Iansblog

Epistemology is Sexy and Dangerous

2007-04-27T13:58:00.000-04:00

In the past year I’ve read two novels that have dealt with epistemology (the study of the nature of knowledge) either directly or indirectly. I’ve had two 300 level lit. Theory classes and a 400 level so I feel, now, I am finally under-qualified enough to write a little on the subject. The first novel I read was for a class. It was Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. This novel digs deep into the nature of learning and knowledge, all within the environs of a 14th century monastery murder-mystery. The second novel was Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, which is less direct about epistemology but follows the careers of academics and the effect of their occupation on their lives and friendships. Both books offer a focused view of the noble pursuit of knowledge, and, surprisingly, both books left me cynical and disillusioned about the world of academia and environments of higher learning.

My current read is not doing much to dispel my doubt. I am now reading Robertson Davies relentlessly witty The Rebel Angels. Like The Name of the Rose and Crossing to Safety, the novel offers facets of the academic microcosm with protagonists that leave you feeling like you’ve just taken a lukewarm bath. Eco’s Brother William gets the closest to being a traditional pre-postmodern hero, but by the end he is drawn into the ranks of the avaricious monks in the monastery and loses, to say the least, his benevolent momentum. With Stegner, I felt myself trying to sympathize with all of his characters, but their graceless judgments of one another left me often feeling annoyed at this otherwise beautifully written work. Stegner’s characters have left me feeling less than compelled before. It was the writing in Angle of Repose that kept me reading, not the fact that I could relate in any way to the characters. Davies offers the possibility of a likeable character in Simon Darcourt, but he is, in my view, distractingly-observant (subtly judgmental) and his charm—eating honey on toast—seems contrived. Shame on me, judging characters for being judgmental.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against judgment as long as it is based on positive foundations. Questionable judgment comes from personal ambitions, however, and all of these characters seem to damage their personal relations through this kind of sizing up. As if the judgment was related to a desire to exploit weaknesses in their peers.

All three novels offer at least one similar sub-theme, with Crossing to Safety being the most subtle, that the pursuit of intellectual property is as perilous as the pursuit of material property. It’s an easy theme to identify, that’s why I’m writing about it, but it has made me think about the role of institutional learning, and the shifting perceptions of knowledge in the 1980s. All three novels were published in the 80s, Davies first in 1982, Eco the following year, and Stegner a few years later in 1987. All this during the decade when Stanley Fish was riding around the Duke campus in a gold convertible jaguar. Grey areas, reader response, and the awkward term “othering” were making their way into scholarly articles almost as a matter of course, and the phrase “publish or parish” took on the same gravitas as “off with his head” might have in simpler times.

It is no mistake that the idea of knowledge as a perilous pursuit pervades these three works. In The Name of the Rose, Brother William’s search for the lost book of Aristotle has nothing to do with the physical book, but of its contents, and, more importantly, what the contents mean to Brother William and the future of humanity. Conversely, the book means much more to William’s antagonist, who I won’t reveal, it is a murder mystery after all, who considers the contents unspeakably dangerous. This dichotomy (God forgive me for using this word) symbolizes intellectual transitions; Medieval to Renaissance, Reformation to Enlightenment, Modernism to post-modernism, in a way that reflects the desire for “new” thinkers to reject the ways of the old. In Crossing to Safety, one of the primary characters is already rich beyond his ability to spend, yet he is broken by the lost chances at scholarly greatness that his marriage inflicts upon him. Like the book in The Name of the Rose, the material becomes immaterial, it is the pursuit of knowledge which destroys, and the dichotomy here (damn, there’s that word again) is love vs. knowing, or being recognized for knowing.

The jury is still out on The Rebel Angels, but I’m predicting similar circumstances. Already it is easy to identify a very similar theme that correlates with the old being replaced by the new. (I’m a history major, and I know that my analysis is cheap chronological observation, but I think it is relevant when looking at, now that we are moving away from the post-modern period, how we are making this transition at the present time—that past movements aren’t static blocks of time, but are always fluid periods of transition, thus the name, movement.) A common element of all these novels is the fundamental trashing of the older academic. All three of the works have an interchangeable character, an old, crusty, arrogant blowhard, just the kind of person people love to hate, who greedily pursues knowledge and demonstrates exactly how the other characters may have their flaws but aren’t as bad as the old fart (excuse the colloquialism). This rejection of past academics is one of the things I find troubling in the works of the 80s. They often seem to me bent on pounding away at the foundation in order to float on wispy half-truths, a feet worthy of a Vegas magician, especially if you popularize the belief that there is no such thing as absolute or objective truth. On the other hand let me say that I do believe that many of the ideas that came about during colonialism and industrialism are antiquated and need to be reexamined.

Last night I watched a special about the Mount Airy Fiddler’s Convention. This is one of the largest Old Time music festivals in the country, and attracts thousands of fiddlers from around the world. One of the things that struck me as I watched interviews with fiddlers ranging in age from eight to eighty was the deep acknowledgement of the roots of the music. No popular musical form has experienced the transitions, coinciding with successive generations, that this form of folk tradition has. To hear a recording of a group such as Yonder Mountain String Band played next to an early recording of Bill Monroe would give a good idea of where the music comes from and where it’s going. The musicians warmly embrace this evolution, and rarely will an interview be conducted without a nod to the founders. This reverence, to me, is important when considering that the search for the nature of knowledge may not be about future intellectual reinvention but careful, respectful, reinterpretation of the past.

After all this, will I stop reading The Rebel Angels? Absolutely not. Wouldn’t it be hypocritical of me to reject these authors as they may reject authors that came before them? As with Stegner and Eco, Davies has already given me a wellspring of things to consider, and, annoyingly, drawn me into his book. That may be one of the most redeeming factors of this period of fiction; that the characters annoy and delight the reader, just as acquaintances in real life do. Not a new feature of fiction, I know, but as someone who is at the age where he is now far removed from years where he once moved freely,the 1980s,the lenses these authors provide aid greatly in self-examination.

mememememe

2007-04-25T20:00:00.000-04:00

I was going to write a "woe is me" post because I received some not so good news today, but I came up with a better idea that I hope will cheer me up and spur me on. Before I start, I just want to say that I am writing this post from my front porch. My dog, Booker, is right next to me, and only a few moments ago he charged out into the street after a Rottweiler the size of a pony. I have an old plywood desktop that I use to rest my laptop on, and I was trapped in my chair and could only pray that the Rottweiler was good natured. Turns out he was. I gave Booker a slight slap on the top of the head. I would rather not see my dog get mauled today.

When I was a little kid I would sometimes get accused of copying my older sisters. They would be engaged in a game or activity of some sort, and for some reason the idea of me trying to invent a similar activity would arouse their resentment. I suppose they saw it as a kind of juvenile plagiarism, that in some way their originality was being compromised. Looking at it this way, I can see how it must have been pretty annoying. But at the time I had little desire to be original on my own. "Stop copying me," they would say, and the idea of doing anything else would be impossible for me to conceive. In fact, the idea that they were forbidding me caused my desire for imitation to become greater.

I realize that the previous paragraph will produce some interesting comments from my primary readers, who happen to be those three very sisters. They may not remember this as I do, and every writer runs a great risk when writing about their families because of this memory dysfunction. Let me just say that I could well be misremembering, and no such things ever occurred. If these events did occur, let me state now that they in no way damaged my reverence for my sisters, in fact my esteem for them grew due to their tireless originality. How is that for the disclaimer of all disclaimers?

Now why would I go to all that trouble to explain this little blip of my childhood? Because now I am about to do exactly the same thing I did when I was six, copy one of my sisters. This time it is Emily. Emily, you are more than welcome to send me an email with size 72 font telling me to “stop copying you!”

Emily engages in a practice called memeing. That’s not a word, but I’m predicting it will be one day. Everyone knows the premise: If you are stuck on a desert island what movies or books would you chose to have with you and why? This may not be the original meme, it may not even be a meme at all, but it gives you an idea of what other memes are getting at. It seems like a fun indulgence, and whenever Emily posts one on her blog I want to do the same meme. Two things stop me. Usually the memes are something like, “who are the best feminist writers of the year and why?” or, “name the top ten things you love about eating organic produce.” Well, unfortunately, I have very little practical experience in either one of those fields, although I don’t discount them in any way, and, Emily, please don’t take these examples literally, I’m generalizing in order to make a point. Also, although I know this would be the furthest thing from Emily’s mind, I still have a desire to avoid copying my sisters in order to make up for being a pesky little brother.

So I decided to create my own meme. I want to come up with some questions I can really get my head around and that have to do with my interests, something that will indicate exactly who I am. It may run longer than ten questions, it may only be one really big question, who knows, I intend to totally make it up as I go along, symbolic of my approach to life.

1) If you fell through the rotten boards on your front porch and got stuck and became parched with thirst, what would you rather have to drink, chilled dirty sock water or warm flat Sierra Mist?
Chilled dirty sock water because Sierra Mist has too much sugar.

2) What would you rather do, make love in an outhouse or win free tickets to see the Eagles?
Do I even need to indicate the answer to this one? It’s kind of the same thing really.

3) When you were a child, what would you rather do, climb a tree or copy your sisters?
I would climb ten trees just for the opportunity to copy my sisters. Besides, where do you think I got the idea of climbing trees?

4) If you were stuck on a desert island would you rather have a TV/ DVD player that doesn’t work because there is no electricity on a desert island, or ten of your favorite books that are unreadable because they were drenched by the monsoons?
The DVD player because I could bust out the screen and create my own soap operas using shells and driftwood.

5) Of all of your neighbors, who is your favorite?
The one that used to own a rooster who would crow into our upstairs windows from 2am until 8am. The rooster, not the neighbor.

6) How many knats do you think have bitten you while you have been out on the porch writing this post?
Don’t know, 758?

7) How far are you willing to go for a cheap laugh?
I would write a nonsensical meme in the hopes that it would produce a laugh in someone far away that I will never hear.

8) How far would you go to get more people to read your blog?
I’m thinking about standing in the middle of a busy intersection in only cowboy boots, boxer shorts and a sign with my blog address on it. Either that, or have some cards made up.

9) Why do you blog?
To get messages out to my fan base, which, at this time, includes only one person, although he is enduring. He also happens to be me.

10) If you get to heaven and you can find out how many times you did something throughout your lifetime, what would it be?
Used the Lord’s name in vain.

11) If you were making up a fake meme and you ran out of ideas for questions, what would you do?
See question eleven.

12) If you were sitting in a hard wooden chair with the knats biting you would you be: a) uncomfortable, b) ready to end this post, c) hungry and very itchy, d) torn between your desire to get attention through humor and your desire not to be consumed by little flying ants?
How about giving a guy an all of the above?

13) If you are secretly superstitious and have a fear of the number 13, how many lame questions would you add to your fake meme in order for it not to end on the number 13?
At least one.

14) If you had the opportunity to drop Dick Cheney in the middle of an extremist Sunni militia encampment in only his briefs, would you take it?
No, but I would want to really, really, really badly.

There, once again I’ve copied one of my sisters activities, but I believe I’ve added my own little nuances to the exercise. Remember Emily, imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Or something like that.

Blog Quote #5

2007-04-25T09:53:00.001-04:00

In a modern university if you ask for knowledge they will provide it in almost any form--though if you ask for out-of-fashion things they may say, like the people in shops, "Sorry, there's no call for it." But if you ask for Wisdom--God save us all! What a show of modesty, what disclaimers from the men and women from whose eyes intelligence shines forth like a lighthouse. Intelligence, yes, but of Wisdom not so much the gleam of a single candle.

Robertson Davies

Gettin' Religion

2007-04-19T15:47:00.000-04:00

With all that is terrible going on in the world it is difficult to get back to writing for this blog, especially with any humor or optimism. The non-stop coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy has left me feeling a little blue and strangely uncertain, but I want to continue with thoughts of deep sympathy for those involved. The death of Romanian holocaust survivor, engineering professor Liviu Librescu, who sacrificed his life for his students, is an example of how senseless and deeply tragic the whole thing is. I don’t necessarily think that it is time for debate, humans need time to heal. I am finding this subject extremely difficult to write about.

While the catastrophic news of the world seems to define every moment these days, I’ve been feeling bitter-sweet, having won awards at my college for this academic year. This makes me happy, but the troubles for others around the globe, and this ongoing Iraq debacle, is causing uneasiness and a deep urge to do something, anything, involving effecting positive change. I don’t know how yet, but it seems the time has come to search for ways that I can put my degrees to positive use to at least join the effort to stem the flood of deep hatred that is festering in far corners and backyards. Some may say, “its useless, how conceited to think that you could change anything, this is all part of the human condition, war, conflict, violence, this time is no different than any other time in history, in fact, there is less violence now than, say, ninety years ago.” I would have to do research to get into a debate like that, but I don’t think we should chalk this up to the “truth” that humans are inherently violent. I believe that some societies have an inherent tendency to foster violence and that it is this societal trend that has to be examined in order to be corrected. With all of the broad steps taken in understanding the human mind, we should find some way to come to reconciliation between individual psyches and the collective psyche. That is, what is the group telling the individual about what is acceptable, what is possible even, and how is that individual turning it into anti-social and violent behavior? With my declaration about no debates in the introductory paragraph, it seems I’ve already broken that edict—good to see I still have the capacity to be hypocritical.

I went to church with my mom on Sunday. We went to a little church that my sister attends (she sings in the choir) and I’ve asked her permission to write about the experience and she said yes, but I will change (or just omit) the names to protect the innocent. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be about being saved, it had just been a long time since I had darkened the door of a church and I’m somewhat surprised that I wasn’t struck by lightening on the way in. The experience was fun, funny even, which is an odd and vaguely blasphemous thing to say about church but I left feeling good, and isn’t that part of what church is for? That, and doing unto others.

The church has a small sanctuary, painted bright white, which was welcome on a day like last Sunday, when the rain fell steadily and the chilly weather persisted. We sat about midway down the pews, and instead of the hinged kneeling stool that many churches have (the ones that run the length of the pew—I still think that word is funny “Confucius say, man who fart in church, sit in own pew.”) this church has cushions like small ottomans really. I like this system, but I was a little out of practice and had trouble positioning the cushion just under my knees and had to squirm a little to keep my balance. Also, the man in front of me didn’t feel the need to kneel, so I had to lean back from the rail of his pew which gave me little anchor to attach myself to the kneeling position. So I kind of flailed around during the kneeling parts, precariously balancing on the tiny ottoman and trying to look like it had been less than two Easters ago since I had been to church. There must be all kinds of symbolism in just this predicament alone.

Before the service got under way, I was thinking to myself how nice it was going to be to be involved in a community activity where all you had to do was follow cues, listen, stand, kneel, sit, listen some more, eat the body, drink the blood, say howdy to your neighbor and sing. At the college I go to, general spontaneous discussion is encouraged at every level from physics class to keg parties, and the idea of letting the traditions and rituals of my family’s faith dictate my actions, with little effort on my part, for the next hour seemed relaxing. I know you don’t go to church to “take a load off” and kick back, but the structure of the service was appealing to me strongly at that time.

The service started with announcements. The minister announced that after some consideration she had decided to allow some members of the congregation to preach sermons in the upcoming months. A general murmur of approval seemed to generate from the congregation. After this had sunk in, the minister also announced that she would be accepting submissions for hymn choices, but here she had to make some things clear. “No Baptist hymns.” She declared. I wondered if this preacher had something against the Baptists. “…or Methodist, or Presbyterian, or any other,” she continued. Wow, this is kind of exclusive, I was thinking. But the explanation was simple, the church only had the Episcopal hymn book, and hymns not included in that would be difficult to sing without the corresponding hymn book. “Also, no Christmas hymns, or Thanksgiving.” She went on to say. The reason for this was more obvious; it was not the season for these hymns.

All this was related in a kindly tone which made for more comfort on my part. Then she opened the floor to more announcements and things got a little confusing. There was a rally of some sort going on in the near future and many feminine voices from around the church spent several moments trying to clarify when the rally would be and who was speaking when, and there was a general aside from one of the choir members about how her memory isn’t what it once was, and then a gentle calling in from the minister and the service resumed. It was looking more and more like how things are done at my little college, and I was worried for a moment that I might be asked to stand, identify myself, and tell a few interesting things about myself, being a visitor of the church. Luckily this didn’t come about and things started to go as I remembered them, with the standing and the sitting and all.

What is interesting, and I mean this with no disrespect whatsoever, is that while we were singing one of the prayers I couldn’t help noticing how the melody resembled a TV theme song from a 1950s western. I thought this was monumentally cool. I mean, every evening during my junior and senior year of high school, I had to endure evensong whose music sounded like it was written by a choir masters in strong need of anti-depressants, and here I was listening to the same prayer where you could almost hear a whip cracking in the background. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Rawhide---heeyaw!” Please don’t let my dad read this, he might disown me.

Later, my confusion returned when we stopped the service to greet and bless our fellow worshipers. The standard phrase always changes between the times I go to church, and I needed to wait for someone to greet me to find out what I was supposed to say, and then I just echoed their words. I think it was something like “peace in the Lord,” but I didn’t quite get the “in the Lord” part and I just shook everybody’s hand saying “peace,” like I was at an Arlo Guthrie concert or something. It was the warmest greeting break I had witnessed, and everyone moved around the church until each member had greeted all the others. I saw everyone move toward the back of the church and for I moment I thought the service had ended—the minister was almost out the door—but soon everyone returned to their seats and we pressed on in our worship. I became a little distracted when someone who knew my father wanted to tell me a funny story about him right in the middle of all this, something about him starting one of his classes by declaring, “I was born in the shadow of Monticello.” I did my dutiful best to laugh and appreciate the story, and declared that it sounded just like him.

After communion (I neither choked on the wafer or slurped the wine) the service ended in short order. After the hymn, the minister had the congregation turn to the back of the church and told us the reason the minister says the final blessing at the back of the church was to send the congregation forth, out of the sanctuary, to spread the word around. I like explanations like that.

I got trapped in the church (more symbolism) when my mother got to talking to the minister, who was greeting people at the door, and the two ladies in front of me began talking about a trip to Vienna. Three older sisters got me used to these types of conversational quagmires, and I looked interestedly around the church while they took their time wrapping things up. There is only so much décor in a church that one can consider, however, and soon I was trying not to convey a blank expression while the women chatted on.

In the social hall—don’t they call them fellowship halls now?—there was more conversation going on, and I was greeted by the husband of the woman who had told me the story about my father. He proceeded to tell me the exact same story, and I reacted in the exact same way. Then he found out what college I attend and found a congregation member who had graduated from the same college. It was good to talk to an alum. Another member of the church was born in Cape Town, and I congratulated her for this impressive feat. The coffee and conversation ended with topics inherent to little churches and places of worship world wide, small town gossip.

When we moved to England in 1979, my sister became enamored with the small town we lived in. The village offered something more than the subdivision existence that we were part of in our middle-American upbringing. She went on to get both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Britain, and developed lifelong friendships in all of these places. Now, living in a small town in Virginia, I believe she has found some things that remind her of those other places, and it’s neat to see her thrive there.

As for me, I didn’t explode by going to church. In Travels with Charlie, Steinbeck writes about going to a little church in Vermont. He speaks of a preacher from a “John Knox” church who was all fire-and-brimstone. Here’s how Steinbeck describes him:

The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumonic drill, opened up with prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot. And he was right. We didn’t amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since.”

I’m tempted to write out the entire passage because it is so damn beautiful, but this gives you the idea. After the service Steinbeck declares that he is revived in spirit and places five dollars in the collection plate. The experience, Steinbeck claims, made him feel so gloriously sinful that he didn’t begin to lose the feeling until the following Tuesday.

My experience, although it didn’t involve a fire-and-brimstone preacher, has stayed with me as well. It is good to have this fresh memory to return to while so much suffering is being experienced. Community may be what causes the problems, but it is in community where we find the greatest solace as well.

Blog Quote #4

2007-04-12T11:18:00.000-04:00

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Kurt Vonnegut

Blog Quote #3

2007-04-09T12:56:00.000-04:00

Doctor, what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred...or the love? Because I haven't even begun to mention everything I remember with pleasure--I mean with a rapturous, biting sense of loss! All those memories that seem somehow to be bound up with the weather and the time of day, and that flash into mind with such poignancy, that momentarily I am not down in the subway, or at my office, or at dinner with a pretty girl, but back in my childhood, with them.

Philip Roth

2007-04-08T10:27:00.000-04:00

My sister Lindsay has been working with water colors lately. This is a sketch she did after Paul Klee. I liked it so much that she gave it to me.

Blog Quote #2

2007-04-07T19:16:00.000-04:00

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

Barbara Tuchman

Zorba and St. Patrick

2007-04-06T10:16:00.000-04:00

Wow, so it has been a very long time since I have posted and boy do I feel slack. I could rationalize an excuse here but I’m not up to that kind of dishonesty this early in the morning so I’ll just say that my attentions have been casually turned elsewhere lately. But I intend to make this post the culmination of all I’ve ever considered a good post to be, as a strong show of ambition often makes up for a brief lack of work ethic.

On that subject, my work ethic has not been so lacking, in fact, I finished two papers this week. The first was about Chief Justice Earl Warren of Brown v. Board of Education fame. I focused on a lesser known, but equally important, case brought before the Supreme Court in 1961 (although it wasn’t ruled on until 1962) called Baker v. Carr which was about disproportionate representation. The case paved the way for more progressive congressional districting around the country. Heady stuff I know, (when I told fellow students about my paper either their eyes glazed over or they made an excuse to leave the room) but I found it interesting, and I tried to get Warren’s gradual shift from a conservative Republican to an advocate of civil rights into the paper. The case had a great deal to do with broad civil rights because voters in urban areas were getting less representation than voters in rural districts. Baker v. Carr went a long way in disrupting the good ole’ boy networks of state legislatures around the country.

The second paper was about the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy in South Africa. I don’t feel as confident about this one. I feel that I might not have been specific enough and may have chosen too broad a topic for a short paper such as this. I tried to focus on strategies of democracy building, economic development, and foreign policy and I probably could have done better if I had just focused on one. I’m Second-guessing I suppose.

On a more hopeful note I got an email this week from the dean of campus life which mysteriously said that he needed a bio of me but he couldn’t tell me why, only that it was very positive. I’m waiting to find out what it is about but won’t say anymore about it until I find out for sure.

I finally read Zorba the Greek all the way through. I’ve had this on my list for a few months now, and lately, since my school reading is less than usual this semester, I’ve been reading exactly what I want with no motive except that the book appeals to me. For some reason this has led me to some really great books, Zorba being one of them, and I’m seeing a definite independent male theme in much of what I’ve been reading. The shame is that I started a book of essays by M.F.K Fisher but was sidetracked when I came across a four dollar copy of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris in London. The M.F.K. Fisher lies half read at the bottom of my book bag, and the Orwell was greedily consumed and passed on to a chef friend. I also, and maybe I’ll figure out why later, have a strong desire to read Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, and this is next on my list after I finish In Pharaoh’s Army by Tobias Wolff.

But back to Zorba. I had tried to read the novel when I was in culinary school in Portland. I probably got about half way through but I’m sure I never finished it. I believe the reason had to do with a temporary job I had through the school working for an Irish Pub on the Willamette River in Downtown Portland. (As usual and if you’ve read my posts before you’re used to this, this post isn’t really going to be about Zorbas the Greek but about me. This is a journal after all, and if you scroll way way way way down to the very first post you will see that the intention of this blog is to record personal remembrances, not literary criticism. Just be glad I don’t post pictures of my drunken spring break in Myrtle Beach—that’s a hypothetical by the way, I spent spring break with my father watching basketball—wow, this is a long parenthetical aside.) The owners of the place were the usual restaurant types, overworked assholes, probably coke addicts, who spewed their misery around the disproportionately small kitchen and treated the temps with con-tempt. I remember their being some hassle with getting paid and the owners were very allusive about it, being conspicuously absent come payday.

We were there to get the restaurant through St. Patrick’s Day weekend. The waterfront area was expecting tens of thousands of revelers and the pub, it wasn’t a real pub just a warehouse with some Irish flags hung on the rafters and a bar at the back, needed to provide overpriced greasy food to drunk grunge-heads by the truckload. So they requisitioned the culinary school to send them some scrawny wannabees to do as much grunt work as possible. The first day, we were put in the damp basement of the pub and presented with a huge pan of meat pie stuffing, several cases of puff pastry, and told that we needed to make ten thousand meat pies by the end of the shift. The puff pastry was frozen, and the work was slow-going and incredibly tedious. This condition was exacerbated by an annoying type-A personality who spent the entire shift not helping us but ass-kissing the owners instead.

As usual, I gravitated to the saddest-sack member of our group who, in this case, was a former teacher who had recently divorced and was starting a new career in the culinary field. I tried out a few jokes about our situation and he just gave me a forced look of patience, and after a while I let him do most of the talking which consisted mainly of complaints about his ex-wife. Somehow I discovered he was well read, and this immediately gave me the opportunity to inch out on to the ledge of literary discussion, dropping names like Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. He was duly unimpressed, so I tried a new tack by announcing that I had just finished Zorba the Greek. I hadn’t. I had probably read about a fourth of the novel. He immediately asked me what I had thought of the ending.

I couldn’t go back now. What I had read of the book gave me the impression that the message was one of affirmation of life, existentialism to its fullest, and I suppose I grabbed hold of this notion in order to get me through the dreary days of late winter in the Pacific Northwest. I believe I had seen some of Anthony Quinn’s performance in the movie, although I had no recollection of seeing the end of that either. I gambled on these two thin straws and stated, “what a great ending, it just makes me feel so positive,” or something to that effect.

My fellow meat-pie-maker just looked at me for a moment, and I knew my gamble had failed. He looked down and continued on his 357th pie. Then he said he wondered how I could get a positive message out of a novel where a woman is beheaded, another dies a slow consumptive death, a business fails miserably, and the hero is diminished by the hardships of existence, dying himself, almost as an afterthought. I, of course knew none of this, I had only read enough to know that they got drunk on the beach a lot. I stuttered something about how I never really thought about it like that before and silently hoped that the subject would change soon.

After that, Zorba the Greek lost all its charm for me. If the Pacific Northwest was contributing to my melancholia, reading about decapitation in the Greek Isles wasn’t going to help. I put the book down and possibly picked up something cheerier, like The Idiot. I wish I had ignored that guy though; my recent reading of Zorba the Greek still leaves me feeling positive. And all that talk about food! That alone makes you feel too hungry to sink into despair.

This time around was different. I debated whether to buy the book, but I ended up searching for it in the school library instead. They had one copy, an old addition whose binding looked like it had been on a couple of space missions and back. The jacketless cover was frayed at each corner and stained with different shades of brown and grey. I flipped through the pages and saw that there wasn’t too much underlining and loud colors of hi-lighter ruining the margins. I put it back though, and looked for a newer addition, coming up empty. It was either this edition or waiting until the next day to buy a book I can’t really afford right now. I reconsidered the worn copy, and decided a well-read copy bound in white but with many stains and scars from over-handling is the perfect vessel to carry Kazantzakis’ words. I checked it out and finished it in well under a week.

Overall I still feel that the existential zest that Zorba exhibits is life affirming and positive. Even the flies laying their eggs in the eyes of the dead convey a cyclical continuity of life which seems to be a promise, however macabre, of renewed existence. That’s my take anyway. I’m starting to believe that the guy I was making meat pies with in Portland was just generally grumpy. Actually, I’m not just starting to think that, I’ve always thought that, and my second attempt at Zorba has definitely confirmed my suspicion.

blogquote #1

2007-03-26T17:47:00.000-04:00

As if in the hard, somber labyrinth of necessity I had discovered liberty herself playing happily in a corner. And I played with her.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Carol's Tea Room

2007-03-19T09:55:00.000-04:00

I may write a longer post about this one day, or actually prepare something to submit for publication, but for now I want to get to the essence of last weekend’s trip to Virginia to see my parents. It was a weekend filled with basketball, it being sort of a holy week in local college sport, the ACC men’s basketball tournament. The tournament is always a hard-fought battle with usually a great deal of upsets, under-dogs, and lead-changes. Tyler Hansbrough, North Carolina’s center, was required to wear a plexi-glass face mask due to a broken nose he had suffered in the last game of the regular season with Duke, and Carolina’s games were overshadowed by the discomfort Hansbrough was enduring, made worse by opposing players trying to “innocently” jar the mask. I spent much of the weekend saying things like, “c’mon, play some D for once,” “Okay, take your time, find a good shot,” and “O my God, you left him WIDE OPEN.” There must be something in human nature that craves tension and release, because at the time there was a great deal of mental agony, but now, looking back it was great fun. Plus my team took the tournament.

Note: before I get into the main point of this post I want to say something about the teams I root for in the ACC. Since I have not attended a school that is in the ACC I have to go with family tradition. My father graduated from the University of Virginia, and while my mother probably taught me how to say useful words like momma and dada during my infancy, it is equally possible that my dad taught me how say the UVA nonsense phrase, “wahoo wah.” So, as tradition goes, Virginia ranks high because of early nurturing. BUT, in the eighties my sister attended UNC, and was a senior when the great Michael Jordon, (anybody heard of him?) was a freshman and the team won the national title. This was so exciting that team loyalty shifted, reinforced by the fact that my sister would allow me to visit her at college and get drunk on three cheap beers and pass out. BUT, soon it was time for my other sister to go to college, and where did she choose? Virginia. She also endured visits from me, and my loyalty again was jeopardized. So here’s how it stands today. I am a Carolina fan until they play Virginia, but because Carolina has had so much success, I usually find myself rooting for UVA. The equation works in complete reverse come football season.

Note #2: When I am in a particularly foul mood I will write about what I think of Duke. I’ll just take this moment to reiterate that they lost in the first round of the national tournament last night. Heh, heh, heh. (to any admissions faculty at this outstanding institution of higher learning who may happen upon this post, my sentiment is solely segregated to Duke basketball.)

So I’ve already written a page and I’m nowhere close to getting to the point. But maybe that last bit will set up the next. On Sunday, before the final game, my father took me out to brunch at a restaurant in Charlottesville. It was warm enough to sit outside, and we had a good meal. My father got to talking about what Charlottesville was like when he was in school, and a name came up that I had heard a few times but could not remember the story behind. It was actually the name of an establishment known as Carol’s Tea Room. Daddy claimed it was a popular watering-hole for students at the University, and there was a well-worn saying on campus that went (paraphrase) “Carol’s Tea Room: where there’s no Carol, no tea, and no room.” He claimed that there was a fetid little creek behind the bar where the students would hold rubber duck races.

The liquor laws at the time required that an establishment that served alcohol must serve food as well, and as Carol’s Tea Room wasn’t in business to be a restaurant they came up with an ingenious plan. Everyday they cooked a hard-boiled egg, and whoever they were serving alcohol to, they would present with the single egg, thus adhering to the law. The plan worked famously until a patron, unfamiliar with the tradition, unknowingly ate the egg.

During the time my father was an undergraduate, Carol’s Tea Room threw a party for the graduate students who had just finished their term. The party was rowdy, and at the required closing time of 2:00am the celebration kept right on rolling, not ending until around 4:00 when it was raided by the police. The proprietor of Carol’s was in danger of having his establishment shut down due to this gross violation of the liquor laws, so he called the man who could best argue to keep a bar open, my grandfather. The judge knew that closing Carol’s for good would cause a riot, so at my grandfather’s suggestion, he suspended Carol’s right to sell alcohol during the three months that the University was out for the summer. In the fall Carol’s resumed business as usual.

After brunch, my father took me on a drive that was my grandfather’s favorite drive around Charlottesville. We first stopped by the house Daddy grew up in, a slightly rambling white clapboard bungalow on Dairy Road with a large front yard and a gigantic magnolia tree. The road was filled with houses, but my father said that when he was a child the surrounding area was an expansive dairy farm. As we drove out of town I tried to imagine the countryside of my father’s youth. Even with the dreaded McMansions dotting the landscape, I could get an idea of why my grandfather loved this drive. The rolling hillside put in relief by a backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a clear late winter day combined with effortless stories of childhood from my Dad was such a welcome diversion.

We passed a large horse stable with a track and exercise areas and a large green hanger-like structure. My father claimed that this was an airfield when he was a kid, and that he and his sister would come out on a Sunday and watch the airplanes take off. During the war, the children were required to be able to identify enemy aircraft in the sky, and this is how, when I was a child, my father could glance at an airplane picture book and casually name every aircraft from the WWII era. He told me how the home defense people had flown a Japanese Zero across the country to see if anyone would spot it. No one did.

As we drove by other horse farms, Daddy told of his experience with horse riding as a child. He was given a horse named Arizona to ride. He said that even though Arizona was the broadest-butt, gentlest old horse that the stable owned he still managed to fall off and get a concussion.

We turned around in the Olivet Presbyterian Church. It was here, at a church picnic, that my father found out that the Japanese had surrendered. The fact that the U.S. had won the war in the Pacific was compounded with the fact that my father had won that day “the only thing he’d ever won in his life,” a chocolate cake. He claimed he was at the picnic because of two sisters that drew his attention. This congenial image was marred somewhat when he told me that both sisters committed suicide.

We arrived home for tip-off of the final game of the tournament. I spent the rest of my visit rocking back and forth with my hands in a position of prayer muttering things like, “make this shot, please make this shot.” Carolina won the game after an exciting back and forth contest, and I readied myself to go home after the final buzzer.

I drove my truck down 29 and tried to remember some of the stories my father had told me. I think I’ve captured some of them here, but I’m sure more will come to me later. My father is an historian, and this occupation lends itself well to personal remembrances. When he and my aunt get together their meeting is usually filled with such recall of what life was like as children. If you can get past the hundreds of cousins with strange names that enter their stories, sometimes, with the help of that beautiful accent inherent to Northern Virginia, you can feel what it was like then; hear the noise of a prop-plane taking off, the voice of an announcer excitedly proclaiming that the war is over, or the revelry, the loud joyous shouts and clinking beer glasses, the triumph, of Carol’s Tea Room.

The Next Best Seller

2007-03-14T19:35:00.000-04:00

I have a great idea for a novel or short story. I’m just going to put it out there and maybe someone who can write will steal it, because it looks like I won’t have time to write it any time soon. But I think it’s a good idea. It’s possible that it is similar to the themes of other stories, but I would still like to pursue it one day.

The idea came to me yesterday after I had finished playing a computer game. It’s one of those games where jewels fall down and you have to line them up and they disappear until all the squares are filled up with gold. It’s very addictive. I had a meeting with one of the students in the class I’m T.A.ing and I noticed that as I was listening to her, my mind was automatically lining up the open windows and shut windows of the building across from us. I realized that my brain was still playing the game. This is probably an old school psychological phenomenon with a name and everything, but I’ve never experienced it this prominently before. I used to feel like I was still riding a rollercoaster the night after a trip to the amusement park, when I would shut my eyes and feel as if I was about to go over that first big slope. Later that night I noticed my brain wanting to line up the chairs in the classroom I was in. I probably should keep playing this game down to a minimum.

Last night, as I was trying to sleep, little jewel-like skeletons lined up and winked out in my head. I started thinking how fun it would be to write a novel about a guy who becomes possessed by a computer game. (I know, yawn, it’s been done—but not by me!) The game, as he plays it, would allow him to become a hyper-genius, solving complicated quantum physics problems while finding a way to end food-shortages and invent an infinitely sustainable energy source. The only problem is no one will listen to him, and he can only maintain the brain power while he is actually playing the game. So, as he plays the game, he has to dictate complicated theorems and theories to the only person who he has a relationship with, his mother-in-law, he being a widower. She is a very smart woman, with a great deal of life-experience and common sense, but she can only take down so much. Plus, she blames him for the death of her daughter who died of ovarian cancer after he refused to allow her to have her ovaries removed because of his desire to create an heir. This atmosphere creates tension, needless to say, and a sarcastic and witty banter will define their working relationship. Finally, when all of the theories are put together, the possessed man takes the entire package to MIT to submit to the physics department. But they will have nothing to do with him because he isn’t a tenured professor at major university.

Without funding, the man turns to the only resource he has to sell his ideas, the internet. A Russian oligarch stumbles across the man’s website and twists the arm of a physics professor at Moscow U. to verify the research. The professor confirms the authenticity of the work and the oligarch sells the entire package to the Putin government. It is here where I get stuck.

I have to apologize for this post. It is mainly subconscious throw-up. I felt like I was starting to take myself too seriously and needed to get something ridiculous out there to clear my head. I’m feeling better now, thanks.

Miranda Essay

2007-03-14T09:09:00.000-04:00

I'm lazy today so I'm going to post an essay I wrote for a class. But I do believe these things. If you read this, what do you think about search and siezure and legislating morality?

The film Search and Seizure highlighted the ongoing debate over the right to privacy and the effect of the Fourth Amendment on the legal system and the citizens of the U.S. The film acknowledged how far the constitution goes in protecting our individual privacy, while underscoring the importance of limiting, or abolishing, what James Madison called “arbitrary government action” against U.S. citizens. Without the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court on the matter of unlawful search and seizure, an expansion of the Fourth Amendment, it is my belief that police would hold too much power when administering procedure and investigating a crime. The danger for the individual citizen is that there would not have to be probable cause or evidence of a crime to for that person’s privacy to be violated. For example, if I am making pancakes in my skivvies one Saturday morning and a police officer who thought he saw me smoking a funny cigarette the night before decides he can break down my door and start going through my sock drawer, my privacy has been violated. Search and seizure prevents these sorts of embarrassing predicaments.

On a more serious note, search and seizure limits the police from detaining or profiling suspects based solely on behavior or suspicious action. It also puts limits on how police can approach a suspect’s residence. The footage from the TV show Dragnet was a good example. The episode before the 1961 all inclusive ruling on search and seizure showed the cops hiding in the suspects own house in order to arrest him. The post 1961 episode showed the cops having to acquire a warrant from a magistrate to make a search on a suspect’s home. For the scriptwriters, the ruling meant a few extra lines of dialogue, but for real police officers and citizens the ruling means that there is a stop-gap, or a third party, to ensure that the search is warranted. The police officers in the film seemed to agree that the extra couple of hours that it takes to acquire a warrant are necessary to ensure that some policemen don’t play the role of judge at the scene of an investigation. In this way I believe that the search and seizure rule, however frustrating for police officers, is necessary to provide protection against rights violations by the justice system.

According to Lawrence Friedman, “vice has a way of bouncing back.” According to his history of American law in the 20th century, the legal system attempted to regulate issues of morality, largely unsuccessfully, for the better part of the century. Laws such as the Mann act tried to limit the actions of those whom the government thought were violating morality, and these laws were either met by exceptional cases being brought before the Supreme Court or an unconcerned public ignoring the laws. The elites, those who had access to channels of power, claimed that the values of the country were at stake, but Friedman suggests that underneath the fear of real dangers, such as venereal disease and dangerous drugs, there was a fear of foreign ideologies which threatened the old protestant value system. Immigration, urbanization, and technology were transforming the nation, and the backlash against immoral behavior, Friedman claims, was a result of American elites resisting change.

Personally I believe that regulating morality is practically impossible. There are some acts that are heinous, such as child molestation, which should be prosecuted to the fullest, but, when the act is victimless, it is difficult for me to justify prosecution when it seems that human behavior will never be deterred from some acts. Friedman claims that anti-prostitution advocates claimed that prostitution was a form of slavery, and I suppose that a prostitute can be seen as a victim in many circumstances, but for an occupation that is known as “the oldest profession,” how can anyone reasonably think that they would be able to stop the practice? It seems more rational to provide health care services to prevent disease and counseling to offer other alternatives.

Another farce is the “War on Drugs”. It isn’t working. All it has done is make the inter-city a war zone and hobbled the efforts made by the leaders of the civil rights movement. The war alienates inter-city youth, and leaves many feeling that they are enemies in their own country. I’m not saying that a playground drug-dealer isn’t a scumbag; I just believe that the war on drugs has created a large sub-culture who believe that survival means criminal activity. Under this mentality it is no wonder that the youth lashes out angrily, looking to embrace their outlaw status in a country, it often seems, that deems them outlaws at birth. If we are winning this war, and I remember when Reagan declared it back in the eighties, why are we building more prisons, arresting more inter-city youth, and seeing more and more evidence of the prominence of drugs in our culture, i.e. Anna Nicole Smith etc? The war on drugs has only created a huge industry based on prosecution and incarceration.

I see large problems with regulating issues of morality; in fact I believe the practice of regulating morality often leads to real criminal activity, much like prohibition lead to the rise of gang violence during the 20s and 30s. I am not advocating the legalization of prostitution or drugs, but some form of decriminalization should be considered to stem the destructive by-products of these activities’ stigmatization.

Closet Cleaning

2007-03-08T10:46:00.000-05:00

Now that I’m done with my job and am on spring break I have been trying to keep myself busy. At the moment I am listening to Yonder Mountain String Band and relearning to type, something I have to do every time I start a new paper or post. I’m trying to write this post from the recliner in the living room, and it is proving to be difficult because the arms of the chair are raising my own arms up and preventing the usual downward momentum I get at a desk. I may have to move, but the comfort of the recliner is causing me to stay put for the moment.

About a week ago I decided, now that I have more free time, to get around to some pressing domestic issues that foreign engagements have caused me to neglect. When I really got the chance to take in all of the projects around the house that are screaming for attention I was very tempted to set up camp on the couch and conduct a Food Network marathon over the week. But I gave myself a pep talk, and half a pot of strong coffee, and got down to it. I tried to look at it as a quest, and in a way it was, because the first task was to clean up the upstairs closet with the goal of finding a complete set of James Fennimore Cooper that I inherited from my grandmother. I had boxed these up and put them into storage during an anti-old-stuff campaign a couple of years back.

But I knew that in our house, the box of books wouldn’t just be sitting conveniently inside the closet door. It’s probable that I hadn’t opened the closet door in about a year, or if I had I just shut my eyes and threw in an old artifact that I was tired of having in our living space. As I looked at the tangled mass of dysfunctional Christmas lights, window fans, air conditioners, bagged up clothes meant to go the Goodwill, and box upon box of books, I sighed and tried to find a starting point.

The first order of business was to remove the bean-bag chair. Along with many books, I also inherited this huge white bean-bag from my grandmother, or I didn’t really inherit it, it just fell to me when it lost its novelty for everyone else in my family. I used to play video games in it but after a while the disdainful looks it received from Margaret caused me to shove it in the closet. Now it needed to be pulled out before any real headway could be made, so I grabbed it up and started pulling it through door, but, it wouldn’t fit! The desire to get the chair through the door was receiving heavy competition from the wonderment over how I had gotten it there in the first place. Meanwhile, as I tugged and pulled and tried to reposition it, the chair was hemorrhaging tiny white foam balls. They were going everywhere. Was this how the entire project was going to go?

I decided to get back to the bean-bag chair later. I put it in corner, out of the way for the most part, and started to pull things out of the closet. After about ten minutes the guest bedroom was full and the closet's contents were strewn (I love that word) out into the hall, little white foam balls following behind like snow flurries. The closet still looked full.

Our house is a two-story bungalow with a severely sloped roof, and this particular closet contains the largest degree of slope in its design. I’m six foot one, and can walk into the closet standing upright, but any forward movement has to be incrementally achieved with a progressively back-straining stoop. I’ve heard all of my life that you must lift heavy objects with your knees (which is the most unnatural thing to try to do) and I believe this is what I was attempting when I slammed my head into the ceiling—the first time.

I won’t go into the language or the tone of my invective; I’ll just say that it was enough to wake Margaret up.

Margaret has about three things she says when she first wakes up. The first one is invariably “What time is it?” We have a clock radio with the biggest digital readout I could find, but still, she wants to hear it from me. The next one is, “Where are you going?” although I’m usually not going anywhere except downstairs, she seems to believe, in her half-awake state, that I’m going on a trans-Atlantic journey or something. The final thing she says is, “did you get me a paper?” Sometimes I can answer this in the affirmative.

On this morning it was “What the hell is going on?” or “What the hell are you doing?” or “Oh my God, you aren’t doing that now are you?” or something to that effect. She had already tripped over a bag of Goodwill clothes on her way to the bathroom, and all of the usual wake-up niceties were dispensed with as she took in the debris of my project.

She could probably tell that I had bitten off more than I could chew, so she gave me some advice that I immediately dismissed, she told me to take it slowly and take one box at a time; all of the boxes and items were causing me to feel overwhelmed. She was right, but in my urgency to build Rome before 11:30am I had convinced myself that everything had to happen quickly, so that I could continue on to the next project. We tend to forget sometimes that home ownership is a long haul, and as opposed to having the day neatly wrapped up by rush hour (as we do in the working world) the household projects often take longer. As long as we don’t act as if the King of Siam were coming over to inspect our use of closet space (or worse, my mother) we can take a more relaxed approach to the task.

As Margaret made her way toward work, her advice started to sink in. I had located the books I was looking for, piled the Goodwill items into my truck, arranged the boxes in a way that you could find things in the closet, and swept up most of the little white “beans” off the floor of the closet, guest bedroom and hall.

While I was in the far reaches of the closet, I came across a box of old photographs that had somehow never made it into albums. There were literally hundreds of photographs going back to Africa and through our trips to Scotland. There were pictures of my friends lined up behind all of our guitars, and of the construction site in Costa Rica, of old friends and pets, and our house before we had it painted, and Margaret and I taking a walk in Yadkin County. I abandoned the closet for about half an hour as I let these images transport me around my recall, marveling at how skinny I once was and how transient life used to be. I shook off (for the most part) initial vestiges of melancholia and steeled myself for the home stretch, placing the photos, within easy reach, inside the closet door.

I’ve moved on to other projects now. In the hopes of having a “Wall of Books” in my office I have been clearing the way for a new bookshelf that I will get this weekend. The Cooper collection will go in it, and as I begin to envision this I’m trying to remember exactly where in the closet I put them. Another excavation might be necessary.

And, still, I just can’t figure out how in the hell I got that bean-bag chair in that closet.

The Speller is the Feller

2007-03-03T09:16:00.000-05:00

This morning I went back and read yesterday’s blog. While I was congratulating myself on my keen insight and wit, I noticed glaring discrepancies in the text. I had written the word attended when I meant to write attendant, and I had written the word possible when I meant to write possibly, to give two examples. I’m someone who should know the value of proofreading, being an English major at a writing intensive school, but its amazing that I only caught these mistakes after the third or forth proof. The biggest mistake I made was misspelling Prince Philip’s name. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I had done it once, but I used his name four or five times, the final time being the punch line of the piece. I just spent the past couple of minutes correcting this in my post.

I’ve become so reliant on spell-check that I rarely use a dictionary for spelling anymore. I was a terrible speller at school, and when I grew up I took comfort in the fact that Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill were both reportedly poor spellers. Didn’t Winston Churchill say something like “I never trust a man who spells a word the same way twice.”? Probably not, but I’m not good with quotes either. Of course for Jefferson, in the eighteenth-century, there was still no coherent standardized form for spelling, so he gets a pass.

I’m hoping I get better about spelling, but I feel that the crutch of spell-check is hindering me by doing the work for me. I could, if I was hyper-disciplined, turn spell-check off and keep an OED in readiness next to my right hand, but I’m not ready yet to make that kind of commitment. Sometimes I mangle a word so badly that spell-check gives me a very discouraging, grayed-out, “no-suggestions.” Then I do have to turn to my dictionary. But what do you do when you can’t even figure out what letter the word starts with? That’s a terrible thing to have to admit, but since I’m in confessional mode we might as well go all the way. In the last post I used the word alliteration. Now I’ve seen this word written on black-boards (and dry-erase boards) since the ninth grade, but for some reason I was positive it began with an i. Even when spell-check tried to convince me I was wasn’t persuaded. I actually looked it up to see if the first suggestion they gave me was the same word I meant. It was, and I felt like an imbecile.

My sister Lindsay helped me out yesterday by posing as Prince Philip in her comment. She spelled the name correctly which sent me frantically searching the internet to check on the correct spelling of the name. Spell-check hadn’t helped me here for some reason, possibly because there may be two spellings for the name. But, annoyingly, the name doesn’t follow a rule I thought I learned in school about how a vowel is short if it is followed by a double consonant, like in apple. We don’t pronounce the name Philip Fie-lipp. So I thought it stood to reason that if the first i is short then it must be followed by two ls. So much for reason. I should have paid more attention to the credits of the movie before I wrote my clever little post.

I suppose these are things that a writer has to live with every day. I know phenomenally good spellers, people who can rattle off words like endometriosis without missing a beat. It must be a wonderful thing. I’m going to keep working on my spelling, along with the speed of my hunt-and-peck typing and my inappropriate use of punctuation. It seems to me a bit like a carpenter who doesn’t know how to use sandpaper.

For fun, I kept a list of all the words that I misspelled during the writing of this post. Some of them are typos, committed in the rush of typing, but many of them are examples of how bad it’s become.

congradualted
congratuling
riting
reportedy
spellin
This one is kind of funny, because this is probably how I would say it, bein’ from the South.
greyed
thay
wors
imbilcile
leafned
consanebt
innapprpriate

Tommorrow, I might write a post about all of the typos in this post.

Modern-postism (or Hypocracy Now!)

2007-03-02T11:35:00.000-05:00

I really don’t have a topic today, but I know that it’s been a long time since I’ve posted so a long rambler of a post might be in order.

I recently left my job of three years. They just couldn’t work with me on my school schedule anymore. It was a good job while it lasted, a means to an end, and I had only planned to stay there until I graduate in December. It was a cooking gig, pretty mindless until the illogic of supervisors—in over their heads and running scared—started affecting my balance of work and study. I won’t make the mistake I made in my early twenties, to forsake school for a crappy job. I’m on the home stretch, and if it means oatmeal and library books for the next eight weeks, so be it.

There, that’s out of my system. On a cheerier note I’ve been catching up on movies and reading. I’m re-reading Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I feel like I’m catching a great deal more than I did the first time around. McMurphy is inspiring me (the constant narcissist in me must relate everything to my own situation) and I had forgotten how Kesey’s protagonist comes on strong, falters, rallies, and eventually is beaten by the system to be chewed up by Chief’s Combine. McMurphy—a great tragic hero, new in style and language, the American war vet, precursor or possible participant in Hell’s Angels ethos—meets his end in a very ancient way, beaten by the inherently Combine-like structure of society.

Okay, so maybe One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest isn’t the best novel to be reading at this moment. But I tend to find inspiration in these types of novels (remember Chief, the one who had them all fooled, escapes) and for a novel that was published in 1962 the character of McMurphy sits in the foreground of a period I am still very much fascinated with, the 1960s. There is hope in this novel which resonates further than the tangible details of its sad ending. The novel seems to predict the rise and fall of youth movements for the next decade.

Away from what I’m reading. There are many great blogs out there about literature and writing, and I am a hopeless bandwagon-jumper, not to mention cliché over-user, so I’ve noticed that I’m tending to try to write as eloquently as some of my fellow blogospherites about what I’ve read. Mixed-results, but I’ll keep trying.

So, on to movies. Because of my previous limited schedule I was unable to see some of the movies that sounded so good but either never made it to my bucolic part of the globe or only played for half a day until the newest Hillary Duff bumped them from the theater. Justin Timberlake is a movie star now—Yikes! And they say he isn’t half bad, Aaaaargggg!

Anyway, the shortage of good films that make you stop and go hmmm a number of times the following day was irritating me. It really began with me viewing the Academy Awards on Sunday night. Of all the films up for best picture I had only seen one, Little Miss Sunshine. The fact that I had no context what-so-ever by which to judge these films left me feeling inadequate, judgment (of all things) being my favorite pastime. So I found myself rooting for Little Miss Sunshine in every category it was nominated for. But I still felt that I had missed so much in the year regarding film, and I took the only recourse I could think of—I blamed Margaret.

“We never go see movies anymore. Why don’t we? I mean we saw Independence Day in the theater. We saw Jurassic Park III in the theater. And now we don’t even see the good movies.”

Maybe that’s why we stopped; I kept dragging her to these films. I remember vividly the first Lord of the Rings movie entering its third hour and Margaret putting her head on my shoulder and sighing as if she had just resigned herself to hell.

When I had finished turning my desire to see movies into an issue of “We never go anywhere anymore,” Margaret gave me her best “What does this have to do with me you silly man?” look, and said “Well, let’s go see a movie.” I said alright, and felt a little disappointed that the argument hadn’t stuck.

We decided on The Queen. I wanted to see Pan’s Labyrinth which I’ve heard so many good things about, but I knew this would be risking it. We went to a matinee at the new monolithic multi-plex (writing about movies lends itself well to alliteration) which is the size of the Greenville airport. Really, I kept expecting to hear a loudspeaker announcing that The Queen would be departing from gate 123 in approximately 40 minutes. I looked around for little golf carts darting movie patrons to the concession stand as I ate my overpriced, undercooked cheese-dog that a hang-dog counter attendent had begrudgingly sold me. We were actually early for a movie. Up is down, down is up.

We loved the film. I especially liked James Cromwell’s portrayal of Prince Philip, possibly because he reminded me of the stuffy, tweedy, blustery, horse-obsessed cousins and uncles on my mother’s side. Lovable stuffy, tweedy, blustery, horse-obsessed cousins and uncles, I might add (note the disclaimer).

The film had enough royal gossip and pageantry to please Margaret and enough politics to keep me happy, and it’s so great to watch a film with someone you know is enjoying it equally. By the end, we were laughing at every word out of Philip’s mouth, (we have an inside joke about the tweedy cousins, and Margaret caught on right away) and the film, in-and-of-itself, was a good tonic. We chatted about the film all the way to Blockbuster. I rented three more films, The Departed, Half-Nelson, and For Your Consideration.

I watched For Your Consideration and Half-Nelson that evening, saving the Scorsese for last. I was able to get about half-way through The Departed, but by that time I was burned out on my celluloid orgy and I kept falling asleep. So, the next morning, I asked Margaret, who was holding her sacred chalice of coffee, if she had finished watching the movie. She said she had. I asked if she liked it. She said: “It was alright—they all die in the end.” …Aaaaargggg!

She took a sip of her coffee. She had just revealed the end of a good movie to me and she hadn’t yet realized what she had done, probably didn’t care either. Now, in the past couple of years, I’ve made great strides in the area of self-control. I’ve learned, for the most part, that I don’t have to be right all the time, I don’t need to win every argument. I’ve become a more forgiving, kinder, gentler me. Great strides; but this took a great deal of will power not to have my ears turn into steam exhausts. I literally felt my head swelling up with putrification, ready to spew vile vitriol across our humble living room and make the dog slink into the kitchen. But I caught myself. I thought of Prince Philip. He would have been incensed at this outrage, and his pomposity over the matter would have made him look appropriately pre-historic. I held my rage, silently blew the anger at the opposite wall, glanced at Margaret, who was innocently slurping her coffee and soy, and started to laugh.

The thing is it doesn’t matter if you know that they all die at the end (and actually they don’t). I watched the movie from beginning to end the next night and there is so much going on with this film that plot and conclusion are almost arbitrary elements. I might write a paper or post about the film, which, against my will, is moving up the ladder of my movie list. It is certainly the best movie I’ve seen this year. I didn’t want it to be, I wanted to disagree with the Academy, to feel superior—old habits die hard, but the Academy of Motion Pictures and I agree, this is a great movie.

Yesterday morning we were in the living room and Margaret was doing the payroll. I was eating a big bowl of oatmeal. I tried to get a conversation going about the pros and cons of oatmeal in general. It was met by impatient glances and monosyllabic responses. I made an off-hand remark about something in The Departed and she looked up and said “yea, that was weird.” Before long we were having an analytic conversation about how the blood splattered and pooled in the violent parts of the film. Just like old times, sitting around pondering Joe Pesci’s performance in Goodfellas. There’s nothing like a hyper-violent motion picture to put the spice back into a relationship.

Later, as she was getting ready for work, I found yet another subject to gripe about, I don’t even remember what. As she put on eyeliner or whatever, she made comments to the effect that I shouldn’t complain so much.

“But why?” I asked. “Why shouldn’t I complain about things that bother me?”

“Because you sound like Prince Philip.” She said.

Ouch.

Introduction to George the Younger

2007-02-16T09:23:00.000-05:00

This is a parody piece I did for 18th Century Literature last year. It is very, very, very loosely base on Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel. I believe, a year later, the piece still rings true with one noticeable discrepancy, the body count. Possibly an appendage about troop escalations would make the poem more current as well.

I ended up with a 90 for the work, punctuation being my downfall, although I had a retired managing editor (brother-in-law Dan) proof read it. I sent it to the New Yorker for a possible Shouts&Murmurs slot but alas, the editors claimed it had “evident merit but wasn’t for them.”

I scanned the paper, rather than copy and paste it from the word file, because I knew that blogspot would mangle the format. I was very careful to try to reproduce the format of the venerable Norton’s Anthology of English Literature. To view the piece, point at it and when the hand appears double click. If some computers don’t support this function I would be happy to email the piece to anyone interested. imichie@triad.rr.com.

Its best to use Internet Explorer to view this, Netscape makes the text gigantic,
and a lot of scrolling is involved.

2007-02-16T09:22:00.000-05:00

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2007-02-16T08:32:00.000-05:00

Books Etc.

2007-02-09T10:59:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking an awful lot about writing and books lately, and I’ve wanted to do a post about the contents of the bookshelf in my office. I realize that to list the entire contents of the bookshelf would be a monumental task, so I’m jut going to take the top shelf and give a brief comment on each book: what it means to me, how many times I’ve read it, etc. My sister does posts like this from time to time, and I guess this is sort of my version of that idea. I’ll start from left to right—like reading a book.

1. Dispatches, Michael Herr
I’ve read this twice, once when I was in France, aged sixteen, and again a few years ago. The account is a vivid description of the Vietnam War
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Read this one twice, once as assigned in eleventh grade, and again on my own in Africa. Fitzgerald, for some reason, caused me to brood for about seven years. Well, maybe it wasn’t all his fault.
3. The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter S. Thompson
Another influential author. My sister Lindsay turned me on to Thompson and for a while I wanted to be like him. This caused problems, and possibly permanent liver damge. I’ve read this anthology twice.
4. Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan
Read once. I have the compulsion now to pull it from the shelf and open it and start reading, but I know I’ll never finish this post if I do.
5. Time and Again, Jack Finney
My brother in law leant me this book. He used to be teacher, and judging how the professors at the college I attend are about leant books, I better get it back to him soon! Read once.
6. Papa Hemingway, A.E. Hotchner
My other brother-in-law gave me this book. He was in the Hemingway society for a number of years. This is a great, largely unsentimental, account by a fond friend and admirer of Hemingway. Read once.
7. The Civil Rights Movement, Bruce Dierenfield
This was a text book for History of Civil Rights. Partially read.
8. Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
I read this book in my first semester back in school. I did a presentation about this figure who I hold up as the greatest single historical figure of the post WWII twentieth century. I read parts of it again for an African history class.
9. Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain
My sister Emily gave me a copy of this book right before I left for Africa in the eighties. Sadly, that copy was lost, but I bought another copy, though I haven’t gotten around to re-reading it yet.
10. Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
I have to admit, I’ve never read this book. Tough admission, but I believe I need to put it at the top of my list. It is a first edition Scribner’s, which is important. See previous post.
11. Beyond the Miracle, Allister Sparks
I haven’t read this book in its entirety, but I did use it to write a paper on Thabo Mbeki. Sparks has written two other journalistic accounts of the transition from Apartheid to the present government in South Africa.
12. The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Medieval World
I used this for a class, lots of useful information and maps about a confusing period of history. Helped straighten things out for me.
13. African American Art, Sharon F. Patton
Also a school text book. African American Art is extraordinarily expressive. Anyone who reads this should check out James Hampton’s Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly and the story behind it online.
14. All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960’s, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman
This was also a text book used for U.S. in the Atomic Age history class.
15. A Short Guide to Writing About History, Richard Marius, Melvin Page
Textbook used for my History 300 research seminar
16. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
The only Jane Austen I ever read (and I use the word read loosely because it was assigned in senior English—during my sloth period—and I doubt that I read more than three pages) is Pride and Prejudice. I have no idea why this novel is in my bookshelf, although maybe my mom slipped it in there in the hopes that I would get hooked on Austen. It hasn’t happened yet.
17. The Best Stories of Guy de Maupassant
I’ve read a couple of these stories, but I always get distracted by something else. Maybe I’ll get motivated to read the rest someday.
18. Old School, Tobias Wolff
I just can’t gush enough about this funny, real, heartbreaking look at boarding school life. So much of it just hit home with me. Read once, with plans to read many times again.
19. Back in the World, Tobias Wolff
A collection of short stories by Wolff from the eighties. Again, just can’t say enough about this provocative master of short fiction.
20. The Night in Question, Tobias Wolff
More short stories, this time from the nineties. Stories that end, and leave you staring at the ceiling, pondering but fulfilled.
21. The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
I’ve read maybe a fourth of this huge, dense anthology. You need to commit to Faulkner, like changing careers or something. At times I’m more than ready to make that commitment, and sometimes the challenge offers up profound rewards.
22. Three Volumes of The Historian
I get this scholarly journal now for some reason; don’t ask me if I’ve read any of the articles. I’m assigned too many in my course work as it is.
23. Paradise Lost, John Milton
Read this for a class. I ended up loving it. Like reading a pointy-headed fantasy novel in verse, of course with huge religious themes and fire and brimstone and social commentary, and sex, and political doctrine, and satire and…
24. Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
Another vivid work from English Lit. I wrote a paper about the use of boasting in Beowulf and used this volume. We read it in high school out of the humongous Norton’s Anthology with its teeny-tiny print, all written out in prose. YAWN! This modern translation made the poem ring in bearable tones.
25. My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, slave narratives
I bought this book on a trip to James Monroe’s house, Ash Lawn, outside of Charlottesville. Turns out that the publisher is located in Winston-Salem. First hand account of life under slavery.
26. German Boy,Wolfgsang W.E. Samuel
My parents gave this book to me to read. Sadly, I have to admit that I haven’t gotten to it yet.
27. Slow Burn: Burn Fat Faster by Exercising Slower, Stu Mittleman
This is an exercise book that I actually used for a while. If there is any book that I need to re-read it is this one!
28. Grendel, John Gardner
Beowulf from Grendels point of view. From the postmodern perspective of the “other.” Spellcheck doesn’t accept the word Grendel, talk about “othering.”
29. The non-Existent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, Italo Calvino
I read the non-Existent Knight for a class as well. I need to put more general reading texts in my bookshelf, assigned reading isn’t the same as the books I actually would read by choice. Still, this is the great Calvino.
30. Without Feathers, Woody Allen
A loaned book from my sister Lindsay, I’ve read excerpts. Very funny. Especially the piece about going to the prostitute for intellectual stimulation.
31. The Partner, John Grisham
I keep meaning to read Grisham. As a result I’ve collected five of six of his books and started all of them. I need a private beach for a month and no other reading choices to accomplish this. This title somehow ended up in the shelf.
32. Richard III, Shakespeare
Read this for class as well. Okay, here’s the deal with me and Shakespeare. I haven’t ever been bitten by the bug. There is no un-philistine reason for this, only the fact that the long lamenting soliloquies make me queasy. There, it’s said. Hate me if you will. Maybe someone will bring me around someday.
33. Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson
Wish I could say I’ve read a single word of this book. Can’t say that though.
34. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
I’ve started this masterpiece, five, maybe six times. I figured if I could manage War and Peace I could manage this. I figured wrong. Possibly another month on a private island for this one.
35. Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Leo Tolstoy
See #33.
36. Tarantula, Bob Dylan
I got this at a second hand store for eight dollars. It’s a first edition, but other than that it’s unreadable. But that’s just me. I would try to tackle it again but I don’t want to remove it from the little zip-lock bag it came in.

So that’s the top shelf of my bookcase. I’d say I came out about 70/30 on what I’ve read of its contents and what I haven’t. Of course I’m adding points to the read list if I’ve read a book twice.:-)

Tender, Moveable Safety

2007-02-05T21:20:00.000-05:00

I was waiting around campus a couple of weeks ago on a Friday afternoon. This was the first time I'd ever been on campus after all the classes were finished for the week, when the students, I imagine, are grouping (I realize how easy it to read that word as groping) in their dorms or apartments between the time of serious study and serious partying. The entire campus, it seemed to me, was like a ghost-town, and I wandered out of my home-away-from-home, the library, to walk the long straight path up to Friendly Avenue in order to cross it at rush hour and explore the used book store across from the college. The busy street seemed the antithesis of the deserted campus, and there was a feeling that I could either be crushed by the rush or buried by the solitude. I timed the lights correctly this time, I had almost been pummeled by a truck turning left the first time I crossed here, and made my way past the Deli and into the book store.

I was greeted by a traditional (that’s what traditional-aged college students are called here) student with a very friendly hello. Not sure whether she worked there or was just hanging out, I waited for a forthcoming “may I help you.” No such thing came forth. I realized soon that she was killing time talking to the young man behind the counter. I began to wander the stacks.

And there were plenty of stacks, all stuffed to the ceiling with books and categorized efficiently. The place smelled like my grandmothers house used to, the smell that old books take on after years sitting in a shelf waiting to be plucked, so their bindings can be loosened and they can receive some fresh air. I came in looking for something specifically, probably Tobias Wolff—this guy has become my personal obsession, just like when I finally “got” the Grateful Dead or Reggae, I spent the following year trying to obtain all I could from these “discoveries”—but I ended up going through the alphabetized fiction section backwards, searching for authors of interest or titles that sounded compelling. At the same time, I eavesdropped on the conversation between the student and the counter-man. It didn’t really feel like eavesdropping though because they weren’t speaking secretively or about anything that they seemed to want to conceal. In fact the counter-man seemed particularly proud to tell of his bass guitar, which was rare, or old, or both, I can’t remember. The young woman flipped through a book of photographs and made arbitrary comments, unrelated to the bass guitar. Both seemed quite likable.

I have the habit of checking publication information in notable books that look old. I like the idea of first editions, although I don’t know enough about old books to know what a good first edition is and what isn’t. I don’t really care about that. I like reading first editions, I’ve found lately, unless they were printed in the eighteenth century or something and are overly dusty, musty or stiff. This is going to sound incredibly snooty, but I really love to read a first edition Scribner’s. This revelation wasn’t necessarily the cause of my trip to the second-hand book store, but rather the result of it. Because I walked away with two first printings, both Scribner’s, and because I got both for very cheap (a very big bonus, but who knows, maybe you can’t give these books away in other places) I felt very virtuous and literary. When I approached the counter and handed my treasures over to be rung up, I looked for an expression of acknowledgement from the counter-man, but he kept a straight face as he accepted my credit-card.

The young woman was still flipping through a book of photographs of what looked like Olympic athletes vaulting over things and hurling heavy objects. One photo showed a girl contorted so unusually on a balance beam that for a moment there was a pause, and I blurted out “Is that Nadia…?” At the same time, the counter-man said “Mary Lou Retton.” He was right. Nadia was years earlier. I remembered her, they didn’t; they couldn’t.

As if to read my mind, the young-woman asked, “Do you remember this?” I feigned surprise and exaggeratedly exclaimed, “God no, way before my time.” She said “I remember.” She flipped a page and revealed a photograph of an athlete wearing a sombrero. I said “Now I remember the sombrero distinctly.” She laughed. I decided to out myself and said “I was seventeen then.” I was expecting surprise but she just turned the page to reveal a muscle-riddled man standing on his hands on a balance beam. “It doesn’t even look like those are his arms.” She said. “They really look like upside-down legs.” I remarked. They did in fact, and she concurred.

I walked out of the store with a first edition A Moveable Feast and Tender is the Night. I’ve read A Moveable Feast twice, once in Africa and again a year or two ago. I’ve never owned a copy though, and this addition is complete with dust jacket which shows a view, presumably, of the Left Bank, facing across the Seine. I’ve placed the book in the honored place above my desktop, next to Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls. I recently read the short piece about how Gertrude Stein contrived the name “Lost Generation,” from a petrol station attendant who had been insulted by one young expatriate. That’s how I remember the story anyway. I could have the facts backwards.

I have to say that the episode of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s road trip is one of my favorite pieces of writing. If you forget the tragedy of Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and read the piece as comedy, with Hemingway as the suffering road-nurse and Fitzgerald as the Norma Desmondesque prima-donna, all in Hemingway’s clipped, hard-boiled style, it is classic buddy-stuff. One usually doesn’t expect to laugh out loud while reading Hemingway, but this instance has provoked in me a moment of putting the book down and bowing my head up and down like an Inca at the alter. I like to speculate that Hunter S. Thompson was inspired by this piece when writing the legendary road sequences in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. There are many similarities.

I turned to Tender is the Night and finished it two or three days ago. It has been a long time since I’ve felt such escapism in reading a book. The themes are dismal: alcoholism, infidelity, disintegrating marriages, suicide, mental illness, incest; did I miss any? It sounds terrible, I know, but the world that these characters move in is so gilded and the time period so distant and dreamlike (between the wars), that it felt like knowing the Europe my grandparents knew—my grandfather was a British diplomat.

The main character, with the name worthy of a porn star, Dick Diver, (sorry I had to go there), gradually comes unglued through his marriage to a patient—he is a psychiatrist—by at once feeling trapped by her need for him and his longing to conduct an affair with a young American movie star. Like most Fitzgerald, no one really gets what they want because no one really knows what they want. But all of the characters seemed likable (I use that word too much I know, maybe in the hope that likeability will come back in fashion), probably for their ability to try to provide what others want of them. Modern fiction, in my plebian opinion, does little of that, where the conflict comes from one selfish person bumping up against the next. So, if there is a tragedy where a faulty but likeable character meets his end I feel moved, but if a faulty, annoying character meets his end, say like in The Corrections, I say “finally!”

It is really hard to explain the difference I felt reading this novel from any other I’ve read. First of all, the chapters were prefaced with a simple ink print showing a scene from the chapter: a couple resting on a terrace, or a two-man sailboat tacking in high winds. The jacket did not come with the book, and I carefully used a book mark to keep my place. The book mark has the irritating image of the cartoon character Ziggy on it, and as I was reading, the squat Charlie Brown derived hapless loser distracted me, and I would have to turn the book mark around, where I keep it in the back pages. I truly believe that there is something different about reading first additions. Maybe a better connection to the author, with the idea that the author was still alive when the book was manufactured. I don’t know, but the easy movement of Fitzgerald’s characters from the Riviera to Zurich and Geneva, from Paris to Rome combined with the loosened but otherwise undamaged binding, the comfortable weight of the book and the faint smell of upstairs guest bedrooms in old houses that emanated from the pages did, I must admit, enchant me. Tender is the Night may not be my favorite novel, but reading it might have been my most sublime reading experience.

I am now reading Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. I’m having trouble with it, though I’m only about seventy-five pages in. I’m not becoming attached to the characters (which is an infuriating criteria of mine which ruins many a perfectly good classic for me). The party scene early in the book, where the superior professor gets one-upped by the narrator’s wife’s ability to read Homer in Greek left me, God forgive me, feeling sorry for the superior professor and his wife. It could be that I’ve succumbed to what Stegner believes is envy over the Morgan’s and the Lang’s brilliance and vitality. It also could be that as Stegner describes the precipice-like wasp-nest of academia ladder-climbing, I realize that if I get into that world one day, with such a late start, it could kill me.

So why will I keep reading Crossing to Safety? Because I bought it, for one. Also for Stegner’s transformative descriptive powers which seem to catch emotions that can only be relayed by a master. Here’s an example:

"In its details, that dinner party was not greatly different from hundreds we
have enjoyed since. We drank, largely and with a recklessness born of
inexperience. We ate, and well, but who remembers what? Chicken Kiev,
saltimbocca, escalope de veau, whatever it was, it was the expression of a
civilized cuisine, as far above our usual fare as manna is above a baked potato."

So yes, after transcribing that passage I feel the need to end this post, this long meandering, unlearned baked potato of a post. With the help of some great authors, possibly I can get off the ground, like those fuzzy black and white images you see from time to time of ill-fortuned flying inventions that thwack and jolt but get little lift. But I’ll keep trying, to invent the one machine that can lift me upward, toward manna.

A Moment by the Water-Cooler

2007-01-18T12:04:00.000-05:00

I watched American Idol last night. Now, like many of the 70 million or so other Americans who watched it (I just made that figure up), I can’t seem to get the experience out of my mind. I have never been a fan of the show, but on Wednesday nights there very little on, and this is the only night I get to indulge in shlock TV and ice cream. I thought that the early rounds of auditions for this show would be interesting, but I only could take about an hour and fifteen minutes of the two hour cattle-call, or rather, in some cases, hog-calling-contest.

Now, meanness has always bothered me. It would be hypocritical to say that I am not guilty of it from time to time, but I hope that it is usually justified, say, when I’m speaking of the Republican Party or something (I believe you need to fight fire with fire). I experienced conflicting emotions, however, when I witnessed the three impeccably preened judges enduring a parade of Seattleites, with a wide range of talent, try for their shot at stardom. I wanted to hate the judges, especially the villainous (and, by now, richer than God) Simon, who veered between patronizing, mocking and cruel. But, on the other hand, I was amazed at how disillusioned some of the contestants were. Part of me (I think we’re seeing a wishy-washy theme here) wanted to route for Simon—or at least not hate him so much—when one contestant, whose opinion of herself far surpassed her ability (something that is so common in the everyday workplace), went on a tirade against the smug Brit. It was like watching two trains carrying e-coli crash head-on.

But there were no-talent contestants who were, even in the face of heartless criticism, gracious and humble. This is something that, to me, shows far more character and worth than the ability to jam thirty notes into one measure of music. My problem isn’t really with the judge’s reactions and comments; it is with the producer’s choice to hold the most talentless contestants up to nation-wide ridicule. If the show wanted to showcase a contestant who took a break from working the street corner to show her “wha-eva, I do wa I want,” attitude on national TV that’s one thing (a la Jerry Springer), but everyday Americans who have been baited by the pseudo-glam of the Fox network being mocked for not being “pretty” enough, or talented enough bothers me. One young man, who appeared to have been put up to it by his co-workers (like that smug prick Jim from The Office), embarrassed himself so vehemently that his shame seemed to radiate from the television set. The whole thing smacks of frat-boys getting the geek to down a bottle of vodka so they can get him to sleep with a goat or something.

But here’s the rub. This next segment is going to cause me to get “this man is a total hypocrite” tattooed onto my forehead. There was a brother and sister team whose father is a classical Indian musician. Both were extraordinarily good. Instead of choosing nauseating ballads by Journey, or tone-twisting neo-soul by Christine Aguilera, the young woman chose Summertime and the young man chose a song by Stevie Wonder. Simon blandly dismissed the sister for not having anything new in her voice, although I thought her version was awesome, but the brother was the only contestant whom Simon liked (during the time I was watching). Both “kids”, the sister is nineteen and the brother is seventeen, radiated genuine enthusiasm and spirit, and it was very difficult not to be totally charmed. So difficult, I’m afraid, that I believe that I am hooked for the season, provided that Wednesday is the primary night for the show.

Here is another admission. During the commercial break, while I was getting my second Polar Bar, I began to sing “Willin” by Little Feat. I tried to imagine the looks on the faces of the judges as I created a tone that was like a bleating sheep with acid-indigestion. I imagined Simon pausing with his pained expression fully intact, and finally giving me, what has now become his catchphrase, “What the bloody hell was that?” I realized, if the auditions come my way, I should be out of the country at the time.

As stated, I could only take a little more than half of the two-hour show. By nine-thirty I was dozing in front of Mythbusters with Jamie and Adam trying to send a wood-splinter through a latex model of someone’s head. Now there is a show that I would love to pass an audition for.

On Whining

2007-01-12T11:51:00.000-05:00

So I've read two pieces in the past twenty-four hours where the author complains about whining in other people's work. One was a superior toned memoir piece in the college's literary magazine whose author claimed that David Sedaris' writing was whiny. I like Sedaris, and someone close to me claimed that my writing reminded her of his. I would rather be compaired to Tobius Wolff, wishful thinking I know. Another person wrote about how she is making an effort not to whine about trivial things while so many people in the world have much more important things to complain about. This led me to ask myself if I whine in my work. I think I do, actually.

I think the main thing I am trying to do is force humor out of certain uncomfortable, awkward or painful moments. I believe there is a propensity for people to look for fault in anything that is foriegn to them. Say if I complain about being cold on the top of a hill. It is very easy to look at that statement and think, "well how many people ever get to be on a hill?" "How many people ever get the chance to climb a hill?" "How many people ever get the chance to even be cold?" So if I say I was cold on the top of a hill, and then I slid down on my butt, bumped my head on a root, while my little brother laughed at me," am I still whining? The point is not that I feel sorry for myself, but that I can look back now and find it funny, and hope, if there are people who still have a sense of humor out there, that others find it funny too.

My family sits around a lot and tells funny stories about what happened to them. At the time of the actual event we may have wanted to cry, scream, or punch something (hopefully not each other) but by the time the memory makes it to the dining room table at Thanksgiving the story has taken on a hilarious nature. "We'll laugh about this later." is the term that sums this phenomenon up. So, really, it is not the fact that tribulations are a learning experience so much, they are just a way to dominate the conversation for an hour or two during the holidays.

The things we really want to whine about, bad relationships, failed career choices, bad relationships--oh yea, I said that allready--stay in the background.I save my real whining for the lucky people who are closest to me. Believe me, my significant other can attest to this, I whine verbally all the time. Sometimes my whole day is dominated by "Why can'ts?" and "How comes."

I think where I'm going with this is maybe it isn't the fact that someone is complaining that is the issue. Maybe the complaint is about community. Comedians use "don't you hate it when..." in their acts all the time. I don't think, as an audience, we are supposed to recognise this as a whine, although it is. I think the point is to remind us that we are not alone in our irritability, vunerability, and pain. Getting us to laugh about it together is a good way of sharing the communal experience.

So, if someone complains about traffic or tax forms, I'm going to give them a break. These things drive me crazy too. And it would be hypocritical to state otherwise. I will complain (Hell, I might even write a three page blog post),about these things. At the same time, I will never forget how fortunate I am to be able to fill out tax forms, sit in traffic, and tell funny stories with my family.

P.S. I have to ask also, aren't the people who are writing about people who whine just whining about whiny people?

Roommates

2007-01-10T12:17:00.000-05:00

You know, I’m probably not the easiest person to live with. That’s not hard to admit sitting here in the chilly environs of my office, where denial is just a river in Egypt, and public pride is of no use. I’ve more often than not had trouble with roommates since I was first assigned one at the annoying boarding school I attended. Part of that trouble, I have to admit, is my fault. I’m a snob at times, who becomes unforgiving of quirks and tics after only a few hours, although I am loath to recognize my own (I used to snort). Someone chewing and slurping a bowl of cereal can tap into my basest instincts. If, God forbid, I am ever under torture, (not so hard to imagine with the current administration) all the interrogator would have to do is ask me questions with frosted flakes churning in his jaws and milk dribbling down his chin. I’d cave in an instant.

Its things like these that create unfair resentment toward innocent co-habitués. But, that being said, I’ve had some real duds when it comes to roommates. My first real roommate was at the above mentioned boarding school. He was from Chattanooga, and he had the couth of a drunk flamingo. At times we got along, although we loathed each other at first. His real sin, the one that had me hold a grudge against him through the entire year, was eating all the food in my first care-package from home. This was a deplorable slight, and I’ve still never forgiven him. Maybe a couple of rounds of therapy would help me here.

My senior year I had two roommates, and there was tension there too. One roommate settled things for me early on when he slammed me up against a wall and threatened me with a broom because I wasn’t keeping my side of the room clean. I ended up becoming friends with him, but kept away whenever he was on a cleaning binge. The other roommate wrote poetry, had a steady girlfriend, won literary prizes, and received high honors every semester. I hated him, of course.

We survive that year together and looking back I realize that they were good roommates. I cringe to think what they would remember about me. I sometimes meet people who knew me long ago and they’ll say things like, “remember that time that you ripped off the head of a frog down by the creek.” Now, I know, that I’ve never harmed a frog that wasn’t already dead, and that was in biology class, but the statement leaves just the slightest doubt as to what I remember and what I don’t. Note to FBI profilers: That last example is purely hypothetical.

When I was in Africa, someone had the foresight to give me my own living space. I really like this arrangement best, present situation excluded (note the disclaimer). But my incompatibility showed itself in other ways. On a long trip to Zimbabwe, I found myself very agitated by one of our traveling companions, an English public-schooler who made Gore Vidal look unsmug and humble. His refusal to get into the spirit of things—which in my mind meant getting tipsy on cheap beer every night—really got me down. We ended up parting ways, he and his girlfriend opting to hitchhike thousands of miles rather than endure my funk. There was a kind of equality in our spoiledness which made us somewhat more alike than I ever like to admit.
When the South African government turned down my second application for a study visa (this was during Apartheid and no American undergrads were being granted visas, although I had already been accepted to Rhodes University) I went into a small tailspin and ended up in Greensboro. This was not the best place to land after spending a year watching history take place in Africa. I rented an apartment that was way above my means, and soon was forced to find a roommate. I ended up with a guy who was the boyfriend of a girl I knew in high school. He would come home drunk and throw furniture at the wall. Once, when I was away, he had a party, and when I returned my room had been rearranged by one of his friends who reportedly had had sex all night in my bed with allegedly the ugliest woman anyone had ever seen. There was body hair all over.

So, the point here might be that its not just me, but sometimes it is a little bit me.

The last person on the list of roommates is a guy I roomed with when I was at culinary school in Portland, Oregon. He was from Atlanta and was somewhere around six-seven or six-eight. Really, the guy was gigantic. We got along very well the first couple of months. We shared an apartment in the oddly named suburb of Beaverton. We located a decent watering-hole and attended classes together, and we played one-on-one basketball where I would get soundly trounced but was able to improve my hook-shot, which was the only thing you could do against the guy. We were both in different stages of long-distance relationships, he was trying to remain separated from his wife, and I had just begun a relationship with Margaret. The telephone became a life-line.

The trouble started when he informed me that his wife was moving in with us. I maintained a “wait and see” attitude, but I was a little wary. She arrived not long after and, again, it seemed that it would be no problem. She was a little eccentric—she would sit on the couch all day and read piles of library books, however, she was afraid to drive a car—but she was friendly enough, ‘til she got to drinkin’. She was the first redneck genius I had ever met. It was a very strange combination, to hear someone talk about how “twawd the end of his laff, Twalstoy, only ceered abawt freein’ the serfs. Hun, go dwn ta store an git me a pack of Misty Ultra-Light 100s.”

About a month later, after hearing about her nine-year-old son day in and day out, I was informed that he was coming out to live with us as well. The kid had the brain power of his mother, and the eccentricities and insecurities to go with it. Plus he was a nine-year old kid with the squirms and a habit of asking just the wrong questions. But, I have to say, I made an effort to be friendly, and I was told that the kid liked me well enough. Never-the-less, the apartment was getting crowded.

I came home from work one day, and was watching TV, when I started noticing a squawking. I asked what in the world it was and was told that it was a parakeet that they had just purchased. As they told me this, a little fluorescent green bird hopped into the room, jumped on the couch, and preceded to peck me on the head. All of my roommates began to laugh. “I think he laaks yoo,” One of them said.

At four in the morning, the bird would start squawking. He would keep this up most of the morning, with his owners snoring obliviously in the next room. I awoke to this racket every morning, and it was getting to me in the worst way.

One morning, while I rushing around, late for work, I began to tie my shoe and the lace broke. The bird had chewed through it. I rigged some sort of lace and cursed a little as I headed off to work. By the third week of living with the bird, the couch that I used in the living room had been covered with little white parakeet droppings. The camels back was beginning to crack.

The showdown came over the phone bill. The bills were high, due to the length of time that we spent making long distance calls, but I let them handle the actual payment. I would give them the money for my share. They had been late a couple of times but it ended up getting paid eventually, and there wasn’t much more time left on the lease so I was okay with the arrangement. But this time, the bill never got paid. I had given them a large chunk of the payment, and a week later the phone was disconnected. I asked them what was going on and only got a passive-aggressive response. After a day or two I began to get highly agitated. They kept telling me that they would take care of it, but wouldn’t tell me why they couldn’t pay it and get us reconnected. Soon the situation deteriorated into silent stonewalling.

I realized that the man had a drug problem and I was becoming certain that this was where the money had gone. I ended up confronting him, not an easy thing to do with someone who is several inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than you. His response was to say “bite me” and leave the apartment. His wife, left to fend for herself, locked herself and her son in their room, and I was left with no choice but to go to class with nothing resolved. Apparently they decided to resolve it themselves. When I got home from class, they, and all their stuff, including the bird, were gone.

I threw myself on the mercy of the apartment complex, and was granted a month to find a new place to live. I didn’t have the means to keep the apartment on my own. Eventually, I found a place right across the street from Nike village that was a better apartment, and fifty dollars cheaper a month. My roommates were normal guys, with very little hang-ups, and I got along quite well with them. I occupied a loft overlooking the living room, and I could study during the day while they were at work (I was attending night classes at this time). I left Portland with the bad roommate experience behind me.

Those were the last real roommates I ever had. Now I have a housemate, but a girlfriend is a different category, there are bonds there that go deeper than sharing the rent together. We annoy each other sure, but it may be possible that all of the ups and downs I’ve had with roommates in the past were meant to prepare me for this one. I’ve lightened up a little, I like to think anyway, but I still may need help in the category of loud cereal chewing. That one, unfortunately, may never go away.

2006, Year in Review

2007-01-09T16:21:00.000-05:00

I really don’t have a topic to for this blog entry but I guess I’ll just go free form and see what happens. I haven’t written anything about it being a new year yet so maybe I’ll write about that. I want to write about last year, however, because except for a few scares and bumps, the main scare being my father’s health, it was an exceptionally good year. Yes, 2006 was one of the best, and I believe I was due for one. So already, in a few short sentences, I have formulated a topic: 2006, the year in review.

So I will try not to make this like one of the form Christmas card family updates that people send you which I’ll only read the first sentence of each paragraph to see if Mary got her PHD or Ed’s out of jail yet. I just want to list some of the things that I am proud of.

I started out the year with a long overdue trip to see my sister Emily and her husband Bob in New York. This was his last year at Union Seminary, and I wanted to take advantage of the fact that they had an apartment in the city before they had to give it up and return permanently to their house in Connecticut. We spent the week rushing from the Museum of Natural History to the New York Public Library, to various cathedrals and even made it out to Connecticut to watch the BCS championship. Bob is a very enthusiastic tour guide, and by the time I got home I was very fired up to start the semester and really make the year count. It was an excellent way to begin the New Year, and I kept up the momentum for a couple of weeks.

The spring semester had me taking four classes and working full time. This was a very hectic schedule. One of my classes was meant to take care of the dreaded science requirement for my degree. I chose Botany. Bad choice. I told my classmates that I was a history major just looking to fulfill a requirement, and one of them turned to me and said “and you chose Dr. Keegan’s class?!” I took this as a bad sign. This was by far the hardest class I’ve had, and it is a 100 level class! I just can’t imagine what his molecular chemistry class is like. Is there such a subject as molecular chemistry? That’s how scientifically illiterate I am. I soldiered through it and ended up with a respectable grade, but I will never look at a tree or a blade of grass with same appreciation that I used to. Trees provoke just the slightest degree of resentment in me now.

The other classes I took went very well though. I took my history seminar class and wrote about the Colonization of Liberia during the 19th century, a much more manageable subject than xylem and phloem. I got an A, and my advisor suggested that I become a teacher’s aid for this semester’s seminar. I’m looking forward to watching, and helping, the class survive the experience. I also managed to get an A- in class with a notoriously tough but brilliant professor, and this gave me a little consolation for the Botany nightmare.

Before the Christmas of 2005, my father decreed that no one was to give him a Christmas present that year. Instead we were to send contributions to our friend’s medical mission in South Africa. Prompted by this suggestion, we began brainstorming for ways to raise money, and I suggested that we hold a dinner. I had raised money this way before to fund a trip that I took to Costa Rica in 1991, and had been amazed at how much money I had been able to raise with just a couple of chicken pies and some desserts. We chose my parent’s church as the “volunteer” venue for the event, and decided to hold the fund raiser during fall break. So, on a break from cell walls and John Dryden, Margaret and I drove to Charlottesville with chaffing dishes stuffed into the back of her Subaru. We let my Mom put us through the paces as we pulled off a dinner that managed to raise almost $7,000. Our goal had been $5,000. My sister Lindsay, an artist, donated a painting for the silent auction which helped to push us over the top.

At the end of the semester, I was honored with an award and a small scholarship from the history department. I was also selected to join Phi Alpha Theta, an honor society for historians. I remember feeling very overwhelmed at times during the semester, but now it seems like it was pretty exciting.

I also had the opportunity to see my niece, Mary Katherine, graduate from high school. She started as a freshman at UNCG in the fall. Amazing, I used to baby-sit her just yesterday.

As the spring semester ended, I prepared for summer school. During the summer I was able to take care of my language requirement and fulfill more credits toward my English degree (I’m a double major, History/English) with a great class called Cult Films. Also during this time, the folk/blues/whatever-kind-of-music-we-want-to-play trio I’m in played a number of times at a bistro downtown. Those were some good times with close friends.

The fall semester had me taking only three classes, but one of them was English 400 with the notorious but fair professor from last semester. This was an extremely difficult and rewarding experience, filled with scholarly articles written by men and women who write in a language forsaken by mortal men. Very Challenging! Two history classes rounded out the semester and got me closer to my history degree.

We also held another fund raising dinner for our friends in Africa. This time it was in Winston-Salem, and we raised yet another $7,000. Yes. I have to say, this is the proudest I’ve been of something lately.

I also met a couple of people around campus who play bluegrass, and we held impromptu jam sessions a number of times. This was a great diversion on days I had buried myself with history and English.

I turned forty, so it wasn’t all good, but I’m getting used to it. I can actually form the words in my mouth now, and sometimes I can even articulate them. It’s not so bad being middle-aged, mainly because I definitely don’t feel middle-aged. What a terrible expression—middle-aged. I prefer fully-matured.That doesn't sound quite right either. How about ten-year-old trapped in a forty-year-old's body?

My father got sick and we were scared for a while there. He is much better now and much of the worry is gone, so that turned out for the better as well.

And as 2006 turned into 2007, I acquired a notebook and a wireless router so I can read and write blogs anywhere in the house. It was a good way to kick off the New Year, and hopefully it will be one of a series of things to be grateful about. Seems like 2006 was filled with such things.

Chicken Pox

2007-01-04T11:19:00.000-05:00

I want to write a post about having the chicken pox. I’m supposed to be going buy a new dryer today because our old one lurches and screeches the clothes dry, and recently lost the ability to heat up. I don’t like doing this kind of thing, but the clothes are piling up upstairs and I’m down to my purple, “only wear in an emergency,” shirt. Amazing, who would have thought that one day I would be using writing as a form of procrastination.

So if the theme of this post is the chicken pox, then it must be one of those childhood memory pieces, right? Wrong. I had the chicken pox at the tender age of thirty-five. I’ve always been a johnny-come-lately when it comes to music, politics, sports and infectious diseases. So I waited thirty years to get this one out of my system—I should have gotten it over with when I was six.

We think that the cause came from sleeping in a bed that my father had slept in while he was suffering from some weird condition known as the shingles. This is not to be confused with another skin infliction of equal severity known as the floor tiles. Daddy took his condition in stride, making up a little rhyme to help him in his discomfort, something like: “jingle jingle, I’ve got the shingles.” I thought it was clever, and I wasn’t worried about catching shingles or any other sickness on that particular trip up to see them.

This was in winter, when the sun never quite reaches an apex in the sky and sunny days mean constantly squinting through an afternoon, due to perma-glare. It is a terrible time to be sick, although when is a good time? “I caught diphtheria in early June, it was simply lovely, had the entire clinic to myself.” But winter, with its leafless trees and icy drafts, makes sickness pretty hopeless. So when I woke up at home feeling like my blood had been replaced by sludgy crude oil, and saw the blemishes covering my entire body (itchy blemishes at that), I felt winter was somehow in on the conspiracy.

When I was nineteen, I got the opportunity to work in a hospital in South Africa. One of the things I did early on was take photographs of people suffering from leprosy for a clinical study. The patients were in varying stages of the disease, and as I looked at my face in the mirror I identified, for the first time, with those South Africans. Yea, I know, Chicken Pox is definitely not as severe as leprosy, but it was hard for me to understand that at the time. Main point here is, I felt like hell.

But I had to be sure it was chicken pox. I called my mom to see if she had any record of me having chicken pox as a kid. Unbelievably, she was able to quickly produce records of our childhood illnesses and vaccinations. She relayed them over the phone, and it appeared that I had never had the illness, although my sisters had. A trip to the skin center at the hospital confirmed that if I didn’t have chicken pox, whatever I had was damn close to chicken pox. How’s that for a pinpoint diagnosis? So I “kinda had” chicken pox.

The doctor told me that whatever it was, it was highly contagious and that I would have to remain at home for at least two weeks. I pretended that this news disappointed me. “Aw, shucks, what am I going to do for two weeks?” I called work and broke the news to them, and listened as my former boss tried to find angles to have me work from home (impossible in the food service field) and prevent me from cashing in PTO time. He was unsuccessful at both, and all he could do was wait for the doctor to okay my return to work.

For the first two or three days I could do nothing but feel like a pile of rash-infected refuse. I seem to remember a debilitating headache which intensified with every inch I tried to lift my head off the pillow. The doctor had told me to take benadril, and Margaret bought me a topical cream for my rashes. The cream, however, did not react well with my face. In fact, it had the opposite effect of healing, and created an excruciating burning which lasted for an entire night. I spent the sleepless night with a wet towel over my face to comfort the searing skin. One of the worst nights of my life.

Back to South Africa. This interlude is not for the squeamish. The night of the evil face cream reminds me of another terrible night I had in the first week that I arrived in South Africa. I had just come from Scotland in January, and now that I was in the Southern Hemisphere, I noticed that my ghostly pale complexion contrasted sharply with the Tropicana tans of the “white” South African kids enjoying mid-summer. I had to act quickly. So the second day after my arrival I sat out in the sun for a good five or six hours. This, obviously, resulted in the worst sunburn of my life.

The family I was staying with had employed me (at their peril—a work ethic was still a long way off for me at this time) to paint the little round guest hut behind their house. A few days after my “tanning session,” I was in the hut working with paint and paint thinner. As I mixed the paint and cleaned the brushes I noticed that my skin was peeling at a rapid rate. I figured that the paint thinner was accelerating the peeling skin of my bad sunburn. It was pretty horrific, but somehow fascinating at the same time. I literally peeled a piece of dead skin off of my front torso the size of a small throw rug.

The discomfort came that night. The exposed new skin was so sensitive that it created the most agonizing itching imaginable. I was unable to stop scratching the entire night, and I was on the verge of waking the family up and asking for help, but I figured at the age of nineteen I was too old for late night pleas for sympathy. I suffered through that night and a couple more, and eventually, grew into my new skin and resumed normal, slacker activity. I developed a healthy respect for the African sun, however.

Back in the third circle of chicken pox hell, I slowly began to feel better. The exhaustion and headaches went away after a few days, and I was left only with the skin rashes which still had me looking like an extra in the leper colony scene of Papillion. My face was patches of white, pink, rouge and crimson—it looked kind of like the paint swatch section of a home improvement store. It didn’t really itch like I thought chicken pox was supposed to, it just looked slightly scary.

During those long two weeks—the freedom from work gave way to boredom around day five—I watched a lot of television. Ironically, the program that sticks out in my mind from that time was a showing of The Elephant Man. I’ve never seen this film on television as much as the time when I had chicken pox. I watched it, and when John Hurt yelled “I am not an animal!” I identified with him greatly. When Margaret would come home from work and comment on how my rashes looked pretty bad, I would shout “I am not an animal!” She failed to find this funny.

The first time I went out after catching the chicken pox, I was returning from the store and was pulled by a policeman. I can’t remember what pretext he pulled me for, maybe failing to use my turn signal, but as he checked my license and glanced at my face, he did a kind of double take and backed up slightly. I expected him to go “whoa… what the hell happened to you?” He quickly told me to be more careful, and let me go.

My return to work was met with equally silent astonishment. The contagious part of the trauma was over, but the blemishes hung around for another few weeks. It was maneuvered (because of the way I looked, I believe) that I would not have to deal with the members of the stuffy little country club I worked for. As usual, everyone betrayed their opinions through body language and facial expressions. Life went on though; eventually the blemishes faded, and the ordeal left only an opportunity for a story.

When I think back on it though, I am again reminded of an incident in South Africa. At the hospital, I followed one of the surgeons on their rounds. We came upon a woman whose angry and drunk husband had pushed her into a bonfire. Her entire back was covered in third degree burns. There is no way I can compare my slight discomfort from chicken pox to the agony this woman was experiencing. The degree of her trauma is sobering when I start to imagine that chicken pox should be a subject of pity. The woman will have to live with her injury for the rest of her life. I, on the other hand, only have to be reminded of my illness when, every so often, TCL shows The Elephant Man.

Nemesis

2006-12-22T12:54:00.000-05:00

This happened right after Thanksgiving. My dog Booker is your typical lab. He is intelligent, friendly, happy, and can sleep for hours at my feet until he is jolted into animation by the almost silent sound of a leash being taken down from the shelf by the door. When this happens, it is a struggle to get the leash attached to his collar because he will turn in quick circles, like an otter with a bum leg, until you can catch him and put the leash’s latch onto the collar’s hook. We have a friend, Phillip, who comes to walk him during the week, and when he shows up Booker jumps about six feet in front of the door to get a view of the approaching walker. It is mayhem for a couple of minutes as Phillip bustles Booker out the door, and about an hour later they return with Booker panting hard and plopping his often wet body down on the oriental rug.

Booker has learned tricks—he has really applied himself; he’s worked hard. He has learned to catch a Frisbee at fifty yards on the fly. He gets the paper for us in the morning. Recently I’ve taught him to shake, but it’s more like a gimmee five because he slaps at my hand instead of placing it firmly in my grasp; and often he embellishes this trick by jumping on me and forcing me to admit that brushing a dogs teeth is not an act of over-pampering. He looks at me sometimes with his intelligent eyes and I know he wants to tell me something, something about what happened at the dog park or how many trees he marked that day, so I’ll rub his ears and toss him a piece of pizza crust (he’s good at catching those too) and he’ll eventually lie down at my feet, content, after completing his con.

I spent Thanksgiving day with my family, and ate more than I think I’ve possibly ever eaten in my entire life. It’s hard to admit this gastronomical discrepancy, but for some reason the idea of rewarding myself for hard work that I’d been doing meant piling two helpings of purposely rich and fattening food onto the biggest plate I could find and not giving myself time to even taste it as I scarfed the entire mass down my gullet. After the cramps subsided a bit (they came on about the time I had my first slice of pumpkin cheesecake, although that didn’t stop me from having another) my brother-in-law invited me for a run. I declined, but asked him how far he was going. “Three miles,” he said and then took off. He was back in less than thirty minutes.

All of this has a point. The solitary orgy I partook in on Thanksgiving gave way to a pendulum of guilt and forced me to evaluate my health. Eating conspicuously while my father was at the other end of the table suffering from what was later diagnosed as congestive heart failure was a bit thoughtless, although I don’t believe anyone took offence—probably no one noticed. The pendulum, however, had swung, and the next week saw me rising at six-thirty to run, what I figured was, three miles. It took me far more than thirty minutes though. But in my defense, I had Booker with me. He tends to slow me down.

So on day two of this extended period of health consciousness (it lasted all of two days), I was running in the oldest part of town known as Old Salem with Booker along. Booker is usually pretty good on a run, although he does much better on a walk, as do I. We sync pretty well unless there is something he just has to sniff or a familiar tree that is in need of re-freshening. If I am not diligent and attentive my arm can get yanked pretty hard, and soon I am forced to realize that yelling at your dog in public is an extremely socially unacceptable act. Weather is a factor as well. We can’t run in the summer because Booker’s black coat acts like solar panels and he gets extremely overheated. The best time for running with Booker is when the weather resembles his natural environment—think Nova Scotia in early March.

On this day the weather conditions were a little warm, and Booker was falling behind, which meant that I had to run with my left arm a bit behind me. It was looking like a good enough reason to stop running and start walking, but I hadn’t reached that point yet. We were running down Main Street which is literally the original main street of town that extends all the way into the modern downtown area. This segment is lined with restored or reconstructed 18th century buildings and is paved with embedded cobblestones. The sidewalks are paved with uneven bricks, and running here is a careful endeavor. If the streets are relatively empty, it is better to run on the street than the sidewalk because there is less of a chance of breaking a femur. We were on a downhill stretch, and I was catching my breath as we had just finished an uphill grade that I probable could have walked faster than I ran it. Maybe the endorphins had me in a daze, but my mind seemed to have been blank at that moment.

Suddenly there was a great deal of barking and Booker shot from his lethargic pace right behind me to my right side and forward, at a position of two o’clock. I was jerked out of my lull by the sight of a small rat-like blur headed straight in our direction. I vaguely caught the image of a man shouting “No” or “stop” or something, but nothing registered right away. Then I realized what was happening, it was Toby, the Jack Russell, and he was charging for Booker’s neck.

I don’t really know the dog’s real name, although I’ve heard it shouted by his owner a few times. Usually, at that time, nomenclature is the last thing I am concerned with as my primary objective is keeping the eight pound devil-spawn from ripping out my dog’s esophagus. It’s sort of like Gremlins meets Benji. I feel Toby is an apt name for the dog though; nothing against the name Toby, in fact it sounds just innocuous enough so the ferocity of the actual beast is put in relief against the cuteness of the name. The real name of the beast should be Himmler, or Beelzebub, or Bubo, or Virus.

We’ve had confrontations before. On a stretch through the Moravian cemetery, known as God’s Acre, an anything but God-like creature came darting out of the cross-paths and bit Booker on the butt. In this instance the owner also ineffectually protested to his dog, who definitely controls the relationship. After wrenching Booker away from the Hitler of dogs, I breathlessly made some remark about the dog having a Napoleon complex and we went on our way. But we would encounter the Jack Russell in the future. Thankfully, at these times, he would be on a leash, which is how he should have stayed. But for some reason, at times, his owner gives him free reign of Old Salem knowing that this little dog is capable of dismembering a bull, like those piranhas you read about who reduce a horse to a mere skeleton in a matter of minutes.

Here is my theory as to why the Jack Russell hates Booker so much. I’m sure dog experts will disagree, and I don’t profess to being knowledgeable about the animal kingdom, but I believe that dogs instinctively do as they were bred to do for hundreds of years. Toby, being a Terrier, was bred to bring larger animals, such as boar, down so the hunter could get a good shot or whatever (I know even less about hunting). When Toby sees Booker he doesn’t see what I see, a friendly harmless pooch with bad breath and a fondness for cheese, he sees a snorting, rooting, wild pig. The confusion is understandable, living in Old Salem; Toby has probably never seen a pig. But Booker is about the right size and color of the Belgian Wild Boar or something, so Toby goes for it; it is his big chance to show what he’s born to do; to exude his purpose. Either that or he’s protecting his master, I haven’t quite decided.

Either way, on this day he was bearing down on me and Booker with astonishing speed. It would be interesting to do a size/speed ratio on this dog. At this level I’m amazed that he didn’t break the sound barrier.

When he reached the point where he was about two feet away Toby slowed up so he could ready himself for a strategic lunge. As I said earlier, Booker had shot forward to greet the attack. I had stopped running and was desperately trying to pull Booker behind me to get between the two pissed off dogs. The owner, some twenty yards away, seemed to be still in the same spot, yelling absently, and taking his time in gaining control over his dog. By pulling Booker back, I inadvertently exposed his backside to yet another butt-bite. Before I could stomp loudly in front of Toby to get him to back off, the Terrier had given Booker a good chomp on the rump. My reaction to this was to let Booker defend himself and let the leash out. Maybe a good bite from a set of jaws with much more poundage per square inch would settle the matter for Toby.

This was a bad idea. Toby was so fast, and by this time Booker and I were so entangled in the leash, that by having Booker go forward, I again exposed him to Toby. This time Toby went for Booker’s neck. He bit down and held on. This was a tragic looking spectacle, and I took the opportunity to swing the entire mass of lab, terrier and leash around and give Toby a hard and well placed punt. It made a little hollow sound; like poonk. He let go.

For the first time I witnessed Toby without resolve and in retreat. He ran backwards a little, still barking, but with less ferocity, and scooted off to our left and out of sight. His owner was somewhere near, but I didn’t even bother to try and look at him. I wouldn’t have made a half-hearted witticism about Napoleon this time. I quickly untangled myself and Booker and kept on jogging, trying to put distance between Toby and Booker. Booker kept his stride, and a few hundred yards down the street I stopped and checked him out. He seemed fine. No problem.

We haven’t encountered Toby since. I have a feeling that his owner took little heed of the fact that his blood-thirsty beast wanted to murder an innocent Frisbee catcher. There are some folks who are oblivious of the effect that their sphere has on others. Toby is probably still calling the shots around that house, and it won’t do me any good to stay pissed about it. One thing I won’t do is report the dog—have the dog suffer for the shortcomings of his owner. But if the dog comes our way again, I believe that I will be justified in scoring the winning field goal for Booker State.

Of Garage Roofs and Witches

2006-12-15T10:56:00.000-05:00

Exams are over!

Memory is strange. I’m trying to remember details from a fifth grade play and already I’m not sure if it was in the fifth grade or sixth. So I have to rationalize a little. We moved to England halfway through the sixth grade so there is less of a chance that I would have taken part in a school play that year, but it’s not impossible. So I am about 89% sure that the play was during my fifth year of elementary school. All I can really say for sure is that there was a lot of nine-square being played that year.

Two-square, four-square, and nine-square were the predominant activities for us outside of the classroom, during recess, where tricks of the real world were learned. Two-square is basically a game where opponents stand in drawn out squares and bounce one of those blood-red elementary school issue bouncy balls in a diminished, net-free game, similar to tennis. Four-square upped the ante by pitting four opponents against each other. The objective was to become king by working your way around the square to become the server. Once you gained this position, you could increase your clout around school by holding the position for a long period of time. To stay king until recess was over was pretty damn good.

The hit sensation of that year though was nine-square. This took the concept further by placing nine opponents on a grid of nine squares and let them have at it. To make king in this game was a joyful event, and, if it happened to me, it took all of the experience that I had learned in eleven years to hold on to the position for a couple of rounds. The guy in the square next to the king square was the one you had to look out for, he was gunning for you. As king, you would send your serve down to the peons at the beginning of the grid and hope that they would battle it out, and screw it up, so you would not have to defend your position. But if the ball came back your way, you may find yourself in a battle to see how softly you could place the ball over the line to force an out. Soft volleys and slams were usually the most effective weapons.

Nine-square was so popular that the two-square and four-square areas often sat empty, while the entire fourth, fifth and sixth grades participated in nine-square. There was always a line—a waiting list—with shouting and breaking in line, and scuffles and admonishments from the principle and taunts; and then you would step up and see how far you got. It was better than kickball, basketball (we were still too short), and dodge ball—where a game could end quickly with some kid’s glasses being knocked off by an early-growth-spurt victim wielding an under-inflated bouncy ball.

After recess the class would return with color in their cheeks and try to settle down. Mistakes and victories would be carried back into the classroom and reported, or distorted, depending on who was doing the talking. The teasing was carried on until our teacher, Mr. Richardt, a funny, hippyish young man who had a beer can pyramid in his living room and whom we all admired, came in and quieted things down. Then it was back to math, or religion, or social studies; and nine square was forgotten, unless you had made king that day, and then, periodically, you could privately bask in that pride.

It was sometime during the nine-square craze of ’78 that the idea of putting on a play was introduced to the class. I believe it was Mrs. Burroughs, the social studies teacher, who put the plan on the table. Most of the class seemed semi-interested, but a couple of the students really took to the idea and began asking questions and trying to develop ideas for topics and so forth. I believe I must have been interested because that night I remember mentioning it at dinner and my family helped me brainstorm topics. If it was up to me, we would do a WWII era action piece culminating with me heroically jumping off a structure as high as our garage roof. I had just learned to do this. I twisted my ankle on the first attempt, but the roof just sat there, taunting me, so when I got better, I mastered the drop and roll technique I had seen in the movies and, to my amazement, it worked. I made this the climax of every WWII scenario I invented from then on. Every game included a need to jump off the garage roof.

The topic I can remember choosing was the crusades. My father had a large book about the subject which contained alluring paintings of knights on the cover and dense, minute, unreadable text inside. The fact that I understood nothing about the crusades did not dissuade me from the topic. It had knights, and swords, and amour; the plot really wasn’t all that important. We could make it up as we went along, like the WWII games.

When the subject of the play came up in class, I was ready to make my case for the crusades, but before I could even formulate my first point, Mary Ann Lofton was already introducing her topic, complete with a script, casting, and possibly even social relevance. This was typical of Mary Ann, she was always prepared. I don’t believe she ever saw a B on an assignment in her life, much less a D given for a homework assignment hastily completed in a Datsun (that’s a car, young uns) pulling out of a gravel driveway. She had her hand up constantly, and led the class by default, but still, I could never picture her jumping off a garage roof.

Her topic was a good one; it was about a true haunting in some puritan town in the 19th century titled the Bell Witch. It was extremely topical because, at that time, the entire country, or at least its younger citizens, was scared shitless by a movie called The Amityville Horror, which is also based on true accounts of a bizarre haunting on Long Island. A dog-eared copy of the paperback based on the movie got passed around and read that year, and when Mary Ann introduced a topic of similar interests, she immediately had the class behind her. My topic, the crusades, never stood a chance.

[Brief note: Because my memory is somewhat shaky at this point about the overall plot of the Bell Witch, I’ve gone online to get a clearer picture. The events took place in Tennessee in 1819, and subsequent years, and involved a ghostly voice who haunted John Bell’s family and others, including future president Andrew Jackson. The story is widely respected as a well documented account of a haunting which was authenticated by many sources. For more, go to:www.bellwitch.org]

After I fell in line with the rest of the class, I found myself cast as Joshua Gardner a suitor of one of the Bell daughters. It was a bit part, but that was okay, because Wendy Debruin, the girl who laughed at my jokes, played the daughter. It would be an easy part, with only a few lines, and some physical comedy, and then I would be free to play nine-square again and not be subjected to too much admonition from the disinterested nine-square all-American types who could have cared less about the play.

Mary Ann was a good director. She started out very patiently, and we worked out our parts and walked through the scenes and generally made progress; and occasionally I would throw in a zinger and Wendy would laugh. It was boring at times though, and often I would sit off-stage and pick at the wood floor or flip through Life Goes to War which I brought to school everyday to display some of the more gruesome photos and paintings. It was a cheap way to get attention, but it worked. My scene was early in the play, but after it was rehearsed I was required to stick around for some reason. I began to get a little resentful. Why did they need me here? I already knew my part. I could vaguely hear the shouts and laughter of the recess session outside. I was missing it.

One day the boys who weren’t involved with the play started talking about a new game. They had taken the game of four-square and added a wall to it. This introduction of a perpendicular element added numerous possibilities. You could bank shots, you could force the ball into the corner and send it in unpredictable directions, the kid with glasses could have them knocked off in new and intriguing ways; it was a revolution in four-square development. And it was catching on fast.

It was just too much for me to resist, I had to play this game. I could hear it being played on the wall outside, behind the stage. When I decided to skip rehearsal and sneak around to the back of the school where the game was evolving, I was welcomed with open arms by my brethren of the bouncy ball. Steve Giljames was in charge here, he was the school athlete, with only one rival, Richard Turner. Richard had a temper, which cost him points at times, but Steve was always cool and was good at every athletic endeavor he tried. Steve seemed to own the position of king in nine-square.

As I learned new rules and techniques of the game, and went a couple of rounds, I got better and the steady progress I made caused me to become hooked very quickly. My gosh, you could zing the ball in strange ways with that corner, and wow did that extra element of banking throw your opponent off, and man did that kid get mad when his glasses flew across the pavement. I wasn’t sure how, but I just might have to forget about the play.

So when suddenly Mary Anne was shouting at me to get in to the auditorium because they were tired of waiting on me—she even used the threat of getting Mrs. Burroughs in on the act—I was lulled out of my dream state and became powerless over the determined daggers being hurled at me from the director’s eleven year old eyes. A shouting match between a couple of the other boys and Mary Ann ensued, and it seemed as if a group of dogs were barking at each other for a moment, but soon I found myself following Mary Ann back into the school, past the chapel and into the auditorium where the rest of the cast was milling around. I could hear the ball bouncing against the wall as soon as I left the parking lot.

So I persevered. On the day of dress rehearsals, Mary Ann had forgiven me, and she welcomed the idea that I suggested about how my character should leave the stage. In the story, Gardner has items hurled at him by the disapproving witch. The plan was to get someone to throw a boot at me from off-stage which would hit me in the head. At this point Gardner has had enough and basically freaks out and runs away, never to come back. I had the idea of having Gardner run all the way through the isles of the auditorium and around the building, screaming all the way. I would circle the building and come back through a door in the back of the building. Mary Ann approved. I only wished there was a garage to jump off of.

On the day of the play, my sisters made special arrangements to leave class to come and see my debut. I don’t remember being nervous, but I suppose I was. When my scene came around I played it well, but I wasn’t expecting to be considered a comic genius. I played the part a little rednecky I think, and by the time the boot hit me in the head the audience, especially the first grade, was howling. I ran around the building, screaming as planned, and all in all I felt that I was a hit. The rush of public approval had me spinning, I could picture myself with that academy award: “I would like to thank my parents, my sister, Wendy Debruin, and all the little people…”

The favorable reviews followed me home. My sisters passed on the reception of the performance to my parents in which I basked until my father took the wind out of me by calling me a ham. I sulked the rest of the night, a prima donna, misunderstood and underappreciated. Then I realized that the play was over! It was back to Nine-square—and the new game, and jumping off the garage roof!

Massacre on Walton's Mountain

2006-12-04T17:05:00.000-05:00

This is a short paper I did for Cult Films. We watched The Waltons religiously in my house as a kid. My dad was born and raised just north of the area where the show takes place, Nelson County Virginia.I got an A on the paper, the professor has a sense of humor.

In the early years of the 1970’s, television and film viewers were being inundated with conflicting imagery that ran a spectrum from simplistic morality to violent depravity. During these years no television show exemplified ideas about morality and family values in the 1970s more than The Waltons. The show, set in depression era rural Virginia, is told through eyes of John Walton, better known as John Boy. The stories are short morality plays about how the togetherness of family is the balm of life and that by giving, one will surely receive. In sharp contrast to The Waltons is the 1974 Tobe Hooper movie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If this film is used as an example of the other end of the spectrum from the morality of The Waltons we can get a clear idea of how diverse the depictions of families were in the 1970’s.
Remarkably, there are some similarities between the Waltons and the family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both are victims of hard times, the Waltons are struggling through the depression while the Leatherfaces are victims of the automation of the meatpacking industry. Both live in rural southern areas and make their living from the use of power saws; John Walton owns a backyard lumber mill; Leatherface owns a chainsaw and half a gallon of unleaded. Both families place a high priority on the nightly ritual of gathering around the dinner table and discussing family matters. And both families have a great reverence toward the patriarchal grand paw figure with Grand Paw Walton being given the head of the table and Grand Paw Leatherface being given the honors of bashing in a dinner guest’s skull.
The similarities meet a divergence however when the families play out their motivations. The Walton’s, always using morality as a roadmap, might make every effort to help a wayward stranger, while the Leatherfaces, erring to the side of depravity, might make every effort to eat a wayward stranger. At the Waltons, a visitor might be treated to an extra slice of Grandma’s famous sponge cake, while at the Leatherface’s a visitor might be treated to her boyfriend’s barbequed spleen. The Walton family might spend an evening tramping through the woods in order to chop down the perfect Christmas tree, while the Leatherfaces might tramp through the woods to chop up a wheel chair bound whiney guy.
However dissimilar the two productions are, both The Waltons and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre represent a fantasy image of the American family. While it is hard to imagine the perfection in which the Waltons adhere to their principles, it is equally difficult to imagine the complete depravity of the family depicted in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Considering the middle ground might give us a better idea of what the reality of family life in the 1970s translated to: that families are weird and imperfect. Whatever the case, there is one more similarity between The Waltons and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Whether it be from the saccharine morals careening off of Walton’s Mountain, or the splattering blood and incessant buzzing coming from the Texas wasteland, a viewer may end the viewing of each production feeling more than a little nauseous.

Short Announcement

2006-12-03T16:22:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I’m supposed to be writing a ten page paper about the boasting in Beowulf right now entitled “The Broken Boast: Fate and Alienation in the Boasts of Beowulf." My procrastination has taken me so far that I am rationalizing that if I write a blog entry it will warm me up for the paper. My sister seems to write ten entries for every one of mine, and she is a highly paid professional person with what I imagine to be a grueling schedule. How does she find the time?

I’ve decided to procrastinate no longer and start on the paper. I will post this blog, but it will be short—just long enough to say that I’m waiting until after exams to write a long post. I just don’t have one in me until these next two weeks are over. So all of my 1.65 subscribers will have to sit on their hands until then. But after exams—watch out!

Lordy, Lordy...

2006-11-15T09:58:00.000-05:00

So, among other recent tragedies, I turned forty yesterday. I spent the entire day, from around seven-thirty a.m. to ten-thirty p.m., immersed in school work. I’m wondering if this isn’t a precursor to the rest of my forties, head buried in a book until my back is so hunched over that it takes a weight-lifting orderly named Sven or Helga to wrench me back into the upright position. I can see some lowly undergrad who has lost his way in a labyrinthine university library, wandering around the stacks of ancient Eucrustian texts and finding me, or what’s left of me, a cobwebbed and bleached skeleton, surrounded by history books and scholarly articles about the postmodern significance of air when applied to the poetry of Walt Whitman. My last written words may be: “Need to find a vending machine, must eat a Snickers now…”

Although my day was busy, I was able to allow myself one gift from myself. This is going to sound like a chapter from “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff,” (and I usually am unable to do these emotionally disciplined, easier said than done, tasks meant to simplify your life) but yesterday I needed something to keep me from going into shock. So I decided that I was giving myself a day free from worry, stress, internalization of other’s worries, self-consciousness, self-criticism, painful memories, obsessions, and other mentally distracting baggage. The amazing thing to me is that, at the end of the day, I was able to pull this off. I must have had help from higher sources because it was just the type of day that all of that baggage would have been following me around like ungainly, whiney muskrats. But it was also only for that day, because at around midnight, just like Cinderella, my carriage of carefree karma turned into a giant, immovable, pumpkin.

I don’t really want to reflect too much on what it means to be forty. Why? Because I don’t really know what it means to be forty. I’m waiting for a mid-life-crisis, but then again, if I am going through a mid-life-crisis already I probably wouldn’t know it. I haven’t bought a sports car or anything. I do realize that the older I get, the more my writing resembles Andy Rooney’s. That could definitely bring on a mid-life-crisis.

Most of my posts are about past events in my life, and I am realizing two things about this process. One is that the events I write about represent little benchmarks in my life, and that in reflecting on them I am able to understand that I have lived a relatively unscathed existence thus far—let us all give a heavy knock on pre-treated, waterproof particle board! The other is that my memory is fading, and that when I make declarations about my writing that include two parts, by the time I get to the second part, I’ve forgotten what it is. My sister Emily swears that when I was a kid I had the most amazing collection of die-cast WWII airplanes imaginable, but I have no recollection of this. This is so frustrating because I want that memory. I remember the matchbox cars—Norman Hill gave them to me when he went off to eighth-grade or something, and when he asked to see them later I only had about five left to show him because the rest were lost around the house, basement or yard—but this memory will not do. Like a child, I am covetous of memories of toys, and the idea that I can’t remember the coolest ones (although Emily may be misremembering as well) is a minor, yet persistent, distraction.

This all comes on top of the realization that my writing is usually about two things. Let’s see if I can get to the second one without forgetting what it is. Nope, couldn’t even get to the first one. No really, I remember. I write about myself and things I’ve had, material possessions for the most part. Why? I don’t know. It seems to be the only way I can be honest, or feel that I am being honest. Myself, and things I’ve owned, seem to be the only thing I can write about with any authority right now, and I can’t seem to find truth by going straight at it, with a “let’s look at religion,” or “let’s look at what the philosophers say,” approach. Not entirely anyway. Being a reluctant egotist, or maybe a closet narcissist, I try to find meaning through my own experiences. If we are to “live in the moment” to find happiness, then isn’t it okay to spend some time revisiting that place where you were in the moment and the moment was in you, and exploring what it means? Or what it didn’t mean for that matter? Or what you thought it meant then, and what it means to you now?

Yea, I’m forty. And if I am not experiencing a mid-life-crisis I believe that I am doing what’s normal for a guy( I’m tempted to write man—but not yet) my age, looking back and seeing if my life has meant anything thus far. I don’t think I’ll ever know, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop trying either. I’m going to make my next post about being in a play in the fifth grade. I want to go there for some reason, and I know I can make it funny—hell, it was funny. I hope I can do justice to the occasion; I’m not quite ready to buy my memory a walker yet.

Post Script: I’m going to do a post one day about the semi-colon. It is my punctuation nemesis. Out of the dozens of papers I’ve written for school, I’ve never used it correctly. Never. Professors either take one out or put one in. One of my life goals is to master it.

Football Etc.

2006-11-03T10:30:00.000-05:00

I am going to write this post, but I want to let it be known that, at the time, I am concerned about the health of my father. He was diagnosed with a very low heart-rate, and although he would be the last person who would want anyone to bemoan his condition, I feel that I should preface this post with this concern. Right now it is a waiting-game for about four weeks until he can visit the cardiologist again, and it is difficult to judge the seriousness of the situation. I just know that he and my mother seem worried.

So I wanted to write about watching (and listening to) the UVA football game in Charlottesville last weekend, deleting any details about his condition. He would hate it if I wrote about that.

I was supposed to leave on Friday afternoon. The day got so away from me, however, that I reluctantly cut my losses and left Saturday morning. That Friday, I had to deliver a letter to the dean’s office before five, and I hurriedly rushed to write the letter, drive to Greensboro, and find the office of the dean in order to “personally hand it to the dean,” as per instructions. It turns out that the library that I have been calling a second home for the past three years has a whole hidden labyrinth, or maze, that leads to the dean’s office. After finally finding her office after a couple of switchbacks and a portal or two, I was greeted by a dry-erase message board that said “back at four.” I put the letter in her box and took a couple of steps back and said to myself, “no—hand-delivered means hand delivered.” So I worked my way back (I should have left a trail of breadcrumbs) and found the assistant dean. She became the recipient of the hand-delivered letter. Job done, if not necessarily so well.

That task out of the way, I asked the pallid circulation-desk attendant where the nearest Barnes and Noble was located. He gave me the typical “I know something that you don’t” sigh, and condescendingly gave me the directions. Okay, usually I don’t “out” my own lying in the middle of a post, but I have to be fair to this kid, he really was pretty good about the directions. I’m just trying to embellish a little on the hardships of my afternoon. Picking on Guilford undergrad is as good a way to do this as any.

It was raining. Hard. And it was about 3:45 on a Friday afternoon, which means it was rush hour, because in modern America rush hour lasts from 11:45am until 6:30pm on Fridays. I was driving Margaret’s Subaru Impreza which is like a squat and elongated AMC Pacer, for whoever remembers that monument of American engineering. Lots of fishbowl-like windows. Yea, spell check doesn’t accept the word Impreza. Why? Because it doesn’t exist. What is an Impreza? Is it Spanish for something?

That day it meant: “my defroster don’t work.” I was halfway to the Barnes and Noble and soon I was completely fogged out. It was like a Cheech and Chong movie but with the smoke on the outside. I couldn’t see shit. I did the old sleeve-wipe on the windshield and this helped for a moment, but then the glare from oncoming headlights would temporarily blind me. I tried the fan switch, pushing and pulling it back and forth in order to get it to kick on, but to no avail. I gave the windshield another swipe with my sleeve and pulled into the shopping center where I thought Barnes and Noble would be.

Usually, Barnes and Noble is the easiest store in the universe to find. I mean just look for a six-trillion-square-foot shoebox stuck in the middle of sprawl-ville and you’ve got it. I had the window down by this time, and had circled the parking lot three times—one of which put me back out on the road I came in on and provoked a string of “creative language,”—before I happened upon the secret, hidden, mini-B&N. Oh yea, I forgot to mention, I had Booker(the dog) with me.

So I braved the Friday afternoon yuppies, who were probably searching for the next set of revelations from Thomas L. Friedman, to grab a couple of Patrick O’Brian novels for my father. Thankfully, this B&N had the next in sequence, ones we haven’t read yet. But I couldn’t find Guns, Germs, and Steel in paperback. Probably not a bad thing though. Contemporary history can be an iffy proposition with Daddy.

Back out in the fishbowl of fog, Booker waited patiently. I couldn’t see to pull out of the parking space, so I had to take it on blind faith that I wasn’t about to back into a Range-Rover. This is when I decided to cut my losses, something I am more and more reluctant to do these days, and give up. I wouldn’t try to make it to Charlottesville that night. The sun was going down, and the defroster situation would only make things more dangerous at night, so I pointed the Impreza west and headed home. The weather was forecasted to improve on Saturday.

The next morning, the sun came up in a brilliantly blue autumn sky. My bags were already in the car, so I just loaded Booker in and headed off. I took 158 to Reidsville, which was especially nice on this fall day, with the colors waning from the leaves but still displaying notable exuberance. The pendulum which is my mood swung way over to ecstatic during the drive up, and even Booker pulling me into the mud at a pit stop didn’t effect my state of well-being. On highway 29, I started to notice cars with little NC State flags flapping off their antennas. State was playing UVA in Charlottesville. This is why I love fall. I arrived at Mom and Daddy’s at around 11:30.

After about twenty minutes of trying to get Booker to calm down, and catching up with my parents, it was time to watch the game. My father has been a Virginia fan all of his life, and he compounded his fanaticism by graduating from “The University” in the nineteen-fifties. His father captained the football team way back at the beginning of the last century, and there is a popular story, that gets told often, about how my grandfather was the only Virginia player who ever had a chance of scoring on Harvard—which was apparently the Ohio State of their day. On a pass play, the ball came down, hit the side of his head and dropped innocuously into the end-zone, eliminating the chance for a Michie to become immortalized through any type of athletic endeavor.

When I was a kid, during the seventies, Virginia never won a game. Then one day, maybe in 1978 or something, my father came home with a half-gallon of Bourbon—the good stuff—and declared that Virginia had finally managed to bumble their way into the win column. I thought they had won the Rose Bowl. Daddy spent the evening demonstrating his rebel yell and singing the school song which begins, “that dear old song of Wahoo Wah.” Occasionally he would break out his UVA records and play them on a massive piece of furniture with a record player inside called a victrola. Okay, here’s a testament to how things have changed, spell check doesn’t except the word victrola either.

So watching a UVA game with my father has a weighty history behind it. I once tried to read a book while the game was going on and this was met with, what I perceived to be, unspoken distain. So this time I focused on each play and was ready with an analysis worthy of an NFL color man. “Wow, that defense is really penetrating the right side,” and “I think they’re going to call this one back—holding.” Things like that. By the end of the first half, Virginia was up seven to nothing. State had been plagued by penalties, and Virginia’s defense was plaguing them even more.

My parents live in an elevated area outside of Charlottesville, and it is a beautiful spot. The one disadvantage they have is a phone system and an electric system that seem not to have been updated since the early nineteen-sixties. A strong gust of wind, or a squirrel making his last leap onto a live wire, can knock their electricity out for hours, even days. The wind was whipping itself into high gusts that day (the punters were having fits with the wind), and minutes before the start of the second half, the TV blinked off and all of the white noise that encapsulates a house went silent.

After a few graphic declarations about a company called Old Dominion Electric or something, and a quick inventory of the radio and battery situation, Daddy made the decision to listen to the game in the car. Booker raced around in the yard as we sat in my parent’s compact car and listened to football in the original broadcasting format. One thing about radio, the commentators have to be twice as emphatic and descriptive, and I began to get a visual of the grid of the field, and where the teams moved, and how the plays were carried out. It was a very back and fourth third quarter, but with no score added to the scoreboard. Virginia was still up by seven.

During a commercial break, I left the car to throw a stick for Booker. I would direct him to find a suitable one and he would return with a dried piece that he would then proceed to chew up into small pieces, until dropping a slobbery nub at my feet. After a while, I chose the stick. Booker was so excited to be in his element—he was born and spent his puppy-hood less than a mile from my parent’s house—that he was markedly cockier than when he is at the park in Winston. He wanted to challenge me for possession of the stick at every throw, and it ended in a wrestling match where he squirmed out from my grasp and left me rolling in the grass and laughing. We went at this for a while, until he had worn me out, and then I returned to the game.

As I sat, listening to the beginning of the fourth quarter, I started to realize that my parent’s car had a funny smell. I couldn’t quite place it, but it seemed earthy yet pungent. Kind of like sour mud. I shifted around and the smell got worse. Was it coming from the back seat? Was it coming from my dad? Was it coming from me? I inspected my left shoe. Nothing. Then my right shoe. Dogshit.

I was wearing shoes that have little capillaries of tread, and all of these tiny veins were now filled with canine excrement. I had to go inside and try to clean my shoe, which really required a microscope and a scalpel. I did what I could, but I felt a need to return to the game, so I listened to the rest of the game with one shoe on. My mom took up the challenge of de-shitting my shoe.

Virginia won, fourteen to seven. State was able to slip by Virginia’s impressive defense for an eighty-plus yard drive, which tied the game. Then in an unprecedented show of determination, Virginia’s offence, who, until now, had been giving a lack-luster performance in the second half, drove eighty yards to take the lead. They held on to this lead, and the game ended, which was good because I wasn’t sure if I could go through overtime with one shoe off, the wind whipping furiously outside, and Booker taunting me with a gnawed and drool-covered stick in his mouth.

I left the next day and the power was still off. This is such a common occurrence for my parents that they have a collection of electric lanterns and flashlights fit for a spelunking expedition, so that night, we talked by the light of Coleman and Duracell and turned in early. There was no clock in my room, so I got up when the sun rose. Old School, I suppose.

Mom went to church and I helped my dad build a fire. We sat in the living room, Daddy reading the Washington Post, and I doing reading for school, and listened to the wind as it traveled in fits and starts through the Ragged Mountains. That, and the crackle of the fire, was only interrupted by a political comment or an observation about the strength of the wind. I ended up getting a good deal done to start the week, and when my mother returned, we brainstormed for a little while about an upcoming project I have due. Then, reluctantly, I loaded up my bags and Booker and headed back down 29.

On the way home I listened to an interview with a philosopher named Jacob Needleman on NPR. He talked at length about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the enlightenment philosophy that went into it. The pursuit of happiness, he said, was not about acquiring things, but about finding a balance in life, about finding that core of well-being, free from material restraints, that we all share. He spoke of how the Quakers have a community that exerts this idea into their community life in an almost mystical way, by stirring that core, making it available, and realizing that all humans possess it. This helped me on my drive back to a busy, uncertain week. As I sit now, almost a week later, and look back on how watching (and listening) to a football game with my father can transcend my age, it takes me back to a time when I would have done the same thing then as now. At age ten, I would have also gone outside during the commercial, play with the dog, and run inside to discover that while I was moving in the ethereal autumn bliss, I had, inadvertently, stepped in something.

Courtroom Impressions

2006-10-25T13:40:00.000-04:00

This is a response paper I did for a criminal justice class I took last spring

On Wednesday, April 5th I attended the proceedings for a capital murder trial in Guilford County courtroom 4c. The defendant in the trial is Fantoine Cummings who is charged with first degree murder committed on December 15th, 2003. The trial was in its third day when I attended, and the jury was still in the process of being selected. I stayed for the questioning of four jurors, only one of whom was picked for the jury. This process took about four hours, with a twenty minute break at midmorning. During the process many interesting events occurred, and any preconceived notions I had about how this process takes place were either confirmed or dispelled as I watched the real life procedure of arguing for a man’s guilt or innocence and, ultimately his life, unfold. I was ready for all of the ingrained preconceptions I had about how the court system works to be dispelled, but I found out that many of the events that are depicted on television actually happen in a courtroom as well, just without the high drama. The main overall impression I got was that the courtroom is a bureaucratic, impersonal place, but that the attorneys add a high degree of personality to the room while arguing for a conviction or an acquittal. This is one impression that, for me, was unexpected coming from what I knew about courtroom procedure based almost solely on the modern media.

The first time I can remember being enthralled by a dramatic depiction of courtroom events was watching Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda when I was about ten. I got wrapped up in the argument over the guilt or innocence of a young man and Fonda’s stubborn refusal to take the easy way out and convict the defendant. To Kill a Mockingbird also helped form my opinion about how the justice system worked in our country. Movies such as these made it seem that the justice system was capable of gross errors, and that strong individuals were needed to stand up to a system that might be faulty, misguided, racist, or all of the above. The reason these movies are popular is because the hero can be depicted as a champion of the underdog, or even an underdog himself as in movies like The Rainmaker and The Verdict. There would be no reason to write a screenplay about a man who murders his wife and the evidence is so overwhelming that the man pleads guilty and is sentenced to life in prison. There is no plot there. So our ideas about the justice system are based on depictions of circumstances that are rare, because there is a much more compelling story if there is an underdog or a social issue involved.

There is another element to what we may think the justice system is and what it really is. This is the time element. This was demonstrated to me on the day I went to court. What was hard for me to understand until I experienced it first hand was that justice takes much longer than fifty minutes (that’s allowing time for the Rogaine commercials). I realize that Law and Order takes place in a time lapse chronology but the way everything gets tied up into a neat package before you have time to eat half a bag of Doritos really makes it hard to conceptualize the real time involved in processing a criminal case. The fact that the case goes from the criminal investigation to the prosecution in about twenty five minutes really gives a warped idea about the time and work an investigation and prosecution takes. But I do realize that this is T.V. and that the producers are not trying to give us factual depictions but are trying to get us to tune in next week so more sponsors will buy advertising.

I have to say that the craziest thing I’ve seen on a recent courtroom drama is a mute woman who was a concert cellist, giving her testimony on the witness stand by playing her cello. For an answer of “yes” she would play a high note, and for “no” she would play a low note. I flipped the channel and have never watched that show again.

An actress playing a cello on a witness stand on T.V. is so far removed from what I experienced in the courtroom in Guilford County on April 5th that it is hard to believe that the two are related in anyway. The courtroom was all but empty, although it is a large room, with seating for what looked like over a hundred people. A few groups were seated in various places around the courtroom and I assumed they were family members of either the defendant or the victim. On the left was the defense team, Dwayne Bryant and Bruce Lee, and seated next to them was the defendant looking at one moment bored and the next attentive. On the right side was the prosecutor, Kelly Thomas. At the time I entered the courtroom, a juror had just been dismissed, and after a moment a new juror entered by a door on the right hand side of the courtroom and took a seat in the juror’s box. The Judge, Judge Davis, asked the juror, who was a young woman, a series of questions in a perfunctory tone. The questions ranged from whether the juror knew any of the witnesses to whether the juror could vote yes to the death penalty. This particular Juror said she could. I couldn’t help noticing a smirk on her face as she said this, as if she somehow thought she and the state were part of an understanding. It’s hard to explain but I found it unsettling. Fortunately she was dismissed after voir dire.

The next juror to be questioned was a man of about fifty. After the Judge asked him the same set of questions as the juror before him, the prosecution took over the questioning. Ms. Davis asked the same questions about the death penalty and if the defendants age of twenty-seven would cause the juror to form an opinion. The juror said no. The questioning was then turned over to the defense.

Mr. Bryant did all of the questioning of the jurors for the defense while I was there. To me, while it seemed that he was being overly detailed and precise about all of his questions, I also felt that with this type of attention to questioning was in the service of his client—for the most part. The one question I had about his tactics when interviewing potential jurors was when he was asking about heinous crimes and the juror’s willingness to give the death penalty to defendants convicted of these crimes. He actually described a heinous crime with attention to detail in order to demonstrate what would be considered a heinous crime. To me, it seemed, that if he was defending someone accused of murder he would not want to put any violent or heinous images into the mind of a potential juror. It almost seemed, as he gave his example, that he was arguing for the prosecution. I think his strategy was to force the juror to commit to being in favor of the death penalty so he could dismiss him, but I think it was risky for him to take that line in his questioning.

I wasn’t expecting to be so caught up in what was happening in the courtroom. I guess I had the idea that if television made courtrooms exciting, then the actual courtrooms themselves were going to be boring. While there was no table pounding or shouting, there was enough happening in just the jury selection that my interest was kept throughout my time there. Mr. Bryant was a compelling attorney and I couldn’t help getting the champion of the underdog feeling from him I had formed early in life. But I know that four hours isn’t enough to get a concrete impression of any situation, much less a capital murder trial, so I will withhold judgment on the ability of the defense team.

At one point, the proceedings far exceeded anything I had seen on T.V. Mr. Bryant had just asked the second juror a series of uncomfortable questions involving the death penalty. The questioning had left the juror squirming around in his seat and stuttering a little, and it was clear that he was a somewhat agitated. Bryant asked the juror if he watched any crime dramas such as CSI. The juror said no, he wasn’t really into those shows. Bryant then asked him what shows he did like. The juror thought for a moment and blurted out “Amos and Andy.” Then he quickly realized he had made a mistake and corrected himself and said “no…that’s not what I meant. What’s that one with Barney?” Bryant helped him out, “Andy Griffith?” “Yea, Andy Griffith, that’s what I meant.” Bryant nodded his head and said, “Yea, I like Andy too.” The juror was dismissed.

Right before the break, Judge Davis sent the juror who was being questioned out and had a few words with Mr. Bryant. He claimed that Bryant was setting a trap for the jurors by forcing them to commit to being for the death penalty. Davis claimed that at this rate, it would take a year to select a jury. Bryant’s partner, Bruce Lee (his actual name), shook his head and the judge became agitated. “Don’t shake your head at me, you’ve been sitting on your hands all morning.” he told Lee. During the break, the defense team pulled out some law books and tried to argue that their line of questioning was correct, but finally a concession was made that Bryant would not go so far in his questioning again. Never-the-less, by the time I left, it seemed that Bryant was using the exact line of questioning he had used all morning.

I think what surprised me the most was that I was as enthralled, if not more enthralled, with what was happening in the courtroom as any courtroom drama I had seen. I wasn’t expecting to be this interested, although I do find the justice system interesting. When I walked into the courtroom and saw the cold governmental décor and heard the monotonous questioning from the judge I felt like this might be a long morning. But as a continued to listen, I realized that there was a standard of procedure taking place that was intricate, nuanced and compelling despite the formality of the process. After all, underneath the formality, a human beings life was at stake and the entire careful, lengthy process is in place to ensure the defendant his rights to a fair trial. By going to the courthouse I was able to see that process in action and it made more of an impression than the numerous hours I have spent watching the media’s depiction of the American Justice system. The trip to the courthouse gave me a much better understanding of what our justice system represents, and I feel more positive now about that process.

Waxing Deadstalgic

2006-10-25T11:35:00.000-04:00

On Monday I made a marked change in my life that I think I should try to get down on paper. I boxed up my Grateful Dead tapes and put them in the closet upstairs. This is a bit of a sea change for me, as those tapes have been sitting on racks, which I carefully built in my office, for several years. I enjoyed the sight of them—I could see them from the living room—and knowing that I had far more music than I could possibly make time for was somehow comforting to me. There were maybe four or five hundred of them, and they now sit, neatly boxed up in cookie dough boxes, in the closet of my bedroom.

I’m trying to avoid the “end of an era” approach to this because that would be inaccurate. The Grateful Dead graciously allows streaming of the majority of their shows from a website called archive.org. I can hook up my computer to my stereo and twirl around the house any time I want to—don’t worry, I don’t twirl. I usually crank the volume and continue the never-ending-battle with “pet smells” that persists at my house.

My first Dead show was in 1986. I was home from Africa for six weeks during a particularly unfettered time in my life. The show was at the old Redskins stadium, RFK in Washington D.C., and I was interested in seeing Bob Dylan, who was headlining a bill which also included Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. By this time, I had already bucked up against deadheads who snubbed you if you claimed “Sugar Magnolia” as your favorite song and rattled off set-lists with transparently self-conscious nonchalance. I was not going to see the Dead. I was going to see Dylan!

I went with my friends-since-grade-school, David and Michael. We met my roommate from Christ School, Bowles, in the filthy-rich northern Virginian town of Middleburgh. One of Bowles’ neighbors was the grandson of Jack Kent Cooke (the former owner of the Redskins) and we had the opportunity to watch our first Dead show from Cooke’s box at the stadium. This was sort of like letting the country-cousins into the Louvre. I was on a Tom Collins kick at the time—there was a VIP bar right outside the box—so things were a bit blurry and inappropriate, I’m sure. I remember, at one point, sitting down on the front row of the box and right before me, on the rail, was a fresh hot dog and a coke. The day was brutally hot, and I was hungry. I took a bite of the hotdog and started slurping down the coke when I felt a tap on my shoulder. The apparent owner of the dog was behind me and none-too-pleased. Jack Kent Cooke’s grandson ended up bailing me out of that one.

That first Dead show had me hooked. You can look it up online and most reviews of the concert have one thing in common, they all talk about how hot it was. Hot, with a happy community throng, and friendly strangers and a little weirdness, and some scariness, and some more friends and dancing and sweat and music. Sounds like Africa. I felt euphoric.

I went back to Africa with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty planted firmly in my cassette deck. I listened to that tape, each album occupying a side, for months and months. When I returned, I bought more official releases on vinyl and cassette. I had not yet started trading tapes, but I knew that at the core of this cultural undercurrent there was an exchange of currency going on that had more value than the products you could buy at the record store. Tape trading.

I really got into it because a boss of mine was a Deadhead. He was an original actually, having seen them at the Boston Tea Party in 69, and he would bring me examples of good quality tapes that he owned, and make me listen to them on a little walkman while I was trying to prep for dinner. He came up with the idea that we start trading nationally, using his collection, and anything he traded, he would make copies for me. We put an ad in Relix Magazine under the name of “Speeding Arrow Tapes.” Within a month I had a folder bursting with tape-lists from as far away as Honolulu. We had to pick a few good people to trade with, people who were serious and would come back with your requests, and this took a few months. But after a while we had established three or four good trading relationships and it was a happy day when I would get a yellow slip in my mailbox telling me that I had a package at the post office on Patterson Avenue. The package would usually contain about eight tapes, and, if the package was from a particularly competent trader named Uncle John, the quality would be excellent. I drove a little pickup at the time, and I would drive into the counties, doing a large loop around Winston, in order to listen to the tapes. This would often get me close to the feeling I felt at that first show.

There was a kind of holy-grail that we discovered during this time. It was 5/8/77. That is the date of a concert at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. I remember getting this tape in the mail, and I had probably heard it was good, but I had heard that about a lot of Dead tapes. It is still one of my favorite pieces of recorded music. There has been a great deal written about this concert, and it still is quite controversial in that some philistines claim it is overrated. It is not overrated. I remember having this discussion with a blowhard at a bar in Black Mountain. He had obviously had way too much to drink, and I left him spouting out concert dates to a non-dead-head, who looked confused and a little frightened.

After a while, I traded with one person exclusively, and my collection began to grow so much that I could no longer fit them in Kiwi Fruit boxes. I built racks for them and they lined the back of my office like little soldiers of peace, love and understanding. I also bought the massive three-volume Taping Compendium that gives detailed reviews of every show the Dead ever played. Yea, I had it bad.

Now, as I am nearing the finish line of school, books are invading our house like never before. I buy them for school, I buy them for enjoyment, and I want them to be visible throughout the house. I want to be able to find the book I need when I need it, and I want the books to act as a bulwark for my own writing. I am also craving a clutter-less work space. This is too much to ask for the whole house, I know, but where I do the most of my work I want the light that comes in from the northwest window to be free from little trinkets that I can’t seem to throw away. So the precious Dead tapes are going into hibernation.

I believe that one morning, when I am free of responsibility for a moment, I might venture upstairs and start digging for 5/8/77, or another concert I remember. It turns out that boxing them up and putting them upstairs was not the traumatic experience that I had feared. They are still here, in this house, and after all, they are right inside the closet door.

Thing Theory #1

2006-10-19T10:55:00.000-04:00

Would You Still Love Me If I Had Crab Pincers?

2006-10-19T08:11:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend and I have been together for about fifteen years. It's been long enough so that calling her girlfriend doesn't quite seem accurate, but we have never tied the knot, so wife isn't particularly true either. I try to stay away from the jargony terms that have come up lately, like life-partner or significant other, although sometimes I like to make up some of my own--terms that would be more accurate--like "remote-control-adversary" or "political-diatribe-recipient." These terms don't quite denote endearment I know, but, by this time, those things go pretty much understood, and humor of this sort goes further than anything else in keeping us bonded.

Margaret owns a Restaurant. It’s a pretty difficult business, calling for long, long hours and a great deal of physical labor combined with diplomacy and organization. She usually works from eleven-thirty am until eleven-thirty pm Tuesday through Saturday and from nine to five on Sundays. With my school and work schedule, our paths don’t cross at the usual times for most couples. We usually get the pleasure of each other’s company in the morning. I get up relatively early, and she gets up an hour or two later. This means the coffee levels are way off balance, I having five cups already and she having none. So it’s the good mood/bad mood phenomena for about an hour, as I hunt and pound on my keyboard doing school work, and she holds a cup of coffee up to her mouth like a sacred chalice. Then, suddenly, she is all action, jogging upstairs, stomping around, jogging back down (dog following her the whole way), microwaving that last cup for the trip in, shouting that she has acupuncture today, stopping by my computer room and asking how its going, hearing me grunt or say fine, giving me a kiss, and then she’s gone.

She returns at night—often we arrive home at the same time—and we spend a couple of hours watching the news, or Charlie Rose, or Letterman, or something. These evenings can have different tones, which usually depend on my mood. I am a person who is very susceptible to suggestion (imagined or otherwise), and, having attended a liberal arts college for three years, I often bring the lofty ideals regarding man’s inhumanity to man home with me and apply them to the eleven o’clock news, Keith Olbermann, or, in some cases, re-runs of The King of Queens. I also believe this is somewhat hereditary (or at least learned), because, as a child, I listened to the same sort of abuse being hurled at a wavy black and white image of Richard Nixon every night by my father for about three years. All of this gets channeled through Margaret’s eardrums—unfortunately. But she is not a passive recipient. Her protests (against me, not the proponents of man’s inhumanity to man) usually start with, “Would you be quiet, I’m trying to listen to this.” Then it moves on to, “Hush now, please!” then “would you SHUT UP!!!” This has been going on for years, and deters me very little. As annoying as it is, I like to believe that I am inviting discourse, however banal, with these provocations.

So this was going on the other night in the same pattern as always, except it was Sunday, which is always worse. On Sundays, after watching my football teams lose, we watch 60 Minutes. Something happens to me when I hear that familiar stopwatch ticking. I may have been in the most lethargic of moods after witnessing my team’s place kicker miss a twenty-yard field goal to lose the game, but as soon as I see Mike Wallace’s embalmed features, I am instantly primed to be outraged and disgusted at the unjust and often illegal activity reported on the show. I, by now, have realized that an automatic digging in on the topics might end with Margaret stomping upstairs to watch QVC, so I try to control the heat with a well placed “bullshit,” or “that’s a load a…” or “liar.” I can feel the alert level rise in her when I say these things, so I’ll wait another ten minutes to insert my next, “fascist,” or “sleazebag.”

We were watching a report about a particularly controversial issue in the news these days, and I was maintaining a very self-controlled, “open-minded” view of the subject. This time, it was actually Margaret who began a discussion about the issue, and she started firing off questions about the topic—what did I think, was this person lying, how much were they telling us, what did they mean by that—so that before I could even form the first answer she was asking another question. “Well, I think it has to do with…” I would venture, and she would fire back “and who was that other guy, what was his motive?” After about three or four minutes I got so muddled that I just shouted “I don’t know… you know, everything isn’t a conspiracy!” This was met with dead silence.

I knew I had crossed a line, and I also knew it would be okay, but I felt bad. I wanted to say I’m sorry, but those words have lost their relevance in this long relationship. It had been a long time since I had pushed her to this kind of silence, and I was trying to remember how to deal with it. 60 Minutes became irrelevant, and I sat, staring at my hands, wondering if I should try to say something, or let it pass and let it stay with her, benign perhaps, but there none-the-less.

I started making shapes with my hands. I remembered seeing a show about a cruel alcoholic sideshow performer nicknamed “Lobster Boy.” He had deformed hands, like claws, and I positioned my hands in this way to see how it would feel. I raised them up and started opening and closing them. Then I looked at Margaret and said. “Honey, would you still love me if I had crab pincers.”
“Hmmm…”she thought a second, still giving me a stern gaze. “No I don’t think I could still love you if you had crab pincers.”
“You couldn’t?”
“No, that’s asking a bit much.”
I returned my hands to their natural state.

We continued watching TV, and the next morning, as she was rushing from the kitchen into the living room, probably looking for her keys, she asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing for the blog. She stopped, thought a minute, and then said, “you should do a piece called Would You Still Love Me if I had Crab Pincers.” She laughed a little at her idea, and I, always looking for a reason to believe this, felt like a genius.

Thing Theory

2006-10-17T13:25:00.000-04:00

So we are half way through the semester, and last week in my English 400 class we read an article by University of Chicago professor Bill Brown called Thing Theory.The article was extremely dense, and what I could grasp as it passed noisily over my head was that Brown is trying to help define the word thing, which we use as a substitute for the unknowable or undefinable. I started doodling in the margin in order to visualize the concepts, but, as usual, my drawings deteriorated into crass--crude actually, cartoons that helped very little but amused me nonetheless. I am seriously considering starting a comic strip called Thing Theory based on these doodles. Here are three of the drawings I did while I should have been concentrating on some of the more abstract points in Brown's article.

This was the first drawing I did. The "thing" is what happens when our relationship with benign matter--every day objects--is changed. I tried to show how the chair feels like he is taken for granted. The joke? The Chair is an object.

Same concept with this one. The chair has gotten the subject's attention now.First he tries to return to being an object and after this doesn't work he blames it on the "thing."

I have to thank my sister Lindsay for this one. I showed her the first two panels and she suggested I take the point of view of a toilet paper roll. Crude, but effective.

So I want to set up a premise around these, and other, house hold objects. I also want to create another environment in the yard, with the yard tools taking on the role of socialist proletariats and the house objects being more like spoiled bourgeoisie. The "thing" is this mysterious non-entity that possesses the objects to break the subject/object barrier and confront the clueless subject in various ways. I don't know if anyone is like me, but for a split second, when I stub my toe or bump my head, I feel as if the object meant to do it. That's around the level I'm sinking to with this idea.

2006-10-17T09:06:00.000-04:00

Booker and Guitars

2006-10-17T08:37:00.000-04:00

This is a sample picture from my hard drive. I'm trying to figure out how to insert pictures into my blog again. Nice view, huh?

Performance Anxiety

2006-10-16T21:38:00.000-04:00

With this post I will combine two themes that have already been prevalent with many of my posts. I will combine the subject of music with a self-depreciating tale of mishap and farce. Here we go.

In my first freshman year in college (I say first freshman year because there were two, or maybe three, so we’ll split the difference and just say 2.5), I was still a bass player. I owned a six-string guitar, and had played six-string for a couple of years, but I was still being recruited by slick guitar players to be the dork of the band because I also owned, and was relatively proficient on,the bass guitar.

My roommate was a friend from Clemmons named Joey. He had a set of Ludwigs and could do a pretty mean Charlie Watts. A bass player and a drummer who were comfortable playing with each other was a pretty good selling point. We were recruited not long after the semester started.

The guy who put the band together was named Lorenzo. He was rumored to be the son of a famous professional musician, but, if he was, he guarded this secret well and I never found out who. I always thought it was George Benson for some reason.

He came to our room one morning with a guy named Keith, who donned a mullet. (The mullet was a stigma-free hairstyle in those days.) Keith was to be the lead guitarist. Both Lorenzo and Keith brought their guitars with them and we sat on the beds and worked a few songs up. By the end of that session we had agreed to become a foursome and enter the UNCG talent show. Joey on drums, Keith on lead guitar, Lorenzo as vocalist and rhythm guitar, and yours truly, holding down the original instrument of love, the bass guitar.

Lorenzo came up with the name. Actually, Lorenzo came up with everything about the band. He called us The Phillips Heads. Phillips was the name of our dorm, and I think the “heads” part was a loose reference to drug use, which possibly meant Joey, Keith and myself because as far as I could tell, Lorenzo didn’t even take aspirin.

We started practicing in the rec-hall in the basement of the dorm. Joey and I were less than thrilled with the set list. The two of us were beginning the habit of meeting after class, getting to the dorm room, meeting our friends Michael and Eric, (Eric was only seventeen and had already been to dozens of Dead shows), putting a towel under the door, cranking the Velvets and—well let’s just say, imbibing. A set list that included Tommy Two Tone’s 867-5309 and Brian Adam’s song about the six-string (that I don’t want to waste time trying to remember the name of) was definitely not cool man. It’s possible that there was an Eagles number on the list too, and I think its one of those psychosomatic situations where the trauma of actually covering an Eagles song has been erased from my recall because it is simply too painful to remember. At times, during practice, Joey would just stop playing and scream, “Noooooooo” at the top of his lungs. The trauma was getting to my compatriot. But Lorenzo wanted to win this thing, and a twenty minute version of Walk on the Wild Side wasn’t going to get us there. It would have to be Brian Adams. I think Lorenzo even picked out what clothes we wore.

I don’t really remember the talent show, although I think it was in Ackock Auditorium and that friends had had the foresight to stock a cooler of beer backstage. My parents came—and seemed genuinely impressed, but I don’t remember winning or not winning. Maybe it was just the idea of playing those bad songs. Maybe by the end of it, I was just happy to have it over with.

All during this time we were aware that there was a sort of local celebrity, a rising star, in our midst. He was a guy from Winston-Salem who had played drums in a local band and was making noise around Greensboro and Winston and even Chapel Hill by this time. He lived down the hall from us, and as we passed on the way to the cafeteria or somewhere he would look up and nod, somewhat shyly, as if embarrassed to be noted and revered. He was really looked on as a prodigy. This is the only time that I can recall where a local musician seemed to wear the look of someone who was really going to make it. Not just make a scene large enough for the country to take notice of our area, but someone who was going to go outside and really make it. To New York or Nashville. You know, the real thing.

His name was Ben Folds. And he did make it for a time in the 90’s. His band, Ben Folds Five, scored a great deal of radio airplay during the alt-rock avalanche. But at that time, our time, he already seemed to be being pulled apart from the rank and file, the flat-footed running up and down the dorm hall, the towel whipping, the gatherings for A Nightmare on Elm Street viewings, the hooting and hollering. Folds wasn't into it. He was a pretty serious dude.

I believe it was Michael, who had gone to high school with him, who set up a meeting where I would get a chance to play bass for him. The whole thing felt like an audition. I really felt pressure about this for some reason. I mean sure, the guy looked like he was destined for greatness, but it hadn’t happened yet, and this couldn’t be any worse than playing for a hundred or more dizzy undergrads who had nothing better to do than go to a college talent show. The guy had such a rep though, he was always playing gigs. Best drummer in Winston. Pressure, pressure, pressure…

I wanted to play my best thing for him. I had a blues run that was pretty good. It was about sixteen bars or something, and I had made it up out of some tab pieces from a Jimi Hendrix bass-for-morons book. I would start with this one, and, if it went well, I would get into other runs I knew.

What I can recall is that I went to his room and he played a couple of demo tapes for me. He seemed very bored. I couldn’t tell if it was because he thought I was boring or because he was just bored generally. Maybe he was stoned. Maybe I was stoned. I looked at the box he was getting tapes from and it seemed like it was filled with literally hundreds of demos. I could not believe this. I think I must have started to get a deer in the headlights look because he abruptly said, “well we can listen to demos all day long.” The way he said it made me feel like he was saying “I’ve shown you what I can do, now what can you do?”

I sat on his roommate’s bed, and was literally shaking. This guy had gotten—excuse the cliché—in my head. I picked up my bass and it felt extremely awkward and heavy in my hands. I played the first note, then the second, and maybe the third and then, I completely choked. I mean, it was as if I had never even heard of the concept of the bass guitar before. I started the run again and the same thing happened. And again. By the third time he was saying, “That’s alright man, that’s alright.” “No, I’ve got it this time,” I would say, and try again, and again—nothing.

I left his room humiliated and embarrassed. Just like I don’t remember the results of the talent contest, I don’t remember his attitude when I left his room. But I try to remember this instance whenever I’m suffering from stage fright. Just don’t, I tell myself, fuck up like you did with Ben Folds.

At some point after this occurrence I was playing guitar in our room. I might have been playing one of those complicated compositions I had made up when in walked Ben Folds. He said what I was playing was good, and it helped a little to know that. He seemed less bored, more open, maybe he felt bad about something. Anyway, I’m glad he had his success.

Post Script: I have to add an ammendment to this post. This post was meant to be semi-intentionally allegorical, as the title implies.But the more I read it, the more Freud seems to apply to almost every word, and I am almost at the point of embarrasment over it. Oh why did I ever take that postmodern lit. class? Go easy on me you armchair psychologists.

Ramble on Prose

2006-10-16T17:31:00.000-04:00

So it’s been almost a month since my last post, and while I’ve been pretty slack on the blog front, I’ve been pretty busy on the everything-else-in-my-life front. School and work have kept me swapping hats consistently, and now I can kind of catch a brief breather because its fall break and I don’t work again until Friday.

I’m hoping to get a good chunk of Truman read by the time school starts back. David McCullough is coming to speak at Guilford in November and I’ve been picked by the history department to go to the pre-speech reception. This means that there is an off-chance that I might meet him, and I want to get some of his work under my belt before blurting out whatever inanity I’m going to blurt out. Reading Truman might temper the blurtation a little. I read 1776 a couple of summers ago. I just picked it up—it holds a place on my desk (next to Doonesbury)—and its amazing what a well made book just feels like when you flip through it. The pages have that rough unevenness when the book is closed, and the picture inserts are slick and full of period maps and portraits. I’m getting all-a-flutter just looking at it. But seriously, I remember being riveted by his description of the hauling up of the cannons by the rebel army to Dorchester Heights, overlooking Boston. I’m looking forward to being in the presence of McCullough. He is supposed to speak about Nathanial Greene.

Tobias Wolff

So this leads me on to another theme that I’ll try to bridge with the famous author meeting the admirer theme. Actually no bridge is necessary because it’s the same subject. Or, that subject leads me to another. Lindsay was here on Thursday to go to a reception, and she happened to leave a back issue of the New Yorker lying around. She must have picked it up to read while she was waiting for something. Anyway, I picked it up and flipped through it and soon found myself engrossed in a fiction piece—this post is on the verge of becoming “quaint”—by Tobias Wolff called Class Picture. There were different reasons why this story drew me in; first and foremost, it is so fucking funny (there, just erased the quaintness). It also takes place in a boarding school, which reminded me of my boarding school experience, and how, in my senior year, I moped around in a heavy wool overcoat hoping Zelda Fitzgerald’s ghost would spring up with a martini shaker and proceed to seduce me.

The story is about a visit to the school by Robert Frost. There is a poetry contest in which the winner gets to spend time with America’s poet laureate the morning after Frost gives a speech in the school chapel. The humor comes from Wolff’s description of the contenders for the honor, who all have a kind of unformed, neophyte brilliance, but not without the self-consciousness and mood swings that betray their age. Wolff describes two characters, heavily under the influence of Hemingway, speaking in that jilted, short, Morse code style—about making their beds. I almost rolled off the couch.

But the story was also very true to me. A few weeks ago in English class, we had been talking about what theorists can do when they analyze a piece of fiction. We agreed that the process was like an archeological excavation, in that as you remove layers to reveal more of the excavation you also destroy that particular site forever. Same with literature. It was with this idea in the back of my mind that this quote from Wolff’s story jumped out at me. Wolff is speaking of the reverence that the English teachers at the school commanded.

How did they command such difference—English teachers?

Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They would put it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion; even, on occasion, science. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequences for you, too.

How beautiful. And it is true.

I’m going to end this post now. After that quote, I don’t feel that my ability is up to anything else insightful right now, and I would hate to ruin it by prattling on further.

The Thing

2006-09-21T10:10:00.000-04:00

The Thing

This is another one you can file under “things I learned in my early adulthood about how material possessions don’t always bring happiness.”

About the same time that I made the fateful windsurfer purchase, (see the August 27th post), I also bought a vehicle which, looking back now, was the most impractical trade of legal tender for heartache and woe that I think I’ve ever made. I was returning to UNCG for the spring semester of 1988—seems so long ago—and it was necessary for me to have a vehicle to get back and forth from: a) my parents house in New Bern where I could do laundry and bum food and money, b) Winston-Salem where I could do laundry and bum beer and cigarettes from my sister, c) Chapel Hill where I could improve my social skills with high school friends who usually helped me along by handing me an unknown alcoholic liquid and saying, “drink this.”
One of these friends was David, who would give a sort of show and tell in his dorm room of substances that were either illegal, explosive, or both. He kept all of these things locked up in a homemade safe, as he had been doing since grade school, and, after displaying different varieties of brass knuckles, switchblades, and various calibers of firearms he would reach in the back of the safe and pull out a mason jar of clear liquid, get this kind of maniacal grin on his face, hold up the jar and hiss “moonshine.” I remember—I use the word “remember” loosely here—one night being talked into taking two shots of the stuff and spending the rest of the night rocking back and forth in a rocking chair humming “Rollin’ in my Sweet Baby’s Arms” and trying not to puke.
I mention David because he figures into the story of the Thing considerably. When he graduated from Military School, where I believe he learned many deviant but useful techniques regarding contraband (he was also an Eagle Scout), he bought a green MG. I remember riding around the housing development he lived in with the top down and being duly impressed and envious. Later, when his mother had moved from Lewisville to Greensboro, I stayed with him and his brothers while I was finding a place to live near campus, and we had episodes of playing quarters with moonshine and developing our threshold for hangovers. It was during this time that I bought the Thing.
One morning, hung-over and dazed, I started searching the classifieds for a suitable vehicle. I circled about half-a-dozen used car ads. The one that was making the top of the list was a Honda Accord with maybe 50,000 miles on it. There might have been a Toyota or an Escort or something like that on the list as well. One of the ads I circled was for a 1973 VW Thing, and whenever I looked at the ad my imagination took me to the Outer Banks where I would be cruising with the top down, the windsurfer sticking auspiciously out of the back. The image was winning out over the more practical Japanese imports with relatively low mileage.
A few notes about the VW Thing. VW only made this model for a couple of years. It was a German version—I guess—of a beach-buggy, but was practical for highway travel also, and, if you were so inclined (I wasn’t), you could paint the car tan, put an Iron Cross on it, mount a machine gun on the back, and pass it off for a German staff car circa 1943. I think VW attempted to soften the martial features of the car by issuing friendly bright paint jobs such as day glow orange and fluorescent yellow. Mine was the yellow variety. It was a strange amalgamation. Sort of Dobey Gillis meets the Hitler Youth.
David drove me to the address listed in the ad. The man who was selling the car was a stout, middle aged, Middle America guy who lived in a cul-de-sac. He took us down into the garage where he had not one, but two VW Things parked serenely in the bright and clean parking spaces. One was orange, the other, yellow. The yellow one was the one I was going to look at, and I fell into a sort of trance as soon as I saw it. When you read about something, especially a car, in an ad or a magazine you can only get a general sense of the material makeup of that object, so your mind develops a fragmented image of that object. When you first actually lay eyes on that object it is as if all the fragments have all been put together and the “realness” of the object is almost overpowering. This is the way it has been for me ever since I got my first set of army men in the mail. Of course that “realness” and actual “reality” are often two very different things. But at that moment all I could see was a fascinating, enticing, hunk of yellow metal. The owner probably knew he had me hooked at that very moment.
Then I drove it. David sat beside me checking the knobs, looking in the glove compartment, adjusting the mirror, and at one point I remember him saying “Man, this is cool!” I heard this over the high pitched whine that is a VW engine at high RPMs, and the approval of my friend clinched the deal in my mind—as if it hadn’t been clinched the moment I walked into that basement at the end of a cu-de-sac.
I can’t remember how much I paid for it exactly but I want to say $2,500. At this point it would be easy for me to say that the guy at the end of the cul-de-sac had sold me a lemon, but that would be untrue. The car was in good shape for being fifteen years old, and although it had relatively high mileage, the engine ran well and there wasn’t a scratch on the body. The paint was a little faded but other than that, the car looked good. As good as a fifteen year old fluorescent yellow German staff car is going to look. No, I think it’s safe to say, that I took a peach and turned it into a lemon.
I soon found an apartment close to the downtown area of Greensboro and enrolled in classes. I could walk to campus, and did so many days because of the parking hassle that plagues every American college campus. I would drive the Thing around in the afternoon, visiting friends and showing off, and artist friends would offer to paint it psychedelic colors and others would just want to ride around in it. After about two weeks everyone, except me, got over it.
It was winter, and one Friday after class I decided that I was going to drive to New Bern and stay with my parents. As I pulled out from Greensboro and headed east, a light snow began to fall and I thought “that’s alright, by the time I get to Raleigh, it will have turned to rain.” I was wrong. By the time I got to Raleigh it had turned into an extremely heavy snowstorm and the windshield wipers were working furiously to keep me from becoming snow blind. It eased up a little past Raleigh, but it was still coming down hard when I got stuck on the turn-off to New Bern. A VW is a rear-wheel drive car, with the engine in the back, so this combination caused the car to dig into the accumulating snow, and I found myself churning helplessly with no results until a driver behind me, probably driving a Honda Accord, got out and pushed me out of his way. I was able to proceed, with the snow still coming down hard, and I happened to glance up at the top left corner of the convertible top and notice that snow was accumulating on the inside of the roof. How, I know not—ask a scientist—but soon it was snowing inside of the car. About this time, the windshield-wiper motor started smoking. By the time I got to New Bern I was starting to have reservations about the deific elements of my new purchase.
Luckily, the weather improved by the time I returned to Greensboro. Soon though, I was faced with more difficulties. I had never owned a car of my own and was very unfamiliar with all of the fluids necessary for ensuring that you vehicle be properly lubed, cooled and insulated. One such unheard of liquid was brake fluid. I had just finished a visit to a friend’s house in Winston-Salem when I stepped on the brakes and nothing happened. This is an unforgettable feeling, and the reaction you see in the movies is pretty much accurate, you start stomping on the pedal to get any kind of stopping power you can and start to wonder of you should just aim for a tree and get it over with. I pulled up on the emergency brake and was able to come to a halt. This was the way I braked (I’m very unsure about that verb) all the way back to Greensboro, using the emergency brake and muttering to myself. My mood was maintaining a foul simmer. By the time I got to the dorms at UNCG I had had it, and my temper got the better of me. I pulled up as hard as I could on the emergency brake and the whole thing tore out of its frame. Whoops. Lesson: a temper only makes things worse. I remember being past the threshold of reasonable thinking, but at the same time I was fascinated that the brakes of the VW use the same wires as a bicycle. The whole emergency braking system had been exposed by my anger.
After a $300 brake repair job, and another month of eating Oodles of Noodles exclusively (due to the expense), the Thing was road worthy again. I got home from class one day and noticed that someone had dented the front of the car just enough so the hood wouldn’t close properly. There was no note or explanation, but the dent didn’t look that bad, and I decided to wire the hood down until I could afford to get it fixed. When that might be I had no way of knowing, but I was hopeful. I got a piece of strong wiring and I looped it from latch to hook and forgot about it.
That weekend I was off once again to Winston-Salem to stay with my sister Forsyth. It might have been March at this point and the weather was drizzly and cold. I got about halfway between Greensboro and Winston and was doing about 60mph when suddenly I heard a horrific WHAM and my field of vision was immediately turned to nothing but bright yellow metal. The hood had flown up. To avoid becoming a highway patrol statistic, I used both of my mirrors to navigate over to the shoulder and, fortunately, was able to stop the car. It’s amazing how your reflexes take over in a situation like this, and I suppose years of driving made the reaction to use my mirrors and coast over to the side of the highway automatic, but I still can’t believe I wasn’t broadsided by a Mack truck. There but for the grace of God go I.
I got out and assessed the damage. The hood had flown back so hard that it had knocked the front windshield back four or five inches. This meant that the rag-top could not latch properly to the windshield and would have to remain down. I got the hood fastened back down, very, very securely, and continued the next thirty-miles to Winston through the forty-degree drizzle with the top down and fellow travelers staring at my wet, dejected, and quite unnerved silhouette slowly making its way to safety at dusk.
Other mishaps occurred, like breaking down in nowhere town, North Carolina or having a friend think he could make the radio work by putting a beer tab in the fuse box (note: this causes fire), or being shot at in a field in Davey County (turns out it wasn’t the best place to party) and not being able to get the engine to turn over, and many more instances where the detrimental aspects of owning this car far outweighed its assets.
I ended up finally parking the Thing in front of my sister’s house when I moved in with her after being evicted from my apartment in Greensboro. I started work at a Restaurant nearby and walked there everyday, because by this time, I had all but killed the Thing. I had some friends who destroyed their cars, but did it in one fell swoop, rolling it down an embankment or totaling it by hitting a tree, but I believe that I subjected this car to a slow death. Its final indignity came when my sister called me at work to tell me that the neighborhood kids had rolled it down the hill, and it was now sitting in the middle of Washington Street. I ended up selling it to a used car dealer who said he’d give me “a buck fifty” for it. In used car jargon, this meant $150, and I could do nothing else but take the offer. The era of the Thing was over; I had owned it for less than a year.
The Thing sat in a used car lot for a couple of years and I would pass by it often. It looked a little beat up and bored sitting there with the used Honda’s and Toyota trucks, but it also looked a little relieved to be out of my hands. One day it was gone, and occasionally, when I see a VW thing driving up Reynolda Road I like to think that someone with a more responsible nature gave the car a second life and that I’m seeing it in its new incarnation, driving its happy owner to Pilot Mountain or somewhere, with a new hood latch, emergency break, and plenty of break fluid.

A Deadhead Fights Back (relatively speaking that is, dude)

2006-09-13T09:21:00.000-04:00

Back in 2005, I emailed the goober who writes music reviews for our local paper because he had done the unthinkable and disrespected the Grateful Dead in print. I wanted to post this letter, and his response, because the same goober just recently stated that Bob Dylan should retire and I think it’s telling because right after he said this, everybody from Rolling Stone to Power Tool Weekly gave Dylan’s new album five stars and glowing reviews. Not only that, the album debuted at number 1, knocking Jessica Simpson off the top of the Billboard charts. Take that teeny-boppers. Retire indeed. Just goes to show what kind of journalism you get if you live in a medium-sized semi-progressive southern town with a Napoleon complex.

My Letter:
If we were to travel down Conrad's Congo River, or even Coppolla's Huang, and encountered Ed Bum gardener instead of Colonel Kurtz, we would find a leader of the indoctrinated brainwashed. Spouting almost nonsensical philosophy in a prolific amount, this entrenched "authority" is clogging the free will of many a young musical ideologue as to what is good music and what is not. Freewheeling singer-songwriters who write of the angst and pain of an unfinished Papst in the environs of a seedy club in Greenville, (North Carolina or South Carolina, it doesn't matter) need not worry, for Bum gardener is their champion. No, it is the people who believe that the Grateful Dead were good, the Allman Brothers were a classic band, and that "hippies" actually represented a voice that was prepared to vocalize injustices in American culture, more than someone crying about the tatooed hottie that broke your heart, that are the target of Bummy's jibes. The thirty five year period that the Grateful Dead spent trying to voice the "americana" sentiment that this culture has now, trendily, embraced is conveniently overlooked. Yea, Bum gardener may hiss "The Boredom... The Boredom", but don't forget that "boredom" is represented in one of the most well preserved musical archives that was ever created, and will be there for much longer than " the best singer songwriter you never heard of and never will again,"

His(patronizing) Response:
Dude, that is a SPLENDID missive. I love it. And thanks for writing. It shows that you have passion, and passion is what matters most in life. That you took the time to write and defend your beliefs is a great thing.

Yeah, yeah, I know it comes off sometimes that I dislike the Dead. I dislike certain periods of the band, but hardly dislike them wholesale Here's the full reality. I loved The Dead through Mars Hotel; saw them several times between 1971 and 1974 and ever show was fine. Things got problematic for me in the latter part of the band's career, particularly when Jerry was more concerned with sucking on a glass dick than making music. Reading interviews from the post-coma period, he made it clear that he, too, thought the Dead and run out of steam and was only sticking with it because he didn't want to put anyone out of work. To be commended.
And so you will know, I have talked at length with Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, all of whom were fine people and all of whom said that at the time Jerry died, they were all considering pulling the plug. They still liked playing, but the spark was missing. Jerry was erratic. And they despised the new generation of Deadheads. To quote Weir, from an interview we did two years ago: "It was more a drugs-in-the-parking-lot thing, not a musical thing, for them. They wore their identity as deadheads like a fraternity pin. Most of them didn't even know why they liked the band, and that was disheartening. It didn't matter if we played well or not. So eventually, it didn't matter to us."

And the two shows I saw in the 90s were excruciatingly dull. Wish they weren't. Made me sad. As for the Allmans - they are Gods. No band, ever, will touch the original lineup, except perhaps for the current lineup. They had some lean times while Gregg was on pharmaceutical vacation, but nothing, nothing, nothing will ever take away from that band when they were hittin' the note.
Time plods on, new talents are born. You don't have to like 'em. But don't put them down wholesale. You'll be missing a lot of great music.

To clarify: I was one of the "hippies" who railed against the unjustices of America. We helped stop an unjust war, so that counted for something. Many of the "ideals" didn't pan out. Some changed the world. Still believe in a lot of it.

I LOVE this line: "the freewheeling songwriters who write of the angst and pain of an unfinished Pabst". Great stuff.

Thanks for writing. One of the best insulting rants I've ever gotten. You can write. Peace.

Okay, before you start going over to this guys side, note that it is a very dubious statement he makes about being one of the hippies. All I know about his past is that before he began hacking away at pop culture he ran a used record store in a middle class neighborhood where he looked down at kids who bought four dollar copies of “Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy.” That crap about passion is the most important thing in life, c’mon, is he trying to be Phillip Seymour Hoffman playing Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous?” Thanks Bumgardner. Also, his “I’ve talked to these guys so I know a little bit about it” shtick bothers me. Name dropping won’t help the fact that if the Dead had quit in the eighties, or whenever, they would have missed some of their best touring years, 1990 in particular, which are represented in hundreds of hours of tapes. I do recognize that the Deadheads could be obnoxiously elitist, and I hated that part too, but these people are in every walk of life and the best thing to do is kick ‘em in the nuts and run. I also hate the idea that the band was killing Jerry Garcia, and I’m okay with the idea that they should have quit if they could have, I just don’t like the fact that out of two or three shows that Bumgardner saw in the nineties, he can expect to know for sure that the band was totally derailed.

So that’s it, my correspondence with Ed Bumgardner, local music gooberu. I stuck it to the man…yea. He said I can write. He said…I can…write!

The Windsurfer

2006-08-27T19:31:00.000-04:00

This blog entry has been a long time coming, but I have to get it out of me. There was a period of my life when I wasn’t the most careful person when it came to money. If I happened to experience a windfall, I would do my best to make exactly the wrong choices about how to spend the money. Forget saving it, that idea didn’t even enter the picture. Besides, I didn’t have a savings account so how on earth could I save it? No, it was better to spend it on “fun” things.
This was right after I had returned from Africa and I was experiencing a sort of reverse culture shock. After eighteen-months in Africa I had become used to only having one choice when it came to everything from toilet paper to guava juice, and now I found myself back in the States where there are a hundred choices for just choosing a candy bar. I would walk in to a grocery store which was twenty times larger than the Cash and Carry in Umtata and become overwhelmed by the size and amount of merchandise offered at these monolithic temples of retail. And this was before Wal-Mart and superstores had entered the scene.
I suppose I was oblivious to all of the excess before I trotted off to Africa to try to single-handedly stomp out Apartheid. My friends, who had remained in the good ole’ U. S. of A., on the other hand, seemed completely comfortable with the domestic supply and demand situation and seemed to be able to catalogue information about products that would remove nose-hair or make your toilet gleam. My ignorance over hair-gel and minute-rice might have led me to overcompensate in order to acclimatize back into the cliques and pecking-orders that made up my social circle during my early twenties.
One large item I bought at this time was a sail-board, better known as a wind-surfer. My mother could never get the name of the thing right and would call it a sail-surfer, or a wind-sailor or a surf-sailor or whatever combination of surf and sail that was possible other than the correct name. I had come upon this nemesis in the form of fiberglass and canvas when my sister Lindsay had suggested to my other sister Emily and me that we go to the Outer-Banks and take wind-surfing lessons. Lindsay had had some experience with this sport/sado-masochist ritual while she was living in Scotland, where the Scots, being fooking Scots, like to wind-surf in the North Sea in January during gales for light entertainment. Lindsay, exercising her Scottish DNA to its fullest, did just this, without a center-board (the thing that keeps you on course), and was picked up after hours of drifting by some bewildered Scottish fishermen. She was suffering from hypothermia and the story made the local paper, but this did not deter her from wind-surfing some more and now she was planning to spread its joy to her siblings.
So we drove to Nags Head one morning and each of us paid fifty dollars to take the lesson. The instruction was given at a little inlet on the sound side of the Outer-Banks by some very patient instructors who must have either been very good at holding their laughter in or had just seen so many spectacularly uncoordinated patrons that they were immune to the spectacle. Either way we spent the hour or so just trying to pull up the sail. For those who have never tried this sport, first you have to make sure that the sail is lying flat on the surface of the water, somewhat perpendicular to the actual board which is basically a surf-board with a hole stuck in it for a sail. Then, you have to haul yourself up onto the board and kind of kneel until you get your balance. By this time, if you have lower back problems, you will know it, for this is a very unnatural act for Homo sapiens and I’m guessing all other species. You are then required to pull on a rope that is connected to the sail and haul it up. The sail is around nine or ten feet high and pretty hefty in and of itself but, adding weight to this task, is the element of the wind. This will be your first meeting with it, and if you are like me, you will learn to hate it with every fiber of your being.
The hauling up of the sail is problematic for a couple of reasons. As stated before, it is hard on the back, and this is one of those many instances in life where people will shout at you: “Use your knees! Use your knees!” What does that mean? In my case, it meant shifting my weight backwards and doing a sort of half-backward flip off the other side of the board and beginning the process all over again. I remember that there was a lot of concern about how your butt was positioned. It was a bit like being someone’s cell-mate. Emily is a big laugher, and she can get us into fits by seeing humor in the most humiliating situations, so our lesson was peppered with moments where we tried to get a hold of ourselves and tackle another go on the board.
The other problem is that when the sail starts to rise up, the wind immediately catches it and you are instantly mobile, headed toward which ever way the wind is blowing. In the case of our lesson, this usually meant right toward another student or right toward the dock where we paid our fifty dollars. Then you would have to abandon ship and hope the tip of your board didn’t knock out someone’s dental plate or something. I can see why we had to sign an insurance waiver. By the end of the session we had had a few small successes and some sever pain in our upper arms, but, for some reason, I had gotten strangely hooked on the idea of purchasing one of these things and mastering the sport, probably not as a personal challenge but as a way to impress people.
Lindsay tried to talk me out of it. I would be returning to school soon and this was a time when I should have been hoarding money. But the windsurfer consumed my thoughts. I needed a physical challenge that would build strength and character and, most importantly, draw the attention of females. The experience did very little of any of these.
So I went back a couple of days later and bought the very wind-surfer that I had taken my lesson on. I paid five-hundred dollars for it. A couple of years later I bought a 1972 Ford LTD for the same amount. The LTD is an example of the good use of five- hundred dollars; the wind-surfer is an example of the bad use of five-hundred dollars. I toted the wind-surfer home to where my parents were living in New Bern and immediately started transforming myself into a hip windsurfer dude. Their house was on the Neuse River, right where it opens into an estuary about a mile wide, and if anything was perfect about this ill-advised venture, this body of water was ideal for learning the techniques of wind-surfing without endangering anyone except yourself.

I was attending classes at a community college at the time, so after classes I would come home and don my Billabong short shorts (this was the eighties) and begin to prepare the wind-surfer for sailing. After about half an hour of unfurling and mast positioning and rope attaching and center board placing, I would put the thing in the water for launch. I would then try to get a general direction of the wind and point the tip of my board away from where the wind was coming. Then I would start the process I have described above, this time with no instructor holding onto my board and no sister laughing hysterically at how dorky I looked. If the wind happened to be particularly strong that day there was a good chance that I would have to make this effort over a dozen times before actually pulling away from my parents’ dock. Also, if the wind was strong at the river’s edge, it was likely that it would be even stronger out in the middle, so once I got out that far it was sort of do or die.
On a windy day, it took all of my effort to go anywhere or even get back to the house. Sailors do what’s known as tacking, which is to complicated for me to explain with any degree of confidence, but basically if the wind is blowing toward where you want to go you’re fine, but if it is blowing in any other direction you have to make about twenty-five-and-a-half trapezoids and a couple of figure-eights to get back to point A. For a while, just not getting dumped off the board was my main focus and by the thirty-ninth time of being hurled head-first over the collapsing mast or being clothes-lined by a very fickle boom, the entire estuary was being exposed to the most foul and graphic streams of cursing this side of a Scorsese film. This was “WHY ME GOD?!!!” style cussing, and I was oblivious to how the wind, along with being my immediate tormentor, was also acting as a kind of communicator to all the shoreline residences along the Neuse. My parents’ neighbor mentioned this to my father once, and remarked that he was somewhat impressed with the creativity of my invectives. I sometimes imagine that he would see me start out from the dock and call a couple of buddies, break out some beer, and sit on his deck to watch the show. I sure put on a few good ones.
A couple of times the wind abandoned me when I was a half mile from shore. I would be clipping along at about a tenth of a knot, which was about the only speed I could maintain for any length of time, and then the sail would empty and I would just stop. There are a couple of things you can do when this happens, both of which are a pain-in-the-ass and make you want your five-hundred dollars back very badly. On the Neuse, I had the option of just getting off the board and walking home because it never gets any deeper than five feet for most of that segment. I could also turn the board around and move the sail back and forth which would painstakingly propel me toward my destination. I usually used a combination of these to get home where I would vow that I was through with sail-boarding forever. The next day would see me out again, stringing together new blasphemies and providing entertainment for the neighbors.
Until autumn brought colder weather I endured this ritual, and after a while I did get somewhat competent. Once or twice, the wind conditions were such that I was able to tack across the river and back a couple of times in a morning. This made the purchase vaguely justifiable, but when I returned inland to start school, I rarely had the opportunity to use the wind-surfer again. I sold it a couple of years later to, ironically, my parents’ neighbor. Looking back, it was a mistake of youth to buy it, but I have good memories of that time when my parents had a house on the Neuse, and the wind-surfer plays a large part in those recollections.

Somethin' is Happenin', But You Don't Know What It Is...

2006-08-25T19:35:00.000-04:00

So after a great deal of anticipation I went to the Dylan concert at Ernie Shore Field last Friday night. This was an extremely good experience, and much of the anxiety I have experienced in my life over my hometown and its shortcomings was quelled by this event, where several thousand members of my community came together and listened attentively to a variety of selections from Dylan’s forty-year-old song book. There was a great deal of good music played in many styles, rock-and-roll, country, blues, and jazz were all represented expertly by the four acts on the bill, but it was Dylan himself who carried the most gravitas, singing of biblical redemption and government indifference in the trademark scowling drawl of his later career. Politically and historically tuned-in personages could not help but draw correlations with current events in Dylan’s lyrics, and the band stood behind him like a mythical, musical supreme court, with grave faces of condemnation, and guitars used like amplified gavels sounding judgment on those who listened but could not hear. To some, Dylan may now represent self-parody, but this is only true if the parody includes endless reinvention which, if not always fresh, is remarkably inventive in its use of traditional forms. Columns and columns have been written about Dylan’s rearrangement of his own material, but, in essence, the songs remain similar to the original, with time signatures and phrasings being the only discernable discrepancy. He may do “Hard Rain” in ¾ but isn’t this just an example of Dylan demonstrating the organic evolution of the art through the artist? It’s still the same song with the same words. We don’t criticize Robert Frost when a new addition of his work comes out with a different book jacket. We’ve never had a poet/musician/recording artist before Dylan; no one knows how it’s supposed to be done, so Dylan is figuring it out. Just let the man work.
As for his stage presence, Dylan seemed like a tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic prophet. He would jerk back from his little keyboard, give a quick sideways glance at the crowd and then lean into his microphone and sneer the next line. It was difficult to tell if he was grinning or wincing, but either way there was a medicine-show, southern-soothsayer quality to his expressions that indicated a playful masquerade was being perpetrated on the press and the masses. Hell, Dylan doesn’t give a shit if the press likes him or not, he has always shot them the finger and showed them up for phonies, and why?—they never were able to pigeon-hole him, and still aren’t, and many of them hate him for it, and he is still great for this.
The chump who writes for our local paper wrote a scathing review of the Dylan concert. In all honesty, his words made me less angry than very, very sad. The idea that hacks like this can pass uninformed and unenlightened judgment on Dylan—hacks who can so wrongly misinterpret, or downright ignore, Dylan’s message—means that there is a larger problem; we live in a society where the truth-tellers are attacked by arrogant and attention-seeking imbeciles whose ignorance is winning the battle for cultural excellence in our country. Dylan takes his own mythology and pokes fun at it, while using musical forms which he is doing anything but poking fun at, and provides an experience that, as it did in his early days, provides an amalgamation of the American ethos. Dylan is older, wiser and oh so very relevant.

Daytrippin' in G'boro

2006-08-15T18:12:00.000-04:00

This next entry will be about, yes you guessed it, once again, no escaping it…music. Actually it’s about the short road trip to Greensboro I took with Kevin and Chris, the guys I play in Dante’s Roadhouse with. We also had a friend of Chris’ from work with us whose name is also Chris. So it was me and Kevin and the two Chrises, but not the ones with the syndicated radio show. We piled into Kevin’s low rider, a late model Honda Accord, and hit the long and winding road. Well, it’s not so long and winding, it’s actually a short straight highway that takes about twenty minutes. The objective was to hit the used record stores and possibly a pawn shop with a side trip to a legit musical instrument outlet with the southern boy friendly moniker of The Music Barn.
But first, as usual, food became the main objective. So we rolled around Lee Street looking out for the Beef Burger. This wasn’t where we were planning to eat, but it is a landmark for me because as a flunky freshman at UNCG we used to walk there from our dorm and get cheap burgers made out of some kind of meat-by-product that would compost your stomach contents if you added enough Black Label Beer to the mix. I kind of have a gastric pavlovian response when ever I lay eyes on the place, kind of a gagging/retching reflex. From the Beef Burger I can always get my bearings around the UNCG area. Take a right and you can see the building where I flunked out of geography, or, over there, was a row of bushes where I threw up, or over there is the statue of the founder whose neck we hung a tire around, and of which a full page photo ended up in that year’s yearbook. Ah, those early accomplishments of youth.
But back to last Saturday. We pulled up to the First Carolina Deli, and according to our usual eating schedule, it was about three-fifty-two in the afternoon and a guy peeling a fifty pound bag of carrots, another guy, and a waitress were the only other souls in the place. We had a pretty good lunch though, no one made coke come out of their nose or anything and we were pretty adult-like during a meal for once. I guess we just hadn’t gotten going yet.
So we took this responsible attitude down Spring garden street, listening to a Dead show from December ’77—Winterland—and then we—December 27th I believe it was—pulled up to—second set, smokin’ Bertha…Jerry rips the solo—The Music Barn and strolled around looking at the overpriced off-brand guitars. I bought a set of strings from a snide clerk who helped me find a better medium-light gauge string, but who had editorial comments about things. I got the feeling he was the kind of nut-job who turns his nose up at you if you can’t recite the serial number of your guitar and who speaks in acronyms and numerals about everything. “The GBK on this unit gets 30 mega hertz if you dial the SR-TZXX4 over to the low frequency driveshaft alternator quasar shifter on the BBKING. What’s your guitar’s serial number?” Or something like that. I disengaged from the conversation.
The Music Barn was closing anyway so we headed back toward campus to Collectables Records. This is where, as a student who found records more important than books when planning a budget, I would buy things like the soundtrack to Easy Rider and Moby Grape’s first album. I remember buying White Light/White Heat here long before I knew who Lester Bangs was. My roommate Joey would often guide me on these expeditions, shaking his head disapprovingly when I gazed at a cheap copy of Billy Squire’s record. I owe some of my better navigations through popular music to Joey’s guidance. The guy has a great ear.
On this Saturday, Collectables was experiencing a calamity of pretty disastrous proportions. The ceiling had collapsed. Half of the store was covered in heavy plastic, and a quick glance upward revealed soundproof tile and insulation hanging precariously low over the stacks and boxes of thousands of vinyl records. We were not deterred, but the owner looked pretty dismayed. Looking through the stacks was surreal in this setting. The smell of mildew mixed with the realization that a band such as Pablo Cruise actually existed was very bizarre. Bands that I had never heard of, who had had their one shot at fame, or recognition, or even a back-stage blow job, were represented in these rows of cardboard and vinyl. Bands with eighties promotional packaging that was as fleeting and insubstantial as the vessels for their message were soon to become. I wasn’t tempted to buy a thing, not because I didn’t see anything interesting, but because I haven’t owned a turntable in fifteen years. It was kind of like exploring a house that no one lives in any more and the last tenants had really let the place go—but at one time, man it was the place.
We set off from Collectables to find another record store that I’d remembered around the Guilford College area. On the way down Spring Garden Street, one of the Chrises noticed that we had passed another store called Collectables Too so we jerked it around and screeched up to the parking lot. The other Chris was driving and he has a NASCAR fixation and drives accordingly. This place smelled a lot better, and also had a great deal of vinyl albums, but also had a very good CD selection. Every store that we entered seemed to be closing in a few minutes, so we hurried to find something to buy. I found an Elvis Sun Sessions CD for seven bucks and a CD by a group called the Rising Sons which was Taj Mahal’s and Ry Cooder’s first major band. The Music Hound CD guide calls the Rising Sons—and I’m paraphrasing here—short lived but influential. It’s a pretty good CD, with a few strange cuts but also with a lot of different arrangements of Taj Mahal songs such as “Corrina” and “Take a Giant Step.” The Elvis is a hunka hunka burnin’ early stuff. I’m pleased with both purchases. The Elvis I knew would be good, but I took a chance with the Rising Sons. It turns out to be a very good CD.
We made a quick detour to a pawn shop where a bald white supremacist looking guy with a skinny worried kid with him was buying a shot gun. We looked at a couple of dubious appearing guitars that were hanging up and, not seeing anything else worth a damn we left before the shot gun buying guy had finished his purchase. Wonder what he wants that thing for. Target practice I guess.
So our last stop was BB’s music across from the Guilford College campus. Here we found import DVD’s of Talking Heads, Grateful Dead, an Alice Cooper concert from 1973—before he gave up what was reportedly a forty can a day beer habit for golf—a Led Zeppelin concert, also from 73 in Australia, and tons of other tempting footage. I declined to get anything though because you really don’t know what the quality is going to be like; many of these shows look like they were filmed from out of an overcoat from the third level of a soccer arena in Hamburg or something. But, the store is right across from campus and the temptation will be there until I break down and buy one of DVDs for twenty bucks. I’ve blown twenty bucks on worthless crap many times before so I’m not that apprehensive. I almost bought Warren Zevon’s first record for six bucks but declined that as well, although it’s hard to admit that I don’t have this in my collection. I may break down and get this one day when I’m supposed to be writing a paper at the library.
So that’s it. I’m going to see Bob Dylan on Friday night so I expect that will be the next topic for the blog. Seems we’re going with a music theme for a while. Oh well, it hasn’t gotten boring writing about it yet, although I can’t comment on how reading it is.

Soundtrack of my Senior Year

2006-08-12T13:47:00.000-04:00

I thought I would write something about music, and the idea came to me to write about the music I listened to during my senior year in high school. This was the year that I believe I had a breakthrough in my ability to distinguish, for the most part, musical merit from musical crap. This isn’t invariably the case, as any perusal through my CD collection will indicate, but my senior year was the time where I shed a great deal of the music I identified with during the sap rising years that contained bouts of acne, pretending you’re stoned when you’ve only taken a Tylenol, and agonizing insecurities about the opposite sex. Groups like Queen, Yes, Styx, and Rush, all fell by the wayside, although Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd would hang around for another few years. I can’t say that my breakthrough came out of the blue because there were a number of people whose musical interest influenced me—thank God.
My junior year in high school I was shipped off to a republican infested boarding school in the North Carolina mountains to serve two years for being a lazy, want-to-be stoner. I was allowed to take my album collection and my guitar, on which I could play about 3/5ths of “Stairway to Heaven” and the intro to Yes’s “Roundabout.” This was a different environment from the Catholic school I had attended for my first two years of high school, where the soccer playing potheads who showed up to soccer practice on acid ruled the campus. This particular boarding school was stringent in its goal of getting every graduate to college even if it had to beat a 1000 or better SAT score into you. My album collection, which contained a rare Japanese import of Yes’s first album and Rush’s “Moving Pictures” picture disk, was impressing no one. Actually it impressed one single soul, a non-bathing English prodigy who smelled like pencil shavings and wrote diatribes in the form of poetry for the literary magazine. He borrowed my entire Yes collection and kept it for the better part of the year. Luckily, he was a Dylan fan and reciprocated by playing “Tangled up in Blue” for me, in the way of throwing me a bone.
The summer between junior and senior year I met some guys who lived together and had two bands operating out of their house. One was a skinny drummer who kind of looked like Neil Young. This was my first introduction to a thrift store subculture that ate at bargain lunch counters and frequented the Goodwill for everything from clothing to appliances and records. Although everyone was poor as dirt, this behavior was partly style induced as well, with paisley shirts being the prized items from the rack and old country records being coveted from the record bins. The skinny drummer would put on an old record and say, “listen to this, listen to the heartfelt anguish in this. This is about a man showing his friend a mansion that he and his wife bought together, but the marriage ended in divorce and now all he can do is show friends his empty house of dreams.” It was George Jones’ “The Grand Tour.”
I was just getting into Dylan at that time and the drummer would say he liked Dylan, but only if you played him at 45 speed. We did this and found it extremely hilarious. He would have nothing to do with Zeppelin or Rush or any of those bands so we would listen to Jonathan Richman or Roger Miller and drink cost cutter beer. The drummer was in love with the drummer from Let’s Active and one weekend we went to Chapel Hill to stay with her and her brother, another local musician who was in a band called the Flat Duo Jets. All I remember is that he lived in a mausoleum, (actually it was a converted tool shed meant to look like a mausoleum) he drank all of my bourbon, and we watched “The Young Ones.”
By the time I started my senior year, my musical taste had changed already. I suppose I should state that this was 1984-1985 and as far as popular music was concerned, there wasn’t much going on. I believe Billy Idols “Eyes without a Face” and Prince’s “Purple Rain” were radio’s non-stop rotation darlings that year. Listening to Rush’s 2112 with the black light on just wasn’t cutting it anymore for me. I returned to school with an appreciation for old country and one dollar used paisley button downs with the sleeves cut off. Not much of a stride forward, but at least I was trying.
In my senior year I had two roommates. Both were of the English, King’s Road commercial new wave school of music lovers. Mechanical drums—they loved em, singers who believed vocals required a thick London East End monotone—couldn’t get enough of them, guitar riffs that contained one note played through an analogue delay box and echoed for fifteen measures—their favorite, bands whose hair styles looked like Elizabeth Taylor had gone out on a bender and was just waking up—high fashion. There was a little friction the first few weeks of school over what music was to be played when, but we worked out a compromise that allotted each of us use of headphones during study period. This compromise worked relatively well.
Although we had wide divergences regarding our musical taste, we also had music that we all agreed on. This is the music that I remember defining my senior year. One record that we could all play, and did play constantly, was The Velvet Underground’s “VU”, which was an album, made up of unreleased material, issued that year. Also issued that year was the Lou Reed album “New Sensations” which we also all agreed on. Reed and the Velvet Underground were experiencing a resurgence in popularity that year due to their marked influence in groups like R.E.M. and The Violent Femmes’ sound. The Velvet Underground with Nico’s “Andy Warhol” was another record we played often.
Well, speaking of The Violent Femmes, that probably was the most played record during my senior year. We just couldn’t get enough of this angsty, angry, funny, fuck you, record. The desperation mixed with humorous, let’s all laugh at ourselves because it is so damned absurd, messages on this record helped us through all the months of knowing we would be free from school one day, but it seemed to be taking forever.
R.E.M.’s “Murmur” was another favorite in our corner of the dorm, but it was “Reckoning” that I personally was compelled to listen to every day for four or five months. You have to understand, MTV was beginning to take over the world, and image was beginning to replace content in everyway imaginable, so R.E.M., with its melodies, (something that most new wave bands had stomped on) was like a bucket of ice water in an endless desert of narcissistic artificiality. “Reckoning” was also interesting because, for once, you could understand what Michael Stipe was saying, at least partially. You could also get songs like “Don’t go back to Rockville,” and “South Central Rain” in your head and not feel like you were being manipulated by mainstream radio or MTV.
And what of Dylan? I had just begun what is now my twentieth plus year of Dylan fanaticism (I’m going to see him on Friday) and the album that year was “Desire.” The first song, “Hurricane” claims, “pistol shots rang out in a bar room night.” The first words of this record take me back to the top bunk of a small college prep school in western North Carolina where I was probably supposed to be doing chemistry homework but was probably doodling in a margin and dreaming of the blond older sister of a friend.
Somehow, toward graduation, I began to listening to Muddy Waters. I didn’t become a total convert to Chicago Blues but I did buy the record “King Bee” as well as “B.B. King Live at the Cook County Jail.” I think it was the song “I’ve Been down Hearted.” That compelled me to buy the B.B. King, with the classic one liner, “I gave you seven children, and now you want to give them back.” I was finally going to the source of what had influenced testosterock bands like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. By now I had pulled far away from the fantasy induced concept rock of my early adolescence and was listening to music that had something more tangible to say.
Other albums I listened to during my senior years were “The White Album,”(actually I listened to a lot of Beatles, but I had been listening to the Beatles since I was a child and was already familiar with most of their music by senior year, although I do remember listening to “Rubber Soul” a great deal that year as well) “The Best of Johnny Cash,” George Harrison “All things must Pass,” The Clash “London Calling,” “The Best of Roger Miller” and I’m sure I will think of more after I post this entry.
The day after I graduated from high school I saw R.E.M. at Meredith College in Raleigh. I good friend of mine’s brother had gone to school with Bill Berry, the drummer, and we all got to go back stage for the concert. I felt very sophisticated and important hanging out with these guys, the kings of thrift store sheik, (this was when they were still with IRS records) and it seemed a worthy reward for surviving the final year of my sentence. I was no longer a want-to-be stoner, although I was dangerously close to becoming a real one, and on returning home I could thumb through a record collection that now included Neil Young’s “Decade”, The Db’s “Repercussion” and the soundtrack to “The Harder they Come.” I was making determined strides although many missteps were still to follow.
When I think of my senior year in high school I generally think favorably of the experience. It was the music that my roommates and I listened to that comes to mind predominately when I file back to that stage of my recollection. I think that it was such a dismal year as far as popular music went that we spent a great deal of effort searching for something that was real. Some of those choices still hold the same sort of importance for me today.

Comparison of Two B-Horror Films from the Fifties

2006-08-09T21:31:00.000-04:00

Walter Wanger’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Roy Del Ruth’s The Alligator People offer two excellent examples of B-movie cinema’s depiction of domestic partnership in the 1950s. Although both examples are dynamically different, there are underlying similarities between the two that demonstrate a status quo that was prevalent prior to the sexual revolution the following decade. The importance of keeping the relationship in tact and staying together until all possible hope is lost is apparent in both films and demonstrates 50s culture’s preoccupation with the perfect domestic space. This depiction of the male/female partnership, coupled with B-cinema’s tendency toward fantasy and exaggeration, offer a caricature-like portrait of perceived notions about domesticity during the early Cold War.
Both Invasion and The Alligator People offer us couples who start out their relationships in the mold of normal happy people. Becky and Miles have a flirtatious relationship, with Becky tenderly thwarting Miles advances and Miles, as the persistent all-American, taking Becky’s rejection on the chin and proceeding undeterred. Conversely, in Alligator, Joyce and Paul Webster are newly-weds, and it is implied in the back-story that it was Joyce who was the pursuer who after some effort was able to win a proposal from Paul. Both Miles and Joyce transform from pursuer to protector within their relationships after their tranquility is threatened. Miles, while trying to protect himself from the body snatchers, is obsessed with protecting Becky as well, and Joyce, after her husband mysteriously disappears, becomes obsessive in her search for him. The survival of normal life, threatened by soul stealing pods or radioactive cobalt that turns men into hand-luggage, seems intrinsically tied to the survival of the male/female bond which, if broken, means doom for humanity.
The character of Becky in Invasion gives us some ideas of what the notions for women were in the 1950s. Becky is coy, intelligent and independent for the first scenes of the film, but when normal life is threatened she becomes almost pathologically dependant upon Miles. Miles is forced to carry, cajole, push, drag and grope Becky through the remainder of the film. Becky, as the weaker member of the couple, can only maintain her independence when it is not threatened, and Miles must act as her protector when it is.
Joyce is no less a model for the Cold War wife. She is more independent than Becky throughout the conflict of the narrative, but her motivation revolves completely around saving her marriage, even if it means being able to truthfully call her husband “lizard lips.” The fact that her husband mysteriously abandoned her at a railway stop leaves her undaunted, and she endures lecherous, hook-handed drunks and snake filled swamps to preserve her dream—to be happily married. Becky is acting independently in order to once again become dependent upon her husband.
Both Joyce and Miles make it through their trauma scarred but in tact. Their significant others, however, aren’t so lucky. Becky becomes a pod-person and Paul becomes a half-man/half-alligator who runs off into the swamp and gets swallowed by quick sand while Becky watches. This time, Becky opts not to “stand by her man.”
The depiction of both relationships demonstrates how the protection of the male/female relationship coincided with the 50’s fears of cultural disruption. The couples in both films are unwilling to separate, and both put the male/female union above the urge for individual survival until it is absolutely necessary to give up. In this way we can see that these male/female relationships act as an allegory (or, in the case of the The Alligator People, an alligatory…sorry, I couldn’t resist) for the importance Americans in the 1950s put on preserving domestic partnership.

2005-01-24T12:18:00.000-05:00

The four of us in Clemmons

2004-09-21T13:37:00.000-04:00

Me at age twenty in Africa

2004-09-21T13:01:00.000-04:00

Building a Slide for a Playground in Costa Rica. I'm in the Backround

2004-07-21T19:34:00.000-04:00

The 3 get five stars for their tribute to the five boroughs!

About the Iraq Essay

2004-07-19T19:52:00.000-04:00

This is a thesis essay I wrote for a class at Guilford College last spring. I felt that Orwell's experience shed light on the experiences we are now having in Iraq, but I found it difficult to draw similarities out of the two works in order to argue my point. I still feel I demonstrated, to some extent, the futility of an occupying force.

Iraq Essay

2004-07-19T19:48:00.000-04:00

George Orwell's Burma and America's Iraq

From 1926 to 1927, George Orwell was a policeman with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He was there during the time of the British Raj, which ruled over India and its territories for over a century, and led to the rise of Mahatma Gandhi. While he was there, he shot and killed a rampaging elephant that was terrorizing the village where he was stationed. These events are described in an essay Orwell wrote nine years later entitled "Shooting an Elephant". While the death of the elephant was the central event in the essay, Orwell describes, in vivid detail, the strained relations between the natives of the village and himself, an outsider representing a ruling force.
In the November 24th, 2003 issue of the New Yorker Magazine, there is an article by George Packer which describes how the planners and troops of the Iraqi occupation view their situation. This article, "War after the War", describes how occupation forces are having a difficult time getting the local Iraqis to cooperate in securing peace in the region and rebuilding its infrastructure. The article implies that there is an underlying resentment towards the American occupying forces and gives examples of these resentments. Perhaps the most notable of these examples occurs when Packer follows Captain John Prior, a twenty-nine year old company commander from Indiana, on his rounds around the streets of Zafaniya, Iraq. The attitudes of the locals in Iraq and the local Burmese in Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" have similarities. It is the purpose of this essay to point out these similarities by citing examples from both texts.
In the opening paragraph of "Shooting an Elephant" Orwell states that the feeling towards Europeans by locals was bitter in an "aimless, petty kind of way".(Orwell, pg.167) He states that the feeling was not enough to cause a riot, but he and others were continually baited by being spit at or tripped during soccer games. When he was at a distance from a crowd, he would hear taunts and see sneers on the faces of the crowd. All of this derision, he confesses, got badly on his nerves. He was already becoming disillusioned with the British Government and its ruling system, but these personal attacks led him to hate the locals as well. This hatred, he states, is a "normal by-product of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you catch him off duty."(Orwell, pg.169)
In Packer's article, he describes Captain Prior as brisk and practical in his dealings with the Iraqis, and even states that it seemed that the Iraqis respected him. The Iraqis seemed to always be talking or trying to argue their case to the captain, who was all business. The mission his unit was on that day was to visit nine sewage pumping stations in Zafaraniya, a southern suburb of Baghdad. The stations were pumping untreated sewage into the Tigris and Diala rivers. Packer quotes Prior as saying the Iraqis are "capable, competent, intelligent people. We're just giving them a different way to solve certain problems."(Packer, pg. 70) At this part of the article the situation seemed manageable from Prior's point of view.
Prior's mission became more complicated, however, when he was trying to settle a price dispute between neighborhood council members and local gas-station managers. The arguing grew intense. Prior was a representative of the wealthiest country on earth, and the Iraqis looked to him to settle the dispute. Packer states that the attitude of the American forces is not to judiciously settle all of the disputes in Iraq, but to help the Iraqis rebuild Iraq themselves. Soon a commotion erupted outside the council hall, and Prior put on his helmet and flak jacket and went outside. His men were trying to intervene with the crowd that had quickly formed. An oil ministry representative was being accused of stealing fuel. Prior told the crowd to follow him. As he was inspecting gas cans, he received a full spray of hot diesel fuel in his face. The crowd fell silent for a moment and then started to shout again. Prior did his best to control his professional demeanor, but the situation had forced him to lose control. He singled out the accuser and brow-beat him, finally showing his frustration.
In Packer’s article, he demonstrates that while the main goal of the American soldiers is to help to rebuild infra-structure in Iraq, many instances require the men to act as settlers of petty disputes. In many ways, the U.S. forces are acting as policemen, just as Orwell was in Burma. The dispute between the council members and the oil ministry representative required Prior to intervene, just as the rampaging elephant required Orwell to do the same. This demonstrates two events, separated by almost eighty years, which show the enormous responsibility foreign occupying forces have in keeping the peace.
Orwell calls the events of the elephant shooting “enlightening”.(Orwell pg 168) He claims that it gave him a “better glimpse than I had before of the real nature of imperialism.”(Orwell pg.168) He was directed to a very poor quarter of town where the elephant had been spotted. He began questioning people and was given contradictory and indefinite information. He claims that this is invariably how it is in the East; the story is clear at the beginning but the closer one gets to the scene, the more grey the facts become. He was about to get discouraged when he was led to the body of a man who the elephant had trampled to death.
When he decided to take action, the whole population seemed to be following him. Before, when he was just gathering information, the population seemed slightly interested, but now, with the prospect of the elephant’s death, the crowd was considerably more interested. Orwell claims that this made him “vaguely uneasy.”(Orwell pg.170) He had not yet decided to shoot the elephant. Finally, he saw the elephant and felt he should not shoot it, but he glanced back at the crowd of two thousand and saw the excited faces who were all expecting him to shoot it. He knew he had to. It is here that Orwell realized that it was not the British Government that is in control, but the will of the natives of Burma. He calls himself an “absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.”(Orwell pg. 171)
In George Packer’s article, he recounts a similar situation involving Captain Prior and his men. Prior was sent to find a suspected fedayeen militiaman. He had received a tip from an operative, nick-named Chunky Love, who had supplied helpful intelligence in the past. Like Orwell, Prior and his men are sent to a poor area with sketchy information and have to deal with a local population that is not one hundred percent loyal to the American cause. The soldiers began a search of the suspect’s house, but were unable to find him. At one point in the search, an Iraqi woman stated, “We were happy when you Americans came to get rid of the dictator--and now here you are searching our house.”(Packer pg. 71) Two young Iraqi boys watched the proceedings, and Packer realized that this would be an event that they would never forget, big, fully armed soldiers of an occupying army, breaking down doors in their house. Later, when the soldiers had left the house, the Iraqi translator turned to Packer and said, “Like Vietnam”.(Packer pg.72) Packer claims that at that moment Iraq did feel like Vietnam. He states, “The Americans were moving half blind in an alien landscape, missing their quarry and leaving behind frightened women and boys with memories.”(Packer pg.72)
There are many points of similarities in these two incidences. Both Orwell and Prior have to trust inaccurate information to reach their objectives, therefore trusting the population that they are there to police. This takes the control out of the hands of the occupying forces and puts it directly into the hands of the population. The population is, at best, suspicious of both Orwell and Prior. When it looks as if Orwell is going to shoot the elephant, the population is behind him, but only because he is an instrument to provide excitement and food in the shooting of the elephant. In the same sense, the Iraqi woman is glad that the Americans came to depose the dictator, Saddam Hussein, but resents the searching of her house. The Americans can also be seen as a tool to free the Iraqis from oppression but, in turn, may be seen as oppressors themselves.
Finally, Orwell grasps “the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East.”(Orwell pg. 171) And while Captain Prior may not demonstrate similar feelings, Packer reflects on them in his thoughts on Vietnam and how that war was lost to an overwhelming resentment of the native people of the country.
George Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant”, was a demonstration of the problems that occur when one powerful nation exercises dominion over a less powerful nation. The remarkable point of his essay is that Orwell demonstrates these problems, not by distant facts and figures, but by giving us a personal example of the forces at work. In much the same way, George Packer in “War after the War” gives us a similar scenario of the perils that befall a country who uses force, and arrogance, to invade and occupy another country.



Works Cited

Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant.” Autobiography A Reader For Writers. Ed. Robert Lyons New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. 167-174.
Packer, George. “War after the War” The New Yorker   24 Nov. 2003: 59.

Mandela Essay

2004-07-19T19:34:00.000-04:00

Nelson Mandela and the Altruist Archetype

“I have always believed that to be a freedom fighter one must suppress many of the personal feelings that make one feel like a separate individual rather than part of a mass movement. One is fighting for the liberation of millions of people, not the glory of one individual. I am not suggesting that a man become a robot and rid himself of all personal feelings and motivations. But in the same way that a freedom fighter subordinates his own family to the family of the people, he must subordinate his own individual feelings to the movement.”

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, pg. 228

Nelson Mandela, the South African freedom fighter and leader of the African National Congress, fought, for the majority of his adult life, to have the policies of racism eradicated from the South African system of government. In doing so, he sacrificed his relationship with his family, his way of life, and finally his freedom, to ensure the freedom of his people. Mandela spent over twenty-five years in prison, during which time he became the symbol of South African pride in the struggle for African rights. He sacrificed more than most of us can imagine, and did so with dignity and humility, becoming a walking embodiment of the altruistic hero. Truly one of the great men of the Twentieth-Century, Mandela stands as an example of how great sacrifice of the individual can aid in the ultimate struggle for human rights. There are many examples of altruistic behavior through out Mandela’s life as a revolutionary freedom fighter. It is the purpose of this essay to give examples of the many ways Mandela gave of himself for the good of his people.
Mandela was born on the eighteenth of July, 1918, in a small village in the Transkei, in south- eastern South Africa. He is a member of the Xhosa nation, which encompasses this region of Africa, and he grew up with the traditions of that people. Mandela describes the Xhosas as a proud people with an “expressive and euphonious language and an abiding belief in the importance of laws, education, and courtesy.” (Mandela, Pg. 4). These were qualities that were not lost on Mandela, and he developed a fascination with education and law that has lasted his entire life. He would use this interest in law to help in the struggle to end apartheid.
The literal translation of apartheid is “apartness.” It was officially instated into South African policy at the end of the nineteen forties by the National Party, a party made up of descendents of the Dutch colonists called Afrikaners. The National Party had publicly sympathized with the Nazis during the Second World War, and actually fought their election on racist slogans, pandering to the white, ultra-conservatives of South Africa. The Nationals held almost absolute power over South Africa for forty years, until Mandela’s release from prison. During this time they practiced the policies of apartheid, which holds the premise that all whites are superior to the other ethnic cultures of South Africa.
The National Party, and its supporters, were Mandela’s main rivals in his struggle to end racist policy in the country, although his struggle wasn’t limited to the Nationals. Many factions inside the freedom struggle worked against him, including the Communist Party, the Pan African Congress, and elements inside his own party, the African National Congress. Mandela handled these rivalries with humility and patience, often conceding his own opinion to the good of the struggle.
As a young man, Mandela was the head of the Youth League of the A.N.C. He was opposed to the Communist Party because he felt that it diluted the message of the struggle, and he was suspicious of its motives. As he matured he realized that in the struggle against the oppression of a race one had to make concessions with others who could aid in the defeat of the ultimate enemy. This is often known as choosing the lesser of two evils. He rationalized that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had to ally themselves with Joseph Stalin in order to defeat Hitler, and he saw the same situation in his struggle. He states, “The cynical have always suggested that the communists were using us. But who is to say that we were not using them.”(Mandela, pg. 121) He was met by fierce opposition within his own party and by the Pan African Congress, who were dedicated to fighting the struggle as a black only organization. He stood his ground on the subject, and subjugated himself to criticism from all parties concerned, including the Communists. He was able to sacrifice his pride in order to show how necessary it was to unify against a common enemy. For his alignment with the Communist Party, Mandela was required to resign from the ANC and was restricted to the Johannesburg district under the Suppression of Communism Act.
Mandela not only sacrificed his political pride in the struggle to end apartheid. He gave up the opportunity to have a normal married life, and to watch his children grow up. He was often banned by the government for speaking out against apartheid, and could not move freely about the country. At one stage before his life sentence, he led the life of a fugitive from justice, hiding in safe houses, and moving about the country with the threat of arrest constantly looming over his shoulder. He used this time to organize and rally the members of the struggle, and to form a policy of resistance that could be implemented throughout the country.
On March 21, 1960, sixty-nine Africans died during what is known as the Sharpeville Massacre. Police opened fire into a crowd of thousands, shooting most of the victims in the back as they fled. Due to fear of African retaliation, the government started rounding up suspected leaders of the resistance. Although Mandela had little to do with the protest that led to the shootings, his house was ransacked and his mother’s history of the family and tribal fables were taken. Mandela was led off to prison. Sharpeville marked a watershed in Mandela’s philosophy about resistance. Up to this point he had been mainly a pacifist, believing in non-violent activism. Now he started to sacrifice his belief in non-violent forms of protest, and began to believe that acts of violence were the only way to bring about social change in South Africa. He had to suppress his revulsion toward violent acts, and align with the more militaristic elements of the movement. He helped to form a faction of the ANC called the MK which was to oversee militaristic acts apart from the main body of the party. Even then he urged the use of sabotage rather than the harm of individuals, as the most effective use of violence for the struggle.
In 1962, after over a year of hiding underground, Mandela was arrested for the final time. He was to stand trial for sabotage, and faced the very real possibility of the death sentence. He says “From that moment on we lived in the shadow of the gallows.” (Mandela, Pg. 350). Mandela was now preparing himself for the ultimate sacrifice, the loss of his life for the struggle of his people.
During the trial, which lasted through February of 1964, Mandela was to be the first witness for the defense. It was decided that Mandela would make a statement instead of being cross-examined. In South African courts, statements from the dock carry less weight than ordinary testimony, so Mandela was putting himself in a dangerous position legally because his statement would be discounted by the judge. Once again Mandela was using his notoriety to make a statement of ideals and policies for the betterment of the cause with little regard as to how it would affect him personally. In his address, he carefully explained the ideology of the ANC and the freedom movement, using the opportunity to speak to all South Africans of all races. He detailed the huge chasm between life for the blacks and life for the whites in the country, and he formally disputed allegations that the aims of the communist party and the ANC were the same. In his closing statements he made this declaration: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." (Mandela pg. 368)
Towards the end of the trial Mandela and his compatriots decided that if they were found guilty they were not going to appeal the decision, even if they received the death penalty. They felt that appeal proceedings would hamper the massive protest campaign that would most likely rise up. To quote Mandela “Our message was that no sacrifice was too great in the struggle for freedom.” (Mandela, pg. 373)
Mandela was not given the death penalty but received a sentence of life imprisonment instead. He was forty-six years old. He was taken to South Africa’s notorious island prison, Robben Island. The width of his cell was about six feet, and when he lay down he could feel one wall graze his head and the other touch his feet. His first occupation was breaking up large stones into gravel and later in a lime quarry. He was allowed only one visitor every six months, and he was allowed mail only once in the same period.
During this time Mandela never gave up his hope for justice. His new campaign seemed to be to improve the conditions in the prison, and he fought this battle just as he had fought apartheid on the outside. He believed that the two were the same, fighting injustice in prison and fighting the injustices of a race spiritually imprisoning another. He defended criminal prisoners that had been beaten by the prison officials, and he fought tirelessly for more privileges, such as the right to study and receive more frequent visits from family. He stepped out of line when an important prison system official was visiting the island, in order to relate grievances to the official. For this he was given four days in isolation. The list of selfless acts he committed for the good of the community is seemingly endless.
In 1969 Mandela suffered one of the most grievous losses of his life. His first son, Thembi, was killed in car accident at the age twenty-five. He says. “It left a hole in my heart that can never be filled.” (Mandela, pg. 447) He asked for permission to go to the funeral but was denied. He had sacrificed even the right to attend his deceased son’s funeral in order that South Africans could have justice.
By the 1980’s Nelson Mandela had become one of the greatest living symbols of world wide human rights. He had spent over twenty years in prison, patiently waiting for world opinion and inside agitation to slowly but steadily decay the archaic system of apartheid. While he was imprisoned Mandela never stopped fighting the battle and never abandoned his altruistic nature, which caused him personal sacrifice, but seemed to give strength to the movement with every selfless act.
Nelson Mandela was released from prison on February 11th 1990. Earlier that month the president of South Africa, F.W. deKlerk, had started proceedings that would officially dismantle the apartheid system. The bans on the ANC and the PAC were lifted as well as the South African Communist Party. This eventually led to free elections in South Africa. On May 10, 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as President of South Africa.
Mandela still is fighting for justice. Even as the remnants of apartheid are becoming less apparent, many other social and political problems face South Africa today. Aids is ravaging the country and political infighting between the ANC and the Inkatha party have caused violent deaths throughout the country. At eighty-four, Mandela is still stepping in and working to find solutions to these and many other problems. He is still giving his life to the cause of a better life for his people.




Works Cited
Mandela, N. (1994). Long Walk To Freedom, Boston: Little, Brown and Company

About the Costa Rica Paper

2004-07-19T19:23:00.000-04:00

The following is a paper that I wrote for an autobiography writing class I took last spring at Guilford College. It is about a trip I took to Costa Rica in 1991. The A- is reflective of a limited knowledge of the use of commas and the difference between independent and dependent clauses.
I had to post this from a scanned image because the original file is not compatible with the new operating system I am using. To read this posting, click on the image and point at the enlarged image until a little box with four arrows appears at the bottom right hand corner. Click this box and the image should be large enough to read.

2004-07-19T16:23:00.000-04:00

Costa Rica 1

2004-07-19T16:22:00.000-04:00

Costa Rica pg. 2

2004-07-19T16:20:00.000-04:00

Costa Rica pg. 3

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Costa Rica pg. 4

2004-07-19T16:17:00.000-04:00

Costa Rica pg. 5

2004-07-19T16:15:00.000-04:00

Costa Rica pg. 6

2004-07-19T13:38:00.000-04:00

Happy Earthquake. One of my favorite paintings by my sister Lindsay

2004-07-19T13:35:00.000-04:00

I call this "Too much time on my hands"

2004-07-19T13:28:00.000-04:00

Cartoon 2

2004-07-19T13:18:00.000-04:00

My sister is an artist. She painted this!

2004-07-19T13:16:00.000-04:00

This is me with my family in Ivy, Virginia

2004-07-19T13:12:00.000-04:00

Cartoon 1

Matt

2004-07-07T12:01:00.000-04:00

Matt
Matt was a cook that worked for me at the Sidewinder Café. He was a good friend of the nephew of my girlfriend, who had gotten him the job. He worked part time at the Sidewinder because he had another job at an area restaurant, so I only got to work with him once a week, on Sundays. He was only nineteen and it showed, as he was a little undisciplined, and came in a few minutes late from time to time. He was a good natured guy though, and any frustration I felt with him being late disappeared when he got there because of his affable attitude.
He was enthusiastic about cooking. He had made decent strides in the two years he had been at it and impressed the owners of the other establishment, as well as myself, with his dedication. He was on the track that many guys take when the partying wears thin and one must figure out a way to support oneself. The restaurant business is a good choice for a lot of these kids, because it facilitates the partying and the night life, and it is an exciting job, with a significant amount of colorful characters.
Matt and I would work the Sunday night shift which was usually slow. We would listen to music and he would give me gossip about the other restaurants where he had worked. He and his friends were into Insane Clown Posse and Stained, which I happened to think, sucked. Once he let me listen to a new release from one of these bands and said, “This is one of their more mellow albums.” It sounded like bags of cats being run over by monster trucks.
I was playing the Grateful Dead one night and he asked “What’s this song? I recognize it. I like this song.” It was Uncle John’s Band. He said “Oh yea, Jason used to play this for us all the time. Yea I like this song!” He made a full hearted attempt to sing along. Matt couldn’t sing. I tried to help him out and the waitresses peered around the corner to hear our off-key chorus.
Matt would surprise you with something out of the blue. He was kind of typical in his dress and appearance for these days, wearing a lot of black clothes and big chrome studs in his ears and lip. He looked kind of intimidating at first, but his nature sometimes didn’t fit his outward image. Once he was telling me about living out in Mocksville or somewhere, and how he didn’t have much to do except read. He told me had read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. I was duly impressed as I hadn’t read any of these.
One Sunday Matt didn’t show up for work. I called his cell phone and only got a cryptic message, recorded by him, about how if you couldn’t reach him, he was probably dead. This was Matt’s sense of humor at work. I called up someone to come in and cover for him’ and finished out the shift. I really didn’t think too much about it. The kid was nineteen, after all, and this was the kind of thing that nineteen year olds did all the time. Still, a no call, no show was pretty serious, and I would have to take some action.
After about four days no one had heard from Matt. This was worrying to his friends because Matt was always someone who kept in contact with his friends. The Police were notified, and a missing persons report was filed. Family and friends started to get frantic.
They found Matt in Richmond, Virginia, stuffed into the trunk of his car. He had been dead for some time. The news came over the small TV in the kitchen of the Sidewinder, and flooded my emotions, and I walked quickly outside, away from people, with all my emotions brimming to the surface. I was in a leadership position and had to keep my composure, but this was the most difficult time I had ever had in controlling my emotions. He was only nineteen, and starting out in this business.
Every one in the restaurant was in a state of shock, and the owner, who should have closed that night, decided to remain open, and made a speech that the customers were not to hear any thing about this. The asshole was still thinking about his business.
I worked out the shift in a daze and kept my composure, for the most part, through out the days to come. Matt was a victim of a drug deal gone wrong, according to the police. Some one had probably killed him in Winston and taken his body up to Richmond to dispose of the body. There were rumors and speculation flying around the restaurants involved, but they mostly went unnoticed by me. I still just couldn’t believe it.
Once, during that first week, I was driving on the highway alone, and I just started bawling like a baby. I couldn’t stop the waterworks no matter how I tried. It felt like a release in some ways, but it made me uncomfortable, and snot began to run down my lip. I had no way to wipe it off. I felt embarrassed that the truckers might see this grown man, hauling ass down the highway, bawling like a baby, trying to find something to wipe his nose with.

Thoughts on Music

2004-07-06T15:47:00.000-04:00

I am passionate about music. I have played the guitar since I was fourteen, when my friend Bert taught me how to play the opening chords to Stairway to Heaven over the telephone. We had a cheap classical guitar, and it was never in tune, but it was more quiet than an electric or steel string guitar, so my parents tolerated my un-metered plucking. Soon I was working my way up to classics, like Smoke on the Water and Dust in the Wind.
The problem was, there were already plenty of guitar players at school, so Bert suggested that I take up the bass guitar. Then we could have a band. I fit the physical requirements of a bassist; I was tall and incredibly skinny, I had a massive Adam’s apple, I was hunched over a great deal of the day, and women ignored me. I had found my musical calling!
I bought a second hand bass from a friend and started learning scales. I learned most of these from a book my sister had bought for me called, ‘Jimmy Hendrix Guitar Made Easy.’ One thing that I learned with the bass, the strings are bigger and are rougher on your fingers. I stuck with it, and soon we were playing the rare party, from time to time.
When I was fifteen my mother bought me a Sigma six string guitar and I switched back over. I've been playing regularly ever since then and have developed a certain style that comes from being self taught. I play with a band called Dante's Roadhouse and we've been together for about six years. People ask me if I ever think of trying to make it, but that’s not what I do it for. We play to feel communication through music as a language. When we hit a certain point, and we know we're doing well, and the audience senses it and gives it back to us, that is where the passion comes in.

A Marathon Trip Across the Country

2004-07-01T21:37:00.000-04:00

A Marathon Trip Across the Country
When I finished Culinary School in 1992, my friend Michael flew out to Portland, Oregon so we could drive back to North Carolina together. We had always talked about seeing the country together and here was the opportunity to ride the ribbon of highway made popular by folksingers and beatnik writers for decades. We ended up making the trip in about three and a half days and barely saw anything except a monstrous storm front that followed us across the country.
I had been in Portland for a year, and, at that time, had been maintaining a long distance relationship with my girlfriend, Margaret, back in North Carolina. She had come out to visit me twice, and those weekends had been like an oasis in a desert of Garde Manger classes and seedy Portland nights. But a year from your gal is a year from your gal, and sightseeing around the U.S. was taking a backseat to the not yet docile hormones of my twenty six year old physiology. In other words I was horny.
At the time I was driving a 1984 Nissan Sentra station wagon with no registration, an expired inspection sticker, bald tires and only three working cylinders. The tape deck worked though, so we had plenty of Dead tapes to see us through. We piled all of my earthly belongings, mostly clothes and cookbooks, into the back of the Sentra and headed south to San Francisco.
After a night staying with my aunt outside of San Francisco, we spent a good part of the day in the wharf area of the City by the Bay. In a year I had seen Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and now San Francisco, and I was sure San Fran was the best one. It was something about the feel of the city and the history. I was enamored at the time by hippy culture and philosophy, as was my traveling partner, and we reveled in going to Haight-Ashbury and walking by the Dead’s old Victorian. God we were tourists!
Now it was time to go. We made a marathon dash to the Grand Canyon. It was like we were bar hopping across the U.S., each sight a different watering hole. We arrived at America’s most famous gash at six in the morning. It was November, and the wind was whipping up the canyon furiously, blowing us and the Japanese tourists back to our cars and down to a pancake breakfast at the monolithic lodge set up to accommodate thousands of gawkers per day. Michael took the wheel after breakfast and I got some sleep as we headed east, to Albuquerque.
Enter the Storm System. After a couple of beers in the hotel room we half heartedly watched the weather report and snoozed off. The following morning we awoke to six inches of snow on the ground. It was still coming down hard.
I wanted to head out right then, but Michael, being a big guy with big guy appetites, was ready for another pancake breakfast. We ate at Denny’s as I worriedly surveyed the winter wonderland piling up outside. Big rigs thundered down Forty as Michael sopped up his blueberry syrup. Finally I insisted that we go, using the excuse that we had to get gas and check the pressure in the bald tires.
After the service station attendant unsuccessfully tried to sell us good tires we headed down the ramp and onto I-Forty. It took us about six hours to outrun the storm and about another six hours to reach Oklahoma City. All the while huge trucks were throwing icy debris up at my windshield and wind gusts were blowing my little three cylinder around like a duck on Lake Erie in January. We crashed at the hotel again and awoke, again, to the storm that wouldn’t die. We had a repeat of the day before, and we finally made it to Memphis, where the weather man predicted rain for the next day. Rain, we could handle rain.
Now I’ve done some driving in my life, and in some pretty hairy situations, but driving through the Appellations in the worst storm system I’ve ever experienced has got to be the worst. After a while I was longing for the snow again. The snow offered a little traction. A reader might ask, “Why in the hell didn’t we stop and let the storm move past?” Actually, that was what Michael was asking me quite a bit by that time, but a year away from your gal is a year away from your gal, and no damn storm system was going to keep me from my gal. We skidded on.
It’s about thirty miles from Statesville, North Carolina to Winston-Salem. The rain was still coming down in sheets but was easing up a little by the time we made it to the I-77 overpass. There was just a little way to go. I was almost home.
In the distance, up the highway, we made out a white sports car, stopped, in the middle of the road facing toward the right shoulder. There was a figure in white waving its arms frantically. We had to stop.
When we got up to the car we found a young woman who had lost control of her car and spun out into the middle of the highway. She was soaking wet and hysterical. While Michael and I were pushing her car over to the shoulder we heard a large crash to our rear, and we realized that there had been another accident. A tractor trailer had rammed into a car slowing down in order not to run into us. This had caused a multi-car pile up. We were going to be there for a while.
After waiting around in the rain to give our statement to a State Trooper we finally pulled onto I-Forty for the last time during the trip. We were soaked, tired, frustrated, and smelly. Oddly enough though this story is the one that Michael and I relate to, and revisit, more than any other in our large arsenal of stories.

9/11

2004-07-01T21:30:00.000-04:00

I want to write about September 11th 2001 for a journal entry because of all the days of my life thus far I am sure that this was the most emotional I have experienced. The feeling of collective grief with fellow Americans, and fellow human beings, was surreal and very moving. Also, two and a half years later, it is remarkable how so much has changed, and how what once was a feeling of unity, has now become one of partisanship, politics and polarization.
I had just taken some time off from work and had spent four days at Nags Head by myself, drinking beer and sight seeing around the Outer Banks. That weekend I visited my parents in Charlottesville where all three of my sisters were visiting. It was the first time we had all been together in years. It was a loud, boisterous weekend and by the end of it I was pretty worn out. I retuned to Winston-Salem and had a message on my box from my boss who told me to take one more day before I came back to work. How great! I remember that the big news of the day was the Gary Conduit scandal.
I woke that Tuesday to the sound of the phone ringing. My girlfriend Margaret picked it up. It was her business partner, Alex(an old friend of mine), and he said something like, “Is this it? Turn on the TV.”
The first image we saw was the Pentagon burning .We couldn’t tell from the report what had happened because they were talking about the effort to get people out or something, but we did see on the ticker at the bottom of the screen that a plane had hit the Pentagon. We were riveted. This was big news.
Then the image of the World Trade Center came up. Everything about what we had just seen in Washington changed. This wasn’t a news story anymore. By this time, both towers had been hit, and images of the streets of New York were being dispersed with ones of the bigger picture. One of the symbols of modern Western Civilization was in flames, poised to collapse. Tough New Yorkers were weeping and scrambling to get uptown. We watched, as both towers collapsed.
Then to a field in Pennsylvania. Another plane had crashed and we heard the words terrorism and the name Osama bin Laden. The idea of all of these innocent victims perishing roughly at the same time began to hit us. To be watching it in real time was surreal beyond words and, we stayed glued to the television for the rest of the day.
About a year later I met a young woman who had been in the Pentagon when the plane hit it. She said that even though the Pentagon is the biggest office building in the world, you could still feel the repercussions of the crash on the other side of the building so much so that she thought a bomb had gone off in her section. She said that she felt that this was it, it was over. She was evacuated out of the Pentagon eventually, and said that she had problems dealing with what had happened for some time after that. I can only imagine. She offered me this information willingly, but after talking to her a while I felt a need to change the subject, she seemed to be revisiting a place she was reluctant to go back to.
The most disturbing images for me were of the people jumping from the upper stories of the World Trade Center. The thought of those images still gives me chills. The desperation, the feeling that all hope is lost, that these people must have felt to compel them to plunge to a certain death still fills me with grief.
For some months after the tragedy I looked at George W. Bush as a hero. I no longer feel this way because as the dust settled from the wreckage of the WTC, Bush systematically turned a sympathetic outpouring from the civilized world into a feeling of suspicion and alienation. And now the Quagmire of Iraq…

African Story

2004-07-01T21:14:00.000-04:00

African Story
When I was working at Ikwezi Lokusa School for the Physically Handicapped, one of my duties was to run errands and transport students and nuns to various places around Umtata, Transkei. The school employed an official driver but he was often too drunk to operate the school van. I was the only volunteer with a driver’s license so the duty fell to me. I didn’t mind though because the job took me away from the school and out into the real world of Africa.
Often, I would be required to take a trip away from Umtata to transport kids to East London, or even better, Durban. This got me out of Transkei all together and into The Natal, where tall, swaying green grass blanketed rolling hills which sporadically revealed villages and sugar cane fields. I would often be taking the students to be refitted with leg-braces which would take hours, and during that time I was free to wander around the city of Durban, a city not unlike Miami or Ft. Lauderdale. It was a very different place than Umtata.
The longest trip I ever took for the school was to Pretoria. Ikwezi Lokusa was sending its table tennis team to the South African Special Olympics and I was their official driver. Pretoria was approximately five hundred miles north of Umtata and we were to leave early in the morning and drive the entire day until we reached the hotel. Along with myself and the table tennis team, we were joined by Sister Consulata who stood about four foot nine and had the sweet disposition of the Thembu people of that area of the Transkei. She was in charge of Physical Therapy at the school and was along to make sure that we had all of our arrangements for the week long trip.
Sister Consulata had just received her driver’s license in Umtata which was encouraging because it meant that we could split up the driving a little. We left very early that morning so we could make good time. This was South Africa, so roads were of variable condition, and many times it would take much longer to travel distances than in the United States. Roads were often being worked on, and guard rails were rare. Drivers would pass on the right, (we drove on the left side of the road, like in England) regardless of blind curves, and one would have to be mindful of herds of cows and women walking in perfect posture with heavy loads balanced on their heads. One had to be very alert.
Around five o’clock in the evening I began to get drowsy. I asked Sister Consulata if she wanted to take a turn at the wheel. She said, “I don’t know Ian, I’m not used to driving on these types of roads.” I told her that if she took it slow, she would be fine. I would take a quick cat nap and resume driving for the rest of the trip.
It was about this time that I felt a frantic tap on my shoulder. It was Dappi, the captain of the table tennis team. I glanced back at him and he had a look on his face I’ll never forget. It was one of complete terror. He was wagging his finger at me and mouthing the words “no, no, no.” I took his warning with a grain of salt and pulled over to exchange places with Sister Consulata.
She sort of peaked over the steering wheel and gripped the stick shift with a look of uncertainty. In the back of the van I heard the table tennis team muttering to each other excitedly in Xhosa. I still didn’t quite get it. She had her driver’s license, she passed the test, and she was legal to drive in South Africa. What was the big deal? I slumped down in the passenger seat, putting my knees on the dashboard and felt the first lurch of Sister Consulata trying to get the hang of the clutch.
After coaxing her off the shoulder and onto the road I tried again to resume my sleeping posture, but immediately found myself sitting bolt upright saying “Sister, stay on the road, Sister, try to stay on the road, SISTER, watch out for that cow.” The muttering in the back of the van had turned into the universal language of “Whoa, Ahhh, Whoa, Ahhhh”. Soon we were veering off towards a shear drop off with no guard rail in sight. The whole table tennis team was emitting a high-pitched shriek by this time, and Sister Consulata was grabbing for her rosary beads instead of the break. In a rare instance of quick thinking, I grabbed the emergency break and yanked it up as far as it would go. We stopped. We were looking down a cavernous ravine.
We had traveled about a quarter of a mile. Sister Consulata and I exchanged seats again, and we resumed our journey. I never got my cat nap, but by this time, I really wasn’t that drowsy anymore.

Movie Review, Sort Of

2004-07-01T21:10:00.001-04:00

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I wasn’t planning to write in the journal tonight, and, as I sit here, the NCAA basketball finals are taking place, but I just saw a remarkable movie and I want to write about it while it’s still fresh in my mind.
We went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this afternoon and were blown away. For some reason this movie really struck a chord in me. And it’s a love story. Yikes.
The screen play was written by Charlie Kaufman, whose other films include Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. Adaptation was probably the best movie I had seen in a few years, and I was expecting to be disappointed by this one, but I wasn’t. This film is typical of Kaufman, with plenty of confusing twists, and imagery that makes you cock your head several times during the first half hour. But things start to come together subtly, until you are immersed in the story and tied to the characters, almost as if you knew them.
The premise is that an agency has the ability to erase unpleasant memories from your mind. The main character, Joel, played by Jim Carry, finds that his girlfriend unexpectedly doesn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore. He is devastated, and is led to the agency, where he decides to have the procedure to erase the memory of her. Kate Winslet plays his soon to be erased girlfriend Clementine, and is very good as an impulsive, free spirit type coming to grips with an ultimate need for love. This is a far cry from her character in the melodramatic love story Titanic, and thank God I can take her seriously now.
Carry is good too, finally reigning in his exaggerated, jerky demeanor without seeming out of his element, or straight jacketed in any way. He plays a shy, awkward, nice guy very believably, and pulls off the few moments of comedy without any of the scene stealing he is sometimes known for.
But this is sounding like a pretentious review. The acting, mixed with a brain twisting plot and innovative directing made for a great film experience. Sometimes when my girlfriend and I see a movie, we disagree on whether we liked it or not. I was expecting the same this time, but when we got to the car she said “Wow, that movie was really good.” That’s pretty high praise from her.
The last current release we saw was Lost in Translation with Bill Murray and we were bored out of our minds. We just couldn’t find anything interesting in it. It was Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter’s movie, and we suspected that the good reviews came from Coppola’s henchmen leaning on the reviewers. We were just kidding about that of course.

A Food Related Story Involving a Foreign Country

2004-07-01T21:00:00.000-04:00

A Food Related Story Involving a Foreign Country
When I was twelve, and our family was living in England, I would ride to school with a family called the Boils. The school was in a town called Seven Oaks, and Mister Boil would drop us off at school, park his car at the train station, and ride the train to London to work. The drive from our little town of Mark Beech to Seven Oaks took about forty-five minutes, and took us through those narrow country back roads that crazy English blokes love to zip around regardless of cumbersome lorries coming in the other direction.
On the very first day of school for me in England, I climbed into the Boil’s little Renault or Vauxhall, or whatever weird little car they had, for my first trip round the Kent country side. Little did I know. The family chatted happily, while Mister Boil careened effortlessly around blind curves and complicated round-a-bouts. The trip came to a nerve rattling halt when we all heard a loud thump under the car.
“Wha wos that?” Nick, the oldest, said.
“Bet it wossa pheasant.” Robert, his brother said.
The father and the two sons got out of the car to investigate, and sure enough, it was a pheasant. A now very dead pheasant.
We drove on and the family started making plans for dinner. We would pick up the pheasant on our way home from school. Robert suggested that his Mum make a white wine sauce for the bird. Nick wanted a Béarnaise. How about Fricassee, Mr. Boil suggested.
This was all at the same time horrific and amusing to me. This family just took this dead bird as an opportunity for a good meal. They were going to let it sit in the dead leaves until late afternoon, and Mrs. Boil was going to work her magic on it that night. I was a long way from the land of Velveeta.
We did pick up the pheasant that afternoon. I don’t know what sauce they decided on, I wasn’t invited to dinner.

2004-07-01T14:50:00.000-04:00

Some of my "art"

2004-07-01T14:46:00.000-04:00

Me with my dog Booker at Guilford College

2004-06-30T21:34:00.000-04:00

Madame Dufour

2004-06-30T21:27:00.000-04:00

Journal # 17
Madame Dufour

In the summer of 1983, at the age of sixteen, I spent a month in Rouen, France as part of an exchange that was worked out between my parents, and a French lady that they had met while we were living in England. I was not thrilled about this trip because, at that time, my universe revolved around loud rock and roll bands, driving fast around the counties of the Piedmont Triad and trying to sneak into the Flamingo Drive-In. I was into Led Zeppelin, Rush and The Who, and I knew very little about France, and cared even less about it. My parents had a way of cajoling me into these things, and told me that I could visit my sister in England if I spent the month in France. I relented. I really had no choice.
I stayed with the Dufour family in a comfortable town house close to the city center. Rouen is the town where Joan of Arc was martyred, I believe, and the city center is dominated by a huge cathedral that was pock marked by shells during WWII. There is also a modern church dedicated to Joan of Arc. Needless to say, all of this was utterly boring to a sixteen year old, and I spent a good part of the trip pining away for the Fast Fare and the midnight movies at the Reynolda Cinema. I was spoiled.
The Dufour family tried their best to entertain this sulky, moping American teenager, but I would spend a good part of the day listening to Super Tramp and Simon and Garfunkle and doodling in a journal. I actually made a calendar that counted down the hours, not the days, until I returned to the States. It didn’t dawn on me that I could have used this time to learn French.
Madame Dufour was the matron of this family. She was a small, energetic woman with jet black hair and a way of ordering her family around that would have made Napoleon envious. Her main attribute? She could cook. I may have been home sick, but I was sixteen years old, and could eat twice my weight in one sitting. The fact that Madame Dufour could cook so well led me to conclude that she was my favorite of the Dufour clan.
Being a teenager, I usually slept late, but when I awoke, Madame Dufour would greet me with a bowl of hot, sweet coffee. This is where I acquired a taste for coffee and a great deal of other things I might add. With this cereal sized bowl of coffee, was a large flakey croissant with plenty of fresh French butter and preserves. This breakfast actually motivated me to get up earlier.
Lunch was the main meal of the day, and Mr. Dufour would return from work (I never understood what he did) at around eleven thirty. Even during the week, lunch could last over two hours, and Madame Dufour would serve course after course of salad, soup, chilled meats, breads, sweets, and cheese. She taught me how good a plain radish was with a little fresh butter smeared on it. She showed me how to make simple vinaigrette with olive oil, vinegar, garlic, salt and cracked black pepper. She didn’t speak a word of English, but she seemed to take a special interest in feeding her spoiled American guest.
The Dufours had a little country cottage in the orchard country of Normandy. They took me there on the weekends, and the living was primitive to say the least. They were in the process of fixing it up, and the cottage was without running water or electricity. The only way to cook was on a camp stove, and an ancient wood stove. Madame Dufour worked these with ease. She would spend all day at it, waking up with the dawn to get things going.
Sunday was the main event. She, her sons and I took their little car to a local farm early one morning to look over a gaggle of geese. After a long discussion in French with the farmer she pointed at one and said “Oui, C’est bon.”(pardon my bad French, it’s been a while). We left.
Soon after, the farmer pulled up with the dead, plucked goose. It was time for Madame Dufour to get to work.
The boys laid a large flat board on some sawhorses out in the yard. This was to be our table. The courses just seemed to keep coming that day, and I suppose it was about the fourth or fifth that we got to sample what had been running around in a barnyard earlier that day. I must confess, I don’t remember what it tasted like, but I don’t remember anything Madame Dufour cooking being less than delicious.
All of this was accompanied by wine and liquors, so by the end of the meal everyone was quite friendly, despite the language barrier. At one point they brought me a fat sausage and I ate it with slobbery gusto. The oldest son, Nicholas, asked me if I knew what it was. I said no. In broken English he explained that it was blood sausage, made from pigs intestines, bread and pork blood. The look on my face must have been telling because Madam Dufour laughed very hard.

2004-06-30T21:24:00.000-04:00

Fall, my time of year.

2004-06-30T21:08:00.000-04:00

Me with my sisters. A tough but fair crowd.

2004-06-30T20:57:00.000-04:00

Me with my Mom and Dad. My Father was the same age I am now.

About Me

2004-06-30T20:36:00.000-04:00

Autobiography
Imitation of Raymond Mungo
I was born in Baptist Hospital on November 14th, 1966. The doctor that attended my mother while I was coming into the world was Dr. Wall. The only reason I know this is because every baby who was delivered in Winston-Salem between 1900 and 1999 was delivered by Dr. Wall. I'll be in casual conversation with a grandfatherly type and it will come out that he was birthed by Dr. Wall during the blizzard if nineteen-ought-six. Dr. Wall retired in 2000 at the age one-hundred and forty-two.
Not much is known about my birth except that I was a couple of weeks late. Perhaps that's why I wait out the entire grace period before I send in my mortgage payment. There is a picture of me in a baby seat, on the dryer with my sister staring at me. I don't know if she was admiring me or waiting for me to spit up, but she certainly seems transfixed.
I had three older sisters growing up, and to torture me they would hold my foot. For some reason this would drive me out of my mind and I would howl like the world was ending, while trying to contort my way out of their vice like grip. I really don't know what my problem was, and I must have outgrown my held-foot-phobia at some stage, because it doesn't bother me now.
There is also an old color photo of me at about the age of two, sitting in a pile of leaves and laughing hysterically. I have no idea what I could have found so funny about sitting in a pile of leaves. I vaguely remember this early photo shoot because our cat Solomon was wandering around in the leaves with me. There is also a photo of me shoving a handful of leaves into my mouth. I can't remember what they tasted like, but this could have been the first moment that I showed a love for gourmet food. Even now, on the rare occasion that I'm raking leaves, I either start to giggle uncontrollably or start to salivate.
When I was five my mother threw a birthday party for me and gave it a soldier theme. I was decked out in an American G.I. uniform and I think our German neighbor came as a Prussian infantry man complete with jackboots and handle bar mustache. She looked pretty cute. All I remember of this event is that my mother baked a cake shaped like a castle and that my German neighbor had us digging a parameter around the front yard until nap time.
At the age of twelve my parents moved the whole family to England. The reason for this is so convoluted, and covered in myth and speculation that it’s better to stay off the subject, but there we were. We arrived in mid-winter when the sun comes up at 12:15 p.m. and goes down promptly twenty minutes later. I was to be schooled at Scolfields School for boys which had no heat, no electricity, no running water and worse, no girls. Actually I made the part up about the electricity, heat and running water but there really weren't any girls. It was in an old gothic building that was modeled after the Tower of London and always seemed to be damp, cold and creepy. Whenever I read Poe the settings take place at Scolfields.
Back in the States I went to a Catholic high school for two years, until my parents were forced to take drastic measures and send me to Christ School in the mountains of North Carolina. This was a haven for all the rich snobbery on the Eastern Seaboard, and once again it was all boys. I started to see a theme.
Then I was off to college and guess what? Too many Girls! I got no studying done but it wasn't because of one romance after another. It was that I would pine away so hard for one that I couldn't eat, sleep or most importantly, study. So I dropped out and went to Africa.

Hendersonville

2004-06-30T20:19:00.000-04:00

Autobiography
After Wright Morris
For some years during my youth, my sister and I would spend a week or two during the summer at the home of a Scottish surgeon in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He and his family lived in an old restored Victorian house with an expansive yard that included a barn where a real horse resided. The front yard was mostly cleared, from what I remember, but at one corner there was a grove of pines that would give shelter from summer heat and provide a place to make plans and invent games. Along the right side of the house, if you were looking off the porch, was a straight driveway that turned into a circular loop as it came into the backyard. The driveway was paved with tiny white stones that would embed themselves into the soles of your Ked’s© and sometimes enter your shoe all together, becoming uncomfortable as hell.
Inside the circular driveway I remember a lone tree with a tire swing. This was also a good starting point for excursions, but I don’t remember anyone actually swinging on it. If someone had been swinging on it they would be facing the back porch, which was screened in and used mainly as a place to kick off muddy shoes and shake the little white stones out of your sneakers. Through a door off the right of the back porch, one would enter the kitchen and smell the smells of British households everywhere, a mix of roasting meat and lavender or some such scent. The smell would at once make you salivate, and mind your P’s and Q’s at the same time. It was here that I would start following my sister’s lead.
Dr. McConnachie, who we were allowed to call Chris, had three daughters and one son when we first started to visit. His wife Jenny was the most kindly, generous person I had known up to that point, family members excluded of course, for how can you be objective about people you’re around all the time. Their only son at the time, Cameron, was still a toddler, but I felt a kinship to him immediately because the poor chap was going to have to suffer three older sisters, just as I had. I felt I could be of help to him once he stopped dribbling strained peas all over his bib.
When we first arrived for the visit, the three daughters and my sister and I would just sort of stand around trying to think up something to say. Then Pandy, the oldest, or Natasha the next to the oldest, would suggest a game of Musher-Man and the ice would break. Actually it would shatter. The game of Musher-Man was so fun and exciting that we would forget our shyness and be fast friends for the rest of the stay.
The front of the house contained a wrap-around porch that seemed so vast that you could house a family there. When the dog-days hit, and Musher-Man’s novelty had worn off, this is where the marathon game of Monopoly would take place. Because I was too young to really grasp capitalistic commerce (I still am in many ways) this part of the stay was extremely boring to me. The porch had other diversions though, one of which was a porch swing that you could get going pretty well. Once, when I was pushing a full capacity load of shrieking girls to the limits of this porch swing, I had the bright idea of seeing if I could slide under it as it was in mid-swing. I couldn’t. The swing came back and hit me in the forehead. It was a good thing there was a surgeon around. Chris always seemed to be bandaging one of us up.
Upstairs, I was bunked down in Cameron’s room, which smelled of diapers, or nappys as the McConnachies called them. The other rooms seemed to be filled with thousands of interesting toys, mostly educational in nature, like magnetic alphabets and felt cutouts that you could recreate Bible scenes with. Usually we would forgo the use of these toys for the more interesting challenge of a drawing contest. As the girls drew puppies and flowers, I would draw tanks and airplanes. I felt I was the hands down winner as my drawings were less generic in subject matter. Jenny was usually the judge. We would all get a “Very Good” but I always felt slighted. Looking back it was Natasha who should have won. She is now an artist living in Colorado.
Chris and Jenny live in Africa now and have since sold the Hendersonville house. I can still feel the little white stones in my Ked’s© when I dream of that house.

Bad Boss Man

2004-06-30T20:16:00.000-04:00

A Bad Boss Man
Recently I had a bad experience with an employer. I will withhold his name, out of fairness, and because I doubt any one who reads this will ever have any dealings with him. I’ll just call him Greg for the purpose of this journal entry.
He is the proprietor of an area restaurant that I will also rename, calling it the Sidewinder Café. He has owned this establishment for a number of years when his mommy, sorry, mother, and daddy, oops, father helped him open it in the early nineties. He originally went in as a partner with his brother, but after a number of years of vicious sibling rivalry, the brother pulled out to presumably run as far away as possible form Greg. Greg was now left as the sole proprietor/autocrat/dictator of the restaurant.
The food at the Sidewinder is a little upscale from Applebees, and a little downscale from The Outback Café. Now, I have nothing against these chains; they do what they do and make money at it, which in the restaurant business is an incredible feat. But Greg would have you think that his menu is comparable to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, as far as ingenious concepts go, and he guards his recipe book as if it were the Magna a la Carta. All of the recipes were either invented by himself, his brother, his mother, or some goon of a chef he employed for years, and who I will get to later. His ribs recipe came out so tough that I once chipped a tooth trying to gnaw one enough to force it down. All of these recipes he dotes over as if he were their grandmother, and any discrepancy by his cooks in changing them in any way is met with pursed lips and a brooding sulk.
He is ultimately a crude man, although he wears airs to impress the rich people in the neighborhood where he operates. Employees are often greeted by him holding a paper cup with a brown soaked napkin stuffed in it. This is his dip cup, which he indulges in twice daily, first when his wife takes the kids to school, and secondly after she has brought them by after school. He is very obsessive about not letting her find out about this habit, and the staff is set up to warn him if they see her arrive and he has a dip in.
The dipping is inconsequential compared to his signature crude habit, scratching himself in his crotch. I wish I could have flowered that last statement up a bit, but to do justice to the act, I have to tell it like it is. This is not the same as what men do when things get a little unorganized down below, this is a habit on the borderline of obsession. We would be having a conversation about inventory or invoices, and inevitably his hand would reach down and go for it like there was an infestation of some sort going on down there. Several times I would see this occur and quell the instinct to just run away and never come back. I never saw him wash his hands and later I would see him making chowder and think, “I ain’t eating that.”
The other cooks and I would make remarks to each other about these habits to relieve tension. This was by far the most negative environment I had ever been in. The cooks were disgruntled, the waiters were trying to undermine the kitchen constantly, the patrons complained often, and the sous chef and I were exhausted most of the time because, of course, Greg worked us like dogs, because we were on salary. He worked the hourly staff less, to save money.
Money. That was Greg’s obsession. He obsessed over money so much that he reminded me of a modern day version of a Dickens villain. All he needed was a tall desk and stool, with a quill pen, adding numbers to a colossal old ledger. That would be him. He was also paranoid of what he could lose. When I first started work he was so worried that a former employee was going to steal his recipe book, that he considered taking it home and locking it in his safe.
He once called me in the office to have a talk about how things were going. He talked about the former chef, who all of the staff had told me was a hot-headed bully (a dime a dozen in this business). The staff had told me that this guy would yell and publicly berate everyone until everyone was afraid to approach the kitchen. I’ve worked with chefs like this before, and vowed that I never would be like that because all it does is break down channels of communication. Greg said that this guy may have been a bully but, like Mussolini, the trains ran on time. I felt like reminding him that Mussolini was strung up by his own country men in the streets of Milan. I also should have asked him, “If he’s Mussolini, who does that make you, Hitler?”
This may sound like sour grapes, but sometimes in life you meet some one who you are completely incompatible with. Unfortunately, in the town where I live, there is a sequestered little group of society who puts on false airs, and likes to think of themselves as cultured. Greg is an example of some one who smells their money, and caters to them because he believes that he belongs on that narrow, shallow plateau.

2004-06-03T19:50:00.000-04:00

My Sister Emily and Me. Age Five and Two

First Blog Entry 6/3/04

2004-06-03T18:54:00.000-04:00

This is my first blog entry and I am very excited about it. I have heard the term blog being used more and more over the past year or so, and I decided to look into it. I am still unsure of what blog stands for but maybe someone can help me clear that up.
I am a student at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. I live in Winston-Salem and work as a cook at an assisted living community. I previously worked at a country club as a banquet chef but the elitists started getting to me so I quit after eleven years and returned to college. I've completed one semester and am about to start the second session of summer school on June twenty-first. I tried college when I was in my late teens and early twenties but it didn't take for some reason. So now I'm back at it with more enthusiasm and focus than I had in those days.
I am thirty-seven. I am unmarried but have been enjoying a long term relationship with a woman named Margaret for thirteen years, and if this is starting to sound like a personality profile for a dating service it isn't. I think that for my first entry I should just give some autobiographical background in order to establish a base for whatever I might write in the future.
My father was a history professor at Salem College, which is small private women's college in Winston Salem. He and my mother raised four children, three daughters and one son, the son being me. I am the youngest. We lived in a farm house about ten miles from town in a little place called Clemmons. Clemmons has now become a large suburb with urban sprawl, but when we were growing up it was fairly rural and you might even say redneck. I caught a lot of crawdads in the creek.
I had sporadic success in grade school and usually brought home Cs and Ds. History interested me for obvious reasons, and I seemed to have knack for English, but the rest of the subjects usually bored me to distraction. I some how got through though and ended up at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This really wasn't the best fit for me and I soon dropped out when the opportunity arose where I could go work in South Africa for eighteen months. This opened up a whole chapter in my life that indirectly led to where I am today. I want to get all of this down using this blog. I'll have a lot of time to do this and I want to get as much of it down as I can. I also want to reflect on daily events and whatnot. This is my goal. See you next time.