Fall Behind

I woke up too early this morning and began thinking about the time change.  I hadn't adjusted the clocks before I went to bed, so I began to wonder what time it was now.  Fall back.  That means four is now three?  Was it three o'clock?  It will get dark earlier.  I knew this to be true.  It will get light earlier, too, then.  I deduced this.  That would be good for me, right?  How, then, could it be three-thirty?  That would not be good for me.

Thinking in the dark can be horrible.  It is what drives me out of bed.  I had awoken thinking about the past, about things left undone, and no matter what, I could not get them off my mind.  I decided to get up and look at the computer.  The time automatically changes there and on the cell phone.  I'd straighten things out.

But when I looked at the computer, it said the same thing as the clock in the bedroom--4:30.  Jesus.  So I Googled "time change 2010."  It got odd fast.  Everything I read said the clocks get changed at 7:00 on Sunday.  When did that begin?  It always used to change while we slept.  What happens to television schedules tonight?  Who thought this up?  How did I miss it?  It seems the government ought to be responsible for communicating this stuff other than by word of mouth.

I thought I might go back to bed, but I found myself putting on the coffee instead.  I began reading the news, first CNN, then the New York Times.  Now the sun is coming up and I think I can sleep.  Coffee sleep, for now I've finished the pot.  You will be up in a few hours, and I will be to.

Fall forward.  Skip ahead.  Spring back.  Fall behind.

Home Alone

I don't go out much any more.  It is dangerous.  I get into situations.  It is me, I know.  If I could stand dinners at the Olive Garden and trips to theme parks. . . but I can't.  But last night, someone from work was having a Halloween party.  I've been before.  It is dangerous.  Not them.  Me.  Before the evening is done, I will get too relaxed and begin to say and do things because I will think, "Wheee, it's a party and people are dressed up like morons and they are drunk.  Why should I be careful?"  And then I will let my guard down and say something that will turn everyone silent.

Still, I had planned to go.  I tell myself that I won't do that, that I will smile and nod and let others be clever in that not-so-dangerous way, perhaps repeating lines from the Dos Equis commercials with running commentary, and I think I can do it, I can just smile and sip beer and not try to ratchet things up a notch.

But the old Volvo's brakes are gone, so I left work early in the afternoon to get them fixed.  I had to choose between the garage I always take my car to that specializes in Volvos or to Firestone store that is close to my house. Brakes, I thought.  Firestone can surely handle that.  And so I rolled in about two-thirty to a pretty empty store.

"Hey," I said to the fellow behind the service desk, "can you change my brakes today?"

"Sure," he said, "we have plenty of time."

"But you will have all the parts?"

"It's early.  No problem."

And so I left the car and walked the mile or so back to my house thinking that I would drive to the party in a safer car.  Drinking and driving without brakes can be bad on a Friday night.  It felt good to be a responsible person, the sort who sees to things that need taking care of.

Later in the afternoon, I got the call from the fellow at Firestone.

"We've got the brakes on, and new rotors.  But we need some hardware that didn't come in the package and we won't be able to get it tonight, so we'll fix it first thing in the morning."

"No, no, that is my only car," I lied, though the lie was harmless since I can't drive the Jeep at night since the lights do not work just now.  "Just use the parts from the old brakes."

"We can't.  The car is old and it broke when the mechanic was trying to take it off.  Let me talk to him and I'll call you back.  We'll see what we can do."

And he did call back.

"O.K."  I think we can get it going, but you'll have to bring it back in the next few days so we can replace the part.  It should be ready in about half an hour or forty-five minutes."

I felt, though, that I was making a mistake.  The part was broken.  They couldn't get another.  What the hell were they going to do?  I pictured them cutting a clothes hanger and bending it into shape or something worse.

But they didn't call.  And it would be dark soon.  I decided that I would begin walking back to Firestone.   I had my cell phone.  They'd call, I was certain, while I was on my way.

They didn't, though.  And when I reached the corner of the big road where they sit, I could see my white Volvo on the rack without wheels.  There was hope, though, I thought as I watched a fellow in a gray uniform actually working on it.  But he wasn't working on the wheels.  He was under the hood.  This wasn't right, I thought.  This could not be good.

And surely, it wasn't.  I watched for awhile, and then there were two fellows at the car.  I walked into the greeting area filled with tire displays and watched through the glass wall as they talked and pointed and hunched their shoulders and shook their heads.  Finally, one of them came in.

"We can't get the brake pedal to return.  We've pumped fluid through the system and pumped the brake, but the pedal stays down.  We think it is the master cylinder."

Resignation.  "O.K." I said.  I guess I'll wait until tomorrow.

Their was a grocery store down the block, so I walked over to buy something to make for dinner.  I would walk home in the dark with my plastic bag of food.  I would make a salad with lots of garlic and then heat some Amy's organic macaroni and cheese and dump in a can of Albacore tuna.  I would drink a big Saporro beer and read for awhile before I watched something on television.  I would not go to the party.

Maybe it is better, I told myself.  Maybe this is Providence.  I am meant to stay home alone where I will not get into any trouble.  No danger sitting home by yourself on the Friday before Halloween.

*     *     *     *     *

Update:  $600.

Unexpected

A friend at work said to me, "Having a conversation with you is like participating in a social experiment!"

I thought about it and know what she means.  I don't say what I'm supposed to say.  Rather, I'll say something unexpected or even shocking.  It is fun.  I watch people go pop-eyed for a second, then they smile.  It breaks the tedium of our existence for a minute.  In a way, they reinforce the behavior.  

It works with kids, of course.  "What are you looking at?" I'll snap to some staring kid, then count--one, two--and smile.  They always get it.  They smile, too.  

It works well in meetings when people of authority begin to pontificate painfully.  

"Wait!  I think your shoe phone's ringing."  

The others smile and chuckle with relief.  

But it can go wrong.  Terribly.  I was at Whole Foods the other night.  I had one of those handcarts and sat it on the conveyor belt and began to unpack it.  But the cashier kept inching it forward making it difficult.  

"Quit it!" I said.  

But I had not sized up my audience well.  She had an ideological haircut and a pair of fuck you glasses and looked at me as if she had just finished her Women's Studies course for credit at the nearby Junior College.  

"What did you say?" she hissed at me.

"Quit it," I said again.  

"Don't tell me what to do." She spoke to me as if I were principal of the Patriarch's Academy.  

And she was just warming up.  I wanted to pay and get out of the store, but she was in control of the conveyor belt, and she had quit ringing up my groceries.  I knew there was nothing I could say that would score points with the Whole Foods crowd.  All that was left for me to do was to scrunch up my mouth into a contrite ball and stare at the organic asparagus that sat dead still before me.  

I guess my friend should have seen me then.  I think she might have enjoyed herself.  

The Sage and the Tyro

Overheard at the YMCA.  Two fellows talking by the incline bench.  One, a middle-aged businessman, the other, a year or two out of college.

"It's a great company.  You're going to love working there."

"Yea, yea, I'm really excited.  I think there is a lot of opportunity for growth with them."

"Yes, they are great.  Just keep your mouth shut, do what they ask, and don't make trouble.  You'll love it there."

I looked over to see if they were kidding.  It was obvious they weren't.  The Sage and the Tryo.  America's Finest.

Happy Birthday

I'm so distracted and concerned about me, I've forgotten my friend's birthday.  In truth, I don't remember birthdays and dread the coming of my own.  Still, I feel badly about it.  Everyone needs a "Happy Birthday" once a year.  So friend, Happy Birthday.  I remember the time we celebrated with about two hundred of your friends in a small bar in the East Village.  Time flows differently for me now than it used to, and I can't remember how old you were then.  But it was a night.  Really a night.

And I wrote you an email the next week and predicted all that would happen.  The women, then of a certain age, would be thinking babies and suburbs and the old gang would spread to the four winds gathering every once in a while to reminisce about the old, crazy days when you were all young and owned Manhattan.  It was a good email.  I wish I knew where it was.  I'd post it here now.  But it doesn't take a sage to predict those things, just someone who has already gone through all that.

Do you want me to tell you about the next ten years?  No.  I won't.  As Glinda told Dorothy, you'll have to learn that for yourself.  If I told you, you wouldn't dare go through with it.

*     *     *     *     *

"Do you believe in God?"

"God is everything and everything is god."

"Yea, you say that.  What do you think hell is?"

"Losing all of this."

"Well, what do you think heaven is?"

"Losing all of this."

"Is that a paradox?"

"Beats me."

Rant

In the associational limbo of driving, one thing leading to the next, way to way, I ask many dumb rhetorical questions, hands waving, face screwed up, shoulders hunching up and down.

"What the fuck is wrong with people?"

"Where in the fuck do these people come from?"

"Are you an idiot?  What are you doing?'

This more and more often now offered to the visage of someone on a cell phone who has no idea that I'm asking them these questions.  What I don't think about, though, are the other drivers around me, those behind and beside me, watching the idiot show that I am.  Do I think that people will quit it, that if I drive fast and hard enough, I will get ahead of ALL of them, that then it will just be smooth sailing?

I guess so.

I have a friend who likes it when I ask those rhetorical questions face to face.

"You're an asshole, did you know that?"

It is an either/or fallacy, but still. . . yes you do or no you don't?

I woke up today worrying about changing the clocks again this week.  Why do they have to screw around with the time?  Who decides this?  Why can't they leave it alone?  More rhetorical questions.  But I've been shutting down when it gets dark lately.  I'll be wanting to go to bed at nine o'clock in the evening.  And then, given that I don't sleep so well anymore, I'll be awake at four.  I can't help it.  My body isn't going to change because they change the time.  It is tyranny.  What's the point?

More and more, I have the posture of the schlemiel, shoulders shrugged, palms up, head slightly tilted.  I can feel it even when I'm not doing it.

I'm just sayin'.

Schadenfreude

"I see you're writing again."

"What do you mean?  I write every day."

"Yea, but for awhile it has all been. . . you know. . . just sort of like adjutant to the photography or something."

". . . "

"C'mon man, you know what I mean."

"Did you say "adjutant?"

"Sally says she doesn't care for your photo series."

"What do you expect."

"What do you mean?"

"Sally doesn't know what she's doing."

"She's been selling work like crazy.  She just got into some big gallery in Connecticut, in Rye.  She can't make enough work to keep them stocked."

"O.K.  She doesn't know what I'm doing.  And Rye is in New York."

"It was supposed to be a compliment."

"Really?  I see.  I don't do so well with compliments."

"Did a cockroach really crawl into your ear?"

"Would I make that up?"

"Yes.  You make everything up.  Did you see what Q wrote about you on his blog?"

"No."

"His readers think you're nutty."

"And they think he's normal, right?"

"I guess."

"Well. . . sometimes you can't catch a break."

"You going to keep taking pictures of naked girls?"

"Sure."

"Does your mother know about your studio yet?"

"Do you want a drink?"

"O.K."

"Good.  See you later then."

"You don't have to be a dick."

It's what I signed up for, I guess, when I started putting things in public.  It was better before.  All the work was good then.  Back then, I really had some talent.

Vigilance

Yesterday, I got to work.  Time to clear the goblins out of my head, and what better way to do that than by setting your house in order?  A trip to the store nabbed me bug spray for the inside of the house, bug spray for the lawn, weed killer, fertilizer for southern yards, and some crazy kind of self-adhesive rubber material for mending the hose where the yardman whacked it with the trimmer.  And while I was at it, I picked up some beauty supplies as well.  A man (especially when he begins falling asleep in public places) can never look too good.  

Home again, it was time to gather my resources--spreaders and sprayers, and thick leather gloves.  Where was all that stuff?  I didn't know.  It had been a long time since I had done any work around the house.  No matter.  I was a changed man now.  I would do something around the homestead every day.  It was all a matter of vigilance and diligence.  That would become my mantra.  Ommmm.  

But I'd forgotten that I wasn't very handy and that I am prone to dexterous frustration.  The healing rubber tape was wound on a core with clear plastic lining each side.  This had to be removed as the tape was unwound.  The instructions told me to stretch the rubber to at least half its length again as I wrapped it around the hose, overlapping each tape width by half.  Twice.  But it was not easy, and soon I had the rubber tape twisted so that each strand was doubling on itself.  And the manufacturers were right.  It did self-adhere quickly.  And so the nice wrap that I began became a knotted, awful mess.  Still, I rolling the twisted, knotted rubber 'round and 'round.  More was surely better, I guessed, and it would make up for my particular lack of technique.  

Of course, it didn't.  

Rather, it directed the spray toward me.  It wasn't as bad as it had been before I wrapped it, but it was a steady, soaking spray nonetheless.  Shit.  Why didn't I just buy a new hose?  Maybe I would have been better off using black electrical tape.  

No matter, though.  I was committed.  First I cleaned out the spreader that was gooked up with a thick, black mass and rolled around the yard back and forth, to and fro.  And next I sprayed, first the weed killer, then the bug killer.  I hated doing it and try not to.  I remember looking at the guys who sprayed lawns and apartments when I was younger, paying special attention to their scrawniness and twitchiness and to their very bloodshot eyes.  This stuff is bad, and I hate to be around it, but I'd be damned if I was going to wake up with a bug in my ear at midnight again.  

When I finished spraying, a bird flying over the yard simply ceased to flap its wings and dramatically dropped straight out of the sky.  Squirrels would be giving birth to two headed babies soon, I thought.  My lips were already numb.  I could feel my blood vessels silently rupturing.  And I still had the inside of the house to spray.  I gave a quick, involuntary twitch.  I was remembering why I didn't like to do this stuff.  

There had been that to do, I thought in my best Bad Hemingway, then it was done.  And so I showered and used the new beauty products and prepared myself for lunch.  Already, the afternoon was slipping away.  I wanted to get out into it in my newly re-tagged Jeep.  But the thing was filthy, filled with leaves and acorns and the detritus from my lawn guy.  A couple small branches clung to the windshield wipers. Tomorrow, I thought.  I would clean it up tomorrow.  

And then the day gave way as it can sometimes, from thought to feeling, from doing to being, the big blue sky and the brilliant sun blending with other blue skies and brilliant suns, lunch alone at a sidewalk table becoming other lunches when you were not alone, the wit and beauty of those lunches and those days.  And lunch over, with nowhere to go, driving here and there passing all the festivals that fill the town just now, driving by the giant food festival spilled out over the big lawn of the art museum, passing a tent bigger than a Barnum and Bailey tens set up in Central Park for Fashion Week (I know, I know), past the Autumn Festival at the Catholic Church with its rides and games, the lights against the purple sky shining through from last year's memory when your friend's son won the goldfish he still has, driving with the wind on your face through memory, passing seeming miles of cars lining the streets, crowds of people carrying lawn chairs and blankets and big baskets of food and wine into the huge public gardens to listen to jazz under the stars, happy, smiling people.  Everything, everywhere.  

Then, with the setting sun. . . you are home.  

Last night, the darkness fell in the present tense.  In first person.  I chopped the garlic and drank some wine while the thump-thump-thump of life beat around me.  On the couch lay a newly released collection of Bukowski poems.  I would eat alone, and tonight, I would pay too much to watch a Pay-Per-View fight on T.V. because I hadn't anything else to do.  But the house was clean, I chuckled, and now the light was very pleasant, and later there would be the fight and, perhaps, a little whiskey.  Not much.  Perhaps one.  Four walls, Bukowski said.   All a man needs is four walls.  Yes, isn't it pretty to think so.  

Under (Perhaps) Some Full Moon

I've had a difficult time finding full moon information on the internet.  Much of it is conflicting.  Last night/tonight is the full moon depending upon where you look.  It is listed as October 23 because it was full after midnight, so was last night's or tonight's moon full?  Again, different sources, different answers.  But let's say it was last night.  It rose big and beautiful here in a perfect sky.  But what was it called?  The Farmer's Almanac calls it the Harvest Moon, but that can't be right.  It is a Hunter's Moon, I think.  But I am no astrologer, just a romantic looking for something always beyond the next rise.

So after a long and hard week of personal and professional turmoil, I was happy for Friday.  I got up feeling as if I needed to get much done as there is much that needs doing.  I was to be just the man for it.  First thing, I went to the bank and did some business.  I don't have a lot of business to do, so I don't go often and what I do have piles up.  It seems such a waste of time, really, going to the bank, although they are always friendly.  Perhaps in a few years it will be part of my regular routine, going to the bank, sitting in the lobby for awhile drinking the free coffee.  But today, that was done.  I was on a roll.

Next up was the DMV.  Remember--I had been pulled over a few weeks back for "making driving look too fun" in my Jeep.  And that is when I found out that the decal had been taken off my tag making it invalid.  So, with great resolve, I sat in one of the hard, plastic chairs waiting for my number to be called.

"I was pulled over a while back for not having a decal on my tag," I told the stone faced woman when my turn came, "and the police officer told me I would have to come here to get a new one."

"Do you have a case number?"

"A what?  I don't know?  Would the policeman have done that?"

"He would have given you a case number?"

"Maybe he did.  I don't know.  Can you check and see?"

"Sir," she said filling me with dread. "I don't have any way of looking that up.  You can pay forty-five dollars to get a new one or you can report the decal stolen and get a case number and we will replace it for free."

I stood for awhile uncertain, looking at her like Larry David.

"You want to call them?"

"Can I do that?  Can I just call them?"

"Yes sir."

"O.K.  I'll call them."

And that is what I did as soon as I got to work, and I got a woman on the phone who said that she could give me a case number.

"They said at the DMV you could do it over the phone."

"No, sir.  Some agencies will, but we don't do that."

"Oh.  Which agencies will?  Can I just call one of them?"

"No, sir.  You live in this city and will have to file with us.  Are you at home now?"

I thought this an odd question.

"No."

"Where are you?"

Really odd.

"I'm at work."

"Where's that?"

Jesus, I was getting nervous.  I was thinking of the old Soviet Union.  This is why I hate the police.  I told her the name of the city.

"When you get home, call us and we will send an officer out to your house," she said.

I didn't want an officer at my house.  I was beginning to think of just paying the forty-four dollars, but now they had my home address and home phone and work phone and cell phone numbers, and I was beginning to feel trapped.  It just isn't a wise idea to get voluntarily involved with the police.  Nothing good will happen.

"Can I just come there?  I'll come there on my way home from work," I said.

It was a gorgeous day and everyone at work, it seemed, was gone.  I wanted to go, too, out into the day.  I would get "things" done as I had resolved early that morning.  I called the mulch company.  I would have mulch delivered and mulch my three driveways.  They were in bad repair.  I would weed my yard and fix my sprinklers.  The yard was already dead and dying.  But just as I was talking to the people about delivering the mulch, someone came into my office.

"I'll have to call you back," I said and hung up.  Way led to way, of course.  I never called back.

Later than I hoped, I left work and headed for the Police Department.  I hadn't been there before, not to this new building.  I live in a small town surrounded by a city, a boutique, really, that is nothing at all like what surrounds it, and this little hamlet had built a new shrine, a combination police department/fire department/ city hall.  It was big and ostentatious and a real waste of money.  I walked into a big hall with fifty foot ceilings and walls of glass.  No one was around.  I read a sign and followed the arrows into a small room where a woman stood behind a bullet proof glass.  She pushed a button and her mechanical voice filled the space.

"Can I help you?" she said without enthusiasm.  I explained.  "O.K.  Go back to the lobby.  You will see a phone on the right.  One of the top buttons says 'dispatch.'  Push that and someone will help you.

Forty minutes later, a large, young, weary-looking police officer entered.

"Are you here to report a crime?" he asked sternly.

After half an hour, and I had my case number.  And I felt lucky not to have been arrested.  In the end, though, the policeman warmed up and gave me a Victim's Rights trifold and told me that if I felt that I had been abused or threatened in any way to call the number on the back and I could get support.

"Perfect," I said.

A trip back to the DMV, etc.

It was later than I'd hoped, but what can you do?  Forty-four dollars would have been a bargain.  I was drained, but I still thought I should go to the gym.  My bag was in the car.

And somehow, I managed my workout though I'd only eaten a bowl of soup all day.  I got home as the sun was setting hungry and wondering if that was the full moon tonight.  I was not clear.

I decided to go for sushi, the only place, really, that it is any fun to eat alone.  I sat on the veranda and drank sake and waited for my food.  It is fun to drink on an empty stomach, I thought, remembering that I had drunk no water at all that day.  But the sake was good, and then the tuna kobache.  I sat calmly watching the crowd that passed thinking I just had time to get tickets to see the new Woody Allen movie, "A Tall Dark Stranger."  It would be a good night.

Now, this is where it gets strange.  And I have buried this here at the bottom of the essay knowing that few if any of you would read this much.  Nobody reads a blog entry this long.  It is not why you go to a blog.  But here it is.

I had thought ahead and brought a full flask of scotch with me.  As I've said, I like to have whiskey after I eat, and carrying a flask seems wonderfully romantic, so thin and form fitting with its slightly curving back.  This would be good.

When I entered the theater, there was only one couple there, and since they were in the perfect row, the perfect distance from the screen, I sat a few seats down from them.  During the previews, three others entered the theater.  And that was it.  Six of us in the dark.

And so I began to drink.  And the movie was slow.  It was awful.  I checked the time an hour into it wondering if anything would ever begin to happen. And already, the whiskey was gone.

And now the horrible part of the story.  And I am not making this up.  I was having a difficult time staying awake.  I should have left, I guess, the first time I drifted off, but of course. . . . And the next thing, I am awakened by a voice.  It was a policeman.  The lights were on and the theater was empty.

"Sir, are you O.K."

How do you answer that one?  There I was, a pathetic looking man, sprawled across the seat, arms and legs akimbo, slack jawed, just as I had been at home the night before, in an empty theater looking up at a policeman.

"Holy smokes," I said and began mumbling about the movie. . . boring. . . .

"One of the patrons tried to wake you up," he said.  "I'm just glad you were only asleep and not something else."

I wasn't so sure.  I drove home in a haze.

What has happened to me, I wonder.  Everything has gone wrong, and suddenly I am living as if in a dream.  No dream, really, but something else, less appealing, but just as vague and far away.  Somehow, I'm not connected to my life any longer.  Recent things come back to me as from some distant past, barely remembered, compressed, like something I've read but not completely, phrases and snatches of a complex chapter.  It is all just something that is happening to me that I set into motion long ago and over which I now have no control.

Don't write to me with advice, nor concern, nor anything else.  Just read this and be mildly entertained, for it is of no particular consequence.  All it requires, as do most things, is a sense of humor.  And if I'm lucky, it will make a good story.

Me and Kafka

"You're just a big fucking creep, you know that?"

"Sure," I said.  "Sure I do."

"Just a big asshole."

What are you going to do, argue?  I guess you could, but what's the point.

But I'm O.K. sitting at home alone.  I like it.  There are movies and DVDs and TCM, television shows, books and magazines.  That's a lot.  Who has time for all of that?

But even alone, things go awry.  The other night started out innocently enough.  After the gym, I opened a good sorghum beer and began making a salad with lots of garlic.  After I had eaten that, I began to cook and opened a bottle of wine.  I like wine when I'm cooking.  The trouble is, I usually am not cooking alone, so there is the talking to slow you down.  It wasn't a complicated meal, just something for a person alone.  Soon enough, I was eating, and soon enough, the meal was over.  I like a whiskey after dinner.  It seems to settle things.  And so I cleaned up the kitchen and settled down on the couch to watch television.  I was switching back and forth between the baseball playoffs in San Francisco between the Giants and the Cardinals, and some UFC fights I hadn't yet seen.  But before long, though, before the end of anything, I was out.  This happens a lot at night when I'm alone and watching television.  It is awful to think of someone walking in or peering through the window to see me sprawled, head back, arms and legs akimbo, slack-jawed, a glass of scotch held loosely in my hand.  Usually I'd be wakened when the whiskey glass tipped and spilled its contents onto my shirted belly.  But not this night.  I must have finished the whiskey in the glass.

When I did wake up, I glanced at the clock.  It was after midnight.  And something was bothering me.  I shook my head and stuck a finger into my left ear.  Something was in there, something big.  Calmly, I pulled it out but right away got the hebejebes bad.  It was a big palmetto cockroach.  Holy shit, holy shit.  I held it by its legs and thumped it with the big finger on my other hand.  It exploded into pieces.

What can you do?  Still woozy, I accomplished my evening ablutions, took my vitamins and a glass of water, brushed my teeth and fell into bed.  In the morning, I remembered nothing.

I don't know why I'm telling you this.  Any of it.  I tried to tell some colleagues at work and the horror on their faces should have been warning enough.  I have imagined what they said to one another when they walked away.  It's a horrible story.  Not even amusing.  I feel like one of Kafka's characters.  It is awful, really.  Terrible.

Days later, I'm still thinking about it, though, my fingers probing into my ear canal again and again.  I'm not even sure it really happened.  How could such a thing?  I mean Jesus Christ, my house is clean.  I don't know.  I don't know.  Maybe friend was right after all.

I wish I had written this. . .

In the third person, of course.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/fashion/24Mirror.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB

Value (Free)

Some days I think that I should just shoot fabrics.  They have an inherent beauty.  I like them.  And they are relatively value-free.  Of course we could create a theory or borrow some other that would pertain to the photographing of fabric.  There is the labor that went into its production, the environmental damage that the planet sustained, the value we place upon it.  Everything must enter a discourse of values.

Here is a portrait of a model arriving at my studio.  She has just walked in the door and I've asked her to stand before the fabric that I've pinned to the wall lit from the side by the studio's only window.  This is how she looked coming from the street, before we began to make our own artifice that was different from the artifice she had made for some other purpose.  I should have made more photos like this, I think, a few of every model, for again, as a group, they would begin to enter some larger discourse and take on another meaning imbued with other values.  Who are these women?  Why do they come?  What sociological and psychological forces, etc.

I make photos while they prepare themselves.  They look different then. Some of them like these photos most, for they are at that moment somewhere between who they were and who they are about to become.  I take a few photos to show them that I can make the kind of images they are used to seeing in magazines and advertisements.  I should have posted this photo in a glitzy style, perhaps without the darkness that is not glamorous.  But in a different form, this is truly a pretty photo.  The woman in it is a "real life model."  I mean to say that people pay her for her work in advertising and illustration.

My point?  I forget.  I don't often have one these days.  I was thinking about my photographs and the value I place on them versus what other people see. Perhaps I feel the frustration of letting some work go so that it is not mine any longer but the world's where it will mean whatever people will have it mean.  I am talented enough to make whatever kind of images I want to make, I think.  But I can't make them mean what I want them to.  All that is beyond authorial intent.

"Mr. Kurtz--He Dead."

I am in a genuinely dark and desperate place, though it is not the worst place yet.  That will come.  In spite of my mother's telling me that my horoscope is an eight today. . . .

The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

   The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

   The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.

(Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad) 

We are a smart nation, among the brightest in the world.  So what do you expect?  Things to run smoothly?  As one comedian put it:

"A mind is a terrible thing."  


Or as former Vice President and one-time republican candidate for President of the United States Dan Quayle said it:


"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."


George Bush Jr. really admired Dan Quayle with whom he surely spent time in his father's White House.  


But reading arguments from academicians can be just as amusing.  This is from an article in today's N.Y. Times:


“If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea concluding ‘everyone’s different,’ but sometimes people help each other out,” she wrote in an e-mail, “there would be no field of anthropology. . . ."  (full article)

Awaken

We are awakened by cataclysm.  Social cataclysm, social awakening.  Personal cataclysm. . . .

And awakened without will, reluctantly.  It is awful and terribly uncomfortable.  We would prefer to sleep.  But there we are, face to face with the thing itself.  What we are.  What we've become.

I woke in the dark long before dawn.  I stayed in bed.  It was simply too early to get up.  The cold had come in the night.  And now the cold morning begins.  The squirrels feel it.  They are very active today, frisky.  A female cardinal flew to my window and hovered for a long while peering in.  Long enough to startle, its wings flapping ferociously, maintaining its balance like a giant hummingbird but without ease or grace, more than long enough to unnerve.

I have not been living unconsciously.  I have been conscious.  But that has prevented nothing.  I am conscious now, too, in a different way.  It is like shifting your perspective by merely stepping to the side a bit and seeing something you could not see before.

We choose by necessity.  There are limits.  Still, we unavoidably must choose.  Why me?  Why not me?  It all comes down to that.

Thinking Fine

Down, wanton, down!  Have you know shame.
That at the whisper of Love's name,
Or Beauty's, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?

(from "Down, Wanton, Down" by Robert Graves)

Yes, yes, we must "think fine and profess the arts."

(John Singer Sargeant)

Aluminum Eaters

Some bad weirdness in the air.  I'm stumbling around in another dimension, or at least I was yesterday.  I'd misplaced some things I badly needed about a week and a half ago, things I owed other people and some expensive things (for me) as well.  I looked everywhere high and low, in car trunks and three offices and all throughout my house.  Somebody had stolen them.  I was certain.

Two days ago, I picked up a backpack I never use.  It was heavy.  When I opened it, there were the things I'd been searching for.  I worried.

Yesterday morning, I got up at my usual hideously early time and went through my usual morning ablutions.  Then I went to the kitchen and took apart the complex machine that was given to me some time ago, cleaning the grinder and filter holder, replacing them and putting in a new filter.  The next step is always to go to the freezer to take out the coffee beans and to dump them in the grinder, to hit the switch and listen to the "ggrrrrr" while I go to the cabinet to get my powdered vitamins which go into a glass of water.  Etc.  Only I didn't do that.  Hundreds of years of doing the same thing, the same motions over and over and over, and this morning, I grabbed the vitamins first, tore open the package, and poured them into the coffee filter!!!  I wanted to find it funny like some 1930's movie with a distracted Cary Grant.  I wanted to, but I worried.

As always, before going to the daily torture, I worked on editing photos and "writing" my. . . whatever this is. . . before packing up to go.  I was carrying much yesterday and had several bags to haul to the car.  The last thing I did at my computer was take out two thumb drives and pick up my cell and put them in the usual place, the place they always reside, in the front pocket of a sling bag I carry always.

I transported everything to the car, locked the door, and left for work.  After a few minutes, I reached into the little front pocket of my bag for my cell.  It wasn't there.  I noticed, too, that only one thumb drive was in the pocket.  ????

I pulled over to search around in the car, certain that these items must have fallen out.  Floors, seats, crevices.  Nothing.  So I turned back and drove home and went inside certain that I would find them lying on a countertop.  Nope.  I searched and searched even though there were only a couple of places they could be.  You've done this.  You know.

I picked up the land line and called my cell, walking around the house to hear its ring.  Nothing.  I called it again and went to the car.  Zip.  And so I began to dig through everything again, but it was getting late and I needed to go.  I could replace the thumb drive.  Nothing irreplaceable there.  The phone, though.  Ah, heck, I thought, I need a new one anyway.  Mine is old and borrowed and only works well about half the time now.  Losing all the numbers stored on the card was the drag, but c'est la vie.

I decided to check the other bag for no reason at all.  I don't put things like my phone in there.  It was in the front pocket.  So I looked for the drive. It would have to be there.  No, no, no.

By now I was running really late.  Screw the drive, I said.  But that was not what bothered me.

The road that connects me to where I had to go lies between two lakes for some distance.  There is no other way to go, no way of turning somehow for an alternate route.  It was a parking lot.  In the usneen distance ahead there had been an accident and the only thing to do was close all lanes until the cars were cleared.

Fifteen minutes later, I was moving again.  And in a hurry.  But try as I may, I could make no progress.  Why?  Why?  There should be little traffic ahead.  But I was stuck behind a gold Mercury Marquis that drove the same 25 m.p.h. as the car in the lane next to it.  I have disconnected my horn for a reason.  But it is frustrating to only be able to pound the dashboard and yell.

Finally, however, the car in the right lane slowed to make a turn, and boom! I was around like a sonic blast, albeit a slow one.  Remember.  1985 Volvo.  And I began to make time.

Ahead I made my turn on to the highway--six frigging lanes of it--and was stuck behind a gold Mercury Marquis.  Not the same one.  No, it couldn't be, for I had been flying and it hadn't passed me.  But doubt creeps in, no?

A mile or two later, finally, traffic cleared enough to make my break, me pondering why people clump together and drive at the speed of the slowest car.  Lowest common denominator, I guess.

I don't need to tell you the next part.  Another gold Mercury Marquis.  What are the odds?  How many of them were made?  It was a nightmare, I was sure.  I was hallucinating.

Skip ahead.  When I arrived at work and was performing my duties, someone asked me for something that was on the drive that I couldn't find.  I told the story--the entire story--and to make my point, I tore open the "other" bag, the one in which I found my phone.  And there, in another pocket, completely separated from the pocket in which I had found the phone. . . .

I am still loopy from it all.  I wouldn't have done that.  Why?  I've never done that.  I'm really worried.  It is a Gothic tale, of sorts.  "Did it really happen, or was it all a dream?  Think what you will, but from this day forward. . . ."

I will have to quit eating so much aluminum.

Walking

Missteps and bungling are costing me much, including peace of mind.  Things piling up make me want to lie down.  Throw in resentments and malice. Then the anxiety begins, at which point is becomes impossible to do anything.  The jitters and the jags.

You can get a prescription for that, I think.

What is best, though, is the long, long walk.  There is not so much that walking cannot cure.  I've come to many reasonable plans and put many unreasonable anxieties to rest by walking.  Eventually you come to a place where things begin to make sense. There is a steadiness to walking, a rhythm that develops in the breathing and the stride.  And that is what you need, body, mind, and soul.  Rhythm.

I haven't time for walking today, and for that, I will suffer horribly.  This nervousness will not subside on its own.  And a trip to the gym is definitely no substitute.  In walking there is meditation.  In walking there is thought.  It is restorative. The mind will drift away from what you think you need to work out, but be not fooled.  Ask Freud.

Freud never spoke of walking as far as I know, but I am not as familiar with Freud as I sometimes pretend to be.  Thoreau, on the other hands, speaks to it often and speaks of it directly.  I love his essay by that name.  "Walking" by Henry David Thoreau.

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return-- prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again--if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man--then you are ready for a walk."

Better Than Going Out

Calibrations on computer screens varies widely, so I don't really know what you see after I post a photo.  I have been using the same computers for some time now, but yesterday I used a new MacBook Pro and could barely see anything of these dark, chocolate images that I have been making recently.  Whether you like them or not might depend on that.  Either way.  I will print some of them in a few days, though, to see if this is a direction in which I want to go or if it is something to be abandoned quickly.  I suspect, though, that they will print up well.  I want the viewer to have to lean into the image trying to see into the dark.  To peer.  To gaze.  I just want to break the "prose" of photography for a minute, to set line breaks, to slow the "reader" down.  How is that different from the desires of any other picture maker, though?  I've never heard anyone say the opposite, say that they want the viewer to hurry through the images as quickly as possible, to spend the minimum amount of time looking at the image.  Maybe there is a new direction there!  Fast Art.  The Quicker, The Better.

I think, though, that these photos "shine" too much and have an idea that they may get a coating of wax to obscure them some, to dull them.

I have just loaded Photoshop CS5 onto my computer and am reading a book on it right now.  It seems there are some changes that I will like, and I'm excited.  I also loaded the software for my new Wacom Intuos pad and will have to begin learning what I can do with that, too.  I'll do stupid things and think they are clever for a long time, I'm sure, and I'll post them here for future embarrassment.

But now I want a new computer, one of the new Macs with the 25" screens.  Way leads to way until you're broke, at which point everything you've gotten stands as an accusation and you can't stand to touch it any more.  The Way of Things.

But Art. . . .  An update.  I've sent some of my work out to places I have no business sending it, and someone significant has done that for me as well.  It is good for me, for with rejection (or utter silence) comes the End of Desire.  And with that comes. . . ?

So I'll just keep spending my money and making images.  Sometimes it is just better than going out.

The Act of Living

Northern states like Minnesota and Illinois have been hotter than the southern state where I live.  Both are enjoying the weather, of course, but I don't trust it.  It is unseasonable.  You don't get anything for nothing.  I, like you, would love to think that you can, but we know better.  It is like the "Free Orange Juice" signs you used to see when you crossed the border into Florida.  A few minutes later, you'd have agreed to look at condos in Ft. Meyers.  Or worse.

But that has nothing to do with what I wanted to tell, if there was anything I wanted to tell at all.  Yesterday was beautiful and last night I was to attend a cocktail party.  Per usual, though, the darker it got, the less desire I had to get dressed and go out.  Rather, I got down a bunch of photo books and put them in a pile on the floor by the chair and poured through the pictures looking for something.  Beer turned to wine turned to whiskey in a brief period.  Not too much, though, and I sat lordly in my chair truly enjoying my leisure.  Once into what passes for my pajamas, I was done for.  By nine o'clock, I knew bed was in my near future.

I worry and wonder about this.  I don't seem to have much need for people any more.  Maybe for half an hour or so if it is not too demanding.  I don't want to hang around and chit-chat.  It wears me out.  Meeting for sushi is O.K. if the people I am with don't need to go any further than that.  Eating or going for a drink alone, though, is fine.  I get just about enough chit-chat from the bartenders and waitresses and occasionally customers to satisfy me.  And the entire time, I'm thinking of how to turn it into something, a story or an essay.  I'm not really interested in the actual event at all.  The writer Jim Harrison once said there came a point in his life where he didn't know if he was thinking or writing.  Perfect.

Active living.  The act of living.  I must think on this.  I must ponder.

What If It Gets Darker?

Scary things revealed by science.  Do you need to know?  The sun has been acting oddly for the past few years.  It is in a quiet cycle without much surface activity.  As a result, scientist reveal, there has been a slight increase in the output of radiation.  U.V. production has been less than normal.  What?!  But U.V. damage to crops and skin is on the rise.  And what about the increasing temperature of the planet.  But there has been a slight increase in the amounts of visible light, they report.  You know--Roy G. Biv.  The scientist who headed the publication of the study's findings, Joanna Haigh, says, [I]t will. . . be very, very interesting to see if the visible radiation starts to decline" when the sun enters a new cycle.

Very, very interesting?!  What does that mean?  What if suddenly visible light production drops by half? Ms. Haigh can't fix that.  What happens with photosynthesis?  And what about photography?

Jesus, I don't know how much information like this I can take.

Synthetic Organic

Synthesizing organic compounds in a laboratory.  That is what won Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.  But it is more than chemistry, I think.  More than Chemistry just like Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" was More than Psychology.  It is a symbol of the coming era.  What could be more apropos?  We've been living in the Age of Silicon in its many forms for the last half century.  Silicon, so similar to carbon in many ways with the four electrons of its outer shell available for chemical bonding, allowed chemists to produce synthetic compounds of tremendous importance--cement, glass, and, of course, silicone which is vitally important in aesthetic enhancements (oh, and computer chips, too).  What would the world have been without Carol Doda?

What possibilities lie ahead?  Surely things that will save the world, fix the environment, and make life generally more tolerable for all of us.  But the literary potential is enormous.  And without literature, where would science be?  For science is controlled by the metaphors and symbols and master narratives just as all other knowledge is that has to be communicated.  The Story of Water, for instance, is one every schoolchild learns.  And believes.  Big, hungry oxygen atoms finding little hydrogens floating around it, sharing it's electrons to form a compound with a dipolar moment, etc.  It is a good story.  Useful, too.  Just like "The Jetsons."

You think I'm kidding, probably, but I'm not.  Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki.  Bigger than Salt and the polio vaccine.  Just like Carol Doda, this will change the moral and ethical environment forever.

O.K.

It's hard to please everyone, and sometimes anyone.  Sometimes, you can't even please yourself.  Yesterday's comments:

"Okay okay okay--go back to tits.  That was way too deep for me."

The Known World

The known world keeps getting larger and more complex.  I like the term "known world."  It is the dividing line between ideologies.  It has become, for me, the intersection that divides us.

The world is larger for some of us than for others.  "The Known World" is a compilation  against which we stake the world we know.  Neither world is "The True World" in that each keeps changing.

Truth.  There is another concept that divides us.  Just the concept. How we think of it is a median that is difficult to cross.  Do you believe that truths are out their waiting to be discovered like some lost treasures, or do you subscribe to the notion that they are inventions of the human mind?

Today, the known world expanded.  A census of life in the world's oceans was released that reveals thousands of new species.  The oceans and seas are richer in life than we ever knew.  Twenty percent of ocean life is composed of crustaceans.  The richest waters in the world surround Japan and Australia.  This news expanded my known world but did not shake it.  Another seemingly innocuous bit of information released yesterday did, however.  It will seem minute to you, probably, but for me, it was world-shattering.

Fat.  Science has long held that there were two types of fat cell growth, hypertplastic and hypertrophic.  In childhood, it was believed, hyperplastic growth occurs, that is, the body increases the number of fat cells in the body.  Children who were overweight in childhood, it was thought, would have the potential for retaining more body fat as adults.  Hypertrophic growth, growth in the size of a fat cell, occurred in adults, but the body no longer created new cells for fat storage.

I remember reading that in the medical library at college while doing research for a paper I was writing.  I was a zoology major then and loved scientific truths, for they were so rare in the common, daily world from which I came.  Scientific truths were gems that sparkled in a dull land full of misinformation and opinion.  I remember the very table where I sat in the library that day close to the shelf of books from which I was working.

Today, I received the contradiction.  It has been found that in parts of the body, hyperplastic growth continues throughout life.  Not everywhere, but in the femoral parts of the body.

You are astounded, no?

It sounds crazy, but for reasons I can't explain here (or anywhere really), that information has been important to me.  My world has shifted, but there is something else, too.  Those who have not held that "truth," those who didn't care, those who didn't believe--they've been "right" all along.  And I. . . I have been "wrong."

I try to succor myself with the new census of sea life.  It reifies what I always believed.  The ocean is rich.  It is responsible for most of the world's oxygen.  It tempers our climate and absorbs CO2.  It is our mother.  It is boundless.

Now I must think about the new genetically altered plants that will absorb more CO2 and give off more O2 than the ones humans have grown up with.  And there is a man who has had an implant that lets him turn the lights in his house on and off just by thinking.

The "known world."  Try it sometime.

I Don't Know, I Don't Know

Don't count on luck.  I've been lucky in some things, far more than normal, but unlucky in others, far worse than I deserve.  Does it even out?  It seems like there should be some balance in the cosmos, something like the black and white circle that stands for the yin and yang of things.  But I don't know.  Maybe it evens out over generations rather than individuals.  Nature doesn't seem to have much fondness for the individual.  And as far as I can tell, it hasn't much fondness at all.

The weather has turned lovely here, earlier than I predicted (so I don't trust it), but wonderful nonetheless.  We ate lunch on my brick veranda yesterday in the lovely air and sparkling light, the table covered by a beautiful blue cloth--I thought of Tuscany.  "Why haven't you bought a grill yet," my friend asked me, her son chiming in.  I haven't though I keep saying I will.  I used to cook on the grill every night until it fell apart.  That was two years ago.  I have natural gas that runs from underground lines, the endless supply, but to buy a grill that will connect is very expensive compared to the ones I can get with the propane tanks. Perhaps four times the cost.  But it doesn't make sense to me to have the propane when the lines are already connected for the other, so I wait and wait and wait, making no decisions.  My indecisiveness meter is on ten.

Under pressure yesterday, I decided on a stop gap measure and headed off to the local UglyMart to buy a hibachi.  No luck there, so I bought a cheap-ass table top grill.  That is what it said on the box.

"Cheap-Ass Table Top Grill."  Almost.  Assembly required.

So I gave it to the ten year old to put together.  He's a wizard with Leggos which have cost thousands of dollars over the years, so I thought to put all that training to good use.

When his mother brought the assembled grill over (she said it had taken her son ten minutes), she put it on the big wrought iron table on the deck, the one with the big glass top that I've told you about long ago (I think), the one that is forty-two inches in diameter and one inch thick, the one that weighs a hundred pounds that slipped from my grip as I prepared for Hurricane Floyd, the one that crushed the bones in my right big toe into a jigsaw puzzle so that it blew up like a busted plum, the one I couldn't walk on when my wife came back from her business trip to tell me she wasn't happy, then that she wanted a divorce, the one that lay in my garage where it had fallen for years, the one that haunted my nightmares.  That one.

I went to Whole Foods and bought three lovely steaks and brought them home to cook on my newly assembled grill.  This will work fine, I thought, I haven't used charcoal in a hundred years, remembering that it really tasted better than cooking with gas.  I lined the bottom of the grill with pieces of the paper bag in which I'd brought the groceries home and set the charcoals on them.  And within minutes I had a nice flame.  "I should have done this a long time ago," I told myself, happy, feeling manly.  Men, meat and fire.  That's it.

And so I went into the kitchen to prepare the rest of the meal waiting for the charcoals to die down to a beautiful red glow.

Pop/Crash/Bang!

I looked up and out the window.  The grill was upside down on the deck, burning coals all around.  What happened I wondered, looking for the malevolent being who had done this.  But it wasn't a being at all.  The monstrous glass had broken, just shattered from the heat, I guess.  Really?  I couldn't have imagined it.  The friggin' package said "Cheap-Ass Table Top Grill" almost.  At least it said "Table Top."

What to do?  Salvage what I could.  I righted the grill, got a big spatula, and began shoveling coals back into it.  If nothing else, I'd cook the meat.  But the whole time, I was feeling weird.  The monstrous glass table top had broken.  I was feeling a thousand emotions and couldn't really sort them out.  I remembered my ex-wife and the girl who came after.  I remembered all the pain of every kind, and then the deep, long melancholy that ensued.  And somehow, I guess, I was bound to that table top that had punished me.  I'd kept the goddamned thing and had eventually made it serve me again.  Now. . . I don't know.  It felt unlucky.

The thing to do was have a whiskey, I thought, and get the meat on.  And I did, but to no use, for the coals were no longer hot enough to cook.  I left the meat on for awhile, but it just looked unappealingly gray.  Shit.  I decided to put fresh coals on top of the others that were still producing heat.  I would start over.  It was already late.  Maybe we could start the salads.  But the damn coals weren't firing up.  I needed lighter fluid, gasoline, something.  All I had was alcohol.  Alcohol burns, right?  I poured it on the coals.  It worked about as well as water.

As I was mucking about in wet ashes (I'd poured water on the deck to make certain I didn't have another disaster) and broken glass and gray meat, my neighbor and his girlfriend walked up.  Talk talk.  And as we did, the flames began.  Good, I thought.  We will eat.

By the time they left, the flames were dying, but all the coals had not flamed.  Some were black, some gray, but there were enough red ones, I thought, to cook with.  I lay the gray meat on the grill hoping for something good.

Inside, my friend had set up trays in front of the television that the ten year old had commandeered.  I thought we'd eat at the table, but I was really too weary now to object.  And so we ate our salads to some nerve-jarring t.v. show with five minutes of horrid commercials for every five minutes of show.

"I think the steaks are ready," I said hopefully.  When I took them off the grill, they looked O.K.  Maybe they would be good after all.  They had been expensive.

They weren't.   They tasted of unspent lighter fluid and perhaps just a little of rubbing alcohol, too.  And they were tough.  Perhaps graying them before had not helped.

As we sat in front of the television watching commercials aimed at ten year olds, we gnawed our way through the horrible meat.  What had dinner cost me, I wondered.  Two hundred?  Three hundred dollars.  And now I would have to buy a real grill.  More hundreds of dollars yet.

This morning, I looked over the shards of last night's disaster.  It felt like  reading tea leaves.  Burn marks covered the deck that was smeared by a sooty ash.  The table top shattered into pieces.  I try to think of it as a just reward, of course, but I can't quite.  We have shared disaster like Ahab and Moby Dick.  Something has ended.  And I'm feeling uneasy, for I don't know what.  All there is now is the waiting to see.  I don't know.  I don't know.

Round Three

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Raconteur

(photo by Sean Cusick)

I'm adding this fellow as one of my links.  I don't know him, I swear.  He has had a blog for awhile now, but it has taken him some time to become consistent with his postings.  Apparently he was once a well-known rascal in the music business.  I don't understand it all.  He must have had a talent, though, for stirring things up, and I like that.  He muses and walks around NYC with his camera.  I think he has a film degree, so he should know how to make a picture.  I like his postings best when they are bizarre.   He is a caged animal now trying to get used to his condition.  I like it when they forget to shut the door.  From afar.  To read about and look at the images.  By God, though, I wouldn't want to be there when it happens.  It would be too much for me.  I don't have a strong enough constitution.  I prefer sit back in my little town and watch the postings from afar.  I hope he'll give you a show.

*     *     *     *     *     *     

He wrote this to me about my last posting:  

"Cavalry, not Calvary.  Very different things."

He thinks I'm stupid.  I meant Calvary.