Thursday, October 31, 2002 7:03:04 PM

Perhaps I have, once again, reflexively embarrassed myself.

When there is nothing to do, which is to say, when I truly wish that there was nothing to pursue, when I wish my life consisted of going to work, cooking and eating a decreasingly caloric meal and stretching myself the length of my entire body on the length of my bed under the length of my covers, washed and cleaned at least weekly I add with my finger on my nose, and relaxing with a deep sigh as the muscles lose tension in my legs and my stomach and the back of my neck melt into a more than normal amorphous lump and click, I perform the ritual power to the TV, and , click, the receiver set to stun me with sub woofer and sensualaround sound and, clickity clickity, a last quick run up and down the two hundred or so assortment of cable and broadcast channels which manage in all their variety of form to achieve remarkable homogeneity and settle invariably on some light full of froth and fluff , an occasional disturbing dash, even mellifluous music in the strum drang and strife of life, the romantic comedy.

I wonder lazily supine!

Wouldn't a happy chase through my video library be better than this endless digital search across movie channels? Still how many times can I unsheathe the videotape cover of Cary Grant suddenly going all gay and watch Bringing Up Baby? I find myself oddly sexually attracted to Susan. Imagine my horror the other night while watching Duck Soup for more times than the placing the rings in the Tower of Hanoi to realize that I wanted nothing more than to settle down in a cleanly vacuumed picket fenced cottage with Margaret Dumont. Something most definitely is adolescent gumming up the works in the waning years of my middle age.

So I watch on HBO and Showtime and The Movie Channel and Starz and Encore (how I ended with the whole platinum package I leave for another time) what passes for romantic comedy in this day and age, the teen angst boy meets girl or increasingly more common the boy meets boy or girl meets girl film. I watch until they turn mean spirited, then I spirit myself away to another channel and give another set of young folks a chance to charm me. Occasionally there is a gem that sets right with my mood and its own integrity.

I laugh at all the right spots. A tear is always on the brink of my eyelid at the denouement when they meet at the airport because he or she is on their way to Paris or Madrid or London and decide that fate and perhaps the discomfort of traveling coach must drive them together in a passionate embrace. Finis. Music soars; usually a soft acoustic rock flat picked steel stringed guitar kind of melody. They're happy. I'm ecstatic! Sated I usually can fall asleep until the sound of screams from the Kansas Windmill Massacre or Die, Scream and Laugh in Terror inserts itself into my dream and wide awake I'm at the remote in search of video love which turns in the deep hours of the morning into soft core sleek and toned naked bodies rubbing with no idea of where genitalia should reside in the coital act.

Face it. I reflect (Once again Reflexive) you are mushy, hopelessly and helplessly mired in the idea of preliminary infatuation. And face it I do. Not much of a one for mature relationships. I freely admit it. I am it turns out as my parents prognosticated sadly shaking their collective heads and wagging their fingers a dreamer. I buy these tales of innocent love wholesale and whole cloth.

Morning noon and nighttime too all I do is dream of you the whole day through.

Monday, October 28, 2002 5:52:11 PM

Meshuga is the Word of the Day

I subscribe, via e-mail to two or three word of the day services, one of which is a foreign language mot du jour in four differing languages, including Portuguese. I treat these services as a kind of oracle, reminiscent of your daily horrorscope or perhaps on a more unconscious level the I Ching, minus yarrow stalks or coin divination.

How appropriate that Mushuga should turn up on the penultimate day of a Meshuga week. Tonight I am in Cleveland, tomorrow after a ten o'clock meeting I will, the Meshuga Gods of Ammonia willing, head my fine conveyance toward Pittsburgh and home.

(So that no one is left behind I include here the definition as given by yourDicionary.com
Today's Word:
Meshuga (Adjective)
Pronunciation: [mê-'shU-gê]
Definition 1: Affectionate) Crazy, nutty, absent-minded.)

Further:
A crazy girl is meshuggeneh
while
A crazy boy is meshuggener

Nu? Can a week be crazy, nutty or absent-minded. Seems far to mild to me as I sit here drinking wine, eating organic blue corn tortilla chips and trying to let the tension seep away. Sick of body and troubled of mind.

Al Lerner, the owner of the Cleveland Brown's, passed away a few days ago and today while I was returning from a rush journey to purchase a fifty foot Cat 5 RJ45 network cable, which turned out to not be the problem, traffic at the corner of Richmond and Chagrin started to back up to Omaha. As cars u-turned and honked the congestion ahead began to clear to my sight and stimulated my consciousness. I saw a police car pull in front of the traffic light and block the intersection. A very long, slow convoy of expensive automobiles with black flags that I just knew were not the Jolly Roger gained entry to the cemetery that opened right, adjacent the corner. All sorts of evil imagery began to fill my mind.

I didn't get caught, went my irreasoning, in such an onslaught when Art Rooney, the chief of the Steelers, died. This Cleveland-Pittsburgh football rivalry dies hard even in the mind of someone who is hardly a fan of the sport any longer. How dare they hold up traffic for a funeral. They should arrange for these thing to happen at 2 in the morning not 2 in the afternoon. Didn't they realize that I had to get back with my network cable? Eventually a kind of sanity returned. RIP Al. Like I say Meshuga!

At the job site, we have not only the garble of the failed communication cable, which is now working like a charm, which is to say that if you swing a black cat by the tail in a graveyard, (maybe the funeral was a message to me, like the word of the day) and whisper the incantation mene mene tekel upharsin, a direct and significant connection will be made, but the mystery of the Missing Ammonia.

We pumped liquid ammonia into the Receiver, moved it by hose, pipe and pressure difference to both the Medium Temperature Flash Cooler and the Low Temperature Liquid Recirculating Accumulator, started a Compressor to pumping. At first the liquid level in the Receiver which disappeared at a shockingly quick interval, came back. Hooray! Then it left again. Somewhere lying in wait out in the system. Don't you just love that refrigeration talk. Makes you believe that I know something about the arcane arts of thermodynamics, eh? Meshuga! I know.

Somewhere in the afternooon my biorhythms started to wane. My head stuffed (with straw, alas), my nose congested, my body down down down. The result of a week in and out of the cold and heat, in and out of the aggrssion and tension, a week of down peak up peak. The constant expansion and contraction of hope and despair has left me exposed and possibly physically sick. I head to a drug store for a flu cure, but am afraid to take it because I had a couple glasses of wine.

Meshuga!

Suggested usage says WOTD.
"I may be meshuga but I'm not an idiot,"
Oh yeah?

Friday, October 25, 2002 6:24:03 PM Joe Coluccio

CO2 sublimates - from a solid to a gas without passing through the liquid state - Dry ice

Cleveland.2:32 PM

Pallet jacks with containers of dry ice maneuver their way from a island depository of mist and sublimation in the center of the new dock floor into a freezer abandoned of any mechanical refrigeration. The fog filled warehouse air beams from the high intensity discharge lamps twenty or so feet above the newly cleaned and damp floor. Most definitely, Dorothy, this isn't Kansas anymore. There is more work and more life in this refrigerated bedlam than I have ever seen. Fork lifts snake around flotillas of scissors jacks carrying workers from the pipe insulator trade, the electricians, the pipe fitters, the sprinkler workers, the steel erectors and the rack builders. I walk beside a row of large gondola cardboard containers loaded with jumbo pumpkins. The single word Jack-O-Latern is striped diagonally across the front of one box, another has a Halloween pretty scary cartooned orange and black All Hollows Eve Scene. The propylene glycol filled temporary refrigeration air handlers add a constant white noise hiss. Air blows in terrible torrents from them. It is colder in here than in the rain fall filled world outside.

In the engine room, a surprising changed ambiance without the constant shrill of rotating dual lobbed screw compressors, two crews of welders are cutting, welding, fittings and pipe. They climb off their lifts and scramble among the confusion of piping. We are in some primeval mechnical jungle with the slight smell of ammonia and motor oil and ozone. The steel metal whir of portaband saw biting in to pipe, sprarks from a cutting torch and the deep powerful crack as an arc is struck - the welding rod in the stinger intermingles the molecules of the rod and the pipe into a solid presence. On the floor we look up.

On the loading dock, a 300 yard strip of concrete fronted by truck dock doors that lead to motorless trailers waiting to be filled, thirty or forty workes on pallet jacks pushing cartons of tomatoes, pumpkins, eggs, grapes, leaf lettuce, cheese, pomegranites, apples golden and red delish, pears and plump possibilites, glide like gondaliers on the Grand Canal, around the obstructions of construction work. As I walk, freightened, wary, ( I know one of these bastards is going to roll right over my foot) the more apt metaphor of bumper cars at an amusemet park pops into my mind. I can feel the chill throught my blue and red winter jacket. This constant movement from the autumn low of the outside to the mechanical heat of the compressor room to the artificial lower temperature of the refrigerated warehouse to the electric heat of our job trailer is wicking me weak. Both metaphoric and physcial toll is beating at me.

We wait for gas bound vessels to empty themselves to the tanker outside. Then a flurry of work. Then we wait again. It's much like rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again. The day passes hot to cold to hot again. I can hardly wait for tomorrow.

Oh well I guess there's always Tara.

Wednesday, October 23, 2002 6:23:29 PM Joe Coluccio

There's a chill in the air, I hope.

I vowed, sometime ago, never to write anything topical in the Blog I steered clear of 9/11,12/25 and Columbus Day, whenever that was. But true to my word, I break my word, and frequently. What's a rule if you can stamp on it with the hob nails of your boots.

Tonight I write about 10/23/02, which was rudely pushed back from 10/16/02 and puts me for yet another week looking forward to another weekend in Cleveland Ohio. I write about, gasp, work! What, did you expect a sage explication of the middle east from me? A rant against terrorism? I'll give you a glimpse of my thinking. The reason there is terror instead of awe in the world is because politicians (left, right and central) are people who play at the scatological notions of political and sociological theory and try to convince us that they are creating a fine produce of yield instead of just creating more baseless muck. In short, don't like 'em, don't trust 'em. The poseurs!

This is the story. There are more than 10 million molecules in an ammonia refrigeration system! And we don't want one single story to escape to tell the tale. Ammonia, NH3, is a mighty fine and efficient refrigerant. God made it that way. But what God gives on the one hand God (notice how skillfully I avoided the issue of God's gender. I figure God is all genders! Maybe I should be a politician.) taketh away with the other. 'Cause ammonia, tho' not poisonous, can in concentrations take the breath away from you until you pass on, or somewhat worse, I think, but no less fatal, can under conditions of very high concentration, explode! KaBoom!

The company that I work for and have for the last seventeen years is involved in the renovation of a large cold storage plant, not three miles from this lovely motel room, in Cleveland, OH. And same uses the efficient NH3 as a refrigerating fluid. Roughly 14,000 pounds of it.

The rub is that we have to remove all 14000 pounds from a couple miles of pipe and some large vessels before we can open up the lines and weld a whole new section into the system. We started removal today about noon.

We have been here since July, installing new High Temperature Suction, High Pressure Liquid, Low Temperature Recirculating Suction, Low Temperature Recirculating Liquid, Hot Gas Defrost Lines, hanging new Evaporator Coils, setting a new Flash Cooler, installing a Liquid Transfer System, (I know you don't know what those things are, Hell, I hardly know, but if you use them in casual refrigeration conversation they will give you a certain cach¾ and perhaps a knowing grin from some thermodynamic engineering type.) And our day of reckoning has begun.

The plant has been cooled temporarily (for they cannot for one minute be out of business, the importance of the food chain is signifying) with very large propylene glycol chilling coils that blow you half way to the Far East when you cross in front of them. A large tanker and a large pumping truck sit in front of the engine room and are sucking the ammonia life blood out of the plant. Tomorrow with some luck we start our surgery. Performed with oxygen acetylene cutting torches and then stitched back together with welding devices that spark and spray the air with a sweet smell of ozone. Like the Medusa staring into the sparks will probably turn you to stone, but at the very least give you an uncomfortable ultraviolet eye flash.

We are all grimly aware of the precautions that must be taken. And it is setting me personally on edge. Which is why I break my hard and fast rule. It's either that or down to a State Store to find a large bottle of the cure. But then I wouldn't be all that sharp tomorrow.

If you have a small whiff of a faint Windex kind of smell that comes from eastern region of the Middle West...well, I might not be writing here Friday. I may be answering a whole lot of questions!

Monday, October 21, 2002 6:47:28 PM Joe Coluccio

Naked for the world to see if only they knew...

I try to journal every day. On weekends I treat myself to a jaunt to this coffee shop, that. and sit with a exotic flavored bagel and a strange brewed coffee. Some places, it turns, are better constructed for the writing experience.

I immediately scratched any fast food establishment. They all smelled with the lush sins of frying bacon and sausage and played very loud warbling teen divas, while building contractors that didn't want to stand in the way of the early customers at the 7-11 with cups of scolding coffee and squalid talk, jostled and mulled like lost cattle in line. "Hey, Shirley would you put two creams in my coffee this morning. Yesterday you only gave me one! Watch out dick wad you almost made me spill my coffee. So, Shirl, we on for this weekend or what?"

I tried the more trendy $7.00 cup of coffee places (I felt for the price they should at least toss in the china cup), but well dressed good smelling office workers would start queues in entirely irrational sections of the shop and cause such a confusion upon the people serving that it wasn't good for the order that resides in my soul. And the only thing to eat were gooey pastries and dried lumps of trendy sugared bread.

A few true trendy were better than others. I settled. Some urban some suburban. A pattern developed and my adventurous days of disastrous discovery were over. I went I saw I wrote.

At first, I was a timid soul, who would find a booth at the rear of the establishment, open my laptop computer which has a screen the length and breath of a combat aircraft carrier deck, stick my nose behind the heavy lit pixilated active matrix and write delicious forbidden thoughts about the tortured workings of my psyche.

I realized that I might as well be in my basement behind a wall of books (I sit here now) and moved into the morning action. My outlook brightened. People buzzed about me. I described them and made small stories about them. Took note of their garb and realized that people wore different kinds of clothes. A fact, as reflected by stagnant wardrobe, that surprised the pants off me.

As I became a regular, now familiar folks would stop by and greet me. The talk mostly revolved around the laptop. "I was gonna git one like that, you know for stocks and stuff." When I brought my Pocket PC outfitted with a fold away keyboard, I caused quite a stir. "Where do you get something like that? Are you on the internet? I have a camp up north and something small like that would be great. How long do the batteries last?"

Finally one cold Saturday morning, an old guy, less hair than me, took a seat across the table. "You're writing a book aren't you?" His eyes piercing me as if to divine out of my very essence the type of "book" I was writing. I said, "No, just doing some work." Aha! "What kind of business are you in?" "Commercial Refrigeration" I said sensitive, hoping he wouldn't tell me that the refrigerator in his garage wasn't working and what did I think was the problem. I quickly clarified, "You know warehouses and supermarkets, that kind of thing." "Not stocks and bonds?" "Nope!" Just doing some work!

And then I was alone. When the journal works, it is remarkable! It is raw and plain and frank. I know that I am capable of hiding some very unpleasant sides of myself. I also know that I am capable of causing dense doubt with revealed motives true and imagined. It is a slippery thing this working within. And often, after an intense session I will look up and see where I am. I look out over the store, into the parking lot, out on to the road. 'How is it,' I think, 'that I can sit here on display for the whole world to see. No need of xray vision. I have just taken my clothes off and turned my skin inside out. There is nothing unrevealed. And yet, people in cars on foot sitting at tables take no notice?' It is part of the miracle and leaves me somewhat ashamed, certainly humble, but also a little better off.

In Denmark we ran nude into the snow from the sauna.

October 18, 2002 7:34 PM Joe Coluccio

Is Fernando Sor?

I don’t have one useful idea in my head to start. So I thought I would think about the fact that I have Andres Segovia playing on the cassette machine. The Legendary, it says Guitar Etudes it says. One side composed by D. Aguado and the other by Fernando Sor.

Now, I have over the years been through almost every guitar method, from Aaron Scherer to Carcassi to Mel Bay. Lately I’ve even been picking my way through a rather pleasing set of books by Christopher Parkening. (My one true Guitar Idol, John Williams, chooses to play rather than instruct). Segovia has, of course, revitalized and made important the Classical Guitar (sorry, Aaron, he insists that it should be called Classic Guitar) in the last and into this century. But I have always found his playing, although precise, to be less than emotionally satisfying.

So when I hear one of the Sor etudes executed, that have haunted and challenged my own playing over the years, by Il Maestro, I think, well, hell, Andres, I can play that as well as you. (I can’t even play it as well as I can). I think what I am responding to is the precision and the lack of emotion that his playing exhibits. Mine on the other hand, when not a terror of failed technique and just plain clumsy, has an emotional connotation that pleases at least me.

I am not a fanatic. I don’t wear gloves (excepting during a severe snow storm or weeding the prickle bush). I keep minimal care, with emery board, my fingernails. The fourth finger on my right hand curls up in a way that is useful to the struggling guitarist in me. I was first base in a pick up softball game on the blacktop playground at Thaddeus Stevens School, a nickel throw from the Eastwood Shopping Center which was a hop skip and a jump from the East Hills Shopping Center. Third base threw hard across the pitchers mound, a bouncing ball that he caught on the heel of his glove. It drilled straight at me and collided with my outstretched finger. Yow! Or something like it. I yelled. “Ow, I broke my finger.” Someone more pissed by the batter rounding second base stated emphatically. “It would really hurt if you broke it!” Kids and their theories! “It really hurts!” I yelled, as the play continued on and around me. Into the next day it throbbed and hooked in a graceful curve upward. Broke it was and broke it remains as I type some forty years later. The consolation is that it puts my finger and sometimes my self into the right attitude.

Oh, let me explain, you neophytes to the world of the Classic Guitar. Every thing, because of the influence is writ in Spanish, ethsepcially the finger, (notice my fine Castilian pronunciation. p = pulgar = thumb, i = indice = index, m = medio = middle (yes, that fickle finger of fate), and finally a = annular = ring finger. I certainly check surreptitiously this digit for a sign of commitment on a woman. Mine yields the pale anguish of two tries and a bad softball throw. (Sometimes c = chico = little finger, Mr. Pinky). P, I, M,A capable to produce a fine Guiliani arpeggio or a Terregan Cancion or a Villa Lobos Brasileiras.

O! Cisco! – O! Pancho!

Wednesday, October 16, 2002 7:06 PM Joe Coluccio

Give me your ‘umble poor, your ‘umble pie and your ‘umble bee!

Ever seen a movie called Les Enfants du Paradis, a creation of Michel Carné. Ever seen a movie called The Grapes of Wrath, a word creation of John Steinbeck a film creation of John Ford? Ever seen a movie called It Happened One Night, a film creation of Frank Capra? (Or for that matter any of the Capra Corn movies, yes including It’s A Wonderful Life) I have a friend that insists that there is a dark side to George Bailey, as evidenced on the night when bumbling Uncle Billy, puts the Bailey fortune into the hands of mean old Mr. Potter. George is cruel to his children, his wife in ways that show that they are not solitary incidents in old George’s life. George Bailey, child beater? wife molester? I don’t buy it, but then I am really not very much attuned to the twentieth century zeitgeist.

Or how about read Gorky’s the Lower Depths or seen every Russian farmer pee into the radiator of every tractor in Russia from Pudovkin to Eisenstein. The collective runs on the urine of the population. Or dallied a day or two with the East End Kids, the Dead End Kids, the Bowery Boys et al. It is true Populist Stuff and I enroll and endorse all of it. (Except for George Bailey as Psychopath, of course).

I, after all is said and done, come from the underbelly of the people. Look at Pietro DiDonato and Chirst in Concrete, a volume given to me by my father. Look at the fat but well intentioned leanings of Mario Puzo. Look at East Liberty and Larimar Avenue on the cusp of flight to suburban heaven and ultimate societal buffoonery. Look at A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The Divine Right of Kings indeed. Twain and Sir Boss were right on the money. Screw Arthur and Odysseus and Aeneas until they become mensch!

The people are revolting!

Indeed they are, but they are my revolting people. Every revolting molecule of them. It makes me laugh that the hollow halls of the academy chase after left politics in a righteous world. They wouldn’t know deprivation if it hit them in the face.

Hell, real people compromise their principals every day of their lives just to get by. Nobility comes from the acceptance of life, politics and the way things are sposed to be in the face of earning a living an in some cases putting that ethnic rich and inexpensive fare on the table.

Which brings me to my point. I have always known who the real thieves are. They are not people who steal a crust of bread, or even a color TV. Nope, my friends, these are just the people who go to jail. The pricks, as I have said earlier, are in charge. To them the mantle of injustice and the American way.

Hoorah for the failed Uncle Billy! Who was there to help him through his ignominy? George was off collecting kudos for his good works. Frederic, corrupt to the end, plays to the riled Children of the Paradise. Christians, in particular, take note!

Monday, October 14, 2002 6:26 PM Joe Coluccio

There’s something here happening and I’m damned if I know what it is. Do I, Mr. Jones?

The summers that I worked at Beighley Hardware and Tool (58 through 60 or so), Souse Side Picksburgh, Penn-syl-van-eye-ay! could not help but form me.

There was Jimmy the driver who was shortly off to be a flyboy in the Air Force. There was lovely snapping eyed Anita, dark and dancing, a small black mole, right slightly below her bowed mouth, adding to the overall grand attraction of her face and spectacular packed body. Jim Mackey, old gray and frail, slightly palsied as he took the wetted tape from the dispenser and magically cemented a cardboard box into a shipping container. There was curled mustached Mr. Cowan, always clean and too well cologned, who was the first person ever to own a Volkswagen. We giggled as his bulk fit with difficulty in an auto that we had trouble believing would ever manage the daunting hills of Pittsburgh. Look at the gas and brake peddles! Too small to make the thing move! There was balding, kindly Mr. Kress, who looked like Frederic March in Inherit the Wind, whose son was going to school to be a shoe maker. There was the boss’s daughter, who was tall, hair severely drawn back over her head, precariously attractive at a thin and swaying six foot. There was Mr. Taylor the book keeper, who practiced the arcane arts of book keeping in his every life. There was Old Suspendered Man and Bespectacled Son Menges who owned the place and lived in a big house off Negley Hill. There was Elmer who sounded like a frog and had more personality than a jump jive DJ. There was sultry Leigh, short clipped light hair and much more woman than I have ever seen. There was my old man. There was me. And there was Mr. Jones.

Mr. Jones had been a Marine. And I thought he was about the greatest person that I had ever met. He had fought against the slant eyed yellow menace gooks in the war. I pictured him on Guadalcanal as the naval ships fled to safety. I pictured him storming the beaches of Tarawa. I pictured him raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi. But he never really spoke of the war. Surely he had been there on the USS Missouri for the signing. For all I know he was a supply clerk in Wilkinsburg, PA. His silence added to the spice.

And oy! the insider talk I would hear about women. Between Elmer and Jimmy and Mr. Jones and My old man. It made all my nascent passions solid and gold. Though I was the butt of some humor, it still made me a quite a man, just being within ear shot of that masculine conversation.

One day, I was back among the shelves arranging something, I heard bean counter Taylor lecturing Jones. “You know what your problem is Jones?” said Taylor, about to show his deep wisdom. No sound from Mr. Jones. “You’re not enough of a prick!” said Taylor. I was first annoyed and then incensed. What was wrong, Mr. Dirty Nefarious Know-It-All Accountant, with being a nice guy, I thought, with being a hero, someone for…me...to look up to?

It struck me. This real world. As I thought it through I knew that Dick Jones was doomed. He just plain wasn’t a prick. It made me sad. Not for the Joneses. It is the sad end American business (eh, Mr. Enron. Mr. WorldCom, Mr. GE). The pricks are in charge.

Flee the years! Take me to 1976 when I worked for a company called Marchase Refrigeration. I had occasion to call Standard Machinist Company. A place where I knew Dick Jones had gone after the Hardware went out of business. I asked for him.

A weak voice came over the phone. “Mr. Jones,” I said, years of warmth for the man in my voice, “how are you?” I explained who I was. He asked after my father. I told him that he was just fine. And asked again. “It’s really great to talk to you. How have you been?”

And he proceeded to tell me.

His wife has just passed away. He was feeling ill most of the time. The only reason he was still working was he couldn’t afford to quit. The medical bills, you know? It was tearing, this conversation, something from me. Not his fault I know. Just my stupid expectations, my royal dreams. I finally said goodbye. Mentioned I would like to see him some day. Goodbye it was.

Semper Fideles, my victorious friend!

Friday, October 11, 2002 8:31 PM Joe Coluccio

10-24 UNC or 10-32 UNF some threads of my life.

Jim Mackey was a gray haired man who came to work in denim overhauls and a Casey Jones railroad engineer’s cap and carried his lunch down from the streetcar tracks in a black half cylindrical metal box.

In the summers, fifth, sixth, seventh grades I would go to work with my father. South 6th and Bingham Streets, one block north of East Carson Street. Souse Side Picksburgh Penn-syl-van-eye-ey, Hey! We ate lunch and breakfast at Sarah’s before she became famous and the word yuppie was whispered, certainly before she disappeared into South Side legend, a block on the right passed the wonder of the 10th Street suspension bridge.

The place was called Beighley Hardware and Tool. The less than presumptuous block building stands today and houses a similar business called Plant Services. Long time competition Standard Machinist four blocks toward the Smithfield Street Bridge on the lower levels of the Terminal Building and Lappe Supply the other side of the original Birmingham Bridge have long been retired to mechanical heaven.

My old man would take my mother to work, Mayflower Coffee Shop across from Rosenbaum’s next to the Loew’s Penn Theatre which had honest to god knights in shining mail jousting at you on the way to the basement men’s room. Downtown Pittsburgh was vibrant with smoke, grime and life. Then he would cross the Smithfield Street Bridge, stop at the Triangular Service station and talk to Bill who would hawk tobacco on the cement while he pumped gas and then take me to work. Sometime afterward he would go on his way making sales calls.

Jim would come in about fifteen minutes after I was settled in with a loping loose limbed gate and stop in front of the scarred desk that sat in a dark corner of the shipping dock and place the contents of his lunch box in a drawer, place the box under the desk and say, “Good morning, sonny!” with a grin that was sincere but looked as fake as his teeth. Then he would walk over to the plywood and two by four shipping table that lined the entire front wall of the room and start his days work.

He would grunt, mumble and hum as he worked and click tongue to his teeth over a back ordered shipment that would be met with his kind but stern disapproval. “Don’t have those Allen Hex Keys. Can’t ship this yet” Jim was a Zen master of repetition. We hadn’t had those damn Allen Hex Keys for two weeks and weren’t expecting them for another two, but every morning he would lift the merchandise that was neatly placed atop a goldenrod copy of the shipping order and intone the same lines with the same inflection, move on to the next order and categorize the missing portions of the order, offer comment to the gods of freight. Jim Mackey taught me everything I know about shipping and receiving (which is considerable). I mumble and hum as I ship or receive, make the incantation of the back order and swear. I learned the swearing from my old man who took strings of invective to altogether new heights and delights.

Lunch time. Jim would retrieve his cup from the desk and walk down the steps to the bathroom and fill it with hot tap water. As he poured the instant coffee powder into the cup he would say, and I mean everyday he would say, looking up at me to be sure I was paying attention, “You know, sonny, once in a café I saw a sign that said, ‘Don’t laugh at our coffee you may be old and weak yourself some time.” Then he would laugh and sit down to eat his pasteboard sandwich prepared by Mrs. Mackey, who I never met, but imagined must look as kindly as Mrs. Claus of the Pole, and soften it with luke warm ersatz instant caffeine as he chewed thoughfully with ersatz teeth.

Mid afternoon mid week, I was given a task that has set a weird reverberation of order and fitness to my entire life. At the beginning of the week the company would get a request for cadmium plated nuts, bolts, machine screws, hex head cap screws, you name it. I would pull the order, literally hundreds of little hundred count boxes packed into two or three large containers. The driver then took them to a tin plater over on Butler Street. Round about Wednesday they would return. The technique of plating the hardware demanded that my neat stacks of boxes, would be carelessly emptied into a metal basket and placed in some electrolytic bath that would coat all with dazzling cadmium plate. The driver upon triumphant return would set the sad empty boxes looking dead on the floor and pour the glittering hardware, more silver that Solomon’s, in a large chaotic pile in the center of the table. It was my job to separate count and place them back into boxes.

I can still pick a 10-32 National Fine x ¾” round head machine screw out of a stack of similar length oval head 10-24 pan head 6-40 hex head ¼ - 20 screws nuts and bolts. My mind would groove. I would start to whistle. Jim would mumble, hum, grunt then say, “Say, sonny, I knew a man who blew his teeth out whistling too hard.”

He was a fine man of habit to whom I now raise my glass! I’ve still got my teeth.

October 9, 2002 6:12 PM

I’m inclined to knockwurst.

Mozart for the Mind is the name of the CD that I picked up at a thrift store today for $3.95. A steal? More than likely for the owners of the thrift. As I waited in line for people with gads of clothes, stripping them madly from the hangers, as clerks tallied yellow and green and red and purple tags marked with thick magic marker numbers that blurred into a large ink blot that caused no end of bickering, I read the liner notes.

The University of California at Irvine, I paraphrase, the document lies far away and to the North on my desk at work, discovered via a survey (and who was it that (you really have to ask) formulated such a study?) that people who listen to Mozart for ten minutes prior to an examination were brighter by a marked degree than those who managed some relaxation exercises or those who merely sat I silence for the measured time.

I rushed back to my work station and placed the CD anxiously into the player high above my desk. Ahh, the marvelous strains of Wolfgang wafted over the office and immediately I could see the effects. I finally understood E=MC2. Several others began recited Shakespearean soliloquies, the Gettysburg Address (552 Lincoln Way, sorry I just couldn’t….), A listing of all the Supreme Court Justices in order of their birth dates, astounding Stock Market prognostications, Cordon Bleu recipes, need I go on? (I hope not because they are becoming strikingly less original and most certainly less funny.)

Alas, I did not wait in the line long enough to read all the liners notes for several paragraphs later it is revealed that the effect is as temporary as the azalea blooms in spring or mosaic of turning leaves in autumn. I am playing Symphony No. 41 C-Major KV 551 “Jupiter” at this moment to try to retrieve my earlier insight into the Einsteinian Universe. But it is lost!

Damn that Mozart!

It did start me to wondering. Why, I said, Mozart. Why not for example Ina-Gadda-Da-Vida? Or The Three Liddle Fisheeze that thwam and thwam all over the dam? Or, for those who like lighter fare, The Ten Thousand and One Melanchrino Strings’ version of Eleanor Rigby?

There is no obvious answer as to why a Mozart opus trims and straightens our brain waves. The final paragraph of the liner notes explains that this survey developed a theory that has become known as The Mozart Effect. Stunned, I realize that there are probably millions of Americans, deep in the hollars and back woods that still pronounce Mozart Mose-art. I will lobby Washington. A funded project aimed at educating those in the deep dark piney forests soused on moon alcohol. Traveling trucks with large speakers atop, like you see once in a while in 50’s science fiction epics, dedicated to playing the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro or dare I say it, Serenade in G-Major KV 525 Eine Kleine Nachtmusick.
My mother’s boss at the Mayflower Coffee Shop (As you ramble on through life, dear Brother, whatever be your goal. Keep your eye upon the doughnut and not upon the hole!) where she worked (downtown next to what is now Heinz Hall that spews out more classically than just Mozart on a Friday night, you betcha), when I was just a young whipper snapper, used to tell me he loved classical music.

“Why just last night,” he would say, “I was listening to Beethoven’s Refrain from Spitting!”

Monday, October 07, 2002 6:30 PM

L’histoire just ain’t what it used to be

In Pittsburgh, when I was a kid, was this enticing bit of television that came on just about supper time, called the Early Show. (The Late Show came at 11:15 PM after the news with Bill Burns) The Early show was always a movie, mostly by Warner Brothers (I still thrill when I see that logo and hear the deep brash brass herald that accompanies it), cut to within an inch of its life so that commercials could fill out the hour. The deal was we could watch TV and eat dinner if, (a.) we were sick or (b.)there was some educational value displayed. Being a rather robust child, it is here that I learned most of the history of the world.

I have often thought that it would be a delicious way to teach a history course and am happy to see that The History Channel does such a thing with a war movies and a panel of experts to tell how the actual events tally with the theatrical recreation.

I, for one, always believe the movie. I know this is controversial, but it is also incontrovertible. Remember the old saying, when you want the facts read non-fictional (in olden days a newspaper might even approach the facts), but if you want the truth read fiction.

Several months ago in a funk I picked up Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman. I remember Ivanhoe (more about that noble knight later) with some fondness and decided to read about Richard Coeur De Lion. Saladin the Saracen king comes off better.

The Early Show circa 1958 The Crusades(1935) with Henry Wilcoxon as Richard Lion Heart and Ian Keith as Saladin. Loretta Young as the yucky love interest. King of the Occident and King of the Orient meet in a tent somewhere in the holy land. Richard, smug as English Royalty, shows his might by setting a steel mace across a couple tables, then takes his big heavy sword and with a mighty thwack cuts the solid metal bar in two. Saladin shows proper surprise and respect and then takes a very delicate piece of silk, tosses it in to the air. It floats on the currents of the hot desert air. As it descends he pulls his curved sword from its jeweled scabbard and holds the very sharp business end up. The silk slowly passes over the blade and is cut in two as it settles to the earth. Now, who is cooler?

The same scene to my utter joy appears in The Talisman. Having looked it up in some internet database I now know that one of the screenwriters for this Cecil B. Demille debacle (the film lost money) was none other than Harold Lamb and was based on his book The Crusade: Iron Men And Saints. I figure Lamb got it from Scott.

An aside: Ivanhoe. You have your choice between Elizabeth Taylor, who, granted, is a Jewess and will cause you a great deal of disfavor, and Joan Fontaine, who is thin lipped and lily white but will cause your countrymen to flock to your aid Sorry, Walter, I pick Elizabeth and move to Israel after I lose the foreskin. So, I never said the Early Show was perfect history!

I love Harold Lamb. He is an historical author who is almost lost to history. I love Kenneth Roberts, another forgotten gem. And Rafael Sabatini, ditto. And Alan Eckert, who Tak au bon Dieu, is still on bookstore shelves but shunned by scholars. Lamb-The Crusades, Sabatini-Captain Blood, Scaramouche and the Sea Hawk, Roberts – Northwest Passage, a movie and or book with a journey so grueling that I cannot either read or watch again for the extreme difficulties and struggles that I would have to endure along with the characters.

And Thomas Costain, Mika Waltari, Frank Yerby, James Streeter, Charles Nordhoff and James Hall, Edison Marshall, Garland Raork, F Van Wyck Mason, Walter D. Edmonds, Ben Ames Williams and…. the unnamed others I discovered during the hours of the early show and then at the library on Saturday morning. Y’all live in the basement with me and my mind!

I thought I was gonna write about Errol Flynn and John Wayne this evening. Boy am I surprised!

October 4, 2002 7:20 PM

It is the end of another week. All is right with the world. My firewire hard drive reads the hours.

Two feelings, begin and end time have been with me my life. Would I be a different person without them?

First, the absolute freedom when I leave my travail be it school or work of a Friday evening. There are two absolutely blank days with all sorts of possibility open before me. Mostly I blow it. I spend the evening sucking at images on the TV. Not this weekend I vow. The sirens call seductively. I tie myself to a mast.

The next morning starts with promise. Breakfast (a flavored bagel or two lately) over a large coffee. Early. While coaches of basketball tennis baseball volleyball majorettes youth groups car washes bring their throngs to the table for good cheers and advice. While weekend contractors struggle, work boots tar smudged jeans a pocked tee shirt, to make plans for another day of drudgery. While old italian guys reminisce the morning about Billy and Jimmy and Jeanie and Antony. While stern lipped mothers explain the rules to their daughters. While casually dressed folk read the newspaper and blow aimlessly over cups of smoke encircled beverage. While good natured employees look longingly at the next in line, tongs extended, hands at the ready. The world abuzz. The world accepted. The world of Saturday morning. The day wears on.

Afternoon at the cooking shows, afternoon at the bocce courts, afternoon at the malls, bistros and throbbing business that we manage to avoid quite nicely most weekdays. Afternoon at the luncheon counter. Afternoon at the movies. Afternoon at the ball park. After noon of the nap. And evening falls, sweet smelling.

I don’t travel very far on Saturday evening. Listen to Garrison Keeler. Manage to keep my fingers off the remote control. Try to catch the reading that has eluded alluded me. Try not to nod off too early, while Miles or Ornette or Sonny or Charlie or John or Andres or Sharon stick to the walls in the background. Dream of long swelling B flat melodies and the mountains of the moon or Cygnus X1.

Til Sunday morn blooms. My mother, hard heels clacking on the kitchen floor, preparing to meet her God, found after years of teeth gnashing, my son stirring to his weekend job and I desultory, wondering, what should I. Awaken? Or just close my eyes for another 10 minutes or an hour? Freedom is dwindling. I sip. I eat.

Maybe the movie I didn’t see yesterday, maybe a trip to the book store, maybe I’ll even watch a meaningless football game and nap fitfully. To afternoon passes.

Number Two. Circa 1954 the evening brought Ed Sullivan and his show of shows, my uncle would yell across the front porch to his daughter Molly look the dancers. Opera singers would be sung. Ed would clap his hands. Senor Wences and Toppo Gigo would entwine themselves and smack the Sullivan lips. Followed o! too quickly by John Daly, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, Bennett Cerf sometimes Ricky Ricardo, sometimes Harry Morgan and the mystery guest that would please sign in. Oh my God is it really Victor Borge or Spring Byington? If I beat my brother to the bathtub I was able, clean and uncomfortable, to watch the whole of What’s My Line. UNTIL that awful moment when John would turn over all the cards, because time was up, the game was over. Like the march to the Guillotine was the march to the beds in our room at the rear of the house with crickets singing over the unfinished patio.

Reprise. The present the Game Show Channel. A bath, a show, a bed, a sleep!

This weekend will be different. Honest!

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….

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

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!