Adam Raised A Cain

Ain't Living Long Like This

You've got to be yourself
You can't be no one else

-- Oasis, "Supersonic"


My father was what you call your “black Irish.”

When some people hear “black Irish”, the first thing they think of is the late Phil Lynott, bassist and lead vocalist for the Irish band Thin Lizzy (“The Boys Are Back In Town”, “Jailbreak”, "Cowboy Song".) Lynott was that rare Irishman with some African ancestry, in his case on his father’s side.

A friend of mine once used Phil Lynott as a component in a convoluted slam of the Chicago Cubs and their manager at the time, Dusty Baker. In the tradition of the Cubs since at least the late 1800’s, one day Baker (who was African-American) was whining to the press about the unfair disadvantages the Cubbies had to overcome in order to compete in the National League Central that season. In this case, it was the team ownership’s penchant for scheduling a high percentage of weekday games during the daytime, unlike almost every other team in their division, who played them at night. Baker, an often brilliant manager who was subject at times to rather bizarre sociological theorizing, opined that since his team was mostly made up of European-American players (like almost every other team in major league baseball, by the way), day games were tougher on the Cubs because everybody knows it is a proven fact that white boys can’t stand up to the midday heat like their African-American and Caribbean-American teammates can. I forget what criteria he was basing his theory on. Skin tones and melanoma, or melanin, or something. Anyway, my friend said what Baker needed was a team full of Irish black guys like Phil Lynott, who presumably could hold their liquor (another disadvantage of playing day games, according to Baker, was that the Cub players had more opportunities to sample the famous Chicago nightlife) and be able to take the daytime heat, too.

Anyway, Phil Lynott, great artist though he was, is not what I meant by 'black Irish'.

A small segment of the native Irish population, roughly 3%, has dark or black hair and a medium skin tone; instead of fair skin and light-brown, blonde, or fair hair, as the majority of Irish do. Gaelic legend held these “black Irish” were descended from Iberian kings (the Milesians, not to be confused with the ancient Greek peoples of the same name) who had emigrated to Eire in days of yore. This was in modern times a disputed tale; but as often happens, it appears the myth had some basis in fact. Recent DNA research has established a genetic connection between the so-called black Irish, and peoples of the northeastern Iberian peninsula (now part of Spain), particularly the Basques. These common Irish-Iberian genes are found primarily in the northwestern part of the Irish Republic (from my intermittent interest in genealogy, I know my father’s people were from County Sligo and County Mayo, on the NW Irish coast.) Also, the western Irish in general tend to possess fewer genes traceable to Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian sources than the rest of the native Irish population.

That is your genetics lesson for today, people, for what it is worth.

*****

I don’t think having vaguely Basque origins made any difference in the sort of person my father was. He was, on the surface, your stereotypical Irishman, hale fellow, well-met. He was convivial and humorous and, from what I can tell, well thought of by most people he ran into. He had a dark side, too; but that is another story.

Growing up, we kids admired and loved our dad, of course. He was kind of emotionally distant underneath all the good cheer and bonhomie, but not to a ridiculous extent. He was all right. A lot of boys idolize their dads, and want to be just like them. That is where my brothers and I drew the line.

We thought our dad was funny and all, but also kind of goofy and out of it. He did really embarrassing stuff sometimes, in public, and said things he probably shouldn’t have. He didn’t care, he just went on his merry way, but sometimes it stung us. For a long time and even up to now, it was a mildly condescending epithet when one brother said to another, “That sounds like something Dad would say.” It meant you had said something “uncool”, and being cool was all that mattered in the era in which we grew up.

So the focus growing up was to appreciate our father, but not be like him, at all. At all costs.

By the way, my father seemed mildly amused by all this. He is dead now, for a year-and-a-half, but I’ll bet he is still laughing, somewhere; because I have noticed lately, to my horror, that I do more and more things that cause me to stop and say to myself, “Goddammit, that is just like something Dad would do.” I have talked to my brothers about this, and they all admit to this creeping malady as well, to varying degrees. Sometimes at a family get-together we will huddle up with one another and in hushed tones trade stories of stupid shit we did and said that we subsequently realized was Dad-like. Then we try to comfort each other.

One trait my father had was extreme cheerfulness at very early morning hours. This trait did not get passed on to us. When we were all living at home, he would get up sometimes as early as 5:00 or 5:30 a.m. and start banging around, making a lot of noise, I always felt intentionally. And sometimes, just for the hell of it, he’d stand outside mine and my brother’s bedroom doors, at 5:30 in the morning, now, in his boxer shorts, and start singing French opera, in a booming voice. “Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!” Loud as hell, with a big smile on his face. It would knock us right out of the bed. I think my aversion to opera and classical music began then.

*****

One recent morning, I was attempting to get my slug-a-bed children up and ready for school. I tried gently at first, then more firmly. But nothing was working (it was a Monday.) So next, without thinking, I stood in the hallway in my briefs and started singing “Figaro” at the top of my lungs. That got them up. Hell, I’ll bet the neighbors could hear it.

I was pretty satisfied with myself. Hey, whatever works, right? Then all of the sudden I realized what. . . oh, goddamn it! Son of a BITCH.

*****

If 6 Was 9

It All Adds Up

Men have thought the prospect strange
demonic scaring as they woke
from a ravishing crystalline dream
of abstract Eternities
to touch the edge of Change
where all Numbers twist and break. . .

-- Jack Lindsay, The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt


Yesterday, at one point I was presented with a column of 15 or so 3- and 4-digit numbers which needed to be added up, then averaged. I reflexively began to reach for a calculator, and then some existential something-or-other made me stop myself. Was it Jesus? Maybe it was. Who knows? All I know is I was suddenly overcome with the urge to add these numbers up, and then derive their average, manually. And, not having pencil and paper handy (not having had pencil and paper handy in years), I resolved to complete the task entirely in my head.

I have this sort of idiot savant skill at basic math. I can add -- or subtract, or multiply, or divide -- extremely long columns of numbers, carrying over and everything, all in my head, and at tremendous speed, with accuracy. It is not a talent I developed or anything, I just had it from the beginning, as far back as I can remember. From whence it came I can only guess.

I never was much for showing off my odd little skill, because it did not seem very remarkable to me. But my elementary school teachers began to wonder how I was turning in my tests half an hour ahead of everyone else, and getting all the questions right. Naturally, they suspected I was cheating some way.

This all came to a head in third grade, when one day my teacher gave me a big fat red “F” on a math test on which I’d answered all but 2 of 30 problems correctly, in record time. She openly accused me of cheating, and refused to even consider changing the grade. Dismayed, I finally told my parents about it. And they went ballistic, met with the school principal and everything (I was dubious about all this, I just wanted the grade I’d honestly earned.) It ended up I had to stand in the principal’s office, in front of him and my parents, while my teacher rattled off a series of about 40 numbers at me. When she was done I gave her the sum total of the numbers, which I'd been adding in my head as she went. The total was correct. My principal was very impressed, but I think my teacher just started hating me even more.

Anyway, all the kids eventually heard about this throwdown/showdown (not from me), and for awhile I was kind of a legend in the third grade. Not to bad thing to be, everything considered. The only reason those kids did not start calling me ‘The Human Calculator’ or something similar is because back then calculators weren’t very prevalent at all, and the ones there were approximated the size and weight of the front quarter panel on a 1966 Dodge Charger. Probably cost as much, too.

Luckily, none of my classmates thought to call me The Human Abacus, or The Human Slide Rule. The Human Comptometer kind of has a nice ring to it, but no one thought of that one, either.

I once impressed a very attractive girl with my addition skills, so much so she started dating me.

My freshman year of high school, there was a really pretty girl in my class, obviously so far out of my reach I never even dreamt of taking her out. I didn't mind standing around looking at her, though. She worked at an ice cream place after school, and I happened to be there one evening when she was closing. She couldn’t make her cash register balance, even after numerous attempts. So I helped her quickly recount the money and receipts, and then everything balanced out as it should have. She was impressed and seemed very turned on by this, so I asked her out. Even then, I knew an opportunity when I saw one; especially one that walked right up and slapped me in the face.

Alas, a romance based on someone’s math skills is generally not destined to last very long, and this one didn’t, either. But I still remember it all with some fondness. It was the first time I realized that some of the stuff I was being forced to learn in high school really did have practical applications.

My vaunted skill at mathematics came to a screeching halt the next year. That was when I first encountered “higher math”, in this case trigonometry. Try though I might, my brain was simply not wired to grasp the more abstract and esoteric concepts of trig and calculus and matrices and whatever the hell else lay beyond that. My facility for mathematics simply went to a certain level, and then stopped cold. And that was it.

Suddenly, my skill at adding numbers was obsolete. It was, I realized, about as relevant -- and useful -- as blacksmithing, or alchemy.

What did it all mean? Would my youthful confidence, flowering but still delicate, be utterly destroyed? How would I cope? Well, for one thing, I was going to have to figure out a new and better way to attract girls.

*****

Nowadays, we are rarely asked to do much math at all. Calculators are everywhere, from one’s laptop to one’s phone to one’s watch, to spreadsheets that do everything for you. No one has to add up anything, anymore.

We are better for it, no doubt. But still, it is fun to go back and try out the old skills again, like I did yesterday. I added up those numbers, and averaged them, all in about 15 seconds, in my head. No pencil and paper, no trees had to die. It was gratifying to find my old skill intact, to know I still "had it." I started thinking, I wish I knew where that pretty girl from the ice cream parlor lives now. I'd go over to her house and show her, after all these years, that I still knew how to turn her on. Okay, maybe that was not such a great idea, but. . .

Stop punching the keys on your phone or your watch or calculator. Add up some numbers in your head. Do some long division, on paper. Figure up a batting average, or an on base percentage. Set yourself free, momentarily at least, from the drowsy ease and convenience of the silicone chip.

By all means, reconnect with the numbers. Follow them. Go with them, all the way out to where the air is thin and there is no light, out to the place where the numbers twist and break.

Some people will tell you, that is the place where God lives.

*****

You Can't Always Get What You Want

I Need. . . Advantages

A friend of mine did this on her blog the other day, and I had enough fun with it I thought I’d pass it on. Google “(Your name) needs” and write down the first eight or ten things that come up which fit the criteria.

Similar to the formula popular a few years back used to discover what one’s “porn name” is (your first pet’s name + the name of the first street you lived on), the results in this little game can seem random, but often oddly appropriate anyway.

Believe it or not, my first name really isn’t Inca. But, out of curiosity, I went ahead and Googled it.

Oh, and if you are even vaguely interested, my porn name is ‘Bo Berkshire.’


Inca needs:

• a lot of water

• a 2006 Bentley Azure

• a home

• an opportunity to upload the calibrations

• someone to step up and volunteer to be a Vice-Commodore

• an adjustment to eliminate snipe

• 40 subdivisions

• 55 tons of fertilizer

• to be inserted into a membrane compartment

• to be busy


Yes. That last one, especially.

*****

I came across this exercise awhile back and saved it for future use, but then like many things I save for future use, I never saw it again. Until yesterday afternoon when, doing a little spring cleaning in my hard drive, I came across it again. Since today’s blog post is mostly pre-fabricated anyway, I figured I’d throw it in.

Copy and paste the list, then highlight the advantages which you have enjoyed, adding in any explanatory comments you want. Then re-post the highlighted list in a comment to this entry.

By way of disclosure, I have presented my own list below, with my advantages colored in:

01.) Father went to college
02.) Father finished college
03.) Mother went to college
04.) Mother finished college
05.) Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
06.) Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
07.) Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
08.) Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
09.) Were read children's books by a parent
10.) Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11.) Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12.) The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
13.) Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14.) Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15.) Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16.) Went to a private high school
17.) Went to summer camp
18.) Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19.) Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20.) Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21.) Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22.) There was original art in your house when you were a child
23.) You and your family lived in a single-family house
24.) Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25.) You had your own room as a child
26.) You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
27.) Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
28.) Had your own TV in your room in high school
29.) Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
30.) Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
31.) Went on a cruise with your family
32.) Went on more than one cruise with your family
33.) Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
34.) You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family


The aim of this is to point out that where you end up in life often has a lot to do with the advantages you had growing up, I gather. I don’t sense any implication one should be ashamed of whatever advantages one had, although there are people out there who would tell you that you should be. And, well, you know. . . fuck them. Seeking advantages for yourself or looking to provide advantages for your own offspring is human, and as natural as breathing. Only a PC-addled do-gooder, or a hirsute sociologist, would tell you otherwise.

But, it is good to be reminded now and again just how much your parents tried to do for you when you were growing up, often without much fanfare or acknowledgement. Which I realize now, as I raise children of my own, isn’t the point anyway.

On the other hand, if you did not have many advantages early on but turned out all right anyway, go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back. Then go thank your mom and dad anyway, if/while you still can. Even if they happen to be PC-addled do-gooders. Or hirsute sociologists.

(Creative Commons License. This meme is derived from an exercise originally developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you make use of this blog game, they ask that you acknowledge their copyright.)

*****

Bad Actors

Brought To You By The Law Firm Of Dewey Cheatham & Howe

I think my favorite television commercial right now, and that is a relative thing, is the one for a brand of motor oil in which a series of guys, apparently weekend warriors planning some do-it-yourself maintenance, are shopping in an auto parts store. Just as each is about to purchase what is presumably the wrong brand of motor oil, he is beaten down by a little Scotsman who appears on the scene, bearded and wearing a kilt, and wielding an oil pan dipstick. As he dipstick-whips the poor guy, the Scot proclaims, “Think with your dipstick, Jimmy!! You got to think with your dipstick!!”

A commercial like this appeals the quirky side of my sense of humor, and I appreciate it. But even I know this sort of thing has the potential to get old, really quick. Everyone from me to the homeless guy down on the corner already has or is working on their own variation of the Scotsman. “Think with your dipstick, Jimmy!! You’ve got to think with your dipstick!!”

See what I mean? My co-workers are already growing weary of it, I believe.

*****

As far as which commercial is currently the most annoying, that is hard to say, now that Valentine’s Day has finally passed. It seems to me there were more Valentine’s Day commercials on television this year than ever before, for flowers and candy and the like; of them all, by far the most annoying was the one for Vermont™ Teddy Bears. By the end those were being shown every 15 minutes or so, and I would literally either change the channel or at the least mute the television each time one came on.

If we are talking about an irritating class of commercials, I suppose whatever is being pimped by Billy Mays this week would have to be on the list. Currently it is some kind of super bonding agent, Mighty Putty™ I believe it is called. According to Billy Mays, Mighty Putty™ can mend anything from a torn T-shirt to the Hubble Space Telescope. It is strong enough to pull a fully loaded tractor-trailer rig!! Tough enough to withstand hurricane force winds!! The over-the-top hyperbole in these ads could potentially be humorously appealing, except Billy Mays has the most irritating voice in the history of Western civilization. So, naturally enough, he went into advertising.

*****

Another class of commercials I find consistently irritating is ads for personal injury attorneys. These are usually local and self-made, which is not a good thing, right off. And the only guys who rival plaintiff’s attorneys for being over-emoting hams is car dealers. Neither should be allowed to participate in their own advertising.

For some reason it has become de rigueur in these parts for PI lawyers to have some kind of handle, boasting of their courtroom prowess. We have The Strong-arm. We have The Texas Hammer. Ridiculous. There is even a guy now locally who overtly plays against this trend. “Arm and Hammer are for cleaning suits, I’m for winning them.” Of course, in the process he has developed his own silly, distinguishing shtick. “Remember, that’s Juhan, with a 'J'”.

I come from attorneys, I guess you could say. I realize that is something like saying I was raised by wolves, or circus people. But back then, at least those guys had a code of honor, and never advertised, ever. I don’t suppose there is any way we can go back to that now, is there? No, and not so much because it would hurt anyone’s business so terribly to do so; no, it is because these guys have got a taste of the spotlight now. No way they are going to go back to well-paid anonymity, not willingly.

A friend of mine, who takes some personal injury cases as a part of his practice, has come up with what I think would be a brilliant commercial idea, for himself.

First, he would re-style himself as The King Of Ka-Ching®. In the opening scene of his television commercial we would see a crowded courtroom not come to order yet. There would be a general murmur as the defense attorneys at their table and the spectators in the seats converse. Suddenly, the lights would go down and the room would go quiet. Then my friend would burst through the back doors of the courtroom and, as spotlights played on him and tons of confetti dropped from the ceiling, loud music would come up – the Rocky theme, perhaps – and my friend would go dancing and sashaying up the center aisle, fists pumping in the air, in the manner of a famous heavyweight boxer entering the ring. He would be wearing a suit like Elvis, with a long cape bedecked with a large, sequined dollar sign on the back. As he headed to the plaintiff’s table, there would be inter-cut shots of a past client standing in front of a mansion, another by a fancy car, another on the captain's deck of a yacht, each beaming ear to ear, maybe a gleaming gold tooth showing here and there. And after each a large logo of a golden cash register, with the trademark sound effect. Ka-Ching!!

There is more, but you get the idea. Now, this is the sort of attorney I would want to have. Not one of these preening, posturing nitwits I see on television these days.

The Texas Hammer, what a buffoon. He’d have his ass handed to him if he ever went inside a real courtroom. But like a lot of these guys, TH only takes “sure thing” cases, and heads straight for a settlement. Gotta collect that contingency fee, and as soon as possible; before all the other slam-dunk cases start backing up in the system. And while there is still a small percentage left in it for the client.

Is that how you want to be represented? No, sir. If you want to get the bling-bling, you gotta call The King Of Ka-Ching!!

*****

Money For Nothing

Looking Sideways For An Angle

You can bullshit the baker
And get the buns
You can back out of every deal
Except one

Tonio K., "The Funky Western Civilization"

*****

I’ll tell you how screwed up I am. After being inundated for months by commercials and public service spots telling me about the imminent changeover to digital television and what it means to me, I dutifully went on-line and reserved two tickets for converter boxes for my household, even though every television in my home is hooked to cable – yeah, yeah, I know Time Warner Cable is a monopoly and sucks, but it is better than nothing (though not by a whole lot.) The point is, I have no need for the converter boxes but, hey, they were giving them away so. . . I took my tickets to H.E.B. and picked up my two boxes, at no charge. They are now stacked on a shelf in my workshop, unopened.

I got the boxes even though I do not need them because I am constitutionally unable to pass up a free deal on just about anything, yes; but also because I figure at some point they will stop giving these boxes away, and will start charging for them. Which will immediately create a market for them on the side, at a discount. I could then sell my boxes at a reduced price, for cash, and still make a tidy profit. And doing so, tax free, would put me squarely into the shadow economy, the one that operates outside the parameters of the IRS and SEC and FTC and ICC and any other number of governmental acronyms you want to throw out there.

Most normal people who do not live in the tree-shaded, speed-bump festooned, manicured lawn-ed West End of Beaumont know there is a parallel economy out there that is always running alongside the official one. The 'official' economy being the one that is in the tank now, run into the ground by a bunch of well-dressed and –coiffed banking boobs who granted millions in home loans and whatnot to borrowers with the shakiest credentials imaginable, loans that Joe Blow down on the street corner would never have made. So now we have to give quadrillions of dollars to these fuckers to keep them from going under and dragging the world economy down with them, for good. The official world economy, that is.

Oddly, and Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes could explain it all better than I, when the official economy screws the pooch, so to speak, the shadow economy, the one economists and politicians call, with much disdain, the “Black Market”, actually thrives. This is the economy of the pawn broker, the loan shark, and the bookie; but also of the guy who mows your lawn, or sells you his vehicle but insists on cash only, or who shines your shoes at his stand in the bank lobby. Billions of dollars are exchanged this way every day, untaxed and unaccounted for by any government agency.

I know most of this sort of economic activity is at least mildly illegal, and it probably costs me money is some way, but I have always looked upon it with some favor. I think I am as attracted to the quasi-rebel spirit of it as much as the practical advantages; the attitude that, hey, we will participate in your capitalist economic system, okay, but we are going to make some of our own rules.

To be honest, I led a fairly sheltered life growing up, at least early on, and I really knew very little about this alternate economic system, one that operates every day more or less in plain sight. It wasn’t until I met up with my father-in-law that I got a real inkling of it.

*****

My father-in-law was a great guy. He didn’t think I was, at first. We had been dating a month or so when my wife decided we were serious enough that I needed to get to know her parents, and vice-versa. So we would go over to their house and she and I and her mom and dad would sit in the living room and make small talk. My mother-in-law was great, but it was all kind of awkward anyway, especially when my father-in-law, after saying maybe two words, would sit back in his easy chair and lift the Auto Trader or whatever it was he was reading up in front of his eyes. And that was it; no more participation out of him, or even another word. Afterward, my wife would say, “I think my dad likes you,” and I’d be thinking, “What?”

Eventually, though -- and I have no idea what it was that brought him around – he decided I was all right. We were pretty tight after that. He had a really nice shop in his backyard -- a second two-car garage, actually -- where he had all his tools and maybe a car he was working on and a stereo and an antique Coke® machine that dispensed Michelob Light™ beer. He would get home from work and head out there, come in for dinner then head out there again, until it was time to come in for good, to take a shower and go to bed. When my wife and I would visit, especially after we were engaged and every single conversation between her and her mother involved some aspect of wedding planning, he and I would escape to his workshop, where our mutual aversion to girl talk and fondness for tools and beer caused us to bond, I guess you could call it.

My father-in-law had a regular job, as a tradesman in a local refinery, and he made decent money. I gathered most of that he turned over to my mother-in-law, for household expenses and such. For his own money, he had a whole other thing going on, on the side.

He bought and sold used vehicles continually. He had everyone in the family trained to look for cars and trucks on sale. It was really weird to be driving along the freeway and suddenly have my wife whip a notebook out of her purse and start writing something down. It was the phone number in the back window of the pickup truck ahead of us, right there at the bottom of the “For Sale” sign. My mother- and brothers-in-law did this, too. It did not matter what the vehicle was; if my father-in-law thought it was a good deal, he’d buy it.

He never drove the same car for more than a couple of months. If someone made him a good offer, he’d sell. Three or four times, after I was married, he called and asked me to come pick him up; he had been somewhere and someone offered him $1500 for the Ford Ranger he was driving that week, cash. And so he sold it right out from under himself. Happened all the time.

He also bought and sold guns, and auto parts. He restored muscle cars, and he would buy and sell or trade for just about anything else one could imagine. All for cash only, none of it on anyone’s books except his own. He wore Red Wing™ boots everywhere, and it sounds like a cliché, but he always had a fat roll of hundreds in his left boot. And often some kind of pistol in the back pocket of his jeans, for protection or, if you offered him a fair price, for sale. Hanging around with him educated me in the ways of the parallel economy, and taught me how one could come out ahead on a deal if the price was right and one was willing to buy and/or sell just about anything, if so.

*****

I suppose I learned the lessons of my father-in-law well. I am not nearly as resourceful as he was, but I am not averse to jumping into a deal every once in awhile, if it looks like the real thing.

Like the day a few years back a friend of a friend approached me with a truckload of brand new HP laptops, in unopened boxes, and offered to sell them to me for $100 apiece. I think he or someone he new had jacked a container at the Port of Houston; but I don’t know that. I did know it was all illegal as hell, but I also knew if I bought the laptops, I wouldn’t have them for very long, so. . . I got him down to $75 and bought ten, which was all the cash I had on me at the time. Kept two of them for my kids, and sold the other eight at work the next day, for $175 each. I believe the statute of limitations has run out on that deal, by the way. Another thing I did was make quite a bit of cash right after Hurricane Ike, just driving around Beaumont after work with a couple of chainsaws and a mower and weed eater and blower and a pressure washer and generator in the back of my truck. I was charging a lot less than the price-gouging out-of-town a-holes were, to clean up yards and the like. And just so I don’t come off as totally rapacious, I was doing the same things for my immediate neighbors, only for free.

*****

I don’t know what the market will be, if there even is one, for digital converter boxes in the future. Everybody who wanted already has two of 'em, after all. However, it is not hard for me to envision people like myself getting so fed up at some point with Time Warner’s bullshit that they rip the cable out of the wall, and from the back of every TV set in their home.

When they do, they will need some converter boxes, for sure. And I will know one place they can buy them, cheap. Cash only, of course.

*****

Yes We Can Can

Inca From Peru's 115th Dream

I awoke with a start this morning, at 6:15. I’d been having the strangest dreams. This happens to me sometimes. I have never really talked to anyone about it, or read up much on dreaming. I suspect my dream life is pretty normal. I sure hope so.

I do know we all dream every night, multiple times, and this dreaming is a mechanism for allowing us to work out subconscious conflicts in a relatively harmless way. Most of our dreams, we never remember. The only ones we do are the dreams we wake up in the middle of. But even those we only remember fleetingly, unless we immediately rehash the dream in our mind several times, or go to the trouble of writing the details down.

There are probably ten dreams I have had during my lifetime that I can still recall vividly. They were just so bizarre I kept thinking of them long after they occurred. I have never had a dream that foretold anything, as far as I know. And I am skeptical about the concept of interpreting dreams. You either end up with the explanation that the underlying meaning is explicitly sexual, like Freud did (some of them are sexual in some way, but not all of them, darn it); or you get interpretations which are so vague they might as well be a quatrain from Nostradamus. In this case, your dreams can seem to mean anything you want them to. Though in reality, there is no practical meaning to them at all.

I tend to look at dreams primarily as a way for my mind to ‘clean up its room’, to throw out the garbage that has accumulated there. Beyond that, any interpretation is dubious.

Dreams do seem to have a refreshing effect. If I’ve had a night of particularly disturbing dreams, once I have awakened completely and realized I can let go of my mental distress because it was only some dreams I was having, I feel suddenly refreshed, and unburdened. It is a pleasant sensation.

Who knows? Maybe this has something to do with the common phenomenon of immediate post-somnolent sexual arousal. Which is the most technical way I can think of describing the, you know. . . the crude term used to describe the aroused state some males find themselves in, just after waking up in the morning. Some females, too. There has to be a scientific reason why two people, at the point in the day they are likely at their least attractive – hair all disheveled, no makeup, face needing washing and/or a shave, morning breath – are possessed by the strong desire to engage each other intimately, in the Biblical sense; to tear up the bedding a little bit before they must get ready for work and/or the kids wake up.

I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Freud about this, next time I see him. In my dreams.

*****

In my dream last night, I was in Iraq for some reason, and eventually I was captured and placed in a prison camp with several others. The camp was physically typical, or maybe stereotypical; dirt floors, stone walls, tiny slits for windows. It was uncomfortable for a freedom-loving American, but we weren’t treated badly at all by the guards.

In fact, the camp we were held in was not far from an American military base, and our guards would go out at night and raid the base’s commissary, and steal American canned goods. They would bring the ill-gotten booty back to our camp and give it to us captives to divvy up amongst ourselves. The guards wanted us to have something to eat we would enjoy and be familiar with, instead of the featureless stuff they would otherwise be feeding us, some kind of porridge made of water and semolina flour cooked to a mush-like consistency.

We were pleased and thankful for the canned goods. My favorite was Chef Boy-ar-dee™ Overstuffed Italian Sausage Ravioli, in a 40 oz. family-size can. When I got it, I would bury all but one of the cans in various places around the floor of my cell, for future meals. We prisoners were allowed to keep one Chicago Cutlery® 8-inch slicing/carving knife (with a high-carbon stainless steel blade) in our cell – well, this was a dream, after all – and I would use mine to cut open the top of my can of ravioli. Let me tell you something – if you have been deprived of the basic culinary pleasures for awhile, a cold can of Chef Boy-ar-dee™ Overstuffed Italian Sausage Ravioli can taste as good as the homemade ravioli-manicotti-cannelloni plate at Villa Mosconi in Greenwich Village. A little tinny, okay; but it really hits the spot.

I found out how good “The Chef” could be this past September, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. My family had fled east, into Louisiana, in search of the nearest electricity; but because I had to work, I stayed home – me and the beagle and a couple of box fans and a small generator. After several nights of Vienna sausage with crackers or bland cheese sandwiches for dinner, I dug around in the pantry and found a 15 oz. can of Chef Boy-ar-dee™ Overstuffed Italian Sausage Ravioli. One of my kids’ choices, no doubt. Anyway, I fished it out and opened it (with a big kitchen knife), and I ate the ravioli straight from the can. I was just amazed at how good it tasted. Heavenly. The already odd-tasting sugo (gravy), enhanced with a faint metallic aftertaste; the mushy ravioli wrapper; the stuffing made of the mildest Italian sausage I have ever come across; these had all melded together into a nearly orgasmic palette of flavors. God, I thought; I’ll never go back to Vienna sausage and crackers.

Chef Boy-ar-dee™ helped get me through the post-Hurricane Ike maelstrom, and I will be forever grateful to him for that.

*****

Anyway, that was the entirety of my dream last night, more or less. No sexual conquests of impossible-to-get women. No hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth to win the big game. No island-hopping the Caribbean on my 57-ft. yacht, various bikini-clad lovelies laying about the deck. Nope. Just me, a humble prisoner of war, enjoying to a ridiculous extent my dinner of American processed food, straight from the can.

Hey, Sigmund. When you get some time, figure that one out for me, my man.

*****

Out Of Mind, Out Of Sight

And I Stood Upon The Sand Of The Sea

Whew. The last few days have been. . . different. Anyway, needless to say I have been far away from the interwebs, for the most part; utterly removed from any facility that might enable me to add to the literary masterpiece this accretion of mental outpourings is fast becoming. And I don’t have a Blackberry, nor have I learned how to post to this blog from a mobile device of some sort. Which is probably just as well.

Where have I been, and what have I been up to? The details are irrelevant to anyone but myself, and largely uninteresting; I see no real point in recounting them here. I would like to be able to say I was on a spiritual quest in the Himalayas, followed by a week on the beaches of Ibiza, just to chill out. But, that would be a lie.

Although, if I were looking for spiritual sustenance and/or renewal, i.e., major chilling out-ness, the beach would probably be where I would go.

For nearly all of my life, “the beach” has been synonymous with the Bolivar Peninsula. Which, by the way, was blown off the map and literally washed off of the face of the earth last September. Gone. There has been a hole in my soul ever since.

The beach was always my safety valve. Whenever I got folded, spindled, and/or mutilated by the vagaries of my 20th/21st century existence, I would either head for the shoreline literally, or at least be comforted in knowing it was there, waiting for me if I needed it. If I did go physically, I would sit out on the sand in a lawn chair for hours, oiled up, stereo playing, big surf fishing rod in a holder next to me for an excuse/distraction. Sometimes I'd be drinking beer religiously, sometimes not. Either way, I'd sit there, just staring at the waves and the horizon for hours, utterly at peace, in an existential bliss.

Now it is all gone. The places I hung out, mostly around Crystal Beach and Gilchrist, were obliterated. Take the most bombed-out village in Iraq you can think of, add some water, and that is what my former paradise, my Valhalla, looked like, after Hurricane Ike was done with it.

This has been in the back of my mind for awhile now, just a vague nagging feeling of emptiness. There is currently an effort to rebuild things down on the peninsula, including the beaches; but, aah, I will believe it when I see it. Until then, I am Moses wandering around the desert. I am Siddhartha living out samsāra, gone off track in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. I am Gilligan, lost on the other side of the island, just trying to find my way back to Mary Ann and her big, tasty coconut-cream pies (Gilligan and I, we always knew Mary Ann was actually “hotter” than Ginger.)

None of this has much at all to do with why I haven’t been keeping up with this blog the last few days; it is just me going off on a tangent. As I have been sometimes known to do.

*****

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

-- e. e. cummings, "maggie and millie and molly and may"

*****

Someone Else's Blues

Tear The Roof Off The Sucker

I am finally getting rid of my blue roof this week. Thank you, Jesus.

About 1/3 of the shingles on my roof were removed for me by Hurricane Ike, and ever since the damaged area has been covered by a heavy blue polyethylene tarp, courtesy of the Corps of Engineers. It is not a bad looking tarp or anything, and there is no shame in having one. After the storm, there were hundreds of houses covered by them.

The tarp was meant to be a temporary fix, however. And it has been five months since the hurricane. Most of the tarps around town have been removed and roofs been repaired by now, so my big blue tarp has gone from a sort of badge of courage to a mildly embarrassing eyesore.

A lot of people had trouble lining up a roofing contractor right after the storm. The dependable local companies were booked up with jobs for months, and the alternatives were mostly fly-by-night storm chasers from all over the country, many of whom may or may not have been legitimate roofers. Roofers by training, I mean. I think a lot of yard men and convenience store clerks and day laborers in Florida and New Jersey and Michigan and everywhere else woke up the day after Ike plowed through here and had an epiphany. “Hey, I’m a roofer now”, they said, and so they packed up themselves and an unemployed cousin or two and a couple of idiot in-laws, and headed for the Texas Gulf Coast.

On the other hand, I’ve had a contractor lined up all along; my guy is a Honduran named Jesus. He and his crew have done several construction and landscaping jobs for me and/or friends of mine over the years. Even though Jesus and I basically communicate by sign language, because I suck at Spanish, he does good work at a reasonable price and I trust him. We ‘talked’ just after the storm, and he said he would do the roofing job as soon as I had my insurance claim taken care of.

And therein lies the rub. I will not spend any time here railing against insurance companies. Believe me, over the last five months, I and everyone else who lives in this area have heard more than enough of it. I’ll just say that all the bonhomie one sees between clients and insurers on television is total bullshit – the relationship between homeowners and their insurance companies after a hurricane is entirely adversarial, both ways. If I ever got elected to any position of power, the very first industry group I am going after is the personal insurance companies. They are a drain on the economy and a scourge on the populace, without exception.

But anyway, I finally got my insurance straightened out, after having to go through three different adjusters and miles of red tape. Then I found out the mortgage company wanted to get involved, too, and dictate terms. That is when I aimed my attorney at them. That didn’t do a lot of good – not my attorney’s fault – so I had to go through another process of lining up pre- and post-construction inspections and having my contractor submit a detailed bid to my lien holder for approval, before we could start work (there are several other minor repairs needed, in addition to the roof.) We finally got through all that, and this week the roof job begins.

I’ll kind of miss my blue roof. It looked tacky, and it was definitely noticeable. But if I ever got disoriented coming home, I could always find my house eventually because of it. There is that. Hell, I could probably have spotted my house from space, if I ever needed to, thanks to that bright azure beacon nailed to the top of my home. But it is almost gone now, to be replaced by 40 squares of dark green architectural shingles (my wife’s idea.)

So, goodbye blue roof, old friend. And good riddance.

*****

Diamonds In Mind

Bats And Balls And Fathers And Sons

Little League is starting up again. Tryouts were last week, and then the draft. It is my youngest son’s last year of eligibility, and I found out Friday evening that he is a Padre. I informed him of this Saturday morning when I went in to wake him up. He had no idea what I was talking about.

“William, you’re a Padre.”

Rubs his eyes. “What?”

He thought I was using some obscure term of familiarity, like compadre. I call him stuff like that sometimes. “You know, like the San Diego Padres. Mr. Dearing called, you’re on his team.” Dearing is someone I know, a good guy and excellent coach. Knowledgeable and even-tempered. I was glad it was him when I found out. My son was pleased, as well.

*****

People tend to get overly sentimental about baseball, especially about the part it plays in the relationship between a father and a son. The movie Field Of Dreams – which was twisted in this direction, away from the novel it is based on – is the best example of this. That novel, Shoeless Joe, was terrific; but almost entirely different in basic ways from the resulting movie, which I found pleasant, but not great. However, Field Of Dreams is useful in pointing out how some men feel about baseball, and their dads. Not me, but. . .

A father-son relationship can be complicated, and sometimes not so pleasant, especially during the child’s adolescence and young adulthood. That is my experience with my father. It was not an Oedipal thing, in the Freudian sexual sense. My father was funny and easy-going on the surface, but was by necessity the aloof authority figure in our two-parent family setup, and therefore a representation of repression to a son who was trying to break free and establish his own identity. Further complications arose from big expectations projected onto me by him. But I am getting off the subject here, and out of my depth. Simply put, a father-son relationship does not have to be overtly ambivalent, but sometimes it is.

The thing with baseball is, it can be a neutral ground in this conflict. A love for the game, passed on by a father to his son and nurtured by a mutual interest, can be a place of respite in an otherwise turbulent relationship at the time, and/or a way to resolve old conflicts later on, when both the son and his dad are presumably more mature and can look at their relationship with a greater sense of equanimity. Even if the father-son interaction is not openly difficult, there is almost always a distance there, I am not sure why. Baseball can be a way to bridge that distance, at least for a little while.

My relationship with my own sons is far from perfect, but not nearly as crazy as mine was with my dad, for many reasons. Our baseball relationship has been steady but not so intense, partly because our conflicts outside of baseball are not large, and also because I have consciously de-emphasized my own place in my kids’ baseball lives. We go to games and talk about baseball and I have tried to pass on to them the knowledge I have from playing from childhood through high school, but I have never formally coached them, and never will. This is again in reaction to personal experience, as my own father’s and my relationship, already tenuous in my teenage years, was almost destroyed forever by the two seasons he decided, against my tacit wishes, to be my Senior League coach.

For all the gauzy good feeling about baseball and paternal relationships, I have seen real ugliness in youth baseball. Even as kids, we used to make fun of the minority of the dads who would get all worked up about the games and yell and scream and stuff. Even if they were our own. We used to call them ‘railing dads’ because during games, instead of sitting in the stands with everyone else, they would group along the fence rails behind the first- and third-base lines, and mutter to each other and yell at the kids and coaches and umpires on the field. We thought they were fucking nuts; and we resolved to never be that way ourselves, when we grew up.

I have kept that resolution, but it has cost me. I’ve never formally coached either of my boys, as I said, and I have restrained my natural passion at their games, for fear of becoming like those railing dads.

But apparently, not everyone has kept the promises we made, as kids. I have seen a new generation of overbearing fathers at games, hovering over everything like a dark cloud at a picnic. And though I have restrained myself, I have at least a passing familiarity with the ugly, creepy feeling that comes when you realize you are way too wrapped up in a kids game, probably because in some way you are trying to relive your own glory days vicariously through your children; or, even worse, you are depending on your child out there, standing in the outfield watching an airplane fly over instead of the action on the field. . . you are burdening your own sweet child with the task of redressing your failures in baseball, and making up for your own shortcomings playing a game. That is a sick feeling, and it kind of scares me.

*****

One other thing people tend to do when discussing baseball is over intellectualize it. Like I have been doing here, for practically this entire post. Because for all the heavy theorizing, the real pleasures of baseball are mostly simple and visceral and tactile. Yesterday afternoon, between church and a Boy Scouts meeting, my son and I decided we should go to the schoolyard and throw the ball around, to start getting ready for the upcoming season. I still enjoy playing catch with him and his brother, even though I have a frayed rotator cuff now, and every time I throw the ball it feels like my arm is going along with it.

We gathered up some balls in the garage and our gloves and we walked to the schoolyard down the street. Once we got there, we stood maybe ten yards apart and started throwing the ball to each other, in a smooth, easy motion. Once we got warm, and started throwing with some velocity, we heard the familiar sound of the ball popping the leather of our gloves. I could imagine that, from a distance, it appeared we were engaging in a sort of reciprocal dance, a basic instinct to throw, and then catch. . . catch, and then throw. Just like it has been done for so many springs, and probably will be for many more.

Just a boy and his dad, standing out in the late afternoon sun on the yellow-green grass of a schoolyard, tossing a ball back and forth and talking and laughing. Sharing the simple joy of throw-and-catch, of mindless banter, and of spending some time together, however brief, out in the sweet sunshine.

*****

A Hit Of Fresh Air

Swimming In Controversy

One of the dominant news stories over the last week or so has been the alleged downfall of US Olympic swimming hero Michael Phelps. I have mostly ignored this because I somehow missed the Summer Olympics entirely and don’t understand what the big deal is about Phelps, anyway. Also, the coverage of and public reaction to the whole thing seems ridiculously over the top.

What did Michael Phelps do to earn himself so much trouble? He went to a party at his girlfriend’s place in London, and smoked some marijuana. Right or wrong, that in itself would probably not have caused him any trouble at all. His real mistake was not being private enough about his partaking; another party guest whipped out a cell phone and took the picture of Phelps in the middle of inhaling that by now everyone in the First, Second and Third Worlds has seen.

While sidewalk cameras doing image scans of unknowing citizens, hidden security cams, and traffic light cameras and the like are cited as examples of modern electronic invasions of privacy, I think the ubiquitous mini-camcorders and cell phone cameras practically everyone carries around at all times now are more pernicious. One must keep in mind that no matter where one is, moving around anonymously in public or at an intimate gathering with friends, everything one does could possibly and probably will be captured on camera. If it is funny or embarrassing or incriminating enough, one’s act will be all over the world wide web within days.

For someone like me, who grew up before cell phones or digital cameras, and when a camcorder was the size of a television and weighed 50 lbs. or more, this takes getting used to. But Michael Phelps grew up with this stuff, and probably should have known better. That was one expensive bong hit, boy.

Commentary on this story has followed two main lines of logic. The first is the Pollyanna-ish moral stance, the idea that Phelps is just the latest example of a modern hero-athlete who has let down his fans, especially kids, by indulging is less than savory behavior he thought was private, but wasn’t. I have always had trouble with this kind of thinking, if for no other reason than it seems awfully simplistic. Most kids couldn’t care less, and even the ones who do are smart enough to know that just because Michael Phelps partakes of the sacred herb does not mean they should run out and start doing it, too. Unless their parents didn’t teach them any better, of course.

The other line of thinking is more practical. Phelps really hurt himself financially by being caught on camera; his many lucrative, post-Olympic endorsement deals are now in peril. Most of those contracts have morals clauses in them, so a corporate entity has an out if their celebrity spokesman starts going seriously haywire on them, in public. That seems fair enough to me. Speculation has been that some of Phelps’ less than ‘hip’ endorsement partners might bail on him, costing him millions.

In fact, one just did. Kellogg’s Co., the giant U.S. breakfast cereal maker, cancelled its multi-million endorsement deal with Phelps last week, saying the gold medal winner’s recent behavior “is not consistent with the image of Kellogg’s.” The thinking is that this cancellation, and Phelps’ subsequent three-month suspension from competing (and getting paid) by USA Swimming, is just a taste of things to come. USA Swimming is the US’s official Olympic training team. Their statement upon suspending Phelps: "We decided to send a strong message to Michael because he disappointed so many people, particularly the hundreds of thousands of USA Swimming member kids who look up to him as a role model and a hero." Right, the poor kids. Anyway, one expensive bong hit, like I said. I hope it was some damn good weed, at least.

So far, though, the other shoe has not dropped. In fact, Phelps has already confirmed the continued backing of many of his presumably more ‘with it’ sponsors. His hurried if dubiously sincere apology last week for making a “serious mistake” has helped stop the bleeding, but I suspect most of those sponsors were ready too look the other way already. They know this transgression probably will not alienate Phelps from most young fans, especially the ones old enough to have disposable income. The decisions of these sponsors were made with an eye on profits first, but there also seems to be a more realistic idea here of how savvy today’s young people are, how they can separate an athlete’s on-field accomplishments from his private behavior in their minds. It is Kellogg’s and USA Swimming’s hoary moralistic condemnations of Phelps that seem quaint and irrelevant.

In Kellogg's case, it is their money and their image and they can do what they like with both. Their pronouncement on the sacking of Phelps caught my eye particularly, though, for a couple of reasons. First, making a public announcement that smoking pot does not fit your corporate image seems kind of ridiculous. We all knew that. It also seems a bit disingenuous, since it is also possible Kellogg’s saw an opportunity to get out of a multi-million dollar deal, signed back in the halcyon days just after the Summer Olympics, and before the economic crash had big companies scrambling around looking for ways to cut back spending. In this scenario, the braying about corporate image is just a cynical cover-up.

Secondly, either way, does Kellogg’s really have a cohesive corporate image? A universal recognition by consumers of some vague trait – wholesomeness, values-oriented practices, anyway, something that doesn’t have to do with using recreational drugs – associated with the company and its products? Their advertisements mostly promote their individual brands, not the parent company itself. Kellogg’s used to point out in commercials that they were located in Battle Creek, Michigan, which seemed sort of bucolic and perhaps small-town wholesome to consumers. But I have not seen that in a long time. Does the mostly cartoon-ish advertising of their individual brands collectively form a corporate image of Kellogg’s in the mind of the American breakfast cereal eater? It may, but I don’t get a sense of it; anyway, what would that image be? That Captain Crunch and Tony The Tiger and Toucan Sam are emphatically not in favor of smoking weed? Actually, it would be pretty funny if one of those guys was caught lighting up or doing something equally heinous in their down time between making commercials. I’d love to see the apoplectic headlines in reaction to that. “Tony The Tiger Tests Positive For Steroids!” “Toucan Sam Pecks Wife!” “Cap’n Crunch’s Secret Life As A Gay Buccaneer!” I always wondered about those pirate shirts.

Anyway, whether Kellogg’s knows it or not, I think most of us think of them, if we do at all, as a faceless corporate purveyor of negligibly healthy, sugar- and high fructose corn syrup-infused breakfast cereals to our children. And I don’t think Michael Phelps smoking ganja at a private party is going to change that image much in our minds, one way or another.

*****

Coming Undone

Rachael Ray Is Easy, Bouillon Cubes Are Hard

When I got home this afternoon, no one else was there. So I decided to throw together dinner for the family. Opting for ease and speed, I chose to improvise with some boneless skinless chicken breasts we had in the freezer. I don’t know what to call the result. It is too thick to be soup. Chicken vegetable stew, maybe.

My stew was conceived by first caramelizing some chopped onions and crushed garlic in butter. Then I threw in 7 or 8 chopped up chicken breasts. Dumped in some sea salt and black pepper and Tex Joy® steak seasoning. Then while the chicken was browning I made a broth of water, a can of cream of chicken soup, and some corn starch. Once the chicken pieces were browned, I dumped in the broth, and about half a bag of frozen mixed vegetables. Then I let the whole thing simmer for awhile, and made a pot of rice.

It is nothing that would make the Food Network™, more like one of those Rachael Ray 30-minute meals that end up taking an hour and fifteen minutes to prepare in the real world. But it came out okay, I guess. No one turned their nose up at it.

During the preparation, after I had mixed the chicken breasts with my cream of chicken based broth, I decided the stew wasn’t quite chicken-y enough, so I grabbed two or three chicken bouillon cubes to add in there, too.

Now, I don’t get too worked up about small things, normally. But one that that has always pissed me off, I was reminded, is the bouillon industry standard method of wrapping their cubes. As best I can tell, a bouillon cube is a pressed-together conglomeration of dehydrated broth granules, basically the size of a sugar cube. Once formed it is wrapped tightly in a plastic-backed tinfoil wrapper, more or less in the manner of a gift-wrapped box. But some sort of light adhesive must be involved, because if you have ever tried to open a bouillon cube while cooking, you know it is a royal pain in the ass. The cube often begins to deteriorate as you attempt to unwrap it. So you stand over the pot while unwrapping so the loose granules will fall into your broth. But, if you are like me, you have never actually unwrapped a bouillon cube with the wrapper intact at the end. I usually start off by patiently pulling up the tabs on the sides with a fingernail, but pretty soon I lose my patience and start pulling the wrapper apart. If I am standing over the pot, there is a good chance I am not only dropping loose bouillon granules into my stew, but little pieces of tinfoil wrapper, too. So I am forced to unwrap on the side, and end up with as much as ¼ of my cube as granulated broth dust on the countertop and floor.

Goddamn it! We can take detailed, perfectly clear pictures of the surface of Mars and beam them back to Earth, in real time. We can do ten gazillion calculations a second on a chip the size of a granule of dried chicken broth. But we cannot come up with a better method of wrapping a bouillon cube? Has the American public educational system fallen so far that our engineers think a bouillon cube wrapper is a perfectly functional design, as is? I’ll bet those bastards never have to come home and throw together a meal for four in less than forty-five minutes.

Of course, neither does Rachael Ray. And I am sure she has some overworked, brow-beaten assistant unwrap her bouillon cubes for her, prior to her show. That is how the hell she can put together a meal that takes most of us an hour-plus in less than thirty minutes.

I used to wonder who it was that designed the bouillon cube wrapper. I still don’t know, but I think he or she was also called in to spearhead music CD packaging, the only current consumer product to rival the bouillon cube in difficulty of use and in causing me to throw things, and curse. Meantime, I suppose I will have to organize a letter-writing campaign to try and get bouillon cube wrappers modified. Now I just have to find fifty or so other souls who are as concerned about this as I am. Or five, maybe.

*****

The Cool Of The Evening

Forgetting Myself

Today I had one of those easy, breezy days. I went through the whole day effortlessly, and everything went well, at work and after. It was one of those days that reminds me how great it is to be running around loose on the planet, doing whatever the hell it is that I do all day. I was in a zone today, and I was not even conscious of what I was doing half the time. As some oh-so-mystical philosopher once said, you have to lose yourself before you can find yourself. Today I lost myself in the cosmic flow; and then at the end, I awoke from my dream, and found myself again.

At work, my inbox magically transformed into my outbox, and when the end of the work day came, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it was quitting time already. After work, on the way home, I ran three minor but nagging errands, and took care of all of them in about fifteen minutes.

When I got home, I grabbed my to-do list, the one on which everyone in the family lists all the stuff I need to do around the house. There were only three outstanding items. I changed the air conditioner filter and poured bleach down the drain, I fixed a flickering light on a ceiling fan, and I reattached the fin on the inside of the dryer drum, the one that keeps the towels and sheets from balling up and not drying. Done. Done. Done.

And there I was, around 6:00 p.m., with the decks completely cleared. I had met all my obligations. I could do what I wanted. My mind was at ease and the feeling started to wash over me, the sensation of extreme self-satisfaction I get at the end of a productive, successful day. I call it the ‘cool of the evening.’ I’d done everything I was supposed to do, well. I’d done everything I could do. My mind was at ease, my conscience was clear. I was almost blissful. I thought, “Gee, this will give me plenty of time to work on a really good post for my blog.”

And then I couldn’t think of anything to write about.

*****

West End Subversive, Or Something Like It

When You're Hot, You're Hot, You Really Shoot Your Shot

I was playing basketball out on the street yesterday afternoon in front of my neighbor’s house, with a bunch of high school kids, mostly. I spent most of the playtime feeling embarrassed, inadequate, and humiliated. I am still as game as I ever was, but what the hell happened to my physical coordination? I was missing easy shots. My mind could still see me making a quick feint and inside move to the basket for an uncontested lay up, but my body would not or could not follow the mental instructions. This depressed me greatly. Although I have never been a great athlete, I have always had a physical ease and grace, an ability to hit or throw or shoot a ball quite competently, without having to think about it. When I start doubting my athletic skills, that is something very fundamental. Yesterday, contemplating my athletic demise, I found myself standing at the door marked ‘Profound Despair’, ready to knock and enter. . . I shook myself from my reverie and suddenly realized I was in possession of the ball and free along the baseline, and I put up the prettiest arcing 18-foot jump shot you’ll ever see. Swoosh! All net, and even the schoolboys were impressed momentarily. My day grew suddenly brighter.

*****

Well it's 3 a.m., I'm out here riding again
Through the wicked, winding streets of my world

-- (Poe, "Hey Pretty")

I came across a really good deal on a very large and pricey sports utility vehicle the other day. I am not in the market, but a friend of mine has this thing that is sort of a Jeep and sort of a luxury SUV, vaguely based on a military transport of recent vintage. We call it his 'urban assault vehicle.' I have always been a SUV/pickup truck person myself; but I have been fascinated in recent years by the phenomenon of the well-heeled doyennes of Belle Chase and Oak Trace and Thomas Road (see West End Wandas) cruising around town running errands in these huge-ass family transport vehicles. These petite, made-up, oh-so-stylish thirty- and forty-something babes strapped into Suburbans and Yukons and Sequoias and Excursions, going to the Wellness Center and then to Bando’s for a light lunch and then afternoon tennis before picking up the kids fom school. The drive-thru at All Saints in the afternoon looks like a combination of the Detroit SUV Show and a military parade. A military parade because, even better than tiny South Beach Diet-ized women piloting these huge land barges down Delaware Street and Phelan Boulevard, are the ones commanding Land Rovers and Hummers through the wilds of Montclaire and Bayou Bend. Rich women steering $50,000.00 off-road vehicles which will never leave the pavement of the West End. . . Anyway, this friend of mine, motivated by a recent re-escalation of gas prices and a desire in these economic hard times to not appear rich and trendy, is selling his Hummer. Since it is hard to sell or even give away most large SUV-type vehicles nowadays, he has it priced quite reasonably. I could probably afford it; I have always secretly desired a Hummer, even though today's version is nothing more than a fancy SUV, and a far cry from the first domestic models available, which were basically right off the Desert Storm battlefield, albeit with an interior makeover and a nice paint job. It is tempting, but I think I am going to pass. It says something about where I live that driving a perfectly good extended cab F-150, which is at the high end of what I can reasonably afford, makes me feel a bit like some kind of proletarian rebel in my neighborhood. It is just one little exercise in fiscal restraint and not following the crowd by me, in a world going economically insane and obsessed with pursuing the latest trends; a world that I sometimes feel is trying to plow me under. You strike your tiny blows for liberty and freedom where you can.

*****

Shadows And Light

Same As It Ever Was

The official groundhog up in Pennsylvania saw his shadow this morning, a sure indicator of six more weeks of winter. This is bad news if you live somewhere in Kentucky, buried under an epic ice storm at the moment, with another Arctic cold front or three on the way. Down here on the coastal plain, six more weeks of winter isn’t necessarily bad news at all. Winter time is when we get some of our best weather of the year. We are in a drought condition presently, but aside from that there have been several glorious days recently – clear blue skies, low humidity, mild temperatures. We’ll take six more weeks of that. Hell, we’ll take six more months of that.

By the way, there are differences of opinion as to the wisdom of making weather predictions based on the whims of sleepy, medium-sized burrowing rodent. Given the current state of the science of weather prediction, it seems to me to be as good a method as any other.

Several years back a movie was made called Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray (Murray was previously in a much better movie featuring groundhogs, and golfers; but that is veering off of the subject.) The basic premise of Groundhog Day was that a local weatherman made a prediction of a short winter based on the doings of the famous Punxsutawney groundhog, which ended up being entirely erroneous. Subsequently snowed in by an unexpected blizzard, the protagonist (Murray) is forced to relive the same day, over and over again.

At the time, some of us may have wondered, where is the story? Platitudinous pronouncements that “every day is a new day” aside, a more common experience seems to be that most days are actually pretty much the same, with slight variations. Or, as the newscaster on the old Hee Haw show used to say, “The news today is the same as yesterday. It just happened to different people.”

A recent skirmish at work reminded me of that adage, which in turn reminded me of something else, from way back; a story which should have given me an early idea of what a lot of my days later on were going to be like.

Did you ever put a lot of faith in someone who seemed like they were worthy of it, and for the most part, after you decided to trust them, they pretty much came through for you? And you thought, man, what a good deal. This person is all right. Then a situation arose, one of those pivotal moments in life when all the pressure is on, and this person who had to this point been so strong and true, well. . . they wavered on you? Or maybe caved in completely, leaving you entirely, unexpectedly on your own? Ever have that happen to you?

Way back, I was matriculating in elementary school, third grade year, and me and my running buddy at the time, dude named Rollo, we pretty much had it made. Rollo and I, we were handsome, and athletic, and funny and suave (relatively speaking), and while we had rivals for popularity, I think it is fair to say we held most of the third grade in our sway, and probably most of the little underclassmen under that, too. We were the kings of 1st period recess – we chose the teams for dodge ball and/or kickball, kids came to us for advice, and some of the little girls would even run up and surreptitiously pull up their skirt and give us a glimpse of their slip and/or panties from time to time. Junior exhibitionists. Or, they’d try to plant a kiss on us, and give us “cooties.”

Life was good. But, this was a K-5 school, so Rollo and I had 4th and especially 5th graders ahead of us, and some of them liked to knock us down a little, when we got too cocky. For the most part this rapprochement was basically good-natured, and we rolled with it. But there was this one 5th grader, a big dorky kid named Larry, and he zeroed in on Rollie and I out of meanness, I think; and, I always suspected, there was some jealousy in there, too. He was sort of like the Ben Affleck character in the movie Dazed And Confused, the upper classman who takes his role of hazing the “fish” a leeetle too seriously. This Larry dude went out of his way to push us in the hallway, or call us stupid names in the lunch room. I think either one of us, Rollo or I, could have kicked his ass, collectively we could’ve for sure; but, just like in geopolitics, one has to think ahead about the ramifications from such acts. Okay, we whoop this guy’s ass, then who amongst his friends was going to come after us in retaliation? We didn’t really know for sure, and this uncertainty kept my buddy and I from striking back. We pretty much just took this guy Larry’s crap, and restrained ourselves from responding in kind.

Then another 5th grader, a guy named Steve, took a liking to us, at least where Larry was concerned. Steve was a big guy, blond, pretty well-liked. Not very smart, but an awesome dodge ball and kickball player (I saw him kick a slow baby bouncer clear to the portable buildings by the library once.) Steve told Larry if he ever jacked around with us again, he’d have to answer to him (Steve.) I guess Larry believed him, because he left us alone after that.

So, life went on in a pleasant fashion. One day, Rollie and I and two or three other classmates decided to have a pissing contest. Literally. We were in the boy’s bathroom, all ceramic block and tile, and there was this open area in there about 15 feet wide, with four or five full-length urinals on one wall and, directly opposite, a wall of windows to the outside with about a four foot high, 20-inch ledge underneath. We scrambled up onto this ledge and stood facing the urinals, our things out, in our hands, ready. The goal was to piss all the way across the room, fifteen feet, into the urinals on the opposite wall.

I don’t recall if anyone actually made it. Fifteen feet is a good ways, even if one has just built up a lot of back pressure sitting through boring old Ms. Montgomery’s Social Studies class. What I do recall is just after we had let it rip, and were more-or-less past the point of no return, Larry and three or four of his friends walked around the corner in that bathroom and directly into the line of fire. We ended up whizzing all over them. Not just in one spot, either. Have you ever started laughing uncontrollably in the middle of a big piss? Messes up the aim, pretty much. Anyway, once those guys recovered they were pretty, well, pissed off. As soon as I could get my joint back in my dungarees, I was out the window and running to the playground, Rollo and a couple of others right behind me, with the pissed upon in close pursuit.

I spotted Steve across the way, on the blacktop, engaged in a tetherball contest of some sort; so I tore out for him. I figured if we could make it into his general vicinity, Larry and his pals, now hot after us, would back off. By the time we got out to Steve, the angry 5th graders were right behind us. I yelled out, “Hey, Steve” just as Larry threw his forearm around my neck from behind and dragged me down, and he and another kid started kicking my ass. I had time to see two other guys jump Rollo and start doing him the same. I got a few good shots in on Larry – I remember elbowing him hard in the nuts one time – but he outweighed me by twenty pounds at least, as did the other kid, and in a wrestling match I was doomed. Rollo didn’t fare any better – the whole left front of his white button-down shirt was gone, and he had huge holes in the knees of his jeans. But, we both wondered, where the hell was Steve? Our protector?

Turns out, when Steve saw how many guys were coming after us, and how mad they were, he just sort of eased on out of there, over to the other side of the blacktop, where there was a game of H-O-R-S-E going on. Fucker.

*****