
How I came to this thriving city that has every other neighborhood labeled Heights, when there are no definite high or low spots, is a story that I will leave for another more plebian and quotidian journal. It is enough that I sit here in the relative quiet of what is essentially a motel room with a kitchenette hard opposite the bathroom and write.
People hump up and down the hall, talking, slamming doors and blocking my way as they talk in a conclave that manages to make five people take up the space of the throngs that greet the Pope’s high mass at the Vatican. They are discussing plans for the evening until I harrumph loudly and ask to be excused while they look tolerably surprised that someone would dare to want to cross into the hallway opposite while they are making what are probably momentous decisions in their lives. To their ever loving credit they part like the waters before Moses when I make my return trip. I feel quite grand and biblically correct. I manage a short circling motion with my hand as I pass among and through them.
Today is my son’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Tim). I didn’t forget the date, merely the day (thought it was tomorrow, the date). This month I must be working on some peculiar perhaps ancient certainly personal Calendar. It is Yom Kippur which I also missed as we pulled into Corky and Lenny’s Deli for lunch marveling at the many parking places available. A Miracle? Oi! Yech! I heard the Yiddish ghosts chant as we got back into the car looking for open Christian fare, dumb Goyim.
Time does indeed march tediously onward while I beat a rough rhythm that manages to evade the tempo, riff and cycle. Some days I almost have a clue and can see the whole world at a glance and put it into an interesting perspective that lies before me like a diorama. My heart and the whole damn world just throb. Mostly I scurry trying to match the cadence. Succeeding suspiciously, du temps à temps.
This weekend at some bookstore or other I managed to purchase a book (imagine that) called Speak the Speech (Shakespeare’s Monologues Illuminated – An Actor’s Toolkit written by (speaking of delicate essence) Rhona Silverbush and Sami Plotkin (go figure). It is a truly swell (and swelled running to 1028 pages) book (Hey, Kevin Spacey has a blurb on the back) that indicates the scan (iambic pentameter most) and has commentary as well as notes of interest about the Monologues – History Comedy Tragedy and Problem Plays. Shakespeare has at last caught my fancy. I can’t get enough, (daughters with their hands removed, a lover awakes with her husband lying next to her – less his head, Richard III offs a couple kids in the manner of a Mafia don, Hamlet pours poison down Claudius’ gullet after he guts him, if those slash and gash, gore and whore, slice and dice, movie lovers only knew).
But, My, his language, (it’s so elegant) the flow of meaning and sound, the resonating depth of image, the incite, the horror (that Shakespearean rag). I am amazed. Once again it took me this long to catch up. Dense, I am buoyed up and sipping coffee about two and a half hours from home. Atone.
Well Shiver Me Timbers – Bobbing along somewhere in America
Here is it that I yam where I yam -
½ mile off US North 271 on the borderline twixt Beachwood and Pepper Pike some miles east of Shaker Heights, suburban playgrounds all of Cleveland Ohio. For a short stay in an Extended Stay America.
I have just washed some clothes in the coin-op and finished a fine feast of fairly foppish foods. And am feeling tired dejected and out of round.
How I came to this thriving city that has every other neighborhood labeled Heights, when there are no definite high or low spots, is a story that I will leave for another more plebian and quotidian journal. It is enough that I sit here in the relative quiet of what is essentially a motel room with a kitchenette hard opposite the bathroom and write.
People hump up and down the hall, talking, slamming doors and blocking my way as they talk in a conclave that manages to make five people take up the space of the throngs that greet the Pope’s high mass at the Vatican. They are discussing plans for the evening until I harrumph loudly and ask to be excused while they look tolerably surprised that someone would dare to want to cross into the hallway opposite while they are making what are probably momentous decisions in their lives. To their ever loving credit they part like the waters before Moses when I make my return trip. I feel quite grand and biblically correct. I manage a short circling motion with my hand as I pass among and through them.
Today is my son’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Tim). I didn’t forget the date, merely the day (thought it was tomorrow, the date). This month I must be working on some peculiar perhaps ancient certainly personal Calendar. It is Yom Kippur which I also missed as we pulled into Corky and Lenny’s Deli for lunch marveling at the many parking places available. A Miracle? Oi! Yech! I heard the Yiddish ghosts chant as we got back into the car looking for open Christian fare, dumb Goyim.
Time does indeed march tediously onward while I beat a rough rhythm that manages to evade the tempo, riff and cycle. Some days I almost have a clue and can see the whole world at a glance and put it into an interesting perspective that lies before me like a diorama. My heart and the whole damn world just throb. Mostly I scurry trying to match the cadence. Succeeding suspiciously, du temps à temps.
This weekend at some bookstore or other I managed to purchase a book (imagine that) called Speak the Speech (Shakespeare’s Monologues Illuminated – An Actor’s Toolkit written by (speaking of delicate essence) Rhona Silverbush and Sami Plotkin (go figure). It is a truly swell (and swelled running to 1028 pages) book (Hey, Kevin Spacey has a blurb on the back) that indicates the scan (iambic pentameter most) and has commentary as well as notes of interest about the Monologues – History Comedy Tragedy and Problem Plays. Shakespeare has at last caught my fancy. I can’t get enough, (daughters with their hands removed, a lover awakes with her husband lying next to her – less his head, Richard III offs a couple kids in the manner of a Mafia don, Hamlet pours poison down Claudius’ gullet after he guts him, if those slash and gash, gore and whore, slice and dice, movie lovers only knew).
But, My, his language, (it’s so elegant) the flow of meaning and sound, the resonating depth of image, the incite, the horror (that Shakespearean rag). I am amazed. Once again it took me this long to catch up. Dense, I am buoyed up and sipping coffee about two and a half hours from home. Atone.
Monday, September 02, 2002
Monday 9/2/02 7:30 AM Labor Day
Double Bubble Toil and Stubble.
It is hard as wood, petrified in a dry climate, to get a point into my head sometimes. Worse when I thought of it myself. I have set this laborious glorious weekend aside to contemplate the nature of work. It seems somehow appropriate. As well as embarrassingly unimaginative and facile. A depth of subject that I sound on a daily and most familiar basis. Full fathom one, my analysis spun, completely exposed in the sun.
It came to me on this leisurely celebration of labor that I have thought of work as the enemy for all these years. A living, that is to say, accompanied by great psychic pain, to earn. Now armed with new and slightly dangerous knowledge, I explore my wicked older ways and try ,somewhat desperately, to come up with a scheme that will integrate my writing life with my comedy life with my commercial working life with my leisure life (and to be complete, lest some narcoleptic god intervenes, my dream life).
Let there be no mistake about it, I consider this integration my highest level of achievement and have little tolerance for segregation in any sense. I have always believed that unity can lead to a master of all trades allowing only little jacking around left to be done.
I have been working in the world of commerce for almost all my life. Since the summer of 1958 I have been paid for that work. That, I think, is the definition of a pro. My father, likely enough, was my first teacher. In his own perverted Italian contractor way he was the Mr. Miyagi of the construction trade. His wick was short and the explosion often violent and couched in foul language and a healthy fist connecting with the newly muscled flesh of my upper arm. He definitely lacked the infinite patience of the wise and old Zen teacher. Although I have problems with method, it definitely got my attention and kept me interested.
I learned, as I perspired mightily over a saw cut on a two by four piece of lumber that would somehow leave the pencil marked line made by a square behind and follow a jagged canted line of its own design, that I must always keep all things plumb, square and level. I further learned that it was important, sweat burning my eyes, to let the saw do the work. Pow! Biff! ~Bam! One of these days right to the moon, Joey. Where I most fervently wished to be. I had stars in my eyes and could think of no more wonderful place to inhabit than outer space. I just wanted my conveyance to be of a more refined and controlled explosive construction. Now make that cut again. Make is Square! To Make the wall Plumb! So that all will be Level! Cross cutting I would go. Eventually I got the point. Of course, the saw was designed to do the work!
My father taught me the true inner glowing of mathematics. He was straddled one day on the railing over a second story stairway. He reached into his apron and realized that he was out of 16 penny (16d for the initiates) common spikes. "Joey," he yelled as I bit my tongue and tried for the hundred thousandth time to force the saw to cut straight, "hand me a couple nails." I was on a roll. Not only had I cajoled and worried the cut to almost straight perfection (it was unfortunately also almost fifteen degrees out of square), I also knew the size and shape of the nails he was using. I hopped over to the nail kegs and grabbed two beautiful new sharply pointed dull steel spikes and ran across the room to his perch and handed them to him. I waited for an acknowledgment of thanks.
"What the farbidyqurab is this?" he said. "I asked for a couple nails!" Which I had given him. With some accuracy and precision. He then launched into an explanation that confuses me to this day. "When I ask for a couple of nails," he said with some force and passion, " I want at least a thabamitywhack handful of nails. If I ask for a few nails bring the whole kilbbityflammed box. If I ask for a handful bring me the godlyfarbiquradifared keg!" Clearly this was a logic that was new to me, but as my father would point as old as the earth is tired. I have encountered it however when trying to understand a soliloquy from Shakespeare. It is a poetic vision of the logical universe that entirely escaped me until just recently.
This weekend.
I, not work, am the enemy! The harder I battle to force my mind to do the work, the more fatigued, unsatisfied and unfulfilled I become. I just gotta let things go a little.
Hi Yo! Hi Ho!
Double Bubble Toil and Stubble.
It is hard as wood, petrified in a dry climate, to get a point into my head sometimes. Worse when I thought of it myself. I have set this laborious glorious weekend aside to contemplate the nature of work. It seems somehow appropriate. As well as embarrassingly unimaginative and facile. A depth of subject that I sound on a daily and most familiar basis. Full fathom one, my analysis spun, completely exposed in the sun.
It came to me on this leisurely celebration of labor that I have thought of work as the enemy for all these years. A living, that is to say, accompanied by great psychic pain, to earn. Now armed with new and slightly dangerous knowledge, I explore my wicked older ways and try ,somewhat desperately, to come up with a scheme that will integrate my writing life with my comedy life with my commercial working life with my leisure life (and to be complete, lest some narcoleptic god intervenes, my dream life).
Let there be no mistake about it, I consider this integration my highest level of achievement and have little tolerance for segregation in any sense. I have always believed that unity can lead to a master of all trades allowing only little jacking around left to be done.
I have been working in the world of commerce for almost all my life. Since the summer of 1958 I have been paid for that work. That, I think, is the definition of a pro. My father, likely enough, was my first teacher. In his own perverted Italian contractor way he was the Mr. Miyagi of the construction trade. His wick was short and the explosion often violent and couched in foul language and a healthy fist connecting with the newly muscled flesh of my upper arm. He definitely lacked the infinite patience of the wise and old Zen teacher. Although I have problems with method, it definitely got my attention and kept me interested.
I learned, as I perspired mightily over a saw cut on a two by four piece of lumber that would somehow leave the pencil marked line made by a square behind and follow a jagged canted line of its own design, that I must always keep all things plumb, square and level. I further learned that it was important, sweat burning my eyes, to let the saw do the work. Pow! Biff! ~Bam! One of these days right to the moon, Joey. Where I most fervently wished to be. I had stars in my eyes and could think of no more wonderful place to inhabit than outer space. I just wanted my conveyance to be of a more refined and controlled explosive construction. Now make that cut again. Make is Square! To Make the wall Plumb! So that all will be Level! Cross cutting I would go. Eventually I got the point. Of course, the saw was designed to do the work!
My father taught me the true inner glowing of mathematics. He was straddled one day on the railing over a second story stairway. He reached into his apron and realized that he was out of 16 penny (16d for the initiates) common spikes. "Joey," he yelled as I bit my tongue and tried for the hundred thousandth time to force the saw to cut straight, "hand me a couple nails." I was on a roll. Not only had I cajoled and worried the cut to almost straight perfection (it was unfortunately also almost fifteen degrees out of square), I also knew the size and shape of the nails he was using. I hopped over to the nail kegs and grabbed two beautiful new sharply pointed dull steel spikes and ran across the room to his perch and handed them to him. I waited for an acknowledgment of thanks.
"What the farbidyqurab is this?" he said. "I asked for a couple nails!" Which I had given him. With some accuracy and precision. He then launched into an explanation that confuses me to this day. "When I ask for a couple of nails," he said with some force and passion, " I want at least a thabamitywhack handful of nails. If I ask for a few nails bring the whole kilbbityflammed box. If I ask for a handful bring me the godlyfarbiquradifared keg!" Clearly this was a logic that was new to me, but as my father would point as old as the earth is tired. I have encountered it however when trying to understand a soliloquy from Shakespeare. It is a poetic vision of the logical universe that entirely escaped me until just recently.
This weekend.
I, not work, am the enemy! The harder I battle to force my mind to do the work, the more fatigued, unsatisfied and unfulfilled I become. I just gotta let things go a little.
Hi Yo! Hi Ho!
Sunday, August 25, 2002
Sunday, August 25, 2002 4:48 PM
Knock Knock?
Who is there?
I’ve been thinking lately. I know and confess it is a danger to cogitate so. Especially for me, who in my inchoate mental states often come up with monsters entirely out of my depths which tend to confuse far more than frighten me. Such is the laughable state of my internal turmoil that I can’t dream up a good multiheaded dog or some antediluvian slime with tentacles and a beak that snaps and rips.
You see here is the horror of television and the movies! I hear argument after argument by good natured Christian men and afternoon soccer beleaguered child guardian mothers who state with all gravity that the crime of media is manifested in the crime in the streets. If they are right, it just shows how tainted and unimaginative even the evil, squalid elements of our society have become.
We buy the dead flesh of animals from the refrigerated portion of our supermarket shelves. We don’t think of it as dead flesh, that guilt ridden disgusting image only comes from the moronic pining of animal rights activists. We don’t think of it as much. We don’t connect it with the miracle that buzzes around us each day. We don’t pin it in the nature and rhythm of our lives. It is just another activity, this driving, taking from stock, scanning across the bar code and slipping it eight minutes on high into the microwave, in our quotidian lives. I am not so full of “old-time” religion (those that know me only marginally accuse me of being full of an entirely other matter) that I would have us praise the dead spirit of the animal that yielded its life so that we may have a TV tray, but there is something to the notion.
I was recently at a poultry processing plant located on a road about a mile off the two lane black top in the Amish section nowhere Ohio. The plant personnel were made up entirely of guys and gals named Juan and Juanita, probably wishing they worked in more southern climes. What, I thought, must Friday or Saturday night look like in downtown Kidren (for so it was called) Ohio? Wild roving bands of mariachis strumming Tex/Mex stringed musical instruments, drinking Pulque and singing to Johnny Cash black attired, Old Testament bearded, simple folk grudgingly admiring the unplugged Dionysian nature of the music as they fled homeward in their surreys. On the tour of the plant we stood squarely in front of a piece of machinery called a water chiller. The purpose of this chiller was to take the freshly slaughtered chicken from the “kill” floor and drop its body temperature to a cool 40 degrees or so. It was called; it turns out a common name in the industry, a “red water” chiller. Jason and Michael Myers don’t have anything on our food chain. You and I have enjoyed just such chickens at many a Sunday American meal. (Actually my mother makes tomato sauce with meat balls and sausage.) This death, this wholesale slaughter is an okay part of our lives. We really don’t have to cower from it.
And that is the problem that set me to thinking. We do all that we can to become abstracted from these procedings. We think of the slaughter of adorable pecking little chickens for our sustenance as disgusting and evil. We let Hollywood give us our monsters, animated, full almost three dimensional, with special effects gore dripping galore, instead of dipping into our own deep little pools of dark psychic energy. We abstract ourselves from our jobs. Think of work as the enemy. Yearn forever for our leisure time. We let the nightly news and thoughtless political pundits fill up our opinion. We let formulaic preachers interpret our spirit. We let media psychics and pysch-o-logists inform our psyche. Each night lying on the couch in a funk after a terrible day.
I, for one, am going to stop it. Right after the HBO movie! Say, hon, grab me an ax. I’m gonna go kill a turkey!
Knock Knock?
Who is there?
I’ve been thinking lately. I know and confess it is a danger to cogitate so. Especially for me, who in my inchoate mental states often come up with monsters entirely out of my depths which tend to confuse far more than frighten me. Such is the laughable state of my internal turmoil that I can’t dream up a good multiheaded dog or some antediluvian slime with tentacles and a beak that snaps and rips.
You see here is the horror of television and the movies! I hear argument after argument by good natured Christian men and afternoon soccer beleaguered child guardian mothers who state with all gravity that the crime of media is manifested in the crime in the streets. If they are right, it just shows how tainted and unimaginative even the evil, squalid elements of our society have become.
We buy the dead flesh of animals from the refrigerated portion of our supermarket shelves. We don’t think of it as dead flesh, that guilt ridden disgusting image only comes from the moronic pining of animal rights activists. We don’t think of it as much. We don’t connect it with the miracle that buzzes around us each day. We don’t pin it in the nature and rhythm of our lives. It is just another activity, this driving, taking from stock, scanning across the bar code and slipping it eight minutes on high into the microwave, in our quotidian lives. I am not so full of “old-time” religion (those that know me only marginally accuse me of being full of an entirely other matter) that I would have us praise the dead spirit of the animal that yielded its life so that we may have a TV tray, but there is something to the notion.
I was recently at a poultry processing plant located on a road about a mile off the two lane black top in the Amish section nowhere Ohio. The plant personnel were made up entirely of guys and gals named Juan and Juanita, probably wishing they worked in more southern climes. What, I thought, must Friday or Saturday night look like in downtown Kidren (for so it was called) Ohio? Wild roving bands of mariachis strumming Tex/Mex stringed musical instruments, drinking Pulque and singing to Johnny Cash black attired, Old Testament bearded, simple folk grudgingly admiring the unplugged Dionysian nature of the music as they fled homeward in their surreys. On the tour of the plant we stood squarely in front of a piece of machinery called a water chiller. The purpose of this chiller was to take the freshly slaughtered chicken from the “kill” floor and drop its body temperature to a cool 40 degrees or so. It was called; it turns out a common name in the industry, a “red water” chiller. Jason and Michael Myers don’t have anything on our food chain. You and I have enjoyed just such chickens at many a Sunday American meal. (Actually my mother makes tomato sauce with meat balls and sausage.) This death, this wholesale slaughter is an okay part of our lives. We really don’t have to cower from it.
And that is the problem that set me to thinking. We do all that we can to become abstracted from these procedings. We think of the slaughter of adorable pecking little chickens for our sustenance as disgusting and evil. We let Hollywood give us our monsters, animated, full almost three dimensional, with special effects gore dripping galore, instead of dipping into our own deep little pools of dark psychic energy. We abstract ourselves from our jobs. Think of work as the enemy. Yearn forever for our leisure time. We let the nightly news and thoughtless political pundits fill up our opinion. We let formulaic preachers interpret our spirit. We let media psychics and pysch-o-logists inform our psyche. Each night lying on the couch in a funk after a terrible day.
I, for one, am going to stop it. Right after the HBO movie! Say, hon, grab me an ax. I’m gonna go kill a turkey!
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
Wednesday, August 21, 2002 6:03 PM
Is there a doctored greek in the house?
At the end of my very last Blarticle (I have come to call these little exercises in mind baloney, Blog Articles or (see above incautious appellation) for short, I took a great deal of time to find the correct Greek letters to write down an aphorism from Aristotle, just so I could look like a big deal guy who can read Greek in its most ancient and Attic form. I can’t, at least I can’t much more than that phrase from Aristotle and Sing Goddess, the wrath of Achilles… After the tedious work of picking the letters one by one from the Insert>Symbol menu in this version of Word office, I copied the whole blarticle and pasted it to the Posting section of my dot blogger dot com. It looked beautiful so I passed it on to dub dub dub the Blog. Went to sleep a satisfied smile on my face.
Upon awakening, middle of the night, fire in my belly, my brain unbalanced, I hastened virtually to the web page. My horror was full realized when I looked at my last beautiful reference. There were, instead of those crisp, full bodied, sensuous Greek letters, a hodge podge of German-English looking symbols with umlauts and grave accents far too horrible to contemplate. Especially at about 2 Ayem. ¼ Öéëüò åòôéí Üëëïò áìôïò.
I give you now the English letter version of Aristotle’s beautiful Greek, “ha philos estin allos autos.” Uninspiring, no? Even less inspiring is the translation. The friend is like another self. Man, how can you generate mystery and wonder with stuff like that?
So I called Dean today, who by the way knows the Bishop, but I’ll let him tell you that eye popping tale, and really he tried to help but through my obstinate opacity I still can’t figure how to make the Blog sing Greek, or at least not that easily. It has to do with Unicode and when I am able to understand the whole business, hell I might be writing in Arabic or Hindu or maybe even Christian HellsaPoppin Tongues. Of course, I will have to watch out for ever vigilant, lurking Home Land Security.
“Bailiff read the charge!”
“Mr. Coluccio of his own free will and accord, with malice aforethought and behind mast has transmitted the works of Aristotle in a foreign looking alphabet via hypertext protocol. Aristotle as you know taught Alexander the Great who afterwards conquered Persia which is now in the hands of some Ayatollah or other.
“Guilty as charged.”
And off I’ll go in manacles to write my great prison book. Say, maybe I’ll become a famous religio/political martyr and will eventually end up on prime time TV hawking prison garb. Less likely things have happened here in America. Little pink houses for you an’ me!
There is no real lesson (and far less reason) here. Just my bitter disappointment. I made an attempt (albeit lame, silly and of no consequence) to show a certain je ne sait quois (See you can write French with little trouble) (Pronounced for those in the know like jin say kwa, Was that Chinese? Nope you can’t write Chinese either), a small smattering of …I guess… intellect.
No wonder I stumbled!
Is there a doctored greek in the house?
At the end of my very last Blarticle (I have come to call these little exercises in mind baloney, Blog Articles or (see above incautious appellation) for short, I took a great deal of time to find the correct Greek letters to write down an aphorism from Aristotle, just so I could look like a big deal guy who can read Greek in its most ancient and Attic form. I can’t, at least I can’t much more than that phrase from Aristotle and Sing Goddess, the wrath of Achilles… After the tedious work of picking the letters one by one from the Insert>Symbol menu in this version of Word office, I copied the whole blarticle and pasted it to the Posting section of my dot blogger dot com. It looked beautiful so I passed it on to dub dub dub the Blog. Went to sleep a satisfied smile on my face.
Upon awakening, middle of the night, fire in my belly, my brain unbalanced, I hastened virtually to the web page. My horror was full realized when I looked at my last beautiful reference. There were, instead of those crisp, full bodied, sensuous Greek letters, a hodge podge of German-English looking symbols with umlauts and grave accents far too horrible to contemplate. Especially at about 2 Ayem. ¼ Öéëüò åòôéí Üëëïò áìôïò.
I give you now the English letter version of Aristotle’s beautiful Greek, “ha philos estin allos autos.” Uninspiring, no? Even less inspiring is the translation. The friend is like another self. Man, how can you generate mystery and wonder with stuff like that?
So I called Dean today, who by the way knows the Bishop, but I’ll let him tell you that eye popping tale, and really he tried to help but through my obstinate opacity I still can’t figure how to make the Blog sing Greek, or at least not that easily. It has to do with Unicode and when I am able to understand the whole business, hell I might be writing in Arabic or Hindu or maybe even Christian HellsaPoppin Tongues. Of course, I will have to watch out for ever vigilant, lurking Home Land Security.
“Bailiff read the charge!”
“Mr. Coluccio of his own free will and accord, with malice aforethought and behind mast has transmitted the works of Aristotle in a foreign looking alphabet via hypertext protocol. Aristotle as you know taught Alexander the Great who afterwards conquered Persia which is now in the hands of some Ayatollah or other.
“Guilty as charged.”
And off I’ll go in manacles to write my great prison book. Say, maybe I’ll become a famous religio/political martyr and will eventually end up on prime time TV hawking prison garb. Less likely things have happened here in America. Little pink houses for you an’ me!
There is no real lesson (and far less reason) here. Just my bitter disappointment. I made an attempt (albeit lame, silly and of no consequence) to show a certain je ne sait quois (See you can write French with little trouble) (Pronounced for those in the know like jin say kwa, Was that Chinese? Nope you can’t write Chinese either), a small smattering of …I guess… intellect.
No wonder I stumbled!
Monday, August 19, 2002
Monday, August 19, 2002 6:46 PM
Anyone with an A.P.P qualifies for a P.P.M under the R.G.H.
It is perhaps time for us to take back the planet. I received, via the original mail the other day a flyer from a University here in the Pittsburgh area, which shall go unnamed but is on the bluff and very Catholic that communicated a message much like the one in the heading. The initials have been changed not to protect the innocent, but because I can’t possibly remember them.
At first I tossed it in the garbage can at my feet, but some warning, like the time I threw away my bank debit card because it had the name Omaha Something or other emblazoned on the envelope, thus masking it from me, the honest customer and letting every mail fraud thief, who were surely on to the bank’s game access, stopped me. Or the time I innocently threw out the bill for the company web site, which consequently went unpaid which caused our email accounts to lapse which caused problems when customers tried to reach us. We had purchased the email and web site from a local ISP (I know, more idiotic initials) who merely administered the account not billed it.
I have been, in short, forced to peruse junk mail.
Further I find that our answering service has the wisdom to be blocking their phone number so that they look the world like a telemarketing firm. (Which is what I suspect they do in the hours that they are not answering our calls.) Forcing this spawn of Italy to now answer all telemarketing calls. “Hello, Mr. Coluccio….” Hang up! Or worse the bastards that call me up and put me on hold. Would that they were within the reach of my clenched fist! On the other hand the violence that I would apply would make me feel guilty and small.
Is this the promise of technology? And is it any surprise that any such noble promise should be so easily subverted by the mean bean counting spirit of America. My guess is, No! At heart, as a species we are irritating money grubbing insects and I only mean this as the highest praise. Remember, tell Michael it was only business!
So, Duquesne, oops, I let the cat out of the bag, University sends an envelope to me! Not Dear Customer or Dear Resident or Dear Manager, but to my very name proposing that I could, for a fee of several hundred dollars, bone up on the A.P.P. And who might qualify for this boon? It says any C.P.M. with an eye toward the C.P.A.E.
I frankly go into a state that looks much like shock, because never have I been so foul of reality. I do not have a clue what this is all about. Further, as I look down paragraph after paragraph of the muddle of jargon and obfuscating initials, I become even more confused and befuddled. I feel like an infant who only has a cursory grasp of language. My grip on reality is pulverized. I am reduced to moving my index finger between my slobbering lips and making infant noises of joy. I actually drool!
Eventually, after I very careful reading, I discover that this day course has something to do with becoming a professional purchasing agent. Now I am truly horrified. I have been a purchasing agent for most of my business career. Sorry, Duquesne, if I felt it at all necessary, I could teach this course. Purchasing has now become a college level activity. I can only conclude that I have gone mad.
¼ Öéëüò åòôéí Üëëïò áìôïò It’s all Greek to me!
Anyone with an A.P.P qualifies for a P.P.M under the R.G.H.
It is perhaps time for us to take back the planet. I received, via the original mail the other day a flyer from a University here in the Pittsburgh area, which shall go unnamed but is on the bluff and very Catholic that communicated a message much like the one in the heading. The initials have been changed not to protect the innocent, but because I can’t possibly remember them.
At first I tossed it in the garbage can at my feet, but some warning, like the time I threw away my bank debit card because it had the name Omaha Something or other emblazoned on the envelope, thus masking it from me, the honest customer and letting every mail fraud thief, who were surely on to the bank’s game access, stopped me. Or the time I innocently threw out the bill for the company web site, which consequently went unpaid which caused our email accounts to lapse which caused problems when customers tried to reach us. We had purchased the email and web site from a local ISP (I know, more idiotic initials) who merely administered the account not billed it.
I have been, in short, forced to peruse junk mail.
Further I find that our answering service has the wisdom to be blocking their phone number so that they look the world like a telemarketing firm. (Which is what I suspect they do in the hours that they are not answering our calls.) Forcing this spawn of Italy to now answer all telemarketing calls. “Hello, Mr. Coluccio….” Hang up! Or worse the bastards that call me up and put me on hold. Would that they were within the reach of my clenched fist! On the other hand the violence that I would apply would make me feel guilty and small.
Is this the promise of technology? And is it any surprise that any such noble promise should be so easily subverted by the mean bean counting spirit of America. My guess is, No! At heart, as a species we are irritating money grubbing insects and I only mean this as the highest praise. Remember, tell Michael it was only business!
So, Duquesne, oops, I let the cat out of the bag, University sends an envelope to me! Not Dear Customer or Dear Resident or Dear Manager, but to my very name proposing that I could, for a fee of several hundred dollars, bone up on the A.P.P. And who might qualify for this boon? It says any C.P.M. with an eye toward the C.P.A.E.
I frankly go into a state that looks much like shock, because never have I been so foul of reality. I do not have a clue what this is all about. Further, as I look down paragraph after paragraph of the muddle of jargon and obfuscating initials, I become even more confused and befuddled. I feel like an infant who only has a cursory grasp of language. My grip on reality is pulverized. I am reduced to moving my index finger between my slobbering lips and making infant noises of joy. I actually drool!
Eventually, after I very careful reading, I discover that this day course has something to do with becoming a professional purchasing agent. Now I am truly horrified. I have been a purchasing agent for most of my business career. Sorry, Duquesne, if I felt it at all necessary, I could teach this course. Purchasing has now become a college level activity. I can only conclude that I have gone mad.
¼ Öéëüò åòôéí Üëëïò áìôïò It’s all Greek to me!
Friday, August 16, 2002
Number One with a bullet
I used to work in the Record Business. Not those things that businesses eventually put in white cardboard boxes with neat black block magic marker headings. Nope, not the yellow and pink grease marked pieces of flimsy that decay away in a storage space because the newer gentler IRS, your grouchy CPA and some august legislature want you to keep for just the amount of years that moisture and rodents can turn that pulpy mass into a cheesy mold. Nay, I say, t’was the Phonograph Recording business. BCD! Not too many years after I had managed to loose my college education and my way all at the same time. Where the hell was Virgil?
The building stood and stands in what has come to be known as The Lower Hill District. I think it now displays kitchen and bathroom tile. A sad replacement if you ask me.
In that brick with boarded window three storied building there were four or more separate businesses, mostly owned by the same guy. Partnerships were rife and companies created at the drop of a phonograph needle on unscratched vinyl. One business was a one-stop shop. Mostly it served the tristate juke box operators. Each stack of 45 RPM records had a pile of red and white juke box cards with perforated labels that would tab neatly into the chrome steel holders on the the Wurlitzer and Bally machines. Another was called a rack jobber. 45 and 33 RPM phono records were delivered and stocked at your local emporium. And last there were a couple or three record distributors. Here was my bailiwick. First floor among the boxes of singles and shelves full of LP's. Stock, receive and ship is what I did. I was and am pretty good at it although if you've had the dubious distinction of looking at my basement living quarters and library, you could come away with some doubt.
In the basement was a room for the salesmen. These guys had the glamorous jobs of going to the DJ's in town and getting them to play hits from the Labels that we represented. Just for the record (this time the moldy kind), payola, now back in vogue in another guise, was deemed unethical and illegal in those days when I worked in that rather energetic and corrupt business. I am not as old as Dick Clark.
My world revolved around numbers. Joe send 25 of Gordy 3365 and 50 of Motown 11567, 60 of Tamla 67765 and 10 of Atlantic 4890. I thought I would never forget those numbers, but the years have dimmed them for me. I can no longer tell label or number or what is on the flip side of Baby Love by the Supremes. There was a time when I knew them all. Used them everyday. I am not even sure if the above listed numbers are even close in sequence or appearance. I am now plagued, another industry new familiar designations, with GFE1C or KALB-0150-TAC (Sporlan TXV and Copeland Compressor respectively)
The fourth type of business was that of artist’s representatives and agents. The owners of the distributorships, one-stops and rack jobbers also managed many of Pittsburgh’s rock and roll talent. I was therefore by association part of the scene! A lowly part to be sure, but the top DJ’s knew my name, at least my first name. None other than, the “Bossman”, Porky Chedwick used to come in and say "Hey, my man, the body!" point at me and then walk downstairs to sales. No, I have no idea!
At the side door, by the loading dock, you would find, for most of the day an old black guy who answered to the name Mose. I don’t know if Mose was his name or if we just called him that. Mose was, blunt, to the point, a wino. He dressed in shabby clothes, had a wiry gray beard, wore the kind of a hat you sometimes see on a horse in an old movie and was truly skunked most of the time. He was, despite his shortcomings, a very pleasant fellow. Lived on the streets and in the various charity houses of the Hill.
Old Mose taught me a lesson one spring morning.
He appeared before us with new clothes and new shining shoes. He really couldn’t communicate how he had come by them. About an hour later I was receiving some new “sounds” and I saw Mose sitting next to the dumpster. Bottle in hand. His new shoes had large cuts in them. What happened to your shoes, Mose?
He spoke in his soft southern drawl like I imagined Robert Johnson or Huddie Ledbetter or Bukka White would have as they pattered between songs. He looked down at the razored slashes, “Well, better that the shoe should hoit, than that I should hoit!”
Follow me down to Mr. Tom Hughes’ town!
I used to work in the Record Business. Not those things that businesses eventually put in white cardboard boxes with neat black block magic marker headings. Nope, not the yellow and pink grease marked pieces of flimsy that decay away in a storage space because the newer gentler IRS, your grouchy CPA and some august legislature want you to keep for just the amount of years that moisture and rodents can turn that pulpy mass into a cheesy mold. Nay, I say, t’was the Phonograph Recording business. BCD! Not too many years after I had managed to loose my college education and my way all at the same time. Where the hell was Virgil?
The building stood and stands in what has come to be known as The Lower Hill District. I think it now displays kitchen and bathroom tile. A sad replacement if you ask me.
In that brick with boarded window three storied building there were four or more separate businesses, mostly owned by the same guy. Partnerships were rife and companies created at the drop of a phonograph needle on unscratched vinyl. One business was a one-stop shop. Mostly it served the tristate juke box operators. Each stack of 45 RPM records had a pile of red and white juke box cards with perforated labels that would tab neatly into the chrome steel holders on the the Wurlitzer and Bally machines. Another was called a rack jobber. 45 and 33 RPM phono records were delivered and stocked at your local emporium. And last there were a couple or three record distributors. Here was my bailiwick. First floor among the boxes of singles and shelves full of LP's. Stock, receive and ship is what I did. I was and am pretty good at it although if you've had the dubious distinction of looking at my basement living quarters and library, you could come away with some doubt.
In the basement was a room for the salesmen. These guys had the glamorous jobs of going to the DJ's in town and getting them to play hits from the Labels that we represented. Just for the record (this time the moldy kind), payola, now back in vogue in another guise, was deemed unethical and illegal in those days when I worked in that rather energetic and corrupt business. I am not as old as Dick Clark.
My world revolved around numbers. Joe send 25 of Gordy 3365 and 50 of Motown 11567, 60 of Tamla 67765 and 10 of Atlantic 4890. I thought I would never forget those numbers, but the years have dimmed them for me. I can no longer tell label or number or what is on the flip side of Baby Love by the Supremes. There was a time when I knew them all. Used them everyday. I am not even sure if the above listed numbers are even close in sequence or appearance. I am now plagued, another industry new familiar designations, with GFE1C or KALB-0150-TAC (Sporlan TXV and Copeland Compressor respectively)
The fourth type of business was that of artist’s representatives and agents. The owners of the distributorships, one-stops and rack jobbers also managed many of Pittsburgh’s rock and roll talent. I was therefore by association part of the scene! A lowly part to be sure, but the top DJ’s knew my name, at least my first name. None other than, the “Bossman”, Porky Chedwick used to come in and say "Hey, my man, the body!" point at me and then walk downstairs to sales. No, I have no idea!
At the side door, by the loading dock, you would find, for most of the day an old black guy who answered to the name Mose. I don’t know if Mose was his name or if we just called him that. Mose was, blunt, to the point, a wino. He dressed in shabby clothes, had a wiry gray beard, wore the kind of a hat you sometimes see on a horse in an old movie and was truly skunked most of the time. He was, despite his shortcomings, a very pleasant fellow. Lived on the streets and in the various charity houses of the Hill.
Old Mose taught me a lesson one spring morning.
He appeared before us with new clothes and new shining shoes. He really couldn’t communicate how he had come by them. About an hour later I was receiving some new “sounds” and I saw Mose sitting next to the dumpster. Bottle in hand. His new shoes had large cuts in them. What happened to your shoes, Mose?
He spoke in his soft southern drawl like I imagined Robert Johnson or Huddie Ledbetter or Bukka White would have as they pattered between songs. He looked down at the razored slashes, “Well, better that the shoe should hoit, than that I should hoit!”
Follow me down to Mr. Tom Hughes’ town!
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
TriVia or The Fork in the Road.
As yins of you who live (or who have lived an at) in Picksburg know, Dawntawn lies at the confluence of da Monongahela, de Allegheny an ne Ohio Rivers.
And if that ain’t trivia I don’t know what is.
I invented a game. It is definitely derivative and positively logical.
Calls it, I did! , Consequential Pursuits. It is an inexpensive game to manufacture but has a few ironclad and fearful rules that make it likely so unpopular that I gave up the idea of pocketing any gelt and print it here with little fear of copyright infringement. It is a game that belongs to the world.
If you choose to read on, I (and a cadre of tough legal professionals) will accept that as an affirmation that you have agreed to pay me, in a lump sum, a couple million bucks, at least, and out of concern for my physical, mental and spiritual well being let me retain all rights, including motion picture in the Orient. Make out said check to my favorite charity, J-O-S-E-P-H A. C-O-L-U-C-C-I-O (Get the picture? Sly devil, eh?). If you stop reading you do so at your own peril of ignorance, perhaps eternal damnation and, of course, you relinquish all rights in any case and I’ll probably cry or feel bad. Whatever the outcome make the check payable to me. As a sign of good faith!
The game consists of a few cards. Perhaps as few as five. Perhaps less. Depends on how comprehensive a universe I conceive, or do you conceive? At the beginning of play, several and many as a few but far less than a conclave of folks sit around a Formica kitchen table with one of those fifties Yves Tanguy Surreal yellow background patterns of pink and tan paramecia. (I have a deal with a furniture firm in Augusta, Georgia. Buy the game and get a kitchen set at 50% off.) The collective player ship should have a jelly glass (more than likely Stop n Save A Lot Grape, but StupidValu Orange Marmalade or those Peanut Butter and Jelly combinations will do as well. It is, of course, your choice whether or not the glass has been emptied of its sticky sweet contents and if emptied, washed) in their hands containing a fine mellow Merlot or a rather peppery Cabernet at the ready. Failing the wine, an option for a Grappa that makes your eyes cross can be seriously considered.
Play goes to the person who is most pot faced. Or snotfaced or snoodfaced or perhaps even straight laced. Make the choice democratic, (unless you live in Florida), see if I care. This is the realm of oligarchy; after all, you can beat the hell out of each other if it suits you. The game is yours to win! But someone must, I Repeat (with Capital Offense), SOMEONE must turn over the first card.
If the first card is blank, the cruelty of this universe is evident, the game is afoot and you must all drink to the Pope Puff. After any members of this Particular Pursuit game are exempt from life, liberty, but they may still pursue happiness! In most cases luckily the card will consist of a single word.
An Aside: I don’t really like to tip the scales one way or the other so I will suggest a word for example here that is at once so plebian and so tempestuous that I suggest it not be included in the official Consequential Pursuit Set of Cards.
The card could say: Love!
Now for the next twenty years or for those of you who, like Hans Morovec, plan to have your mind downloaded into a device, perhaps a Hoover Vacuum Machine, eternity, or until the warranty runs its course, you must contemplate that exposed for the all the world to see word and all the concept it contains.
You can only win by gaining tenure at a University as the Chair of some odd School or by having your name end with an ism.
Bon Chance! Good Luck and keep those flags a flyin’ !
As yins of you who live (or who have lived an at) in Picksburg know, Dawntawn lies at the confluence of da Monongahela, de Allegheny an ne Ohio Rivers.
And if that ain’t trivia I don’t know what is.
I invented a game. It is definitely derivative and positively logical.
Calls it, I did! , Consequential Pursuits. It is an inexpensive game to manufacture but has a few ironclad and fearful rules that make it likely so unpopular that I gave up the idea of pocketing any gelt and print it here with little fear of copyright infringement. It is a game that belongs to the world.
If you choose to read on, I (and a cadre of tough legal professionals) will accept that as an affirmation that you have agreed to pay me, in a lump sum, a couple million bucks, at least, and out of concern for my physical, mental and spiritual well being let me retain all rights, including motion picture in the Orient. Make out said check to my favorite charity, J-O-S-E-P-H A. C-O-L-U-C-C-I-O (Get the picture? Sly devil, eh?). If you stop reading you do so at your own peril of ignorance, perhaps eternal damnation and, of course, you relinquish all rights in any case and I’ll probably cry or feel bad. Whatever the outcome make the check payable to me. As a sign of good faith!
The game consists of a few cards. Perhaps as few as five. Perhaps less. Depends on how comprehensive a universe I conceive, or do you conceive? At the beginning of play, several and many as a few but far less than a conclave of folks sit around a Formica kitchen table with one of those fifties Yves Tanguy Surreal yellow background patterns of pink and tan paramecia. (I have a deal with a furniture firm in Augusta, Georgia. Buy the game and get a kitchen set at 50% off.) The collective player ship should have a jelly glass (more than likely Stop n Save A Lot Grape, but StupidValu Orange Marmalade or those Peanut Butter and Jelly combinations will do as well. It is, of course, your choice whether or not the glass has been emptied of its sticky sweet contents and if emptied, washed) in their hands containing a fine mellow Merlot or a rather peppery Cabernet at the ready. Failing the wine, an option for a Grappa that makes your eyes cross can be seriously considered.
Play goes to the person who is most pot faced. Or snotfaced or snoodfaced or perhaps even straight laced. Make the choice democratic, (unless you live in Florida), see if I care. This is the realm of oligarchy; after all, you can beat the hell out of each other if it suits you. The game is yours to win! But someone must, I Repeat (with Capital Offense), SOMEONE must turn over the first card.
If the first card is blank, the cruelty of this universe is evident, the game is afoot and you must all drink to the Pope Puff. After any members of this Particular Pursuit game are exempt from life, liberty, but they may still pursue happiness! In most cases luckily the card will consist of a single word.
An Aside: I don’t really like to tip the scales one way or the other so I will suggest a word for example here that is at once so plebian and so tempestuous that I suggest it not be included in the official Consequential Pursuit Set of Cards.
The card could say: Love!
Now for the next twenty years or for those of you who, like Hans Morovec, plan to have your mind downloaded into a device, perhaps a Hoover Vacuum Machine, eternity, or until the warranty runs its course, you must contemplate that exposed for the all the world to see word and all the concept it contains.
You can only win by gaining tenure at a University as the Chair of some odd School or by having your name end with an ism.
Bon Chance! Good Luck and keep those flags a flyin’ !
Monday, August 12, 2002
Monday 8/12/2002 6:45 PM
Mind Mapper becomes Mind Manager and I don’t really Mind!
For better or for worse I am addicted to listening to audio books as I travel the autobahn, as I shower and shave in the morning and yea and verily even as I cardio exercise on the treadmill. So I found this audio tape at Book Country, a discount and remainder book store here in the Pgh area. It was about Mind Mapping.
I was familiar with a computer software program that purported to use mind mapping and I found the idea intriguing enough to plop down the less than half price of the two audio cassette package. This on Sunday, I waited till this morning to set the cassette in my jet blue sport edition cassette player and cranked up the volume as I strode through the six am open doors for my rendezvous with the tortuous machine that pretends to give you a cardio workout. After 4 minutes my heart is pumping a breath taking 130 beats on its way to 140 as I listen to the mind mapping pleasures that are arrayed in my ear and hence virtually in my head and I literally gasp for breath.
What can you use mind mapping for? Well it turns out for everything. Need to organize the food in your refrigerator. Mind Map. How about a trip to Antarctica? Mind Map. Plan the intricacies of your entire life for the next hopeful fifty years. Yep, a short sketch away on a note pad or in my case, as I shall inform you all presently, on the computer keyboard. Mind Map!
Now what is mind mapping really good for? Well the guy hits the nail on the head with a sledge when he mentions that we often use outlining as an organizing kind of principle without really having any topics to outline. As we fill notions in, some move to the bottom, some to the top and our organization which is never reasoned and linear starts to look pretty ghastly. It becomes untidy, dirty, without reason, out of sorts, mean, out of focus and …get the picture? (It is hard for such an undisciplined, undisciplinable and rebellious lout as me to really care, feel, or talk much about the virtues of organization.)
So mind mapping, in which you on a piece of paper put a topic that is key to the idea at hand and then you free form lay in lines of connections which lead to sub topics off sub tropics which all in all helps to give you the kindling for the fire of your organized outline.
Intrepid I go off to the internet to look for the program that I had once used and abandoned. I don’t find it. Rather one called Visual Mind and it does upon trial download some spiffing stuff. I try a topic. And damn! It works plenty good. I look further. It turns out that Mind Mapper, the program that I originaly sought, has become Mind Manager, a far more imposing title and even more grandios yet there is a Standard, a Business and an Enterprise Edition.
I with grave alacrity download the trial business edition and am more than pleased with the features which include ready linking with most of the Microsoft Office Programs that I use. So (I must admit after an abortive attempt at finding a crack) I buy the program for my company. It is now on this computer which just tickles my mind in erotic places.
I can now plan my entire life with circles and colors and subtopics and images and files from the computer. I am one happy fellow.
It really takes so little.
Mind Mapper becomes Mind Manager and I don’t really Mind!
For better or for worse I am addicted to listening to audio books as I travel the autobahn, as I shower and shave in the morning and yea and verily even as I cardio exercise on the treadmill. So I found this audio tape at Book Country, a discount and remainder book store here in the Pgh area. It was about Mind Mapping.
I was familiar with a computer software program that purported to use mind mapping and I found the idea intriguing enough to plop down the less than half price of the two audio cassette package. This on Sunday, I waited till this morning to set the cassette in my jet blue sport edition cassette player and cranked up the volume as I strode through the six am open doors for my rendezvous with the tortuous machine that pretends to give you a cardio workout. After 4 minutes my heart is pumping a breath taking 130 beats on its way to 140 as I listen to the mind mapping pleasures that are arrayed in my ear and hence virtually in my head and I literally gasp for breath.
What can you use mind mapping for? Well it turns out for everything. Need to organize the food in your refrigerator. Mind Map. How about a trip to Antarctica? Mind Map. Plan the intricacies of your entire life for the next hopeful fifty years. Yep, a short sketch away on a note pad or in my case, as I shall inform you all presently, on the computer keyboard. Mind Map!
Now what is mind mapping really good for? Well the guy hits the nail on the head with a sledge when he mentions that we often use outlining as an organizing kind of principle without really having any topics to outline. As we fill notions in, some move to the bottom, some to the top and our organization which is never reasoned and linear starts to look pretty ghastly. It becomes untidy, dirty, without reason, out of sorts, mean, out of focus and …get the picture? (It is hard for such an undisciplined, undisciplinable and rebellious lout as me to really care, feel, or talk much about the virtues of organization.)
So mind mapping, in which you on a piece of paper put a topic that is key to the idea at hand and then you free form lay in lines of connections which lead to sub topics off sub tropics which all in all helps to give you the kindling for the fire of your organized outline.
Intrepid I go off to the internet to look for the program that I had once used and abandoned. I don’t find it. Rather one called Visual Mind and it does upon trial download some spiffing stuff. I try a topic. And damn! It works plenty good. I look further. It turns out that Mind Mapper, the program that I originaly sought, has become Mind Manager, a far more imposing title and even more grandios yet there is a Standard, a Business and an Enterprise Edition.
I with grave alacrity download the trial business edition and am more than pleased with the features which include ready linking with most of the Microsoft Office Programs that I use. So (I must admit after an abortive attempt at finding a crack) I buy the program for my company. It is now on this computer which just tickles my mind in erotic places.
I can now plan my entire life with circles and colors and subtopics and images and files from the computer. I am one happy fellow.
It really takes so little.
Friday, August 02, 2002
Friday, August 02, 2002 6:31 PM
I proclaim this territory in the name of, well… Me!
A funny sort of thing happens to me when I finally drag myself to the monitor and double click the icon in order to play some computer game. The ones that I am most fond of, (none of them thrill me that much, for that long, I continue wasting money on differing companies and strategies in hopes of finding an interesting one.) are the simulation games. I adore the Flight Simulator and continually thrill and finally slaughter whole plane loads of passengers as I try to bring that 747 down in a thunder storm at the Champaign-Urbana Airport. I manage in my Train Simulator to jar the line up and break the linked connections between the cars by flooring the throttle and neglecting the task of tightening up the individual cars of the train. (Did you know that even the most modern diesel engines have what is called a sander? It is very simply a device that can drop sand onto the metal track for added friction. Injudicious use, run out of sand, run out of friction and run out of stop, yes I have! Just another crash coming out of Baltimore through the tunnel heading for New York.)
There is Sim City (up to Version 3000 now) in which we have the control of the building of a city from the terrain up. My cities are sadly unsuccessful. The citizenry rails against the rapid increase of taxes (It’s for their own good and swells my neglected coffers) without giving them adequate fire and police protection. Once I had a perfectly good nuclear power plant render a whole area of my kingdom (I prefer the title King Joe to Mayor Joe) irradiated and uninhabitable for the rest of the game. (Hey, it’s the small price cheap power and progress!)
I dally with any number of Simulator Theme and Roller Coaster Parks, which don't, because of lazy graphic programming, run all that well on Windows XP. Oh well! Those damn park patrons are constantly kvetching because I don’t give them enough clean rest rooms! Go urinate in the bushes!
The funny thing that happens which prevents me from moving forward in the game is that I am far less interested in the rules of play than I am in the territory and wonder of the place. I want to start out on foot and explore this great land or plane or roller coaster. I want to meet people who are traveling and living there. In short I want a narrative to happen in combination with the creation of the cyber land. I want Story!
AHA! You may say, divining my direction. In Cyberspace I want an autonomy as well as some story. I suspect that I have found my guiding principles. The ways to proceed. My vision! Understand please that the cyber world doesn't yet have the technology and I in particular can only partially manipulate the programming code that is needed to achieve this end. It is a challenge. Which I will rise to meet, however flat footed and lame.
In cyberspace everyone can hear me scream!
I proclaim this territory in the name of, well… Me!
A funny sort of thing happens to me when I finally drag myself to the monitor and double click the icon in order to play some computer game. The ones that I am most fond of, (none of them thrill me that much, for that long, I continue wasting money on differing companies and strategies in hopes of finding an interesting one.) are the simulation games. I adore the Flight Simulator and continually thrill and finally slaughter whole plane loads of passengers as I try to bring that 747 down in a thunder storm at the Champaign-Urbana Airport. I manage in my Train Simulator to jar the line up and break the linked connections between the cars by flooring the throttle and neglecting the task of tightening up the individual cars of the train. (Did you know that even the most modern diesel engines have what is called a sander? It is very simply a device that can drop sand onto the metal track for added friction. Injudicious use, run out of sand, run out of friction and run out of stop, yes I have! Just another crash coming out of Baltimore through the tunnel heading for New York.)
There is Sim City (up to Version 3000 now) in which we have the control of the building of a city from the terrain up. My cities are sadly unsuccessful. The citizenry rails against the rapid increase of taxes (It’s for their own good and swells my neglected coffers) without giving them adequate fire and police protection. Once I had a perfectly good nuclear power plant render a whole area of my kingdom (I prefer the title King Joe to Mayor Joe) irradiated and uninhabitable for the rest of the game. (Hey, it’s the small price cheap power and progress!)
I dally with any number of Simulator Theme and Roller Coaster Parks, which don't, because of lazy graphic programming, run all that well on Windows XP. Oh well! Those damn park patrons are constantly kvetching because I don’t give them enough clean rest rooms! Go urinate in the bushes!
The funny thing that happens which prevents me from moving forward in the game is that I am far less interested in the rules of play than I am in the territory and wonder of the place. I want to start out on foot and explore this great land or plane or roller coaster. I want to meet people who are traveling and living there. In short I want a narrative to happen in combination with the creation of the cyber land. I want Story!
AHA! You may say, divining my direction. In Cyberspace I want an autonomy as well as some story. I suspect that I have found my guiding principles. The ways to proceed. My vision! Understand please that the cyber world doesn't yet have the technology and I in particular can only partially manipulate the programming code that is needed to achieve this end. It is a challenge. Which I will rise to meet, however flat footed and lame.
In cyberspace everyone can hear me scream!
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Wednesday, July 31, 2002 6:59 PM
Joe Goes to Cyberland or The False Recognition of the Camino Real.
This Monday I set myself the onerous task of exploring cyberspace. It turns out, after a quick search in my soul and a perusal of my spirit, that I have to look at me first. What else is new?
I find it a sad thing that the advertisers have taken over the World Wide Web. (Need I say gentle folk that I do recognize the advertiser in me?)Most web pages that you go to are either trying (some terrifying attempts) or succeeding (I haven't decided which is worse) at looking like whiskey adverts in a slick magazine. Plenty of content all of it wrong headed all of it for ill use. We are told and trained at an exceedingly young age that to succeed we need to sell ourselves. Those web pages are the far reaches of that childhood instruction. It’s a hard world and we have to sell not only ourselves, but our football team our college our family our home our company and now our web page or NO ONE WILL PAY ATTENTION TO US! Or perhaps worse give us a pat on the back and introduce us into their club.
I think that eventually we can get to this place of people visiting us, applauding the magnificent work that we have placed before them, showering us in vague phrases of dubious praise. I am, in short, not entirely opposed to the notion. I just truly really and in all sincerity with all the veracity I can muster, straight forward and frankly, honest injun, don't believe it is a place to start. It is a shaky platform. It is going over to the "dark side" (Look what the hell happened to Anakin Skywalker, no, not when he makes it to the dark side, when he shifted back to defend his equally left handed son and choose to look like a pale worm instead of a splendid tyrant. Bête Bête where is my beautiful Bête!)
I spend my life in preparation. I practice the guitar each morning with fumble fingers and a groggy head. I then electronically scribble in my journal hoping that some wonderful nugget will be mind from the massive store of fact and feeling that influences my muddled thinking. I dig at ill formed and less that lucid (illucid? A new word for the growing grants of geekdom) computer programming, mathematical, musical and foreign languages. I read incessantly and obsessively. Eventually I became deeply troubled by my apparent lack of achievement. What was the purpose of all this preparation? Whither goest thou, my fragile psyche?
Then in a Zen hissed fit it occurred to me. Preparation is life. At least it is my life. The preparation seems progressive although it may not be. The preparation seems like a path though it well may not be. The preparation seems like that which comes before, but it is not. It is instead, the goal. I know that this mystical kind of ritual stuff has been thought and said before, but that didn't make it any less startling to me. The Gospel formulated according to the cup of Joe.
And so I begin to glimmer the gleam of my approach to cyberspace, www, internet, technological nightmare, whatever we decide collectively to call it. Start the process. It is all preparation. The produce of this procedure will grow, shrink, look better, look worse, hold your interest, bore you to tears, displease, please, gain your admiration, gather your disgust. But it is important that it is there, bare, with all the cracks, fissures and disjoints evident. Throbbing, potential. It will be the Lackzoom Web with all our hopes and aspirations and foolishness and wisdom. What I hope you never see is a little icon of a construction worker with a jack hammer and a sign over a wooden carpenters horse close at hand that proclaims "Pardon our dust this page is under construction." I hope that our site will be under constant deconstruction. Constant reconstruction.
I guess I'd like to make it hard on those damned advertisers.
Joe Goes to Cyberland or The False Recognition of the Camino Real.
This Monday I set myself the onerous task of exploring cyberspace. It turns out, after a quick search in my soul and a perusal of my spirit, that I have to look at me first. What else is new?
I find it a sad thing that the advertisers have taken over the World Wide Web. (Need I say gentle folk that I do recognize the advertiser in me?)Most web pages that you go to are either trying (some terrifying attempts) or succeeding (I haven't decided which is worse) at looking like whiskey adverts in a slick magazine. Plenty of content all of it wrong headed all of it for ill use. We are told and trained at an exceedingly young age that to succeed we need to sell ourselves. Those web pages are the far reaches of that childhood instruction. It’s a hard world and we have to sell not only ourselves, but our football team our college our family our home our company and now our web page or NO ONE WILL PAY ATTENTION TO US! Or perhaps worse give us a pat on the back and introduce us into their club.
I think that eventually we can get to this place of people visiting us, applauding the magnificent work that we have placed before them, showering us in vague phrases of dubious praise. I am, in short, not entirely opposed to the notion. I just truly really and in all sincerity with all the veracity I can muster, straight forward and frankly, honest injun, don't believe it is a place to start. It is a shaky platform. It is going over to the "dark side" (Look what the hell happened to Anakin Skywalker, no, not when he makes it to the dark side, when he shifted back to defend his equally left handed son and choose to look like a pale worm instead of a splendid tyrant. Bête Bête where is my beautiful Bête!)
I spend my life in preparation. I practice the guitar each morning with fumble fingers and a groggy head. I then electronically scribble in my journal hoping that some wonderful nugget will be mind from the massive store of fact and feeling that influences my muddled thinking. I dig at ill formed and less that lucid (illucid? A new word for the growing grants of geekdom) computer programming, mathematical, musical and foreign languages. I read incessantly and obsessively. Eventually I became deeply troubled by my apparent lack of achievement. What was the purpose of all this preparation? Whither goest thou, my fragile psyche?
Then in a Zen hissed fit it occurred to me. Preparation is life. At least it is my life. The preparation seems progressive although it may not be. The preparation seems like a path though it well may not be. The preparation seems like that which comes before, but it is not. It is instead, the goal. I know that this mystical kind of ritual stuff has been thought and said before, but that didn't make it any less startling to me. The Gospel formulated according to the cup of Joe.
And so I begin to glimmer the gleam of my approach to cyberspace, www, internet, technological nightmare, whatever we decide collectively to call it. Start the process. It is all preparation. The produce of this procedure will grow, shrink, look better, look worse, hold your interest, bore you to tears, displease, please, gain your admiration, gather your disgust. But it is important that it is there, bare, with all the cracks, fissures and disjoints evident. Throbbing, potential. It will be the Lackzoom Web with all our hopes and aspirations and foolishness and wisdom. What I hope you never see is a little icon of a construction worker with a jack hammer and a sign over a wooden carpenters horse close at hand that proclaims "Pardon our dust this page is under construction." I hope that our site will be under constant deconstruction. Constant reconstruction.
I guess I'd like to make it hard on those damned advertisers.
Monday, July 29, 2002
Monday 7/29/2002 5:38 PM
Clean mind, clean body, take your pick.
Attributed to Elvis
Never put Descartes before dehors.
Cannot possibly be attributed
Lousy as I am at a reasonable facsimile of reasonable argument, I find myself once again embroiled, like a chop blazing on a charcoal grill in the universe of discourse that concerns itself with hypertext, Dub Dub Dub and our burgeoning technological marvels. Scratching my head and other perhaps less appropriate nether portions of my body, I contemplate the spirit filled electronic void that passes itself off as cyberspace. And come up all doe eyes and blank.
I decided that I would single handedly embark on the creation of a hyper novel. Wouldn’t it be neat, I thought, if all my parenthetic expression could be placed in some sort of text box available at the click or passing over of a mouse on some underlined or gaily colored text? That was all that was on my mind, really! But as I started to write I realized that in hypertext chronology or whatever organization that I could manage to design control is more in the hands of the receiver, (in this case you) than the sender (in also the same case me). You would not, for example, necessarily read this sentence because you could choose to drift off to some other portion of my hyperuniverse before I could hyperventilate. It gave me pause which has turned to full stop.
I thought I would take a look at the literature of hypertext and see what was going on. Off to WWW (Dub Dub Dub. It has been pointed out that it is actually faster to say World Wide Web than Double U Double U Double U, certainly ironic and more pointedly indicative of the state of cyberhyperspace.) And I found a welter of confusion. Robert Coover is writing, among others, a hyper novel. There are even such works electronically published. (Don’t want to sound too cheap here, but the $25 fee was too much for my poor, and I do mean poor, mind and its physical manifestation the bank account to pay).
Then I looked for hypertext editors or writing systems figuring that method would become evident in the use of the software and essentially came up with web page editors. Since I already use both Dream Weaver and Front Page to develop (isn’t that a pretension way to put it) my company intranet and parts of the Lackzoom Web, I decided to look at the proffered demo software and was to a program disappointed.
Then I looked at books. Printed pages of materials. Hamlet on the Holodeck is one, The Unfinished Revolution another, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace a third. The arguments of all lead back to that old French guy Descartes and the Mind Body split. Tired and gloomy I plotted it in four extended Cartesian dimensions and out popped the devil. Seems that many people look on Cyberspace as a place where spirit, long left ignored in our scientific objective glance at the cosmos, shines. I’m not so sure that they are all wrong.
Pearly Gates points out that we, in cyberspace, have and become avatars that guide, like angels, like Dante’s long bearded Virgil, out beyond our midpoint residence in the Great Chain of Being, physically midway between heavenly and animal out to where the stars hang in spirit filled luminescence.
Lost lost lost am I. In a maze of CAT 5 Cables and DNS Info. Unable to bridge my network at home with my network at work with the network of the world. Crashing whole systems of bits bytes words writ in XML C++ HTML ActiveX Perl Unix Linux XP CGI PDQ LSMFT. It all seems like it should be easier. I just, I cry, want to write! Or Do I?
Clean mind, clean body, take your pick.
Attributed to Elvis
Never put Descartes before dehors.
Cannot possibly be attributed
Lousy as I am at a reasonable facsimile of reasonable argument, I find myself once again embroiled, like a chop blazing on a charcoal grill in the universe of discourse that concerns itself with hypertext, Dub Dub Dub and our burgeoning technological marvels. Scratching my head and other perhaps less appropriate nether portions of my body, I contemplate the spirit filled electronic void that passes itself off as cyberspace. And come up all doe eyes and blank.
I decided that I would single handedly embark on the creation of a hyper novel. Wouldn’t it be neat, I thought, if all my parenthetic expression could be placed in some sort of text box available at the click or passing over of a mouse on some underlined or gaily colored text? That was all that was on my mind, really! But as I started to write I realized that in hypertext chronology or whatever organization that I could manage to design control is more in the hands of the receiver, (in this case you) than the sender (in also the same case me). You would not, for example, necessarily read this sentence because you could choose to drift off to some other portion of my hyperuniverse before I could hyperventilate. It gave me pause which has turned to full stop.
I thought I would take a look at the literature of hypertext and see what was going on. Off to WWW (Dub Dub Dub. It has been pointed out that it is actually faster to say World Wide Web than Double U Double U Double U, certainly ironic and more pointedly indicative of the state of cyberhyperspace.) And I found a welter of confusion. Robert Coover is writing, among others, a hyper novel. There are even such works electronically published. (Don’t want to sound too cheap here, but the $25 fee was too much for my poor, and I do mean poor, mind and its physical manifestation the bank account to pay).
Then I looked for hypertext editors or writing systems figuring that method would become evident in the use of the software and essentially came up with web page editors. Since I already use both Dream Weaver and Front Page to develop (isn’t that a pretension way to put it) my company intranet and parts of the Lackzoom Web, I decided to look at the proffered demo software and was to a program disappointed.
Then I looked at books. Printed pages of materials. Hamlet on the Holodeck is one, The Unfinished Revolution another, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace a third. The arguments of all lead back to that old French guy Descartes and the Mind Body split. Tired and gloomy I plotted it in four extended Cartesian dimensions and out popped the devil. Seems that many people look on Cyberspace as a place where spirit, long left ignored in our scientific objective glance at the cosmos, shines. I’m not so sure that they are all wrong.
Pearly Gates points out that we, in cyberspace, have and become avatars that guide, like angels, like Dante’s long bearded Virgil, out beyond our midpoint residence in the Great Chain of Being, physically midway between heavenly and animal out to where the stars hang in spirit filled luminescence.
Lost lost lost am I. In a maze of CAT 5 Cables and DNS Info. Unable to bridge my network at home with my network at work with the network of the world. Crashing whole systems of bits bytes words writ in XML C++ HTML ActiveX Perl Unix Linux XP CGI PDQ LSMFT. It all seems like it should be easier. I just, I cry, want to write! Or Do I?
Wednesday, July 17, 2002
Wednesday, July 17, 2002 5:55 PM
Modulate whose frequency?
Thirty years ago I became involved with a listener sponsored radio station here in the Pittsburgh area. Call letters: WYEP-FM. It is on the air to this day at 91.3 FM instead of 91.5 FM on your radio dial. It is quite a different station. Not passing judgment. The trade off was that the station must sound more acceptable. Simply survival. People are more prone to pay during the pledge drives. It is far, however, less dangerous to listen.
Don't get me wrong here. In the early days even I had a hard time listening. Our politics were boorish. We thought we were revolutionary. Our social message, then deadly serious, now, still serious, seems quainter, like watching in all its embarrassing retrospect, Woodstock, the Movie. Our programming skills amateurish. I am certain that in the halls of "professional" broadcasting the high “pros” laughed at us. More probably ignored or were unaware entirely of our existence.
Eventually, in a move that still puzzles me, I was appointed (hired I guess) Program Director of the station. This came with some very serious disabilities, not the least of which was a drastic non-living wage. The most of which was ultimate responsibility for the duties of the job with very little authority to carry them out. Sound like a political position? You bet! I abhor politics on almost every level. Instead of a system developed to preserve rights in a social context, real politic serves as a wedge for most abusers to pry their own ideas and ways with whatever tools or power available. If it doesn’t work hit it with a hammer. Do I sound bitter? Perhaps! I hope I will never be in such a position again.
BUT
when it worked you never heard the like.
Two grade school on friends (they became my friends as well) one a newly discharged Vietnam Vet, the other a clever musician with a genius for finding and playing appropriate music, produced an impromptu show each morning, 10 AM to Noon. Audio snippets of historical and current events mixed with musical snippets, classical hep, nostalgic rare and topical music in as tasteful a montage as I have ever heard. The very juxtaposition filled the air with meaning and depth. That radio program was lived in that time for that moment. If you were not there to hear it, you missed something significant.
There were black shows, gay shows, feminist shows, political shows; ethnic shows one following the other. Mostly saying the same old thing in the same old way, but all capable of rising above the thrall and all definitely exposing a voice that had all but been cashiered out of the broadcast band. As you can tell, the thrust of WYEP was mostly to the far left of center. Which makes it even odder that I became the leader of the air. I eschew, close to disdain, all political messages. I consider definite purpose in the art of radio as pornography. (James Joyce makes such a claim about the nature of pornography and what it serves in The Portrait of An Artist As A Young Man. I subscribe to it.)
I believe in the Art of Radio. In those days I could feel it strumming through me. The Tribal Tom Tom. You bet! I envisioned the radio dial as a geography, swoop from peak to gorge as you glide from low AM or FM to higher frequencies. It is a constantly moving landscape. Not only did it move as you moved in space from city to city but it changed in texture with time. I wanted WYEP to both fit into and disrupt that geography. I wanted it to explode mountains and then rebuild them, cause gorges to fill with torrents of water, move with sometimes swift violence and sometimes gentle determination.
My tools were the people who sat in the control room. It was my style to set them in place and then let them create as they would. I demanded only that creation. The problem was that I could not remove the poseurs. The Board of the radio station was all powerful, it consisted of listening subscribers, working members, staff and some community wonks. It met almost weekly. It made decisions with a socially cautious group mind. It left the staff powerless and ineffectual. "What gives you the right to throw me off the air?" one of the untalented who got the crook of my thumb would ask. I'd explain my criteria. Reach through your Brother Love DJ image. It is indistinguishable from the music that blares out 8 Track machines from the candy apple red Mustang at the corner of Forbes and Craig, out of record players in placed in the windows of college dorms. Forget the soft midnight DJ voice and use your own. Over and over I’d make the points, thinking that someone was listening to what I was saying or what the station was playing. And then without mercy, without thought, I would be overruled. I simply made it harder to get on the air. I worked the system, learned to buck it and eventually I left. Not in a hail of protest but in a whimper when a new General Manager was hired. We agreed. A Dios!
The station languished. Some people stayed and put forth tireless and thankless effort. It is out of Oakland on the South Side and prosperous. On the air. Plays a lot of alternative rock. I guess I was wrong about the 8 Track college dorm thing. WYEP sounds to me pretty much like everything else. There are a few charming exceptions.
There is no more landscape on the radio dial. Owners like Clear Channel Sound have brought a sound to radio across the board that is close to what the universe will sound like near the ultimate increase of entropy. Undistinguished, undifferentiated, no signs of struggling life or intelligence.
I can't wait for the cycle end. I want to see Rebirth. In a roaring flashing Big Bang!
Modulate whose frequency?
Thirty years ago I became involved with a listener sponsored radio station here in the Pittsburgh area. Call letters: WYEP-FM. It is on the air to this day at 91.3 FM instead of 91.5 FM on your radio dial. It is quite a different station. Not passing judgment. The trade off was that the station must sound more acceptable. Simply survival. People are more prone to pay during the pledge drives. It is far, however, less dangerous to listen.
Don't get me wrong here. In the early days even I had a hard time listening. Our politics were boorish. We thought we were revolutionary. Our social message, then deadly serious, now, still serious, seems quainter, like watching in all its embarrassing retrospect, Woodstock, the Movie. Our programming skills amateurish. I am certain that in the halls of "professional" broadcasting the high “pros” laughed at us. More probably ignored or were unaware entirely of our existence.
Eventually, in a move that still puzzles me, I was appointed (hired I guess) Program Director of the station. This came with some very serious disabilities, not the least of which was a drastic non-living wage. The most of which was ultimate responsibility for the duties of the job with very little authority to carry them out. Sound like a political position? You bet! I abhor politics on almost every level. Instead of a system developed to preserve rights in a social context, real politic serves as a wedge for most abusers to pry their own ideas and ways with whatever tools or power available. If it doesn’t work hit it with a hammer. Do I sound bitter? Perhaps! I hope I will never be in such a position again.
BUT
when it worked you never heard the like.
Two grade school on friends (they became my friends as well) one a newly discharged Vietnam Vet, the other a clever musician with a genius for finding and playing appropriate music, produced an impromptu show each morning, 10 AM to Noon. Audio snippets of historical and current events mixed with musical snippets, classical hep, nostalgic rare and topical music in as tasteful a montage as I have ever heard. The very juxtaposition filled the air with meaning and depth. That radio program was lived in that time for that moment. If you were not there to hear it, you missed something significant.
There were black shows, gay shows, feminist shows, political shows; ethnic shows one following the other. Mostly saying the same old thing in the same old way, but all capable of rising above the thrall and all definitely exposing a voice that had all but been cashiered out of the broadcast band. As you can tell, the thrust of WYEP was mostly to the far left of center. Which makes it even odder that I became the leader of the air. I eschew, close to disdain, all political messages. I consider definite purpose in the art of radio as pornography. (James Joyce makes such a claim about the nature of pornography and what it serves in The Portrait of An Artist As A Young Man. I subscribe to it.)
I believe in the Art of Radio. In those days I could feel it strumming through me. The Tribal Tom Tom. You bet! I envisioned the radio dial as a geography, swoop from peak to gorge as you glide from low AM or FM to higher frequencies. It is a constantly moving landscape. Not only did it move as you moved in space from city to city but it changed in texture with time. I wanted WYEP to both fit into and disrupt that geography. I wanted it to explode mountains and then rebuild them, cause gorges to fill with torrents of water, move with sometimes swift violence and sometimes gentle determination.
My tools were the people who sat in the control room. It was my style to set them in place and then let them create as they would. I demanded only that creation. The problem was that I could not remove the poseurs. The Board of the radio station was all powerful, it consisted of listening subscribers, working members, staff and some community wonks. It met almost weekly. It made decisions with a socially cautious group mind. It left the staff powerless and ineffectual. "What gives you the right to throw me off the air?" one of the untalented who got the crook of my thumb would ask. I'd explain my criteria. Reach through your Brother Love DJ image. It is indistinguishable from the music that blares out 8 Track machines from the candy apple red Mustang at the corner of Forbes and Craig, out of record players in placed in the windows of college dorms. Forget the soft midnight DJ voice and use your own. Over and over I’d make the points, thinking that someone was listening to what I was saying or what the station was playing. And then without mercy, without thought, I would be overruled. I simply made it harder to get on the air. I worked the system, learned to buck it and eventually I left. Not in a hail of protest but in a whimper when a new General Manager was hired. We agreed. A Dios!
The station languished. Some people stayed and put forth tireless and thankless effort. It is out of Oakland on the South Side and prosperous. On the air. Plays a lot of alternative rock. I guess I was wrong about the 8 Track college dorm thing. WYEP sounds to me pretty much like everything else. There are a few charming exceptions.
There is no more landscape on the radio dial. Owners like Clear Channel Sound have brought a sound to radio across the board that is close to what the universe will sound like near the ultimate increase of entropy. Undistinguished, undifferentiated, no signs of struggling life or intelligence.
I can't wait for the cycle end. I want to see Rebirth. In a roaring flashing Big Bang!
Monday, July 15, 2002
Monday, July 15, 2002 6:37 PM
Adventures in Lawn Bowling
Saturday afternoon roughly one pm. I parked in front of the lawn bowling courts at Frick Park. The area surrounding is a posh inner city neighborhood on the south side of Penn Avenue which separates the drive-by black neighborhood of Homewood and the yupped-up money of Point Breeze. The city at this divide is a constant study in contrast. Black and white in every polemical sense of the words.
There was no one around. Chirping birds, wishing whispering wind. I walked the distance around the chain link fence that encapsulated the lawn bowling courts to a small shed building with the name Frick Park Lawn Bowling Association on a sign. People skirted me with dogs on long leashes and plastic bags in their hands. I noticed a white paper announcement behind the links of fence giving the hours of operation. Saturday, but I was an hour early. I drove over to East Liberty in search of books at the Goodwill.
I returned with a passel of Ross Thomas in my trunk. I parked in almost the same place. At the far left court a man and a woman, Isabel and Hank I later learned, were heavy at work. She was weeding around the gutter and while, he with an electric drill attached to about one hundred feet of orange 12/3 extension cord was peppering the green painted boundary board with holes. I sat on a park bench, Pocket PC attached to the extended keyboard, and labored in Pocket Word trying to physically describe the place. Twice the keyboard slid off the notebook in my lap and I contented myself with observation in the hot sun.
There are three courts each one hundred and twenty feet by one hundred and twenty feet. Left, Center and Right. Left and Center are manicured grass. Right is wild grass in a much more chaotic state. Each court is separated by a black-top island strip the length of the court and roughly five feet in width bounded with a foot high concrete curb that drops to the field of play. There are three two sided park benches evenly distributed across the strip. A resting place for players and spectators. Around the entire perimeter of the two manicured courts was a gutter. The far left court looked and I assumed had been abandoned. I was only partially correct.
A bearded man in a red ball cap and a woman in gray shorts and a white blouse shook the locked gate that was closest to the park bench where I wilted. "Do you have a key?" she asked him. He shrugged. They walked around to the opposite open gate. Soon another woman, dressed for game, tan shorts, tan blouse, opened the locked gate with a key and walked across the court. A final women player arrived.
They all gathered while the workers pulled and whirred. "Oh, no," said weeder woman, “you can play today." And they all disappeared into the shed. Out they bounded with satchels full of equipment and moved into the middle of the center court. First they stuck number boards into the ground by the gutter to indicate the lanes in which they were playing. The two men were playing singles. I heard them say. The four women, doubles.
Someone flipped a coin won the toss and threw the small white colored jack ball. Another walked across the court and centered it on the lane. Play followed. Each player alternated rolls. This was different. Bocce, after the initial two throws, the person furthest from the "puleen" (pallino) throws until he exhaust his store of balls trying to get closer.
The women playing doubles had sixteen balls (later I found that they were called bowls) at the end of play. This is also a change from Bocce. When you play doubles in the Italian version, there are still only four total balls on a side. I concluded from my recent excursion to the discount sports store that lawn bowling is a more expensive sport.
Four young people walked into the court. “Hey,” said Hank, “do you have your Bocce balls.” One of the girls held up a white net beach bag with bright yellow and green balls. “They’re not really Bocce balls she said. “Well, you can play over there.” Said Hank pointing to the far wild court. “We can show you how to lawn bowl, if you want.” I moved close to the fence, the young people huddled and listened. Isabel went to the shed and came back with an 8 ½ x 11 paper hand out describing the Lawn Bowling League and the activity. One of the women, Annika, showed them the bowls, pointing out that they weren’t round. Hank looked at me and said “You’re allowed to come in a watch.” I did.
They were all lovely people. The young folk moved away to the far court and played a casual game of Bocce in the wild grass. Not making nearly enough noise for my money. Annika., slight Swedish accent, handed me a bowl and showed me that it was biased on either side and that you rolled it in down the middle. Isabel explained that there was a large logo and a small logo and the bowl was manufactured to break toward the smaller logo. Hank beamed across the court and said, “I guess you can tell we love this game.” You could. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t play it.” And for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out either. I stayed for an hour or so and watched. Shook hands with everyone when I left. “We’d love to have you join us,” said Isabel.
I read the flyer later that night. Most everyone, it says, who bowls is under sixty. Dispelling the rumor that it is a game only for old codgers. Isabel explained to me that it was a national organization and that they traveled to Connecticut and New Jersey and that although last year’s finals were in California that they were going to take place in August in good old Frick Park this year.
But I kept looking at that wild court. The game of lawn bowling is gentle and gentile. Thought about stern old Dago guys in the alley. It would be drinking tea instead of slopping grapes. Thought about the light of the hot afternoon sun. Remembered the darkness encroaching, chasing shadowed men more deeply into shadows.
Maybe next year.
Adventures in Lawn Bowling
Saturday afternoon roughly one pm. I parked in front of the lawn bowling courts at Frick Park. The area surrounding is a posh inner city neighborhood on the south side of Penn Avenue which separates the drive-by black neighborhood of Homewood and the yupped-up money of Point Breeze. The city at this divide is a constant study in contrast. Black and white in every polemical sense of the words.
There was no one around. Chirping birds, wishing whispering wind. I walked the distance around the chain link fence that encapsulated the lawn bowling courts to a small shed building with the name Frick Park Lawn Bowling Association on a sign. People skirted me with dogs on long leashes and plastic bags in their hands. I noticed a white paper announcement behind the links of fence giving the hours of operation. Saturday, but I was an hour early. I drove over to East Liberty in search of books at the Goodwill.
I returned with a passel of Ross Thomas in my trunk. I parked in almost the same place. At the far left court a man and a woman, Isabel and Hank I later learned, were heavy at work. She was weeding around the gutter and while, he with an electric drill attached to about one hundred feet of orange 12/3 extension cord was peppering the green painted boundary board with holes. I sat on a park bench, Pocket PC attached to the extended keyboard, and labored in Pocket Word trying to physically describe the place. Twice the keyboard slid off the notebook in my lap and I contented myself with observation in the hot sun.
There are three courts each one hundred and twenty feet by one hundred and twenty feet. Left, Center and Right. Left and Center are manicured grass. Right is wild grass in a much more chaotic state. Each court is separated by a black-top island strip the length of the court and roughly five feet in width bounded with a foot high concrete curb that drops to the field of play. There are three two sided park benches evenly distributed across the strip. A resting place for players and spectators. Around the entire perimeter of the two manicured courts was a gutter. The far left court looked and I assumed had been abandoned. I was only partially correct.
A bearded man in a red ball cap and a woman in gray shorts and a white blouse shook the locked gate that was closest to the park bench where I wilted. "Do you have a key?" she asked him. He shrugged. They walked around to the opposite open gate. Soon another woman, dressed for game, tan shorts, tan blouse, opened the locked gate with a key and walked across the court. A final women player arrived.
They all gathered while the workers pulled and whirred. "Oh, no," said weeder woman, “you can play today." And they all disappeared into the shed. Out they bounded with satchels full of equipment and moved into the middle of the center court. First they stuck number boards into the ground by the gutter to indicate the lanes in which they were playing. The two men were playing singles. I heard them say. The four women, doubles.
Someone flipped a coin won the toss and threw the small white colored jack ball. Another walked across the court and centered it on the lane. Play followed. Each player alternated rolls. This was different. Bocce, after the initial two throws, the person furthest from the "puleen" (pallino) throws until he exhaust his store of balls trying to get closer.
The women playing doubles had sixteen balls (later I found that they were called bowls) at the end of play. This is also a change from Bocce. When you play doubles in the Italian version, there are still only four total balls on a side. I concluded from my recent excursion to the discount sports store that lawn bowling is a more expensive sport.
Four young people walked into the court. “Hey,” said Hank, “do you have your Bocce balls.” One of the girls held up a white net beach bag with bright yellow and green balls. “They’re not really Bocce balls she said. “Well, you can play over there.” Said Hank pointing to the far wild court. “We can show you how to lawn bowl, if you want.” I moved close to the fence, the young people huddled and listened. Isabel went to the shed and came back with an 8 ½ x 11 paper hand out describing the Lawn Bowling League and the activity. One of the women, Annika, showed them the bowls, pointing out that they weren’t round. Hank looked at me and said “You’re allowed to come in a watch.” I did.
They were all lovely people. The young folk moved away to the far court and played a casual game of Bocce in the wild grass. Not making nearly enough noise for my money. Annika., slight Swedish accent, handed me a bowl and showed me that it was biased on either side and that you rolled it in down the middle. Isabel explained that there was a large logo and a small logo and the bowl was manufactured to break toward the smaller logo. Hank beamed across the court and said, “I guess you can tell we love this game.” You could. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t play it.” And for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out either. I stayed for an hour or so and watched. Shook hands with everyone when I left. “We’d love to have you join us,” said Isabel.
I read the flyer later that night. Most everyone, it says, who bowls is under sixty. Dispelling the rumor that it is a game only for old codgers. Isabel explained to me that it was a national organization and that they traveled to Connecticut and New Jersey and that although last year’s finals were in California that they were going to take place in August in good old Frick Park this year.
But I kept looking at that wild court. The game of lawn bowling is gentle and gentile. Thought about stern old Dago guys in the alley. It would be drinking tea instead of slopping grapes. Thought about the light of the hot afternoon sun. Remembered the darkness encroaching, chasing shadowed men more deeply into shadows.
Maybe next year.
Saturday, July 13, 2002
Saturday, July 13, 2002 8:28 AM
I know that I yam and yam that I know.
I went out last Sunday in search of a Bocce set. Thought, if I'm going to be mentally involved in this game for a time then I should probably try some physically finessed action. Figured, well, it'll probably cost around $40.00 which is too much for the frivolous side of my budget and hoping it would only be around $20.00. I also vowed to get down to the lawn bowling courts over at Frick Park this coming weekend. Research says my brain. Research! I am nothing (quit the cub scouts twice before my twelfth year), if not prepared. At least, know something of what the hell you are writing, expostulates my creative writing teacher.
Creative writing class ninth grade. "You can only write what you know," said Mrs. Whatever-her-name-was-that-vanished-from-me-after-all-these-years glibly. I thought it was stupid then, confirming that if I could only write what I know I would spew out about a page and a half and before the necessity of moving on to something else. I know that wasn't her meaning, but it is always my initial negative reaction to a rule or a guideline. I am a very contrary person. Whatever it is I'm against it, remains the ruling script in my life. Sometimes it is even helpful.
But there is a problem with this knowing thing. An old Stan Freberg cartoon where a person comes across a struggling artist, who looks terrible, takes one look and says, oh, you've suffered too much. My life has not been full of suffering. I am a suburban guy in a middle age struggling from pay check to pay check in middle America just middlin’ along. I have not been to war. I have not been part of a holocaust. I have not seen abject poverty. I have not ...well, it's all been ok really. So in the suffering department, other than a load of guilt I carry around for acts that seem not even all that related to me, I lack the "artistic temperament". I conclude from Stan and others that I just suffer too little.
I am not particularly driven. I wish I came home every evening and just wrote long tormented passages of passionate prose or poetry. Instead I eat some dinner, take a glass or two of wine and write for an hour and produce some broken dreams that seem never to get done. I will not bother here with the growing list of projects which I am far better at conceiving than completing. Hey, maybe this is a “life of quiet desperation.” No?
The other problem with this epistemological dilemma is that what I know is relatively uninteresting. For example, I toyed with the idea of a novel called simply, Mechanical Refrigeration. I liked the idea of it being confused with a text book and I may (just one of the projects) even write it some day. The problem is that when I start to write it, it seems very uninteresting. Either I know this subject too well or I don't understand its charm or my depth of knowledge is every bit as shallow here as elsewhere. Perhaps I should suffer on the spit of thermodynamics for a century or two.
It really is ridiculous, I now suffer and despair because I don't suffer and despair or know enough. Doesn't seem legit to me. Could I exist in an unheated garret with these superficial miseries? Perhaps I should cut off an appendage and proclaim undying unrequited love to some woman. Carry her scarf in my back pocket so that…wait this is getting far too erotic and complicated for my simple brain.
I went over to one of the sports sales stores that reside behind the mall and seem way more interested in clothes than sports. They had exactly two Bocce sets. One for $20.00. But it was called a beginners set, had pictures of children playing on a lawn and plastic hollow balls. Next to it was, of course, the set that I wanted. I picked it up, proud that I had the muscles to do so, for I am sure that Olympic Weight lifting champ Paul Anderson (shows when I paid attention to sports last, eh) would have had a hard time raising that set in a spiffing wooden box to eye view for examination. 80 bucks!
Always the smart shopper I went to a discount store and found a set for even more money. America can provide a cruel shopping experience. How can I possibly write about Bocce when I have not played Bocce? How can I play Bocce without having a set of Bocce Balls? Thus, thrust high on the horns, I hang watching the world spin around.
I know that I yam and yam that I know.
I went out last Sunday in search of a Bocce set. Thought, if I'm going to be mentally involved in this game for a time then I should probably try some physically finessed action. Figured, well, it'll probably cost around $40.00 which is too much for the frivolous side of my budget and hoping it would only be around $20.00. I also vowed to get down to the lawn bowling courts over at Frick Park this coming weekend. Research says my brain. Research! I am nothing (quit the cub scouts twice before my twelfth year), if not prepared. At least, know something of what the hell you are writing, expostulates my creative writing teacher.
Creative writing class ninth grade. "You can only write what you know," said Mrs. Whatever-her-name-was-that-vanished-from-me-after-all-these-years glibly. I thought it was stupid then, confirming that if I could only write what I know I would spew out about a page and a half and before the necessity of moving on to something else. I know that wasn't her meaning, but it is always my initial negative reaction to a rule or a guideline. I am a very contrary person. Whatever it is I'm against it, remains the ruling script in my life. Sometimes it is even helpful.
But there is a problem with this knowing thing. An old Stan Freberg cartoon where a person comes across a struggling artist, who looks terrible, takes one look and says, oh, you've suffered too much. My life has not been full of suffering. I am a suburban guy in a middle age struggling from pay check to pay check in middle America just middlin’ along. I have not been to war. I have not been part of a holocaust. I have not seen abject poverty. I have not ...well, it's all been ok really. So in the suffering department, other than a load of guilt I carry around for acts that seem not even all that related to me, I lack the "artistic temperament". I conclude from Stan and others that I just suffer too little.
I am not particularly driven. I wish I came home every evening and just wrote long tormented passages of passionate prose or poetry. Instead I eat some dinner, take a glass or two of wine and write for an hour and produce some broken dreams that seem never to get done. I will not bother here with the growing list of projects which I am far better at conceiving than completing. Hey, maybe this is a “life of quiet desperation.” No?
The other problem with this epistemological dilemma is that what I know is relatively uninteresting. For example, I toyed with the idea of a novel called simply, Mechanical Refrigeration. I liked the idea of it being confused with a text book and I may (just one of the projects) even write it some day. The problem is that when I start to write it, it seems very uninteresting. Either I know this subject too well or I don't understand its charm or my depth of knowledge is every bit as shallow here as elsewhere. Perhaps I should suffer on the spit of thermodynamics for a century or two.
It really is ridiculous, I now suffer and despair because I don't suffer and despair or know enough. Doesn't seem legit to me. Could I exist in an unheated garret with these superficial miseries? Perhaps I should cut off an appendage and proclaim undying unrequited love to some woman. Carry her scarf in my back pocket so that…wait this is getting far too erotic and complicated for my simple brain.
I went over to one of the sports sales stores that reside behind the mall and seem way more interested in clothes than sports. They had exactly two Bocce sets. One for $20.00. But it was called a beginners set, had pictures of children playing on a lawn and plastic hollow balls. Next to it was, of course, the set that I wanted. I picked it up, proud that I had the muscles to do so, for I am sure that Olympic Weight lifting champ Paul Anderson (shows when I paid attention to sports last, eh) would have had a hard time raising that set in a spiffing wooden box to eye view for examination. 80 bucks!
Always the smart shopper I went to a discount store and found a set for even more money. America can provide a cruel shopping experience. How can I possibly write about Bocce when I have not played Bocce? How can I play Bocce without having a set of Bocce Balls? Thus, thrust high on the horns, I hang watching the world spin around.
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
July 10, 2002 6:00 PM
I land on the moon
The People’s Park flap was gone almost three months. Chain link fence contained the place. The Manson family was driving around the town before going to LA on a rip. The Barb and the Tribe were passed out on each corner and down on University Ave peaches and penumbras were sold out the aisles of an all night grocery. It was July. It was the twentieth. It was 1969. And when Armstrong blew the line 240,000 miles away, my new wife and I were trudging up the stairs, carrying meager boxes and suitcases to Phil and Kay’s apartment at the Pacific School of Religion.
It took a couple weeks to get established. An apartment rented from Landlord Elmer over on Ashby, round the corner from the Black Panther National Headquarters. Two apartments down from the nightly concert given from Country Joe McDonald’s balcony. Five blocks from constant turmoil and riot control.
Came the looking for jobs. Andrea got one first at the Bank of America main office at the far end of the Tenderloin, home of P. Giannini. I cleaned an occasional movie theatre, applied to run a newspaper clipping service filled with chattering Hispanic women clicking scissors across a table, talked to one of the large grave insurance companies that abound across the Bay Bridge. Walked Hammett’s dark streets in a tie and sport coat. Out of place in almost every world that San Fran exhibited.
I would find solace during this period of unemployment, in two places. Ocean side San Francisco in Golden Gate Park there was a bandstand filled with empty concert chairs. I would read and dream between unemployed appointments. In Oakland, I would go to Lake Merritt, blue water mid city with small sailing craft tacking, finding the wind. A ribbon of tar macadam around the lake, and gentle grass covered hills into the park.
Which lead to lawn bowling courts and the myriad of retirees that played the day long. They were not the loud and sometimes drunken with all the spirit and passion of the men that I remember that played bocce in the alley behind my Carver Street house. The game only nominally resembled Bocce. The idle old folks were gentile, with supreme expressions of bliss, self satisfaction and awareness as they would roll the ball on a manicured grass lawn. It was cucumber sandwiches and tea contrasted to provolone, mortedella and wine.
As I sat there, day after day, newspaper, marked with irregular black penciled circles, on my knee, Chandler and Hammett (both recently discovered in the mystery section of the Berkeley Library, highly recommended by Berkeley denison Anthony Boucher in article from an old mystery magazine) on the bench next to me, I started to recognize this undistinguished mass of older folks as individuals. I could only give you as I write this, a high fictional account of those personalities, a choice I leave for another writing. Clouded feelings that linger in my memory, made somewhat more vivid by a glass or two of blood red Cabernet and feverish typing.
They would kneel, close to the ground on mats and examine the lay of the courts. Like a golfer reading the break and speed of a green. Then stand, bending deeply and roll the biased ball down the lane, striving to place it as close to the jack as possible. Hardly a cry of triumph, just a small smile that followed the gently swaying accurately placed body English that surely must have affected the course of the bowl. I sat outside the fence on a park bench and they never paid me much mind. Concentration on the game was intense. I longed for inebriated yells as I watched, howls of disapproval, a victory dance followed by vicious gulping swallows of grappa. None ever came. But they eventually won me over. Expressionless, liquorless, focused, they rolled game after game. Men clothed in green pants, yellow shirts, women with their hair pulled severely back wearing plaid culottes that bared no danger. White buck shoes and tennis sneakers. The court, carefully short cut grass surrounded by a perfectly wood framed gutter. The wind blowing genteelly against an American flapping flag, sails snapping on the lake, which was surrounded by high rise senior apartments on the far side hard against the four lane boulevard.
I shake a fag loose. Feel the heat and smell the orchids in General Smallwood’s hot house. Take a sip of his brandy. I reach. One small step for a man.
I land on the moon
The People’s Park flap was gone almost three months. Chain link fence contained the place. The Manson family was driving around the town before going to LA on a rip. The Barb and the Tribe were passed out on each corner and down on University Ave peaches and penumbras were sold out the aisles of an all night grocery. It was July. It was the twentieth. It was 1969. And when Armstrong blew the line 240,000 miles away, my new wife and I were trudging up the stairs, carrying meager boxes and suitcases to Phil and Kay’s apartment at the Pacific School of Religion.
It took a couple weeks to get established. An apartment rented from Landlord Elmer over on Ashby, round the corner from the Black Panther National Headquarters. Two apartments down from the nightly concert given from Country Joe McDonald’s balcony. Five blocks from constant turmoil and riot control.
Came the looking for jobs. Andrea got one first at the Bank of America main office at the far end of the Tenderloin, home of P. Giannini. I cleaned an occasional movie theatre, applied to run a newspaper clipping service filled with chattering Hispanic women clicking scissors across a table, talked to one of the large grave insurance companies that abound across the Bay Bridge. Walked Hammett’s dark streets in a tie and sport coat. Out of place in almost every world that San Fran exhibited.
I would find solace during this period of unemployment, in two places. Ocean side San Francisco in Golden Gate Park there was a bandstand filled with empty concert chairs. I would read and dream between unemployed appointments. In Oakland, I would go to Lake Merritt, blue water mid city with small sailing craft tacking, finding the wind. A ribbon of tar macadam around the lake, and gentle grass covered hills into the park.
Which lead to lawn bowling courts and the myriad of retirees that played the day long. They were not the loud and sometimes drunken with all the spirit and passion of the men that I remember that played bocce in the alley behind my Carver Street house. The game only nominally resembled Bocce. The idle old folks were gentile, with supreme expressions of bliss, self satisfaction and awareness as they would roll the ball on a manicured grass lawn. It was cucumber sandwiches and tea contrasted to provolone, mortedella and wine.
As I sat there, day after day, newspaper, marked with irregular black penciled circles, on my knee, Chandler and Hammett (both recently discovered in the mystery section of the Berkeley Library, highly recommended by Berkeley denison Anthony Boucher in article from an old mystery magazine) on the bench next to me, I started to recognize this undistinguished mass of older folks as individuals. I could only give you as I write this, a high fictional account of those personalities, a choice I leave for another writing. Clouded feelings that linger in my memory, made somewhat more vivid by a glass or two of blood red Cabernet and feverish typing.
They would kneel, close to the ground on mats and examine the lay of the courts. Like a golfer reading the break and speed of a green. Then stand, bending deeply and roll the biased ball down the lane, striving to place it as close to the jack as possible. Hardly a cry of triumph, just a small smile that followed the gently swaying accurately placed body English that surely must have affected the course of the bowl. I sat outside the fence on a park bench and they never paid me much mind. Concentration on the game was intense. I longed for inebriated yells as I watched, howls of disapproval, a victory dance followed by vicious gulping swallows of grappa. None ever came. But they eventually won me over. Expressionless, liquorless, focused, they rolled game after game. Men clothed in green pants, yellow shirts, women with their hair pulled severely back wearing plaid culottes that bared no danger. White buck shoes and tennis sneakers. The court, carefully short cut grass surrounded by a perfectly wood framed gutter. The wind blowing genteelly against an American flapping flag, sails snapping on the lake, which was surrounded by high rise senior apartments on the far side hard against the four lane boulevard.
I shake a fag loose. Feel the heat and smell the orchids in General Smallwood’s hot house. Take a sip of his brandy. I reach. One small step for a man.
Monday, July 08, 2002
Monday, July 08, 2002 8:52 PM
Lawn Bowling to you, Boules to the French, Bocce to Me
Take me back O! gaming muse to the alley of a hot summer evening behind my childhood dwelling at 33 Carver Street, Larimar Avenue District, East Liberty, Pittsburgh, USA, World, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Universe, World Without End Amen. (Thank you, Stephen Daedalus). Old men, at least to my young brain, would move from the helpless humidity sweating their back porches and sweet smelling coolness of grape arbors out into the black cinder heat of the alley. This alley was at best an avenue of careless lumps, bumps and holes. Car traffic had, over the hard years, caused a massive mountain crest midway and ruts deep enough to swallow half a 1950 car wheel. When those old guys congregated, black pants, white shirts, gray whiskers and liquored, it became a Bocce Court.
I remember them as dour, stern, serious guys. I remember the passion with which they treated these nightly matches. It frightened young me that someday I would have to join such an adult world. Where game was high drama and serious as murder. Games are games; I shrug, now, dismissively. My life is a game. The thought of entering such intensity, witnessed as a child so many years ago leaves me weak kneed and panting. Perhaps it is a fault. It seems like it when I insecurely tick off all the slack solutions to my problems on a sleepless night.
I wish I could remember their names, their faces. I know that they did not come from my father's generation but my father’s father’s. Maternal grandfather died when my mother was young, paternal when I was still cutting teeth. Having little direct connection is the probable reason I remember them as shadow.
By high mystery, akin to what I witnessed in the mass on Sunday, somber Latin rising with the blue incense to a reproduction of Michelangelo’s touch in the dome, they broke into teams. Those who were waiting in the wings to play would line the side of the alley, leaning against fences that were held upright by green vines and dragon popping flowers, would drink basement prepared wine out of unlabeled bottles and jelly glasses. They were a wonderfully boisterous expletive included, albeit in some dialect regional Italian, crew. Some of their bocce balls were made of wood, some of steel, taken I guess from Homestead or Braddock Works. They were not the modern gaily colored red and green with yellow lines balls that are shelved at We Are Sports stores, but a murky brown or gray dark with dirt, age and use. Camouflage in the alley. I could never distinguish one team from the other.
Opposing teams would either toss a coin or play mora, that rock, scissors, paper staple of Italy, throw out a number of fingers, one through five, against an opponent who would violently thrust a digit count at your midriff. You both cry out an amount that predicts the two handed count. Italian number words would be sung out with a cadence, Cinque, five, would become Cccchhhhinnn Kwaaaayeee! and instead of ten, dieci, deee-aaaaaa-chi, but the cognoscenti would yell Tutti, all. To this day this distinction between dieci and tutti is how I know if a veteran or relative new comer is playing. The winner would throw the pulleen. I know now that this small object ball, called the jack in more Protestant circles is properly named the pallino. But these guys threw the pulleen.
Placed with rolling care in that precarious humped street the game would begin. Volo, the air shot, with back English so that the ball would hit, cause damage to the opponents position and stick close to the pulleen, against Puntata, the rolling shot better suited to a manicured lawn and in desperation, raffa or smash shot, all the explosive force of a hand grenade, lobbed or thrown overhand. Not much finesse, but powerful collisions. I am sure that this is how Enrico Fermi got the idea to split the atom.
The truly wonderful thing is, as I sit here in the backyard typing, I see that it is Bocce at the neighbors this Monday evening. There are loud guys over across the orchard, white tee shirts, bellies extended over their belt buckles, black or tan slacks, yelling as they play on the posh Bocce court built by my Plumbing Contractor neighbor. Earl just scored a point, I heard the yell. I probably should walk over, behind the vegetable garden next to the tar paper, wood window and two-by four shed, in front of the carefully high stacked grasshopper winter fire wood and the swing that delightfully flies out over the forest valley below.
I just threw out my right hand.
Tutti!
Lawn Bowling to you, Boules to the French, Bocce to Me
Take me back O! gaming muse to the alley of a hot summer evening behind my childhood dwelling at 33 Carver Street, Larimar Avenue District, East Liberty, Pittsburgh, USA, World, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Universe, World Without End Amen. (Thank you, Stephen Daedalus). Old men, at least to my young brain, would move from the helpless humidity sweating their back porches and sweet smelling coolness of grape arbors out into the black cinder heat of the alley. This alley was at best an avenue of careless lumps, bumps and holes. Car traffic had, over the hard years, caused a massive mountain crest midway and ruts deep enough to swallow half a 1950 car wheel. When those old guys congregated, black pants, white shirts, gray whiskers and liquored, it became a Bocce Court.
I remember them as dour, stern, serious guys. I remember the passion with which they treated these nightly matches. It frightened young me that someday I would have to join such an adult world. Where game was high drama and serious as murder. Games are games; I shrug, now, dismissively. My life is a game. The thought of entering such intensity, witnessed as a child so many years ago leaves me weak kneed and panting. Perhaps it is a fault. It seems like it when I insecurely tick off all the slack solutions to my problems on a sleepless night.
I wish I could remember their names, their faces. I know that they did not come from my father's generation but my father’s father’s. Maternal grandfather died when my mother was young, paternal when I was still cutting teeth. Having little direct connection is the probable reason I remember them as shadow.
By high mystery, akin to what I witnessed in the mass on Sunday, somber Latin rising with the blue incense to a reproduction of Michelangelo’s touch in the dome, they broke into teams. Those who were waiting in the wings to play would line the side of the alley, leaning against fences that were held upright by green vines and dragon popping flowers, would drink basement prepared wine out of unlabeled bottles and jelly glasses. They were a wonderfully boisterous expletive included, albeit in some dialect regional Italian, crew. Some of their bocce balls were made of wood, some of steel, taken I guess from Homestead or Braddock Works. They were not the modern gaily colored red and green with yellow lines balls that are shelved at We Are Sports stores, but a murky brown or gray dark with dirt, age and use. Camouflage in the alley. I could never distinguish one team from the other.
Opposing teams would either toss a coin or play mora, that rock, scissors, paper staple of Italy, throw out a number of fingers, one through five, against an opponent who would violently thrust a digit count at your midriff. You both cry out an amount that predicts the two handed count. Italian number words would be sung out with a cadence, Cinque, five, would become Cccchhhhinnn Kwaaaayeee! and instead of ten, dieci, deee-aaaaaa-chi, but the cognoscenti would yell Tutti, all. To this day this distinction between dieci and tutti is how I know if a veteran or relative new comer is playing. The winner would throw the pulleen. I know now that this small object ball, called the jack in more Protestant circles is properly named the pallino. But these guys threw the pulleen.
Placed with rolling care in that precarious humped street the game would begin. Volo, the air shot, with back English so that the ball would hit, cause damage to the opponents position and stick close to the pulleen, against Puntata, the rolling shot better suited to a manicured lawn and in desperation, raffa or smash shot, all the explosive force of a hand grenade, lobbed or thrown overhand. Not much finesse, but powerful collisions. I am sure that this is how Enrico Fermi got the idea to split the atom.
The truly wonderful thing is, as I sit here in the backyard typing, I see that it is Bocce at the neighbors this Monday evening. There are loud guys over across the orchard, white tee shirts, bellies extended over their belt buckles, black or tan slacks, yelling as they play on the posh Bocce court built by my Plumbing Contractor neighbor. Earl just scored a point, I heard the yell. I probably should walk over, behind the vegetable garden next to the tar paper, wood window and two-by four shed, in front of the carefully high stacked grasshopper winter fire wood and the swing that delightfully flies out over the forest valley below.
I just threw out my right hand.
Tutti!
Monday, July 01, 2002
7/1/2002 6:50:07 PM
Is this a doddering old man I see sniveling before me?
As I sit here typing TV news is telling all residents of Penn Hills (where I live) that the East End Rapist, armed and dangerous, this morning after a police chase, has ended up in one of the woods hereabout. Keep your doors locked. And your eyes peeled.
The office of Home Security has asked all Americans to look out for anything peculiar. We are on high alert during the 4th of July holiday weekend.
Two truck loads of coils are being shipped to a job site in Cleveland Ohio at least a week early and with little goddam notice. Surprise!, I’ll cry when I awaken tomorrow and tell the crew of unprepared workers to look out the window and figure a way to get those nine 3000-5000 pound babies across the dock and into the safety of the presently empty cold produce-to-be cooler.
At another job site we managed to receive a common place across-the-line reduced voltage start 150 Horsepower Electric Motor instead of the more rare and more difficult to find part winding start 150 HP Electric Motor. It only costs money to fix it.
I nearly stopped at a stop sign in Wilkins Township over the weekend and was sorrowfully given a $95.00 ticket by a young crisp crew cutted law officer, who was, he said, letting me off easy because it would not carry the three points against my license and insurance. The people in the neighborhood were complaining about horribly careless drivers.
Because I paid via electronic transfer, my cable internet line provider, which apparently can not receive electronic transfers (cash them, of course, just not log them) shut my connection off until I emailed (at work via the DSL line there) proof that I had paid them.
We added two computers with the Windows XP Professional operating system and I have spent the past week scaring up drivers for printers, print servers, scanners, cameras, DVDs CDs, upgraded software, and, by gum, two optical mice and one damaged keyboard.
My laptop keyboard developed alien typing syndrome, wherein anything typed on the right hand portion of the keyboard came up as those interesting ASCII symbols that must be of use to some one on Aldeberan. Tech support in Houston called to let me know that I had left the key pad in a locked position and that everything worked fine once they pushed the Pad Lock Key. Bad I am, but I pushed that key many a time and the damn thing still wouldn’t work. What? The air trip and rumors of Middle Eastern terrorists, scared the thing into proper operation? I’m afraid I’ve just become another stupid tech support story.
My VPN (Virtual Private Network) at home will not recognize my Virtual Private Network at work. Oh, yes, it worked for a day or two just long enough to give me the flush of hope. I am almost never home so I have to figure it out or figure some way to call the bastards during the day. Beam me over, Scotty. Uhh, on second thought is that teleport beamer configured with some network card. Remember the fly? Ugh, all those intermingling fly and human body parts.
So I am bent, beaten and bewildered this week. Where is the young Joe who used to laugh in the face of danger? Who made naked love to his wife in a park atop Berkeley while the East Bay Slasher was impaling people weekly in the dark? (It was my wife’s idea, honest. And now that I saver it, not a bad one.) Where is the young Joe who used to laugh at electronic gadgets and give them a sharp tap with a very large hammer until the blasted circuitry either worked correctly or was toddled off to the gadget bone yard? Where is the young Joe who used to ridicule the high panic of news reporters who have nothing better to do than to feed and make us all crazy with fear? Where is the young Joe who used to drive in the face of the worst winter blizzard or drive without care through summer monsoon? Who used to take the garbage out in the morning?
Here. I guess. Just older. Not as stupid. Not as much to prove. More cautious. Mature! Still it would be nice to lose a little of the fear that manages to bind me and brings with it unhealthy dollop of paranoia. Or maybe it’s just the weight of this week. Who did me more harm the rapist of the policeman? The terrorist or the TV news anchor? Is it worse, if I am victim or perpetrator?
I’ll take off my clothes, if you take off yours.
Is this a doddering old man I see sniveling before me?
As I sit here typing TV news is telling all residents of Penn Hills (where I live) that the East End Rapist, armed and dangerous, this morning after a police chase, has ended up in one of the woods hereabout. Keep your doors locked. And your eyes peeled.
The office of Home Security has asked all Americans to look out for anything peculiar. We are on high alert during the 4th of July holiday weekend.
Two truck loads of coils are being shipped to a job site in Cleveland Ohio at least a week early and with little goddam notice. Surprise!, I’ll cry when I awaken tomorrow and tell the crew of unprepared workers to look out the window and figure a way to get those nine 3000-5000 pound babies across the dock and into the safety of the presently empty cold produce-to-be cooler.
At another job site we managed to receive a common place across-the-line reduced voltage start 150 Horsepower Electric Motor instead of the more rare and more difficult to find part winding start 150 HP Electric Motor. It only costs money to fix it.
I nearly stopped at a stop sign in Wilkins Township over the weekend and was sorrowfully given a $95.00 ticket by a young crisp crew cutted law officer, who was, he said, letting me off easy because it would not carry the three points against my license and insurance. The people in the neighborhood were complaining about horribly careless drivers.
Because I paid via electronic transfer, my cable internet line provider, which apparently can not receive electronic transfers (cash them, of course, just not log them) shut my connection off until I emailed (at work via the DSL line there) proof that I had paid them.
We added two computers with the Windows XP Professional operating system and I have spent the past week scaring up drivers for printers, print servers, scanners, cameras, DVDs CDs, upgraded software, and, by gum, two optical mice and one damaged keyboard.
My laptop keyboard developed alien typing syndrome, wherein anything typed on the right hand portion of the keyboard came up as those interesting ASCII symbols that must be of use to some one on Aldeberan. Tech support in Houston called to let me know that I had left the key pad in a locked position and that everything worked fine once they pushed the Pad Lock Key. Bad I am, but I pushed that key many a time and the damn thing still wouldn’t work. What? The air trip and rumors of Middle Eastern terrorists, scared the thing into proper operation? I’m afraid I’ve just become another stupid tech support story.
My VPN (Virtual Private Network) at home will not recognize my Virtual Private Network at work. Oh, yes, it worked for a day or two just long enough to give me the flush of hope. I am almost never home so I have to figure it out or figure some way to call the bastards during the day. Beam me over, Scotty. Uhh, on second thought is that teleport beamer configured with some network card. Remember the fly? Ugh, all those intermingling fly and human body parts.
So I am bent, beaten and bewildered this week. Where is the young Joe who used to laugh in the face of danger? Who made naked love to his wife in a park atop Berkeley while the East Bay Slasher was impaling people weekly in the dark? (It was my wife’s idea, honest. And now that I saver it, not a bad one.) Where is the young Joe who used to laugh at electronic gadgets and give them a sharp tap with a very large hammer until the blasted circuitry either worked correctly or was toddled off to the gadget bone yard? Where is the young Joe who used to ridicule the high panic of news reporters who have nothing better to do than to feed and make us all crazy with fear? Where is the young Joe who used to drive in the face of the worst winter blizzard or drive without care through summer monsoon? Who used to take the garbage out in the morning?
Here. I guess. Just older. Not as stupid. Not as much to prove. More cautious. Mature! Still it would be nice to lose a little of the fear that manages to bind me and brings with it unhealthy dollop of paranoia. Or maybe it’s just the weight of this week. Who did me more harm the rapist of the policeman? The terrorist or the TV news anchor? Is it worse, if I am victim or perpetrator?
I’ll take off my clothes, if you take off yours.